Emotional Intelligence| Chief Operations Officer for Pressbooks, Başak Büyükçelen (Podcast 284)

Practice stoicism, man. I try to practice it every day now, but I think the younger, the earlier you start to understand, to deal with your emotions. You become a better person, you become a better future manager, you become a better colleague.

Today we have the pleasure of speaking with a true visionary in the tech world. Join us as we dive into the world of pressbooks with none other than Bashak Boyuk Sullen, the incredible COO behind this open sourced SaaS platform. Basic's passion for innovation and forward thinking leadership is evident in everything she does, from her unorthodox hiring practices to her office rent offsets for company retreats. She's a global citizen with business experience spanning Turkey, Canada and Mexico, and she's here to share her journey and insights with us. With a focus on employee wellbeing, PressBooks has implemented a company wide four day, eight hour workweek, a revolutionary concept in the tech industry. And Basic knows that productivity gains gains can actually come from an employee retention rather than just simply working longer hours. But it's not all about work for basic. She's also a pro at navigating cultural differences from hiring offshore talent as cultural additions to managing the drinking culture in Korean companies. And she's got some inspiring insights to share about her daily stoicism practice and how it helped her recover from corporate burnout. So, Basak, welcome to the Second Command podcast.

Hi Cameron, thanks for having me.

Nice to see you again. Why don't we just dive right into what pressbooks is? You're the COO of a really cool organization. Tell us a little bit about pressbooks so we know where we can go. I already got a bunch of questions I know, I'm going to ask you too.

Pressbooks is a SaaS platform. We're actually open source or an open source SaaS platform where you can come in and publish your book. Originally, we started as a company that, you know, if you have a book that you want to publish by yourself without the involvement of a, of a traditional publisher, you could come in, pay us a fee and publish your book and you know, put it on Amazon or wherever you like. But we actually shifted quite a bit, especially in the last five years and we now almost primarily serve educational institutions. So educators will come to us, they will create their content, they will adapt the content that we have, they will share the content that they have seen and it allows them to share these textbooks with students so that students don't have to necessarily pay hundreds of dollars per textbook. So we're quite popular in especially the open educational resources Land where the idea is that you give the, the textbook to the student. But it's not only that we connect to learning management systems. We have interactive quizzes that you can build. So it really allows the educator to build their own books, Use the books that we have to allow the students to understand do I really understand the context and the content so they can go and do their quizzes. As a professor, you can say, I don't want to grade a quiz. Send me the results automatically. We will connect your learning management system and we will say, here are the quizzes that your student has done and the student even has a choice to send the best results if they've done the test multiple times. So we're a mission driven organization, to say the least.

Who pays? How do you make your revenue?

It's the universities that pay us. We don't charge the student. And we have a sliding scale pricing system where if you're a small university with little funds, we say you can start by $5,000 and you can go all the way up to $100,000 or more, depending on how many students you have, how many books you want to create, how many people are going to use the system. So, you know, we talk about that when you come to us and we see what your needs are and then we'll give you a pricing.

I would think that prior to two years ago, building out an LMS and building out quizzes and building out testing and building out, it would have been expensive. I have a feeling like you're probably starting to leverage AI.

AI we haven't even touched yet, but now is such a big topic because it's not to use AI. But actually there's a big fear in the educational space where professors are thinking, how do I know if this essay was written by an AI? How do I know this test was? Especially if you're doing like online quizzes and stuff, there's a lot against that. Not to say we don't want to leverage it, but I think there's also the other point where there's this genuine fear. You know, you're, you're this professor, you get just given homework and said, do this essay. Now how do you know if that essay is actually genuinely written by the student? So there are ways now of thinking, how do we find ways to encourage authentic learning and authentic experiences? So the way we have been connecting to learning management systems and doing all these quizzes, there are all these systems in place that we do leverage, that we do use and then rebuild our own. But I Think AI is now becoming such a hot topic. I mean, it's been around for a while, but with ChatGPT coming on now, it's like alarms for everyone everywhere, right? So now we're hearing this, you know, professors have this fear that, you know, how do we know how much of this is genuine learning and how do we make sure that students use it to their leverage to actually learn and master their, their, their knowledge as opposed to just cheating the system?

Whereas my son is saying right now, is it cheating the system when this is a tool we're going to be using for the next 50 years? Maybe I'm learning how to use a system that's going to become necessary. And yes, absolutely got a point. Like it's kind of like me telling my kids they have to learn how to type. And my kids, like, I've been typing my whole life. Like I had to go to typing class, my kid just started typing. Like, how did you learn? He goes, I don't know, the keys are right in front of me. I'm like, you said something that intrigued me and that you said you're an open source SaaS company.

Open source means that the code that we have, the systems that we have are available. You can go grab our infrastructure, our coding system from GitHub, you can use it. Let's say you're a university, you have your own infrastructure, you have your own DevOps team and, and they want to take PressBooks as a product and they want to implement it in their campus. They can do so completely for free. We don't charge them. As a matter of fact, we support them because we want. Open source also means you have all these contributors who can come in and contribute to your code and they can make the product better. That said, we also have to make a living because we are a team. We want to be able to, you know, like pay our people. We will generate revenue. So that's where the paying customer comes in for multiple reasons. A, they don't want to go through the hassle of keeping the infrastructure secure. They don't want to hire this person who's going to maintain it. They just come to us and say, I will buy your system. I know you're hosting it, you're in charge of keeping it secure. And then there are some features that we can say, we're just going to do this for people who are paying us the extra fee as like an additional add on. That's where the revenue numbers come in. That's why people come to us. We've Actually even had open source users who've been using Pressbooks and they've been hosting it themselves for years. And they said, if we just had enough, can you just do it for us? We'll come pay you. And we're like, gladly.

You've got a fascinating kind of backstory. Let's go into some of your backstory before you got to be the CEO.

Yeah.

You originally from Turkey, you're now sitting in Mexico, but you've been living in Montreal, Canada, where.

Yes.

Goal. Walk us through that journey.

I'm originally from Turkey and my, my first job was at a bank and then I started working for LG Electronics. It was a great learning experience, but I felt like I didn't want to be in Turkey. I just wanted to be somewhere else. And I don't think it's a unique experience. There are many people, that's why there are so many immigrants. They want a better life. But I also happened to not be happy at the job where I had to like wear a suit and, and you know, go into the office and fit in this like kind of Persona that I had to fit into. And I was like, I want something better. And I ended up applying to Vancouver Film School. Actually in, in Vancouver because I found that they were, they were just starting this program called Entertainment Business Management. And I was like, oh, I want to be in films. Like I not in be in films but I actually be in the film industry. And I said, I have background in finance and maybe I can be a line producer where I can, you know, do budgets for films and stuff. So that dream started, moved to Vancouver, studied at Vancouver Film School and then I was like, nah, I don't want to do budgets. I want to make films. I actually ended up making films, writing them, directing them, producing them. And I had a short lived for reasons outside of my control and I'm not going to get into it here. The short lived directing career and it was just incredible. Five years of, you know, write films, produce films, go to festivals, you know, it was fascinating. Then I had to leave Turkey. So at this point I'd come back to Turkey after studying in Vancouver, come back to Turkey, do all of that. And I said, okay, I need to get the hell out of here. Within that period I had applied through the federal skilled worker program to become an immigrant, a permanent resident in Canada. That took a long time because it always does. Takes you, costs you a lot of money, takes a long time. I was like, okay, I'm going to move to Canada. And I ended up Visiting Montreal. And I said, no, no, no, I'm not living in Vancouver. This is the place I want to be found. Like Montreal was the melting pot of like Europe and North, North America. The problem was I spoke zero French. So I was like, okay, go back to school, study French, learn French. Okay, now I'm ready to work. And I started applying for jobs and I was like, whoa, nobody's hiring me. Why? Like I have a great, great resume. I'm a well traveled, well spoken person. I'm fluent in English, I bilingual. There's a lot that I can bring to the table. And yet six months and no one will call me for an interview. I now understand as someone who does hiring, now I understand why there's always the fear that someone from another country, someone from another culture is not going to sit well with your culture. They're not going to understand the intricacies of some stuff. There will be all sorts of like, maybe there might be misunderstandings, but there's so many ways to get around that. And bringing different people will only enrich your culture.

Yeah.

So now pressbooks. We go out of our way to bring these immigrants in. We actually pay for their lawyers, we pay for their visa applications. We do it for them so we can bring this talent that will only make us a better company.

You're bringing skilled people in from other countries into Canada. What's process? You mentioned it. Something like Van Hack.

We started working with a company called VanHack Technologies. They're basically a typical recruiting company with an additional let us hire these people for you and help you bring them into Canada. So when you pay Vanhack, when you pay the typical 15, 20% recruiting percentage that you would normally pay any other recruiter, they have cut their margins enough that they actually that fee that you paid to them and goes to their lawyers and their immigrant consultants where they do the application for you that this person that you want to hire from Argentina, from Brazil, from Mexico, whatever that might be from Dubai, they bring them, they apply on behalf of you, or you do it with them in a way and you get into an agreement with federal government of Canada. And then depending on what your province is, we have one with Quebec where we say we're going to bring these three people because we can't find this talent in Montreal. Full stack developers, DevOps engineers, whatever that might be. And in exchange I say the next three hires or four hires that I'm going to make are going to be local permanent residents or citizens. So you say I'm giving back to the society to the Canadian taxpayers by creating more jobs for them. So I know the next sales, marketing, customer support people that we're hiring, we will do it from Canada. You also go into a negotiation with, with the government and say in exchange for bringing these people, we're going to create knowledge transfer programs. You brought this person because they, they have, they hold this particular knowledge, whatever technical field that they work in and they will come and train the rest of your team. So you now hold this knowledge and when that Canadian folk that you've hired as a, as a junior PHP developer goes elsewhere, they've now been trained. This is not so well known. Like this is. I'm fascinated that this is not a program that we're all not doing.

And I love that your, your approach to it came from something that you felt and saw and then you kind of reached out and found a different solution for it. It also clearly helps your organization. But can you walk me through one other thing? If we're a company based in Canada, based in the us, based wherever, and we have that weird bias that we would like to overcome, which is that bias against hiring a foreigner, how do we interview and know that they are going to be a good helping fit or they are going to have the right skill set? I get so tired of chatting with these taxi drivers who are engineering degree or they're a taxi driver, they're a doctor back in their foreign country. What the heck are you doing driving a taxi? So how do we, how do we screen them and know that they are going to be a great fit? What do we do to give ourselves the comfort that you know what these are? These are diamonds in the rock. We're crazy not to be hiring.

Exactly. Well, so you do your regular screening process. You have to have a very good hiring process in place. What I also find is we do cultural interviews and often you should call them cultural ad interviews. You're not going to fit somebody into your culture. You're trying to add more to your culture by bringing these different people from different backgrounds, let's say. But it's not just the hiring. Cameron, I think where we are forgetting that is super important to do is to train ourselves to read. How does someone from a different culture behave? One of the reading assignments and one of the training assignments that we have on our onboarding process is you have to go through a training that we provide. We actually pay for it. Where you learn how people from different cultures behave. Now you can't generalize a culture and say people from Japan behave this way people from Brazil behave this way. But there's so many traits there that you start catching on that if you train your people in understanding those clues, when you, when you work with someone from a different culture and start understanding that it is a cultural difference, you start embracing that and you start using that to your leverage. If you, let's say in this, there's a book that I always recommend that read the cultural map. We always say, read this book and you're going to understand why this colleague from the US will end up a call in this specific way where this call from Brazil will actually not going to ask you many questions because you know, understanding of different hierarchies. So when you train yourself and your entire team, that now becomes an incredible source of power where you can leverage all these different kind of, these different backgrounds, that understanding of company culture, and it only enriches you. It's not just about hiring, oh, somebody's very skilled. It's not just about that. It's so much more than that.

Talk to me now about going offshore, like, or moving now from Canada post Covid or during COVID you're like, all right, sitting in an office. Your company went through a really interesting transition with getting rid of the office and going offshore. Can you walk us through that?

Before the pandemic, we still had a couple of people who were working from, from the States or from elsewhere, like contractors or people who were full time employees that chose to live there. But we always had like, whenever we were going to hire someone, we would say, okay, the product manager who lives in the US should come and we should do an in office onboarding. Right? And the pandemic hit and we're like, what are we going to do? Like not hire until whenever? Like, we, you just don't know. You have to adapt. Adapt fast. We realized that working remotely actually was a huge addition to our productivity, to our understanding of how do we communicate with each other when we're not in the same room. I think it improved our communication style. Like everybody, we started doing meetings for everything. And you know, because you don't have the water cooler conversation, you don't have the regular, let's work for coffee and sort this shit out. Now has to be a meeting where you have to set it up, you have to set up an agenda. But the meeting suckbook is great. Thank you for that. And eventually we realized, do we give up the office? Let's maybe it's about time. So we pulled a survey and we said, do you want us to give up the office and people were screaming, no, I don't want to stay at home with my children, with my dog. It's so distracting. Please don't give up the office. I'm going to be there as soon as the government allows me to do so. Two years later, we pulled the same survey. The only person that said yes, I would go to the office was me. And now I'm in Mexico. I'm so glad I was the only person that said so. And we realize why. Take that money that we pay in rent, put it in a retreat. Pressbooks is going to a retreat in Dominican Republic in three weeks and we're going to shape our next year's OKRs. The objectives and key results that we use. Much like the EOS system. We're going to get together in person in an exciting location. We're going to spend three, four days working together and then a couple of days we're going to be swimming at the beach and what have you. I think it was so interesting to see. I thought everybody wanted us to give up the office in the, in the beginning. And people were like, no, I have to go. I don't want to be at home with my, with my husband and my child turned into no man. I'm not going ever. So I'm glad we consulted the employees on that because I thought like, I think I would have kept the office honestly and then I wouldn't be here in Mexico. That's very sad.

One of the things that we do at the CEO alliance is we, we tell all of our members that we guarantee they get a 10x return if they come to all the events, participate actively, they're going to get at least 10 times the cost of membership. They're going to get that in return. And I say I want them to really do that every month. Like I actually want like a 10x times 12x. Like I want a big, big return. But just understanding that you can take what you used to pay in rent and use that money as an offset for an all company retreat or even a couple of great quarterly or annual retreats for the employees, that makes so much sense because now it's not an expense, it's an offset that used to have the expense anyways. I think that's brilliant. Super good idea. You also do something pretty unique with the four day work week. Can you walk us through how it's going?

Great. I actually just did a second survey to ask people how it's going and I have seen so far about 70% of the people believe that we've seen an increase in productivity. Productivity. A lot of people think if you're working 32 hours, you have X amount of work to finish and you're now going to try and do it at 32 hours, there's only so many meetings you can remove and so much better performance you can take out of people. There's no way you're going to be able to squeeze that eight extra hours in there and therefore you're not going to be as productive. What people are missing about this is that productivity is not here's the input, here's the output we have delivered. X number of hours of work is not productivity. Productivity should be looked at as a whole where if you get to keep your people because they're healthier, they rest better, they like the idea of having a three day weekend. What will happen is your retention of your employees are going to go up, you're not going to lose people. And all those people who have the institutional knowledge, who have built in the code, built in the infrastructure, sold all of those accounts, are becoming more and more and more senior. So you're enriching your people. That's, that's one thing.

Secondly, that's another bonus time.

Exactly, exactly.

Employee retention can be enough productivity in and of itself.

Yes. Because even if you do replace those people fairly quickly, it takes six months for someone to get started working with you into rece, into becoming to the peak of their productivity. You've now lost six months. Like I don't know how. It's not so clear to all of us that it's not about, oh, wish the hours are now less and therefore we're not going to achieve as much. Forget about what you're achieving on a week, a weekly basis. Look at the big picture. Definitely burnout. I, I experienced burnout myself years and years ago. It's such a traumatic experience. For the person who's going through that, who is now questioning, why am I behaving this way? Why am I not performing well? Why am I unable to take on more work? Why am I, why do I not want to go to work? Like it's such a mind, right? Like you're constantly in your head, why am I reacting this way? And then it takes a therapist to tell you you're going through burnout. These are the symptoms. You have to stop working.

Yeah.

When I was first told you're having burnout, you got to take leave one month, I said, absolutely not. I'm not leaving my job for one month because I'm worried everything is going to burn, burn down. The more I resisted, the longer it took me to recover from that burnout. I was out for four months. It took me four months to get back to my, to myself. Of course, burnout doesn't happen only because you work a lot. Right. There's so many other additional factors, but one of the reasons is because we're trying to achieve so much, we're trying to do so much and we're always in this, kind of romanticize the idea of overwork. We kind of proudly say I'm a workaholic. And we try to sell this as a selling point in interviews. You know, the, the usual. What's your. I'm a perfectionist, I work too much. Like all of this is bullshit. Let's just get over that. Right? Yeah. What you do when you say to people, talk the talk and then walk it as well. We're going to be a four day workbe company. We really don't want you to work more than 32 hours.

You're a four day, eight hour workweek.

Yes. It's not compressed. 32 hours. Yeah. Well, you have to mean it and you have to show it over and over and over again because everybody thinks it, it's, it's normal. It's normal to think, what's the catch? What's going to happen? Am I going to lose my salary? Does it mean I won't be able to get a promotion? Does it mean you're going to hire somebody else? What does it mean? Like there's so many questions. Because it's not normalized yet. Right. When you get ahead of those concerns by actually doing a survey before you implement the four day work week, what are your concerns? And then take them and then before you implement it, work through those problems. Improve your standard operating procedures, improve your processes, improve your meeting time. Look at all the things that are taking so much time for us to be able to get through on a Friday afternoon. How do I work better and then address all of those concerns with the people and do a trial. We are now hiring for multiple people. And I used to hear all the time, why are you interested in pressbooks? And I would always hear, oh, a mission driven organization. I like your, your, you know the company. I like open source. Now I hear you're a four day worker company. We're getting incredible talent. Like there is just so many benefits to it that we're now only starting to see and I hope it's just going to become the norm.

You now mentioned a couple of times surveying Employees surveying employees. Is that something you do with practice? And what are some other examples of when you survey them and why you survey them?

It's interesting. I come from again, talking about cultural differences from where hierarchy. Not only about Turkey, but I've worked for Korean companies for years. Hierarchy is like super important. Right. So even if you disagree with your manager, you don't bring it up in a way you don't. You kind of like somebody makes a decision and it trickles down from there. So when I moved to Canada, I saw that it's a different culture here and I should be able to speak up and I should be able to say that's bullshit on, on my, to my manager when they have a shitty idea. But practicing that is not that easy. Although I worked many, many years in Canada, I still felt I couldn't quite shake off the. I made the decision and I said so because I know better. Because sometimes you do, Sometimes you have the experience more than someone is early in their career. But you miss that unique person's feedback where they don't have the baggage that you're bringing about a certain decision. Or they have a different approach, a different generation, different culture. My CEO, he's like, let's ask everyone, let's ask everyone everything. So we found this point where we now have a process where we say if we're making decision, these kind of decisions, the C suite makes those decisions, these kind of decisions. The managers of those departments are included in that decision making process, these kind of decisions. We talk to everybody on the floor. So we now have this like literally a chart where when we're making a decision, we sit down and say we call them red flag decisions. Actually he coined the term on it. It's a red flag decision. If we know it's going to affect everybody and we may not know better, that's when we start serving everyone.

Sometimes it's to make a decision, sometimes it's just to understand the issue more and to make better decisions at a team level.

Absolutely.

But you explain why we're serving it. We're not serving it and taking the best response. We might, we might be. Or we might be serving it, taking information and making decision based on what we read too. Yeah, you tossed out something kind of intriguing as well. I want to ask you about. You mentioned that you've done a lot of work with these Korean companies.

Yeah.

Like working with Korean leadership teams. What can you kind of, what kind of insights can you give us there?

It's completely different culture. It is now definitely improving There is, especially in Korean companies. I have seen there is gender bias. It's not unique to Korean culture. Like it's everywhere, right? But it is more subtle in some companies and less so in other companies. There is a fascinating drinking culture where it is embedded into the business. When I was working for LG Electronics, every Thursday the manager of the logistics team would take his team over to a bar to get them to learn how to talk business over drinking. Teach them to drink better so that you can out drink the Chinese and get a better pricing like it. There are fascinating stories I'll tell you. I was in the Netherlands, went to what I did not realize was an interview. I thought it was just that I was invited to a dinner. It was a 12 people dinner with different budgeting specialists from LG Electronics working different locations. I was working in Turkey at the time and there were other people from Greece, from here, from there. And I thought it was just a dinner. I had no idea why. Where there were 200 attendees to this conference. I had no idea why only 12 people were there. We were fed snake. We were fed a lot of boots. What I realized at the end of this three hour dinner was that where are you going to eat the snake? Because they want to know, are you open minded? Are you going to refuse something right off the bat? Are you going to be able to say yes to something that might be not very comfortable for you, but it is in their own culture to eat that. I was also, I was talking to someone who was probably like VP of Finance or something like that. And he looked at me and he said, I think I'm too drunk to go home. And I said, I'll drive you. And he gave me his car keys. That was him testing me. Did I. Did I hold my liquor well? Can I drive him back home? These are all like, these are fascinating things to see. Is this person right for you?

I'm curious what would happen now with somebody because drinking is becoming such a not taboo, but like so many people are being away from drinking. Can you navigate the Korean work culture and be someone who doesn't drink?

I faked my drinking many years before that. There was a time I decided I didn't want to drink for a few years. When I had that interview, I had gone back to drinking and I was perfectly fine drinking in modest amounts. But when I first started working for LG Electronics in Turkey, we had a couple of managers coming from Korea and it was my job to take them out to a restaurant with my own manager. I knew if I say I'm not drinking. It's not that I'm going to lose my job, it's not that bad. But you understand to read the subtleties, right? So I gave some tip to the waiter and I was like, keep the liquor coming, but make mine. So I didn't drink the entire night. Nobody knew. And I, you know, everybody else was, they weren't happily home. They were super excited to be in Turkey. They invested in the factory that I was working in. Things went right. You always figure a way out. Like you know, now this is like 20, 25 years ago, right? So now it's different. Now there is also, you know, there's political correctness, there's, you know, work culture, but understanding. These are also different. I, I did an internship in a film company in Vancouver and one of the owners was Korean. He would call me at 2 in the morning and for me that was normal. But when I mentioned this to the Canadian, his Canadian co partner, he was like, that is not okay. Like he can't call you. I'm like, why? My Korean Boston Turkey called me at two in the morning all the time. So we're all changing and adapting, right? And, and that's why it's important to understand these different cultures. Read books, do some trainings, train your own people in understanding when they react to you in a certain way. It might be a completely, it might come from their, their cultural background. They may not feel comfortable to speak up more. So then you, especially as managers, we figure out I should ask that person's opinion in a more formulated way to tell them I want you to speak up. I put it in their performance reviews. I know you're shy. Totally. Okay. We're all different people. Some people talk more than others. But I want to hear from you more. And they open up and they will, right?

They will. All right, I want you to Talk to your 22 year old self. 22 year old Bashak just getting ready to start in her career. What advice would you give the 22 year old that you know to be true today?

Practice stoicism, man. I try to practice it every day now, but I think the younger the earlier you start to understand, to deal with your emotions. That's one thing. Second. Oh dear God. If I could go back 20 years ago, 25 years ago and say just put on a regiment of like working out every morning, 10 minutes. It's so easy to implement that earlier in your life and it pays off your body. As we get old, we don't realize we're getting old and implementing that workout routine in your 40s is so much harder. So invest in myself, is what I would say, because career is going to come right, Career follows. But you need to invest in your emotional state and learn how to deal with problems head on. And also invest in your body, because it's going to beat you later.

It's going to beat you later. Kashik, thank you so much for sharing. In 270 episodes, you're the first person I've heard say mention stoicism and that is awesome.

That's great.

Ryan Holiday and I go way back through a couple of masterminds and he's good. Good writing around that whole space too.

Oh yeah.

Thank you for sharing on the Second in Command podcast. We'll see you at our monthly event next week.

Great thing that we do have is just our responsibilities chart, where you can go through every single person's roles and understand is this still important to me? How many hours are you spending on these individual roles every single week? And then let's have an open, honest conversation. If you're spending way too much time in a specific area, are there things within there that you can drop down and delegate.