by Stela Lupushor and Donna Scarola
Work, technology, skills. re-orchestrated. Hosted by HR practitioners Donna Scarola and Stela Lupushor, workestration.ai spotlights AI innovation and what it means for people, teams, and results. Each episode brings Doers (HR leaders), Builders (startup founders, consultants), and Shapers (economists, ethicists, computer scientists) to share what’s working, what isn’t, and what to try now.
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June 17, 2026
<p><strong>Guest: </strong>Arthur Matuszewski, Managing Partner, Carrara</p><p><strong>Hosts: </strong>Stela Lupushor and Donna Scarola</p><p><strong>Category: </strong>Builder</p><p><strong>Episode summary</strong></p><p>Arthur Matuszewski runs Carrara, an operating firm that embeds inside companies and does the work across talent, finance, go-to-market, and ops. He is not there to advise. As he puts it, “critics don’t get statues.”</p><p>He scaled Better.com’s talent function from 400 to 4,400 people in just over a year, led strategic talent sourcing at Wayfair from 7,000 to 14,000 in under two years, and built predictive hiring assessments at Bridgewater. He is also a venture partner at Shine Capital.</p><p>In this conversation he makes the case that the comfortable HR illusion of the last fifteen years (focus on people and the work takes care of itself) is ending. When every contribution is tracked on Slack, Google Docs, and Git commits, productivity has nowhere to hide. Orgs flatten from pyramids into diamonds. The manager-only career ladder stops being the only way up. And the job shifts from collecting the right people to giving people context, momentum, judgment, and a good experience.</p><p>Along the way: Bridgewater’s hiring “anti-portfolio,” resumes as “Victorian calling cards,” a four-layer “pyramid of value” for where AI actually does work, two anonymized Carrara turnarounds, and a closing argument about meaning, identity, and why a meaningless job is worse than the struggle to find a meaningful one.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Chapters</strong></p><p><strong>00:00 </strong>Cold open and intro</p><p><strong>01:52 </strong>Welcome: Arthur joins</p><p><strong>02:01 </strong>Operator, not advisor: why Carrara does the work (“critics don’t get statues”)</p><p><strong>03:50 </strong>Talent as top-line, not overhead: managing people like a portfolio</p><p><strong>06:10 </strong>Focus on the work: the end of the people-first illusion</p><p><strong>07:53 </strong>From pyramid to diamond: flattening orgs and the exponential individual</p><p><strong>09:25 </strong>Leadership as a “cascade of absence”</p><p><strong>11:46 </strong>Hold the spear: why the manager-only ladder was a momentary illusion</p><p><strong>12:11 </strong>The Bridgewater anti-portfolio: hiring on upside, not false positives</p><p><strong>15:24 </strong>Talent density as a moving target; hire the person vs. the role</p><p><strong>17:33 </strong>Spiky people and “coding in a closet”: Palantir vs. the kombucha cage</p><p><strong>18:31 </strong>Resumes as “Victorian calling cards”: pedigree out, exception in</p><p><strong>21:04 </strong>Inside the Carrara playbook: the $2.5B social platform after 70% RTO attrition</p><p><strong>25:03 </strong>The healthcare marketplace: a math problem and a new horizontal role</p><p><strong>27:51 </strong>The pyramid of value: where AI is doing the most work</p><p><strong>30:37 </strong>Defining value, and the “golden age of private equity and human equity”</p><p><strong>33:48 </strong>Work, meaning, and identity beyond the job</p><p><strong>36:38 </strong>Signals: the K-shaped workforce and what won’t fade (experience + judgment)</p><p><strong>39:51 </strong>Rapid fire: Team Human, doing the work, and what we’ll get wrong</p><p><strong>42:02 </strong>Where to find Arthur; close</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Mentioned in this episode</strong></p><p><a href="https://carrara.is/ideas/focus-on-the-work-by-carrara"><u>Focus on the Work</u></a>, Arthur’s essay for Carrara, the thesis behind the conversation.</p><p><a href="https://carrara.is/"><u>Carrara</u></a>, Arthur’s operating firm.</p><p>The Mythical Man-Month (Fred Brooks): the classic on why adding people to a late project makes it later, which Arthur revisits in an age of 2x to 4x engineering productivity at lower headcount.</p><p>Bridgewater Associates: where Arthur built predictive hiring assessments and tracked the anti-portfolio.</p><p><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/workestration/id1844366068"><u>Apple Podcasts</u></a> · <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/03bFFezxYA2yBMU7b88T0P"><u>Spotify</u></a> · <a href="https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdExURIwfX1j7Dy9AO5mrhEe-LG6w2b4P"><u>YouTube</u></a></p><p><br></p><p><strong>About the guest</strong></p><p>Arthur Matuszewski is Managing Partner at Carrara, an operating firm that embeds inside companies to do the work across talent, finance, go-to-market, and ops. He was previously VP of Talent & People at Better.com, led strategic talent sourcing at Wayfair, and built predictive hiring assessments at Bridgewater. He is a venture partner at Shine Capital. Reach him at <strong>arthur@carrara.is</strong>.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>About Workestration</strong></p><p>Workestration is a podcast for the doers, builders, and shapers of the world of work. Practitioner-first, jargon-light, allergic to AI hype. Hosted by Stela Lupushor and Donna Scarola.<br></p>
May 18, 2026
<p>Michaela Schoberova, SVP HR for Global Commercial Transformation at Colgate-Palmolive, on what 20+ years inside one company taught her about running AI experiments without breaking the culture.</p><p>Stela Lupushor (Donna is off this week) gets into:</p><ul><li>Colgate's proprietary digital consumer twins and how they compress early-stage product innovation</li><li>Whether you can, or should, build synthetic employees the same way</li><li>The AI Hub, mandated short training, and broad access behind a firewall</li><li>"Super You" peer cohorts: why voluntary, role-specific learning beats top-down training</li><li>Where AI grows the business vs. where it just cuts cost</li><li>Coaching at scale, knowledge management, learning velocity</li><li>The positive psychology lens on AI: character strengths, human relationships, and what we risk losing</li><li>Leadership for a BANI world (brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible): empathy, clarity, agency</li><li>What HR will regret in three years if we don't act now</li></ul><p>References from the episode:</p><ul><li>"The GenAI Focus Shifts to Innovation at Colgate-Palmolive" (MIT Sloan Management Review, Davenport & Bean)</li><li>"Navigating the Age of Chaos" by Jamais Cascio, Bob Johansen, and Angela F. Williams (2025)</li><li>Anna Gallotti, MCC, Chair, ICF Task Force on AI in Coaching</li></ul><p>More at workestration.ai.</p>
May 11, 2026
<p>On the Workestration podcast, hosts Stela Lupushor and Donnas Scarola speak with Jeff Schwartz (VP at Gloat, author of “Work Disrupted” and “Workforce Ecosystems,” and Columbia Business School professor) about navigating the future of work in 2026 as AI accelerates. Schwartz argues leaders need “new maps” to move beyond old either/or frames (human vs. machine, employee vs. contractor) and focus on integrated automation and augmentation, super teams, and work orchestration. The conversation explores the shift from pilots to enterprise AI, the need to redesign work around outcomes rather than optimize existing processes, and the idea of “renaissance” roles enabled by AI (illustrated with radiology). Schwartz highlights Deloitte data that 84% of companies haven’t started redesigning work, emphasizes workforce ecosystems that include employees, contractors, and technology, and discusses evolving expectations for HR and managers as designers, coaches, and navigators, alongside concerns about individual adaptation, organizational speed, and public policy transition nets.</p><p>00:00 Welcome to Workestration</p><p>00:39 Meet Jeff Schwartz</p><p>02:10 New Maps for Work</p><p>06:23 Beyond AI vs Human</p><p>09:34 From Pilots to Redesign</p><p>14:35 Rethinking Jobs and Careers</p><p>24:08 Beyond Work Disrupted</p><p>29:28 Renaissance Work Example</p><p>33:14 Reimagining HR for 2030</p><p>42:55 Workforce Ecosystems Shift</p><p>45:03 What Keeps Jeff Up</p><p>47:58 HR as Navigators</p><p>50:08 Closing and Part Two</p><p><br /></p><p>You can contact Jeff at: </p><p>Email: <a href="mailto:jeff.s@gloat.com" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">jeff.s@gloat.com</a>; <a href="mailto:jls2387@columbia.com" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">jls2387@columbia.com</a></p><p>Linkedin: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-schwartz-future-of-work-disrupted/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-schwartz-future-of-work-disrupted/</a></p><p>Websites: <a href="http://gloat.com/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">gloat.com</a>; <a href="https://www.fowdisrupted.com/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.fowdisrupted.com/</a>; <a href="https://business.columbia.edu/faculty/people/jeffrey-schwartz" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://business.columbia.edu/faculty/people/jeffrey-schwartz</a></p>
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Work, technology, skills. re-orchestrated.
Hosted by HR practitioners Donna Scarola and Stela Lupushor, workestration.ai spotlights AI innovation and what it means for people, teams, and results. Each episode brings Doers (HR leaders), Builders (startup founders, consultants), and Shapers (economists, ethicists, computer scientists) to share what’s working, what isn’t, and what to try now.
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