Companies Don’t Transform, People Do: Rishad Tobaccowala on Work, Agencies, and Reinvention

Few people have had a better vantage point on the transformation of advertising, technology, and work than Rishad Tobaccowala.Over a 37-year career at Publicis Groupe, Rishad helped pioneer its digital businesses, chaired Digitas and Razorfish, and ultimately served as Global Chief Strategist and Growth Officer. Today, he is an author, teacher, adviser, senior adviser to Publicis Groupe, co-founder of the Athena Project on Modern Leadership, and one of the industry’s most original thinkers on how people and organizations navigate change. In this wide-ranging, smart, funny, and deeply thought-provoking conversation, Rishad joins Brett House and Rio Longacre to challenge one of the biggest assumptions surrounding technological transformation: companies don’t transform simply because they buy new technology, reorganize, or deploy AI. Companies transform when their people do.Rishad argues that AI represents something fundamentally different from previous technology waves—not simply another tool, but what he calls an emerging form of “alien intelligence.” The question, then, isn’t whether organizations have an AI strategy. It’s whether they are willing to rethink how work gets done, how people are rewarded, where power sits, and what human beings uniquely contribute. The conversation explores why transformation is ultimately about power, politics, people, and partnering; why technology moves faster than organizations; and why simply making the old model more efficient is like putting a faster engine into a car when what you really need is to design an airplane. Rishad also explains his idea of “de-bossification”—the decline of management built around control and the rise of leadership built around influence. He compares the organization of the future to jazz rather than classical music: more improvisational, collaborative, fluid, and less dependent on rigid hierarchy. Along the way, they dig into:Why AI may change nearly every white-collar job without necessarily eliminating workThe rise of portfolio careers, fractional talent, freelance work, and agentic employeesThe six skills Rishad believes matter most: creativity, curiosity, cognition, collaboration, convincing, and communicationWhy knowledge may become abundant while judgment, imagination, and wisdom become more valuableHow individuals can “rearchitect” their careers instead of waiting for an employer to provide purposeWhy leaders should “untie, not cut” when leaving organizationsWhat Publicis got right in its decade-long transformation—and why changing incentives and behavior mattered as much as acquisitions and technologyWhy agencies, consultancies, and other services businesses will struggle to keep selling hours and FTEs in an AI-enabled economyRishad also shares a deceptively simple definition of success: the freedom to spend your time in ways that give you joy.This is a conversation about AI, but even more, it is about work, leadership, careers, agencies, reinvention, and human agency. And it’s a reminder from one of advertising’s great strategic thinkers that the hardest part of transformation has never been the technology.#SignalAndNoise #RishadTobaccowala #FutureOfWork #Leadership #Reinvention #Advertising #Marketing #Agencies #PublicisGroupe #DigitalTransformation #OrganizationalTransformation #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #Careers #FutureOfAgencies #Workplace #BusinessStrategy #HumanIntelligence #Debossification #RethinkingWork