.future · Microsoft / Gimlet Creative

Work in the .future

August 9, 2017·21 min·1 clip

Ram David Naney, the James Bond of IT professionals, secretly filmed human towers in Mumbai while working remotely for Citibank.

The episode opens with Ram David Naney, a Citibank IT professional who secretly used remote work arrangements to travel the world as a documentary filmmaker. While officially working from home, Ram filmed a 300-person human tower in Mumbai, the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, and cannibal serial killers in India, playing ambient New York City noise on conference calls to disguise his location. His films were featured on the BBC and Al Jazeera, and he won a Sundance Grand Jury Prize. Host Christina Quinn uses Ram's story to frame a broader exploration of how technology is redefining work itself. Anton Andrews, Microsoft's director of Office Envisioning, leads a team that builds prototype workplaces to test new technologies and raise ethical questions about them. His prototype office features a circular conference room made of acoustic felt with no head of the table, designed to break down hierarchies. A digital assistant named Cortana greets visitors, transcribes meetings, recommends relevant documents, and reminds participants of each other's names. Anton frames this as a response to the transition from information scarcity to information abundance. He introduces the concept of the panopticon — Jeremy Bentham's 18th-century model of surveillance-based control — as a metaphor for outdated management styles that technology is rendering obsolete. He argues that future workplace success will depend on creativity, collaboration, and comfort with uncertainty rather than top-down monitoring. Anton uses the military acronym VUCA — volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous — to describe the environment all modern organizations now face. Ben Weber, CEO of Humanize, describes smart ID badges equipped with microphones, Bluetooth, and accelerometers that track conversation patterns, location, posture, and vocal stress at the team level. He argues that serendipitous face-to-face interactions are critical to collaboration and that working from home more than a day or two per week has a measurable negative impact on team dynamics. Janice Martirano, founder of the Institute for Mindful Leadership and a former VP at General Mills, describes her own burnout from juggling a high-pressure career, children, and caring for ailing parents. She argues that technology has outpaced our ability to use it skillfully and that neuroscience shows innovation requires mental spaciousness. The episode concludes by arguing that all three approaches — AI-assisted collaboration tools, social interaction data, and mindfulness — represent a shared shift away from panopticon-style management toward workplaces that prioritize meaning, creativity, and human connection.

As heard by us

A measured look at work, privacy, and collaboration, from one IT worker's creative leap to an office prototype built around information flow.

Work in the .future uses two very different workplace stories to ask what work is supposed to become. It opens with Ram David Naney, a Citibank IT professional handling storage and backups, chasing documentary filmmaking on his vacation and flying to Mumbai to film a massive…

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Why you'd press play

If you want a career-leap story that starts with a human tower and then widens into how offices handle privacy and collaboration.

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