After losing his job in 2016 as Digital Head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sreenath " Sree" Sreenivasan, shared on Twitter tips for getting your next ideal job. This week, Sreenivasan sits down with Roben Farzad, host of Full Disclosure, on how we can digitally adjust during the pandemic.
Episode Excerpt
The following excerpt was edited for clarity.
[7:08]
Roben Farzad: There's the quote from Vladimir Lenin, “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” I first saw this, I think on Twitter one of the platitudinous things on LinkedIn several weeks ago, it really did have me think back to 9/11. I was on the way to work that morning. I was on a crowded subway train beneath the towers. I got off at Wall Street and ultimately continued on to Brooklyn Heights and watched the atrocity kind of transpire in this gorgeous, crisp early autumn morning. When I was thinking of this, and I lived in New York for more than a decade, this kind of throws the entire New York sociological compact into question. You're supposed to be able to go on a crowded subway train and not think twice about it, and not freak out if it's 8:20 a.m. and you have to squeeze in. Things happen, but I can't just imagine people being inches apart anymore.
Sree Sreenivasan: I completely agree. Can you imagine having to go on a plane and that first international flight you take, somebody coughs. What's gonna happen to that guy? He's gonna be escorted off the plane with or without a parachute 30,000 feet up, because everyone's gonna freak out. That's the world we're heading into. I have my parents and my in-laws living in India 15, 20 hours away, my kid brother lives 12 hours away in Dubai. When will I see them again? Those are all things that we never imagined we would be thinking about and wrestling with. At the same time, I would also say this is also a moment of opportunity, as in the middle of tragedy and crisis. I hope we'll get to talk about that as well. I'm telling my kids every day. You met them when you came to do a story on us back in the day four years ago, they’re now 17-years old juniors in high school. So for everyone who's listening and is complaining about their toddlers and keeping them engaged and locked down, imagine locking down two 17-year olds. Not so easy.
Farzad: So let's flick back to that profile that I did of you. I believe it was 2016, for the PBS NewsHour. When you lost your job as the Digital Head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it struck me. It was all over the internet immediately, that you more than telegraphed it to the world. You told the world “hey, I lost my job. I'm completely available for walks, Skype talks, I'm open to anyone.” You made yourself ultra, ultra, ultra vulnerable. You used the viral aspect of the internet to your benefit. The fact that everybody was going to share this that was going to be sent around it was like the ultimate job posting. We asked for tips and lessons learned from this thing, like you did that in a moment of crisis. You did that in a moment of peak and the world was in some way professionally falling apart for you. But when you picked up the pieces, when you were employed again, we said what could you share with people that they could do in a kind of a peacetime thing? So I promised you when and if a financial crisis would return to us that we would come back and get your best advice and lessons learned, as of the week of it happening. So in this case, I want to get a sense to start with for the kinds of overtures you've been receiving. The kinds of approaches, the kinds of parenthetical asides and things that people have been sharing with you in the four or five weeks since this has been declared a pandemic.
Sreenivasan: This has been an unusual time in so many ways. But in my business of being a digital consultant, people are contacting me because in a way, for 25 years, I've been talking about this. The way we're working needs to change, the way we're thinking needs to change and not because I'm some prescient person. I just know that we needed to work on digital transformation of companies, organizations, governments and people. Individually, you can do that as well. That was our effort, that's what I've been I've been preaching and thinking about and wrestling with for 25 years.
