317 The Future of Empowered Management: Insights on Systems, Mindsets, and Democratizing Performance from OnLoop's CEO &Co-Founder JJ (Projjal) Ghatak | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***


[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Gatak, welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

[00:00:06] Projjal Ghatak: Thank you, Mohan. I've been looking forward to this. So it's great to be here. 

[00:00:09] Mahan Tavakoli: Can't wait to find out a little bit about your background before we get to what you're doing now at OnLoop.

First off, JJ, whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing impact who you've become? 

[00:00:23] Projjal Ghatak: Yeah, it's a good question. And I feel as I spend more time in therapy, I probably find out more, so it's an evolving. Answer. But I grew up in India. So it's been zero to 17 and a half in India, most of it in a town called Calcutta in the east of India.

So it's a town of about 14 odd million people. And they speak Bengali and I am Bengali and people in Bangladesh also speak Bengali. So people don't know that Bengali is actually one of the top five or six languages spoken in the world. As a combination of those two states.

Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote India's national anthem, was a famous Indian poet, was also Bengali. And so Bengalis get made fun of as being the intellectuals of India, the ones that want to be philosophers. And not do any work. Why that bring that up is that intellectual pursuit is something that's always been something that's meaningful.

And then thinking about things somewhat critically and deeply and then having a dialogue about it. It's something that existed from genetics, but also as a household. 

[00:01:27] Mahan Tavakoli: I appreciate that. And your intellectual approach, I'm curious about the time first you spent at Uber head of strategy and global business development. What was that experience like for 

[00:01:38] Projjal Ghatak: you, Pooja? Yeah, so I spent three and a half years at Uber a year and a half while Travis Kalanick was CEO, and then another year and a half or so with Dara Khosrowshahi as CEO and I also played a combination of both.

running our Philippines business out in Southeast Asia running investment strategy for all of Southeast Asia and then also being in a global role to set up strategy for business development. And so I was lucky enough to see the company go from 9, 000 to 27, 000 people go through a leadership crisis when Travis left and CEO less for a while, it was interesting working in a company where there was no CEO and realizing.

Actually it works. You can figure it out. One of the things that I've realized about myself and also led me to really enjoy my Uber experience, especially the early years is I'm a fighter. And fighting for something that's worthy of fighting for is very inspiring.

And at Uber, we were all fighters. And when you're a fighter that , leaves scars sometimes on the battlefield but ultimately we were fighting for good. And we were fighting for a safe, affordable, reliable way to move people around the world where taxis were largely inefficient and not high quality and providing a new way for people to make flexible earnings.

And a lot of us joined Uber and, the Uber mafia. is quite famous as people who have gone to found companies and quite well connected as an ecosystem. And I think because we were all mini entrepreneurs in the same company. And when you have a bunch of those people, it's rough around the edges because it's decentralized.

People make decisions without necessarily thinking through all the repercussions because you're hustling and moving forward. And so There's downside to it, but often Uber gets characterized as a evil company with evil people. And a lot of us really struggled being inside Uber, seeing that caricature on the outside, because we knew the reality.

And we didn't think we were bad people doing bad things 

[00:03:46] Mahan Tavakoli: So Pratul, when you reflect on that Uber experience, you mentioned that you were, fighters for that purpose of Uber, a lot of leaders talk about organizational purpose but there is still tremendous amount of disengagement in organizations 

is it that Uber had a strong purpose? Is it that there were systems? What made it that the people at Uber, like you, felt like they were fighting on behalf of the riders to then advance Uber's purpose? 

[00:04:21] Projjal Ghatak: And drivers, and that's often misunderstood, but it's a good question. So I do think that if you look at data around this too, founder let companies stay mission driven for a much longer amount of time.

And private companies stay mission innovation driven for a lot longer amount of time. And it goes back to what are you optimizing for as a company? Company. And therefore, what kind of talent do you attract? And Uber is a very classic example where it was one version of a company under Travis Kalanick, a CEO.

And it's a different version of a company with Dara Khosrowshahi, a CEO. And we could argue that they've both been incredibly successful. And it was the right transition from a timing perspective in terms of the company needing to change who it was and how to get to the next level and the way that got to where it did wouldn't take it.

To the next level actually fighting was not beneficial to the company anymore, but the company would have not got to where it got to without being in a fight and be at a war with the taxi cartels and the injustices of how cities were run. A huge part of it is who runs the company.

 I see this in my own company all the time, that my superpowers and blind spots become superpowers and blind spots of the company. It's very scary to watch. In some ways, people mimic their leaders, they embody the leaders, there's so much that's subconscious that you don't realize, and the leader of an organization sets that culture in many ways.

And then B, the talent density that you have in the organization also sets it up a particular way. Like having a mission driven CEO will likely hire mostly mission driven people. And then you will have a mission driven organization. And as organizations scale, and there's a great 20 minute Bain media around founder mentality that is very good.

And maybe we should add to the show notes. I remember watching it at Uber, like a couple of years and I'm like, This video is spot on and we started losing people with fundamentality. And there's a coaster on my table. It says, we act like owners and I have this from Uber still and be an owner, not a renter was one of those classic cultural values.

And so it goes back to how people are intrinsically motivated and what talent you attract, right? Talent is attracted to founder, mission, other talent in the company, hiring processes, compensation philosophies. Bonus structures. Decentralized, centralized, there's so many things you can go into sort of what defines what the talent proposition is, but does it attract a certain type of person or not? It starts with the founder. 

[00:07:15] Mahan Tavakoli: I couldn't agree with you more Dara is a brilliant CEO. He couldn't have done what Travis did and Travis did incredible things building up Uber. He wasn't the person to be able to lead the organization at this stage but when you reflect on that, beyond the founder mentality, which part of what you is that we look to leadership and the leadership.

Practices, example, have an impact on the organization. for people who are not the founders of their organizations? They are managers of a division. They are directors of a group. How would you transfer some of the lessons from Uber to what those leaders can learn 

[00:07:58] Projjal Ghatak: from it?

You've asked fantastic questions.. At Uber. Especially the first two years or so, I felt massive amounts of responsibility to embody, promote and drive culture. And when I left Uber, I used to do a talk with a few universities around my learnings from it and what really drove it.

I think the couple of things that stick to mind is one, it was incredibly decentralized as a company at the beginning. And one of the reasons why I joined Uber in Singapore, where I wasn't really interested in working for a Google or a Meta or a different Silicon Valley tech company, is that most of those tech companies, their regional arms are sales and marketing offices, 

they don't set strategy, they don't really make decisions, they're made out of HQ, so the regions execute. Uber was very different. And we had to centralize over time but people were very autonomous in terms of how they made decisions. And, I was making decisions worth tens of millions of dollars on a weekly or monthly basis.

And boy, does that make you feel like an owner, it brings the best or the worst out of people, I think that's one. I think two, we genuinely liked each other which meant that I had organizational connectivity across the full company. And actually funny story from 2018 the ICC cricket A sponsorship landed on my desk when the deal was about to die.

And it sounded like an amazing deal for a company that operated in so many developing cricket loving countries around the world. And so I'm like, we can't let this die. But the hardest thing is we had never pulled off a global marketing campaign at Uber. It had never happened in the history of the company.

And we were just not organizationally set up to do it. But I took it on and made it happen because I was able to call on friends and stitch people together because they were happy to talk to me as Prodol. Not that my role was S& P senior manager or director of BD it wasn't like I'm talking to you because your title says so.

It's because we like collaborating. We like to make things happen. So if it's a worthy cause, we will work together. and globally landed multi million dollar marketing campaign where we had never done a global marketing sponsorship before. And then the third is, and this is a little bit controversial, is I didn't feel like I had to respect someone just because they were more senior to me,

 There's so many different insights that come out of that. There is one of them that I do want to touch on before then moving on to on loop.

[00:10:39] Mahan Tavakoli: You mentioned that part of the reason you all collaborated and worked with each other so well, including on the cricket world cup was the fact that you liked each other and you respected each other. There were personal connections within Uber. How did Uber as an organization establish that? Great 

[00:10:59] Projjal Ghatak: question.

So actually one of the things we did up front was everybody who joined the company flew to San Francisco for about two weeks to do what was called Uberversity. And when I joined at the time we were hiring hundreds of people a month in China and everybody came down to San Francisco for two weeks to do the worst city.

And actually the friends you made at Uberversity created your first. Global coalition of people that were your batch mates, and that automatically created global connectivity. Two, there was just a strong culture of setting one on ones with people just to understand what's going on in other regions.

And so I actually found that very odd coming to the company. And my manager gave me a list of 40 people to have time and I'm like, why will they talk to me? What is in them to have a conversation with me as a person and this notion of having deep curiosity about, Each other's jobs was two.

And then three, there was a deep amount of information, transparency across the organization and a deep culture around sharing what people were doing. So like we were running city operations around the world. So if Bionazares ran a really cool writer promotion that did well, that information would find its way into company all hands and other places.

And then people would happily copy paste and steal it all and then global orgs would then take best practices and go build it out. So there was a deep desire of, let me just take what other cities are doing that works well and make it work in my own city, because we collectively want, if you all want.

 So the hunger to learn and curiosity combined with information transparency, we actually ended up hurting us later because stuff leaked. And that's informed sort of how Travis looks at culture in companies he runs now, which is unfortunate. But that transparency really shot up the learning curve, as well as people hopping on and being like, Hey, I'm RiderOps in Manila.

Bye. I saw your deck on your get X, get Y. Will you hop up for 30 minutes? Explain to me how to set it up in our tools so I can go set it up. Sure. Very happy to do cause we're in this mission. Together. So one, onboarding, getting people in, forming a local community.

Two just people encouraging people to reach out and learn. And three, deep information sharing around the world. But very good question. 

[00:13:21] Mahan Tavakoli: Outstanding perspectives, both on that Uber experience and a lot of transferable value as well with respect to setting up the kind of culture where people are in it together, are willing to cooperate and help each other along, which makes the organization Much stronger now approach.

All what was the problem that you saw that got you to start on 

[00:13:46] Projjal Ghatak: loop? Thank you for saying that. And I One of the downsides of free money in the world people say I want to be a founder as a career decision.

, Once people become founders of the career decision, the world's not in a good place. The sort of broad problem. And actually when I left Uber within a week, I'd written a two page document that I called talent technology. And my whole career, I felt that the way managers had to deal with hiring, the way they had to deal with performance management, the way they had to deal with learning and development just weren't built for them, 

it was built for someone else. And that meant continuous frustration around all things related to on your team. That was coupled with the fact that I'd spent two years at Stanford Business School, where we were ingrained into believing that 90 percent of your job as a manager is to hire, retain, and fire your team.

And everything else can be A, delegated, B, learned. But how to build organizations was fundamentally a job. We had seen technology do an amazing job, fix communication, fix project management, fix other aspects of getting work done, but how to effectively bring the best out of your team.

 It felt every manager was using their own approach and it just wasn't a way to productionize and playbook that out. And I naively believe. That nobody had tried before why is this not solved?

It seems weird. And so I wrote down five pillars of what I call talent tech pillars of how to build technology to really serve talent in organizations to bring the best out of them. A particular problem that was a particular itch for me was performance management and how much I hated it, how much everybody around me hated it, how it killed weeks of productivity if at the same time in a calibration room, a loudest voice always won and whether someone got ahead or not was based on manager quality or manager loudness versus individuals And getting visibility was more important than doing work.

[00:15:54] Mahan Tavakoli: Management is really important. Prajal, one of the challenges that I see in many organizations is that the science of management is not.

Implemented well, and there've been a lot of attempts at addressing it. How does on loop look to address it in a way that really makes a difference?

[00:16:16] Projjal Ghatak: I think this is where Silicon Valley makes a lot of money building this notion called product the art of building product for me is taking deeply complex things and making it very simple to make deep impact. And the Google search bar is a very complex product that has a stupidly simple interface that nobody can get wrong.

That's called building good product because you're able to abstract away the complexity and then make it stupidly simple. Anybody can do it. And we've taken a very product based approach to being a manager. And we've set out to productionize being a manager and make it so stupidly easy that every manager can be a good manager.

And that's what drives us. I'm sick and tired of people saying, most of our managers are not great, they can't do X, Y, and Y. That's because nobody knows how to do anything they've not been taught to do. And if you don't make it simple, they're not going to learn,

and unfortunately, we've made management and leadership sound like this complex web of things that is like voodoo magic. that takes. A spiritual PhD and an intellectual PhD to master, what we've tried to do with our framework that we call collaborative team development is to break it down into very simple.

layers or steps that a manager needs to do. And we think a manager has five distinct jobs that have a hierarchy. A, they've got to make sure their employees are inspired and have high energy and, or at least be aware of where the energy level is. Two, they've got to define and track clarity of goals in terms of targets, projects, and skills.

Three, they need to recognize good work, not just for the person to feel validated, but for them to understand where their superpowers are. Four, They've got to give them constructive feedback so that they feel like they are aware of where they can grow and how to get better. And then five, they need to feel like they're constantly learning and growing.

 The lower the performer, the more at the bottom of that pyramid you need to focus. And the higher the performer, the more at the top of that pyramid you need to focus. And often that is counterintuitive because someone's a low performer, you want to give him improved feedback, but that's only going to make things worse. And someone's a great performer, you don't give them any improved feedback. But that's only going to demotivate them because they don't feel like they're growing. And just like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you're not getting fed, who cares about self actualization in the same way that if you're not motivated to show up to work, giving someone constructive feedback is not going to help. I think management and leadership has been the domain of philosophers.

And not the domain of product leaders and philosophers like to think about big brain stuff and make it complex that then doesn't get widely adopted, which is why , I'm very glad I took a product first approach because I am successful if you make it bloody simple.

And everybody in the world uses a proctomy to measure versus people studying my book because I'm so smart and I have a lot of insight on how to run things. 

[00:19:33] Mahan Tavakoli: It has to be something that is usable, fragile, the framework sounds great. The reality is there is a huge difference between knowing what we're supposed to do and say, and being able to do it, there is that bridge, which sounds like you are doing some training around that.

I want to understand further. And then. There is even a bigger gulf between knowing what we're supposed to say and do, being able to do it, and then actually doing it so would love to touch on how are you getting people to learn How to do it, and then how are you effectively through the product, helping people make it a practice rather than the training they went through. Sounds great, but I don't have time to do this with all that I have going on 

[00:20:26] Projjal Ghatak: and your questions are amazing. So when we talk to companies, we talk about the framework being at the core of what we do. And then B is. Build habit. And frankly, habit building has been thrown around, and Atomic Habits and sort of other books that have been written have brought habit formation to the zeitgeist and habit formation and gamification have become buzzwords that get used everywhere.

And I've had the privilege of knowing Niral, who now lives in Singapore and Roadhooked and learn directly from him. There's a very clear science to building habit. And the people who've cracked it the best are social media companies. And the people who are in the process of cracking it is fitness companies and with the Oura Ring and the Whoop Band, we've actually come a long way in how you can apply habit to drive behavior, 

and the first part of that is there has to be a trigger. And people often see triggers as notifications, but it doesn't have to be notifications. It can be. rituals that exist in the organization that you stack habits around. So if you have an all hands meeting or a one on one or you have certain rituals that exist, then those become the right rituals to create new habits around.

So we're trying to create a habit of feedback on a regular basis. Then the only way to do it is to stack it to something that happens every day. So like the Noom app, for instance, makes me weigh in the moment I wake up. I wake up every day, that's the thing that happens every day, and once you tie the way into it, the two couple and start happening, and then b, you can obviously trigger people to notifications, et cetera to drive it. The second piece is that trigger then needs to be converted to action quite quickly. And so you have to really reduce the friction around taking action.

And that's where with things like feedback, Gen AI has become very powerful in being able to take our observations that are raw and convert it to structured feedback. People always have the feedback. They just don't know how to capture and then deliver it the right way.

And actually with our product, even 3Gen AI, we had the concept of a capture where you wrote down a quick piece of feedback and tagged it with behaviors. It was lower friction than pulling up a clunky web form and filling it out. But it was still more friction than Just doing a stream of consciousness.

And now, we have something on AI and answer that can do that for feedback. And so how do you make that action super easy? The third, and this is the one that people often forget is the concept of a variable reward. 

If you give people the same reward for every action, the behavior goes down. But if you give them a variable reward around the action, the behavior sticks. The reason why we addictively open Instagram is the suspense of did a friend post a new story, if we knew for a fact X friend posts Y story, that takes the suspense out and it takes out the habit of doing it.

So as people take action, you got to give them a points increase of some sort. Or a reward that is variable that inspires them to take that action. That's the piece that is very important to nail and doing that in a way that feels inspiring, yet not gimmicky and motivates the right behavior.

And then the fourth that hopefully they're then taking a new investment in the platform that compounds the value and brings them back. So if they're updating a goal in the product or giving someone's feedback, then you've added value to the platform that brings you back. That habit science is consistent for any behavior.

And it's way easier said than done. And we haven't cracked it fully yet. We're in the process of getting there. But if you do those four really well, you do crack habit. And when you drive the variable reward, it also needs to feel challenging yet attainable at the same time.

 One of the things that I read about Good games is that they push you but give you a sense of success almost in the right balance. That is also a hard balance to strike. So what the new map does is that it doesn't let me do too much every day. 'cause it's like we do too much every day, not gonna be consistent around it.

And we talk about that entirely around what we call the Clarity score. Someone's Clarity score is 26. Then in a week we should try to get it to 29 and tell them exactly what to do to get it replaced to a 9. Because setting that target at 29, which feels challenging and attainable drives action.

And so what we do with next actions is drive actions across the pyramid in terms of what the manager needs to do to then make sure they're taking the right actions to increase clarity of the team members. So it becomes a combination of the framework and then landing that to people plus using generative AI very effectively to take friction out.

And then three building habit And it's not easy. 

[00:25:41] Mahan Tavakoli: I love the fact that you've incorporated both an element of generative AI, which makes the process easier, but most importantly, I'm a fan and some of NIR AI's work, you have thought through the science of habit formation and incorporated Because intentions by themselves aren't enough.

 Vast majority of managers I've interacted with over the years are very well meaning individuals who want to do right by their people. It's just that they never get around to giving the feedback following the process. So it requires a different set of habits. So in developing these different set of habits, what is the day of a manager that is using on loop? And how does it support them in managing their team? 

[00:26:34] Projjal Ghatak: Something we think about a lot is work happens in work weeks, and there's a set of things that I imagine you should do on a weekly basis.

Across the five pyramids. Now check in how they're focusing on your goals every day. You can give feedback, you can do it every day, but if you have a team of five or six, it's important to get to the right cadence across your also direct reports on a weekly basis.

And then drive the right actions at an individual level. We set a great clear directive saying keep your clarity score above 80 in the on loop app. And then take the actions required to drive that score above 80. And that is very core to how we think about who we serve and therefore being of service to the manager and worshipping the manager as a well intentioned human being.

Really drives how we design our products and experiences to enable that person versus keep check boxes around that person. So that person doesn't do bad things. And that is very core to how we think about our differentiation. 

[00:27:36] Mahan Tavakoli: One of the things I tell CEOs and executives for Jal is that. If you find that vast majority of your people or your managers aren't doing something, it's a systems issue. It's not a people issue, now you have deep insights on hiring and nurturing talent, and would love to get some of your thoughts on that,

one of the big challenges that you talked about earlier also, whether it was with respect to Uber or what you're facing at on loop is that you need to recruit and retain the right talent in addition to some of these management practices, what are some of your thoughts on recruiting and retaining the right talent?

[00:28:20] Projjal Ghatak: This is a fantastic question. And one thing I've learned about sales and the same applies to recruiting is that process wins. It's less about a feel. It's more about taking a structured approach. And it's something I've really changed my mind on. Because I'm a vibe kind of guy.

It doesn't work. That's one. The second is that, we massively under utilize the network of people that have deep knowledge of a company, the individuals in the company and the talent. So I'll give you an example, like today I'm a better recruiter for every manager that I work for because I know how they work and it's more about the individual versus the company they're at. , yeah, certain companies attract certain kind of leaders, but ultimately, I'm a very similar type of leader at Onloop versus Uber, the sort of ways of working, how to work successfully, et cetera are quite similar. And the best recruiters for me are people who have worked with me for a long amount of time and succeeded with me.

And we just don't have a structured way to use that collective intelligence that people have off hiring managers and talent there's a lot of collective social intelligence around our knowledge of people and talent that we've not matched well.

And really relying on people that know you well to give you an assessment of will this person work well with you, despite the credentials, et cetera, of the person, I think is huge. Because. Environment plays such a role over someone successful or not. And that environment is set so often by a manager and being able to accurately assess that ability and chemistry is humongous.

And then three and I argue a lot of people about this often is I massively undervalue experience and I massively overvalue the core raw talent of the person. And what I tell people is the core raw talent is the base variable. The experience is the exponential variable. So someone who is a one.

Even if they've worked for 15 years, they're still a 1. But someone who was a 2 and has worked 2 years is a 4. And that person is probably 4 times better than your 1 with 15 years of experience. However, your 2 with 15 years of experience is significantly better than you're two with two years of experience.

And therefore who you hire is a function of the base talent of that person exponential with the experience that they have. And often we hire for what can't fail. So someone's done something before you hired because you think. They can be successful.

 That plays a role. And sometimes I over index on base talent a little too much. And then my investors will tell me you need to hire more for experience versus base talent. , I think it's a combination, but there's way too much incidents based on 10 years of experience or 15 years of experience or 20 years of experience because having many years of experience.

If the learning machine below that experience is not moving at the same speed it's meaningless. I think at the very basis of it is, do you care and are you operating from first principles or on how you think about things? And, I'm a huge Amazon, Jeff Bezos fan around loosely held strong beliefs.

I change my mind all the time and I'm very proud of it. And I don't change my values or what my purpose is very often, but I evolved my worldviews all the time. And sometimes people don't argue with me because they think I have a very strong opinion about it. But , I'm much happier someone proving me I'm wrong because I am in service of what is the truth and not in service of whether I'm right or wrong.

[00:32:41] Mahan Tavakoli: That's why systems matter. As you mentioned, structure and processes matter. They make a difference, whether it is in recruiting, retention, giving managers the opportunity to coach and guide their people. Couldn't agree with you more in terms of the importance of characteristics or attributes as Rich Deviney was a Navy SEAL commander for 20 plus years and did a lot of that work for the SEALs and has written a great book on attributes. And I had him on the podcast talks about that fact.

And I see it repeatedly in organizations where while experience is important, experience is weighed very heavily and. If you understand the functionality of the roles you're recruiting for, looking for the attributes or the characteristics that would do well in that function is a lot more important than someone that has lots of experience in it.

[00:33:41] Projjal Ghatak: that point it's a really good point and one of the things that we really want to do with our product is help. people identify those attributes from observations. A lot of organizations talk about skills based orings, but the skills data that we have on people is shit.

Because all of that skills data is stuck in feedback. And if you're able to mine feedback for attributes and then stay really honest to it and don't see one as being good or bad because they're not, they're superpowers and blind spots. And the sooner we call them blind spots and not weaknesses, we will move knowledge workers and humanity forward.

We will then put people into roles that they thrive in. Putting me in a role where being organized is the most important thing is going to set everybody up for failure because it's just not my natural proclivity. But putting me in a role where I'm a talk show host, I can do all day because this doesn't feel like work.

And it's fantastic. And we've got to put people in a zone of genius and not be treating people like shame about anything. And when we call them weaknesses, we shame people for maybe having lower attention to detail, etc. There's a flip side to everything.

You can't have someone who is deeply creative and deeply meticulous at the same time. It's just not going to happen. And the more we just accept it's both sides of the same coin and really understand people's attributes and something that is really my hope for the world is that, it's unfortunate that I still play up Uber and Stanford MBA.

Versus the fact that I connect dots and think on the fly and inspire people better than anybody else. That's what should matter more versus I'm a Stanford Uber, but unfortunately that's what people care about more. And I wish that changes in my lifetime. 

[00:35:36] Mahan Tavakoli: I do want to get your thoughts on a couple of other issues as well, Prajal. Related. Part two AI and a future of work. A lot of organizations are having major challenges with transition to hybrid.

Now, some are also hiring people who are remote. So fully virtual, which opens up a different talent pool and possibilities and additional challenges. So where do you see the future of. work headed and then the challenges that managers will face as a result. 

[00:36:12] Projjal Ghatak: Fantastic question. By views evolved around this, so we started a company in April 2020 when the wall shut down.

So we've been remote native. From day zero and that led me to just hiring people from around the world from day zero. This is very hard in early state startup. I think that the genie's out of the bottle and hybrid is here to stay. If the pandemic had lasted a year the world's knowledge worker diaspora wouldn't have spread out and you could bring people back to a single location and even if it's in the office, it's still distributed. And actually, when I worked at Uber, I spent all my life on zoom, so sure, there's zoom in an office, with teammates from around the world. And now it's a home office versus an office conference room.

So I felt like when COVID happened, my life didn't change that much, We were on Zoom 10 hours a day pre COVID, we were on Zoom 10 hours a day after COVID. So for a lot of global technology knowledge workers, it wasn't a big shift, but it was in a lot of other places.

There's a really good Microsoft research around hybrid work that talks about the productivity paranoia. And this fact that 88 percent of employees believe that they're productive in a remote hybrid environment and 87 percent of leaders not feeling the teams are as productive as they can be in hybrid environments.

And that's because as humans, we manage our anxiety by seeing action, so when I was very young, three days before the exam my mom would see me playing computer games at 11 a. m. and freak out. And she'd like, just go pretend you're studying. So at least I see you with a book because it gives me anxiety seeing you playing computer games.

I know for a fact that you actually do well in the exam. I don't know how you pull it off, but you actually do. So I know that you don't actually need to say you do well, but I need to manage my own anxiety that you are making progress, and leaders that will come back to work feels like this in in, some ways.

And by and large, if people are self disciplined enough and intrinsically motivated, they will get results done irrespective of whether work. However, we have had to let people go. especially early on in their careers, when that self discipline does not exist. And they need the environment to discipline themselves to drive productive work.

And I have not yet figured out how to build self discipline in a remote environment. That I've not solved. But if you have a deeply self driven, intrinsically motivated team, it doesn't matter. And then B, you need to manage leader anxiety around progress and accountability.

And we're doing quite a bit of work with a bunch of companies right now on how to sewage leaders with the right drift feed there. That stuff is moving and they are feeling a sense of progress because when they go to the office, see a bunch of people working, they feel a sense of progress.

Thanks. And so making leaders feel a sense of progress, plus driving self discipline in every knowledge worker, will make hybrid and remote work better than in purpose work. Those two variables don't exist at scale today. And therefore, Hybrid remote work today does not work well enough or in the same way as in person work does, but I am in service of making sure it works well because the benefits outweigh the cons, but I fully also empathize with leaders who want people back in the office.

It is 

[00:39:58] Mahan Tavakoli: a challenge for leaders, you both articulated what the challenges are, some perception, some reality, and there are ways in trying to address it when it is addressed, though, it is going to drastically change work and the way it's done for organizations. This is a puzzle piece, but when put in, it's going to transform the way work gets done.

Economies, communities, the transformation is going to be significant. 

[00:40:35] Projjal Ghatak: If I was an American knowledge worker, I'd be anti hybrid remote work. Because once the vision pro gets really good and work feels deeply immersive, then every job gets offshored and outsourced. The offshoring and outsourcing industry is not new, it's existed for a long time, but the premium of hiring someone in a high cost labor market will only keep going up. And the way the sort of. Industrial revolution and automation led to China's boom and the technical offshoring led to India's boom. This sort of creative knowledge work is going to the Philippines's boom because actually the Philippines exports the largest number of jobs in non technical knowledge work.

And that assisted by Gen AI Is a superpower for people willing to work for lower wages around the world at nice shifts with headsets on that feel immersive.

[00:41:33] Mahan Tavakoli: As we go through that transformation, one of the things leaders are going to need to do more of is learn, unlearn, relearn at a faster rate than ever before.

So we'd love to know, are there leadership. Resources or practices. You typically find yourself recommending

[00:41:53] Projjal Ghatak: I think it starts with self awareness. And truly understanding who you are, and we're all different, one of the biggest mistakes I've made in life is expecting other people to be like me. And first of all, I don't want to hang out with more ProJolts anyway. Each of us are very unique. And so I think you can't follow someone else's philosophy. And the reason why I like podcasts so much is when I listen to a podcast and a conversation with two people, I feel like I'm the third person in that conversation. And then I hear those people and then I assimilate that to who am I and how is that relevant to me?

 And I think the plethora of psychometric tests et cetera are all good resources. A lot of them are free to just get a sense of Who you are as a person, what your inclinations are. And so I think self awareness is big. I think too I've been blessed with having really good exec coaches in my life.

 I feel lucky to that. I coach a few CEOs, but I've been on both sides of that coin and it is truly transformational. And just this conversation. I feel like you've been a coach for me in this conversation, just asking amazing questions, that lets me lead to a greater level of insight that wouldn't come if you weren't asking the right questions and the art of asking the right questions effectively is what coaching is immense.

And the reason why you can ask those questions because you have the answers, but you're asking me questions, right? And that. leads to a me feeling better. I feel Oh my God, I'm so insightful, versus if you said it, I'm like, Oh, that's smart. Let me write that down. But if I come up with it myself, I'm much more likely to take action on it because I feel better doing it.

I came up with it versus someone else told me. And so figuring out how to bring a coach like persona into your life, and that can be a professional coach, or it can be someone who's trained in coaching tactics, or even self inquiry, but being in a question asking more of yourself to deepen insight is big.

And then three, this might sound flippant, but YouTube premium? Is really good at suggesting stuff to me based on other stuff that I see. So recently I was listening to something from the guy called Kapil and novel Ravikant around Success is about the mind. And the fact that, the only freedom you're fighting against is freedom in your own head.

And if you feel free, nothing can feel you're not free. They were like, listen, most people have no interest in listening to this. For me listening to people, I respect and have multiple perspectives and have discourse. I think, Andrew Huberman, when he talks to the David Goggins of the world and for a while I listened to Adam Brown and Simon Sinek, but I often feel some of the insights are quite mainstream.

It doesn't help me go deeper. So I feel you graduate over time as well, but you'll no good content when you find yourself. thinking at a deeper level. So I would say experiment with leadership podcasts, et cetera, on people that you like on YouTube premium. And the internet will lead you to places and people that are insightful to you.

 What is insightful to me may not be insightful for someone else. And . There are certain Bibles, like high output management by Andy Grove is a Bible. How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie is a Bible.

[00:45:18] Projjal Ghatak: The messy middle by Scott Belsky for an entrepreneur is a Bible. The Hot Things About Hot Things by Ben Harlow. There are certain 101 books but even more powerful than that is understanding what works for you. And there's this infinite number of resources,

 Trying to accumulate the resources is going to be one of those non habit forming endeavors, because you'll get so overwhelmed that you won't start because you're like, Oh my God, there's so many places I could go, which is the enemy of habit formation in so many ways. But just hang out with yourself.

 It sounds trivial, but You'll be surprised how much you learn about yourself by just hanging out with yourself and just enjoy hanging out with yourself. 

[00:46:02] Mahan Tavakoli: Love the perspectives, whether it is in getting to know yourself, some of the recommendations with respect to. Books, the podcast listening. I totally agree with you. There is a tremendous amount of great content out there. Christopher Lockett, tongue in cheek says it's a dumb time to be dumb because you can listen to brilliant people anytime you want and learn from them.

 You don't need to have special access and pay millions of dollars to have lunch with Warren Buffett. You can just. Tune in and listen to him if that's what you wish or listen to Projowl and learn from him, which I really appreciate having had the chance to do so Projowl, if the audience wants to find out more about you, OnLoop, connect with you, follow your work, where would you recommend for them 

[00:46:54] Projjal Ghatak: to go?

 Thank you. To get in touch with me. Linkedin is the best and so searching on loop or searching jj hot tech will find me I read every message that comes in my mailbox. I may not reply to everyone But I do read everyone. 

[00:47:08] Mahan Tavakoli: So you don't reply to the ones that say your profile is very impressive.

I want to connect with you or chat 

[00:47:19] Projjal Ghatak: with you. You don't respond to those fragile. You know what's cool? My first name now says JJ bracket Projol. So when someone sends an automated note and it says, hi, JJ bracket Projol, I know it's automated, so there's a good test for that.

And then be, in I often find that if someone's sounds famous or wise, they're like, they don't care about me. Or if I write to them, like, why would they respond? A, I freaking love hearing from people who hear something like, Oh my God, that helped me. So if this has been helpful Anyway, I'd love to hear from folks with good bad and ugly you agree or disagree but we're on this journey to learn and grow together and I feel a huge honor to be on with you today mahan and this has been a very Insightful enjoyable conversation.

So I am very grateful that I get this platform and this opportunity. 

[00:48:08] Mahan Tavakoli: I really appreciate your insights, Prajal, and giving me and the audience an opportunity to learn from you. Much of what you're doing, can add a lot of value to organizations and managers now, as you mentioned, it's time for action to Change behaviors and make him part of our habits, because I do believe we're going through a transformation in the way we work.

Why not make it more human, whether it's through individual connections and conversations, or through the way we manage our people in organizations. So I really appreciate you and your insights, taking the time to share it with the partnering leadership community. Thank you so much, Prajalgatak.

[00:48:57] Projjal Ghatak: No, thank you man. This has been a huge honor and a huge pleasure. Thank you