Today’s guest is the founder and CEO of The Starr Conspiracy, Bret Starr. The Starr Conspiracy is “is a weird mashup of analyst and marketing folks and consultants who have been working specifically in what we now call the work tech industry, which we used to call, back in 1999, the HR software industry; HR software and services.”
Not only is The Starr Conspiracy the underwriter for this year’s Punk Rock HR episodes, but Bret is an infinitely interesting guest on his own. This episode talks about the distinction between HR and work, the future of human resources and how adopting the “reverse mullet” concept can increase your employees’ overall happiness.
I love Bret for many reasons, but years ago, when I sold my domain of PunkRockHR.com, Bret got it back for me through valiant efforts. So, if you are interested in two middle-aged Gen Xers talking about the world of work and tech, and all things good about life and leadership, then I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation.
Punk Rock HR is proudly underwritten by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is a B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head over to thestarrconspiracy.com.
The Difference Between HR & Work
Many of us try to get away from the words “human resources” and “HR,” but we always come back to them. And while that happens, it’s essential to understand that there needs to be a distinction between HR and work to evolve in the future.
Bret explains that we saw the paper clip as the center of the universe in the old system. That can mean that the success of any business or enterprise was focused only on what the enterprise could do by itself. All the systems these businesses had were pre-technology, so they optimized what was best for the company and generated products or services for its customers. However, the watershed moment came with the shift from an inventory-centered enterprise resource planning, manufacturing-centered software world to a broader world.
“I think as we started to encounter some of these concepts, really about the same time that cloud computing was becoming a significant thing,” he says. “I think the center of the universe shifted from being an individual company to being more of this like notion of the extended enterprise, where we’re all collaborating in these networks of supply chains and business transactions and all that stuff.”
So when it comes to separating HR and work, it’s essential to take in the workplace holistically. “The work experience doesn’t cover everything that work does,” Bret explains. “And so increasingly, you’re seeing project planning solutions and meeting management solutions, and stuff like that that’s part of the everyday fabric of how work gets done, being integrated in a more people-centric way with systems that we used to think of as financial systems or ERP systems or stuff like that.
“So I think there’s a real need to take a holistic view of what work is and the significance of the role of the human in the work, but those aren’t necessarily the same thing all the time,” Bret continues.
Traditional or Reverse Mullet?
Now that we have the distinction between HR and work, what exactly is the role of HR? Bret breaks it down and shares that role can be broken down into two categories, the traditional mullet or the reverse mullet.
While these terms can cause a chuckle or two, they play a significant role in a business’s ecosystem. “That’s a funny way of saying something very serious, which is in a business ecosystem, I think there’s four things that matter,” he says. “There’s the employee experience, there’s the customer experience, there’s the shareholder experience, and then there’s just social good.”
So when a business has a traditional mullet in the ecosystem, “which is business in the front, party in the back, 99% of all companies are going to put shareholder experience first.” The perfect example for this would be the drama “Dopesick” (which can be found on Hulu). “It’s the perfect example of basically when it’s all about shareholder value. Everyone else gets squeezed, and in this case, murdered, dead,” says Bret.
However, with a reverse mullet, the employee’s experience comes first in the business ecosystem, which many businesses now are trying to do. Bret explains that the reverse mullet means prioritizing employee experience and saying “that if we take care of our people in a real way, not in like a logo way or catchphrase way, but if we really take care of our people, they’ll take care of our customers.”
And the pandemic has pushed more and more companies to improve their companies’ overall employee experience to drive better results.
Reverse Mullet for Employee Happiness
This past decade has taught us a lot about the workplace and today’s systems. Most importantly, it has shown us that we have been complicit and compliant in how we treat our employees — especially when using a traditional mullet concept.
Right now, we are at a “50-year low for happiness,” Bret says. There are many contributing factors to this, but the most relevant aspect is businesses putting their shareholders first. Bret explains that while our planet is literally and figuratively on fire and employees are getting screwed over, and profits are at a hundred-year high.
This is when HR can genuinely step in to advocate for employee happiness by holding the reverse mullet as a priority. “When you look at the role of HR, it’s really the mandate. Are they there to serve the employee, or are they there to serve the shareholders?” he says. “And anyone who says, ‘well, both, and,’ no, you just don’t get it, because, at the end of the day, it will always be the shareholder. Unless the organization has taken a stance and said, we will always make every decision based on a simple question, ‘is this good for the employee experience or not?’ If it’s not, we’re not going to do it; if it is, then we are.”
We are seeing employees change jobs or even careers because of companies failing to prioritize employees’ happiness. Profit is essential for the success of the business, but to drive that success, you need employees who want to be there and are happy to be there. Bret shares, “I think inherent in that companies are going to have to be comfortable making less profit because the profit situation is just out of control when you look at what our life circumstances are right now.”
[bctt tweet=”‘The planet’s on fire, employees are getting screwed every day and yet profits are at a hundred-year high.’ — Bret Starr of @StarrConspiracy. Listen in as Bret shares the benefits of a reverse mullet on #PunkRockHR” via=”no”]
Glossary of Terms from the Episode
- Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO): Decisions are made by the community and not just by those riddled with power.
- Professional Employer Organization (PEO): Outsourcing firms that provide services to small and midsize businesses.
- Crypto: Basically what we are seeing all over social media! Crypto is digital money secured by blockchain tech.
- Blockchain: Where bitcoin and crypto are maintained in a peer-to-peer network.
People in This Episode
Bret Starr: LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube channel, The Starr Conspiracy website
Full Transcript
Laurie Ruettimann:
This episode of Punk Rock HR is sponsored by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is the B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head on over to thestarrconspiracy.com.
Hey, everybody, I’m Laurie Ruettimann. Welcome back to Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Bret Starr. He’s the founder and CEO of The Starr Conspiracy. Now, The Starr Conspiracy happens to underwrite Punk Rock HR, but Bret is an infinitely interesting guest on his own. And on today’s episode, we are talking about work tech, the future of human resources and all kinds of crazy shit because you can’t run an agency called The Starr Conspiracy without the conversation going bananas. I love Bret for a lot of reasons, but years ago, I actually sold my domain of punkrockhr.com and Bret, through valiant efforts, got it back for me.
So, everything you hear on Punk Rock HR, everything you see on the website, all of it is technically Bret’s fault. So listen, if you’re interested in two middle-aged Gen Xers talking about the world of work and technology and just all things good about life and leadership, well, I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation with my friend, Bret Starr.
Hey Bret, how’s it going?
Bret Starr:
It’s going great, Laurie, how are you?
Laurie Ruettimann:
Oh, I’m terrific. I’m even better because you’re here today. I’m lucky because we go way back, but for those who don’t know you, could you do the honor of telling us who you are and what you’re all about?
Bret Starr:
So I am the founder and CEO of The Starr Conspiracy, which is a weird mashup of analyst and marketing folks and consultants who have been working specifically in what we now call the work tech industry, which we used to call, back in 1999, the HR software industry; HR software and services. But we work mostly exclusively in that industry. And we help with everything from customer experience, all the pillars of customer experience from brand marketing, sales, products, service, et cetera. But because we’ve been in work tech for so long, we also help with employee experience and we help with shareholder experience, and we see all three of those things as being really interrelated and things that need to be held in balance in order for organizations to be successful. I think we’re an experience company or agency, but I don’t really know what that is or what it looks like. I just know that we do a lot of weird stuff compared to what people would normally say, “hey, this is what consultants do, or that’s what marketing folks or agencies do,” or whatever.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I was just thinking about this phrase “work tech,” because no matter how hard you try, and we’re all trying to get away from the words “human resources” and “HR,” but we get back there all the time. There’s “HR tech,” “HR tech analyst,” “HR tech vendors.” Why is the distinction between HR and work so important for the future?
Bret Starr:
Well, I think there’s a lot of reasons for that. The one that makes the most sense to me is that there was a time when basically a paper clip was the center of the universe, which is hard to imagine. And so it used to be, as we were navigating the Industrial Revolution or whatever, that the success of a business or an enterprise was really focused on what that enterprise could do in isolation, so that company and their ability to produce something. And so all the systems they had — this was pre-technology — all the systems they had, all the processes they had, et cetera, were really optimized around what was in the best interest of that company and producing whatever product or service they were producing for the customers.
And I think as we started to encounter some of these concepts, really about the same time that cloud computing was becoming a significant thing — like the internet was invented and all that — I think the center of the universe shifted from being an individual company to being more of this like notion of the extended enterprise, where we’re all collaborating in these networks of supply chains and business transactions and all that stuff. But what was really interesting about that period is that the center of the universe was the paper clip. So it moved from being the factory to the paper clip, and how the paper clip moved from one company to another company in this notion of the extended enterprise.
And, really, I think that there was a growing realization, starting about the turn of the century, that it really wasn’t the cost of a paper clip flowing through a supply chain that needed to be tamed by an ERP system — which back then the biggest software investment that a company would ever make was a big ERP system from Oracle or Sybase, or some of these big companies that don’t even exist anymore or have been acquired.
And it was a combination of software and servers that were stored on premise, on-site, et cetera. But there was a realization that ERP; enterprise resource planning systems, what they’re really good at was tracking the efficiencies of the cost of a paper clip as it flowed through the supply chain. But the cost of a paper clip really comes down to an individual’s ability to negotiate the cost of a paper clip and to choose a vendor to work with and to choose what ecosystem they participate in, and that’s all people.
And so, I think, a real watershed moment — I know that Workday’s a touchstone for a lot of folks — but I think a real watershed moment for the transition from this inventory-centered ERP, manufacturing-centered software world to where we are becoming now was when Workday came out and said, “hey, we’ve got talent acquisition and we have financials and we’re putting those two things together.”
And that was like the first time that there was this major, well-funded attempt to demonstrate the relationship between people and how a business functions and how work gets done. And then finally, I would say, that increasingly work tech and why it’s important to distinguish between things like HR, which is an important component of the work experience. The work experience doesn’t cover everything that work does. And so increasingly you’re seeing project planning solutions and meeting management solutions, and stuff like that that’s part of the everyday fabric of how work gets done, being integrated in a more people-centric way with systems that we used to think of as financial systems or ERP systems or stuff like that.
So I think there’s a real need to take a holistic view of what work is and the significance of the role of the human in the work, but those aren’t necessarily the same thing all the time.
Laurie Ruettimann:
It’s so surprising to me that so many organizations and communities are rooted in the past, rooted in this notion of HR being a gatekeeper, HR being the center of excellence by which all work is determined, when we find that some of the most innovative work tech doesn’t even have, to your point, anything to do with human resources. Whether it’s something in well-being or something around project management, HR is often the last to know. So, do you have any examples of really great tech that sprung up that everybody’s using now, but didn’t start in HR?
Bret Starr:
I’m really into like, Cal Newport right now, so I’m reading “A World Without Email” and trying to really get deeply grounded in this notion of deep work and deep collaboration. And we have a pretty unusual just way that we work at The Starr Conspiracy, and we’re always trying to make it better, but I would say that a great example is, if you are able in the knowledge worker economy — for lack of a better, that’s been a phrase that Drucker introduced a long time ago and now —
Laurie Ruettimann:
We’re stuck with it. Yeah.
Bret Starr:
Yeah, we’re stuck with it and it feels gross every time I say it, but there it is. The work has to be autonomous. It’s not like it was in, working on assembly line, assembling cars, where people had to repeat the same step over and over and over again. And there was no need for autonomy in their work. In fact, autonomy was antithetical to doing a good job in that system. Right? And so enter the knowledge worker economy, and that work has to be autonomous. And so you can’t look over someone’s shoulder and force them to be creative, et cetera. No.
Laurie Ruettimann:
No. They’ve got to have their own inner accountability to do that. And inner skills and inner drive to get the work done. Absolutely.
Bret Starr:
And so you see all this onset of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and what those really are, versus what people mean when they kind of say it in a corporate environment, stuff like that. But one of the things that I don’t think people have is that while the work that’s being done needs to be autonomous, there needs to be autonomy in the work, the workflow cannot be autonomous.
And so distinguishing between work and workflow is, I think, going to be one of the major innovations of this period that we’re in. And therefore, I think you see a lot of interesting software solutions that were not considered HR or people solutions like Trello, like Flow, like Asana that actually create a better experience because it provides some definition around the workflow, so that people can be autonomous in their work.
And so I think a lot of the solutions that really had nothing to do with HR, but now are getting wrapped up with everything HR, like performance management and learning and development, all that stuff, are really coming out of the project planning space. And there’s other spaces, as well.
One of the other ones that I would mention is just this earned wage access. Earned wage access is a pure financial play. You wouldn’t expect that to enter an organization through HR, but increasingly, it is entering cultures of work, and individuals are able to access it because it was given to them by a human resources outsourcing firm who has those one of 30 or 40 benefits that they provide as part of their service.
And so, increasingly, the way people get paid is becoming intermingled with HR, even though it came out of more of a financial area. And so I think you just see all of this stuff just converging. And the thing, the one thing that it all has in common is people. And the people who are supposed to be the most important to the people are the HR people.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, and it reminds me of, well, my example for this would’ve been like Slack, right? That went through rogue adoption, popped up in organizations and suddenly everybody’s using it. HR gets wind of it and they try to put a workflow around it, to your point, right? And now everybody hates Slack. And I think there’s this danger that when HR gets — this entity, this function, this nameless, faceless monster, right — gets their hands on something, they often ruin it or they descale the beauty of it. And that’s part of the risk of our industry. But I think you fight against that all day long.
Bret Starr:
Well, and yeah, and look, I think it all comes back to the same issue. And we exchanged a few emails about this, but it’s about the reverse mullet. And the question is, what is the role of HR, and how is the role of HR defined by whether someone has a traditional mullet or reverse mullet? And so that’s a funny way of saying something very serious, which is in a business ecosystem, I think there’s four things that matter. There’s probably a lot more things that matter, but just for the sake of argument, let’s say there’s four things.
There’s the employee experience, there’s the customer experience, there’s the shareholder experience, and then there’s just social good. I’ve recently been talking a lot more about the relationship between social good and those three experiences, because you can have a company that’s having a great employee experience, creating a great customer experience, creating a great shareholder experience, but they’re destroying the fucking planet, and that’s not OK.
Laurie Ruettimann:
No. And it’s so common. Absolutely. Well, and so the four being intermingled for you, do you rank them?
Bret Starr:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s the point. So if you are an organization where you are running a traditional mullet, which is business in the front, party in the back, 99% of all companies are going to put shareholder experience first. They’re going to put customer experience second, they’re going to put employee experience third — and most would say last, except the conversation about social good isn’t even happening. And so do you ever watch that show or have you watched that show “Dopesick”?
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah. It’s scary and petrifying, and Michael Keaton is amazing. We’re going to put that in the show notes because everybody should watch it.
Bret Starr:
Yeah, it’s so great. But to me, it’s the perfect example of basically when it’s all about shareholder value. Everyone else gets squeezed, and in this case, murdered, dead.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Straight-up dead. Yeah.
Bret Starr:
Straight-up dead. And a lot of the times, what people don’t understand is that, if these things are not held in balance, if there’s not a single vision that’s shared across all four of those, then it’s going to start a fire somewhere, and that fire will eventually engulf the entire ecosystem of that business. And in this case, the fire started with people dying from the drug. We could say that that’s traditionally a customer experience problem.
Laurie Ruettimann:
We can. Yeah. So this reverse mullet idea is just applicable to so many aspects of our organization, as well as our entire enterprise. It can apply in human resources, it can apply in customer service, but also just the way you approach your individual encounters with shareholders, correct?
Bret Starr:
That’s right. And to put a fine point on the original question, a company that’s running the traditional model to put shareholder experience first, the role of HR is going to become a defense role, where the goal is to implement repeatable processes that benefit the efficiency of the business and are more focused on shareholder experience than they are employee experience. If you’re on the reverse mullet, and you put employee experience first in your belief system is that, if we take care of our people in a real way — not in like a logo way or catchphrase way — but if we really take care of our people, they’ll take care of our customers.
And if our people are having a great experience and our customers are having a great experience, then the shareholder experience really becomes about stewardship rather than managing everyone to death around the numbers that they need to hit, so that the shareholders get … We’re at a 50-year low for happiness. Happiness is a 50-year low right now. This all done by the University of Chicago, who looked at multiple data sources over the last 50 years to try to get a longitudinal read on multiple factors driving happiness.
But happiness is at a 50-year low. The planet’s on fire, employees are getting screwed every day, and yet profits are at a hundred-year high. So how can all those things be true? How can all those things be true and we think that’s okay? So when you look at the role of HR, it’s really the mandate. Are they there to serve the employee or are they there to serve the shareholders? And anyone who says, “well, both and,” no, you just don’t get it, because at the end of the day, it will always be the shareholder, unless the organization has taken a stance and said, “We will always make every decision based on a simple question, ‘is this good for the employee experience or not?’ If it’s not, we’re not going to do it. If it is, then we are.” And I think inherent in that is that companies are going to have to be comfortable making less profit, because the profit situation is just out of control when you look at what our life circumstances are right now.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, you don’t need to put a fine point on this, because I want to continue down this vein. We had this really great guest on the show and you may know her, Kristy McCann Flynn from GoCoach, an amazing leader, former human resources, walked out the door on her 20-plus-year career in human resources because she thought, enough is enough. I’m not enabling this behavior. I’m no longer empowering profit before people. She’s one in a million. And I think there’s so much to be said about HR being braver and being bolder and more courageous. But how do you actually do that in the moment? How do you live that? You know you’re running a business, right? You’ve gone from small business to successful enterprise, and you have these inflection points in your career journey. How did you navigate that? And how should a regular honest-to-goodness HR person in Indianapolis, Indiana, navigate these tricky situations around people and profits?
Bret Starr:
Yeah. First of all, it’s hard. We run a pretty good business at The Starr Conspiracy. And the only reason that we do is because we ran a really shitty business. So, you can’t-
Laurie Ruettimann:
You learn from failure. It’s the only way to learn. Yeah.
Bret Starr:
Well, I totally agree with that. If you stick with something long enough, you fail enough to actually get good at it. But the thing that we learned through experience was that, every time we tried to focus on numbers or profit or customer experience exclusively, that caused us to take our eye off the ball of how we were treating our people and the experience that they were having, the business suffered, everything suffered. And the more we just said, fuck it, let’s treat people really well, and we know that the customers are going to have a great experience because of that. And then we’ll see what happens on the business side. And if the business side doesn’t work out, then we must have a really screwed-up model that’s never going to work anyway. But at least our people will be happy as the ship is sinking rather than feeling like their asses are whipped all the time, trying to hit their numbers.
And so we learn from experience — and the average tenure of someone at The Starr Conspiracy, I would say, probably seven or eight years of people who are there right now. We doubled in size this year. So we’ve got a bunch of people who are here for less than a year, but people tend to stick around The Starr Conspiracy. So we work together for a long time, we figured a bunch of shit out. I will say this: If there was ever a moment where people were going to look around and say, if we keep doing things the way that we’re doing them now, we’re going to end up in some kind of nuclear winter situation, this is that time.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people are going to have to see the old model completely unwind before they make the change. But I do think that there is a group of folks who are coming out of the fringes of agile and of deep work and of what used to be these little culty corners of how work gets done and how that relates to profit. And even, dare I say it, in the blockchain world and the crypto world and the impact that DAO have had on people’s options for working together and where governance happens, as opposed to —
Laurie Ruettimann:
My favorite example of a DAO is a CEO who’s like, “I’m all about a DAO.” And I’m like, well, then you’re no longer a CEO. That’s how that works.
Bret Starr:
Or unless the DAO passes a rule to elect a CEO, then you probably wouldn’t get elected anyway.
Laurie Ruettimann:
And you all get paid in tokens. That’s right.
Bret Starr:
That’s right. Yeah. All the governance, there’s actually a PEO that was created by one of the crypto wizards from five or six years ago, who created yearn.finance, which is a huge crypto by market cap. And the second project that he created was a PEO to handle basically payroll for DAOs. And so it’s all coming together.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well I have to laugh because what I’m going to do for the show for people who are listening is I will put in the show notes a glossary for all of these phrases. DAO, PEO, crypto, blockchain. There’s actually a website, not more than Investopedia, but like a list that we can give you so you can follow along. But there’s all sorts of weird stuff happening in the fringes of work, which to Bret’s point makes this industry so exciting. But Bret, I want to know, how do you describe your own career journey? Because I know you didn’t start out to work in the world of work tech. I know that you’re a musician, you’ve got athletic abilities. You had big dreams, dude, is what I’m saying. How’d you end up here on this podcast? Come on.
Bret Starr:
First of all, I like where I am right now. So thank you. And it’s a question that I ponder a lot because I think there’s all these founder myths and stuff out there. And when I was younger and thought about the speech that I was going to give in front of the Rotary Club in my retirement and talk about how I did it my way and all that stuff. I didn’t even know what the Rotary Club was, I just knew that that was a place where people gave speeches. I was, for a period of my life, constructing my own founder story of all the adversity that I faced and how I single-handedly created A, B, C, D, and E resulting in amazing shit. The problem is none of that’s true for anybody in my opinion.
And so my career journey I think is really straightforward. I never thought of it as a career journey. And I didn’t know I was doing this at the time, so, big picture of this is what I believe. I believe the only two things that matter in life are locus of control and situational awareness. Period, end of story. And I think if you have high situational awareness, then you can see what’s going on, and you can predict what’s going to happen if things keep going in that direction. If you have low situational awareness, you can’t do any of that. If you have an internal locus of control, you feel like you are the person who makes things happen for yourself, the good things and the bad things. You have an external locus of control, you’re just a leaf tossed on the river of fate.
And so I think there are a lot of folks out there who, through no fault of their own, really have low situational awareness and an external locus of control, so they don’t know what the fuck is going on and they wouldn’t do anything about it even if they did, right? And so I think that my journey through life has just been focused on saying “yes” to a bunch of stuff, because I was aware of what was going to happen if I continued in the same situation that I was in at the time and could predict that — run that out of my mind in the future, and then run this out my mind in the future. And I also feel like I have a very strong internal locus of control, which is, I feel like I can make things work if I make a decision.
And so you put those two things together, I’m just a person who was presented with lucky chance after lucky chance after lucky chance. I was hired as a waiter, I was waiting tables in Austin, Texas, at Good Eats Cafe on Bernard Road. I was hired by a drunk CEO to work in a software startup with about four employees that had a big exit. And then I just kept jumping to lucky opportunity after lucky opportunity. Actually, this whole agency was started by someone who gave me the money to start it, a company out of California. And all they wanted in return was to be a customer. So my agency wouldn’t even exist. It wasn’t like a fundraising round or anything. The person gave me a bunch of money and said, “go start an agency and let us be a client.”
Laurie Ruettimann:
It’s amazing. I’ve known you for over a decade. And the one thing I still love about you is that you think in two-by-two quadrants. But I love it. And I love this idea of situational awareness and locus of control, because this is really the stuff of life. If you feel as if you have some ability to say things about your life and to act right, you don’t just live and learn helplessness, you can get pretty far when you realize no cavalry is coming. And when you can see a little bit above the weeds and understand what’s going on, you can make some good career decisions. So I love that you’ve been able to find the center of that and model that for your employees.
Bret Starr:
Our entire hiring experience is based on — it’s a very unique hiring experience. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s really based on identifying those two things: locus of control and situational awareness. But I will say that, for me, that discovery has been in retrospect rather than — it’s more like an analysis and reflection of what’s happened to me over the last 20 or 30 years.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Of course. That’s what middle age does. Yeah.
Bret Starr:
Thanks for the middle-age shoutout. I appreciate that.
Laurie Ruettimann:
It’s all good.
Bret Starr:
I feel older than middle age, but —
Laurie Ruettimann:
I know. Yeah. There are mornings, definitely. Well, listen, my friend, it’s always good to connect with you and to figure out what’s happening in the world of work and work tech. And I love this reverse mullet idea. Give people a really great experience, give your workers a really great experience. And I don’t know. What do you worry about, the compliance shit on the back end? That’s how I hear some of this stuff. Where do you put that compliance stuff?
Bret Starr:
Well, what is compliance? If you think about it in terms of basically, are you talking about, like, the compliance around a relationship that you have with employees and how to manage that? Are you talking about compliance of the regulations that govern the manufacturing of the product, or, whatever. I think that that is a form of governance, and unlike a true DAO, governance is required in a corporate entity because at the center of a corporate entity are the shareholders.
And I’m not saying that shareholders need to go away and that we need to move to real DAOs or anything like that, I’m just saying that the equation needs to be balanced a little bit more and tilted in the favor of the people who are doing the work and creating those great customer experiences. And that things like compliance and governance and all of those issues that need to be managed by, really, a central organization, need to be managed based on the best interests of the people in their ecosystem, rather than simply the best interests of the shareholders in that organization. So I think it’s just perspective. It’s like, compliance for whom?
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, Bret, it’s always good hearing from you. Thanks again for being a guest today on Punk Rock HR.
Bret Starr:
It was a real honor and a real pleasure, what a great way for me to start the year. And I hope that you have an amazing 2022.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Hey everybody, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Punk Rock HR. We are proudly underwritten by the Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is the B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head on over to thestarrconspiracy.com. Punk Rock HR is produced and edited by Rep Cap with special help from Michael Thibodeaux and Devon McGrath. For more information, show notes, links, and resources, head on over to punkrockhr.com. Now that’s all for today and I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll see you next time on Punk Rock HR.
love it!!!