James and I had the chance to pick Holger Mueller’s brain — an intriguing brain to pick, as brains go. He’s one of the principals at Constellation Research, and his various social media feeds are always full of goodies and learning. We buckled down to talk about the FUTURE OF WORK (as our current season ongoing question), but wound up on a few fun detours.

🎧 Give it a listen here.

"Shoey" - from Holger's Twitter Feed at the Workday Rising Conference

Highlights

• Check out Constellation’s October event: Connected Enterprise 2023
• What a great sense that things are ALWAYS exciting — but in early days of his career that exciting-ness was slower.
• “Smith” — highly common last name these days — tied to the old profession of blacksmithing. What’s the new “smith” these days? Probably producing software.
• Holger: why can’t email be done better? (Yeah. I agree here for sure. It seems like a useful holdover ripe for some kind of sea change.)
• The art is finding the right ratio between human and automation. Find the right pace of digital transformation for people.
• Stay until the end where Holger catches me forgetting what we’d discussed in the pre-show!
• The “money quotes” section below is intentionally truncated. Holger says so many little nuggets of wisdom that I found myself just transcribing the episode.

Money Quotes

Holger

It’s all about how we will work, what we will work on, what we will get paid to work on…and it’s changing rapidly.

You have to reinvent yourself every 5 years.

You have to find the right balance between the skills of people and the automation you can provide them. Companies who do that right do amazing things.

SAP is like concrete: it’s great when it’s warm and moving…but [after time] you need a sledgehammer to fix it.

James

You’re seeing the veil between the back office and the front office be torn apart — but it’s also creating lots of consternation and hand-wringing.

Paul

It’s never been more clear than now that what you do for work and how you do it have the distinct possibility of changing right under your feet. Difference is faster, now.