Olga Mizrahi

178: Olga Mizrahi I publicly thanked them for the negative review

Intro Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

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Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who really has some insight into the future of work as we really are seeing it now and growing tremendously. 

Olga Mizrahi was born in Europe and via London landed in South Bend, Indiana at the age of five. After her dad’s relocation for work, she and her younger sister grew up in and around Los Angeles. Her parents were hard-working immigrants who both had a love of science and engineering. As such from an early age Olga was encouraged to think analytically while engaging in creative problem-solving. Olga is widely known for her two best-selling books, Sell Local think Global, and The Gig is Up. Of course, it took her some time to amass the know-how in those pages. 

She started her career in the dot-com world went on to teach web design. At the ripe old age of 24 she earned a master’s degree in business and eventually started her own successful design firm. Now coming full circle she teaches Trans-media for the University of California CE Irvine’s Digital Marketing Program. She’s proud to be able to show her family that living the dream is truly possible when you put your mind to it. 

Olga is multifaceted engaging in intellectual pursuits as well as getting out in nature skiing, stand-up paddle boarding and mountain biking for fun. She embraces the work hard, play hard philosophy. She is a lifelong learner, who is always connecting with others reading how-to materials, listening to podcasts and attending seminars that foster perpetual growth. She currently blogs at chunkofchange.com and leads a small team at Ohso! design which serves a wide variety of clients and web design and development as well as business consulting and strategic marketing. Olga currently lives in Long Beach, California with her husband of 21 years and they’re multi-talented preteen daughter who keeps her even busier with extracurricular classes and performances. Olga Mizrahi are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Olga Mizrahi:      I am ready. Bring it. 

Jim Rembach:   I am glad you’re here. Now I’ve given my Legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

Olga Mizrahi:      My current passion is truly the gig economy. There are so many opportunities both on the corporate side and outside of corporate to really take advantage of the future of work. It is just amazing right now it’s filled with anxiety too I don’t want to completely sugarcoat it but there’s so many opportunities and I want to make sure that your listeners know there’s something out there for . 

Jim Rembach:   I think there’s something out there for them. So for me—there’s a lot of podcasts out there that talk about being an entrepreneur doing your own thing and I know you get on a lot of those podcast but mine’s a little bit different we have more people who are in organizations that are actually listening to the show but I see the whole entrepreneur aspect as well as an opportunity for organizations from a coaching perspective, say to some of their top employees and top talent and say, have you ever thought about doing this as a side hustle? Or opening up more opportunities for you for growth?

Olga Mizrahi:      Eighty five percent of milennials, the fastest-growing segment of the US workforce, want to telecommute 100% of the time they want to be remote 100% of the time. So if you have top performers in your organization it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take a little bit more from the gig economy in terms of mentality. A lot of these people have side hustles they have other interests, how about we nurture that so they feel like a whole person and they want to stay because they love that you understand that.  

Jim Rembach:   I think it’s very short-sighted to think of development and skill development and growth from an organization’s perspective and a person who’s in an organization as a leader to say that you’re only going to get that here. Maybe it’s a good opportunity to really stop and say, what is gig economy? I think your definition is a little bit different than what I have seen before, so if you can explain that to me. 

Olga Mizrahi:      I think there’s a lot of confusion around the gig economy. Because we start hearing things like, sharing economy, app economy, knowledge economy, connection economy, well they’re all the same flippin’ thing. The thing is most people go, oh, crap does that mean I have to be an Uber driver? Does that mean that I have to have somebody now stay in my house and be an Airbnb? No. There are hundreds of platforms out there that cater to your project work and that’s the key, project work and technology combined. Freelancers aren’t new we’ve had freelancers forever, so what’s new? It’s the technology behind it. There are, like I said, hundreds of different apps and platforms that now feed this definition. The gig economy is project based services or on-demand that can be really provided by anyone at any time, it’s that simple.

Jim Rembach:   For me it was also kind of a AHA when I started looking at some of the statistics associated with as your definition of gig economy is looked at across the entire economy how really prevalent this is but even by 2020 there’s some amazing statistics that I think we’re probably going to reach sooner. Can you share some of those?

Olga Mizrahi:      One out of three people identify as being part of the gig economy right now. Does that mean full-time contract work? No. That can mean somebody who identifies because they’re doing it as a side gig but it also does include full-time freelancers and contract workers in that statistic. What’s amazing is within two years that’s going to be one out of every two. One of every two people in the United States is going to have some sort of 1099 income coming their way from being part of the gig economy, and that is mind-blowing. Think about what that means for you if you’re not necessarily interested in the gig economy. Well guess what? There’s probably a loved one that is either by choice or not and there’s probably somebody on your team that is. So there’s something that we know is coming around the corner let’s look at it let’s take it head-on and really take advantage of the opportunities coming our way.

Jim Rembach:   I also see from an organizational perspective that they’re really going to have to change the way that they look at work and how to get work done how to resource and deploy against all of those different tasks and all of that. I see that organizations as a core from an employee perspective, we seen it over time, but I think they’re missing one side of it. Meaning that they’ve thinned out but yet they placed more responsibilities on the people that are left and expecting them to do more. We just know from a human perspective we can really only focus in on one or two things at a time. We need to have people and resources that are outside of the organization to be able to handle the three four five six seven eight nine ten things that I’m not getting to.

Olga Mizrahi:      Right. So, what is the essence of your organization? There’s this competitive advantage number one and number two almost necessity as we go into the future of work to take a really hard look and say what is it that is our essence that we can’t outsource? That is our competitive advantage. And then those things that you can, what about you don’t even maybe know? What if you said to a top performer, look I’m going to give you a budget this week here’s $500 bucks, here’s a $1000 bucks I want you to find something that frees you up by going to Upwork, by going to Fiverr by going into any of these platforms and have something get done, will you manage that process? But hopefully it’ll free you up. So you’re not only teaching that employee a new skill as far as managing remote workers but also you’re asking your whole organization to say, okay what is your essence? If you can outsource that it’s not your essence.

Jim Rembach:   Okay, so that brings up a really interesting point. As I started thinking about that fact that a lot of organizations may say that their essence is really their culture. And so if I’m using a lot of outsourcers or gig-gers to do a lot of my work, how am I going to maintain or even grow that culture and get them to engage within it?

Olga Mizrahi:      What an excellent question? One of the biggest challenges with this new influx of gig workers is the communication aspect the idea of how to bring them also into the culture. There’s also by the way a lot of contract workers that are coming on-site to companies. Guess what? There’s a little bit of a discrimination happening still. I don’t think there’s shame in contract work like there used to be. They’re used to be really like this, you would go into corporate and you’d be like, oh that’s just a temp guy. But now I think appreciate more these specialized skills that people bring to the table. They’re coming on-site how about we make sure they don’t have the broken chair? And we haven’t stolen all their office supplies and we also invite them to the meeting because we forgot that they were part of the team because we don’t see them every day in front of our face. Those types of things can be easily remedied by checklists and by bringing that into the organization after all like there’s no harm in checklists. Really people, why do you think we fly safely? It’s all because of checklists it’s like, do you have a pre-flight checklist for when you bring gig workers and contract workers on?

Jim Rembach:   That’s a great point. I do see that onboarding process that engagement process and all of that in itself from an organization perspective requiring our unique set of skills that now has to be taught to a lot of different parts of the organization as they’re bringing these workers on and many times multiples of them for longer periods of time and also managing all of the whole deployment aspect of it. Managing of people knowing that they’re in the right place the right time focusing on the right things that in itself is huge. 

Olga Mizrahi:      There are some technology helpers. Like your audience right now hears me and that’s wonderful but you actually see me because we’re using a program so that we can connect as we’re talking. And for all you know we’re actually sitting in the same studio in North Carolina. But in reality I’m in Long Beach so there’s many more technologies that allow that connection whether it’s as simple as FaceTime. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been through airports or through a local Starbucks and you see people on FaceTime working, why is that? Because it creates a certain level of connection that you don’t get on a conference call that nobody’s paying attention to any day. 

Jim Rembach:   You are so true. It’s kind of funny that you say that t’s kind of funny that you say that because I’m currently on retainer for an organization and working on some of their materials and content, sales materials, marketing materials doing some other project work because of the skills that I’ve built and emotional intelligence in connecting with people. And so, when I come on we use go to meeting a lot—there’s a product that they’re using that when I come on I’m automatically activating my webcam. There’s someone made a comment today, Jim’s you turn your web cam on. 

Olga Mizrahi:      Very nice, good training good training. 

Jim Rembach:   Exactly right. I think it’s just your new habits, right? And that’s really what I’m getting at. We have to undertake new habits that we haven’t used in the past and never have been though about because of this future of work that we’re really talking about. 

Olga Mizrahi:      Yeah. And so if we get back to—I love that you have entrepreneurs. I remember back in the late 90’s I went in house at Pacific investment Management Company and it was the first time that they had ever had a website and then very quickly they discovered the beauty of an intranet. Here I am basically snot coming in like knowing web design which very few people did at the time and also I was like hot beep because all of these managers were coming to me and saying, hold on you mean our accounting department can put on the expense sheets and people can download them but people from the outside can’t see them? And so this is kind of an extension of—you have to sell people back then on the value of an intranet. Now a lot of times these sites are larger, most the time actually, than the external versions and they’re always trying to get more efficient and more things out of them. The same thing with videoconferencing and things like that all of those who’ve kind of come in to the mainstream, this is the next level this is the next thing. I feel like the more prepared you are as an entrepreneur to say, how can I take advantage of these technologies and of these resources that are worldwide? It’s not that it’s easy it’s kind of like saying, oh, I don’t want to hire them it just doesn’t work when I go on web work really because hiring temps back in the day worked. These are human issues so that’s not going away it’s how you’re dealing with the humanity and the connection. Especially with younger generations they crave that connection it’s not like in fact if anything they have maybe some boundary issues. But should we be surprised we’re asking them to be on 24/7 when their dings, slack channel anyone? You know what I’m saying. 

Jim Rembach:   You’re totally right it goes back to change transformation when we have to do things differently and that doesn’t come easy because we’ve been wired to conserve energy and put things in cruise control so we just have to take it out of cruise I guess. So, when we’re talking about all of this, the economic transformation our individual transformation our organizational transformation, all those things there’s a lot of motion wrapped up in that and one of the things that we look at on the show in order to help us get focused on the right emotions are quotes, so is there a quote or two that you can share that you like?

Olga Mizrahi:      Perfect is the enemy of the good. In today’s environment the launch is quick and so some of us are still back in that perfect thing, I can’t go because this isn’t perfect and I’m going to get reamed I’m going to get reamed and what happens is then you don’t go or you don’t go as boldly and yet it’s the bolt fortune favors the bold in essence that get any sort of attention or cut through everything that’s out there so, don’t be afraid to launch and launch often. It’s tough to even have stuff that’s out there I’m not immune I just flexed the muscle more that’s it. It’s a muscle that I flex and the more that I kind of put out there the better I am at not trying to reel it back in because it’s not perfect. 

Jim Rembach:   Yeah, we all talked about that you have to fall in order to get up and it’s not how not what happens but how you actually react to all that but still nonetheless painful and often times we shy away from it and like you said it’s a flexing of a muscle. I always like the things were people are getting interviewed and talking about that success that was just wild and it just took everybody by storm and sometimes you’ll hear them say, let me tell you about the 200 other times I failed. 

Olga Mizrahi:      Right, it’s the overnight success that took 20 years. 

Jim Rembach:   That’s exactly right. Talking about your transition being born in Europe being in London I know you were young when all of that happened but especially with the family and the immigration or some culture shock and Tiffany come from South Bend, Indiana to California had to be a huge one but I know also there’s been some transitions and humps that you’ve had to get over and we learn a lot by those, is there a story that you can tell when you’ve had to get over the hump? 

Olga Mizrahi:      Getting over the hump? Honey, I’d do that every week right. I’m going to share something from a long time ago and then I’ll share something really recent and I’m going to start with a recent one. When we talk about flexing muscle and really putting our money where our mouth is I recently—look, obviously as an author you look at your reviews just like on LinkedIn you would look at your ex or if you’re a business owner you look at Yelp and get mad say, how do I turn this Yelp thing off? You don’t. Anyway, so I got a negative review on the book and I read it, of course, and my first reaction was this person didn’t even get past page three because they admitted it in the review and they also had gotten like a free copy or something. And so your first thing is like, you didn’t even read it? What’s going on why do that? But I had to reel myself back and say, reviews are so much a part of the gig economy and the future of work this is not about me just responding to this person or responding at all I have a choice to not respond at all to respond directly to the person or to respond publicly and that’s what I did I responded publicly. The first thing I did was thank them because I truly appreciate it that they took the flippin time that means a lot so they didn’t connect with me. Okay, so then I went and put forth the issue that they couldn’t get past on page three actually had a whole chapter dedicated to it in the book on ethics. And so I just asked, did you get to the ethics chapter? People have told me that they really enjoy that and they’ve been giving me good feedback on that. So maybe we still have a chance to connect or not but just I’d throw that out there to be helpful. Not only am I responding to her in a very—not only cordial but respectful way but I’m doing it for everybody else that reads it because it’s important for them to know that this is a conversation this is your opportunity. You can think Amazon, just in general for all of us getting reviewed now because they’re the ones that started it, but we make those snap decisions now so it’s important to be okay with having your neck out there a little bit. 

Jim Rembach:   Very much so. And again I get think that’s one of those changed things we’re we just haven’t been used to that. I still have that conversation even with myself I just need to do it get out you know stick the neck out and just not worry about it and like for you I would like to respond to everything too regardless of whatever it is it’s just giving myself the pause so that I don’t respond it was some type of passive-aggressive thing, right?

Olga Mizrahi:      Exactly where you’re just kind of, hey (20:52 inaudible) right?

Jim Rembach:   Exactly. 

Olga Mizrahi:      I promised you an earlier story. So because I came to this country so young, I obviously don’t have much of an accent or anything like that, but talk about getting over the hump—I didn’t know what a fireplace was. I’m five or six years old in kindergarten and where we came from, including by the way in London, there’s just not a lot like they have these kind of old coal almost like things in the middle of the room and so we’re coming around Christmas that’s when we came to this country and there’s the stockings on the fireplace and this is all new to me and I get handed like a color sheet with this and I don’t know what this is and I’m also very shy and I’m just learning the language. The teacher automatically assumed that I was special so that’s my first time to get over—

Jim Rembach:   You are special just not in the way that she thought. 

Olga Mizrahi:      No not the way it is. I won’t tell you what she actually wrote because I don’t think it’s politically correct to use that word anymore but you get the idea. Needless to say that was like probably within one month of coming here and your first challenge as a child. 

Jim Rembach:   Well you definitely have overcome that. I really enjoyed going through the book and some of the work that you’re doing I have not even been exposed to some of the work that you’re doing with chunk of change so I’m looking forward to that. I do want to make sure before we move on we talk about one thing that you address because I see it more and more and you talk about the robopocalypse.

Olga Mizrahi:      Yes.  

Jim Rembach:    Tell us about that. 

Olga Mizrahi:      O-M-G, Jim I just posted this crazy video on like—do you know how to share videos on Facebook? If you guys haven’t seen it the Boston Dynamics the robot company has this terrifying looking like huge dog that can run something like 35 miles an hour and I’m already thinking of like the military implications like scaring myself to death. Well, somebody posted on Facebook it must have been one of the engineers where this thing is walking through their house and coming around a corner and they just put like banana peels down and they went down and they’re like bananas will save us from the attack of the robots and that’s the whole thing. AI is here, artificial intelligence machine learning, when we think about just Google Translate what Google Translate does, they realize this a few years back, they realize that it doesn’t make sense for Google Translate to translate from English to Spanish it created its own language. And so every single language that translates from it goes English Google language Spanish, Spanish Google language French, so it has an underlying basically machine learned language that is now like 90 some odd percent, like high 90s like 95 98, I don’t remember the exact statistic accurate and that’s also allowed for speech to be that way. So those of you that have an echo or a Google home or any of those types of things in your house the whole reason you can talk to it is because of AI and because of machine learning. I actually nicknamed Arse wiretap and it’s in my daughter’s room it does not live anywhere else in the house. If you want to talk to the wiretap you go on ahead but I’m a little old-school when it comes to that. 

Jim Rembach:   You’re still not sure about who’s listening. 

Olga Mizrahi:      Still not sure. It raises this whole host of other questions which is what we see now anyway in terms of technology and all that stuff which is we can’t keep up as far as the laws and understanding and whatever. Something in the news recently was that the transcripts from one of those was asked for by prosecutors from a supposed murder of a wife-husband thing, anyway like we have all that. It makes great news too because we’ve been taught from Terminator to like everything is dystopian like our future’s dystopian I am so sorry like nothing is happening. And yet we don’t really appreciate the fact that for instance seniors in their home now have somebody to talk to, can order things, can get things done and there are other sides to this stuff guys and there are ways that we can also implement it that makes sense. 

In my book, I don’t know if you saw this little picture in there, I was looking for examples of how like we’re not there yet we can’t just think like, oh great, we’re just done for and it was that they had a robot basically doing the choosing for phone cases on Amazon. So this artificial intelligence—and basically they were saying, hey just give us the really popular stock photos and we’ll make them into phone cases on demand, kind of an interesting idea except that they got things like old man and diaper in other words they didn’t quite realize that there’s a lot of stock photography that’s used by companies selling stuff to old people or whatever. And so like all sudden you have these phone cases that nobody in their right mind would want to buy like some guy with sexy abs and like a piece of cheese on it like you’re just like, what is this? So random because a human didn’t do the choosing. 

Jim Rembach:   Well I think from a gig economy perspective when you start thinking about AI a lot of people think that it’s just, we’re going to have a lot of jobs wiped out. I was actually reading a study that talked about, okay so over the next couple years we’re going to lose 1.8 million jobs using artificial intelligence however there’s going to be like 2.1 or 2.2 million jobs created because of AI and I that’s going to have a huge impact on the gig economy. 

Olga Mizrahi:      Yes, absolutely. I wanted to—for those of you that are truly kind of in disbelief about the fact that if were already picturing The Terminator to robot coming and taking your job I’d like you to look at James Zorroski and he writes in the Great Tech Panic, Robots won’t take all our jobs, that since automation allows companies to produce more with fewer people a great wave of automation should drive higher productivity growth. Yet, in reality in the past decade by historical standards productivity has been kind of dismally low. Back in the heyday of the US economy from ’47 to ’73 labor productivity grew at an average pace of nearly 3% a year but in the past 10 years, in this case since 2007, it has grown at a rate of around 1.2 percent the slowest pace in any period since World War II. Over the past two years productivity a mere 6% and that the very years when anxiety about automation spiked. So it’s simply not what you’d see if efficient robots we’re replacing our human inefficiencies on mass so that’s a little bit of a reality check for all of us. And this is where you go, okay, well then what’s taking all these jobs? Because they love pointing at automation and it’s almost given you read some of these articles and it’s just given robots will take our jobs, not a given. 

What’s actually happened is that, and it’s kind of like China, because 2.4 million jobs have disappeared from 1999 to 2011 alone due to massive trade deficits driven by manufacturing. By the way people, that’s all of us purchasing crap on Amazon, do you know I mean? We somehow want to blame China but like, hmm did kind of order all my child’s dance tights on Amazon in like a six pack for what one would have cost from the dance store and it came in a strange package that was from China that means that I contributed to that and so did all of us. I think it’s one of those things like, can we just kind of take a little bit of responsibility too that we’re part of the problem?

Jim Rembach:   Most definitely. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor. 

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Jim Rembach:     Alright, here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Olga, the Hump Day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Olga Mizrahi, are you ready to hoedown?

Olga Mizrahi:      I’m ready.

Jim Rembach:   Alright, what do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Olga Mizrahi:      Letting go of perfection.

Jim Rembach:   What is the best leadership advice you have ever received? 

Olga Mizrahi:      You’re not thinking big enough. 

Jim Rembach:   What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Olga Mizrahi:      Constant lifelong learning. 

Jim Rembach:   What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Olga Mizrahi:      Embracing automation. 

And what would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners, it could be from any genre, of course we’re going to put a link to the–Gig is Up-Thrive in the Gig Economy where old jobs are obsolete and freelancing is a future–on your show notes page as well.

Olga Mizrahi:      Well I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin, so let’s go with Linchpin. 

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader Legion you can find links to that another bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/Olga Mizrahi. Okay, Olga, this is my last Hump day hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age of 25 and you have been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. So, what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why? 

Olga Mizrahi:      I would work in Silicon Valley instead of Orange County. I started before the dot-com bubble so I’d be on a yacht right now. 

Jim Rembach:   Olga it was an honor to spend time with you today can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Olga Mizrahi:      Easiest way, chunkofchange.com which is where I blog and you can find out more there and I really appreciate the Fast Leader Legion for having me on today and let me know how I can best support you in the future. 

Jim Rembach:   Olga Mizrahi, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. 

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today, for recaps, links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

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