The Quiet Powerhouses: Building Inclusive Organizational Structures

Written By Paul Mwangi Gichia
 
 

📑 Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Alex Furman

12:08 Problem with Traditional Organizational Models

22:17 The Four Quadrants of Talent Performance

29:37 True Diversity and Inclusion

35:52 Importance of Childlike Wonder & Creativity

48:05 Alex Furman’s Magic

 
 

Disclaimer:
The content shared is to highlight the passion and wonder of our guests. It is not professional advice. Please read our evidence-based research to help you develop your unique understanding.

 

💕 Story Overview

Dive into the world of organizational dynamics and talent management with @MAGICademy S3E9 featuring @Alex Furman, CEO of @performica as we discuss a range of topics from organizational psychology, the need to move away from traditional hierarchical models to focus on mapping collaboration networks within companies to the potential impact of AI and emerging technologies on work.

Show Takeaways

  1. Data-Driven Talent Identification: Alex Furman introduces the concept of using metadata from various communication and collaboration tools to map out talent networks without invading privacy. This method helps identify "stealth performers" (high performers who don't self-promote) and "overhyped" talents (those who are good at self-promotion but may be underperforming), allowing for more effective talent management and resource allocation.

  2. Rethinking Organizational Structure: Moving beyond traditional organizational charts and viewing organizations as dynamic networks of collaboration allows for a more accurate representation of how work gets done and helps identify key contributors who might be overlooked in traditional hierarchies.

  3. Fostering Innovation through Psychological Safety: Creating an environment that encourages childlike wonder, playfulness, and psychological safety is crucial for fostering creativity and innovation in the workplace, allowing talent to experiment and take risks without fear of punishment.

  4. Diversity and Inclusion as a Natural Outcome: Using a data-driven approach to understand organizational dynamics naturally leads to more diverse and inclusive workplaces. By identifying and empowering talented individuals who might be overlooked in traditional systems, companies can achieve greater diversity at all levels without resorting to quotas or artificial measures.

  5. Alex’s Magic: Caring deeply and passionately about making a meaningful difference for people around him, his community, and more broadly.

 

    • O'Reilly, C.A., & Pfeffer, J. (2000). Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People.; 

    • Palepu, S., Nitsch, A., Narayan, M., Kim, S., & Osier, N. (2020). A Flat Organizational Structure for an Inclusive, Interdisciplinary, International, and Undergraduate-Led Team. Frontiers in Education.

  • Alex Furman is the founder and CEO of Performica, a technology company revolutionizing how organizations understand and manage talent. Born in the Soviet Union, Alex came to the US as a Jewish refugee and built a diverse career spanning software engineering, biotech entrepreneurship, and HR leadership. His experiences as a co-founder and Chief People Officer of a publicly traded company led him to develop Performica's innovative approach to visualizing workplace dynamics. Alex is passionate about creating more human-centric, innovative work environments and leveraging technology ethically to empower talents and foster diversity.

    https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexfurman/

    http://www.performica.com/

  • Jiani (00:02)

    Welcome to MAGICademy podcast. Today with us is Alex Furman. And thank you so much for sharing your time with us. He is the founder and CEO of Performica, very interesting startup company that's helping us to build a new way of work and help us to visualize the hidden talent within organizations. So thank you very much, Alex, for coming to the podcast.

    Alex Furman (00:29)

    Thanks for having me. This is going to be fun.

    Jiani (00:31)

    Yes, let's get started. So if you were to introduce yourself in a way that nobody has heard about, if you see like a bee bee, an alien coming from a spaceship, how would you introduce yourself?

    Alex Furman (00:45)

    So aliens, I don't know how to think about aliens. I'd have to define a whole bunch of concepts. That's probably a little too hard. But my name's Alex, you know that I grew up in the Soviet Union. I came to the US on the very tail end of the Jewish refugees fleeing oppression in the Soviet Union. I grew up here, started my career as a software engineer, then became a biotech co -founder.

    That became an HR executive who are really, really interesting. Twist of fate. And now back to my roots as founder and CEO of Performica, which is a technology company, helping other organizations do the sorts of things that we did a really, really great job of the last time around.

    Jiani (01:30)

    beautiful. So tell us more about Performica, like why you decided to found the Performica.

    Alex Furman (01:39)

    Well, so I'll start with a big Y. And the capital WY is, look, and I talked about this. I have two kids. I have a family. I have wonderful friends. And I spend more time working than I do with all of them. I spend more time working than doing just about anything else in my life. And life is short and wonderful. And work needs to be wonderful since we're all dedicating so much of our lives to it.

    And I've always noticed that throughout my career, I've always noticed that most companies are made up of wonderful people trying to do what's best. Most leadership teams, most executive teams are actually made up of smart, wonderful people who are genuinely trying to do good things. And it's really, really hard. And one of the reasons that's really, really hard is because we're frankly looking at organizations all wrong.

    And when I became a founder of my last company and I got to play at building an organization from scratch, and we scaled it to like a global publicly traded company with many, many thousands of people all over our place, we did many things very differently and it worked really well. And some of these approaches...

    Like I was just, I fell in love with so much that when it was time for me to kind of move on and figure out what I'm gonna do when I grow up, I packaged them up into a new company and that's what I'm doing now.

    Jiani (03:15)

    That's great. So in one of our kind of previous chats, you were talking about like the process of where you kind of got this idea and start to kind of piloting that idea and then that kind of gradually evolve into Performica. Can you share with us about that kind of process? Yeah.

    Alex Furman (03:38)

    Yeah, totally. And this takes us back, this was a long time ago. This takes us back to like late 2014, early 2015. And my last company in VT, we spent the first few years being like a little technology startup and a team of scientists and engineers kind of like geeking out over a prototype. And then we just, we knocked it out of a park. So we got the technology to work, sales started happening.

    We went from being like a small team of essentially nobodies to taking the company public on the New York Stock Exchange over the course of a year and hiring like hundreds of people and then proceeding to like double year after year after year in all sort of measurable, like by all reasonable metrics and all hell broke loose. Like we were unprepared for success. We were unprepared for growth and it became like...

    frankly, I became scared that we're about to mess this up, that this wonderful thing we have going here, and in that case, literally a life -saving technology, literally life -saving technology, we were going to basically mess up because we couldn't get organized and couldn't figure out how to make work happen on scale and how to make innovative work happen at scale. So to my amazement, I went from a technical co -founder, I spent the first few years working on bioinformatics algorithms and such.

    Yeah, and I became our I became our head of HR. I became like my first job and probably last. you never know. But my first job as an HR practitioner was a chief people officer of a publicly traded company and that never happens. And it's like, as funny as it sounds. And, and this was in the context of a young like rapid growth, a lot of success. And

    Jiani (05:08)

    Hehehehe

    I'm sorry.

    Alex Furman (05:22)

    we just needed to understand how to make people decisions and how to make people decisions correctly and how to understand what's working and what's not working and who is working and how and how to make everybody successful. Again, as we're global and distributed, we're very, very distributed before COVID, before all the cool kids were doing it. And the existing approach has just don't work and they've never worked.

    So I started playing around with other ideas and some of them didn't work, by the way, but some of these ideas stuck. And over time, we developed a performica technology and here we are.

    Jiani (06:05)

    That's beautiful. And, how do you use this performica strategy to actually solve the challenge that you were facing, like organized people and actually sustain actual innovation on a, like on a scale, literally how, how can, how can, how can that take place?

    Alex Furman (06:29)

    Yeah, no, we started with basic principles. So the idea was that if we want to optimize and improve things, then step one is to deeply understand them. And when I wanted to deeply understand the company and how work was actually being done, I realized that the models that we have for looking at a business from a people perspective are just, they don't work.

    Right. And what I mean by that is we tend to look at one of two things or both. Right. We look at people as spreadsheet, like as lines on a spreadsheet, specifically in the liabilities, like in the liabilities for social statements. Like there's an irony to that. And that's one way we look at people. And the other way we look at people as boxes on an org chart. Right. And if you think of like an organizational chart at like,

    Jiani (07:07)

    Mm.

    Yeah, liability.

    Alex Furman (07:23)

    It's a way to imagine that this company is this collection of verticals. Here is engineering and here is finance and within finance here is accounting and FP &A. And if you go back in history, we got that model of looking at organizations straight from the Industrial Revolution.

    like the first modern org chart, which has this like beautiful drawing in pen and ink, by the way, like Google it, it's really gorgeous. But the first modern org chart we had from like the Eerie Railroad Company in like 1860 something. And that was like a very meaningful and reasonable way to organize like railroads and factories that...

    And these were, again, if you think about like what these organizations were, they were designed to do the same thing over and over again, really, really well, like day to day, month to month, year to year, like make the trains run on time. Maybe once every couple of years, you'd open a new range, but typically here in the business are doing the same thing over and over again and really, really well. Or if you're a factory stamping out widgets, you'd be making the same like PMS or whatever it was over a course of years and decades.

    So you are really like optimizing for efficiencies in a steady state process. And that's not how modern companies work, right? Like we, the innovation cycles are insane. We do what we're doing now is very different from what we did a year ago. What we'll be doing two years from now is like more. Yeah. It's like everything changes and we need to optimize for innovation and you can't like, you're not going to win the innovation game.

    Jiani (08:55)

    Yeah, we're moving from waterfall to agile and.

    Alex Furman (09:08)

    if the way you're looking at things is a good fit for running a mid -19th century railroad. They weren't particularly innovative organizations. So we should be doing something different here. And we are. And we're helping our customers do something different here.

    Jiani (09:29)

    So if it was not that like, you know, it's not like a line on the data sheet under liability, it's not like a, you know, pyramid style kind of or charts that focused on doing one particular thing well forever. What should it look like then in 21st century?

    Alex Furman (09:51)

    Well, work happens in networks. And these networks, again, they don't show up in our systems a lot of the time. It's when a couple of engineers get together with a marketing person and then maybe pull in somebody from the finance team to run some analysis and build a model. That is how inventions are made. That is how new products are developed. That is how magic happens. True magic happens that way.

    And in order, and if we want to like optimize for that, like if we want to be very good at that, then we need to like see it and understand it. And we're never going to see it and understand it if we look at a work chart. So like we need to see it and understand it like dynamically cross -functionally in real time. So like, like we need a model for, we need to, we need a view of the organization that actually corresponds to like how the meaningful work happens.

    Jiani (10:33)

    Hmm.

    Alex Furman (10:49)

    And that is what we created with, that again started before the Performica days and as a little prototype we developed in my last company. But that's what we started from, like actually for real visualizing how work happens. So that once we see it and once we understand it, we can now make tweaks and adjustments and experiments and try to get very, very good at this thing.

    Jiani (11:18)

    So instead of, so we're looking at like a network of kind of, that reminds me of like a neural network. It's like how we process information and make decisions and implementation. So it's like neural network for the organizations in a way.

    Alex Furman (11:34)

    Yeah, I mean, I think of it and I actually got the analogy when we started working on this. And remember, I'm a software geek, right? So I came from that world. And my, initially I thought of it as people systems observability. Like there's all of these wonderful solutions out there that let us observe our technological systems and like map out data flows and see what happens as a various pieces of our technical architecture interact.

    And what I wanted to do was see if we could do that with how people work together. Like actually map out who is spending time together at meetings and who is communicating heavily on Slack and who is committing source code into the same GitHub repositories and who is moving the same tickets around in the CRM or in the project management software. So I wanted to basically observe company business systems.

    and use that data to give me a real -time, accurate map of work that is happening in the organization as various people collaborate and move in and move out through various stages of a project. So we went and did that. And once we did, and the map was fascinating. The first time I saw it, I didn't believe it. It was so different from what I was expecting to see that I actually...

    Like I told the team that there must be a bug. I wasted a couple of weeks of their time to like test and retest the whole prototype because the picture, what turned out to be reality was just so different from my expectations. And once I realized that like, wow, like this is reality. Like there is no bug. Like this is like, I don't know.

    Like I felt like taking the red pill, right? Like I actually saw like how people were working together for you. Yeah. And how wrong I had it or like we as a leadership team, we as a founding team, like how wrong we were about our assumptions about like how work was happening. That the second I saw that, like that just made it so clear that this is important. This is a big deal. Like we're on to something.

    Jiani (13:26)

    Behind the curtain.

    Can you explain a little bit more in details? Like, what did you see that really kind of shocked from like your expectations or your initial assumptions? What was what was that particular piece?

    Alex Furman (13:59)

    Well, lots of things, and you're going to need to stop me here. But the initial thing that I saw was that, like, I didn't know half of our key employees. Like, just looking at a basic visualization of people working together and, like, and seeing who were the...

    folks that were like gluing these key efforts together and who everybody was going to for like their expertise or mentorship or advice or whatever it was or help getting things done. Like half of those people I didn't know their names and again and at that point in time like we weren't a large company we were only maybe three four hundred people.

    at that point and half of the key folk, absolutely critical to the board and projects, I didn't know who they were. Or in some cases, I knew who they were, but I thought of them as these quiet, non -leaders, quote unquote. Like smart, but quiet.

    I don't like scientists or something and and and in real life and I saw a picture you could see what they're leading and they're gluing massive like chunks of work together and we're like we're Exercising leadership like for real and you could see it without any of the fancy analytics we built later You'd like you don't need you could just look at it

    And then conversely, we had people in designated leadership positions would be appropriate, like titles and compensation packages and so on. And you could see basically that the company was kind of routing around them as damage. There was actually somebody else on their team who was quietly doing amazing work and completely underrated, not getting any recognition for it whatsoever.

    And then like their boss just gave PowerPoint presentations every once in a while. And like, and we thought that they were like absolutely alien, like, like absolutely critical. Essentially, like, like getting credit for, for work that wasn't theirs, though worth mentioning, like these weren't bad people. Like they're, I'm not talking about like bad people doing the cynically on purpose. It's just kind of how, like how we're incentivized and how companies work a lot of the time.

    That was the low hanging fruit, but that was the part that I just saw with my eyeballs without algorithms or data processing or AI or any of the fancy things we did later. And then when we started doing fancy things, we discovered no less incredible stuff. But for example, predicting attrition.

    Jiani (16:30)

    For example.

    Alex Furman (16:37)

    So most advanced HR analytics efforts, like the first question, whatever somebody tries to analyze people data, the first question anybody asks is how could we predict who's likely to quit next so that we try to prevent it where it would be regrettable? And it largely to date has been kind of an unsolved problem. People crunch a bunch of demographic data and get the sort of...

    relatively minor conclusions that are sort of at the demographic level that like people of like, I don't know a certain gender identity in the Midwest who haven't had a promotion in the last like two and a half years or 7 .5 % more likely to quit within the next nine months or something. And it's not particularly actionable, right? So those are like interesting descriptive statistics, but it's hard to do anything about that.

    And then what we found, once again, looking at these networks, is we found that attrition contagion in these networks of high performing individuals is tremendous. That like when you lose a close collaborator, you're now something like 6X more likely to leave over the next three months.

    And we're in large organizations, like we have a number of collaborators, right? Like where your buddy in marketing, who you like work shoulder to shoulder with to launch products, puts a notice, you're now at risk, like partially because you just lost a valuable resource, partially because they like working with you, they're gonna...

    you over, partially because you just might pick up the phone the next time a recruiter calls because why not, right? Or go on LinkedIn because you're curious. And next thing you know, this is this domino effect. And interestingly, this domino effect, it traces the same collaboration and influence networks that I was talking about. And it's particularly powerful in high -performing individuals, right? It's your best people who actually follow each other out the door.

    Jiani (18:31)

    Hmm.

    Alex Furman (18:39)

    And then and then everybody else kind of stays behind And people have been banging their head against trying to like predict or like voluntary regret of a literature and forgot knows how long but again We're just like looking in the wrong place if you're looking at orchards of spreadsheets, you're not gonna see it because like people are So so so that's one like sentiment contagion right like we found that

    Jiani (18:56)

    Hahaha

    Alex Furman (19:05)

    A small number of highly influential people in organizations actually drive most like morale, engagement, sentiment, and optimism about the future. Like you can literally identify like a sub 5%, like three to 4 % of your employee population that are responsible. And we demonstrate the causality by the way, this isn't just correlation that actually drive like the vast majority of how everybody, everybody else thinks about the company.

    And you can like, and you could you like, you can talk to them, you can ask them questions, you could use them on the focus groups, right? Like this isn't about some sort of like creepy, like we're going to manipulate people by like, leveraging influencer effects in a way like we sell $20 t shirts to each other on on Facebook. Right? Like that's, that's not that's not what I mean at all. What I mean is we can like, like influential people are influential for a reason.

    And if you know who to ask, and if you know who to involve in your decision -making process, your communication process, you can do so much better. And at the end of the day, again, create this rising tide that lifts all the boats and that makes everybody happier and more productive. Up to it, including your shareholders, but starting with your teammates who show up day in and day out and spend many hours a day doing great work.

    Jiani (20:23)

    Hmm.

    Alex Furman (20:28)

    on your behalf for your companies. And I can keep going and going. I just like, I will, if you don't stop, we all ramble.

    Jiani (20:31)

    It's kind of like, yeah, yeah, I think you brought a lot of like very key pieces where like in traditional ways, it's really hard to identify and hard to kind of diagnose. And with this kind of active mapping, it brings radical transparency.

    into like the talents and then how work is being distributed and completed. And when you're talking about like the map, what do you track? Do you track like communication? Do you track like meetings? Like what are some data points that makes the map?

    Alex Furman (21:09)

    Yeah.

    So this is a really important question, especially, and I assume we'll revisit privacy confidentiality, how to do all of these wonderful things and not be a creep. So Performa operates when it comes to communication systems, it operates at the metadata level. So we connect to email systems, calendar system, corporate messenger systems, like Slack, Google, Microsoft, whatever.

    But very, very importantly, what we don't do is we don't actually read the contents of the communication. And we don't do it, frankly, because it would be really creepy if we did. So what the Performica system knows, it will know that you and I, for example, spend on average seven hours a week in meetings, out of which 45 minutes is a one -on -one. And the rest are distributed between small group meetings, large group meetings, and so on.

    Jiani (21:51)

    That's important. I think people need to know that.

    Alex Furman (22:09)

    it will, for example, know that we collaborate on the same tickets and, let's say, Jira or Trello or Asana or whatever. Or we check code into the same GitHub repository, like in Python using whatever libraries. So it maps out, again, in these communication collaboration systems, it maps out anything where the work that we do together leaves behind breadcrumbs.

    And then that data is used to understand both how the company is wired together at the macro level, but also how at the very individual employee -centric level, how each and every one of us contributes to the fabric of the organization.

    Jiani (22:54)

    I love that the fabric of the organization, the metadata is more like communication types, frequency, collaboration types, frequency locations. And that helps protect people's privacy, but also get the crucial data that's essential for mapping out the collaboration neural network of the organization.

    Alex Furman (23:16)

    Yeah, that's right. And like, and for the record, like if we were reading all the emails, right, and like running them through some sort of like AI, could we get useful information out of that? I was like, absolutely.

    But we don't and we never will. Or like certainly as long as I have anything to say about this. Giving that I'm like founder CEO of MSA. Because that would be creepy, right? Like I mentioned, I grew up in the Soviet Union. So like the last thing I want is some like black box that is reading all of my email and like telling me to HR. It's like I wouldn't work in a company that does that. So I would want anybody else to work in a company that does this.

    Jiani (23:53)

    Yeah, it's like a trust thing.

    Alex Furman (23:56)

    But again, back to my original point, that said, understanding who I collaborate with and in what ways is absolutely critical because the company is in the business to make me as effective as I can possibly be and as empowered as I can possibly be. And in order to be good at anything, you need to understand it. And understanding how people work is absolutely critical. But again, we'll have an eye toward like...

    Jiani (24:20)

    Mm -hmm.

    Alex Furman (24:27)

    empowering everybody versus spying on them in some sort of a like ridiculously creepy and sad way.

    Jiani (24:29)

    I love that.

    Yeah, I think that would be kind of the key kind of message that people need to hear. It's not like tracking specific details. It's just trapping communication types and frequencies. So metadata is all that it takes to build that fabric.

    And you were talking about, you, you put like, you kind of categorize based on those metadata, you were able to kind of categorize or, or. Visualize people on a kind of a place with a four quadrums. Can you explain more on that? Like the quadrum and how, what does that? Yeah.

    Alex Furman (25:16)

    Yeah, and so, and I'll start with a caveat is like, look, this like everything else is an oversimplification, but it's like, it's a very useful oversimplification. Like there's many ways. Yeah, there's, there's, there's many ways of looking at this stuff. But if you do, like, just like do a thought exercise, think of like your place of work right now, or, or like any place where you've worked before. And you try to think of people on these two axes where, where,

    Jiani (25:27)

    Whatever helps people to understand.

    Alex Furman (25:43)

    One axis is how good they are at what they do, how valuable they are to the organization, to their colleagues, to the mission. And then on the other axis, we have how good they are at self -promoting, how loud they are, how good they are at making sure that everybody really, really understands their value. And if you think of this, so if you think on one hand, you have performance, again, to really oversimplify, performance, self -promotion.

    Jiani (26:04)

    Advocate.

    Mm.

    Alex Furman (26:12)

    And then you can start again, like you can kind of break it into quadrants. And in the top right quadrant, we have people who are good at both. So I'm like really smart. I work really hard. I am a great teammate. I am valuable and I'm a great communicator. I communicate effectively and everybody knows it. And these are like, we know and love these people, right? Like these are people who don't need our help. Like they're easy to identify. We know them already and they're great. Right?

    Jiani (26:36)

    Thank you.

    Alex Furman (26:42)

    Because again, communication and even self -promotion is actually a useful skill. There's nothing wrong with self -promotion. So these are our known leaders. Our known leaders are not a problem. They're great. Let's leave them alone. Then in the bottom, like in the bottom left side of this, we have people who are bad at both. So I'm bad at self -promoting, and I'm bad at the work that I do.

    Jiani (26:48)

    Promotions actually help to communicate.

    Alex Furman (27:10)

    And that's obviously a sad story. And maybe I can be helped and with proper guidance, mentorship, training, and so on. I can be rescued and become good at these things or not. Or maybe I just need to be replaced. Maybe I'm in the wrong organization, wrong career, wrong whatever, wrong time in my life. But regardless, these are the known problems. So just like with known leaders, these types of problems tend to be relatively straightforward.

    They're easy to detect. We kind of know about them. If we have any sort of healthy approaches to managing performance in the organization, we're doing stuff about this. Again, hopefully by helping people get good and where that fails by terminating them and hiring somebody else. So these are problems, but they're known problems. And these other two quadrants, this is where we get in trouble. This is where we routinely get in trouble in very, very important ways. So on one hand,

    we have our stealth performers. And these are the people who are smart, valuable, hardworking, high potential, but quiet and don't self promote. And often, not always, because sometimes the right person in senior management kind of notices them and becomes their champion and good things happen. So that happens all the time by the way. But often we miss them. And these are the incredibly valuable people who we don't know.

    And the fact that we don't know about them, it means that we don't pay them enough. It means that we overlook them for promotions. It means that when we have leadership opportunities, right, or like projects that would really benefit from their amazing skills, because remember, these are incredible people, we don't know to tap them. It means that when we do layoffs or when...

    We reorganize. We will sometimes, like, they will get caught up in these sorts of things. And we only find out later, right? Like, we, and this, I've seen this over and over again, and if you think about it, you probably have too, right? Where, like, somebody got caught up in a layoff, or somebody was, like, underappreciated, frustrated, and left.

    And two months later, we realize it's like, good God, we can't get anything done without that person. They were the only person who knew his key system or had some sort of really, really important intangibles that they're bringing to the table. But again, we only find out after we fired them or frustrated the heck out of them and they left on their own. Do we then realize, wow, that was an incredible person and we were wrong? Happens all the time. Right?

    And then on the other side, we have the folks who are sort of overhyped and ironically, and like uncounterintuitively wind up really under supported. And these are the people who are very good at self -promotion, like the super effective communicators who are not that good at what they do. Maybe because their incredible communication skills got them over promoted.

    Jiani (30:17)

    Hmm.

    Alex Furman (30:22)

    and now they're like responsible for things they have no business being responsible for. Or maybe, right, or for whatever reason, right? Like the people who are very good at presenting, we tend to like over incentivize, we tend to entrust with very, very important things. We put them in charge of like big things and they're not set up for success.

    And when they're struggling, we don't know that they need help. Because again, they come across so polished and they're so good at communicating that they hide their performance issues that are often salvageable until it's too late and they blow up. And again, if you think about it, I'm sure you've seen this. I've seen this in every single place I've ever worked.

    Jiani (31:12)

    Mm.

    Alex Furman (31:18)

    where the people who are much better at presenting than doing the work wind up in positions of authority, importance, and so on. And that leads to failure on the stocks of our team. Worth mentioning.

    Jiani (31:31)

    I think it's an international thing. I think it's a common human thing. Like when I see someone who's really good at presenting and advocating, I'm like, okay. I would like to follow that person. And somehow it just, I don't know, is that like a human thing? I don't know.

    Alex Furman (31:36)

    Total! Yeah, those are the things. No.

    It is a human thing and there's nothing wrong. And for the record again, like communication skills are very important skills. Like I...

    Did I just disappear?

    Jiani (32:11)

    Are you still here?

    Alex Furman (32:12)

    Okay, is my internet okay? It's being weird.

    Jiani (32:16)

    Yes, it's still still running. Yeah, I did that. And also do you want to drink some water? Just so weird. You're welcome.

    Alex Furman (32:17)

    Okay, anyway, you'll edit this out later, I'm sure.

    That's what we're doing. Thank you. Thank you for caring.

    But back to the conversation, right? It's like, yes, it is a very human thing. And on some level, there's nothing wrong with it. Because again, effective communication is a very important skill. That said, when our communication is so effective and we get over our skis ahead of our ability to actually do work, that becomes toxic. And it becomes, and worth mentioning, there's a very serious, like,

    I don't know if we'll get to talk about like fairness and like diversity in the workplace. But this is where a lot of like really bad kinds of biases seep in. Right? For like the stealth, the stealth performer category, right? Like the quietly wonderful, underappreciated people. Like there absolutely are quiet men, like quiet tall men in there.

    Jiani (33:05)

    Let's do that.

    Alex Furman (33:26)

    But you know what, there's more women than men in that group, right? And there's more people from diverse backgrounds. There's more people who speak with an accent like you and I do, right? Like we're first generation immigrants, you and I. Yeah, so like that group is a very, very diverse group. And one of the, there's lots of things that we've sort of tried to do.

    broadly speaking in the DI arena to make our organizations more fair and equitable and at the end of the day, more performant because diverse teams actually do better and we know this and there's scientific backing for us. But the one thing that I've seen really move the needle as a very, very effective strategy to make teams more diverse, to make leadership teams more diverse is to, again, put in the performative approach.

    identify wonderful, high -performing, high -potential people who you already have, who are already on your team, who already bought into your mission. They're already doing great work. You don't have to try to hire new diverse talent or something, which is really hard. Most organizations already have all of these people. And the second we get good at identifying them, supporting them, empowering them, and make sure that they do well,

    Jiani (34:36)

    Mmm.

    Alex Furman (34:48)

    Suddenly, lo and behold, we have diverse teams and we can do this without any sort of quotas and without specifically targeting certain classes. And again, this is something we published in a white paper, like one in a word from a Wharton Business School from last year. But putting in Performica actually, like,

    leads to diversity at all levels of leadership in organizations, organically, by recognizing the great work that is already happening and without doing anything artificial. And it's one of the things that I'm incredibly proud of.

    Jiani (35:32)

    Yeah. And I think, wasn't that like, just the, if we were to think of trace back why, you know, inclusion diversity is so important is, is exactly the same reason it helps organization, helps company to, to thrive and do better. And that's kind of the, that's just exactly what we're trying to advocate. And then, because we bought into this like schema where people who tends to, advocate the, the strong.

    usually gets all the resources. it's called like squeaking wheel phenomena. So I think with data, while protecting people's privacy helps to again, bring that radical transparency into exactly how people are working in the company, which is a group of people who believe in the same mission, you know, toward the same goal. And, and,

    Alex Furman (36:07)

    Yeah. Yeah.

    Jiani (36:31)

    feels like intuitive than in this case.

    Alex Furman (36:35)

    Yeah, a lot of these things, right?

    A lot of these things that I'm talking to you about, they're actually very intuitive. And this is where, again, if you want to see this, I'm easy to reach. Ping me and I can show you these things to you or anybody in the audience. But what I'm talking to you right now, this isn't like...

    some of the most valuable things are actually really straightforward. They're intuitive, you can see them visually, they make a lot of sense. And the reason this feels so novel and groundbreaking is because it requires to fundamentally look at the organizations differently. So if you're staring at org charts or spreadsheets, you're never gonna see these things. But if you're staring at how work actually gets done, much of what I'm talking to you about is incredibly straightforward.

    And there's also really, really fancy stuff that we can talk about too, if we have time, but...

    Jiani (37:36)

    I actually have another question. well, we've, we were talking about like the kind of communication collaboration. What if something people do does not require a lot of communication and collaboration and, but they require a lot of focused work then would, how would they be? I don't know.

    Alex Furman (38:00)

    Well, that's great, right? Because on some level, and again, this is where maybe it's really important to say it, what performica is not and what performica does not do. It never will do, by the way. So what performica does not do is try to look at this data and try to put some sort of a performance or productivity score in individual people. And we don't do it because...

    Well for two reasons a like there actually isn't a good job like there isn't really a way to do a good job of this like work are so multifaceted and the way like humans interact together on such like bespoke and and unique ways that there's been like many attempts to try to measure of a productivity of like I don't know a software engineer by like lines of code or

    like whatever, like pull request statistics and so on. And these things, like they don't work, they're easy to game and like they're naive. So on one hand, like, but on the other hand, it would also be really, really scary. Like we, like people are in a number and we contribute in unique ways. And some of us are high communicators and...

    we contribute by pulling people together. Some of us are hyper -focused and we're very productive and we contribute by being very, very productive. And the idea here is that performica, our fundamental approach is to just expose all of that and then have humans make human decisions. Because again, the...

    If we want people to truly do their best, we want to be incredibly human -centric in what we ask them to do. If there's lots of, and again, if you follow performance management of the organizations, there's lots of data on how.

    Like when the only way to grow is to manage people, we take a whole bunch of like wonderful engineers and scientists and like whoever else and turn them into mediocre managers because it's the only way to grow. And we're like losing value on once like, and we're, and we're losing value on both ends, right? We're, we're like losing wonderfully productive people on one side and we're like gaining mediocre managers on the other side where like we actually want excellent managers obviously. Yeah. So, so yeah, the idea here like isn't.

    Jiani (40:18)

    Mm -hmm.

    Alex Furman (40:20)

    that the high communicators are more valuable. In fact, that's not how it plays out in the vast majority of the time. The idea is to truly understand how people working together in being the unique and wonderful snowflakes that we all are make this tapestry that is an effective, innovative, agile organization.

    Jiani (40:39)

    Mm.

    Alex Furman (40:47)

    And the idea here is again to really, really understand how it's working right now and how it should work and try to bridge the gap between what we're seeing and what we want to see and not any sort of cookie cutter prescriptions because that would be crazy and depressing. And not magical.

    Jiani (41:01)

    Yeah, that makes perfect sense Yeah, there's no there is magic and there there does not need magic That's beautiful. And so my other question would be in our previous conversation. We're talking about the The role of like childlike wonder. So what role do you think? childlike wonder play in terms of like

    people development, culture development, and the ability for us to kind of understand the fabrics of an organization. Or is this related? I know it's a key theme of this podcast. I have to ask.

    Alex Furman (41:39)

    Yeah, it also like one of my favorite questions, which is which were like themes, which is why we're talking about this in the first place. And I'll give you a few different answers. So what is creativity and innovation like pick your buzzword requires a whole lot of freedom and playfulness.

    Right? Like you can never, like you can't micromanage people into being creative. Right? Like if you're micromanaging people, if you're giving like explicit orders, then they may or may not do a good job of following your orders, but they're sure as heck never going to do anything new. Right? Like if you want creativity, if you want innovation, you need like freedom and playfulness and experimentation. Without it, right? Like again, you're like, you might be a very, very good factory making the same widgets over and over again for the next 10 years.

    bye

    That's not how, like, the innovation economy, like, doesn't allow for that anymore, right? And actually, thank God, because I wouldn't want to work in one of those sectors, I don't think. Though that's an assumption. But anyway, back to your point. So like, you need people to be playful, and you need people to be free to experiment, and you need people to, like, not be afraid. Like, there's a tremendous amount of psychological safety that's required, right? Like, if you've ever, like, been trained in brainstorming, like, it's been really hard for me to get good at brainstorming.

    Because like my inner critic is always in there and I'm always self -censoring and I'm always worried what will other people think and in a highly hierarchical environment, right? Like you get into a room and you figure out who the SVP is and who the senior director is and so on.

    And people, and that shuts down conversation, creativity, playfulness in a way that gets in the way of doing anything innovative. And the gray teams naturally bypass this. They create this environment of like...

    Again, that's this combination of safety, playfulness, willingness to experiment, like, permission to fail, the right guard rail so that the failures aren't catastrophic, right? You don't actually drive off a cliff. And creating these environments, and when I look at... So I have two kids, I think I mentioned that earlier. And when I look at my kids, they're so good at this. They do this naturally. That's how they approach life.

    Jiani (44:08)

    Two dollars.

    Alex Furman (44:16)

    And they're like wonderful at brainstorming or so much better at brainstorming like even the highly trained adults that we are. And I admire that so much in my like in the work that I do on myself to get good at this because I must get good at this right like I am the CEO of like a small innovative company. We have a lot to figure out like I try to imitate my kids in as much as I can.

    And segueing it back to the approach that we take, breaking up hierarchies, like the more you look, again, the more you think of people as liabilities, the harder it is going to be to create an environment where they're playful and creative and innovative and do all of these things, right? The more you're hierarchical and the more you stare at work charts and your people stare at work charts, because again, the way you think of your organization seems true.

    And if all you look at is reporting structures, budget authority, signature authority, right, like whatever, like everybody else will kind of pick up on it.

    Jiani (45:14)

    Yes.

    Alex Furman (45:28)

    And the more you start thinking of your organization, again, as these networks and dynamic networks of people coming together, the more you acknowledge that and incentivize it and reward those behaviors, the more you create an environment that, again, has this combination of psychological safety and permission to be creative. And it's transformative, and it's also so much more fun. Like, it...

    Jiani (45:53)

    Yeah.

    Alex Furman (45:55)

    I'm getting emotional here, but I really, really care about that stuff. It is so much more fun to be in that environment. It's also, at the end of the day, more productive.

    Jiani (46:05)

    And more innovative. It's good for the economy after all. That's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, Alex, for sharing that. As we move into the future with artificial intelligence, GenAI, extended realities, Web3 and brand machine interactions, like all coming to us fast, fast, fast. How do you, how do you see like what would be the best future look like?

    with performica

    Alex Furman (46:37)

    So this is where, again, this is a controversial topic, and this is where I am going to cheerlead, right? When it comes to these things, I am squarely optimistic. There's lots of ways we can use technology, AI, data for evil, right? And we need to be really, really careful that we don't, and we're...

    incredibly careful at performing and not to do that on so and so but there's there's like

    you can use all of these things to be reductionist, right? And it's not hard to paint like a dystopian society where like terrible things happen because of AI and robotics and augmented reality and whatever else. And like from Ray Bradbury to The Matrix to whatever sci -fi is coming out right now, like those themes are very well explored. And like, yeah, some of those books are behind you on the bookshelf. However, right, however, we could...

    Jiani (47:29)

    Hehehehe

    Alex Furman (47:37)

    also think of all of these things as enabling, enabling us to be more human together, enabling us to... My experience of Performica, before it became Performica, my experience of Performica starting with the little prototype where we started looking at, again, work actually happening in real time, the true story versus the corporate period that we're used to staring at. It...

    it made it so much easier for us to have fun and it made it so much easier for us to like, it created a better workplace, like fundamentally, and it created a more human workplace, right? Like it is not reductionist. It is a view of a world that like can be a lot more like granular and bespoke.

    And for lack of better term, like human centric and like understanding how we work and identifying our strengths and identifying our contribution and rewarding these contributions. And it's like, it's the opposite of like reducing a worker to some like five numbers and requiring for a buck to be in a seat from like 8 a to 6 p or something, because you don't have a way to understand what they're doing otherwise, unless you have eyeballs on them. And I think we're going to see that everywhere. Like, I think.

    Jiani (48:57)

    Hmm.

    Alex Furman (49:01)

    There's so much possibility to help us focus on the things that require like human expertise and true creativity. And yes, get some of the groundwork out of a way that frankly, I'm not going to miss. What it looks like, I don't know. But it looks more network based and less hierarchical, right? Like it looks more employee centric and less transactional.

    I expect that like the employer employee relationship and it's being radically redefined, right? And you can argue about when it started, whether it was the internet or COVID or whatever else. But I expect these things to continue and I expect them to take us in a great direction as long as we're like very careful and very mindful and very deliberate of.

    what we're doing, why we're doing it, more importantly, what we're not doing and how we go about it in an ethical way. And yes, I think it will require self -policing and yes, I think it will actually require regulation because there is potential for abuse. And we need to be careful of that stuff, but it's so powerful and it, again, when done right, and even though we're still with performa, kind of scratching the surface, but...

    Like, it's already magical and it could be so much more.

    Jiani (50:28)

    Yeah, yeah. And I think educated optimism or disciplined optimism is something that I get a sense from just by hearing what you're saying as it comes.

    Alex Furman (50:48)

    Yeah, I think the potential is amazing. And I think like, yes, as a society, as employers, as human beings, like as me and you as individuals, like, I think we need to be careful and mindful. But that's true about most powerful things, right?

    Jiani (51:02)

    Yeah, it's technology, it's a tool and we just need to use it. Be wise to use it, to design it in a way that helps. Wonderful.

    Alex Furman (51:13)

    But I can't wait, like I get to like very specifically, I'm sorry, you're trying to wrap up with like, I can't wait to be in some sort of an artificial reality where you and I, even though we're on different coasts or sitting on a couch and I'm not staring at like a screen for a webcam, like it will make it easier for us to brainstorm and be innovative. Like, right? Like it will, so I could just like come up with example after example after example for how like all of these things can be great.

    Jiani (51:31)

    Just like city.

    Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's coming. Definitely coming. So yeah, it's probably faster than we thought. Maybe just in a few years. Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's great. So as we move into the magic piece of the conversation, I would give kind of a brief recap for our audience of so far what we talked about. So we talked about Alex's story, how he

    Alex Furman (51:46)

    It's going.

    Certainly faster than I thought, but hey, I'm old.

    Jiani (52:11)

    evolve performa ca from this challenge of

    having to understand the talent in the organization that he's growing in all the way into the performica right now, helping to bring radical transparency into the organizations, moving away from the industrial kind of revolution style of org chart, where it's like a lie in the Excel sheet under liability for human resources or like a kind of pyramid like,

    like OrgChart into more of a dynamic communication and collaboration focused talent map or the talent fabric.

    of an organization. And he also shared about the quadrants of the, the, performance of how we can potentially kind of see as we, who are people who are high performing and also self advocating, who are people who are totally the opposite and actually help us to more focus on the other quadrants where people are high performing, but low self advocacy versus people are low performing, but high self advocacy.

    And by focusing on those two quadrants that's usually ignored and hard to track by traditional way of understanding the company or the organization development or fabric, we're able to bring transparency and helping we identify potential hidden talent that we need to give more resource and promotion and people who are maybe taking.

    too much load, you know, they have, they need more support or coaching to help them actually catch up the performance with the level of advocacy they're, they're, they're showing. And also it brings, diversity and inclusion into the culture, not by advocating for it at all, but just by as a byproduct of being able to see those two dimensions. And we're also looked into the future of what the AI,

    extended reality, all the kind of Web3 technology can potentially be leveraged in a disciplined, optimism manner. We also explored what childlike wonder can create magic within organizations, especially if we want organizations to innovate, to survive and not survive but thrive in a world that's a lot of unseen and just take uncertainties into fuels and thrive instead of...

    Alex Furman (54:53)

    Thank you.

    Jiani (54:54)

    the other way around. I hope I did a good job. Sorry. Cool. Cool. I think that comes natural somehow. All right. So let's talk about the magic. So what did Alex enjoy creating or playing when he was about 11 years old?

    Alex Furman (54:58)

    No, this was great. I should get your help on my marketing materials.

    So I'll give you kind of a disappointing answer to that question. I mostly don't remember. And again, this is getting personal, but since you asked and we're talking about these things, when I was 11, two things happened to me. My mom died of cancer and we got on the plane, left the Soviet Union, landed in Boston. And I...

    two siblings and a single father with 200 or like $400 in his pocket I think the actual number was. And we as a family and I as myself really spent like an extra year surviving and I don't have a lot of memories. I start remembering myself more or less well kind of from when I turned 16 or 17. Between that there's just a gap.

    So I don't know.

    Jiani (56:30)

    Thank you for sharing that with us. It must be tough.

    Alex Furman (56:34)

    I know I drew a lot because some of my drawings, like my grandparents and my aunt still have some of my childhood drawings. But yeah, that's kind of all I know.

    Jiani (56:43)

    Mm. Mm.

    And when you were then fast forward when you were 16 or 17 what did Alex enjoy doing that time disappeared?

    Alex Furman (57:05)

    A few things. I was very, and right, like this is one, where the geekery really comes out. But I was really into like role -playing games, kind of started with Dungeons and Dragons and then went into like more free -form, like creative communal storytelling. That's really kind of how I think about it. And I spent like, between my friends and I, we just spent like, I don't even know how many, like hundreds of hours.

    with these grand imaginary epic adventures, which was a lot of fun and in a way I kind of do this with my kids right now. This sort of thing has stuck with me, I still really really enjoy it. Besides that, I've always been super outdoors, yeah?

    So we did extended wilderness trips in the summer and the winter, on skis for weeks, we were backpack climbing stuff. Do less of that to date, I actually need to do more of it now. Those are probably kind of the big things.

    Jiani (58:00)

    nature.

    Yes, that's...

    Alex Furman (58:21)

    besides figuring out how to be a teenager and all of the stuff that comes with that territory.

    Jiani (58:23)

    bigger. Yeah, it's.

    Yeah, yeah. I think stories and human -centric is kind of is there, like, kind of as you kind of evolve through your version of life and were there and you mentioned about like, are you open for me to ask more questions? Like just kind of poke around during that like challenging time?

    Alex Furman (58:51)

    Yeah, yeah, yeah, ask away. If I don't want to answer, I won't answer. I'm not like, I won't be shy about it.

    Jiani (58:57)

    Okay. I appreciate that. And, our audience will appreciate that too. so my next question is, you mentioned about that challenging time, around like when you were 11, do you think that part of that experience helped to shape who you are? Helps you to develop more empathy for, for people? was that?

    Was that part of the major challenge in your life? Or were there bigger challenges?

    Alex Furman (59:27)

    to us.

    So it's hard to know. So I think like I definitely think of myself as like a highly empathetic person and sometimes in bad ways, by the way, we can like, again, this might be a tangent, right? Like we tend to think of empathy as a good thing. It's like not as like there's a dark side to it. There's absolutely a dark side to empathy. I've always been like a highly, highly empathetic person and I've been very sensitive to other people's like happiness and pain.

    So I don't know, right? I don't know. I think it was definitely like a tremendously powerful experience. It definitely taught me a lot.

    I think I can... Knowing what I know and having struggled as much as I've struggled, I think it's easier for me to be less judgmental, I guess, which is different from other fields. So it was probably very important, but who knows? It's hard to put a finger on it.

    There was definitely like and also Like I probably like I probably learned a lot from it. It probably made me who I am I am all things considered I'm like I'm not complaining too much about who I am like I I think I'm more or less turned out Okay, but like I certainly wouldn't want my kids to have an experience I guess you know they did like like I don't want to pretend like it's a good thing. It made me stronger. I look like I overcame

    It like, it could have gone very very poorly on a number of occasions. It was the opposite of fun. I'm pretty sure I was pretty terrible to a lot of people around me. I certainly was like terrible to my father many times and him and I have a pretty close relationship and we talk about it and so on. So like there is a tremendous amount of regret out of that period and in general like I kind of got things together.

    I'd say in my late 20s. And there's like all, again, like all in all, like life turned out pretty well for me. It was like on many different levels, but there's a lot of regret and I, yeah, I.

    a part of, again, we're in science fiction and spiritual territory, but if I was staring at myself as a 10 -year -old about to enter the world of pain that I entered, and there was something I could have done about it, I sure as hell would have prevented it, if that makes any sense.

    Jiani (1:02:25)

    a lot of things to be improved like a like a like a empathetic performance review for for a younger self yeah but that's hard like if i were in your shoes and going through that i don't even i don't think i could do it better than you do i think it takes a lot of courage a lot of

    Alex Furman (1:02:35)

    I'm gonna go.

    Jiani (1:02:54)

    encouragement, a lot of reflection, deep thinking, and just reflect. Yes. And the ability to bear with heavy emotions.

    Alex Furman (1:03:02)

    I'm sure you've known this, I reflect quite a bit.

    Jiani (1:03:16)

    Yeah, that's, I mean, even though we don't, we don't really like those life challenging, life challenges. Sometimes when we look back, they did kind of open us up for new capabilities that we would otherwise not easily develop.

    Alex Furman (1:03:44)

    Yeah, no, I think it's certainly true. But the reverse is also true. There's a whole lot of survivor bias. The reason you and I are having this conversation, you found me because I started a company, took it public, created a technology, spun it out, started another company. Life turned out pretty well for me.

    And on other fronts too, right? Like, wonderful family, wonderful children, like excellent friends, right? I was just like counting my blessings, right? Or I couldn't count my blessings, there's too many of them. The flip side of it though, right, is that like there's many, like I flirted with disaster many times, right? Like things could have turned out very differently from, yeah. I mean, I'm glad they didn't. But.

    Jiani (1:04:35)

    That's beautiful. And I'm very honored to be able to hear your story and to be able to create this space that you are open to share. So I'm very grateful for this conversation.

    Alex Furman (1:04:51)

    Yeah, I'm happy to talk about maybe this is useful to somebody, at least I'm sure it's saying ideally useful. I'm happy to share.

    Jiani (1:05:00)

    Yeah, as I think every thing that really happened and especially challenges that we kind of come through will resonate with someone we know we don't know someone out there in a big, big world. As we conclude this podcast, what do you think is your magic after as of now? And I know magic evolved.

    as we evolve. So what do you think is your magic?

    Alex Furman (1:05:33)

    Yeah.

    I think, it's so hard to talk about myself like this way specifically.

    Jiani (1:05:42)

    I know, this feels like self advocating.

    Alex Furman (1:05:46)

    I think I care more than most people. Like, broadly speaking, right? Like I...

    Like, I know lots of people who are smarter than me. I know lots of people who are like more productive than me. I have lots of people who are stronger than me, faster than me, like prettier than me. That's not hard. Right? Like lots of things, right? Like.

    I don't, I mean, like I know people who care deeply about like.

    I don't know that I could point to somebody who like, cares deeply a lot more than I do.

    Right? Like you can compare it like the gap between me and like, I don't know, like the fastest person in the world. And I'm a terrible runner. Right? Like is massive. It's like, I, like, I don't know. It's just like, I really, really care. Like I, I, I want to do something meaningful. Right? Like for.

    people around me, people in my community, people broadly. Like I really give a damn. And I get a lot of like energy, power, inspiration out of that. Like I, we kind of talked about that earlier, right? Like this is where, this is what I go back to on my bad days when like I don't want to get out of bed, right? Like I'm feeling depressed, right? Like that.

    Jiani (1:07:17)

    Your wife.

    Alex Furman (1:07:24)

    Like, I really, really care, so I go and do things. And that's probably like, if I have magic, it's probably not. I hope I don't have to self -do -pretentious, right?

    Jiani (1:07:34)

    the ability to care deeply. That's great. Thank you. Thank you, Alex for I wish this conversation can continue. And.

    Alex Furman (1:07:48)

    Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of like, you asked, like these were, this was great. Like these are, like these are important questions. And again, I hope I wasn't rambling too much and didn't bore the heck out of your audience, but like, thanks for having me.

    Jiani (1:08:01)

    Yeah, it's so great. When you talk, I just wanted to sit here and just listen back to that vision that you have sitting on a couch, maybe having firewood burning and drink some tea. I think that will be, hopefully, it will be sometime in the future in the virtual reality. It's very good to have you, Alex. And...

    Alex Furman (1:08:29)

    Thank you.

    Jiani (1:08:31)

    And for folks who wanted to follow up with him and get to know more about a performa car and the methodology or even the white paper, just click, you know, check out the show note below so you can get connected with Alex. And thank you again, Alex, for coming to the podcast.

    Alex Furman (1:08:50)

    Awesome, thank you so much.

Paul Mwangi Gichia
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