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Matthew Bidwell, professor at the Wharton School and author of The Insider Advantage, examines why familiarity with an organization remains a substantial source of career advantage. After studying employment and careers for more than 25 years, he concludes that work has not become nearly as fluid as many predictions suggested and that "free agent" arrangements are less attractive than they often appear.
Bidwell distinguishes advancement from a satisfying working life. Promotion, pay, and status remain common measures of success, but their contribution to happiness is limited. "Doubling your income has a very small effect on your happiness," he explains. Relationships, trust in managers, belonging, meaningful work, autonomy, and lower stress tend to matter more. Professional milestones also provide only temporary satisfaction. Once one goal is achieved, "there's always something else to think about, to worry about."
His research comparing external hires with people promoted into similar roles found that outside hires took approximately two to three years to reach the same performance level. This was not because organizations hired less capable people. Their performance eventually converged, but new hires first had to learn the organization's culture, relationships, processes, and ways of coordinating work.
Organizations frequently underestimate the cost of losing that knowledge. Recruitment and formal training are relatively easy to measure, while reduced performance during an employee's adjustment period and disruption to the wider team are harder to quantify. Bidwell has not seen a rigorous calculation of the full cost, but considers estimates of one to two times annual salary for professional and managerial employees plausible. The underlying problem is straightforward: "What goes in a spreadsheet is what gets managed."
The same reasoning complicates claims about workforce flexibility. Contractors can be brought in quickly, but they cannot become effective immediately. If a contractor becomes the only person who understands a mission-critical activity, the organization may find that it cannot dispense with that person as readily as expected.
Becoming an insider requires relationships within a team and across the wider organization. Familiar teams learn how colleagues communicate and coordinate, sometimes with very little explicit instruction. Yet effectiveness also depends on people encountered less frequently, including administrators, specialists, and colleagues in other functions. New employees should attend meetings and shared activities, spend time in the office when practical, and place themselves in situations where they can meet people beyond their immediate group. Remote teams can build familiarity through informal conversation and periodic in-person gatherings.
The structure of a professional network matters as well. Dense networks tend to circulate similar information. Sparser networks connect people across different groups, providing access to a wider range of information and opportunities. They also allow someone to create value by introducing a colleague with a problem to another person who can solve it. These relationships depend on reciprocity. Bidwell's advice is simple: "Be reliable. Be nice." Consistently helping others and fulfilling commitments builds the trust that supports future cooperation.
Adapting to an organization's culture requires understanding not only its practices but also the purposes they serve. A culture that consults widely before acting may seem unnecessarily slow to someone accustomed to rapid decisions, yet its process may produce more carefully considered choices. These practices involve trade-offs. Employees who cannot live according to their values in an organization may be better served by leaving, but Bidwell advises examining first which preferences are essential and which learned behaviours remain negotiable.
On AI, Bidwell separates current evidence from longer-term forecasts. Government labor figures do not yet show displacement on the scale suggested by public discussion, although there is no reason to assume that displacement will remain limited. He recommends scenario planning, shorter planning horizons, and preparation for several plausible futures rather than confidence in a single prediction.
Early research conducted with his postdoctoral colleague found that people moving into jobs with AI in the title tended to have broader professional backgrounds. Experience across different roles and functions provides access to more opportunities and a larger toolkit for solving unfamiliar problems. Social skills and judgment may also remain valuable, particularly the ability to work with people, persuade them, make them comfortable, and decide what should be done. Bidwell treats none of these as permanent certainties. His central advice is to build breadth, relationships, and organizational knowledge while remaining prepared to adjust as the nature of work changes.
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There's some big news that came out today, that has not actually gotten much publicity, but it should, especially for our client base, and for anyone who wants to have a major professional career, and that's the fact that the U.S. government has some say it's temporary, but they've temporarily banned certain tech companies from sponsoring foreign employees that are in the U.S. for permanent residency.
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Resume template - www.firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf Book (Nine Leaders in Action) - www.firmsconsulting.com/gift How to self-publish a book - https://www.firmsconsulting.com/freebook My day planner (in excel) - https://specialoffers.firmsconsulting.com/planyourdayFor this episode, let's revisit a strategy skills classic featuring an interview with the author of Ping Pong Leadership: 18 Principles to Succeed at Any Table in Business, Sports, and Life, Justin Bookey. In this book, Justin distills lessons from a beloved global sport into 18 actionable and unforgettable "Pong Principles." Justin has spent decades as a competitive table tennis player, trained with national and world champions, and won medals at the US Open. He is an Emmy-nominated content creator and strategist, and he's worked with leaders at global companies to accomplish their business goals. As these two worlds overlapped, Justin realized that the core principles he learned while training to compete at the table also apply to success in business and leadership. Ping Pong Leadership is a powerful guide to success at any table.
Justin Bookey is a former lawyer, an award-winning marketing strategist, and global ping pong player. He's had the good fortune of learning from some of the best and brightest in several arenas while working with leaders at Disney, Sony, Honda, Qualcomm, XPRIZE, and more. After practicing communications law for several years in Washington, DC, he transitioned to web content development. He's earned Emmy nominations for feature documentaries he produced, and Telly, Viddy, and ADDY awards for digital marketing campaigns he spearheaded.
Upon moving to LA, Bookey stepped up his training with Olympian and world-class table tennis coach Wei Wang. His efforts with her and other national/world champions helped him win medals at the US Open and the US national championships. He learned different leadership cultures while studying in India and teaching in Japan, and has played table tennis on seven continents. He grew up in Seattle, Washington, and now lives and works in Santa Monica, California, where he also runs PongFit, a nonprofit that builds fitness and community through ping pong.
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For this episode, let's revisit a strategy skills classic featuring an interview with the author of Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality, Benjamin Shestakofsky. This book draws on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, and examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it. Investors push startups to scale as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. Benjamin Shestakofsky shows how these demands create organizational problems that managers solve by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by these companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. Shestakofsky compellingly argues that we must focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.
Benjamin Shestakofsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is affiliated with AI at Wharton and the Center on Digital Culture and Society. He is the author of Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality (on sale March 19, 2024, University of California Press).
Shestakofsky's research centers on the relationship between work, technology, organizations, and political economy in the age of AI.
Articles based on his research for Behind the Startup have been awarded the 2021 Star-Nelkin Paper Award from the American Sociological Association's (ASA) Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology and the 2019 W. Richard Scott Article Award from the ASA's Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work. His research has been supported by the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. His work has been featured in the Financial Times, Axios, and in a publication of the World Economic Forum.
Author website: https://www.benjaminshestakofsky.com/ Book website: Behind the Startup: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520395039/behind-the-startup X/Twitter: @bshestakofsky
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For this episode, let's revisit a strategy skills classic featuring an interview with the authors of Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit. This book explains that the system that governs our economy—a winner-take-all economy—is the root cause of these myriad problems. The WTA economy self-selects for aggressive, cutthroat business tactics, which creates a feedback loop that sidelines women. The authors, three legal scholars, call this feedback loop "the triple bind": if women don't compete on the same terms as men, they lose; if women do compete on the same terms as men, they're punished more harshly for their sharp elbows or actual misdeeds; and when women see that they can't win on the same terms as men, they take themselves out of the game (if they haven't been pushed out already). With odds like these stacked against them, it's no wonder women feel like, no matter how hard they work, they can't get ahead.
Naomi Cahn is the Justice Anthony M. Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, as well as the Co-Director of the Family Law Center. Cahn is the author or editor of numerous books written for both academic and trade publishers, including Red Families v. Blue Families and Homeward Bound. In 2017, Cahn received the Harry Krause Lifetime Achievement in Family Law Award from the University of Illinois College of Law and in 2024 she was inducted into the Clayton Alumni Hall of Fame.
June Carbone is the Robina Chair of Law, Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. Previously she has served as the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri at Kansas City; and as the Associate Dean for Professional Development and Presidential Professor of Ethics and the Common Good at Santa Clara University School of Law. She has written From Partners to Parents and co-written Red Families v. Blue Families; Marriage Markets; and Family Law. She is a co-editor of the International Survey of Family Law.
Nancy Levit is the Associate Dean for Faculty and holds a Curator's Professorship at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law. Professor Levit has been voted Outstanding Professor of the Year five times by students and was profiled in Dean Michael Hunter Schwartz's book, What the Best Law Teachers Do. She has received the N.T. Veatch Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity and the Missouri Governor's Award for Teaching Excellence. She is the author of The Gender Line and co-author of Feminist Legal Theory; The Happy Lawyer; The Good Lawyer; and Jurisprudence—Classical and Contemporary.
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For this episode, let's revisit a strategy skills classic interview with an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker and authority in harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth, founder and CEO of Triggers, Leslie Zane. Leslie is the author of The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life. In her book, Leslie shows that to grow a brand, business, or even a social movement, traditional persuasion tactics fall short. Instead, you must connect to the instinctive mind. And to do this, you need to understand the science of consumer choice and employ techniques that work with a person's brain, not against it.
Leslie Zane is an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker and the foremost authority in harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth.
In her early career at P&G and Johnson & Johnson, Zane championed the position that what people say is unreliable and that telegraphic cues are more powerful than direct communication, but her unconventional thinking was often disregarded. In 1995, she founded Triggers®, the first brand consulting firm rooted in behavioral science, where she continued to champion the primacy of the instinctive mind in brand decisions.
With her groundbreaking discoveries in boosting salience, the Brand Connectome® and Growth Triggers®, Zane and her team have delivered over $20 billion in incremental revenue for Fortune 100 clients.
Today Triggers' strategies are evident in diverse fields from consumer-packaged goods, health care and insurance to fighting anti-Semitism, showcasing its versatility.
An alumna of Yale, Harvard Business School and Bain & Company, Zane is a recipient of the Congressional Women of Distinction and the Ogilvy Award. In 2021, she coined the term "Covid-stasis" forecasting the pandemic's lasting psychological and behavioral effects. Zane has been published in prestigious publications including Knowledge@Wharton, Harvard Business Review, World Economic Forum, Newsweek and Ad Age. Zane is a board member of El Centro Hispano, the leading non-profit empowering Hispanic immigrants with skills to thrive in the United States.
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Jesper Rangvid, professor of finance at Copenhagen Business School, explores what leaders should understand about interest rates, inflation, the cost of capital, prioritization, and AI.
Rangvid explains why the roughly 40-year decline in interest rates was "a completely unique historical period" and why executives should not assume borrowing will continue to get cheaper. Falling inflation and demographic changes helped drive rates lower, while low rates also contributed to rising house prices and increased borrowing. As he puts it, "lower and lower interest rates are not always good."
He discusses the post-pandemic shift toward higher inflation and interest rates, including the growing financing needs of governments and major AI companies. For executives, the key question is how changing financing costs affect investment and strategic decisions.
The conversation also explores prioritization and reflection. Rangvid describes scaling back his media commitments because "it simply takes too much time" and using running as "a time of reflection" to think through difficult problems from different angles.
Finally, Rangvid shares a cautiously optimistic perspective on AI and argues that technology does not eliminate the value of human judgment. Even when AI can produce an answer in seconds, "facilitating a discussion among executives is still unbelievably useful" because different perspectives help people challenge assumptions and think more deeply.
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For this episode, let's revisit a strategy skills classic interview with the author of The Illusion of Innovation: Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress, Elliott Parker. The Illusion of Innovation tackles the problem with innovation inside big companies, having activities that feel like innovation but lead to value destruction, not progress. This book explains why meaningful innovation naturally emerges from deliberate inefficiency and how large corporations can harness the power of small teams—startups—to drive radical change through systematic experimentation.
Elliott Parker is the founder and CEO of High Alpha Innovation, a venture builder that partners with corporations, universities, and entrepreneurs to co-create startups that solve compelling problems. He built his career in strategy consulting at Innosight, the firm founded by Clayton Christensen, in corporate venturing, and as an entrepreneur bringing new ideas to market. To date, he has launched over 40 venture-backed startups. Originally from California, Elliott currently resides with his family in Indiana. He earned a B.S. in Finance from BYU and an M.B.A. from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
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The Illusion of Innovation: Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress
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Cornelia Choe explains why being right is no longer enough for leaders operating in environments of constant change. She calls the problem "perspective blindness": we may be correct about what we see while still seeing only part of the picture.
Drawing on experiences across private equity, government, nonprofits, and leadership advisory, Cornelia argues that information has become increasingly commoditized while context and judgment have become more valuable. AI can broaden our understanding and challenge our thinking, but it can also become "a very easy substitute for judgment" when leaders accept its answers without questioning them.
The discussion examines two forms of perspective blindness. Reality blindness occurs when leaders fail to get close enough to different people, ideas, and situations. Projection blindness occurs when they assume others see the world as they do. Both become increasingly consequential when different members of an organization are responding to rapidly changing realities.
Cornelia encourages leaders to move "from being an expert to the chief investigator of their company": continually seeking perspectives that challenge their assumptions, listening closely to customers and stakeholders, and questioning whether the value they have historically created still meets what people need today. Her advice for customer conversations is deliberately simple: "just zip it and listen."
AI can support the same discipline. Cornelia uses AI personas representing people who see an issue differently from her to expose blind spots and expand the range of possibilities, while continuing to triangulate those perspectives with human judgment.
Before an important decision, she recommends asking: "Who sees this differently? Why do they see this differently? What do they see? And which of my assumptions would they change?"
The goal, she argues, "is not to eliminate uncertainty," but to take a wider view before making consequential decisions.
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Glenn Hutchinson, a psychotherapist who developed the personality science behind the assessments used by Match.com, explores one of the most misunderstood aspects of infidelity: why people sometimes violate their own values without fully understanding how they arrived there.
The conversation begins with a broader look at human behavior. Glenn explains that much of what drives our decisions happens outside conscious awareness. Using the familiar experience of driving on "autopilot," he argues that our unconscious mind is constantly shaping our judgments, emotions, and interactions long before we recognize it. As he puts it, "subjective experience is very deceiving," and "our behavior is more complicated. It comes from a deeper place than we realize."
A central theme is how people interpret situations through mental categories rather than objective reality. Someone may believe they are "just being friendly" instead of crossing emotional boundaries, or see an affair as "a unique situation" rather than recognizing it for what it is. Glenn explains that these unconscious mental frameworks can influence behavior in powerful ways, even for people who genuinely see themselves as honest and faithful.
The discussion also challenges the tendency to blame oneself after betrayal. Glenn explains that there is "no evidence" that a partner's infidelity means the betrayed person was lacking. He discusses several research-backed risk factors, including growing up aware of parental infidelity, having many sexual partners before marriage, and an anxious attachment style, while emphasizing that these are risk factors—not predictions—and that greater self-awareness and healthy boundaries matter far more.
The conversation concludes with practical guidance for both preventing and recovering from infidelity. Glenn argues that no one is completely immune to temptation, making honest communication and emotional openness essential in long-term relationships. For those healing after betrayal, he advises avoiding rash decisions, finding a trusted person to talk to, and recognizing that recovery takes time. As he says, "The first thing you got to do is become aware of it." Lasting change begins by recognizing the unconscious assumptions that shape behavior and gradually aligning actions with personal values.
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