Building the future of work | with Ranjit de Sousa

Hello, and you're very welcome to episode 102 of the Shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm joining you right now, broadcasting from Barcelona, where I'm attending the Saster Europe event, which is a conference that brings together SAS companies and founders all over Europe, really. We've spent the last two days talking about our topic today, which is the future of work. That is what we're going to talk today about, building the future of work. This is something that has been talked about massively since the pandemic kicked in and we've realized that we needed to digitize our workplaces. And we also realized that the workforce themselves, the people, were unbelievably important and how we treat them and our relationship with our staff has changed. So much has changed in the last two years that we felt here in the shortlist, it was appropriate to readdress this conversation about the future of work. So joining us today, I have a fantastic guest who normally will be based in Switzerland, but today he's in Germany in a hotel room. And his name is Ranjit Mesoza and he is the managing director of a company called the Coal Yard, which is a consultancy that works with organizations on how to future proof their business. And before that he was the president of Lehigh Kerrison. Many of you may know lhh as part of the ADECO business. And Ranjit has worked with many businesses addressing issues sometimes in times of downturn, which with the economy at the moment and inflation, maybe some of you are going through this at the crisis at the moment, but also working with companies who are trying to address this future of work, particularly around the future workplace. And what does that look like? Ranjit has gained a lot of experience working with companies and technology businesses that are investing in this space, building products and solutions, this space. And here to join us today to share his insight on what that world looks like. Ranjit, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today, the special show that's broadcasting live from Barcelona for myself, live from Germany for yourself. I wonder if you wouldn't mind reintroducing yourself perhaps more properly, and explain to me why did you leave the corporate world to get into this particular space, the space of the workplace and work itself and the technology companies that I gather, considering you've made it now, your career that you believe are so impactful or important in this future.

Yeah, absolutely, Johnny. And first off, thank you for having me on the show. Very jealous, obviously, that you are in Barcelona and I'm sitting here in A hotel room in the middle of rainy Germany. But yeah, so like what? And why am I doing what I'm doing today? Right? So what I'm doing is really helping ventures in that work tech space. And this is kind of the space where these companies are defining what the future of work will look like, helping these ventures scale get bigger. You know, thinking through the go to market the strategy, getting the funds to grow, and then at the same time helping large corporates think about how they can integrate that tech into helping create a better place to work. Because if you think of it right, we spend most of our living hours and our waking hours definitely at work. And an incredible amount of people and surveys show this again and again actually think that work sucks, right? So you gotta make work suck a little less. And a lot about what is happening right now is exactly about that, right? So I've always been fascinated by the topic and that intersection of work and technology. But I think the last couple of decades, and especially now, the last few years, have absolutely changed and catapulted us into the future in terms of how we work, when we work, what we expect from work. And I would even, you know, go a step further and say we are seeing the biggest change in the world of work that we've seen the last 150 years since the first industrial revolution. And a lot of things that are happening now are probably going to be around for a long time to come. So, you know, really fascinating moment in time and a place where I thought I could have a lot more impact if I'm really working at that intersection between the ventures and large organizations.

We had an interesting ask me anything session here at the Saster Europa Conference with Jason Lemkin, who runs Saster, a very well known individual character, I should say, in the SAS world. And he was asked by one of the audience members about what his thoughts were on the future of work, in particular the return to the office. And he answered it. I felt really well. He said, well, all of us here, all the companies in the SaaS world, and that software as a service is that we all are distributed, every one of us. That's the way way it is today and you can never go back because we've seen how successful that can be in the last two years. I know SAS is only a small segment of the economy, but software as a service is driving a lot of the tech innovation in the world of work. And his point was that perhaps organizations like Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, who have more established large teams who are in A particular area, let's say the barrier area in the US they may have people come back to the office. And in fact, from a real estate perspective, you mentioned that a lot of companies still looking at offices, but more as a vanity project that, you know, founders or boards want. They want 100,000 square foot as a vanity place. It's kind of a temple to the organization. It isn't actually going to be intended as somewhere that people will work anymore. And this is something that's been quite controversial. I wouldn't mind addressing it first and get your thoughts on it because I know in April 2020, when in social Talent we announced that we were moving to being distributed first. And I said to a lot of our customers, the VPs of talent in massive organizations, that I believe this would be the future, 90% of them politely laughed at me and said, johanni, it's a bit naive. You're a small company. Maybe for a small company like you, this is the future. But we'll be going back to the office quite soon. In fact, they, as you know, kept giving dates, companies kept giving dates further and further in the future. But what are your thoughts on that particular aspect of the future work? Because it's not the only part far from, but that kind of remote working office space future. What are your personal thoughts?

So a couple of thoughts. Fascinating question, right? I think the first answer that I always give when this topic comes up, right, is we don't know. We only have two years of data at scale, if you want, around what works and what doesn't. And these two years of data, you know, and what worked often rested on the fact that over decades social capital had been built within companies, teams had been built, there were codes of how to interact and how not to interact, how to collaborate, how not to collaborate. Right. And so in the very initial phase of working fully remotely, a lot of things worked because of the social capital which had been built. I also believe that a lot of things did not work or were highlighted in terms of what was going wrong when people moved to a fully remote environment, when it came down to gaps in leadership which existed before. Absolutely existed before, but were even more damaging when people started working in a more remote environment. Right. So I don't think we have the experience so far to really say what works and what doesn't. But we can say that there is definitely a need to build and continue building social capital. And that can happen in office, it can happen in a hybrid environment or it can happen remotely. You just need different types and tools for that. Right. And whatever environment you are in, but especially if you're in a remote environment, you have to have good leadership. So for me, those two takeaways are very clear. But now exactly what kind of setup a lot of companies are trying to prescribe? 2 days per week in the office, 3 days per week in the office, no office at all. What really works and why it works for which organization? I think there we do not have the data and we don't have the evidence as yet. It's going to take a lot more time for that to kind of pan out and for us to have more insight.

It's an excellent point, particularly around leadership, that you make, Ranjit, that you know, regardless of whether you have a completely office, completely remote or hybrid environment, this is all question that leadership piece and as you say, social capital and a lot of organizations like ours and social talent, we have now approaching 60% of our workforce joined post Pandemic. So they never had that social capital that was built in person. Whatever social capital is there was built in a fully remote environment. And I know in our business, our attrition is extremely low. In the last two years, we found that it went down after the pandemic and even in the last year with the great reservation because we focused on that piece there. Right. It's easy for a company like Social Talent and easy for someone like yourself or the business you were in, which is the people business. In lhh before now, we've always lived and breathed in the kind of world of work it is our industry. But I might just jump to our first article, if you don't mind, as a kind of jumping off point. Ranjit from Forbes, is it the pandemic plus the skills gap or skills emergency, as Forbes recently called an article about Shay David which said the skills emergency is happening now. How much was here before the pandemic related to this skills gap or now skills emergency? How much was just exasperated by the pandemic and what other forces are at play here, in your opinion?

Yeah, I would think that all of this was already present before the pandemic. And the pandemic has just been an accelerator or a catalyst of a lot of the trends that were happening before. And if you take a step back and again kind of buy into the idea that this is the biggest change that we're seeing since the first Industrial Revolution. I think there are probably two or three major trends that we've been seeing which have influenced us.

Right.

One is that we've gotten into market cycles which are moving at such great speed that you can no longer drive strategy top down. And that also means that organizations need to be structured in a very different way, deconstructing the large enterprise, so to speak. That means you need to be able to delegate a lot more decision power to your frontline leaders. And that was all happening already pre pandemic. The second thing is what I would say is the Netflixization or the, you know, the always on demand requirement for all businesses. And that has probably been, you know, really catapulted into the future through the pandemic. People have spent so much time on Netflix, have become so much so reliant on your Amazon prime, that they want to replicate those experiences at the workplace and in every kind of interaction with business. And then the last thing is the total transparency that social media creates. Now, obviously, granted, there are a lot of negatives there too, right? But the transparency that has been created also means that we can hold leaders accountable in a completely different way. That level of accountability also means that leaders need to behave, have to behave in a different way than perhaps previously when the transparency wasn't given. And all these trends were absolutely present prior to the pandemic. But again, I think the pandemic really was a catalyst and catapulted us five or ten years further into the development of what's happening. And the skills gap in that context is just one other evidence point of that happening. So there was a skills gap, there was the war for town. We've been seeing that way before the pandemic. But again, the fact that technology has become even more important in every single business, that the skills which are required to develop great product, to market great product, to sell great product, and especially when we're talking of product and you're at this conference in Barcelona which revolves around SaaS product, when it comes to SaaS product, those skills, they're rare skills and can't be found everywhere. And so that has just been exacerbated. That skills gap and the requirements to go along with the skill shift has just become an imperative. And if you look at surveys asking CEOs, you know, what is kind of the top barrier to growth in the short and midterm, you know, the skills gap has become, you know, one of the one or two top priorities for CEOs across the globe.

Yeah, I agree with all those sentiments. And when you look at how it plays out in different industries, let's start again with the SaaS industry, the software as a service industry. I'm here at a conference representing this and we're talking about the lack of engineers, the lack of product managers, the lack of account executives and sales, the lack of CSM to support customers.

Right.

It's not that, you know, of course we're fighting for each other's talents in the SaaS world, but there just isn't enough people there. And despite the economic crash that's occurred in the last three months and the inevitable recession that will get reported in about four months time as a result of that, hopefully small one, we don't have enough staff in SaaS. And it was pointed out today that the majority SaaS companies, their sales are still strong. So the need for talent is still strong. And I'll point to right behind me, you might not be able to see, but there's a setup for a gig that is Primavera here in Barcelona which is this year is a two weekend, three day gig in each weekend. My brother and his wife were at the gig last weekend. You could not get a pint of beer because there weren't enough staff. I was at a fest, two concerts in Dublin last weekend and at one big festival they had two massive bars. One was closed and one was short staffed. Not enough people to serve drink. So you look at two contrasts. The sophisticated technology world of software and then the world of that's called arms and legs hiring, where you just need somebody to stand there and give somebody a pint of beer or a glass of wine. They are restricted by their ability to make revenue. Sales at a concert is restricted by the lack of people to just pour a pint. So this seems to be something that when you look at the gaps, it's everywhere right now. Service levels have gone down in the service industry because nowhere has talent. The in demand skill areas that we'd expect to be in demand like technology and sales, they still don't have talent. What's the solution? Talk to me about where you see the, perhaps the silver lining on the horizon when it comes to how perhaps technology or other solutions can begin to solve this skills gap crisis that seems to be in just every industry at the moment.

Yeah, I think there are a couple of angles there. Right. And especially when it comes to solving the skills gap there that you speak of when it comes to a higher skilled folks. Right. So the fact that you can bring in technology that democratizes learning, gives accessibility to learning in the moment on your mobile, when you actually need it, that allows you to reskill and upskill people in a much easier and on demand manner. Talking about that on demand imperative, I mentioned a moment ago. So that's where technology definitely helps, right? If you think of the potential of also augmenting learning with other technology, bringing in very targeted assessments, bringing in coaching which ensures the sustainability of the learning, again, democratizing that all through technology has a huge impact. On the other end, it's more also a question of matching demand and supply, right? And finding the places where there are people who have the aptitude, the attitude, the willingness to take up certain jobs and matching that with the employers who are willing to pay sufficiently, pay attractive, attractively enough salaries or hourly pay and matching that obviously also is made a lot easier through technology. So I think both ends in both problems that you were describing, Johnny, technology can play a key role. The but there is technology is a tool, right? So it's not going to solve your problem. So just throwing some kind of learning management system or some learning content at people or bring or trying to access matching technology, it's just not sufficient. If you do not know what skills you're lacking, if you do not know what your what skills you actually need and if you do not know what kind of environment you are able to provide to people, what is actually attractive and how are you going to attract those people, you know, the best tools are not going to solve the problem.

Can I ask you Ranjit, on let's say the problems to be solved here, right? And you're so right in saying that the technology itself is not going to solve the problem. It might enable the solution, but it's not going to be the solution necessarily by itself. If you look at the different categories, when you look at an organization's ability to make sure that they have the right talent, doing the right thing in the right place, with the right outcomes. You have hiring tech, right? So you got recruiting tech, a lot of innovation there around how you can find that talent, identify that talent, interview that talent, onboard that talent. You've got tech around how you can upskill folks. So creating talent pools. There's lots of great tech out there that you know, I see a lot of the blue collar, let's say retail organizations using that would essentially give you a college level degree or even, you know, your basic high school education online for free. And then that gives you access to jobs with the organization. Again, employers jumping in and solving those gaps with, with great scaled democratized technology. So there's a reskilling and upskilling tech. There's workplace enablement tech. How do you get teams to collaborate and work together in non in person environments. There's analytics tech on how to analyze what's happening on. And then there's the Netflix. The Netflix. Netflixation. That's a word that you mentioned earlier, where you have consumer tech coming to hr where people want to check out their benefits. They want to, we talked last week about. They want to be able to access not they want to be able to book off time off and leave for paternity for other things and be able to get advice on that as well and get access to that. But they expect kind of an app kind of service, not like ring your HR person and book an appointment. They expect the, the service to be on demand, full of information, etc. What are the categories you see? Like if I'm a Chro, a CPO of a modern growing organization and I'm given and going to the CFO and I'm asking her for a new budget for tech this year for my people, what are the big categories you think that CPOs or CHRO should be prioritizing? There's so much tech you could buy, right? There's so much noise out there. What would be your top four top five categories are things that you would say, you know, you need these, these are essentials that you probably didn't have before 2020 because obviously everyone has this HCM platform or an ATS, you'd imagine. What are the new things that you think are the absolute must haves for the modern CPO or chro.

So I would frame this a little differently, right? So if I, if I was in the shoes of that CPO and I have a sizable tech budget, I would actually not be focusing on three or four specific categories, right? Because exactly. Because of that noise that you mentioned and the amount of innovation which is happening in the market. I think if you're going to prescribe something top down and say, you know, okay, I want to have these and these diagnostic tools in place, right? Or I want to look at the employee experience, as Josh Burson calls it, right. From an end to end perspective. And I need one platform for that. You are most likely going to lock yourself in to something in an area where there's so much evolution or maybe even revolution that you might come to regret it once you've actually, you know, gotten to the point of implementing this across the organization. And you will also want to avoid right now, I would say putting your bets on one specific topic because there are so many relevant topics, as you just mentioned. So I think the approach that I would take would be one much more of experimentation and trying to find pockets within the organization. Where significant progress can be made by looking at one or two topics and really experimenting around it. So, say you have an area where you know that a lot of people have skills which are being depleted and are going to be redundant in a couple of years, in a fairly short time horizon. But you also know that a lot of these people have the attitude and aptitude to be reskilled. Well, that's probably an area in a very focused manner where you want to experiment with different reskilling tools, where you have upskilling, you know, implement a few diagnostic things to see, you know, what actually gives you the best visibility of where you have skill gaps and how you want to close the skill gaps. But don't do this across the entire organization. Do it in a very focused way. Maybe at a department level, maybe at a, at a, at a country level. Right. But in a, in a controlled experiment. And then there is another place where you say, look, this is, this is where we've just acquired, made a small acquisition and acquired something. And this is the perfect place to test new employee listening tools, where you want to get feedback on a weekly basis, for example, in a merger or an acquisition situation. So let's use that place to test and experiment with employee listening tools. And that allows you to actually learn and course correct and see which of these tools can even be deployed at scale versus saying top down, you know, I want to have a 2x, which is because it's very hot and you know, it's early in the hype cycle and therefore we want to spend a lot of money on it. And so I think this is a very different way of approaching things. Right. And one that many corporates don't necessarily follow. But that experimentation and doing things really in a very focused manner before you take anything to scale, is probably the way to go and gives you a lot more insight and more bang for your buck than if you say, look, I'm going to just place my bets on three or four things.

I love that. It reminds me of Yasser Ahmed, who we had on the show a few months ago, who's the VP of talent globally for HelloFresh. And if you Google, I don't have the link to hand, but if you Google HelloFresh Talent Tech Radar, what you'll see is something that they borrowed from the Zalando in Germany dev team, which was they have a live view that it's crowdsourced, sorry, it's public available. You can see what talent technology they're assessing, where, what they've adopted, what they haven't adopted with their parking. So it's quite inspirational to see it in just one view. It's exactly what you would describe, which is taking an experimentation approach to tech in different categories and then moving it between different levels of we're experimenting, we're trialing, we've adopted or we have rejected and you can see a bunch of vendors in there and you see Social down as a vendor in one of the spaces as well in one of the categories, but as an approach which is a much more engineering experimentation approach, which perhaps is not normal in a HR environment. To think to your point is that we don't know what will stick and what's going to last. And therefore it's critical to not commit too early your budget to one thing, but to have an approach of experimentation. I like the idea in terms of the future of work, but let's go back in terms of that's looking at let's say the wider issues and let's focus less on the tech. I think you're right. That's a great answer on how to approach the tech is experimentation. Let's look at the problems that have to be solved. If I could ask you to kind of maybe take my question again, but from the perspective of the problems that you think the modern CPO or CHRO will have to deal with in 2022, what are the problems we solved and how would you prioritize them or look at them from the lens of a cpo?

Yeah, absolutely. And it's great frame. And if you own the shoes of a CPO right now, and what I hear a lot when speaking to organizations is that the culture, the purpose, the why people should be either joining or should be staying at an organization, that is one of the big problems to be solved, right? And it becomes, and you mentioned this earlier, right? When you have a lot of people joining the organization in a remote state and you have not been able to build or not able to build a social capital the way you were doing previously, say in an in office setting, it becomes even harder to build that purpose and that culture. So that is definitely one big problem to solve. I think the second thing as a cpo, which might sound a little contradictory to what I was saying earlier when it comes to experimenting and combining different technologies, is you need to spend some time thinking of your tech stack even in an API driven world, which allows you obviously to plug and play things in a much easier and more seamless way. But even in the API driven world, you do need to spend some time thinking of what does my tech stack look like and what kind of experiences am I trying to cover or solve for by each layer in my, in my tech stack. And this might not necessarily be a way that, you know, a people organization or an HR organization typically would have looked at, at the world, but I do think thinking of that tech stack and what, what are you trying to solve for in that context is absolutely key, right? So, you know, how do you build culture? How do you build and sustain the tech stack? And then I think the third big thing is leadership, right? And I come back to that again and again, right? Leadership being the killer app. How do I ensure that I get good leadership? I'm not even saying amazing leadership, right? But good leadership in place. How do I support my frontline leaders in their decision making, help them get the right frames to both lead the people and make decisions at speed and at scale very often. And how do I ensure that the principles of good leadership are lift through an entire enterprise organization? So, you know, those would be kind of the three topics I think, you know, I'd have, I'd have top of mind next to whatever else, as every CPO will tell you, is, you know, all the fires that are burning that need to be, need to be taken care of at any given moment in time.

So let's say it's 40% dealing with the fires, right? I'm going to take the 60% that's left. And I wouldn't mind teasing into each of those three buckets if you don't mind, Ranjit. So let's start with that purpose piece because it reminds me of a story. I was at a HR conference in Vegas two weeks ago. I met with a fantastic customer of ours. And the leader I met with was shared with me that she was concerned that in her organization, which is going through a lot of change at the moment, acquisitions and integrations, and it's a very large 20,000 person plus organization. There was just no clear purpose and this was killing them in terms of attrition and new hires. It wasn't clear anywhere in the organization why anyone would want to work there, what the business was trying to do beyond grow investor and shareholder value. So if you're a leader, if you're the cpo, you're the VP of talent, you're the head of Talent Acquisition. Regardless of your role in the business, you recognize that you're in a business that perhaps lacks this. Who's responsible for fixing this? What can you do to make sure that that vision or that mission is first of all clarified, documented, and then communicated consistently like who owns that in a business?

Well, I think it starts at the top, right? And I think the question to ask is because very often when it comes to purpose, there is a lot of talk, right? And people try to also look at purpose as a, as from an ESG angle or from a HR angle. But purpose is really driven by what is fundamentally the problem that we as a company are trying to solve for what customer, what stakeholder. And especially in companies which might have seen a lot of growth very quickly, or in companies that are very large and very often very diverse, the organization, but especially the leadership might have just lost sight of what is fundamentally the problem that we are trying to solve for customers. And that problem, that problem statement, in my view, needs to inform what the purpose is because you want to attract people to your organization who want to solve that problem, who want to make the life easier, better, more fun for your customers every day. Right? And so actually figuring that out for me is at the core of defining the purpose and the culture and everything else is like the onion around it.

I love that because as we're recording this in June 2022, the most recently published Harvard Business Review has a great article that talks about purpose and highlights the fact that a lot of organizations and CEOs and founders think of purpose in the context of a company like Patagonia. To have a clear purpose that's about fixing the world and making the world better. Or Elon Musk, as much as you might give out about his craziness when it comes to remote working, he has a vision of making us energy dependent, our vision independent. And that's the kind of the big thing. And a lot of companies, this article argues, are thinking that must be what purpose means. But they actually argue that the real thing is to your point is what problem are you solving? Because that's, that's, that's enough. You know, Google are trying to organize the world's information. They're not trying to fix the planet or make, you know, make like lives better for solve poverty. They're just trying to organize, do a specific thing around organizing information. And I think to your point, that's good enough. In fact, it's fantastic if you can articulate it clearly and make that the thing your team rally around consciousness of time. So I'm gonna move on to point two and I know we could chat each of these individually for quite some time. Your second point was again, I think if I remember correctly, Ranjit, you're saying don't ignore the whole tech stack piece, you need to basically make sure that you're honest. And when I was listening to you describe this, it reminded me that in our own business, as small as social talent is with 70 odd people, you know, we're having this problem with our tech stack today is that we're different departments are buying different pieces of tech and sometimes there's overlapping pieces of tech and you're buying the same thing that does something else over here that we're already using. You know, in the recruiting world that I'm from Ranjit, you know, we've created in the last few years this role of a TA Ops specialist. And TA Ops folks, they own typically the vendor relationships for all the tech. So they were able to see what are we buying, Making sure the overlap doesn't exist or it's not too prominent, making sure we're getting the ROI and we're using the tech property across the business. If you pull back to the much wider organization, is there a similar role in hr? Like is there a people ops? A people ops role also owns all the tech that our people use. Is that still not something that's prevalent in most businesses?

Way too little. I think it is often delegated to and I would put this to somebody in it, right? But actually having somebody who looks at the entire employee experience and says, look, these are kind of the parameters that we need for our tech stack along the employee experience. These are kind of the layers and the topics we need to be trying to solve for. That doesn't necessarily mean prescribing the exact technology, but also ensuring that you don't have too much overlap. You always have a bit of overlap between certain applications. Whether you try to minimize that overlap, that it's clear for people that, look, if I want to pulse my team, this is how I'm going to be wanting to do that. Right? And if I want to be messaging with the team, then I'm going to be using this application or this type of application and that you get that clarity, that level of clarity and that you have then somebody who can kind of orchestrate all of that makes a lot of sense, right? Because what you can often see is that employees, and this is not necessarily just large organizations, it happens very quickly. Also in pretty small startup environments of maybe five or 10 employees that you add up all these applications and then people are using the stuff in parallel. So, oh, are you messaging in Slack? But that should be done actually over email. Then we have some kind of project management tool, Asana Trello I don't know what now, what goes in there. So getting kind of a bit of an organizing principle around this, I think makes a lot of sense. And having somebody orchestrate that even more so.

But how would you balance that with your earlier point about experimentation? Because the danger of having centralized organization, and I've introduced the word centralization here, is that typically that creates a kind of bottleneck or a throttling process that can slow down innovation and slow down experimentation. So how do you balance that?

Yeah, and I don't think there's a clear answer or silver bullet. Right. I think you're going to have to have both. Right. You're going to have to have the experimentation, you're going to have to have somebody defining certain parameters. I think what you don't want is to centrally prescribe. It needs to be this application. I think that's where you run then into, into a problem. But if you just, you know, have, have applications being plugged into your environment without any kind of framework or any kind of parameter set. Right. Then you're also not going to be able to even measure what, what, what does success mean? Right. Is this an effective application or not? Right. Is this an application which we, where we can say that the experiment was successful or not? Right. So you need those parameters. You need to be able to have a, have a landscape where you say this actually serves to solve for this problem.

Let's bring on to that third and final point you made around leadership. An article we both read before this broadcast but didn't get to cover mentioned the role of empathy in modern leadership. And I want to contrast that against, and if you don't mind me saying, Ranjit, we're probably of a similar age. We're both middle aged guys who, I know I grew up with the, with the world of Jack Welch. I remember reading his book in my late teens and thinking there is a leader when Jack Welch was lauded as the type of leader we should all be back in, let's say the mid-90s. Talk to me about what are the characteristics of a great leader today and how they perhaps might differ from the Jack Welch era.

Yeah. And I think there's a book which was recently published which casts a bit of a more critical eye on the Jack Welsh era. Right. So probably there's a bit of a question mark of how sustainably successful even that leadership style was at that time. Right. The way I would frame it is I think good leadership needs to cover probably five things. One is coaching. So coaching your team, coaching the individuals in your team. And that neatly segues into collaboration. So coaching is around the individual. The collaboration is how do the individuals work together effectively At a very technical level, where does asynchronous work makes sense, where it should be actually working together at the same time. But also kind of what kind of, you know, modes of collaboration do you want to use? That segues nicely into culture, right? Defining what kind of culture, what kind of values do you want to have within the organization? And that links, you know, closely to community. Right. And thinking of, you know, what are the relevant stakeholders, how do we actually integrate with stakeholders. And most importantly, and that comes back to the, to the point we were discussing earlier on when talking about purpose. Right. Okay. How do you actually put the customer at the center? How do you ensure that you relentlessly, as Amazon puts it, right, thinking about the customer. And so for me, good leadership centers around those five key topics and five Cs if you want. Right. When it comes to empathy, obviously these to, to deliver on any of these five topics, you require empathy. You need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of, of, of the person that you are speaking to, the person who you are listening to. I think Adam Grant put it even even better. It's more than empathy, it's compassion. So it's not just putting yourself into the shoes of the counterpart and that might be the customer, it might be your colleague, but it is also trying to actually help them solve that issue. So I think this for me is kind of the essence of good leadership and it is not something which is some newfangled thing which is relevant just now, but probably has been relevant throughout the ages. And, and if you want to have sustainable success, then those are, you know, five or six elements which are absolutely critical in every situation.

I love that you mentioned that sustainable success. I think that's probably the difference. You mentioned obviously the recent criticism of Welsh's management style, which had opportunity. I think, you know, it was lauded in a pre Internet age where we didn't get a feedback loop for five or 10 years. I think in the modern world, if you had had Jack Welch leaders in the 90s with Twitter, I think it would have been ended quite fast. But your point about sustainability and leadership is a fascinating topic, a topic we're not going to be able to get into today because I've, you know, I've squeezed so much out of you and I really enjoyed the conversation. Ranjit, your. You have an enormous amount of knowledge to offer and background. I'm going to ask you two Questions before we leave, though. One is, if folks want to find out more about the code art and your business, where should they reach out and who should reach out to you? What is your area of specialism and what problems do you solve for whom? Maybe you can answer that question for me first.

Yeah, absolutely. So LinkedIn, super simple, right? And you'll find me on LinkedIn who, on the one hand, you know, founders in the work tech space who really want to make the difference in shaping the future of work and who want to have the dialogue or maybe also get in touch with other resources besides me and people. Business leaders, I would say, could be CEOs, could be CPOs, right, who are really thinking about the future of work and who believe that solving for the big skillshare skills gap, thinking through, you know, what their workforce should look like and how people in the organization should be interacting with each other, that this is critical to the business success. Yes, those people, I think, you know, I might have. I might be a good sparring partner. Might be somebody they might want to speak to.

I think you're underselling yourself there, Ranjit. As to might be a good sparring partner, I'd argue to be an excellent sparring partner. Brings me to my last question. We've had 101 pieces of advice to date on the shortlist, and that is by no means to reduce the impact of advice. Number 102. What advice would you leave our audience with today? Perhaps in the context of our topic today, perhaps not in that context, either advice that you have received yourself during your career or advice that has become obvious to you during your career you need to pass on. What would you like to leave our audience with today?

So I'll break the rule, Johnny, and have two pieces of advice. So I think the first thing is, and this is very much in line with what we were speaking of today, kind of. And this is something I learned from, from one of my previous bosses, was to pick something that I want to learn every day. And that has really helped me. And this might be something really small, right? Just a piece of information, a bit of knowledge, or it could be an actual skill. But having that piece of learning every day, I think, you know, gives you so much joy. And it is something which I see in my children, right, who do this so naturally, and for some reason, we as adults sometimes lose that. Right. Over the years. So going back to that, just curiosity and really wanting to learn something every day, that would be my first piece of advice. And the second piece of advice. Advice is choose the right football club to follow. Because unfortunately, you know, you get to choose that very early on in your life and then you're stuck with whatever you've chosen for the rest of your life.

Ranjit, I'm not a big football fan and this is soccer for those Americans listening in. When I was in school, I was an Arsenal supporter. Do you know why I was an Arsenal supporter? Rangy.

Oh, you gotta tell me.

I wore red and white Nike socks to gym one day and somebody and I had no idea about soccer and somebody said, oh, you're an Arsenal supporter. I said, am I? And he pointed, said, yeah, you're wearing Arsenal socks. Okay. And for eight years I supported Arsenal because I had inadvertently bought a pair of red and white Nike socks. Turns out ours was not. Don't worry, I've learned my lesson from that. Ranji, huge. Thank you so much for sharing your insight. Joining us from hotel room in Germany. I know it's always difficult to find the time, but I'm sure our audience really appreciate the advice you've given and will reach out should they feel that they're in that category of somebody who wants to learn from such gold and such wisdom. Ranji, thanks so much for joining us. We'll have you on again. I'd love to talk to you again about many of these topics and go deeper on leadership, go deeper on tech, go deeper on the future of work. But let's do that again.

Cheers, Johnny, take care.

Pleasure and thank you for listening. We're going to be back next week. We've got another show will drop in Spotify or Apple, wherever you listen to our podcast or of course join us live on LinkedIn or YouTube. That's going to be next Wednesday, which is what, the 15th of June, that's 4pm UK Irish time. That's 11am on the east coast of the US and 8am on the west coast. And we're going to be joining from Rick Kelly. Rick Kelly is the head of Meta, formerly Facebook in Ireland. And Rick previously ran Facebook's global gaming business. They have a gaming business? Yes, they do. It's a huge, huge part of the business. And Rick is joining us not to talk about gaming, not to talk about Facebook, not to talk about Meta. Johnny talk about diversity and inclusion because he is a leader who in his team was just a massive advocate for inclusivity and for diversity and who literally booked the trend in the gaming industry, which Tiffany would have had, I think. And Rick will share with us next week. Sub 20% female representation in roles in the gaming industry. He pushed that all the way up to close to 50% because he really believed in having an inclusive culture that made his team unbelievably successful. Rick's going to be talking to you is about inclusion, about diversity as a leader, the importance of it, how you achieve that. On our show next week, do not miss out. If you can't make the live show Wednesday, you will drop in your Spotify, your Apple podcast come Wednesday evening, wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next week. Thanks for joining me live from Barcelona and putting up my shaky camera and my perhaps not great quality sound. We'll be back in the studio next week. Take care.

Sam.