The Future Of Work Is Now
Seth Mattison is an internationally recognized thought leader, author, advisor, and top-rated keynote speaker on change and transformation, leadership, and the future of work. His ideas have been featured in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Entrepreneur. His diverse client portfolio spans industries ranging from Lockheed Martin and NASA to Microsoft and IBM.
In addition to leading his own research organization and future site labs, Seth is the Cofounder of ImpactEleven, a speaking training development and accelerator community that I am a member of, which supports both emerging and established thought leaders and bringing their message to the world.
Seth, you have such a compelling story and a message. You are traveling around the world. It’s very fortuitous for all the readers to be able to get to know your story. Before we get into that, would you mind sharing your own story of origin? You can take us back to childhood, school or wherever you want to start. When you started thinking, “This whole concept of speaking and being in touch with what’s going on in the world is something that lights me up?”
I think of my story as almost like a three-part saga. Part one is I grew up on a fourth-generation farm in Minnesota, father, grandfather, great grandfather, mother, grandmother, great grandmother but on my father’s side, I’m watching four generations of men approach work and life. The farm was a business. It was a remarkable way to get to grow up.
I was watching at a very young age this idea of how each generation has its own unique story and history. I was fascinated with that and had close exposure to it early, having lived through the Great Depression, the characteristics and behaviors that manifested out of that having come through the 1960s and ‘70s in Vietnam.
Without understanding or even knowing that generational theory was a thing, I was exposed to it naturally and learned how to connect across those generational divides. Coming out of University Act 2, I go into Management Consulting. I worked for a boutique firm in Minnesota, and the firm specialized in executive alignment and culture change work like the people part of the transformation. I came in as a very junior account executive. The role was more of sales and relationship development, calling in at a C-Suite level to $100 million to $1 billion businesses, mid-size or mid-cap.
At the time, I’m 24 or 25 years old. I’m calling on CEOs that if I could get through or I was chatting with people, these 25 or 30 years younger than they are. They are looking at me like, “What are you going to tell us about transformation and alignment?” They weren’t wrong. I tried to communicate. I’m not there to bring the solutions. I’m there to bring the right resources and play matchmaker with this incredible bench that we had.
To build a better connection, I started asking him a different set of questions. As an aspect of a lot of what you talk about like the power of asking great questions and what that opens up, I started asking them more specific questions about the younger workforce. It was unbelievable. This is in the mid-2000s. The conversation around Millennials and Gen Y at the time were new. We weren’t inundated with it like we are now with social media, articles, and all the coverage.
As I’m asking this question, I could see all of this pain and frustration come pouring out of these leaders who are like, “Tell me what it is that you all want?” To these kids, “What do you want? I don’t what to do. You are driving me nuts.” It is a little light bulb that went off in my head of like, “For the first time in this world, my age is a benefit. Instead of holding me back and being perceived as negative, this could be positive. I could be their inside guy to this world.”
I started studying and researching the topic, having my own point of view and perspective as a member of the generation but wanting to understand the theory. I naturally gravitated towards it because of my upbringing. I got lucky. I found the serendipity of life. I found that there were two best-selling authors who were also based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I was as well. It’s a niche. In all of the places in Minneapolis, there are these two HarperCollins-published best-selling authors. I knew that I wanted to speak to teach. I didn’t exactly know what or how but I felt that calling.
All of a sudden, I was like maybe this is a path. I used my network and my relationship building to find someone who knew someone who got me to David Stillman and Lynne Lancaster. I was able to convince David’s executive assistant to be on his calendar, which was not easy. I will never forget sitting down and having coffee with him. All that youthful enthusiasm and vibrance of like, “I’m the next generation. Lynne is a Baby Boomer. You are a Gen X-er. I’m a Millennial. We can do this together. Here’s what I think.” God bless him.
He let me talk and smiled. He’s like, “I love the enthusiasm. We are not looking to hire anyone now. If you want to speak, I will help you. I will give you some insight and show you the landscape.” He was the first one to encourage me to what I needed to put together to start reaching out. I’m talking about Chambers of Commerce, local rotaries, and the entry-level where you got to go because the barriers to entry are very low. They are always looking for people. There’s not a big budget. I started speaking for free wherever I could. I started introducing myself as a generation’s expert.
I read a couple of books. I met one actual expert and just claimed it. Sometimes, on our entrepreneurial journeys, even in the journey as a speaker, there comes a point when you have to claim that identity. Before anyone else is going to give it to you, you have to do it that become claim the identity before you feel you are it or before you feel ready. I started to do a study to get the reps. We stayed in touch, and it took about a year.
A year later, David reaches back out and he’s like, “We got the green light to write a book about your generation, the Millennials. We think it’s a perfect time for you to come onboard.” I did. I got to help them in the writing of their second book, which was called The M-Factor: How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace in 2010. We had an unbelievable ride together, and it’s where I got my speaking chops. I started to speak with them. They were working with all the bureaus. It gave me an entry point. I was speaking on their IP and learned their content.
It taught me stagecraft, communication skills, and influence skills. They sell the platform and the brand. When they did, it gave me a beautiful opportunity to launch on my own. In 2013, I launched on my own and pivoted my research and focus from thinking exclusively about generations to thinking, researching, and talking about the future of work, which is Act 3 in this story.
I lunched on my own. I had just enough momentum and credibility in the marketplace with clients and more specifically, with speaking bureaus as I worked my way up that fee structure that when I launched on my own, they were like, “We’ll see what you got.” They were willing to take a shot at me. We were celebrating a decade in April of 2023, which is wild to think about.
We can talk about that journey and where the research landed. That’s a little bit of the background of the fourth-generation farm in Minnesota. I played college football, came up through the ranks and management consulting, stumbled into this cottage industry, this interesting profession, and got paid to speak for a living, and we are having a blast.
You co-authored another book, The Future of Leadership. I’m curious about that one because one of your key takeaways in that book is navigating disruption. Everyone’s experienced disruption. You wrote about navigating disruption before the pandemic. You have always had your zeitgeist.
We wrote it with my co-author in 2017, and then it came out in 2018. We took this fundamental shift happening in the world of work, this big trend, and we brought it to life through a parable. I had never written a business book like that before. It was a little bit of a leap of faith. I had so much fun. It was much joy to give myself permission to create characters and write fiction to bring these lessons through the feedback we’ve gotten from that has been remarkable over the years of a surprising way to bring these insights to life. That has been fun.
I can certainly relate to that journey with my book, The Sale Is in the Tale which is a business fable and a story about storytelling. You get into the descriptions of someone’s life. You want to paint that picture of that character in a situation. You’ve nailed it when someone says, “I thought so and so would get together at the end of the story.”
Their imagination is taking those characters and bringing out their storylines 1,000%.
What is the other thing that distinguishes you, in my opinion, is the research that you have. The thing that jumps out at me is going beyond this agreement, “I’m going to be your leader. That’s the table stakes.” How do you work with C-level executives? This is applicable to whether you are Fortune 500 or running a small company of 50 people that they need regardless of their age from their leaders.
It’s an interesting and exciting yet challenging time for leaders. They’re more confronting, and external change and transformation on marketplaces are shifting faster than ever. At the same time, the people talent that we need to help us deliver value and create exceptional experiences for clients, and their expectations, wants, needs, and values are shifting at a speed we’ve never seen before. COVID fundamentally changed us. We all collectively went through a collective existential experience.
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