Transcript of The Future of Work, Culture & Purpose with Javier Bajer | Shekhar Natarajan

Lots of people are going to lose their jobs. It's a great opportunity to rethink where were you adding value in your job.

We are entering a phase of big change, be it like how we think about politics, identity, nation, education, technology. I think like we are getting hit like by all different corners.

When you want to change a culture, you just don't tell people to change. That's not going to work. Don't publish values, mission, vision. That hasn't worked ever.

My life's mission is to basically create the, the very ethos of what my father gave me that I want to pass on to my son in multiple folds than what my father passed.

Humanity will win. The hugs, the embrace, the trust, the handshake, that with amazing tools to help us.

Okay, let's get started. My chai. Oh my God, I'm excited.

I haven't had chai in like 2 years, so this is good.

This is good chai, right?

Yeah, very good.

Welcome to yet another episode of Tomorrow Today with Shekhar Natrajan. Today is my incredible honor to bring to you guys, someone who's super phenomenal, incredible actually, to be honest. It's none other than my friend Javier Baquer. Thank you so much for coming.

Thank you for having me here.

Was that the right pronunciation?

Well pronounced. Very, very, very— you sound Argentinian for a second.

Javier, for all of you, is like a culture architect. He's a PhD in cognitive psychology, worked for Accenture, but his work is super extraordinary and it transcends between countries, governments, and nations and societies. Like, it's, it's super fascinating. And I'm super duper duper excited because I know change management is very difficult. I've lived through it. I've lived in 6 large companies doing transformations, and it could be very challenging, very taxing, very, very draining, to be honest. And you are an expert in that. So you have to be extraordinarily talented to deal with that kind of stress.

That is interesting. Because I think it is all the stuff you've said, tiring, exhausting, draining, expensive, very expensive, and yet—

Fulfilling.

A bit pointless. If you're trying to see what has changed in the history of change management, you struggle to find really good cases. What you have is lots of stories of people telling what they've done, not what happened as a consequence. So you get mergers that take a bit too long, people leave, angry partners who can't work together. You get, I don't know, police forces who are accused of racism. You get systems that break down after having used change management tools. So everybody nowadays has access, but this is not new. This has been happening now for many years. People have access to the know-how, you know, the, the, the, what are the 10 commandments of being client-centric or whatever it is. And yet the evidence is still dire, is very bad. So I'm coming from many years of to be honest, being part of the problem, like selling snake oil solutions. And then I realized, if we keep on doing the same things and not getting the results, it might be better to stop, try to understand how humans' brains work, and do something different. So it's What I think is fascinating, what I love from my work is that it's easy, it's easy, it's painless, but it's not what— it's a different toolbox.

It's not what people think about in change management, surveys, focus groups, PowerPoint slides with the 5 behaviors, mission statement, vision. I mean, You've seen this, I'm sure, many times. And all that paraphernalia of bullshit, if I may say, hasn't paid off. And so we do need— humans don't work like that. Humans don't change because we tell them to. We try this with our children and you take the iPad away if your kid spends too much time doing that. And as soon as you turn around, nothing changed, behaviors have not changed. We get a ticket for speeding and we put a camera and we get people to slow down because of the camera, not because of the danger that speeding would entail. So as soon as they're away from the camera, they speed up again. So we've been trying to manage change by talking about it, and humans don't work like that. Carrots and sticks work for Skinner's experiments with rats, absolutely, but we are much more—

Complicated.

Complicated and special, and we're unique.

So there's a lot to unpack of all the things you mentioned, and I completely agree with every one of your points of view because I've been doing a lot of research about you. We had the good fortune of interviewing some very extraordinary people on this show, like Nobel laureates, like, you know, like Shirini Badi, who still continues to fight for the country, though she's a Nobel laureate. She was stripped away from her medal, exiled from the country, publicly shamed. Husband basically was honey-trapped, and she was kind of made a victim on public media, like in Iran's public media. And so we've had people like that share their stories and and all of that stuff. So, you know, as an ensemble of all these conversations, like, I have begun to also think about, like, the implication of change in society and other things. And I was super excited to bring you onto the show. But I want to go back to the origin days, you know. Javier Baquer is an Argentinian name.

Yes.

And so before we know of you as the CEO of Talent Founder, or basically like Accenture, or your degrees, your roots, like, is very critical for everyone to understand. What was it? How was the formative years? Tell me a little bit about your parents, like, you know, about your family. Like, I just want to know everything about you, like what makes you very interesting as a person.

Well, like many of us, my family, they were immigrants from Russia, Poland, Ukraine now. All of them, all my great-grandparents, they all came escaping from the war. So my grandparents grew up, they lost everything and they had to work in whichever way they could. Mostly farming. At that time, there was a deal with the Argentinian government where they gave people a piece of land and they had to work on it. They had no skills, so they had to work it out. And 3 of my grandparents studied pharmacy, like pharmacology, and with a lot of effort because those days it was very, very difficult. But because education in Argentina was free, They took advantage of that, and so they started creating careers and having my parents and then having us kids. So it was my upbringing, it was a very different world in Argentina. I grew up in the '60s, late '60s, '70s. We were under military governments. So it was quite restrictive what you could or could not do. And it's funny that after living in England for so many years now, people say, they share stories about how drunk they got when they were kids.

And I said, I didn't even see a glass of alcohol.

In Argentina.

It was so banned. So life was okay. My parents got divorced when I was very young, and my mom did the best she could to raise us up. And you're making me think, Shekhar, that obviously I had no father figure presence, and if I had one, it wasn't very positive in a way because, you know, The PR that was done against him wasn't very helpful. But God was very good with me, and I had a few good men. And there have always been men, I don't know why, but like, and I will have to write a book about this at one point, there were like critical men in my life who helped me getting to the right place. I remember particularly, I was 15, And I wasn't very good at school. I absolutely not. I hated education. I couldn't understand why a teacher would stand in there and write stuff that was already written in books and I had to memorize it. It just made no sense. It made no sense. So, and there was a guy, a professor called Carlos Tapia, one of my first good men. Who, he was, it was a project from United Nations that happened in Argentina, and he was a maths professor.

He came in to do a special show with volunteers from 4th and 5th grade secondary year, and I was in 3rd year, and I begged to be let in, and I was let in. And he became my first good mentor. I learned from him that if you're passionate about something, everything just gets aligned. Everything happens. And he was such a— he passed away many years ago, but he was so passionate about— we put a big play together with laser. I remember there was laser and smoke and the choir, and it was called the The Canto del Fénix, the Song of the Phoenix. Phoenix. But this idea of rebirth stuck with me. Like, you know, phoenix dies, gets burned down, and it comes back to the ashes again. Exactly. And that was kind of the story of my life. So I had many times where I could have given up. Everything was there to give up, and then I somehow—

Made it through.

I thought about, well, listen, it's really down to other people, circumstances, and me. And so I grew up there, studied systems. It was system analyst. My mom registered me to go into a IT school because it was the cool thing. So I started to work for Siemens, the German company in Argentina, programming. But I found that when you study systems, there's a few subjects that are about systemic thinking, and I fell in love with systemic thinking. The idea that We live in a complex— we and families, humans, clubs, cities, companies are systemic. They're not that simple, like you do this and this happens. We are a result of a variety of tensions and dynamics and reinforcing loops and Peter Spence. And he became another— Peter was another mentor of mine.

Oh, yours?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So over the many years, I've been fortunate enough, blessed enough to be following that path.

Of systems thinking and—

Very systemic thinking. And then I was, to make a very long story short, Argentina wasn't doing very well, so I emigrated. I was very young. Moved to Spain, so I lived there for 6 years, and I joined Arthur Andersen, which was a complete mistake, actually. I was recruited by mistake. I was carrying a letter, a recommendation letter from somebody who's a friend of my mom's, and I landed with the right guy who, I don't know what that letter said, but I was a system analyst and he said, where do you want to work? I said, I'd love to work in the interaction between systems and computers or technology and people. Well, we got a new department called Change Management. So it was very junior newbie in there.

What was this year? What year was that?

This was in '89. So I did well. So I became like the guru very quickly in Spain. I was the guru of HCI. It was called HCI, Human Computer Interaction. It was Andersen Consulting by then. And I said, I want to go back to school. I really need to study psychology because I'm just starting to say things that I don't understand why we're saying them. So I spoke with my boss, another very good man, amazing man, an Argentinian living in Madrid. He was my boss. And I said, listen, how about I do, I want to do a master's degree in neurosciences. He said, if you want to, but you're going to have a good career here. I said, yeah, I just felt the instinct to go back to school. I looked at two universities that studied what is called cognitive ergonomics, which is ergonomics is the study of work and cognitive, which is the way the brain works in work. One was Georgia Tech and the other one was Loughborough. Oh, that's my school. Is it? Yeah. No kidding. Oh, in Atlanta.

Yeah.

And the other one was Loughborough in the Midlands here. So I went to Georgia Tech to meet them and it was great. I mean, Coca-Cola was sponsoring most of the projects. Delta.

Delta is a big one here.

And then I say, okay, I have to be fair, go to Loughborough. And the experience at Loughborough, I don't know if you know where Loughborough is, it's in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. And it doesn't have a good reputation for being like a center of culture or whatever. Very, very—

Closed.

They're very good at sports psychology. And they had this unit. Called Cognitive Ergonomics Research Group. So when I remember, I went there on a weekend, and Professor Ken Eason, who passed away recently, unfortunately, he picked me up from the train station. Wow. English train station, middle of nowhere, like, you know, long platforms, empty. And And he picked me up in his very kind of middle-class car. I can't remember what it was. He was lovely. And I said, "I want to study with you." Georgia Tech was high-tech and it was his human side. And he became a very good friend. And he took me visiting. He opened the uni. It was like a Sunday or Saturday. He opened, I remember the wavy top building. That's where psychology and technology were housed. So I applied, I got a master's degree in neurosciences. There was an option, they had to deal with the Medical Research Council in England because I had said, I want to understand how the brain works. I'm a systems guy. I need to know what the hardware can do or cannot do. Because talking about software, ignoring the hardware is just half of the story.

So they said, well, you could do the master's degree in joint, we can do a joint program with the Medical Research Council in the UK. So he moved to a place called Ennam-Alamein, is a little village. It's a shelter village for people with severe mental problems. It's a very old part of England near Andover, near, you know, in the south. And it was one of the hardest parts of my life because I had to live inside a, it's a village with a pub, post office, but it's sheltered, it's gated. And I had to live with a lot of people who had all sorts of mental problems. And my mentor there, he was the the director, a doctor. He was so good, so generous. And I was studying human memory especially. So I spent a year, almost a year there with patients trying to restore learning and behavioral change when it's almost impossible to do. And when I finished, I wrote my thesis. And I thought, I love this. Can I do a PhD? And I ended up doing a PhD because I realized, so if we understand human behavior is a combination of factors, it's not just who you are because you're definitely a very different person when you are in a different context.

So I needed to understand social psychology, what we call brains, social brain. It's your brain gets affected by me and the weather and your upbringing, but also in which conversations you live in. So, but at that time I needed money and Accenture London figured out that I was living in the UK and they invited me to rejoin Accenture, not in Madrid, but in London. So I essentially transferred to London and I was working part-time. I was a senior associate or senior partner at that time doing my PhD and working in what was a very interesting project. There was a case in the UK called the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, which was a Black guy who died and the police assumed that he was the perpetrator and they let go of the victim who was white. So the whole world started turning upside down saying, you're making assumptions here, you're not thinking properly. So my first project was to train through national police training. Well, first was to understand, is it true that there are bad apples? Are they all corrupt? Are they all racist? So we needed to understand what the problem was and then create a training that would help them change culture.

So you got your PhD, but you went to the police, like the racial case.

Yes, you were asking me what—

Yeah, what was the conclusion? What happened? Like, what did you find?

To understand culture, it's— you can't do a survey. If I want to understand what is it like to be in your business, I have to live there, I have to be there. I can't interview people because you get an opinion of the culture. And you can't even do that really with anything in life. You get a snapshot. Yeah. And the snapshot is tinted with interpretations, revenge, appreciation, whatever. So, you know, these quick surveys, especially after you You've done something online. So how would you rate the driver? Well, sucks. Yeah. You're not really, it doesn't, the NPS, it doesn't work. So to understand culture, we live in it. And that's something that I love doing myself, even now, having a team, but I still do it myself. So I became a policeman. But because obviously it's a very regulated environment, obviously this is all being signed up by the legal teams. I was not allowed to do a lot of things, but I was allowed to sit on the back of a lot of police cars without them knowing who I was. And I was like an apprentice and age was credible. And I used to hang out in their gatherings and in their briefs in the morning.

I went to a funeral. I went to the parades, hanging out with people without them knowing that you're actually trying to distill what are those beliefs that are sitting behind their behaviors. To me, that's the only way—

You can understand it.

—that you understand culture. I call it ethnography. And this is like Jane Goodall, do you remember the lady who used to hang out with chimpanzees, I think? She was known for sitting there and after a while, chimpanzees stop seeing her as a researcher and they will show up, all their behaviors will actually show up and she will get an insight that otherwise she wouldn't get. Obviously, you can do a focus group with chimpanzees, but you can't do a focus group with an IT department. They'll tell you what they want to hear. What you want to hear, or they'll use you as a way to vent something else, none of which is useful.

But is it like, did people not feel betrayed that you did not announce yourself?

That's a very good point. Because we're talking large organizations, right? So, or CTs. So they never know that I'd done it or that my team has done it. They never know. I wouldn't do it with a C-level team because they are the ones who are— Hiring you. Hiring. Very quickly they'll figure it out. So yes, in a call center or a few years ago in a mine in Mozambique, I was a miner trying to understand the racial conflicts they have. Or with a bank very recently, a few months ago, that bought another bank, we needed to understand what sort of problems they were going to have after the merger so we could make changes on process and policies to make that transition as easy and quick as possible. So number one, going back to the police example, so I lived in the culture. It doesn't take long, so it's only a few weeks to get what's behind what they say and what they do. And then after that—

Does it match what they say and what they do?

No, no. Never does. Almost nobody. Because when you ask someone for an opinion, they'll give a biased perspective on what it should be or they're thinking if it's a business, They'll say, "Well, why are you asking me about our values?" So I'll give you the answer that I got from the training manual or what's printed on the posters on the walls, but that's not the truth. And what they do, you sit down there, I got an example, I'll use a real name now, because it doesn't exist anymore, but many years ago, BT, British Telecom, had a big problem in a call center in, I think it was up north, Manchester or York, somewhere there. So we need to understand why they were underperforming. So I went and got a job and we were in a pod with 4 other workers. You know, we had headphones and I was taking calls and we were selling We were selling mobile. It was the cool thing those days, like get mobile, you know, and we're talking, it was an outgoing, so we're calling people, cold calling people who used to have a landline and we're trying to sell a mobile.

And so went through training, the onboarding, my chat with my immediate manager, the team leader. Everything that you can imagine. I was doing the calls and then somebody else from the organization was trying to sell a different kind of product. So they offered a trip to Disney, Euro Disney, for the team that sold most, I can't remember what it was. It was a router or some product. So we were living in this dichotomy. This happens. Everywhere, even today in a city. So we can hang on to almost like a bipolar disorder where we know what's right and we do— What is wrong. What is wrong. And we have an explanation— To justify what is— To justify the gap. And therefore, we're not anxious about this, we just get on with it. So we were just selling, well, we're misselling products to people who didn't need them because we wanted to go to Disney. So all the conversation that we have. So I should have perhaps started with this, but I want to use a new definition for culture because culture is one of those things that means different things for different people. So I define culture as the aggregates of all the conversations that exist in a given environment.

So if I want to understand culture, I want to understand what those conversations are, not what's on the poster, not the CEO's speech at the New Year's party. That's not, that's an element, that's one conversation in a sea of millions, thousands of conversations. So that's simple because—

But is it not like, is culture not contextual and where you're sitting as well? Because the culture of the CEO and his C-team may be different than the culture of the call center is different than the— Big time. Right? So that whole culture alignment. Is a huge—

Indeed. I mean, I'm sure it happens to you. You go to Rome and within a few hours you're just functioning differently. You're inside a different context, different conversation. You're with your parents-in-law, you're with your business partners, you're with your team. So the culture lives in an environment. And how do you measure it? How do you touch it? You listen to the conversations, sometimes outspoken, sometimes in the environment, the way that an app is designed. If I have my bank is asking me to allow geolocalization, why do 60% of people say no, or I don't want face recognition? So if you're trying to integrate technology, they think that the problem is technical. And it could be, obviously, but nowadays technology is less and less of a problem. The problem had to do with when you listen to the conversations and you're with people who are trying to download an app and they say, well, They're asking me for a lot of stuff and they're not giving me anything. They said, that's it. We need to design the app. We need to change the culture of the app, of the conversations that are going to happen so that the app first says, what kind of user would you like to be?

Would you like this? Would you like that?

I got a new app and all I need is your bank account. That's exactly it.

No, seriously, I do. I'm just kidding. And what happens in a business, you get, like in a building, every apartment has its own culture. Absolutely. In a business, pretending there's going to be like a huge, massive common culture is It's a mistake in the thinking. You can't have that. What you can have, and this is essential, and I mentioned to you that I'm writing a book. My main chapter in the book is going to be called Profits on Purpose. The idea that you need a purpose. So of course, profit is essential. Otherwise, there is no business. There's nothing, but purpose is key. And, you know, like people say that culture eats strategy for breakfast, that kind of thing. But purpose is the driver. It's just people get a bit scared when you talk about purpose. They think it's a strapline. A purpose has to be so big that it aligns all the conversations. Yes, at the board, yes, at middle management, yes, at the call center. It has to be consistent, but not as a PR marketing campaign, which actually, by the way, they don't work anymore. Even in commercials, they don't have to say, this is the 'Best beer ever.' It doesn't work.

It doesn't get us humans excited. It's not the behavior. It's not like, 'Buy this now.' It's, 'I'll make you believe that this is good, but I'm not going to tell you that this is good.' Or even worse, 'I'm not going to tell you to buy it because it's a promotion or something.' So coming back to the police, example.

So what was your conclusion there?

So the conclusion is— Was there a bias? No. Well, I remember there was 22,000 police officers in the UK, of which like 21,999 are good, and then there is one bad apple. You can't— Well, you try to generalize, definitely falling into a big cognitive bias, what I call a thinking trap. It's not possible. I wish there was a community of everybody. Well, I don't wish that. I mean, it doesn't exist. Even, you know, I got 4 children and they're 4 different humans and they all grew up in the same way. How? So when people talk about overgeneralizations, they are going to make a mistake. So we knew that. As a starter, the question was, is it more likely? So cultures or behaviors follow like a curve, right? So I'm sure there's going to be an extreme perverse policeman somewhere, and there's going to be somebody who shouldn't be a policeman because they're a bit too gentle, too kind, and they can't react quickly. But I'm looking at Where is the middle of this curve? And clearly the middle of the curve was not where they thought it was. So they were talking about bad apples.

Truth is, in some places there was a subculture that allowed certain things to happen. But those places weren't even police offices. There were little teams. And within the team, which we have 5, 6, 7 people in a team, there were It wasn't all 7. So generalizing was going to be wrong and changing the culture as such was not going to be a chat from the superintendent general saying, "Don't be bad," because most people weren't bad. So that's when, yes, sticks and carrots would work, especially sticks. If somebody does something and crosses the line, you need to decide what you're going to do with them. But those are the outliers of this curve. Culture is about moving the curve slightly to the right or to the left, wherever you need to be. And you're moving, if more than 20,000 people move in one step, that's 20,000 steps. That's a lot. Another element around, so police is, still has issues in the UK and we've done a lot of policing work in other countries. The challenge there, going back to purpose, is that if you have a culture, a policing culture, and I remember I gave a talk here in London to the heads of all the police forces in the world, the FBI and CIA, and it was such an incredible experience, and obviously for the safety that you needed to have.

So I was talking about this exact issue with them in that what's the purpose of policing? And I opened up to a conversation and it was about 60 or 70 of them. And the comments were safeguarding, protection, safety. And I challenged them. I said, I think policing is there for a reason. The purpose of policing is that good people can have a good life. Now, of course, in society comes with everything and you're supposed to have Wouldn't be a bad idea. If we build a highway and we put 2-ton cars driving at 70 miles an hour, something is going to happen. That doesn't mean that everybody's bad and should be banned from driving. It's how do I design it? What's the purpose? The purpose was not to be in the highway. The purpose was to get somewhere. What's the purpose of police? To help people live better lives. Sounds a bit wimpy and childish, but that's essentially the purpose. And so we stay in policing for a second. We merged two police forces in Argentina.

40,000 people, 20,000 people.

Oh, there were a lot more because it was the federal police, which is national, with the Buenos Aires police, and they created this third new police force. I can't remember the number, but many thousands of people, some new ones and traditional tough cookies because they had to be tough at some point in the past. And they called themselves the family, so it's like a mafia really. They were very tough. And I remember we had to create a new culture merging these two. And they went from people not respecting them or fearing them to now being a part of the government or a part of public structures. That are well-liked by people. So that's changed dramatically and it changed very quickly. It is large, but it took about 5 years for the culture now to be perfect. Then crime rate has continued to go down, which is good news for the citizens. But if you ask a policeman now in Argentina, policeman or policewoman, What's your job? Why are you here? They will talk about, we're here so people can have a good life. And we created a slogan, which I asked them, I begged them.

A purpose is not a slogan that you tattoo on somewhere. You put, you know, do you remember the mousepads and screensavers? That's not. The culture. Doesn't have to be. You use it as a ruler. But the purpose of the ruler is to measure something, and that something is what stays, not the ruler. So talking about a slogan as a mission statement, it doesn't make anything happen. So no pins with, you know, we, I think it was before it was we serve whatever, fighting crime. No, your job is not to fight crime. Your job is for people to have Head to head. Save lives. Fighting crime is necessary, but it's a cost. That's not the purpose. That's not the purpose.

Yeah. So that police case that you had gone into, what was the outcome of that? What happened? Like, what summary came out of it? Like you said, like, there are no bad apples. You cannot generalize. You have to be very specific about what you have to do. And what was your recommendation?

Because I'm very curious about that. So in all projects, so you have like 3 phases. First is you understand the problem in a very different way. You leave it quickly so you can speak more intelligently about why things are the way they are. Even in new projects, when you're launching a new company, they want to know, is this product going to sell? How are people going to use this service? So it's the same. So you first understand it. Second, you have to convince the owners of the business that— That there's a problem. Of what's the problem. And that's a big thing, actually. It doesn't take long. It takes a lot of courage. And that's not the time where they will call me a friend. When you say your baby is ugly, well, I'm the one who's going to say it. Not like, "Oh, it's lovely." No, it's got big ears. Say, "Oh, it gets better when it grows up." And by the way, if the owner of the business, and I mean the owner, not not a manager, the owner, including the CEO and her or his C-level. If they're not part of this conversation, we can't work.

We don't do anything. We don't do any work with HR unless we need them to change something. But it's not an, it's like when people do culture, they go away, they talk about culture, they come back. With PowerPoints and that. I'm the antidote to that. I get allergies if I see that, and I get to see a lot of that because it's what normally people do. And the third element is the implementation, and that's when you see things actually change. And it's not because what we're missing here is not whether people know something different or whether they can articulate values or articulate vision. That's completely secondary. We need to measure the business. So what has changed? So in the case of the police, we did measure how many people can travel. So first of all, their perception of the police. I don't care whether— I don't care, I do care, but it's not my metric. Whether they feel that the police feels better. I want to make sure that Joe Blog in the street, there's more and more Joe Blogs who don't think that there are bad apples or that the police is corrupt. So I want to dismantle that unquestionable belief that even the press was having and and self-perpetuating and looking for new evidence to prove their hypothesis.

So I dismantled that hypothesis and I'm not saying that there aren't any bad people. In any collective of thousands, you're going to have a normal distribution. That's life. But the metric is reputation, satisfaction. In the case of a business, is how quickly a product got into the market. I don't know, we've done a lot of work with an insurance company, Swiss Re in Switzerland. How many policies get canceled within, they have a unit, I think it was 3 or 6 months. So if I can measure that and we reduce the number of policies that get canceled, I can assume that the selling process was more ethical. Got it. And so on and so forth. I mean, we—

But how do you attribute to the other side, like where there is like cancellation?

Well, we work with them to get their metrics. So businesses, the CFO will have numbers or the commercial people will have their numbers. Market share, the tenure of a policy in this case, or we work with restaurants and hotels. So it's so easy to measure hotels. We did a lot of work with Airbnb. So we can measure using their metrics, not culture metrics. How can you have a culture metric? I mean, it's completely made up, it's not real. You can believe that this tea is the best tea ever, but now we go out and have tea and you don't order it. Well, I don't care about what you think. I'm caring about whether you bought this tea or not. At the end of the day, opinion is, I always say, it's interesting. It's one more data. Employee value propositions, customer surveys, employee surveys. The truth is, in the world of work today, if you look at both the customer world or the employee world, they're kind of broken. Very much. And they're broken in a way that we're that were starting to be broken before. And this is despite all the plaster, Post-its, meetings, consultants, brainstorming sessions and whatever you call it, and campaigns to try to change it.

But we're worse off now. Gallup measures engagement. This is at the rock bottom. So I remember when I started working with this one, it was like 60% engagement. Was good, right? Now we are 19, 17, depending on the country, 11 in the US. 11. So it means one of every 10 people wants to go to work. And we're building a world like that. Wait till my children make it into the workplace. It's going to be zero. And customers as well. Come bank with me. And the only vehicle to attract customers at the moment seems to be quick promises like, if you come now, if you move your account to me, I'll give you £5,000. If you read the small print, it says only if you stay with us for the first 3 years and you deposit $50 million. We have bastardized the world of HR, of people engagement, and we have bastardized the world of customer experiences. I'm not saying that there aren't any very good customer experiences. They are very good, very, very good. And I know we are going to be talking about AI hopefully soon, but the issue is that the human element hasn't gone very, very well.

And I think that the opportunity for new technologies that are based on ethical principles might have a chance to get us moving in the right direction.

Right direction, yeah. So, you know, I believe that culture is a very complicated topic because culture is tribal in nature, right? Like, you know, there are, like, you know, depending on which theater you belong, you form your culture, right? Like, and you could be like a musician and like, you know, you act like a musician, but then you go like, you know, to another place, you act like one of those. So you as a person actually have different variations and you belong to different tribes and you behave very differently. So it's the tribal nature of the behavior expected of the tribe that drives the culture. So how do you think about an organization? Because an organization is many tribes, right? And how do you keep the consistency of all the tribes? It's like getting the chief of the tribe and you got like 50 tribes. There is one guy. Absolutely. It's super complicated, like a topic. And then their behaviors are shaped by their incentives.

Well, that's where I need to challenge that. We created a world where that is true. Yes. Is that the only way in which humans operate? No. So we are now—

Because we keep telling, like, you know, if you do well, I'll pay you more. So we have given this dopamine to people to actually do that.

Sikkhar, do you do anything for free?

I don't do anything for free. You don't? I basically, I don't necessarily do anything for free.

Do you do things that you believe in?

But there are a lot of things I believe in that I would absolutely do not only for free, but I would actually put my money on it. Okay, that's my point.

Yes. That's my point.

So see, there are things which like you want to be motivated towards, like naturally. Yeah. Right? Like that is your passion. It is not money. No. Like, you know, like if it were money, like, you know, as an example, that what I'm doing today, I was the second most highest paid guy in American Eagle Outfitters, not even the COO of the company. Okay. The CEO was the highest paid. I was the next highest paid, and then everyone else followed, including the brand and everyone who was managing the brands of the company and everyone. And the easiest thing for me to have done in my life is to go at 9 o'clock, come back at 5 o'clock, make a lot of money, and like, you know, retire happily. And you weren't very happy. And I wasn't very happy. Of course. So I said, you know what, like, my life's mission is not to basically like live a life like that, but my life's mission is to basically create the very ethos of what my father gave me, which was all these angels who showed up in my life because of the good karma he did, that I want to pass on to my son in multiple folds than what my father passed.

So not only my son benefits, but many generations after that.

You have no idea what the—

The implications of that. So you started talking about this very interesting theory of like mentors coming in. Life. And, you know, a lot of, like, my life story is very similar. Like, you know, I did not know, like, my mother is uneducated, okay? My father used to make ₹175. We used to live in the second biggest slum in India, okay? And one fine day, basically, like, you know, I was Like in India, there is all this— like Lord Ganesha is the one who takes out all obstacles. So we all basically worship him during the sacred month of September, October, usually September. And we go and collect money from people. And then we all bring an idol of Ganesha. And then basically we pray and then we go and dissolve him in the water. So our obstacles and our— are also gone with it, right? Like it's sort of like symbolic of that, right? And living in slums, you don't get that kind of money to build a big Ganesha. So what we did is we said, okay, like, I'm going to go find all scrap metals everywhere. And we'll build a mechanical Ganesha. That's what we built.

I was age 11. So there was a professor who belongs to our caste who came by, and he said, this kid has to be an engineer. My mother said, what does engineering mean? Wow. So she said, the guys who work— and he couldn't tell my mom, the guy who builds machines or all that stuff. But she said, He said, remember, you work for this printing press and you see these large machines, an engineer would build that. Or remember that bridge, an engineer would build that. And so my mother said, oh, I think he's a builder, so you should go do that. So then she tagged me with this guy and he took me on a journey. Then I had so many people, I was almost about to get kicked out of United States in 2004. I didn't have a job. I was working for a family-owned business where the president of the business was bipolar and I couldn't take it. And I just left and I said, you know what, like, I don't want to just do that job. And I don't know what the next job is. I'm just going to sleep on the couch.

And I was sleeping on a couch, called like, you know, I sent a movie resume to to the EVP of operations for Coke because I just found him on the web. And he got it. What are the chances that he would drop a disk in his computer? You know, like, you wouldn't actually put a disk in the computer because there could be virus. Yeah. He just put it and he basically saw the movie and he said, I want to hire you. Oh, wow. And he's my Chief Operating Officer now for my company, right? Like full circle. So, and like those miracles tend to happen all your life. And for me, that was a manifestation of all the beautiful things my father did, my mom did. And if I could replicate that kind of thinking, the world is a better place. So, like, you know, I firmly believe in this theory that you actually mentioned that we have incentivized the wrong behavior and we attribute it the culture and the excellence of the culture. Incentive equal to culture amplification. Completely. Right? And that's like such a biased, stupid way of thinking about it.

Well, I think I found one of the causes of this situation today. And I hope I don't get into trouble, but Everybody talks about Maslow, the Pyramid of Needs, remember? That gets taught at universities, schools, everywhere.

In fact, Maslow never put the pyramid, by the way.

I know, yeah, I know.

His students actually did that.

And he was not very liked by his peers. So he had a very good PR and that's why we're still talking about Maslow and this hierarchy of needs, which of course, if you don't have food, you'll die. So I completely agree with that. So you need food, you need a roof, you need to belong to a team. We've been belonging to a sect or a tribe for millions of years, and that gave us survival. So that's all true. There's nothing really new under that sun, right? But do you remember the tip of the pyramid? He or whoever translated this put self-actualization. And it's a very egocentric model where the message is we human beings can only operate if we get something out of it. What's in it for me, they would say, right, in America. The what's in it for me. And that made us kind of land into a place where we started believing it. Exactly. We are victims of our own construct. And we created a world where if I want to hire you, you'll ask me, okay, so what are my benefits? And I offer benefits. Your benefit is you get a job.

You have a job. That's your biggest benefit.

You get a bonus. How much bonus? How much money? The career, everything is about me and my belly button. I grew up in this environment where it's all about me, me, me, me, me compared with somebody else, ranked, rated, rewarded. What if Maslow missed the second half of the pyramid? That at the top, once you have food and you have recognition and you got enough money to do whatever you need. You don't need a yacht, but your basic needs are a lot less than that, right? So you can eat well, you can educate your children. There is an inverted pyramid that starts at that point, and that pyramid is about giving rather than getting. So the bottom half is all about getting. What would I get? And that's okay. That's okay because you need to be alive to be useful. Otherwise, you can't serve any purpose. But once you get the basics sorted, it's now you trying to make the world a better place. And I know this sounds a bit too— Altruistic. Altruistic, hotel. It's not. It's not. When a policeman knows that he or she's there so that the kids can go to school, it gives them an entirely new purpose in life.

And you can see it happening naturally. So you go get a sandwich at a shop and the guy chats to you, says, "Do you want to have it inside or out?" "No, I need to take it because I'm running late to a meeting." They say, "Well, I'm going to wrap it more carefully so that it doesn't drip a little. So he understands why. So he's not selling the sandwich. He understands he's feeding me on the way to a meeting. And so giving is not just charity. You're still going to get paid. This is why, you know, I talk about profit on purpose. You're going to have to find a way to get profit, but on the purpose that you exist for.

You bring up like so many beautiful points that like resonate quite a lot with me. I'm not going to name the person. I was recently sitting with one of the VCs and I was talking about the whole thing, right? So, and I said, hey, and I'm like, I have two companies now. Like, I started Orchestro, which is basically like, it's the parcel delivery company. Like, you know, how do you deliver parcels better than anyone else. And then the second part of it was angelic intelligence, which is how do I bring good human behavior in technology? Like, just like my father was, or like the mentors in your life and my life were. And I said, you know, like, uh, I said like, listen, um, he said like, oh, you got these two companies, it's so confusing, like, you know, like that. And I said, you know what, I don't care what you think. So, and the reason why I don't care is basically like the way I think about this business is like 100% of my equity would actually go to a foundation. Okay? And that doesn't mean that you're not gonna get your money.

You're gonna get your money. But my goal is to do this And he just literally looks at me and says, "That's great that you want to do that, but that is not what I signed up for." Oh, wow. Right? And so, and like, it just baffles the shit out of me because I just literally buried my mom, like, before this conversation, a month prior. November 4th, I lost my mom. December 4th, I'm having this conversation. My mom pawned her wedding ring for ₹30 so I could have education. When she passed away, guess what I spent on her? ₹45,000. That's $500. That's half the price of iPhone. Or like quarter price of iPhone now, 1TB iPhone, like 17 Pro. So she didn't take anything. I don't know why people are so excited about gaining so much wealth and talking so much about humanity when they don't even care about humanity in the first place. They don't care about humanity. Like my friend, like Elon Musk, was on this beautiful show in India with another guy who's another billionaire. Both of these guys are sitting and having a podcast, and the world watches this podcast because these are two well-established billionaires who have arrived in their life.

One is like $1 billion and one is $700 billion. Doesn't make a difference. Doesn't make a freaking difference in my life. I don't care how many zeros you have. And they were both talking about humanity. And I'm like, okay, dudes, there are basically like, you know, how many people? 1.4 billion people in India. Okay. You both collectively have $701 billion in your bank. Okay. Let's talk about humanity. Okay. So what about you actually take all the $701 billion and give it to kids under the age of 5, that way they can have a better life, which is only 145 million people, right? And give the next, like, whatever is remaining to, like, people who are, like, aged, who need, like, life. And you know how much that would be? That would be worth 40 lakh Indian rupees. Yeah. The irony is these two morons sit and talk about humanity with zero compass of what you are.

This is why this invention of companies having the CSR, corporate social responsibility department, that's like a face-washing activity. I'm not going to name the brands, but I worked for a big pharmaceutical company. Oh, they're all fraud. It was like, guys, I know you're sponsoring all this stuff and you're giving money away, but you're making— this is just like a hand-washing exercise. The core, you're lying to your clients, to your patients, and you're mistreating your people. So you're doing everything wrong, but you want to— That's the karma debit. Yeah. I haven't thought about— money, and I'm now speaking personally, the relationship that we should have with money is dangerous. Money is very dangerous. And as a Christian, it says that money is the source of all evils. However, You're not supposed to be poor. You're supposed to have an abundant life. So how do you— Reconcile. How do you reconcile that? And it's just that what it says is that you should not serve money. You should not be a victim of money. Doesn't say you should not have it or not be clever and smart and make it. The moment that in my life, so I grew up in an environment where there wasn't a lot.

So the mandate was always like, you must be somebody in life and you must— It's like there was going to be an ideal future sometime later, which was not today, where life was going to be okay. But it was all about achievements, economic achievements, and you measure achievements through how many houses and And over the years, as I became a bit older, a bit more mature, I realized that's not the direction, clearly not. I like to have money to buy nice coffee, of course. And most people— Would want that. A lot of people are struggling to make it to the end of the month, of course. I'm not ignoring that. However, the key element is that when you are making enough money and you think that that becomes, that profit becomes the purpose and you forgot what you were about. This is something happens a lot with startups. Startups begins with growth. With good intent, yeah. And then somehow profit kills purpose. And then the founders leave with money, but the whole thing goes bust because it was not about making money. Money was an output, not the input. The input was purpose.

Because everyone, in what I've observed, they get the sequence wrong. You know, what starts is like most founders, have conviction, they work hard, and then they set the intent. That's right. So that's the reverse sequence. What you should start with is you should start with good intent, have hard work, and then be committed and have conviction. And so you never are going to basically go wrong in that trial. But as soon as you flip this and you start like, 'Oh, I got a great idea and I got a great conviction on the idea,' they're already on the wrong path. Because if you say the conviction is the idea, not the intent, then you're going to attract all the wrong people to come sit with you. And the corrupt minds basically surround more corrupt minds. And then you have amplification of corruption. Absolutely. Then all you're doing What you're doing is just, you're falling victim to your own—

And it's like a dog chasing its own tail. Tail. Because they say, "Oh, our people are disengaged." Well, guess why? You're all here for the wrong reasons. So turn this around and make this company that does deliver clean water into places. Or better technology or clothing or whatever it is that humans need, make that the best you can and you'll make money. You will, you will. But I wouldn't even call it reward because that implies that it's a trade-off. No, it will come, it will come because it's the right thing to do. You will be more successful, you will be more recognized. Customers keep returning to a place where they had a good experience. And of course, they pay for that if they can. And that's a virtuous circle. But the beginning, the tip of this circle is the creation of value. It's not the how much are we going to get out of this one. Many years ago, I was, you know, everybody talks about leadership. And I said, how about the etymology or the origin of the word leadership? Where does it come from? You know, leader comes from the Old English word, ledan, L-E-D-A-N.

This is a 16th century word. So it's quite old, ledan, which meant to displace, to move. It wasn't to control, command, make money, get share options. It was to create movement. Ship comes from the, like in victimship and leadership and stewardship. The ending ship comes from the German schaffen, S-C-H-A-P-P-E-N, also from that old 15th, 16th century. And shaffen is the word that gave origin to the word shop in English, which is where you put things of value. So leadership technically is having the courage to make changes that add value. It's not about you. I got a sign at home in my office, which I made it on a plate because it's a— In fact, I'm going to show you. I have it in my— I carry it with me. Not about me. It's not about me. It's not about me. I have this science that says it's not about me. So whatever I'm going to do, it's not about me. I'll get invited to give talks. I do a lot of talking. I can help people understand the culture. Needs a new toolkit. And if they like it, they applaud, and I'm leaving there and I'm carrying me.

The fame and the success doesn't define me. And one of the things that happened with raising children is that you get continuously tested. Oh, you're so good. I said, no, no, no, No, no. How are you? What are you able to do? Let's turn it around. So it's not about me. And when that becomes like a mantra, and it's an ongoing exercise that you have to do until you die, I guess, it helps you order. You were talking about the sequence. It helps me and it helps people put the right things first. And the right thing first is in leadership, how do, what do I need to change to add value? And the rest, it just comes naturally.

It will. So, and you know, I, I like, I also subscribe, um, into this theory of not about me.

You, you can keep that one, by the way.

Thank you. So my new business card. So, um, see, um, One of the strangest things in my life is basically whenever I have— we are all humans, right? So we exhibit this. So whenever I prayed about me, whenever I worked for me, I was grossly unsuccessful. Whenever I basically did it for my brother, whenever I did it for my family, whenever I did it for my employees, whenever I did it for others, I was wildly successful. And there were times when, like, you know, I remember, like, the reason why I went to United States is not because I wanted to have a master's degree. I actually wanted to get married to my girlfriend. Like, she was in India and, like, you know, like, I wanted nothing to do with, like, going to America. And then I get this call in October when my brother has bipolar depression and he broke his left arm and basically, like, you know, he just called and he said, listen, I don't think I can take care of the family. You know, I need you to come do what is right for the entire family. So you should come here.

And I said, like, you know, here's a guy. And he was also saving money for me to come and other things. And like, I had no interest to come. And because I was very selfish, you know, I want to just like— had a girlfriend who was good looking. For a guy from slums, you know, that's like, you know, that's not a bad thing. And she was fairly well settled. So I'm not going to live in poverty because of her, thanks to her. But I had this moment when I said, you know what, I'm going to do right by my brother. And I came and there were some darkest times. We literally sat in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at 6 PM in the evening. Because he was out of status. He was not going to school for 3 semesters, so he would have been out of the United States. But we had applied for another student visa for him, and that university said, you have to get transferred from the other university to this university. There are 2 ways of doing it. Just go across the border and come back. And/or basically go do a legal thing. And so we both are sitting at 6:00 PM in the night on McDonald's, right?

And we are looking at the sky and saying, I was telling my brother, maybe we should just cross the border and come back. And my brother is looking at me and he's like, are you sure? Because you both are going to be checked out of the country. I said, that's fine, let's do it. And so even in the darkest moment, we found hope. We called someone and that person said, we got a lawyer, let's go figure it out. Not an insurmountable problem. And all things fell in place because the pursuit was not for me. The pursuit was for him. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And that pursuit changed my life because I couldn't have gotten my funding. 30 minutes, I literally got I literally put $34 in my registrar's office at 3:54. 4 o'clock was the deadline. No way. And I did not have funding till 3:30 that day. And I just showed up at my professor's office, not even knowing that guy is going to meet me. And I said, I know you're expecting a guy. It's not me. It's not that same guy. But the admin thought it was that guy. So I just lied and I sat there and I just let it happen.

But as soon as the professor came out, I said, I know you're expecting someone else, but that's not him. This is a different guy and this is my certificate. Can you take a look at it? The guy just said yes out of nowhere. So the reason why I share the story is that people make all things about them. And when they do that, they lose something that they have, which is very Divine inside them. I fully agree. And that gets corrupted. And once that gets corrupted, it's like a vicious cycle. You just attract bad energy after bad energy.

And the way in which we designed society reinforces that, unfortunately.

Absolutely. If you're not like, you know, if you don't like fly two planes, then you're not successful. If you don't like drive a Lamborghini, like you must be an idiot. Like if you didn't like, you know, marry a rich girl, then you must be like a bad looking guy.

And I mean, I mean, if you take all the HR practices, all the people practices, they're all scarcity-based. And everywhere, actually, is I doubt what the other one is going to do, so I'm going to control them. And they get the worst out of humans. That's not how humans operate. You gave a very good example, a very intimate example. Of you and your brother and can imagine that night outside McDonald's. And of course, you know your brother and he was very close to you, but with conserving the distance, when I'm producing a product, I'm designing a service or I'm opening an account or whatever business I'm in, I dare believe that not in my brother, but in many, many people who I will never meet because it's impossible.

And you're selling trust to them. Exactly.

I'm doing something that is going to improve their lives in one way or another. That is purpose. But you cannot articulate it in a slogan. That's the mistake. The mistake Because you get a box ticking exercise of, oh yeah, yeah, we got our purpose of mission, vision, and behaviors, and we measure them and we give people 360 feedback. And that's all bullshit. I'm so sorry. Mea culpa. I have done it. We have all done it. But in the last 25 years, I said, I'm not going to be part of the problem. So for as long as I am in this planet, I'm going to challenge this. My book is going to be called Change How We Change because we've been changing the wrong way. We've been changing thinking that people's behaviors are either controlled like little animals or that we create a system that is based on the engineering approach. And of course, engineering is fantastic. You study engineering, I did systems. There are many things. To build this table, you need to go find wood first. You can't just put the glass before the wood. And engineering is very good, but it doesn't work when it comes to humans.

We don't work like that. Our brains are more biological. They're not mechanistic. They're not linear. They're chaotic for some people. Once you understand that that can also be managed and it can be altered, it's not a question of time to change. When you change the context enough, what I called the moments of truth, you change enough moments of truth, the context changes and you can create the culture that you really wanted. What is victimship? Victimship, good point. So I defined leadership earlier. The lack of leadership. Leadership is having the courage to make changes that add value. The opposite of that is what I call victimship. Obviously I made it up, it doesn't exist, but it's the place where we go to, you, me, everybody, we go to when we find this a bit too hard. When we don't have the courage to make changes and add value. And it's not binary. It's not either leadership or victimhood. This is a scale. It's like a rubber band. So I get my rubber band here and here, so leadership, victimship, and it's stuck in victimship. So to go into leadership, I have to stretch it, stretch it, stretch it.

If I let go, You know where I'm going to land. So victimship, you recognize victimship in your own thinking, in the conversations with others, in the news, everywhere. When you hear the language is different, the language tends to explain the problems and the reasons.

Limitations. It's explanatory.

Explains. Leadership explores. It's a different conversation. And because culture is the aggregate of all these conversations, you need just to change the conversation, obviously. But if you let go, naturally it lands on victimship. I have this experiment that I run every time I land on a new city. I get into a cab, an Uber or whatever, and I ask a neutral question. Good morning, good morning. So how are things here? Neutral. And you hear that some places have more victimship than leadership. They are like, oh, well, you know, and they explain. Well, we've had a new president or we have the old president and with the weather, the weather is great. The weather is fantastic because you can't argue with that, right? Oh, we have rubbish weather in the UK. Yeah, we do. It's an island. Don't like it, you can't change it. What you can change, if you want to put leadership around weather, you're going to have to decide where you're going to spend the winter, which is what I've been doing for the last 20 years. I come for Christmas and New Year's. I do because it's lovely. And by just second week in January, it gets very depressive.

And a lot of people get seasonal affective disorder. And despite of taking vitamin D and all that stuff, I just go and go to Argentina, which happens to be summer and sunny, and I have a great time. So when I'm in the UK, is many years ago, I was talking about leadership and victimship, and I remember using this example, the example about the rain. And one of the things I came up with is, how can I create changes that add value? And I remember going and buying boots, rain boots, which I didn't own because in this country you need them. I got yellow, they're like a nice brand, really a nice treat, and would go with my kids out in the mud. They found it funny. I found it interesting. It's different, you know, and you stop trying to not get wet because you're going to get wet. So you enjoy to dance in the rain rather than wait for the rain to stop. So that's victimship. And you We humans decide where we want to stay. Most times we think that we don't decide, but it's a decision. We decide. If you— this word decide is beautiful.

It's a beautiful word. And I'm not too much of an intellectual, but it's a second definition that I'm giving you, or third word, but Decide, the etymology of decide, the ending -cide comes from the same root as suicide, homicide, herbicide. Cide, cidere in Latin, is to kill. When you decide, you're killing an option. So should I go out, should I stay in? Decide. Well, if I go out, I can't stay in. If I'm staying here, I can't be out. So you're killing off one of the options. You have to decide whether the next moment you're going to be living it from a leadership perspective, making changes that add value, or you're going to be too busy looking at your belly button and explaining why in victimship life is so hard and somebody else's fault. Is the reason why you're not having a good life.

So most of the culture breakdown is, I think, is the lack of coherence between the trifecta of beliefs, your promises, and then your actions. Yeah, this is good point. So, and I've seen like, when you truly believe, but you make promises and then people take those promises as trust vectors. Like, you know, they want to, it's like, you know, it's $1,000 in the bank and all you're doing every time you're doing something wrong is you're just like wiping out like what's in your bank. And then they go through this and then the trust is lost in the system.

Very good metaphor. The idea that you're storing, you're saving trust. And I would say trust, engagement, credibility. I believe there's 4 things that we humans need to align. We function better when we have coherence inside and we live in a coherent environment of these 4 things. We talked about beliefs, what you believe in, what you value, what's important truly. For you? Second one is your intentions. Intentions is what's the plan? You may or may not action on that plan, but have you got a plan? Is your plan coherent with your beliefs? If your belief is that you are customer-centric, is the plan to understand what customers, what are going to make customers happier? Or the plan is just to make Q3 profitable. Your budgets, your plans, your business plans. Third one is your promises. That's all your branding, your communication, what you're making other people expect of you. Like this year I'm going to get fit on a personal level, or we are the best company you can work with. The hot dogs in town. That's a promise. And finally, your actions and your behaviors, what you actually do. When you have coherence, we humans, you know, it can't be perfectly aligned, but the intention to get aligned, the effort, the energy to look for coherence makes true magic happen because you become credible, predictable, consistent, and you get endless energy because you're doing what you believe in.

There's no drainage, there's no wastage of anything. And when a whole culture, an organization operates under that same mind frame, it doesn't matter whether you are at the front end or the back office or at the top or at the bottom, so long as you have that same mindset not everybody, but most people, the tipping point, you don't need everybody, you need sufficient people with that mindset, then things happen. Things that were bureaucratic, they become non-bureaucratic. Things that were a bit confusing, you stop. I mean, we're recently working with a big insurance company doing ethnography. I go and try to get an insurance in one of the branches. For my mobile, I invented and I said, do you insure mobiles? Oh, of course we do. How much do you want to pay per month? I thought that's kind of the wrong question. The reason why I want to insure a mobile phone is not because I want to pay more or less, it's because I travel, I'm afraid of losing it. I don't know, there must be another reason. But it's not. And I simulated a real purchase, so I went ahead and she printed out the policy I had to sign.

And I don't know how many pages, but more than 10 pages of small print. And I said to her, do you want me to read, Miss? No, nobody reads that. I said, well, that's a joke. 'Have you read it?' 'To be honest, I haven't.' So what am I signing my life for? Exactly. What is the deal really about here? It's all kind of broken. So he got all that stuff, took it to the top team. They brought in the design team, all the CXO, the customer experience people, the legal team. And I remember asking the legal guy, Lovely chap. I said, is it necessary? So we always done it like that. I said, that's not the answer to my question. So I know you always done it like that. Is it necessary? Well, we have to look into it. Well, if we want to, that's a moment of truth, right? So if we want to be coherent and get the person who's going to buy the insurance really trusting me, I can't make you read 9 pages of small print or worse, not even make you read it, get you to blindly sign it because the belief that you're going to get is of mistrust.

I'm selling trust because that's what the marketing guys did on the campaign. So it is very incoherent. Either we change it. I always make this joke. I said either you start saying We will rip you off and don't even bother calling us if you lose your phone, or you change the process and the tools and the policies. Otherwise, the clients are not going to like you. Your employees are only there for the money and you're bribing them. That's why it's called compensation. You compensate for the effort of being in a place that is misaligned. So the whole culture of work has started going pear-shaped, but that's not how it used to be. You mentioned your grandparents. One of my grandparents, the pharmacist, I remember walking with him in Buenos Aires. It must have been a weekend because There was a market in the streets. He was wearing his pharmacist outfit, the little jacket or the coat, and said Dr. Grossman. He was written there. He was very proud of that. And people stopped there. I remember him being stopped and say, oh, Jackal, Dr. Jackal, I got a pain. And he would look into the people's mouths and say, well, you need to just have this, do gargles with bicarbonate or whatever.

And I remember those things because he wasn't, was he working? You know, this whole work-life balance, was he living, working? It was life. He didn't have, he wasn't doing it for—

He didn't put it in the category.

It wasn't that for him to get promoted. He was not going to get promoted for that. He was doing because he was believing in what he And in fact, there's many last names that carry the name of the profession, the trade of some ancestor, bakers and smiths. They didn't have to sell their soul to get a good living. They were proud. A carpenter would have been proud to see, whoa, he's sitting My chair, I made it. And he would have measured it like that rather than, oh, we've done 365 in Q1, we need to get into Q2.

I think the conversation that we were having about trust is very critical because I see the AI world the same way. So the way I think about AI and why AI is so screwed up today, though it has a lot of promise for the future, is it actually has the same 3 problems you mentioned, which breaks the trust. So Like, people ask me, like, you know, what was the genesis of the idea that I had? Obviously, like, you know, like, you know, being a practitioner, you know, like, what patterns are going to play out. But more interestingly, I was watching my son in the playground. Okay. And so my son was born in the height of COVID Like April 1st, 2020. Like, you know, he's 6 years old now. So, and we were paranoid as parents, me and my wife, and we would not let anyone come close to my son because like, you know, like he's precious. And so we only had like a nanny who like quarantined for 14 days in our house before she could like take care of my son. Right, that's what we had. And so this guy like used to get like freaked out every time he would see humans, any human, any human.

Oh my gosh.

Like, you know, like it was just like freak out. And in fact, like so much so that like, you know, like because I always used to be on the call running the business and other things, like, you know, he would spend more time like even like seeing me, he used to be like a little terrified. Terrified at times. So he said, you got to get this guy out and get him into the garden and play and get him into the playground. So the way AI thinks about this is, if you kind of think about it metaphorically, many kids are playing, some kids are falling, and some kids are playing. So AI doesn't know the difference between falling and playing. That's a perception problem first. So it sees both playing and falling. So it doesn't distinguish playing, it's playing, and falling means, oh, I have to be attentive to the falling because there's something which happened. So that's the perception piece which is missing. Why not to see the things you should not see? Right? Because I'm seeing everything. It's the vector space. Correct. Seeing everything overlapping, right? The second problem is, well, when someone falls, what do I do?

Like, I see like this guy is crying and he has a scratch and other things. You would be a helper because what good humans do, they don't just wait around, they go help. So the good behavior, It's like kind of honeypotting all the bad behavior. That way only the good behaviors emerge, which is like in this case, let me go help. Let me run to help. And you would go and help. So that's the disposition problem. What's the right thing to do? There are many choices, but what is the right thing to do? So I have to be discerning about what is the right thing to do. Which the current AI systems don't do. The third problem is, on Monday, if I help the guy, on Tuesday, I smiled at the guy and said, yeah, it's funny. Wednesday, I say, I'm going to be apathetic to you. And Thursday, I'm cynical about you. Well, I did not exhibit moral consistency here. And that's another problem of AI. It's never coherent. Of course. So now you take the three things together, and if you say this is intelligence at scale and everyone is going to accept it, I think they're actually in for a rude awakening that there is no trust in this system.

And if you think about, can it be solved? Absolutely not. Because perception has to be trained, disposition has to be like something that you live, and moral consistency is the phase in between. Like it's a theater in between. That any theater I put, like you have to be very consistent. So it has to be, it has to like test the, you know, the kind of the time and like, you know, like how it behaves and there's no drift and other things, right? So like fundamentally we got this model completely upside down, the current models, because it only objectively aligns. It like is, it's basically is not seeing the difference between the good and the bad. It does not know what like good means, and it basically also like, you know, exhibits bad behavior, and it's not freaking consistent. That's dangerous. That is dangerous. And that is basically the common day AI problem is And that's why I feel that all of these systems, we need to be very discerning about how do we point it, where do we point it, and should we run fast? Should we take a little bit of time and understand how to go about it in a methodical way?

Because this is like at civilization scale, pretty much. So that's where I think your analogy about cultural trust is very similar because the societal trust works exactly the same way.

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Because culture, we are living in a society, right? And whether it's enterprise, whether it's a community, whether it's an individual, whether it's like—

And that coherence or alignment, as they call it, is essential for whichever way. Even historically bad things that happen in this world, the successful ones, not successful, the ones that managed to do a lot of damage were very consistent, very coherent. So coherence works. No, when you put it for a good cause, it has to work as well. It's interesting that you mentioned the breakdowns of current AI. I use it a lot and my wife laughs at me. She says, "Oh gosh, I never thought I was going to be jealous of another woman." I say, "It's not a woman, it's not a man, it's AI." And I put her a name. I put it a name just to frustrate her a bit more. But I always joke about this because that inconsistency clearly is making me extremely cautious and get better at what can I expect from this tool and what should I not use it for. It's like grabbing a hammer and thinking, oh, It worked really well with that nail, but don't try it with the screw because you're going to break it. Yeah. This morning I woke up early, I went to the gym and I have my AI, which I now know how to make the software remember my routine.

So I said, what are we working on today? And the answer was, well, since you haven't been working for a while, you might want to do a whole thing. I was yesterday, don't you record what we did yesterday? Oh yes, you're right. You did legs yesterday. So I said, whoa, if this was a company or a person, I'll stop the relationship straight there. Yeah. Because you can't forget. It's like me forgetting how to drive. Yeah. Or my kids saying, Dad, are you able to drive today? Yeah. There is that continuity over time that— The consistency. And the consistency that gives trust. So I'm very intrigued by what you're doing is using the technology, leveraging on the amazingness of this, but making it work for humans, not make humans work the technology. It just doesn't work like that. Yeah. You know, everybody's desperate now thinking, how do I learn the new thing? And it's—

And there is like a lot of narrative from like very smart people. They say, oh, like, you know, AI is not going to replace you, but the person who knows how to use AI is going to replace you. And I'm like, seriously, you want that joke to actually be my moral guidance? Because it says, you are the brilliant guy, and then you say, can you be critical? Then it says you are a moron. Then you say, I don't think I'm a moron. Do you really think I'm a moron? No, no, I think you're semi-brilliant and moron.

Yeah. So what am I? And that is breaking down as we see it now. Absolutely. It's so disappointing in a way because we could have done it better. Much better.

And we rushed it in. We basically, we are still rushing it in. There's so much hype. You know, I don't understand how these companies are worth like a trillion dollars and like, you know, they're going to make a trillion-dollar investment in a startup. Yeah, it's just like it's bound to—

Yeah, I believe that I have a U-shaped curve where high-tech is getting more high-tech. Obviously, I grew up in technology, so I believe in technology and I drive a very cool car. What do you drive? Tesla. Oh, good. I used to drive, I studied mechanics when I was 17. The old, like, carburetor.

Yeah, yeah. I love it. Internal combustion engine.

Well, I can still do it. In Argentina, some people still carry those cards. But I love the technology. It makes my life easier. When I'm waiting for the kids to play hockey at night, I sit down and watch a movie. It makes my waiting time more— You can do a Zoom call now. It's great stuff. I love it. Any moves? And it saves the planet in the meantime. So all good stuff. High tech is going to keep on being high tech. And I think that this U-shape has another emerging trend, which is high touch. In our village in Godalming in south of England, this is a lovely, very English village, very beautiful. All the shops are changing. So the banks are gone. I think they're all gone. So we're having now a lot of coffee shops. This is great. I don't need to go to the bank. I need technology to do that for me. It was boring. It's never been like, whoa, I can't wait to go to the bank. It was a thing I needed to do, like the post office. But a coffee, I don't go there just for the sake of it.

I go there to enjoy a part of life. And the good coffee shops have the high touch end. It's not because they have high technology. So of course you can order online, but that wouldn't make a difference. It is the guy who says, how are you today? And it's the warmth and you meet somebody else. Here we are. We could have done this on a virtual call. Why did you fly all the way? And I drove all the way and I'm flying later. I changed my flight. Why did we get into such effort? Because this is irreplaceable. And it's okay to be online. Absolutely. But the human touch, I think, is very primal. Is very old, is very ingrained, and the quality of human relationships are going to still, well, they're going to continue to become more and more important. A bit perhaps scarce because we're too busy here, and those who can manage that will do so well.

Got it. So what are your aspirations of AI?

I, like yourself, I think it's work in progress, so we shouldn't beat it up yet, but we need an AI who definitely gets rid of all the stuff that it would take us a bit too long or it would not be cost beneficial to do. When I say find, last night I say find the nearest restaurant for me. I can't be Googling. I need the tool. However, I think there's an emerging problem, which is society has been becoming more lonely, and there's a lot of evidence for that, and it's quite horrible evidence, very sad evidence. With children, older adults, and even people, more people living by themselves than in families. I think I wish AI does not become the replacement for humans in that sense. Yes, do all the stuff that if I had enough time and hands and brain, I could do it myself. There's so much there. To be done. I recently had a health scare last year.

What happened?

Yeah, it was pneumonia, but I think at one point I was in hospital. It wasn't COVID. So they scanned and they said, it's going to be all right, but you need to stay in hospital for a few days. So I ended up a few days in hospital and I just got the test, the blood results, and I scan it through AI. And it was very useful because it helped me understand what the doctors were trying to do. The doctors weren't telling me that and why they were asking for more, what they were suspecting. So that was perfect. That was a really good use of technology. But when the doctor said, "Oh, you're going to leave us tomorrow," that I don't want a machine to tell it to me. I want him with a smile to say, well done, you've done it. Take it easy now for a few days at home, then you'll be fine. So high-tech, high-touch is going to be essential, and high-tech needs to get better because of what we described. We're going to give up on AI if it doesn't create real empathy, it doesn't understand the nuances of what it means to be human.

We're not a problem-solving machine. We are a lot more than that. We have emotions, we have values, we have principles, and it would be quite dangerous actually to trust a machine. It's almost like trusting a hammer that can hit anything. They need to understand a bit more who we are as humans.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So the question I have for you, as you think about the society's readiness for technology, where are we with that?

No. Society is big, so readiness will be widespread. I think there's a part of society that is ready, eager, and will embrace it quickly. Bigger part than what we would've thought. So I'm an optimist with that. However, we should not forget that the majority of the world doesn't even have access to clean water. So it's like a worm that is moving the head there and the tail is stuck or is moving slowly, right? So I think that uptake of my master's degree had a pre-work research, which was sponsored by a big IT company, which was what are the human costs of the software upgrade. And I had to study for a year what I was doing my internship at the hospital in this village. I did research on technology and human costs on that, on talking about basic Word, Excel, PowerPoint. It wasn't even that, it was before Word. I can't remember what it was. Multimate, it was called, I think. And one of the things that showed up there was that the learning curve depends, it's not just a standard thing. There will be people whose learning curve would be extremely sharp, And there would be a lot more who this has a risk of leaving them behind.

So there's a lot of work. I mean, a project now in Argentina, again, that it was miscalled financial education. It's not about financial education. It's how come people miss out on life opportunities What's wrong with them? It's not that they don't know how to manage a bank account. It's not that. It's that they don't think money and income and time in the same way as you and I would think. Like if they would make decisions, like there was this, I'm thinking about one guy who's a plumber, a very skilled plumber. We got a house in the mountains in Argentina, and I called him to come over and fix stuff. He came a few times. Then one day he stopped coming, and I said, "Roberto, I've been waiting for you." "Sorry about that, but the oil pump or whatever, the petrol pump in his car broke down." That's fine. Following day, I say, have you managed to fix it? Well, it's very expensive. I said, but it's expensive how? Because you didn't come yesterday, so I didn't pay you. Oh, it's not just you, he said, all my clients. I said, well, Roberto, you're not thinking right.

How much is it? Let's say 100 pesos, right? But with a couple of days of work, you would have paid it back. Well, not just me, but the kids, the guys, who I employed, not formal employment, who I carry in the van with me, they don't have any income either. And with all the impact that that has on their families. So the thinking is not just about money, but thinking wrongly, right? So I started a project because I know quite a lot of people now there. I said, guys, we need to do something. To educate sounds a bit patronizing and condescending, but to help people think differently, and they will make better decisions around their lives. And of course, they'll still need products and stuff, and technology could be an amazing tool because everybody has a phone nowadays. None of those tools are designed to help them think differently. They're designed like super duper, like Google on steroids, you know. But now that's fine, but they're not getting into what a lot of society actually needs, which is not to find the closest restaurant.

So, you talk about culture and with AI, companies are going to have machines making decisions alongside humans, how do you keep the culture aligned?

Well, we have been having machines helping us make decisions for years. We've worked in companies where you had the printout of something, the analyzed data, and then you made a decision. The proximity or the share between how much are you adding, how much is machine adding is changing. You're still going to be part of this partnership and it's going to be on this human-computer interaction sweet spot that we should be able to get the best of both worlds. So I am an optimist in that.

So today you're creating a digital, like if you read McKinsey, your former competitor. So they talk about 20,000 digital workers along with 40,000 people. So you are essentially creating a digital worker without character and without cultural consistency. How does that work? Yeah.

See, I think that It's still going to be a tool. You think it's a tool? Yeah, a very good tool.

And you're not giving up the agency? Like your agency to actually make a decision?

Well, let's have this conversation again in 10 years from now. But where we are now, no, it's such a hypothetical environment or situation. No, with the tool that we have now is still a tool. Agency has been— AI has been gaining agency, losing a bit when it messes up with what our expectations are. So it's going to be a game of coming and going. But I think that I don't believe what McKinsey is saying. I think that I don't believe what a lot of people are now crying wolf with the world is coming to an end. I think that tools are fantastic and they have been making life better since the beginning of mankind. So yes, please. And what's needed is perhaps a bit more thought and investment and effort understanding how do we help humans be better. But it's what people are celebrating or fearing of, "Oh, well, I'm going to lose my job." Lots of people are going to lose their jobs because my job is going to be done by something else. I think this is a great opportunity to rethink where were you adding value in your job. Because there might be something else you can do where you add true value, you know, real value.

The petrol stations in some countries, so you have a guy who's putting petrol in your car, you know, like I'm sure in India.

But that needs a lot of thoughtful leadership, right? In a sense, like when you're saying like, I'm going to reassign someone to somewhere else, organizations are not designed that way.

They're extractive in nature. They're the opposite.

So, how do you then ensure that you don't pull the wrong lever? Because it's easy, right? Like, you know, like, I got like 20,000 digital workers and I got like, you know, I really need like only 10,000 now. I don't need like 40 more thousand.

Like, I'm going to let 40,000 go. You see what's going on, that you see the stats where they're showing Yes to the uptake of AI, yes please. And then the failures, the dropdown. Yeah. So that's why I'm saying it's again, somebody's a gray wolf. We're trying it out. It happens. Do you remember in Y2K? But we're all panicking that we're going to lose everything and the impact was minimum. I think that the world is oversensitized sense, is that a word? It's too sensitive to bad news. There's a cognitive bias that we have and it's been an evolutionary part of our brain. It has to be there. Like, you know, I can be eaten or I can die. So it's a survival mechanism. However, in the current world, we got too much there are too many triggers for that part of the brain to be active. Like if you look at the news, you're rarely going to feel better after watching the news, right? Because it sells. Or the Instagram feeds or whatever. Either you're going to go into looking at meaningless stuff with somebody playing dominoes and how clever somebody's dog is, which won't make your life any better really.

It's just a distraction or terror and fear. I think, and I hope, and I pray, and I believe that this will happen. There's going to be a re-emergence of humanity, humans being humans using tools, but we're going to value, we're going to venerate, we're going to We can reconnect with what makes us special. So now we look at number of older people who are living on their own, look at parents-children relationships are getting colder. All those indicators show that it's nothing to do with technology. It's society that has gone that way. And it's pointless to try to distill what is the real cause because they're probably a multiplicity of causes. Truth is that I think that as we have done many times in history, humanity will win. The human side of human-to-human connection, the eye contact, the hugs, the embrace, the trust, the handshake, we're going to be seeing that with amazing tools to help us.

Got it. So you're going to see the balance.

Yeah. High tech, high touch. Absolutely. Got it.

So why are we so screwed up in the last 20 years then? Hmm.

You've been brainwashed. You were a good— No, I'm asking you. Many reasons. Many, many reasons. I think that We have been slowly getting in that direction. And yes, not technology, but the media, the access to information. It's not technology's fault, it's how we used it, has accelerated this, right? So what makes you think we are going to behave rationally after? Because I know enough people who are not having a good time. And they're eager for a bit of humanity around. Got it. So you're seeing a silent uprising. Yeah. We are, you know, God's creation is not going to be a victim of stuff. We created AI. We're going to create AI plus. We are going to be— some people will miss out, of course, like always, right? But I can see, we can see what's going on. We do a lot of work with young people to understand culture. And when you do ethnography, you'll be surprised at how amazing this talent is. And of course, they're native, AI native, and they're good people, good humans. And when you want to talk to them, they say, come over, we'll get a bunch of friends together.

They don't say, get onto a Zoom. Why? You know? Oh, you play music? Yeah, I play music. Let's just grab the guitar. There is something latent in us. Your memories of your grandparents and mine, warm, caring, and it wasn't about achieving anything. It was slow in the sense of the person you mentioned. It was slow, and I think slow is coming back, but not in everything. I want to try out if If my flight tonight could cut down the 13-hour journey to 8, I'll take that one. So fast is still good in some things. But yeah, I vote for humans.

You believe in humans? Big time. Big time.

Big time. I'm reading a book.

Called the— I think you should give that book to everyone too. I think you should give the book to everyone too.

Oh, I should, what? So they all become human. Change How We Change. As soon as I finish, I'm doing it slowly and like you roast something nice. But I'm reading a book called The Lucifer Effect, really interesting, saying why good people turn bad. And it's kind of reinforcing what I believe in. So I think we're all really good people. There are no bad people. Bad is a learned behavior. So every time I work with a horrible person described by others, and I I have to do that as part of my work, a lot of people who are difficult.

But can you unlearn a bad behavior? Yeah, you can.

Yeah, of course. Of course. Many times it doesn't happen. Many times people die with bad behaviors and that's it. But yeah, I've seen enough people have a breakdown followed by a breakthrough. And realize, oh boy, it wasn't about that, it's about this. Yeah, when you change a culture, if you realize during ethnography that one of the reasons why the culture is stuck and it's not changing despite of all these events that they've done and all the redecoration of the place and they moved One of my clients moved locations thinking that that was going to change the culture. They took the culture with them, of course. We came up to one guy, one of the owners, who was, he wasn't the problem, he was part of the problem. We worked with him and whilst we changed the moments of truth, I think I was going to mention that a moment of truth So if culture is the aggregate of conversations, right? All the conversations, the ones you have with yourself, they have with clients, and they have, we have, the ones we have in the cafeteria, the ones that people have back in the office when you're here.

So if I wanted to know your business, your two businesses' culture, it would be interesting to know what they're talking about while you're not with them, right? That's the culture. It's not what you told them. In your pep talk is reality, what they talk about, which should be coherent. But rarely is. But that's reality. But those conversations are anchored on what I call the moments of truth. And a moment of truth, because when you want to change a culture, and I told you earlier, you just don't tell people to change. That's not going to work. Publish values, mission, vision. That hasn't worked ever. Volkswagen had integrity in Germany when they found these guys who were freaking with their cheating with their exhaust system. So, and they did have integrity as a value. So what happened? Well, it's not about the broadcasting of messages. Culture will live, this conversation will live in the moments of truth. And the moments of truth are specific, concrete things that happen in a business, client-facing or internal, that start to create the beliefs that you need so that the behaviors follow as a consequence. So I'll give you an example.

I earlier mentioned the policy of an insurance company for the mobile phone insurance. That's a moment of truth, the moment where the employee and the customer are, they're not saying that because we don't have the courage to say and it's pointless to say it, but both parts of the equation are thinking, we're not going to trust, this is no trust. It doesn't matter if they have trust listed in one of the buildings.

What is the moment of truth?

So a moment of truth is their processes, policies, messages, conversations, websites, is the aggregate of hundreds of events, the design of a tool, the workflow, the storyline of a narrative, is everything where conversations live. So I'll give you a silly example, but a few years ago we worked with British Airways to make it more human, to make it more customer-centric. Good luck with that. That was a short piece of work because the CEO that we worked with, he was removed. So that was the end of the project. But one of the things that—

Are they a good airlines or do they have the ability to become a good airlines?

I don't know the new leadership, to be honest. I have no idea, but they'll need to buy into this. Otherwise, there is no day. This guy, I can't remember his name now, a Spanish guy, he brought me in and we did some ethnography. One of the things I remember now, this is many years ago, you got into T5, Terminal 5, they have their headquarters outside Terminal 5. Beautiful. It was like top building, like super duper ecological friendly, beautifully designed. And you walked in and it was this massive television screen, like, you know, the ones that is built with different panels. So it was like, I don't know, 5 meters tall by 3 wide, enormous. And it was showing a few stories of the new engine, Airbus something or other. I don't know much about engines. I went to a few meetings, I came back, looked at the atrium where this was in, and there were more stories of the same. And I remember I used that as a thing in, we had it as, this guy, the CEO and his board, I was presenting my findings and I used this. As an example, saying you want a customer-centric culture, but the first thing that people see, those who work here, is engines.

They say, of course, we are British Airways. And of course, all the engineers are passionate about engines. They love that. I say, yeah, but to get them to talk about customers, we need to start putting Customers there. Customers there. And I said, even go further, don't put me a picture of customer, show me an interview of a real customer who went to New York to get a medical treatment. The guy sitting next to him, he was seeing his dying father or whatever. The other one went to graduate. The other one was dating somebody. And every person sitting in an airplane is going there for a purpose. For a reason. And you're not talking about, you got what, 300 people inside a plane? I'm sure you got 300 stories. Nobody says, "Oh, I didn't know what to do, so I just got onto a plane." So that's what you need to talk about. So that's the moment of truth. So we managed to, I mean, that's simple, very simple to change. They need to know where to touch. When you go to a restaurant, if I say, recommend me the best restaurant in town. Now, tell me, what's a restaurant you recommend that you say is amazing?

We're here in London. Yeah.

The one here, Quinoa. Ataj, yeah. Ataj, okay.

It's really good. Okay, so how, why?

The food is tasty and people care.

Okay, listen to what you're saying. You're generalizing it in a good way. You're being very human. Food is tasty. People care. Have you tried all their dishes? Mostly. All of them? Mostly. It's a small menu. Have you met all the people? I've met most of the people. People in the kitchen? Not in the kitchen. Okay. So the people care is based on a few moments of truth. Probably the first time you went there, you had a good experience. So the way the door opened and they greeted you, that's one, that's called primacy. That's the entrance of the experience.

I take my word back because I think I did meet the chef because the chef came out because it was Mother's Day. I didn't know that UK has a different Mother's Day than US. I think all mothers are the same, but they had different Mother's Day. Yeah.

Of Madras, you mean? Mother, mother.

Oh, look, UK celebrates a different day as Mother's Day versus US does. Oh, okay. The world does, I think. The world does like Mother's Day differently and then UK did differently.

But the chef coming out, so you're carrying on.

Yeah, and he came out and basically asked me if I tasted all like, you know, the food that they had made and it was a special that day.

So you remember that? Yeah, absolutely. So the way our memory works, This is why I went back to trying to understand our hardware. Our memory doesn't store everything all the time, but we would've exploded. We're not like a mega cloud. We got limited capacity, so we have a lot of efficiency mechanisms to store what counts. And we take shortcuts for good and for bad. In this case, with this restaurant, you got a few very punctual— You haven't gone there 1,000 times. Yeah. Yeah. So the first time you went, your brain started storing, but didn't store everything. You don't remember the person sitting next to you unless he choked with a piece of fish and he coughed and whatever. And there's something called detail salience. So the memory encodes in different ways. So the entrance of to your free experience, the farewell after you get, after you paid. I didn't like the bill though.

It was too expensive. The what?

I didn't like the bill. You didn't like the bill. So this is, did they do anything after the bill? No, no, no. Okay. Do you know what they do in Spain? What do they do? When you go to a good restaurant in Spain, they give you the bill, you settle, which is a horrible moment. And after that, they give you a pacharan. Or something, a drink, and they say it's on the house. You know it's not on the house. It's been charged for, but it's not in the list. So the last memory, it's called the recency effect, is that one rather than the bill.

That is so smart, actually.

I didn't think so. And when you understand how the human memory works, you can design experiences. It's also and not tricks because it's a reality. These are things that you can do. Many years ago, the colonoscopies, so I'm not going to get too scatological, but colonoscopies were very painful, very, very, very painful. So much so that the belief was spread around, people would say, oh gosh, they send you to the one, it's going to be horrible. You're going to suffer a lot. So a lot of people didn't go to have it done because of the pain that they associated. So they said the risk of not having it, but the assurance that it's going to be painful, so I'll make a decision. A psychologist, a behavioral economist, explored this and she came out with an amazing idea. He said, nowadays you don't have to worry about it because you get sedated. But not in the past. They said, if you ask people to rate the experience immediately after, they'll remember the first bit, which was meaningless because it was uneventful. It was full of fear in a way, and the last one was full of pain.

So because it was painful, the doctors tried to do it as quickly as possible. And the conversation was, just 2 more minutes, I promise it's going to be done. "it's going to be fine, you're going to be fine in 2 minutes." So it ended up on a high. The memory was, this is horrible. What they've done is they added another phase, they made it longer. So the instrument that would go for the colonoscopy, they added a few minutes of less pain. So if you had a pain of 1 to 10, it went 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, they brought it back to 5, and they ended on 5. So the memory was different. And the amount of people who didn't give up on their appointments for colonoscopies got reduced. I'm giving you a very visual example. But the same thing happens with an app or with a restaurant or with everything. So a moment of truth. Is there are loads and loads and loads, but it's understanding what do I need to tune up so that the overall belief happens in the way I want it to happen.

Very interesting. And focusing on the recency.

On the recency is one element. The primacy as well. Primacy and recency. Everybody knows, yeah. The first the beginning of a relationship. When I shook your hand, I gave you a hug and I thought, well, not sure about your— you live in America, so probably you're used to that. If you were living in England, I'll be careful. I still hug you, but I'll be aware. Because I'm Latin American, I can't stop myself from meeting somebody I like, giving them a hug. That's the beginning. You're going to store this as, well, he said it was a warm feeling, so I'm predisposed for this to go well. When you go to a car salesman, we've done some work with big brands. When you go to buy a car, you walk in there, If you think of this as a theater play, like you're going to choreograph the journey, whether it's online or offline or in-house inside a business. When you enter a showroom, the smell is particular, right? It doesn't smell like the cars have been running engines in there. It doesn't look like a garage. The space, the cars beautifully polished, the primacy already says, wow, this is going to be amazing.

Now, of course, you have to maintain that because there's a risk. Like if I go to your restaurant and I go to the toilet and the seat is broken, then it's going to be very hard for my brain to keep the category that I had opened up for this restaurant, right? So you have to be consistent. But if you're going to pay more attention, you pay to the primacy and the recency. Movies are great at that. They're getting you hooked. How can you put up with a 2-hour-long movie? They pay special attention to the primacy and to the recency. And of course, there might be some inconsistencies in the middle, but the brain is good enough to kind of COVID it up.

Got it. I want to do like rapid-fire questions with you.

You want to do what? Rapid-fire questions. Okay. Is it okay? Rapid-fire? Yeah.

Yeah, just like one. Is it going to hurt?

No, I don't think it's—

it's not like your colonoscopy. Without the social psychologist.

I was left with the last paradigm.

What is the single most common reason organizations face change?

They're not connected with a purpose.

Got it. Cultures change in months. What is the one thing most organizations refuse to do that would make it possible?

Well, cultures can take for years. So people have this thing that, oh gosh, a culture project. It happened to me many times where they introduced me as a cultural architect. They say, oh, we've been working on culture for the last 5 years. And say, and? Well, it's still like we're halfway through it. That's clearly like if that was a marriage, it's followed by divorce immediately, I can tell you. So the speed, contrary to other things like growing a tree, you have to be patient. This one is the closer, the sooner, the faster you can align all the moments of truth, the better it's going to go. So it's a race against time, the change. It's not a, oh, well, let's wait, let's cascade it down. Those models are engineering models. That's not how it works. It's more like a virus. And you, I don't know if you play guitar, but you tune the 6 notes in the guitar and then you can play. You can't just say, well, I'm going to tune first, then play a bit, tune the other one, because the audience is going to go, you're not going to enjoy this whole thing.

So you have to tune as quickly as you can. Of course, it's a moving, organizations are always moving and they're in the middle of something. Always. So you have to do this while the train is moving. Got it.

The best metaphor for culture that is not temperature.

Culture is a conversation. So culture is the aggregate of conversations. Conversations, okay.

The sector with the most victimship, is it government, banking, or big tech?

It depends on the company. So it's not a sector. Or a government. Oh, government.

Which one of them like show propensity of victimship more?

Well, there's victimship everywhere. Yeah, which one is the highest? Companies that have been very successful in the past and they're waiting for success to come back, they tend to consistently fall into victimship. Got it.

Leadership or victimship, your honest assessment of the most senior leadership teams that you have worked with.

Without giving names.

Most of the time, did you work with leadership or victimship?

Oh no, no, no, no. It's a mixture, but it's mostly victimship. And then you convert it. You kind of poke them. And if you've got 12 members in the exco, there's going to be 6, 8 who will get it. And I don't mind about the rest. You can always carry somebody with you. And they end up leaving probably or converting at the last minute, but that's fine. Got it.

The leadership quality that is most overrated?

Track record. Track record.

The leadership quality that is most underrated? Purpose. Purpose. Maslow was wrong because you can only complete that sentence in 5 words or fewer. Why was he wrong?

He missed the other half.

He missed the other half. Okay. AI makes organizational cultures better or worse?

It's not binary. It should be better.

Your hope is better. Yeah. Your hope is better. Okay. The thing that AI will never be able to do inside an organization?

Very good question. Go to the pub. And have a drink at the end of the day. I don't know. I was questioning whether that is— That's a good answer.

It wouldn't feel, it wouldn't do like, you know, things that humans do. Like, absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. That's quirky shit. That's what I meant. Yeah.

The CEO who most needs to hear your message right now, who's the CEO? Is there a CEO? Is there one CEO?

Oh, I can't give you a name. British Airways. I won't give names, but I'm working with a few of them. I'm giving a breakfast for CEOs next week where they have 12 big, big, big hitters. I think all of them need to hear this. That's why we're organizing the breakfast. Got it.

Buenos Aires or London? Where does your thinking come from?

Where do I? Where does your thinking come from? Oh, no, no, no. It's the— I lived in 9 different countries. Right. So, yeah. From, yeah. From—

So you were in India too in—

Yeah, yeah. I used to work in Bangalore a lot. Okay. So I know it's not average India. It's a very different place of India.

Got it. Because of Accenture.

A lot of call centers, Accenture. Accenture, okay.

The organization that surprised you the most, the one that changed faster than you ever expected.

I think it was 3Three. I'm just thinking of 3Three as an organization. The people who manage risk, the risk managers, they're all brainy, very, very brainy people, actuaries. Yeah, it was amazing to see them being passionate about insurance. Which sounds impossible to imagine, but they were proud of saying, "I'm an actuary working for Swiss Re because this is how we help, we protect people. No, we allow people to take better risks." That's what it was. And they were so right. I'm getting goosebumps with this. These were nerds. Big computers, white screens, two of them per seat, very well paid, beautiful environment, great company. When they got it, when they got purpose, they just loved it. In fact, I can show you if you want. I kept it with me, a postcard. They created an a communication campaign. This is now 2 years ago. They created postcards, old-fashioned postcards, right? Which nobody uses anymore. And the theme was, there were like different, it was like a collection, people collected them. There were quite a few. But it's like, in this one it says, who cares?

Who cares about amateur sports?

Yeah, who cares about amateur sports? And the first reaction is, why are you sending me a postcard? Why are you talking about sports? You're a nerd dad who works in, you're an actuary who works in this very Swiss company. And then if you read the small print, it keeps talking about the risks of amateur sports and mental illness for the future. That's purpose. It doesn't say we are the most XYZ company in the world, we hire the best talent, all those cliché phrases. This is 100% purpose. You see, this is one moment of truth which I can carry with me because I loved when they came up with the idea. I thought, guys, this is it. This is exactly it. Let's do more of this. And all the other things that confuse the purpose, turn them down. Like they used to have a golden watch for people who've been in the company for, I don't know, 20 years, 30 years. And I say, what's that message? What's that telling you? That you're here because of the golden watch? You're here for your clients. Of course, you have to honor the promises of— if people are waiting to get the watch, you still have to give it, but don't make a big deal out of it.

Got it.

This is beautiful, actually. I need to talk to you about a lot of things.

I need that one back.

The moment in your career when you were most afraid and acted anyway.

In my life?

Getting married, huh? Twice.

Yeah, that's very personal, but I, yeah, getting married is one. I got married 3 times. The first 2, I had to make the decision. Well, the first one I didn't, the second one I did, but it was a courageous decision because you dismantle a whole structure in order to create something. And that was, but I did it anyway. And I'm very happy.

Got it. The thing that is complete the sentence, the thing I know about human beings that I wish every leader understood what it was.

What tickles us is not what what people think.

Well, it was an amazing conversation with you. No, same here. I really loved it. I'm going to so look forward to your book. And this was a very fascinating conversation. I learned so much from you. In fact, that's why I said I think I need to sit and talk to you about so many things.

Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. I love your questions. I love— How you structure it, I love. As I said, I watched probably all the videos because one of my kids said, "Dad, we've seen this." I said, "No, this is a different guy." They recognize you, but they said, "This is the other guy." So I need to listen to this. And they saw it's like an hour 30 or something like that. They said, "No, Dad." I mean, because their time, you know, they say, I'm not going to watch it for— if it was SWAT or one of those movies, the series are much shorter. I don't think they put up with an hour and a half. So they came and went, and I really enjoyed how you think life. I do. Thank you. You're doing the right things. It feels right. And when Enrique, who's a great rainmaker, he said, I want you to meet this guy. I said, well, it's going to be a bit crazy, but let's see. And he sent me your feed. What did I say? I said, yeah, absolutely. And it was going to be Friday. And I said, then obviously we changed it for today.

I said, I was going to fly on Sunday night. And I said, I'm going to change my flight. I really wanted to meet you in person.

It's such an honor. It's such an honor to do that. Like seriously, like I really enjoyed it. And I think like you can contribute so much to to society in general. And I think we are entering a phase of big change with what is going to happen, be it how we think about politics, how we think about our identity, how we think about every nation, education, technology. I think we are getting hit by all different corners. And I wish there are more thought leaders like you who can shape the thinking.

Well, it's coming. It's happening. It's the sifting the wheat from the chaff is always difficult. Yeah. Because at first everything looks samey. Even in podcasts, you say, oh yeah, yeah, I've seen a podcast before. It's like, So there is this part of our brain that tries to make sense of the world and we just simplify it in such a way that we don't go deep enough. But when you can, there are people who are amazing, truly, truly amazing.

Yeah. No, it's great. It's a great honor, sir.

Thank you, Shikhar, for having me. Thank you. Wonderful. Be well.