Episode 20 | Part One: Dark Cockpit

Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses, a recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard.

2020 forced business professionals around the world to shift to a new normal, but did everyone do it right? Joining me today is a bestselling author, speaker, and co-founder of a training company based in Romania. His name is Octavian Puntish. Hello, Octavian.

Hello, Greg. It's a pleasure to meet you and thank you for the invitation.

Sure. It's fantastic. I'm really excited about this podcast. I think everybody's going to be really excited to hear about this. The first question I have for you, Octavian, is for years we've been hearing the phrase the future of work, but it seems like the pandemic has expedited that progress. There was a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of CEOs that said that 78% of CEOs believe that the shift towards remote work will endure, and 61% said they believe that low-density workplaces are here to stay. Is that what you're seeing as well?

Yes, it is. Whether we like it or not, the office as we know it is history. I mean, of course, if you're a surgeon, you cannot work from home. If you're a bus driver, you cannot work from home, or at least not yet. Maybe with the 5G or 6G or whatever, maybe you'll sit in your armchair and navigate the bus. But for the moment, some jobs, of course, you still have to be there. But for the millions and millions of so-called knowledge workers who work in a ton of types of companies and who used to go to an office every morning, that situation is history. I mean, if the COVID would have ended within maybe 1 month or 2 months, Then people would have said, okay, fine, let's just hit the undo button and where were we? Okay, I had a meeting tomorrow in London and I was in the office and so on. But because it's going on for months now and there is no— of course, vaccines, everybody hopes for the best vaccines and quick tests and everything. But because it keeps going on, these tendencies to work from home, to work from anywhere will continue to be there.

I agree. I wrote a piece for World News and Report that talks about this. And in there, it shows that, you know, a lot of the social media platforms. So if you look at the likes of Facebook and Twitter, etc., that they put the work from anywhere inside of there. And so there's a lot of people that are moving into these little towns and working from there. And that's the whole Zoom town situation that you start to see. And I wonder if it's the same in Europe.

It is the same in Europe. Obviously, COVID is bad, and it's a tragedy that people die and people say, but in working from home, there are advantages. I mean, people find out that you can be in a call now and 5 minutes later you can be with the kids and you can feed them lunch or you can help them with homework. Now, one year ago, you would have had to maybe commute for half an hour if you were lucky, or 1 hour or more, or you were away for 2 days traveling for business. But now you're there. So there are some advantages and people kind of got used to that and they will not be ready to, to give up on them. So even if, let's hope that vaccine, vaccine comes or 2 vaccines or 3 or whatever, And people— okay, it's safe to be back home. People will, will say, hey, I don't want to commute 1 hour a day or even more to be in an office. Most likely we're still going to have to wear masks. So even with the vaccines, the mask will probably not go away for some time soon. In the same way as with cars, when airbags appeared, people still kept using their seatbelts and we still use seatbelts now. We have airbags all over the place and curtains and super— safety measures, but we still wear seatbelts. So, the mask will probably continue. So, people will say, hey, I like it. I like some parts of it. Of course, I miss the community. I miss the belonging. I miss the chitchat. I miss the open floor space where somebody got a new perfume and within 5 minutes, everybody knew that or there was a story about this and that. But the office is not coming back.

I agree with you. So, let me ask you this then. What are some of the paradigm shifts that entrepreneurs should prepare for and must make in order to work in this new knowledge worker environment?

So, if you have a team, if you are an entrepreneur, if people who are listening to us now, they have a team and you're based somewhere in the world, okay? And you had to recruit people for your team and you were kind of limited. Of course, people would have, I don't know, personal assistants from India or they had their web design done somewhere other in the world. But now, the good thing is that you can hire from anywhere for almost any job that you have. From marketing to accounting to somewhere. So, that's an opportunity. So, the new paradigm is not that you have to hire within your city. And if you say, oh, I'm in San Francisco or New York, I'll have to pay a gazillion dollars for whatever. Now, you can hire good people from wherever they are because you can find them. So, that's number one. And also, if you lead a team of people, whether it's 5 or 10 or 100 or more, 1,000, the old paradigm was that you kind of watched what they were doing and how they were spending their time. And if you saw that they were not in the office, you would call them, hey, hi, are you okay? And everything. That's the old paradigm. The new paradigm is that you cannot manage their time. You should manage the results or the output, not the input, but the output. What are they producing? And pay for that and aim to worry if the results do not come in, not did they answer their phone at 10 a.m.? What's wrong with that? No, they did not. But on the other hand, they did write an email at 3 AM. So, you don't know how they spend their time. You don't know what's going on in their homes. But as long as they deliver the results, you should be happy. And that's the new thing.

So, work with the entrepreneurs on productivity. So basically, it all has to do with productivity and leading and lagging indicators in their workday.

Yes, yes. So, make sure that everybody in your team knows what they're supposed to deliver, whether they're supposed to sell or whether they're supposed to deliver financial reports or marketing plans or whatever. And make sure that's the discussion in any calls you have with them. What is the output? And make sure that you reward them based on the output and try to not be too judgmental on whether or not they have video on in their calls because they have— they might have 2 kids running around the room and they might be for some reason ashamed to show that or whatever. So give them a break and just worry about Yeah.

So focus on the KPIs and the productivity of those KPIs instead of whether they answered the phone when you called them at a certain time. So basically what you're saying is office hours are out the window and now it just has to do with productivity.

Yes, they're out the window. And again, that's good or it's bad. One problem now is that people, some people tend to work way more than 8 hours because during the day, they're doing other things. dragged into calls and another call and then another call. But then they have some silent time in the evening after the kids went to sleep or whenever the calls are done. And then they go all the way into midnight answering emails.

Yeah, I do that myself. I ended up watching my hours and I was like, holy crap, no wonder. I mean, like exhausted every day. And I actually looked at it and I said, well, I'm actually working like 3 times more than I was in an office.

Yeah. This will, this will, this will tend to stabilize in time because now everything's new and still 6 months into it or 9 months into it, we're still learning. We're still finding out new things about COVID and what you're, what you can do, what you're allowed to do or not allowed to do. So probably it will stabilize and people will find that their balance is the best time schedule or the best amount of hours for them is 8. For you, it might be 10 or 12 because you want to do more or achieve more. For some people, they might say, hey, if I just work 4 hours a day and make X amount of money, that's fine with me. So, the expectations that people have from work will be way more different than they were.

So, with all that said, I would like you to tell us a little bit about your company, what your company does, what you focus on, and what you do to help organizations.

So, we set up basically a training and consulting company back in 1999. And we work with the largest multinationals usually and also with a growing number of entrepreneurial companies. And we help them be more productive, to put it like that. And we focus on the, on what we call the human side of business performance. So we're not into optimizing processes and optimizing their supply chain. But if it's people-related, if it's motivation-related, if it's productivity-related, if it's leadership-related, we can help because we have access to some of the best know-how in the world and also with people with the expertise who've seen that, done that, and who can help either through classic training or with tends to be more often now one-to-one coaching with executives or through speeches. And we have customers mainly in Europe, but also in the US and in Asia, still a small number, but growing from year to year. And we're glad to have good feedback. And we see that companies need to be coached, need help, need assistance, especially in tough times, especially when things change very fast. And what we see is that in some companies, even before COVID there was a kind of a, what you could call a change saturation. Things were changing. They were going into digital. People wanted to conquer new markets, wanted to optimize different things. So there was kind of a low energy even before that in some companies. But now, in some places, it's even worse. I mean, people have to reduce their headcount and they have to let people go. It's tragic. But the risk is that if they cut too much into cost, then they don't— will not have speed enough to regain altitude and energy for when this COVID situation is over.

So, this might be a kind of a silly question, but in light of the fact that you're a global organization and you work all over the world, but you're based in Romania, do you see differences between organizations and cultures from country to country?

Yes. And not to be judgy in any way, so we're not— we're just noticing differences. Even before COVID American companies tended to be faster and more focused on delivering results, not as much bureaucracy, not as much bureaucracy. As some of the European or traditional big European countries where still there's a hierarchy and there's procedure and there's a committee and then there's a second committee and it takes 3 months before a decision gets done. Again, we're not judging, we're just noticing differences. So, I kind of like the American spirit of, okay, let's get this done. What matters most? And let's get that done now and let's not worry too much about anything. And we also like the American entrepreneurial. There's not so much talking. Europe about startups, about unicorns and so on. So it feels like it was faster. Now this COVID has made the world really a village. This expression has been around for years, but now it tends to be more truer than ever because any information and anything that happens in one country is— people know about it literally the next day or inside the same day all over the world. So now if somebody finds out something or a way to solve things, the speed at which information moves throughout the world is faster. So, companies around the world have found out that they need to move faster. They need to be focusing on what drives results now and put aside bureaucracy. COVID is a big hit for bureaucracy, thank God.

Yeah, I noticed. Yeah, I mean, it's harder to have a meeting in the first place, right?

Yes.

So, it's not like you just grab a bunch of people and go in a conference room. So, it's harder to grab. So, I think that I've noticed there's less meetings and the meetings are more succinct and focused. And then people get off the call and execute. Is that what you're seeing too?

It is exactly what we're seeing too because the urgency is there. I mean, we have no revenues, right? Or revenues in companies are going down 10%, 20%, 50%, 60% a month. I mean, think about airlines. Think about restaurants. Think about everything related to tourism, right? So, If we, if we say, ah, I don't know, maybe we should do something, let's have some ideas within a month and then we'll talk about them at the April, whatever, maybe the company will not be—

And they're like, we're going to be out of business by then. So we got to do it now.

Exactly. So they work around the clock and they— we have a meeting today, we discuss, you research that, I research the other, and let's meet tomorrow or on Monday the latest. And that's good because that much bureaucracy was not helping anybody. And thank God even government Governments tend to move faster. Now, of course, they move 10 times slower than an average company. But it's good news to see government people and local authorities, not only health-related but also in other fields, moving faster now. So, that's one good thing that is happening in all this disaster with COVID I agree with you.

So, I've heard you say there are 3 ways in which people relate to work. We can have a job. A career or a calling. What do you mean by that?

So, you have a job if practically you exchange time for money or skills for money. You're good at whatever, at selling or at marketing, and you say, hey, I can do ABC. How much are you paying me? And the guy says, or the lady says, okay, we'll pay you $100, whatever, fine. And you do that, right? You don't want to become the CEO of the company. You don't want to take over the company. You don't want to appear on the COVID of whatever magazine. You exchange time for money. What does it mean? It means that your main passion in life is outside outside job, is with your family, is with fishing or something else. You have a career if you give time and skills, but in exchange you want not only money, but money and something else. A better title on the business card, a bigger card, a better office, a corner office, the prestige, the CEO or whatever else, a VP title that you want. You see yourself in that particular company or in that industry for a few years. You see yourself growing. And again, And this is not good. It's not bad. It doesn't mean either of these is good or bad. They all exist. And what happens with careers is that you tend to give more time. So it's not a 9 to 5, and I'm air quotes here because nothing is going to be ever 9 to 5 anymore unless some exceptions. But you tend to invest much more time because you want to get involved in side projects and you want to know more and you want to prove that you can bring a bigger contribution and so on. You have a calling if you give time and skill and energy, not for money, like in a job, not for money and something else, like for a career, but for something else first. And a calling can usually mean 2 things. Either you have a passion for something, a kind of a hobby that you think, hey, I can make money out of this. For instance, you're a photographer. You're good. People invite you. Or you're a chef. You want to cook and say, I can make money from cooking, for instance. Or if it's not a passion, it's you believe very much in a cause and you dedicate your professional time for that cause, whether it's saving the forest or helping orphans or helping elderly people. And of course, you want some money because you have to put some food on your table, but you don't do it for money. You don't do it for a business card or for a car. You tend even not to care so much about that. You do it because you find joy in doing that and because you believe in that cause. So this is the Now, people sometimes say, ah, it's not good to have a job because it means you're superficial, you don't care enough. And what we see is, no, no, no, that's just wrong. You can be superficial in all 3. You can work for an NGO trying to save trees, and under your watch, people are cutting trees like crazy, and you don't do much because they did not cut the trees right next to your office. So, you can be superficial in all of them. You can bring passion in all of them. But it kind of tells you where your focus is if you have no job. Job, your focus is outside the world of work. If you have a career, your focus is on that career. If you have a calling, your focus is on something usually bigger than yourself. And you can have— people can have a career, and then after a while they can move to having a job, or they discover a calling, and then you can dedicate your life to that calling. So you don't jump from one to another from week to week, but you can easily have And it can also be like a sequence, right?

Because like, if you're young, you have a job, and then maybe you go and have a career. And then after that, you find your calling, right? So, it could also be a chain of events.

Yes, it can be. And Fred, you just graduated. There's nobody waiting for you at home. So, it's not like, oh, I got a garage to feed the kids. No, you have nothing at home, maybe just an empty fridge with some Coca-Cola in it and some chips that are maybe not so good anymore or whatever. So, there's no one waiting for you. So, you have to find your calling. There's nothing that attracts you home. So, you'd rather stay somewhere and learn and work and learn from the more experienced people. And you learn like crazy in those years and you find passion in that and say, hey, I want to take over, or I want to start up a company, for instance. And that's fine. But then you say, hey, I have a family, I have kids, or some people, they just— what we found, for instance, is that after the crisis of 2007, 2008, Many people had this shift from career either to a job and say, hey, I want to spend more time with family and maybe bicycling or fishing or whatever, or towards a calling. So the big changes in the environment tend to create shifts in how we look at work. And the same is true now. We've had people who were 100% career people. They were traveling, they were on a plane, they were— they had gold and platinum and whatever on most airlines and most hotels. They were just like the guy from George Clooney in Up in the Air, right? They were traveling all the time and that's okay. But now, I realize, hey, I don't need that much. I don't need to have a Mercedes. I don't need to have a corner office. I don't even get to go to that office now for weeks. What matters is to be healthy and to enjoy the time you have with the people dear to you. It could be parents or somebody else. So, times like these create shifts. So, that's an invitation for everybody who listens to us. Question number 1, what do you have now? Do you have a job? Do you have a calling? Do you have a career? If you think about it, what would you like to have? Because you can have any of the 3.

And that changes and sort of answers the big question, which is happiness, right? Which I noticed in COVID, a lot of people are like, you know, I'm more present with my family. I'm more present when I'm at work. And it starts to lead to happiness is what I've heard from a lot of people. And even in my own life, you know, when I was younger, I had a job and then I went into a career and now I'm doing my calling, which is helping entrepreneurs. entrepreneurs succeed in order to help out with wealth inequality. And so I think a lot— there's a lot of people that I talk to on an ongoing basis that have switched careers and went to charities or switched from a job to a career. Or, you know, there's— it's very interesting. I think what you're saying resonates a lot with me and probably with a lot of people that are listening.

Whenever there's a change in the environment, people tend to go back to the basics of life, to be healthy and to have people around you, whoever you prefer them to be, and to enjoy the moment with them. I mean, Think about, for instance, some people survived 9/11, right? I think their first thought was not, oh, how can I make a million dollars more? No, it was, thank God I survived. Let me call my wife. Let me call my husband. Let me call somebody. Again, 2008, or when people are sick, even without COVID, people just found out they had a tumor in their body and then the whole life shifts. And let's say they got rid of that and they're back fine again. The first thing they say is not, oh, I want to I have the top job in my company. No, they tend to go to the basics. And then again, slowly, slowly, life happens and we have things and we want to have more and we want to contribute more and be more. And again, we moved in different directions. So our whole life, actually, it's a succession of these tend to be job, career, or calling. And that's fine. What's wrong or what's not fine is when you go in one direction just because everybody tends to take that road and you find yourself one year later, years later, hey, I'm not happy, this is not what I wanted. So that's wrong. So if, if people choose for themselves, any of the 3 they choose will be fine.

All right, well, we've covered the future of work, and coming up in part 2 of my conversation with Octavian Puntis, Octavian discusses the similarities between entrepreneurs and pilots.

There is a treasure of know-how in aviation about leadership, about managing Learn more about the BOSS Business Operating Support System at bossstartupsience.com, or you can reach Gregory Shepard at gregoryshepard.com. This has been a production of Forbes Books.