3. Matthew empowers innovation through the Future of Work, a paradigm shift in the way we leverage
technology to match & manage labor.
Currently at Microsoft, Matthew is building the infrastructure to drive enterprise adoption & enablement of the future of
work. At Georgia Tech, he is teaching this future. At universities & enterprises, he is speaking on this future. And, for
early stage ventures, he is advising on & investing in this future.
Whether by choice or chance, his life has always gravitated toward technology and its impact on work. His first ever
project at Crystal Engineering reskilled 15 workers by generating $100k from the state of MA by revising a
prior-denied grant. His favorite project at PE firm Potentia Holdings saved 90 manufacturing jobs by spearheading
their go-to-market strategy. He most recently drove thought leadership & created a signature go-to market offering for
one of the fastest growing players powering the gig economy. His piece What the Future of Work Means For Your
Business Model was the #1 viewed post, while his offering repeatedly & scalably generated what should be built in the
software development life cycle.
Matthew is the author of university-level textbook StartUp not StartDown and upcoming book Ready For It:
Automation & the Future of Work. He has delivered his work globally and across Fortune 100’s.
Matthew holds an M.S. from Babson College, the #1 graduate school for entrepreneurship according to U.S. News
and World Report, a B.S. in finance/accounting, as well as certificates from Harvard University for Computer Science,
Harvard Law School for Negotiation Leadership, and Tongji University (Shanghai) for International Business.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once said, “Technology is nothing more than the collective soul of those who build it”.
So is work. Matthew believes through an interdisciplinary framework of design-thinking, lean/agile methodologies, and
innovation/disruption frameworks, our model of work can create the greatest collective soul humanity has ever seen.
MATTHEW IS ON THE FOREFRONT OF ANSWERING
4. ANNOTATED SLIDES
This presentation is delivered at Universities and
Fortune 500’s to prepare their students & workforce
for the Future of Work.
For convenience, we have seperated the annotated
& presented slides.
5-30
PRESENTATION SLIDES
31-51
EST. TIME
15-30 min.
5. CURRENT DAY
Law of Accelerating Returns
Slides 6-13 I 32-36
PROBLEM
The Gig Economy
Slides 14-16 I 37
Automation
Slides 17-22 I 38-44
SOLUTION
The Expert Entrepreneur
Slides 23-30 I 45-52
5
6.
7. “There’s never been a better
time to be a worker with
special skills or the right
education. However, there has
never been a worse time to be
a worker with ordinary skills
and abilities. ”
8. Work is broken. It’s slow. It’s static. And it looks nothing like it will tomorrow.
We see hints of this today. We’ve replaced retail associates, travel agents, and full industries with the crowdsourcing of ratings &
reviews. We’ve replaced Wall Street, Main Street, and soon to be all human-driven streets with algorithms.
Yet, this is just 1% of the change to come.
The Good News - for those who grasp the framework of the Expert Entrepreneur, the future holds unlimited opportunity.
The Bad News - tomorrow holds monumental challenges. Careers will be shattered. Inequality will run rampant. And the education
system that unlocked economic opportunity for millions of Americans today is deathly close to leading the next generation astray.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Careers can be transformed. Opportunity can be democratized. And education can once again
unlock the keys to prosperity. Steve Jobs once said, “everything around you was made up by people that were no smarter than
you”. What he means, is that the world today does not determine the world tomorrow. We have the power to change it.
But it won’t be simple. It will be daunting. Yet every single of us can, and by the end of this presentation, every single one of us
will create the world we want to believe in.
WHY WE’RE HERE TODAY
9. While interning for a small manufacturing company, the boss slapped a thick stack of papers on my desk. On the
top was a big X, followed by a grant proposal to reskill 15 workers.
Management was faced with a tough decision. There was new technology that could replace current headcount,
but rather than full replacement they wanted to reskill these workers. Unfortunately they didn’t have the
resources. Thus the livelihood of our 15 hard-working employees depended on this 100K grant.
But what hit me beyond the weight of this challenge was the lack of education around this coming epidemic. We’re
all taught that if we go to school, get good grades, get a good job, all will be well. Yet these workers did just that,
and now stood at the mercy of technical unemployment.
Fortunately this story has a happy ending - we won the grant - these workers were reskilled. But the concept of
technical unemployment was an intro that sowed the seeds to why I’m here today.
Technical Unemployment: Doing everything right then losing your job to “technology”
10. It is my junior year and I’m sitting on the 52nd floor of my dream job -
an internship at Big 4 accounting firm.
While approaching my second month something hit me…..
What I was doing was following a checklist - taking a standard process and monotonously following
it with no deviation. From my experience I knew technology is too smart for humans to be
doing monotonous tasks. Yet this was the “dream job” - the one that only 2% of my graduating
class got a call back from.
Could it be that we were all those workers I needed to generate a
grant for?
11. I spent the next few years taking action around this hunch. I read all the books. I read all the reports. I completed a Masters Degree in
Innovation/Disruption at Babson College. I built a research technology company that drove innovation through design-thinking & lean/agile
frameworks. One project saved 75 manufacturing jobs. One project increased client revenue by 125%. I even built a platform that
connected students and small business through this new economy.
Yet to truly understand the implications of this hunch I had to go straight to the source: Silicon Valley. I joined Gigster - a software delivery
platform leveraging intelligent automation with the Future of Work, and within 6 months I developed, launched, and led our ideation
offering.
But the hunch was around Automation and the Future of Work, and through this added visibility the potential was now clear.
SO what did I learn?
“We are going through the process where software will automate software, automation will automate automation.” - Mark Cuban
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12. It’s not only true. It’s a full blown revolution challenging every societal norm we call work.
In terms of automation - I was right - my role at the big 4 has a 94% probability of automation.
But in terms of the societal impact - I grossly underestimated just how right I was.
Society is facing two fundamental transformations:
1: A transition away from full-time employment and towards a “Gig”/freelance economy.
2: Massive job destruction in the name of intelligent automation.
Millions of jobs will be lost, and the new jobs created tomorrow will look nothing like they do today
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15. Every single one of us will become a product on Amazon. We’ll have a rating. A review. We’ll probably be two-day shipped.
The reasons/ the prevailing winds carrying the Gig Economy:
Reason 1: A shift to part-time/flexible work that has been in the works since the 80’s.
Wave 1 - outsource individual
freelancer
Wave 2 - outsource freelance
department
Wave 3 - The platform augments
the individual
The Platform
THE GIG ECONOMY
TALENT-MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS
Reason 2: Rise of talent management platforms due to the convergence of cloud computing & the internet
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16. MIT compiled every study they could find on the impact of technology on
job destruction/creation, and while the raw numbers are alarming, what
comes to surface is two patterns:
1: Overwhelming job destruction
2: A higher proportion of destruction than creation
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17. According to education leaders Tony Wagner & Ted Dintersmith, the way we trained our current
workforce is:
"train millions of young adults to perform repetitive tasks quickly, retain modest amounts of content,
and keep errors to a minimum."
Commonly called “the knowledge worker”, this is the very profile computers are primed to automate.
According to Joseph E Aoun, author of Robot Proof: “In any predictable task, computers have
humans at a cognitive disadvantage - If a problem can be reduced to a train of yes and no
questions, no matter how complex, then a machine can resolve it.”
Thus what we’ll see is that knowledge workers - the objective of modern education - will be obsolete in
the Future of Work.
The knowledge workers will be obsolete in the future
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18. "Typically, the most valuable knowledge workers are the ones who thrive in the straitjacketed world of corporate
process, by building deep expertise in a narrow set of skills" - authors of How Google Works
The term “knowledge worker” was coined in 1959 by Peter
Drucker in his book Landmarks of Tomorrow.
Broadly speaking, knowledge workers trade physical labor for
cognitive tasks. While an accountant, an astrophysicist, a
teacher, and a hedge fund manager are all knowledge
workers, what determines their susceptibility to
automation is the degree to which they work under
complexity.
Keep reading to learn what “complexity” means.
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19. The buzzwords are AI, robots, now we hear a lot about machine learning. But they all come down to one force: computation.
Computation = Execution of a process.
What’s important is that computers will always outcompute us with known information for three reasons:
1: Raw processing power: While it takes us over 100 hours to read a single book, it takes a computer minutes (maybe hours) to read
all of Wikipedia.
2: Computers don’t forget.
3: Computers learn collaboratively through the cloud.
What does this mean?
Everything repeatable and predictable will be automated through
intelligent automation tools built around computation.
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21. 1: Massive job destruction
2: Obsolescence of the knowledge worker
3: We will all be products on Amazon through the convergence
of the Gig Economy & Talent Management Platforms
IN SUMMARY
25. According to the World Economic Forum, currently 65% of children entering primary school will work in a job that
hasn’t been invented yet. Further, the Institute for the Future says that 85% of jobs in 2030 currently don’t exist.
If we relate this to computation, this means the input is incomplete. And without input, computation can’t compute
for the intended result.
So computers do have a weakness… they can only compute with known information*.
Thus what if the position of human is solving for uncertainty? What if humans could work collaboratively with machines
by combining a computer’s computation capabilities with a human’s ability to mitigate uncertainty?
*This is assuming we won’t figure out AGI - artificial general intelligence
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26. Where do we start to deal with uncertainty? Here is a hint…. the latin root of Entrepreneurship is to undertake.
If we take this deeper, the definition of Entrepreneurship is:
Identifying, creating, and capturing value in extreme uncertainty.
Unfortunately, entrepreneurship on its own is insufficient….
“A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”
- Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
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27. What do innovators, chess champions, fire chiefs, and all top performers have in common?
The way they make decisions. They can’t explain it themselves, but neuroscience shows us that top performers pull
from a reactionary state - meaning they are pattern seeking on a subconscious level. It’s not magic, but rather a product
of memory to the point that they subconsciously have a map that allows them to see patterns that amateurs can’t. We can
think of it like a ladder. The more experience (memories) one has, the more steps they have. The more steps, the higher the
ladder. The higher the ladder, the more patterns they can see.
What’s funny, is when you think of it this way, you start to see examples of how we visually display this in society - tennis line
judges, court judges. Thus in terms of entrepreneurship this brings about a crucial insight.
In order to ask the right questions so that we can identify, create, and capture value, we can’t only be
“entrepreneurial”, but rather possess the expertise to see at a heightened state of
consciousness.
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29. WHEN WE BRING THIS ALL TOGETHER:
THE PROBLEM
There will be massive job destruction, with the knowledge worker becoming obsolete.
The jobs of tomorrow will look nothing like today, with roles requiring symbiosis between man and machine.
THE SOLUTION
The future will belong to those who can not only mitigate uncertainty but see the “non-computable” inputs.
And those that can do this will be the Expert Entrepreneur’s, those who possess two traits:
1. The ability to identify, create, and capture value in extreme uncertainty
2. The ability to see from a heightened state of consciousness through deep expertise
When you string these two together you have the Expert Entrepreneur, and most importantly - you have the keys to create the
society we need in this future.
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52. We collaborate with Enterprises & Universities to transition their workforce/students
through our Future of Work Platform that includes:
The science of expertise &
creativity through
neuroscience frameworks
The science of Entrepreneurship
through Lean/Agile methodologies
The tangible impact of Intelligent
Automation & a New Model of
Labor
54. Did you know, that the smartphone in your pocket holds more computing power than all the supercomputers combined that
powered the first man on the moon?
This same smartphone gives us the world's knowledge in the palm of our hand. It allows us to shout to Australia and hear
back within seconds. It allows us to buy something sourced in Africa, manufactured in China, then delivered to your
doorstep. It also knows more about you than you know about yourself. Through a multitude of sensors it knows where you
go, what you buy, and as emotional intelligence quantifies it will know exactly how you feel. Yet it’s just one of the
technologies powering what Ray Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns - exponential rate of change in a wide
array of complementary evolutionary systems.
There are currently exponential revolutions in Biotech, in quantum computing, and intelligent automation to name a few.
We’re far advanced from the hardware driven innovations of Moore’s Law - yet the speed of innovation has just begun:
“We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress”
- Ray Kurzweil
Law of Accelerating Returns: exponential rate of change in a wide array of complementary evolutionary systems.
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55. According to Peter Diamandis:
“Our brains are programmed to think "local & linear" -
an evolutionary result from our origins in the Savannas
of Africa. Here nothing affected us that wasn't within a day’s
walk, and because of this, our brain evolved in what Peter
calls a local & linear fashion.
Yet while we can predict it or not, the future holds two
major transformations:
1: The Gig Economy
2: Automation
We can no longer predict the amount of change our future faces
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61. Freelance/contract-work in place of or along with full-time employment
“The convergence of the internet & cloud computing fueled the emergence of the
Gig Economy from a cost-cutting decision to a smarter alternative”
70. Justin Time
iOS & Android App Development
“Justin had a very methodological approach that fit well with our team.
He also went the extra mile with every milestone” - Jocelyn L
“Justin was a self-starter that needed very little direction to deliver high
quality work” - Gary J
$ 130.00/hr
98% job success
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Full time dog, part time graphic designer
“Vicky was more focused on squirrels than our project.” - Mark M
“You’d think she was never fed with the amount of begging she did” -
Riley
$ 79.00/hr
12% job success
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Part time baby, full time content blogger
“Baby Brent delivered really out of the box solutions with little direction”
- Mark M
“Baby Brent missed a couple deadlines but always clearly
communicated progress & results” - Kimsoo
$ 48.00/hr
78% job success
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