Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen

Amjed Saffarini - Designing for Employee Engagement

September 11, 2024 • Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 244

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As Trove’s Chief Executive Officer, Amjed Saffarini guides the organization from both a growth and customer-centric perspective, building a nationally recognized, award-winning family office that focuses on exceptional outcomes and outstanding client service. As a board member and CEO, he leads a team of experts who serve as trusted advisors for our families and are helping to build, manage, and grow the company.

Amjed’s focus is to deliver a flawless and highly valued experience for our clients by ensuring excellence across all aspects of the company, including family office services, lifestyle management, business advisory, and tax services. By bringing new ideas, processes, and technologies to industries such as education, cybersecurity training, and now family office, Amjed has built a career transforming organizations and delivering successful outcomes.

With experience leading growth teams, companies, and serving on multiple boards, he knows the value of communication, coaching, and mentoring to deliver purposeful and successful companies. Amjed earned a Bachelor of Science in Cell Biology and Neuroscience from Rutgers University. He is a Board Leadership Fellow at the National Association of Corporate Directors.

A Quote From This Episode

  • "You give them something really interesting to work on as a problem set, and then you keep making the problems harder and harder and harder...they're always seeking that next challenge. They're leveling up, and we've effectively gamified their work experience because of that. But, at the same time, they're working on projects that are not just gamified, but they're gamified and really interesting."


Resources Mentioned in This Episode

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.


About  Scott J. Allen


My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00  

Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today, I have the CEO of Trove, Amjed Saffarini. He has a background in education and cybersecurity. He works with ultra-high-net-worth individuals and family offices and ensures that they are prepared for the future and that they have all aspects of their organization locked in. And we're going to kind of explore that a little bit today, but we're also going to explore this kind of notion of how he has designed his organization, and it's a unique design. And I was in a session with him. Probably about three months ago, we were doing a learning session, and he was contributing and speaking, and I said, “Wow, I need to have a conversation with him because he's thinking in very, very cool ways.” So, he is seated just outside of New York City and doing incredible work. And Amjed, what should everyone know about you that maybe I didn't say in that quick introduction? What do listeners need to know? 

 

Amjed Saffarini  1:03  

Well, I think things that someone listening to this podcast -- and I'm a listener, I love the sessions that you've done in the past with others digging really deep into particularly interesting content areas around knowledge and knowledge management -- I would say that one of the biggest things that I've accidentally, certainly wasn't deliberate, I've been able to do in my career over the last 25 or so years has been really trying to capture the essence of expertise in various disciplines. Compare where that expertise, the underlying concepts, and principles behind it are common, and then apply that to completely different, wildly varied areas of expertise. And so, I often get the question, Scott, “How the heck did you go from education to cybersecurity to running a family office?” And what's so similar between them, and of course, that's what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to start in one move to the other. But the reality is that when you look at the underlying concepts behind these various disciplines, there is actually a really sensical thread between them that makes a lot of sense as you go through. So, I'm happy to talk a little bit about that as we continue in our discussion.

 

Scott Allen  2:15  

Awesome. Well, we were in the session, and we were having a conversation about millennials and Gen Zs, attracting, retaining, and designing organizations. And I know it's a hot topic out there. I work with a lot of different types of organizations, and it's really fascinating to kind of engage in these conversations because they're struggling with recruiting, onboarding, retaining, and creating a culture where Gen Z and millennials feel like they can thrive and have a career. You made a comment during this learning session that we were on, and that just really caught my attention. You were discussing some of the ways that you've designed Trove in a way where maybe it's obviously turnover and recruitment and retention is always an issue that we have our eye on. But you had mentioned something to the effect of, like, look, we don't have too much of an issue with that. And I would love to kind of get into your head a little bit about some of these design principles that you've implemented, so that these individuals, we almost like painting a picture of what you've done, so that these individuals feel like, okay, this is a home. This is a place where I can build my career, and this is a fit for what it is that I'm looking for. So maybe we’ll talk about that.

 

Amjed Saffarini  3:32  

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, Scott. I would say any organization is going to be dealing with this historical precedent question of how you manage, in general, a workforce that tends not to think of careers in one place any more but tends to think of careers in multiple places. You can see that in the statistics on average tenure in an organization. And it doesn't matter if it's the best place to work, organization, or somewhere toxic, today is definitely shorter than 10 years used to be in the past. So, you have that as a macro trend, sort of applying a headwind to folks who are trying to design these experiences for employees. And then I think you sort of compound that with everything that has happened over the last five years or so with COVID. And the reaction, of course, by different organizations to instill, out of survivorship, remote work policies that they didn't really believe in, and then sort of renege on those policies, and then snap back into a more traditional work environment, or had already bucked an expectation that was set with a lot of millennials, ultimately, maybe even some Gen Z employees that created, again, a micro rift. So, you have these macro trends of movement and more common movement, but then, of course, exacerbated by everything we know happened since the virus. So, here is a little bit of background about Trove that I think helps set up the answer to your question, Scott: we're an administrative family office. Most people will not quite understand or know what that means, even inside their industry. What it means is actually fairly straightforward. When your life gets to a certain level of complexity, generally tied to a certain level of wealth, you are managing, on your own behalf, a ton of really complex projects. You and I might be thinking about our next vacation. We might be thinking about the house. We might have a place down on the shore or somewhere else, a vacation home. And every one of those assets creates a little bit of complexity in our life, something we have to remember to do every week, every month, or every quarter. Well, what happens when you multiply that by 100, for example, because you might have 20 family members, and the number of assets is larger and more complex? You have operating companies and entities. You have hobby businesses. All of that becomes too much to handle. The working memory of an individual gets overwhelmed, and it becomes a real problem area. For us at our level, it is much more so at that higher level of wealth, and so a family will end up building a company inside of their family structure called a family office. That family office will have staff, just like a company would: operators, project managers, technologists, executive assistants, and professionals in finance, who will pull together all of that complexity and try to manage it on behalf of the family, just like they would if it were an operating company. Now historically, that construct has been an investment-minded construct. So, a family office, historically, has been something that helps me invest my large trove of wealth and then generate returns on that wealth. And it's become more and more and more defined in that construct. More often, though, now you find that, for lots of reasons, the investment side is sort of well taken care of. There's a really robust industry in wealth management that sits around it. It's really well understood. The strategies are well-defined and well-honed. And it's not that it's become a commodity, but it's a well-understood discipline. There's a science and people, there are a lot of scientists, so to speak, who knows how to run it really, really well, that leaves a large gap on the operating side, on the administrative side. And so, when you try to fill that gap of administration with folks who are historically finance-driven folks, you start to get a little bit of a mismatch. And that comes back to the story that originally launched your question around how you instill a sense of belonging and a sense of tenure into these employees who you know are going to get itchy and want to leave after three or four years, maximum. And the answer is you give them something really interesting to work on as a problem set, and then you keep making the problems harder and harder and harder. And so, from a human nature perspective, they're always seeking that next challenge. They're leveling up, and we've effectively gamified their work experience because of that. But, at the same time, they're working on projects that are not just gamified, but they're gamified and really interesting. And so, by its very nature, when you're working with ultra-high-net-worth individuals, you might be working with the biggest real estate portfolios in the country. You might be working with the largest philanthropic organizations and charities in the world. You might be working on the largest fleet of airplanes or yachts on the lifestyle side or the most complex birthday party that you've ever thrown in your life. All of those things sort of come together under the auspices of what a family office's responsibilities are. And so, those are really fun things to plan around when you're trying to build a job around it. And so, the exciting part is there, so that leaves the career-tracking part. And it's really important when we bring staff into the organization that they're brought in under the auspices of working in a family office structure. So, even if they're financial operations staff if they know how to make the dollars work, and they're bookkeeping, and they're doing investment analysis, they're still doing it in the context of a family. A family that generally probably will not care all that much about an 8.5% return versus a 9.2% return, but they're going to care greatly if you mess up Grandpa's 90th birthday party. And so, building a staff that is dedicated not only to the trade that they're involved with, that trade might be in finance, or it might be in operations, or it might be in technology, but that actually see the bigger picture of what you're trying to do. You're trying to change, really, at this point, and when you're thinking of this level of wealth, you're trying to change the way that the Earth operates or the world runs, and you're trying to do it one project at a time. You're trying to do it one philanthropic project at a time, one social impact project at a time, and we're enabling all of that work. And so, I think that that level of vision really helps the employees see how they fit into a much larger puzzle. I think it's the same kind of mission that you might get out of public service, for example, it's probably not too different from the kind of mission that you would get when you go to a Teach for America internship, or something like that. So, you get that satisfaction, that deep satisfaction, but, at the same time, you have this massive career trajectory and career path that's available to you because it's still a familiar industry. It still has lots and lots and lots of upside opportunities for that individual. And because of that gamification component, there's sort of a real-time feedback loop that hits you with the right amount of dopamine at the right levels in there and keeps you excited about the job you're doing. 

 

Scott Allen  10:36  

I like that phrasing, “The right amount of dopamine.” Maybe we'll call the episode that. (Laughs)

 

Amjed Saffarini  10:41

Oh my goodness, no. 

 

Scott Allen  10:44

But it's such an interesting way of thinking about these individuals. And I just did a post, literally, today, Amjed, about, have you ever heard the term the zone of proximal development? 

 

Amjed Saffarini  10:55 

Sure, of course. A learning science concept.

 

Scott Allen  10:57  

Yeah, great. Okay. But it sounds like, from a career standpoint, we are constantly keeping someone just outside of their current ability level. They're learning, they're growing, they're taking, as you said, these little puzzles or these tasks are getting more and more complex, harder and harder, and we've kind of gamified that. There's a career tracking process that's in place so I can see the next levels and a future for myself. And we're also, in some ways, linking it to some sort of meaning that this work, some of these individuals that we're working for and working with, have the ability to make a global impact in the world. If this is the Gates family, then these are individuals who are making seismic shifts in the world and doing a lot of good. So, we're applying then some meaning to the work as well. Are those three of the core ingredients that you just said? 

 

Amjed Saffarini  11:51 

Absolutely. It doesn't even have to be at the Gates family level of wealth, but when you look at, for example, I think it's become public at this point, but recently, Mike Bloomberg had made a very large donation to… When the concept behind the initiative was to donate enough of a corpus in order to make medical school free. It had happened once in Albert Einstein in New York City with the wealthy widow of Goldman Sachs, the early founder of Goldman Sachs. And then Mike Bloomberg did it again, I think, at Hopkins. And so, when you look at how something like that gets done, there's obviously a lot of financial modeling that's going into that kind of an exercise. Operationally, there's a lot. I bet you there were 10, if not 20, different universities that were talked to at the time. Operationally, there's a lot that goes into making something like that happen that's not a ‘wake up on a whim’ and make a decision like that. So, to be involved in a team that is doing that kind of work, think about the impact of that. So, all of a sudden, cost is no longer an issue in medical school, you're now just looking for the best talent and med school is paid for. And to be able to make that shift changes society. It's only happening right now in two medical schools, it's only a matter of time before it's going to be at 20% 30% 50% of medical schools. And now you have a very different generation of physicians who are coming into the workforce, who A) Want to do it for the right reasons, you'd say, at least the reasons that matter societally, and B) Who are extremely competitive in their own right. So, they're competitive in the sense that they are academically talented, that they have the right bedside manner, that maybe they're research physicians, and they're going to invent the next set of treatments. All of those things apply today, but they will be turbocharged tomorrow because you've taken one restriction out, which is the ability to pay. And so, that's the kind of dopamine hit that our teams get because they're working on these kinds of things all day long, not just in philanthropy, but in social impact. They're working on it in education initiatives. Obviously, just even the satisfaction of organizing something that's massively complex, that, in and of itself, is sort of a gamified way to create that return, that sort of immediate feedback loop. But you're right, I love that you use the learning science. The zone of proximal development is one. We talk a lot about gamification, we talk a lot about spaced repetition, these are all learning science terms that we've applied from our early backgrounds in education into a very, very different discipline.

 

Scott Allen  14:27 

Tell me about spaced repetition; I don't know this one.

 

Amjed Saffarini  14:31 

Oh, sure, you do. If you've learned anything way back in the day when you were preparing and studying. The concept of spaced repetition is that every bit of knowledge that enters your brain has a decay curve attached to it, and so you just want to sort of ping the knowledge right at the level at which it might fall out of those little synapses and decay. And so, what's really cool about this is you could do a lot of research on the different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of learning that you do that requires different half-lives. And just like drug administration, you come and bring in that intervention, that learning intervention, at the right half-life time. And so, if I teach you that two plus two equals four, that might be something I tell you once, and you'll never forget again. And I don't need to… It has a half-life of your life, and so I never have to kind of bring that backup. But if I teach you the colors of the Jamaican flag, you might forget it by next week. And so, that has a very different half-life, and I'd have to go back and kind of intervene on it. So, really great education. There's not a whole lot of it, by the way, out there, but really great education has this sort of spaced repetition element built into it, like the old flashcards in the old days. That concept of space repetition applies in business as well because, oftentimes when you look at value creation, it has the same sort of half-life tendencies as when we're talking about knowledge acquisition. So, you do something for me, you do it over and over and over, and over time, I sensitize to it, like a neuron I would sensitize. When I sensitize to it, I don't really even see that you're giving me value, it just has become status quo. So, every once in a while, you kind of need that boost, that spaced repetition boost to get back on the program and remind you, “Hey, by the way, remember, we are creating value.” And so, that's one of the things that we do on the business side to make sure that we're not only creating value but that our principles are constantly seeing how that value is being created. 

 

Scott Allen  16:31 

Okay. So, any other design elements? When it comes to developing a staff and a team that's engaged, that's retained, that's growing, that's developing, are there other design principles that you've baked in to ensure that the team is in, that they're committed, that they're passionate about the cause? 

 

Amjed Saffarini  16:55 

Yeah. Two things I would say we do passionately, and I think quite effectively. We have made it a goal. We have grown during what is, ostensibly, the hardest time for a company to have grown in the last 100 years. So, we went from a staff of 18 in 2020, at the end of 2020, right in the middle of COVID, to a staff of just under 180 now, three and a half years later. 

 

Scott Allen  17:22

Wow. 

 

Amjed Saffarini  17:22

And so, recruiting the right talent, motivating the right people to come on board in a hyper-competitive environment where you might be actually competing with the Gates or that talent. If you're a good talent, they're going to take you, and they're going to pay whatever it takes. So, you have to have a better story than ‘I can pay more than Bill Gates can’ because I can't. So, how you tell that story matters a lot. The camaraderie, of course, the organization that you're bringing someone into matters a lot. But one of the things that helps bring all the different pieces together is we bring our groups, our entire company together two times a year into a retreat, and many of our common colleagues actually have spoken and presented at those retreats. These are not sales kickoffs, these are not ways of motivating the troops so we can hit a quota, these are not customer meetings. They are, essentially, an opportunity for us to get together as a team, lay out the goals that we have, and, as a group, actually think through who the best individuals are and who the best teams are to go after those various objectives that are coming up against us for the next six months. So, I think it gives our team, first of all, of course, the obvious things: camaraderie, community, and a sense of belonging, which, when you're spending most of your time on Zoom and Teams, is critical, even if you're coming into one office, maybe you're not meeting staff from the other office. So, it does create that connectivity, but beyond that connectivity, it creates something else, which is agency. And so, when you have somebody planning for a really important company initiative that might be getting done in the next six months, and they're doing that today presenting in front of 150 plus people, oh, but, by the way, their last job was as a staff accountant in a family office, that is a really seismic juxtaposition for that individual. It is like a life-altering, different experience. And so, the chemistry in their brain that's happening when they're up there presenting both from the nerves, and the excitement, and all of that, but also that sort of sense of ‘this is really different,’ hopefully, in a very cool way, that chemistry, I think, just creates a little bit of great glue that keeps folks around. 

 

Scott Allen  19:40  

I love that. I love that phrasing, ‘the chemistry in their brain.’ 

 

Amjed Saffarini  19:44  

Oh yeah. I use that with my kids all the time. (Laughs)

 

Scott Allen  19:48 

Well, it reminds me. I have an interview coming up with Stephen Kotler, I don't know if you've ever read any of his work, ‘The Art of the Impossible.’ 

 

Amjed Saffarini  19:57

The art of the impossible, sure.

 

Scott Allen  19:58

Yeah. He writes a lot about flow and the flow state. And he's brilliant at naming the different chemicals: serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins, all of these different chemicals that equal progress and continue in a state of engagement. And so, I love that phrasing of chemistry because you're right. You take an individual who had this role in this function, and now you're charging them with this new opportunity that gets their attention pretty darn quickly. You said there was another thing; there were two things that you were talking about. Is there a second that you wanted to mention? 

 

Amjed Saffarini  20:30 

So, the first one was the convening power that we would sort of have over our teams, bringing everybody together, which gave them both the sort of camaraderie and agency to really kind of get excited every six months or so about not necessarily a change in their job, but a revitalization. It's kind of that space repetition concept that we talked about a little bit earlier. The second big thing that comes into play is that for every single employee that we have in the company, we have a rubric. Effectively, that rubric is 30 or 40 job competencies. These job competencies are laid out as a rubric. Rubric means that for every level of expertise within every one of those competencies, we effectively have a description of what that means. For example, one of the rubric line items might have to do with the ability to hold a meeting. And so, you would think of it as holding a meeting inside the company. Can I bring people together? Can I build an agenda? Can I keep people on track? Can I deal with conflict? Those kinds of things. For every one of those elements, you could sort of define what higher levels of expertise look like. And so, you can put those concepts for the ability to hold a meeting with all those different conditions on, for example, a four-step rubric and say, “Here's what an entry-level expectation would be, and here's what an executive expectation would be for that task.” Notice, I didn't use the terms ‘low, medium, high,’ because, in some cases, what you need as an executive is really not a whole lot more, it's just different from what you might need coming on an entry-level for any one of those items. What's great about that is that we run these rubrics every six months with our teams, and so every single person, you would have effectively the ability to look at this report card-looking thing that doesn't have any A's, B's, or C's, or D's, but instead says, “For all these items that you have in here, here are the things you're absolutely knocking out of the park, and then there are these stretch areas that are available to you.” So, it goes back to that gamification concept of, “I really want to level up. I really want to get to that next maybe career opportunity. But more importantly than that, it just really bugs me that there are a couple of things that are still missing, that are a stretch for me to do.” And a lot of really great things come out of that large self-awareness, of course, because you're getting this every six months, you also end up getting a development plan that, effectively, you're building yourself, but, of course, the team is helping you build as well. But a development plan that sort of says, “Here are the areas that are going to help you level up to the next stage.” And so, any feeling of helplessness that you might have as an employee wondering, “Gosh, I don't really understand what's next for me, or how I level up, or how this next piece comes into play,” is all eliminated because you've got this sort of six-month check-in that's available to you. And everybody goes through it. I go through it with the board. Everybody else goes through it with their managers and peers. Again, it just comes out of really good learning science design. I worked at a firm called Kaplan for a long time, and we would design these programs for large corporations with exactly this intent. How do you help these corporations level up? And it would apply, by the way, equally to a physician where we're training doctors, to a lawyer, or an accountant, or to call center staff at a large telecommunications company, for example. Same principles, very, very different roles, but, ultimately, the same exact playbook could be applied in every one of those disciplines.

 

Scott Allen  24:00 

It's so much fun to hear you taking some of these concepts from learning as if it's first principles concepts to now this space over here, and even using phrasing like ‘gamification’ and ‘we are going to keep you engaged.’ Question on what you just said. I love it. Is it the person's manager who helps decide where this person is located? Is it a 360-degree experience? How does that work? How would I get that feedback that I know I need to level up on holding a meeting? 

 

Amjed Saffarini  24:33  

So, obviously, the meetings themselves are structured. They happen at particular points in time, two times a year. The funny thing is I think most companies have some version of this. If you're talking Big Four accounting, I'm sure they have a performance management system, and rubrics, and 360s, and all that good stuff. But I think there's a concept. I think it was Jeff Colvin who had initially come up with it, it was like the 10,000 hours concept. 

 

Scott Allen  25:00  

That's Kay Anders Erickson from the expertise literature.

 

Amjed Saffarini  25:04  

It was expertise literature, and I thought Colvin wrote about it, and then ultimately, of course it got hijacked into Freakonomics. 

 

Scott Allen  25:11 

Yes, it totally got hijacked. K. Anders Ericsson was on…. Colvin could have been on the study, but the original paper, yeah, it was kind of bastardized in some of the… It might have been Gladwell, right? 

 

Amjed Saffarini  25:25 

It was. Yeah, it was Gladwell. Most people know it was Gladwell, but certainly, I forget what it was called, but it was a book about work by Jeff Colvin. And I think the original study, you're right, was not by him. But my point about it was the critical word that everybody forgets when they think about 10,000 hours is the word ‘deliberate.’ So, everybody always says .”Practice. 10,000 hours of practice.” If you read the books, of course, in literature, the whole point was not practice; the whole point was actually the opposite of that. It was like, “You can't just go out there and play the game, no, you have 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. You have to actually do…” The difference between good and great was that the 10,000 hours, the person who was doing chords for that long was the one who ultimately achieved that orchestral greatness. So, I bring that up because I think when you're talking about performance management, much like the way you talk about anything else, you can go through the motions. You could say, “I have a performance management system, we do 360s, we have our managers meet with our staff.” I think the difference is, are you doing it in a deliberate way? Does your manager actually have a goal in mind, or is the motion the goal? I think, in most organizations, the motion is the goal. “Oh, it's June; therefore, we must do the performance management reviews. We must do the assessment. I have to write something for my employee. I need to sit down and meet with them.” So, it becomes a little bit of a chore, and the goal is really the motion. The goal is the process. I think when you do that in any discipline, obviously, you end up with failure or at least a lessened sense of accomplishment. I do think that, if you flip that on its head, and I would say we try to do that, I'm sure I'd get called out on it by our employees listening to this in some cases, but I think, in large part, most folks would say that we're quite deliberate about using that methodology as a means to an end, not as the end itself. And so, oftentimes you'll hear managers talking about not really wanting or needing to do a meeting like that. Well, because why? Because going through the motions is really not going to produce an outcome. Maybe there isn't a producible outcome at that particular point in time. The check-in is just really worthless, and it's a waste of time. And so, enabling, I think, the managers and the teams to be able to sort of think through, “When is it deliberate? When is it going to produce an outcome?” And we're going to use the process to produce that outcome versus going through the motions, which I think is really important. To answer your question, the managers are empowered to have those conversations and make those decisions. And, obviously, the talent team, the HR team, is always there to support that and train them on how to do it the best way possible and go through the motions in that way. 

 

Scott Allen  28:09 

It's just a really fun conversation and a fun puzzle where we've touched on a few different areas and ways of thinking about this. I love that you're pulling out the expertise literature because I think that has some really, really important clues from us. The learning science literature has some important clues for us. And, ultimately, what we're trying to do back to Vygotsky is, are we ensuring that our folks are consistently developing, growing, and staying just outside of their comfort level, and we're providing the learning experiences for them so that we're ultimately building the bench? And if we're keeping people engaged in meaningful work with a little bit of a roadmap of how to level up their own career, there's ownership here that I have some things I know I need to level up on; we're probably a little bit better off.

 

Amjed Saffarini  29:01  

I want to say it was Jamie Dimon recently that JP Morgan was going through this massive exercise. I think he used a ‘P,’ which was like a four-letter word for it, but conceptually, the idea was sort of getting rid of busy work, which was sort of the goal. And so, they're spending an insane amount of money. I want to say it's like a billion or $2 billion, or something like that, a year at this point on bringing in automation, bringing in process improvement, for the sake of nothing else other than to remove the busy work out of the daily life of their employees across the company. And that might be a banker at a Chase branch or a wealth manager in the private bank. It doesn't really matter. I think that's a really interesting concept, the idea of sort of looking at the day of your employee and looking at that as the challenge of how do I take everything that they're doing in that given day, pull it apart, tease it apart, destroy anything that might be creating monotony? And I don't mean monotony in the sort of ‘sometimes I like to do busy work because it helps my brain decompress a little bit.’ That's healthy for everybody; it's like your little time out. But, more often than not, entire jobs become that monotony. That rote repetition. The point at which the employee is thinking, “My gosh, well, a machine could be doing this and probably ought to be doing this.” That's, I think, what JP Morgan is trying to tackle. And what's really admirable is they're tackling it with absolutely no goal of creating real efficiency in the process itself. So, what I mean by that is they're not trying to eliminate a certain percentage of rote work because they believe the machine can do it better or faster or less extensively, more efficiently. I think that they're just doing it because they believe that if they remove that gunky element of the workday, they will have more engaged, more excited, happier employees, which will translate to higher tenure, and that is where the value gets created at JP Morgan when they don't have to train and recruit 20% more people because they have the tenure and the engagement of their existing staff. So, I think there's a little bit of that element of recognizing in human performance the cost of somebody getting to a heightened state of expertise that, getting from the point at which they walk in the door even as an expert, to the point at which they become an expert in your own value creation chain is a really expensive value proposition. It's expensive in training. It's expensive and results in lost productivity and time. It's expensive because other people have to train them, and they lose productivity and time. So, there's a lot of great work that's getting done right now to categorize, understand, and quantify what that looks like. The more that you do that, the more that you start to invest in those mechanisms for employee retention and employee engagement. That becomes just that much more important. And, of course, employee evaluation and performance improvement are important because you want your best employees, and you want your most effective and most productive employees to be the ones that you're focusing your engagement and tenure on. So, it's an interesting… We didn't even talk about aviation, by the way, which is another passion of mine, but we can talk a lot about how pilots get trained and how this applies to pilot training. 

 

Scott Allen  32:20 

Well, I love your phrasing of gunkiness. That just makes me think of a Teams meeting all day long. Some of the gunky aspects of some of our work. (Laughs) 

 

Amjed Saffarini  32:31 

Yeah, there's probably a more elegant term for it.

 

Scott Allen  32:34 

No, it's perfect because it feels really gunky to be on a Teams meeting all morning long, three or four of them, and wonder, some of the time, “Why am I on this? I don't need to be here. I could be doing something different.” And I had not seen that, so I'm gonna go look that up. And, for listeners, I will try to find that also and put some links in the show notes so that you can check that out, because I think it's a wonderful exercise. How are we spending our people's time? And is that time well spent, or is it gunky and probably going to demotivate, demoralize, and cause them to look elsewhere? Okay. Now, aviation, go there real quick. How are you thinking about that?

 

Amjed Saffarini  33:15  

Yeah. So, in between my cybersecurity stint, I founded and ran a company in the cybersecurity education space, and we happened to have learned a ton about the industry at a very, very young point and at a very formative point in its inception. So, in 2013 and 2014, we started to think about it, launched in 2015, and really spent a lot of time structuring the industry right. And, of course, now it's a massive industry, and companies are wildly successful in it. But right after that, I got into aviation. I really wanted to take some time, about a year, and get as many pilot ratings as I possibly could. I wanted to become a pilot, not to fly people on United Airlines or whatever, but to buy an airplane, fly my family around, and just kind of enjoy the skies, and I was able to do that. And, as part of that, I was able to really see how pilot training takes place. And, of course, you can't help yourself if you're in education or if you grew up in that environment, to kind of take a challenge. So, I invested in a flight school. I acquired a simulation manufacturing company that built flight simulators and just absolutely went deep into it. And it was a great experience. It was a really great experience. And I'm still very much involved in it. One of the things that I think is super relevant to the conversation we're having here is that a lot of these airlines used to sort of say, “Hey, your job, Scott, is to go out there and acquire 1,500 hours of expertise,” which was literally measured in 1,500 hours in your logbook, and they did not care how you acquired those 1,500 hours. And so, these poor pilots, who were literally poor, would try to find the cheapest possible way to acquire 1,500 hours. So, they would go, and they would banner tow little airplanes on the beach. They would go and become certified flight instructors, so they would instruct other students in the local airport traffic patterns. They would do crop dusting. They would do survey work. Now, surprise, surprise, 1,500 hours of going around your local airport and not leaving the two-mile radius of that airport, not only is it tedious and repetitive, and you get really, really good at it, but it's completely irrelevant to actually flying a real airliner, right? 

 

Scott Allen  35:35

(Laughs) A 747.

 

Amjed Saffarini  35:37

Yeah, exactly. And so, all of a sudden, you have these folks who have 1,500 hours of experience, who show up at Jet Blue's training program, or United's training program, or whatever, and they then need to be taught how to fly airplanes at that point. And so, Republic, which is a feeder airline for United, did a study and realized that they were spending almost a quarter of a million dollars educating a student after they've been educated. So, the question then became, okay, well, then how do we take control of that pathway? And what's really exciting about it is they actually decided to invest real dollars into this and created what's called an ab initio program, which is one where they identify, very early on, employees, or future employees, who have the characteristics of a great future pilot. Then, they would take that individual who has the right sort of characteristics from an attitudinal perspective, from personal effectiveness skills, communications, decision making, risk-taking, and management, and they would then teach them how to fly. And that's such a great way to do it if you think about it. There are skills that are much more difficult to teach and those that are easier. Funny enough, teaching somebody how to fly is actually the easy part; teaching them not to take off into a thunderstorm is the harder part. And so, they find people with the right sort of mindset, they hire for the attitude, and they train, of course, with aptitude. And so, that's one of those areas where I think that 1,500-hour concept, 10,000 hours, deliberate practice, however, you sort of want to look at it, where you take the motions, and you turn it into deliberate action, and you just get a wonderful return coming out of it. So, there's a lot. I can go into aviation for days at a time, but sadly, it is not where I spend 100% of my time.

 

Scott Allen  37:23 

What I really enjoy about this conversation, Amjed, and as we begin to kind of wind down our time, is that you said at the very beginning, “Maybe I'll tie together how education and cybersecurity and aviation and family offices connect,” but I think you've modeled it beautifully. Oftentimes, as I think about leader development and how we develop effective leaders, there are a lot of clues around us, whether that's developing a cardiac surgeon a pilot, or a black belt. And to go back to Vygotsky, at times we don't scaffold that learning well. We don't really do that work and design it in a way that a meeting is a fairly base-level activity for a leader; maybe even before that, it might be active listening. Are we scaffolding it in a way that the learner can be successful? A lot of the work that we do is sometimes talking about complexity theory and leadership out of the gates, and that's a black belt-level conversation. That is a virtuoso-type conversation so far out of reach in the realm of a novice learner. So, you go back to the deliberate practice literature. Ericsson and Poole had this beautiful book called Peak, which had 11 elements of what it means to be engaged in deliberate practice. So, oftentimes, I think looking at an industry from the outside and pulling in some of these other areas of expertise can be just a game changer because the industry has always grown up the way it is and just knows what it knows, and you're now bringing in this really new view that's just incredibly valuable, shifting paradigms in a lot of ways. So, I see the connection, and I appreciate the connection, and I just can't thank you enough for sharing how you're looking at even just… In this case, we started off the conversation with talent, millennials, and Gen z's, and how do you design an organization that is going to retain those individuals and engage those individuals, and you're coming at it from a cool perspective. You really are. 

 

Amjed Saffarini  39:26  

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. Thank you. I think we're creatures of our experience, so I wouldn't have engineered my life this way, I wouldn't have even known to. But I think it's really interesting. When you look at industries, that we think of as old as time, medicine, I guess it started with Hippocrates or with a Hippocratic Oath a few thousand years ago. But the reality is that modern medicine as we know it actually only started about 100 years ago at Johns Hopkins. And after World War One, the concept of medical teaching was even brought into the fray. The concept of medical school didn't exist until the early 20th century if you can imagine that. It was a bunch of pharmacists who were practicing medicine effectively up until that point. So, the concept of aviation, of course, the Wright Brothers just had their 100th year anniversary, so aviation wasn't even around 100 years ago. And so, cybersecurity wasn't around 20 years ago. I think it was Buffett who said "never to underestimate humans' capacity to make something simple and extremely complex." I think that's just absolutely true. The reality is that, in a lot of these disciplines, that we sort of think of as bastions and pillars of everything we know about civilization, and then you sort of realize, well, my goodness, civilization or even medicine is only 100 years old as we know it today. I think that puts things into perspective on what true learning really is. People still practiced medicine 2,000 years ago, and I bet there were a ton of similarities between what was being done then and what's being done today. What's different, obviously, about it is how we've structured it into real learning, into deliberate practice, and created a medicine machine, an industry around it. That's the thread that I think ties all these different conversations, is that when you go nuclear, not in the big bomb sense, but when you go into the nucleus, atomic level, I think you find that many of the building blocks of expertise are actually quite similar. And the scaffolding that you talked about of how you start with a novice level of expertise and playing a violin, holding a scalpel, maybe doing your first bit of coding and cybersecurity or flying an airplane, that first bit of scaffolding is probably actually using the same exact framework from the groundwork. And it only gets really different at the highest levels of that competency pyramid where the job tasks really diverge.

 

Scott Allen  41:51 

And again, really early in the conversation, you were talking about, look, governance here probably applies here. And this knowledge exists; it's there, but you are making those connections, and I think that's incredibly valuable. To make those connections and to see those possibilities is such a fun conversation. Real quick before we end up just a couple of minutes, what are you reading, listening to, what's caught your attention in recent times? It could have to do with what we just discussed, or it could just be something else that's caught your attention; what's been on your radar?

 

Amjed Saffarini  42:25  

We just came back from a trip around Europe. Unbelievable experience down in Central Europe, which is not an often visited area, I guess, for most New Yorkers, but we had just an incredible time working our way from Prague down to Budapest. And I think we oftentimes sort of over-index the way we live to apply to the rest of the world. And I haven't quite found a good reading on this. I read a lot of Scott Alexander, if your listeners are familiar, Slate Star Codex. And I'm trying to find the place where they talk about this. I bet it's been covered before, but I don't know what it is about the human condition that sort of tries to overfit what's happening around the world into your very, very tiny little paradigm, it turns out. And so, I think we travel the world quite a bit as a family and also in the work construct, and we're blessed to be able to see those different perspectives, but I was a little bit surprised, Scott, by just how reminded I was of just how wide and different other perspectives can be around the universe, and all I was doing is walking around Prague. So, I think it's just so important with everything going on these days around us. You've got wars happening everywhere. You have hyperpolarization that's driven by algorithms that are only fed by the number of eyeballs and clicks and nothing else. I think it's just really important to sort of break through some of that and try to figure out where perspective comes from. In my case, just a quick little trip for a couple of weeks really helped with the reset switch on that.

 

Scott Allen  44:06  

Well, my family just returned from a couple of weeks in the UK, so your story resonates for me. Just in something as simple as watching the Olympics through the lens of Great Britain was just a wonderful experience for our children, and for me, to have that as something that, okay, we've watched it from a different vantage point, and can value that different vantage point, and understand that different vantage point. It's invaluable. 

 

Amjed Saffarini  44:32 

I'm curious: What was their biggest takeaway from it?

 

Scott Allen  44:36  

It was similar in the sense that they really did a nice job of highlighting specific athletes, and oftentimes athletes who they thought were going to perform well. But it was interesting to see who they then highlighted or not. So, the American divers, for instance, were not at the top or even doing all that well, so they were never mentioned. It was the Chinese, the North Koreans, and then the Brits, and they paid close attention to them. So, whoever was leading had somewhat of a focus, but then always that focus on that athlete from Great Britain and then the story associated with that individual. So, it was wonderful. I really had no clue how America and the United States were doing in a lot of these things unless I checked the medal count because they didn't speak about unless you were Simone Biles or won the gold medal. We focused on the British athletes, and that was fun to see. 

 

Amjed Saffarini  45:26  

Yeah. We actually found our way to France in the middle of the Olympics, and it was amazing seeing the amount of pride that they had in hosting the Olympics, which was really cool. Were you the one who had told me about the Comfort Crisis, about the book? 

 

Scott Allen  45:42

I wasn't. No.

 

Amjed Saffarini  45:43

Okay, yeah. Michael Easter's book, somebody, as we were talking, had just told me about it, and I read it on the plane ride over. And I would say that's a good book for your listeners, as we sort of think about everything in our lives that is spoon-fed to us, everything that we do that creates this feeling of satisfaction, this book sort of goes in the opposite direction and sort of says that personal growth and even physical benefits come out of creating a kind of discomfort. And so, it talks about a combination of Peter Attia, how to live your health, and how to stretch the extremes. And a lot of great examples and great stories of it.

 

Scott Allen  46:19  

Awesome. I will put that in the show notes so that listeners can grab that. Amjed, I am so thankful for your time today. Thank you for the good work that you do. Thanks for sharing your wisdom. And I know that listeners got a ton out of this conversation. Thank you so much, let's do it again.

 

Amjed Saffarini  46:36 

 I hope so. Thank you, and would love to, Scott. Thanks again for having me. Glad to have been here.

 

 

[End Of Recording]