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67 turns · 46 minWhat if the biggest obstacle to understanding how work changes is the word job? And what would it look like to manage work rather than jobs as the fundamental unit of analysis in an organization? My guest today is John Boudreau, Professor Emeritus at USC and one of the most influential thinkers on the future of HR and workforce
strategy. Here's our talk.
Welcome to The Economics of Work. I'm so excited to welcome John Boudreaux. John, I know I've told you this before, but I think of you as kind of the preeminent philosopher of work. So I hope that's a title you're cool with.
Yeah, those kinds of things start to crop up more often as I get older, I've noticed. Yeah, I feel like this philosopher of X is like...
Yeah. Yeah. You have to graduate into that. That's
exactly right. I'm not at the stage you are where I was this, you know, brilliant new kid with a new book and, you know, first book and all that. So, yeah, it's been a while.
Well, when you were a brilliant new kid, then I assume you had a different angle, a different like persona, right? A little bit.
That's right. Yeah.
Yeah. How would you characterize like your style, your reputation when you first started compared to now?
Well, I first started as an academic, as an absolutely straight up, you know, research PhD from Purdue University. And I tell everybody, you know, I grew up in New Mexico and went to college in Southern New Mexico and I thought I was super fortunate when Purdue admitted me. And so I got an MBA and then a PhD there. And I thought, okay, that's great. I'll go back to New Mexico. And this Purdue thing on my resume will probably get me a decent teaching job at some regional university in New Mexico. And lo and behold, other universities called up, including Cornell. So off I went to Cornell in 1981 and the next, probably certainly the next 10 years were pretty much straight up publisher parish academic. And in those days I got very lucky because having had an MBA, I was a little differently qualified than a lot of industrial psychologists. My degree was kind of business plus economics plus psychology. And it turned out that the field of biopsychology became quite fixated and fascinated with the dollar value payoff from things like better selection, better training, etc. And they called it utility analysis. And it involved a whole bunch of equations based on the normal curve and all that stuff. And I remember I spent hours on an exponent with 15 terms in it one time to figure out what was
going
on. So that was, you know, I kind of got research famous for developing models to calculate the value. And then I put in some of the economic stuff like discounted present value. And we had a whole simulation about if they stay or if they go and all that stuff. So yeah, those were heady times leading up to tenure in about 1986, 1987. And then started working with companies because Cornell is so prominent in the HR world. By 90, we had founded the Center for Advanced HR Studies. So executives were coming to meet with us and all that kind of thing. So then I started working more with companies. And in the late 90s, I met Pete Ramstad. And Pete is a CFO and studied accounting and accounting
Episode notes
Finance has net present value. Operations has bottleneck theory. What does HR have?
In this episode, Ben sits down with John Boudreau, professor emeritus at USC and one of the most influential thinkers in the history of human resource management, to explore a question he has spent 40 years trying to answer: why do leaders who make rigorous, model-driven decisions about financial and operational assets continue to rely on gut instinct when it comes to people?
Topics covered:
- Why leaders who would never make a capital investment without a discounted cash flow model routinely make multi-million dollar talent decisions on instinct
- The bottleneck problem: why investing equally in every role is as irrational as improving every stage of a production line simultaneously
- Why economists were studying tasks long before HR was
- Why AI pilots aren't experiments: the difference between watching what happens and actually measuring it
- What it would take to create generally accepted principles for people decisions, and why codified principles matter more than codified measures
- Why the word "job" may be the single biggest obstacle to clear thinking about the future of work
About John Boudreau: John Boudreau is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. He is the author of more than 200 articles