Corporate Culture Disruption in the AI Era - with Pinaki Kathiari

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Daniel Nestle: Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host Dan Nestle. Let's be bold, unconventional, even spiky. As my friend Marc Schaefer would say, job descriptions and roles as we know them are obsolete. That's right, I said it. They're obsolete. I'm talking about comms and marketing roles. But I think the same thing can be said for most of the so called knowledge workers today. Now before you say anything, yes, AI is a big part of this, as it should be. Everybody knows I'm pretty AI obsessed on this show. But you know what? It's an accelerant, it's not a cause. AI is an innovation engine.

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Daniel Nestle: It should enable us to not only be more efficient, it should and will increasingly be a co creator and co explorer, helping us to change the way we work and what we produce and even the nature of what we can contribute. So that means it will make the bullet listed fixed job description more of an obstacle to progress than a checklist for career advancement as it currently is. The fact is we can go so far beyond what a senior manager of such and such or a vice president of such and such is or is supposed to do and discover new tasks that don't currently belong to anyone. What does that do to recruiting? What does that do to performance reviews? What does it do to functional boundaries, org structure, corporate culture?

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Daniel Nestle: I could go on, but I think my guest today can help us understand all this and more, especially when it comes to the changing nature of employee engagement and culture change. He's another one of those rare birds or weird unicorns I like to talk about so much. A man who started out as a UX and web design specialist, became a tech entrepreneur, still is, and ultimately found his calling where technology, digital experience and employee experience kind of intersect. For almost two decades he's been helping enterprise clients with digital transformation and strategy for internal and external communications, connecting employee experience and culture to brand experience outcomes. Now, as the CEO of Local Wisdom, he and his company are solving problems through talent and technology, sharing their wisdom and shaking things up as they say on their website.

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Daniel Nestle: He's a well known speaker, he's a teacher, he's a mentor in the comms world. He's a board member of the iabc. He's active in multiple professional organizations. You'll see him out and about conferences, schools. Please give a warm welcome to my good friend Pinaki Kathyari Pinaki.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Oh thank You so much Daniel. I'm doing well, thank you. I'm doing a lot better now after that introduction. Fabulous introduction. Thank you so much for your kind words and thank you for having me here. I'm glad to be here sharing the mic with you.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, man. For the second time. Because, you know, you came on in the original iteration of the Dan Nestle show, which is now the trending communicator, but better. And, you know, I want to bring people on who actually are trending communicators, who are thinking about the future, who have their foot and their hands and their brains in that space that's changing and volatile and kind of scary to a lot of people, but can make. Help us make sense of it, you know, and what you've been doing with employee experience, with internal communications and technology writ large. I mean, this is something that I think all communicators can benefit from. And I want to hear about it, you know, as we talk about, for lack of a better phraseology, the future of work here. Right. The future of work and corporate culture and et cetera.

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Daniel Nestle: Now, we've had a lot of conversations about this, and I don't want to lead you too much, but I think that there's just so much here that people are interested in. So, you know, first I. I want to give you another chance because, you know, you were on before, but that was such a long time ago. Can you give us a little bit of an intro? How'd you get to where you are? And you know, tell us a little bit about Local Wisdom and then we'll. We'll dig right into. Into the good stuff. Well, not that's bad stuff, but we'll dig into the good stuff.

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Pinaki Kathiari: The juicy stuff. No, all good. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm CEO of Local Wisdom. I also am the co founder of Resource Hero. Local Wisdom is a digital communications agency, like you said, a group of talented folks who are. I'll just call them unicorns because we try to find the right type of people who can do multiple things, but also we know how to treat and nurture unicorns because a special breed of people, but essentially Local Wisdom helps communication teams stay above water. It's really our goal here. We have a set of strategies that we could implement and we have execution. So we're basically bringing together strategy and execution to help y'all sleep better at night and a little bit easier and stuff like that. I have another company called Resource Here, which is my product company.

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Pinaki Kathiari: It's a app built on top of Salesforce, and it's meant for managers to help forecast their people's time into the future. So we're not burning them out, essentially.

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Daniel Nestle: See, that's, that's what I mean by weird unicorn. You know, you're developing the, You've developed apps. You know, you, we've been, we've talked about your coding. Kind of fun that you have. Coding. I don't know. Fun and coding don't always go together for me. But, you know, you came, you started off as a, you know, as a. As a developer and, you know, a techie. And here you are dealing with the. What some people would argue is the softest of skills. Right. And I don't like that term. I don't like calling, you know, interpersonal relationships and employee engagement. I don't like calling it soft in any way. But that's what it's known as. Right?

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Pinaki Kathiari: It's hard to do.

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Daniel Nestle: It's really hard to do those soft things.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, exactly.

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Daniel Nestle: So, like, no, you know, what was the transformation?

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, it was a funny story. It kind of goes, I don't know, like, very young age. Like, I always wanted to be an engineer growing up because my dad was one. And then come high school, I don't know, I got into things. Good stuff. Like, I got into DJing. I got into drawing and writing. I got into poetry. So suddenly I wanted to be an artist and a writer and a poet. My dad was like, no, you're going to go into engineering. So I started off engineering. I still love engineering. And it was about the time where, you know, the Internet was coming about. Shows you how old I am.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: But given that, I was like, this is cool, I should go into computer science. So I switched to computer science and still had this, like, love for design and whatnot. But the school that I was going to at the time, they didn't allow me to do both computer science and art. So I ended up doing computer science and psychology, which is, which is fascinating. You know, I think squiggly career path and just bringing together just different passions is, I think, really special. And at the time, doing computer science and psychology didn't make a great deal of sense when you kind of think about what jobs are out there that involve computer science and psychology. But then a few years later, as I entered the job market, the world of user experience just opened up.

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Pinaki Kathiari: And then user experience led into just all types of experience design. And when you think about experience design, that just kind of goes everywhere. So, yeah, I do enjoy so picking up the pencil and paper and sketching. I do enjoy coding every now and then. I do enjoy DJing still. And yeah, so I think I kind of get to bring all of this stuff together.

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Daniel Nestle: What was the particular bridge, if there was one? Or like the, you know, that the thing that happened that said, you know what I think this is. This is really suitable for internal comms, for employee comms, for culture change, and for cultural, you know, for corporate culture building. You know, was there something that kind of put you over the edge or moved you to the dark side, as we in comms would say, but, you know, like, what got you going in that direction? Because, you know, going from a app developer to a communicator and a combination thereof is, again, a weird unicorn thing to do.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, yeah. It was kind of like, I think there was like three things that brought me there. It was like one, when Local Wisdom first started, we worked with more external communicators because there weren't internal communicators at the time. And while working with them, we started seeing that over the years they were getting certain internal communication roles, jobs and responsibilities, because from the earliest stage, you know, we're putting something out externally, we should say something internally about it. So came that. And then as it started becoming more of a thing, we started seeing the role internal communicators come out, and we saw that they're just not getting the same amount of love from a resourcing perspective as external communications and marketing.

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Pinaki Kathiari: And then when I became CEO of Local Wisdom, it's when I really put my own internal communications and culture building to the test, because I really had to change things up and seeing what communications and culture would do to an organization in the bottom line and just what it feels like to walk into the office or log into that Zoom call or whatnot. Felt something so special. So I'm like, I. Then my heart started going into it, which is why you probably hear me talking more about internal communications and employee experience and culture building so much, because I've seen what it can do.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. And just to be clear for the. For our listeners, you know, I said you're CEO of Local Wisdom, but you didn't start out that way. You started out as, you know, within the organization and you became the CEO, what, 2017 ish, something like that?

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, that's correct. And yes, 2017.

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Daniel Nestle: How'd that happen? I mean, you just, you started off in UX and in strategy and then just kind of, you know, kicked everybody out, booted them to the curb, took over. Was it hostile?

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Pinaki Kathiari: That's how it works. No, it wasn't so hostile. It was basically like, yeah, the company was started by a few colleagues from college. Like, we all graduated computer science around the late 90s, early 2000s, when that tuck bubble burst. So we're like, what do we do now? And kind of brought in. And I kind of saw that there was this need for a company to do both good design and good technology together. At the time, no one was really into that sort of thing. So we set off for that, and we're just like four guys just hanging out, doing stuff, exploring things that we just enjoyed doing, and, you know, trying to see if we could make it into a service. And, yeah, it just started growing. We were just like, I think from one employee to six to nine to 12.

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Pinaki Kathiari: And now we're about like 30, 33. Yep. And around 2016, ish or so, we realized that, you know, one, it's getting really difficult for the four of us to get together and make a decision. Two, if someone were to ask one of us for something, it's like Mommy and Daddy. If they asked one of us for something, didn't get the answer, they'd go to someone else to get the answer they want. And three, it was just kind of becoming more of a problem that we didn't have an aligned overall vision of where we're all kind of taking it because we all had slightly different variances of where we wanted to go.

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Pinaki Kathiari: And so, yeah, I proposed that we need a CEO model and put myself in the ring, knowing that it's a difficult job, and it was put to the vote, and that's how I came here.

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Daniel Nestle: Interesting. No Game of Thronesy stuff happening. Nothing happened.

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Pinaki Kathiari: No Games of Thrones stuff. No. I did kind of go through my ranks at Local Wisdom. I think I first started off as director of user experience, then headed up production, then sales and marketing, and then here.

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Daniel Nestle: So why, you know, a widespread or kind of broad baseline career that led to a wide purview that, you know, put you in the CEO seat. It's just interesting to me because, you know, you didn't start off in comms, right? A lot of the people, or even in marketing, a lot of the people who are. Who are listening, and certainly people we know, they did communications in college or they learned. They went to biz school, B school, and then they came out and they're like, yeah, I'm in marketing, I'm in comms. And that's their path. But. But increasingly I'm. I'm seeing more and more people who kind of edge their way into it. Sometimes unassumingly or unwittingly. You know, in my case, I've told the story before, but in my case, you know, I. I was in, like, who knows what I was doing.

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Daniel Nestle: I was teaching, and then I was doing, like, recruitment, and then I was, like, working on, you know, working in a consulting company. And, you know, I was thinking, okay, I'll be in the HR world maybe, and just. It was just not fitting. And I just hit the reset button and said, you know, the only thing I can really do is write, so I'm gonna be a copywriter. And this was a long time ago, but when I put myself out there as a copywriter and managed to convince people that I actually was a copywriter, got jobs and got clients before I knew it's like, if somebody had to put a name to it's like, what are you doing? Well, I mean, you're copywriting for sure, but actually you're a marketer now.

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Daniel Nestle: And then you look at the clients that I was increasingly getting, and it's like, oh, you're actually doing comms work. So I've always been straddling or kind of in that zone that bounces between marketing and comms, and certainly it started off with the writing stuff, but grew into more project management leadership, and then eventually had my own little agency, and then sort of then I moved back to the corporate world, and I was running a marketing and comms function for a while. So that's kind of the path. And eventually just, you know, now I never feel comfortable saying, yeah, I am a comms guy.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: But I think I own it now. I think that's kind of, you know, that's the. That's the coat I'm wearing.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah. I'm a reason for that. I think there's a reason for that. I think. I think it kind of goes back to what you started off this podcast talking about job descriptions.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Right. Like, the world of work, once it puts us in the little boxes and things like that, and saying, this is what you're doing. This is what we want you to do. But, you know, here were just following things that we enjoy doing. Right. And I think that's the special place is like, you know, it doesn't feel like work because I'm just enjoying the things that I'm doing. Right. It doesn't feel like you're doing marketing because you're just writing stuff, and you just enjoy writing.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: And so people see that and try to peg you in a box or put you in A place. So we as humans do that because there's a psychology. It's like we need a way to categorize things, to remember everything around us. And yeah, like, I wasn't in comms, but I think the thread for me was probably around psychology because psychology is all fascination with, like, just the human experience and neuroscience and the human mind and how it works. And communication is such a core part of how we interrelate. So it's, you know, so there's psychology. Even from like a UX standpoint, how does it feel to use this system, psychology, when you read the words like, or do they understand me? Is this connecting with me? And then psychology, actually, when you're talking to people.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. Neuroscience and psychology are threads that continue to pop up or come out in the conversations that I have with communicators, whether or not, you know, they. They realize it or not. But I. There are certainly some specialists who are like, yeah, I'm a. Like, like my friend Dr. Laura McHale. She is a neuroscientist for communications primarily. And maybe she started off as a comms person. She was running comms for. For a bank in Asia, and she's like, you know what? I kind of want to be a psychologist. And she went to get her doctorate, and then she discovered a program for neuroscience and went deep in that direction. Now she's arguably one of the world's only, if not the leader of the study of neuroscience for the industry of communications.

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Daniel Nestle: And the things that she has kind of uncovered in her research and what she talks about is so in line with, I think, your journey a little bit here. And just seeing it's not just about what we like, but, like, understanding the motivations and behaviors that cause people to react in certain ways. But also our own, what's going on in our own neurological neurophysiology that, you know, that kind of leads us to lead in certain ways or behave in certain ways, et cetera, and, you know, kind of put that all together. Communications is the glue or the kind of the ether that floats between and among all of us. Right. That activates those. Those. I don't want to say triggers. It's the wrong word, but it activates the. The way that we. That we deal with these situations. It activates our skills.

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Daniel Nestle: And, you know, it sounds like you've probably had that. That baseline when you started things off. But, you know, let. Let's. Let's circle back here a little bit, because you said it, and I do want to get into it, which is this whole idea that, you know, we, we fall into things that we like or we, you know, at least you and I sort of created our own job in a way from doing the work that really kind of we started by doing this work and just sort of ended up being classified and being categorized. And once you're classified or categorized, then you're on a track. Right? People like to put you on a track.

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Pinaki Kathiari: They like to put you on a track.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. And there's nothing that a compliance minded person likes more than checkboxes and a list. Right. And a percentage. And in the case of, you know, in the case of recruitment or in the case of performance appraisals and review, it's just, okay, these are the five checkboxes. What's the percentage that this person has matched these tech, these checkboxes or exceeded them, whether it's their duties or their goals or whatever. And my perspective has changed a lot on this over the years. I've never been a big fan of performance reviews and we could talk about that too. And we have indeed. But we can again. But especially now where we have this opportunity to unleash not just ourselves, but unleash creativity, unleash possibility and real innovation.

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Daniel Nestle: Because for the first time ever, or one of the reasons, at least for the first time ever, we can use our natural language skills to effect massive technological advance to help our jobs, to help creativity, to help efficiency, productivity, et cetera. And of course that's all about AI, but not only about AI. What do you think really this is going to mean to this whole world that is so compliance and checkbox oriented that you know, we've got so much like room to color outside the lines now. And you know, what looked like a connect the dots and a paint the dots picture is now going to turn into a completely different painting.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Absolutely. Probably literally. Literally and figuratively. Yeah. I think everything changes, especially as like we're getting deeper and deeper into this. Like the amount of power that we've had before AI in our back pockets was astounding compared to like 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Now with the advent of AI on top of that stuff, it's. We could code on the fly, we could design on the fly, we could write on the fly, we could ask questions and learn on the fly without having to do much. So. And it, and yeah, and it breaks structures. Right. Like I think when you, when you mentioned job descriptions, I got interested, I started like, I hit up a new tab Real quick and started like Googling, when was the organization chart invented? And things like that.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Because we as humans in work, like have been loving the idea of structure and assembly line and you know, things like that. This starts to really break and pull apart the fabric of that. Because yeah, I don't need certain things or I don't need to go off and do all these types of research. I have this at my fingertips. There's definitely some skepticism that we should still keep with regards to AI, of course, but the core of it changes everything. Just like the Internet changed everything, just like the mobile smartphone changed everything. Yeah, this is probably a little bit more, dare I say, nuclear. It's more like it's more powerful than all those things. But even if you kind of even go back, like the engine changed our world, right. There's these advances in technologies that change the path of humanity forever.

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Pinaki Kathiari: This is one of them, a really big one.

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Daniel Nestle: Past changes. Talk about the engine. You know, maybe the printing press might be a little bit different, but the advent of the steam engine, the advent of, you know, the advent of, of some degree of automation, you know, the changes were primarily labor related. Right. I mean, when you think about like productivity, you're right. So it's like, okay, I have 100 workers that I need to build the car. Well, now I only need seven. So what happens to the rest of those workers? Right? They get, they have to get new tasks. They have to, or they have to leave the company or we have to. There's, there's a lot that has to happen, but there's nothing for. They have to learn something completely new or just change, you know, their entire career now did. If they're unskilled workers, they're portable.

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Daniel Nestle: If they're highly skilled in this one very thing about, you know, which, you know, riveting something onto another thing. And I'm talking about this like I know the first thing about industrial production. I don't. But, but if that's their specialized job, then they're really in trouble because they, you know, they don't have any skill set to replace what's happened now with. I think this time is a little bit different, broader ranging because, you know, yes, we can see for sure the writing on the wall or the writing that's already in front of us that, okay, AI certainly it can handle a lot of the baseline tasks, you know, no problem. It can do your proofreading and it can do your first drafts and it can do your press releases.

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Daniel Nestle: And it can do your emails if you're so dis, if you're so inclined, you know, it can take care of that. Whether or not it could do it well is another story. But it could do it good enough, right? And that then gives you, as the user of the AI, a couple of options. One option is, oh, it's going to do this for me. I'm going to keep quiet and just, just work less, right, and just pass off this work as my own. Of course we don't want that to happen. We want people to be ethical. Another option, another option is, okay, it's taking care of all this shit work that I don't like to do that frees me up to maybe do more that I like to do.

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Daniel Nestle: And you double down on the things that you really like to do and you enjoy your life a little bit more and your work a little bit more. That's option two. Option three includes option two. But then it's like taking it to the next level, which is like, okay, it takes care of all these baseline tasks, it frees me up to do more. But wait a second, what am I going to do with that more AI is also able. Or it's, it also enables me to do more with the more. So it's like, it's kind of like gets a little meta here, but it's kind of like creating a cycle or a spiral, a positive cycle of creation and expansion.

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Daniel Nestle: And, you know, I don't think everybody's going to necessarily go that route, but I think plenty of people are and certainly creative people and people in the knowledge world that we're in will do it more. And when they start doing that, then you start to see things. Like, just a solid example would be a communicator or a comms person who is, you know, reliant on research to understand their audience and reliant on insights will say, okay, I can do a lot of the reporting, I could do some of the baseline work here with my AI. And then, you know, oh, hang on just a second. What if I give the AI a role that allows it to be, or that kind of makes it portray my audience? What if I do that over and over again?

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Daniel Nestle: And now I have my own little research group. Wait a second, I can conduct the research. Not to say that the expensive external research we're commissioning is outdated, but I can conduct my own research, get ahead of my assumptions, my validations, bring better questions to the table, and suddenly now I'm insights. I wasn't insights. Before, I was on the comms team. So this kind of radical expansion of roles and responsibilities. Right. There's nobody saying there's no kind of job description that says your job is now insights. But if I go to my boss and I say, look, I've developed this thing, we can get insights like for, for nothing, for 20 bucks a month. Right. We can get all kinds of insights. And I've worked out we can do it real fast. There's no real downside to this.

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Daniel Nestle: Now suddenly it's part of my job, you know, and do more. Yeah, I have to do more, but it's not taking me much more effort. Did it. Did it first, but not anymore. And now I'm adding more value. I'm. I'm contributing more to the company. And there's no way currently for most enterprises to recognize that new contribution and to alter my path and to provide me with the opportunity to alter my path. That's where it sort of starts to boggle my mind.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, it's going to take years. It'll take multiple years, especially for the larger organizations to adapt and kind of move and whatnot. I think we're still. It's so weird. Like, I don't know if I thought about this, but I think we're still, in theory, early adopters here.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Even though it feels like it's been so long and that, you know. But in the kind of grand scheme of things, we're still early adopters. I think, I think that you're right. You kind of hit a few interesting points. There is like, one where you talked about the past technological revolutions have kind of shifted labor workers. This one, I think is going after, I guess, intellectual workers, white collar workers or whatnot type of thing. Because I could easily create bots and AI that could run through strategy, create. I could give it a framework, teach it a framework and have it run through that. It does it fairly very well. And it's not perfect like you said earlier. But I'll also say this, that this is probably the worst AI that we're ever going to use because it's only going to get better.

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Daniel Nestle: Absolutely right.

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Pinaki Kathiari: If you think about the car when it was first invented. But yeah, I think it does make massive rippling effects to people, I think. Yeah. In one states, in one aspect of it, there's certain physical labor that I think is now becoming more somewhat valuable because of it. In that, for sure, it's interesting, like my son is going into his senior year in high school. Going into college and last year, junior year, as we're looking into colleges in the advent of AI was one of the first times where I was at a loss of like, what should you get into?

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, right.

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Pinaki Kathiari: And because the world in five, 10 years is going to look amazingly different. In fact, like, you know, were talking earlier about, you know, the career progression, you know, when somebody said, oh, you're an internal communicator, when you started, there wasn't an internal communicator. That role wasn't a thing. Right. When I started, there wasn't a user experience, you know, position. Right. So like, I think technologies and things like that or changes creates new things. And it's hard to be able to foretell that to like, say, where should I go into?

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: So when I was talking to my son, I was thinking, like, you know, I think you should definitely get into like something that you're passionate about, something that you're really interested to get a deep expertise in it and also explore something that's physical, that's going to have you outside moving about and things like that. Something that, you know, AI won't be able to do. But AI and robotics are coming together. So, yeah, that's all going to happen sooner or later anyhow. But the thing is that in the world of the future, I think we definitely need folks who are human and have a deep expertise to be able to tell if the AI is wrong. Because that's a thing. Because AI is not giving you the right answer. It's giving you the answer that it thinks you're going to like.

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Daniel Nestle: Yep. There's the whole Ethan Molik principles of keeping the human in the loop and it's, you know, always invite AI to the table. These kinds of things where we can work, you know, you're supposed to work together with it, be treated as a co intelligence and, you know, but, you know, check its answers and totally true. I think it's, you know, I don't know how long it's going to be true, but it's for at least as long. As long as we have something that needs to go out into the public and we risk our reputations and our livelihoods on that something. We're going to want to check it. Right.

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Pinaki Kathiari: It'll, for the most part, I think, and I'll go out on a limb and say, I think it'll maybe always be true because the basis of AI is learning off of humans and we still have to fact check humans.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, yeah, we'll Always do that. And there's, you know, there's some talk about, well, let's have the AI fact check the AI. And you know, that gets into this kind of crazy philosophical discussion.

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Pinaki Kathiari: But that makes sense, though.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, but, you know, I was thinking something you said as well, about internal communications and just thinking about how it didn't exist years ago and now it does. And, you know, part of that was a technology change. You know, we enabled our teams and our companies with these platforms for rapid messaging. Right. First it was email. You know, email was probably the first game changer in that respect. Then instant messaging and things like this where, okay, you now have people who aren't sitting right next to each other, can really kind of communicate what's happened really fast and kind of get. Have conversations. And at the same time, when you have your executives want to tell the people something, you don't have to gather in a town hall. You can actually just shoot out an email. This is a long time ago. Right now.

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Daniel Nestle: Email has been with us for 30 years. I don't know, something like that, some crazy long amount of time. And it's, you know, it'll never go away. It is, as my friend Robbie Fitzwater says, it is the cockroach of marketing. It will survive. Everything, will always have email. That said, when it comes to internal comms. Right. I think you're right. This sort of technology started to really enable this kind of information flow which needed to be managed. But at the same time, it took some innovator or somebody to say, wait, we can take advantage of this and actually use it or kind of see the potential of this to help us build a cohesive culture. And that was a leap of, I think a leap of faith or a leap of kind of understanding of the potential. Right.

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Daniel Nestle: And then, of course, various, as technology advanced, various platforms were developed, we could make these things happen now that everybody's got a slack or a workplace or whatever it is and zoom and whatever other technologies, and now we can have tech enabled or tech enhanced communications inside, which requires a much more strategic approach. At the same time, I think in parallel, the other thing I wanted to mention before I hand it back to you because I'm being very selfish here in my own podcast, is at the same time, somewhere along the line, it was finally understood that employees are a stakeholder group. It took a long time for that to happen. Employees were treated as, you know, in some ways, like the whole. Even the, even the term human resources. They're assets, you know, chattel to be Traded.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, yeah, right, yeah. Human resources are created for the business, not necessarily for the people. Right?

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Daniel Nestle: So then, you know, some people start to change that to employer relations, whatever, even that is a little Orwellian. But the idea though, that, okay, employees actually, when they're happy and when they're productive and for good reason, right, when they're satisfied with their work and they feel that they're doing good work, a miracle happens in that your brand gets uplifted in the market. Right? So how that connection, right, there's people like you make that connection. This is, there's a, there's this really direct and measurable connection between how well you communicate with your employees and engage with your employees to how well they advocate for your brand and become ambassadors for your company. So where I'm going with this, I think, is the future.

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Daniel Nestle: We talked about job descriptions changing and I think we only scratched the surface of that because I think job descriptions, structure, team structure, functions, everything is on the table. I'm not saying that accounting is no longer going to do accounting. What I am saying though is that enterprising individuals within the company will figure out ways to do stuff that's outside of their traditional classic remit and are they going to be pigeonholed or are they going to be let free to run? And that will play havoc on the structure and on HR's capability to manage advancement and pay and titles and everything that requires a really heavy compliance checklist. Right. So all of this put together is going to, I think it's going to really, or maybe it already is going to play havoc on corporate culture. So where do you come in on this?

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Daniel Nestle: And you know, where do you think it's going?

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, I think you're right. It's going to get much more messier before it gets better. And you got to kind of like learn things. And it's going to take some people, you know, some companies who are like leading to kind of push through and test things out. Because it's going to be all testing things out, trying things out, see what happens, what works and what doesn't work. So there'll be successes and there'll be failures. And I also think it's going to be interesting kind of the long term kind of aspects of how AI will change things. Because it's. I kind of think of certain, like humans, right? Like for us, things get played out. You know, we grow and we change over time. Like Facebook was cool once upon a time. Go. Right. And I remember that It's Right, of course.

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Pinaki Kathiari: So it was kind of like it was things like that. And now Facebook, I think even people who are on it is like, it's not that cool. But you know what, it's the only place I have to like, connect with folks. It's just something has changed and the environment around it has changed to kind of put it in that different light. I think employee experience has been interesting because I think, like, it's always been kind of rooted in some kind of like business profit end all state. Right. And like the early days of user experience, it was all about utility. Let me make sure that people have what they need to do their job safely and without, you know, getting hurt so that, you know, we don't have as many sick people or people taking days off.

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Pinaki Kathiari: And then after that, it went into, all right, employee experience. Let's talk about productivity. How can we get more with less? In the 80s, it started to get into more attraction. An engagement was like, hey, we have a lot of other companies that are hiring the same type of people. How do we make ourselves more attractive to them? And, and even today, it's, they're. They're trying to still work out the structures, but it's still all rooted in the end, all profit for the organization. Now, it sounds weird for me to say this out loud because you're like, hey, aren't all corporations for profit and stuff like that? Yes, and I get it, but at what expense is really the question. Right. And that's kind of where I'm working on or thinking about deeply. I launched a podcast.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Why does it feel so wrong to be human at work and just try to explore these topics of like, we've been doing things in a certain way for so long that, like, let's just look into where that came from, why we do that, and is there a better way or is this the right way to do things? So I think there is a lot of change in what I'd like to see. If AI could do this for me, that would be great.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Or for all of us, that would be great is if, like, yeah, take up a lot of the stuff, a lot of the work, and if we could use that extra time to think of how do we take care of each other as human beings, not how do we take that time to squeeze more out, to kind of, you know, get that next level advantage over the company. Because right at the end of the day, I think, and I hope having a machine intellect might help us be more human and treat each other more like humans and not machines, which we've been doing all this time. This sounds weird and, you know, hokey pokey, but it's like, you know, what is our meaning in this planet? Right. Greater than our jobs and things like that. Right. What are we here for?

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Pinaki Kathiari: We're not here for the nine to five.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: We're here for the human experience.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Does that make sense what I'm saying? Am I totally going off the wall here?

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Daniel Nestle: No, I mean it's. There's a little bit of woo happening here, but that's fine there.

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Pinaki Kathiari: It's true.

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Daniel Nestle: There was, you know, I have this on my list of things to read today or tomorrow. The CEO of Anthropic just wrote thousand word, kind of very optimistic, beautiful piece about. I say it's beautiful. I haven't read it yet. But this optimistic piece about, you know, this glorious future with AI and I haven't read it yet. I'm assuming, I mean, and I'm just going to predict that when I do, I'm going to hear some, I'm going to read some of the things that you just sort of voiced in his piece. Because you know, the enablement enabling us to be more human is one of those, I think, those special features that it takes a certain perspective to sort of, I think, to recognize that this is a possibility.

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Daniel Nestle: It's like that third option I mentioned earlier where yeah, you get AIs taken care of the basic stuff and frees you up to do stuff. But then what do you do at that time and do you use it for the betterment of yourself and of your company and of, you know, as you say, for humanity? I mean that's, you know, that's very highfalutin stuff and I, No, I mean, I'm on board. I think it would be if we, if that happens at scale, we're in a good place.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah. You know, I'm not sure if, but I. And the whole thing feels like. Was that movie cars that came out, Pixar cars?

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Where you say like, you gotta like, what is it? Turn right to like bank left. I'm getting this all wrong. But I'm sure it's true though.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, I think you're right.

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Pinaki Kathiari: It's just counterintuitive to the way we're thinking. Like wait a minute, care about people. Like I, you know, like wait a minute, like more than a prophet, something like that. Like, it seems so foreign to think about it in that way. And then that kind of begs the question of, like, why is that so foreign? Right. Like, how do we get here in that way?

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Daniel Nestle: You know, like, ultimately that even that, though, is going to have to yield some kind of measurable positive effect for a company's investors, for a company's employees. Right. And while clearly, if you're nicer one or it's really good for the employees, investors might have a different kind of feeling about it, you know, and it would take bravery for a CEO or for a board to say, it's all right, we're going to reduce our, we're going to bank on or risk our stock price because we feel it's right to invest in this right now. But there has to be. Because, because in six months, a year from now, we're going to be doing even better because of this. It will boost our value. That has to happen.

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Pinaki Kathiari: It's going to get more messy before it gets better. But I hope it does. I hope it does. Because if you think about all the things that we used to believe in the past, like, yeah, we wouldn't think that way today.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: So I'm hoping our thoughts of today are things of the future that you're like, what were we thinking?

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, true. I mean, you know, it's easier, it's easy to over index on some things in the short term. You know, we have to do some calibration and experimenting until we figure out, you know, like, the argument can be made that we've over indexed on remote work or the argument can be made that we've over indexed just, you know, it works for some. But as a, on the whole, on, we've over indexed on this whole idea of the employee as a family, you know, we've over indexed on a lot on the idea of, of, you know, giving the employee everything that they want to make them happy because, you know, their ultimate goal is happiness. The ultimate goal is not happiness. Right. And, and I think this is another concept that.

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Daniel Nestle: I know you and I talked about this a little bit, but this is another concept that goes hand in hand with the changing nature of corporate culture. And certainly as companies come to grips with the changes that are going to happen as a result of AI and other things, it changes their processes. It changes everything. I think it would be a surefire way directly to the madhouse if your executive team, your leadership team was trying to get on board with AI. Understand the productivity benefits, get an understanding of how all of this is going to ultimately accrue to the bottom line. And at the same time, make sure our employees are always happy, because those things cannot happen all at once. If, if you have a, if you think that happiness. Right.

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Daniel Nestle: All at once, if you think that happiness is the number one thing, because happiness, you can make an employee happy by doubling their salary and giving them like a 20 hour work week. That's going to be a happy employee for a while. Some employees, yeah, you know, certainly some employers would like.

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Pinaki Kathiari: That is an interesting perspective. And I think as humans, happy happiness, it might be the goal that we all want, but it's probably not because we're, as humans, we like drama. And so I think if we're too happy, I think we'll create some kind of drama in our lives just to have it.

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Daniel Nestle: And we also like.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Because it's. It's boring otherwise.

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Daniel Nestle: It is boring. Right. But we also like, you know, we also like to create things and contribute and say, I'm proud of myself or proud of my friends, I'm proud of my colleagues for this. We like this. We like to point to something and say, I was part of the group and I'm. This is my tribe that did this. And sometimes we individually and again, armchair psychologist here, I know nothing, but we individually kind of suppress or willingly kind of sacrifice happiness for the good of the group all the time. So if you look, that probably affects.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Our happiness in a way as well. There's a fulfillment there.

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Daniel Nestle: There's a joy that comes from that, which is different from happiness. And, you know, if the corporate culture is changing, if the purpose of companies is changing, et cetera, as time goes on, you know, maybe we really need to have another serious discussion with people about what you think happiness is at work and why you think you're entitled to it or not. You know, and part of that's this whole family concept, right? And I think it's cool to talk about it with you because, you know, this is your. You're working with internal comms and kind of helping culture to build cultures. And just reminded me that recently I saw a note from the Netflix CEO to his team saying, basically, you're not a family. Stop thinking like you're a family. These people who you work with are not your family. Your family's your family.

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Daniel Nestle: Right? Instead. Instead, you have to think of your coworkers and of our company as a team. And you want to make sure that you include the people on your team who are the best performers and who can actually take our team to the win. Very sportsy. And I think he said, and I'm bastardizing it a little bit, but I think he said that we need to look around and have this kind of keep or don't keep exercise where it's like, if you're picking a team, do you keep this person on the team or do you like, not sure? No, I don't keep them. And if you're not sure that you want this person to be on the team, we got to rip off the bandaid and let them go. Let them go and find a new team. Harsh. I get it.

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Daniel Nestle: Netflix can do a lot because they're like a multi quadrillion gajillion dollar company and in no danger of folding today. But, you know, what does that mean, though? Like, what does that mean for writ large for all the companies that are downstream? And when I say downstream, I mean downstream of trends, not downstream of them. But like, you know, tech and big companies, sometimes they set the trend. All the companies downstream of trend that are still so three years ago and saying, you know, bring your authentic self to work and everybody's a family and huggy, lovey, lovey. Yeah, this, there's gonna be ripple effect and I think AI is gonna actually push it forward. So what. Where are you on this?

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, I think, like, first of all, I agree that I can't sit here and consider us a family. I mean, I love co workers, enjoy their company and everything like that, but we're not bound by blood, you know, the way, you know, other family members are like, and whatnot. We choose to work together as opposed to being born into living together. And you know, so I agree, like, I think there is that aspect of, like, we can't sit here and say we're a family because someone could leave on their own or because of us or for whatever reason. And that's cool. I do care about while they're here, their experience and what it's like to be part of this team because it has to feel good no matter what.

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Pinaki Kathiari: I think the party you talked about was like, yeah, you know, look to the people around you and if, you know, you wouldn't, you know, if they're not working out, that we have to like rip the bandaid off fast. Agree with that in part. Yeah, I do agree that we have to always look at ourselves and kind of look at all right, where. Where could things go wrong? Who's. Who's kind of dropping the ball? Who you know, things like that. But I think we do have to address it as well, because otherwise it almost starts feeling like, you know, a game of Survivor. It's Survivor, right? Yeah, it's. That's not what this is. This is not a competition. And I think I've seen companies have a really abysmal culture because everyone is too busy competing with each other than to be competing outside.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Right. So back to the team analogy. If the football team were too busy kind of fighting each other, they're not playing the game against their opponents, their real opponents. Right.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: So you have to be really careful on how you kind of pick people against each other in an organization, because it could turn really bad really quickly, especially when you're something so massive. Right. Like a Netflix or a massive company where it doesn't become apparent, especially to leaders, especially to the CEO, because all that stuff happens, you know, at different levels and inside conversations and things like that.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: So I think we have to be careful of. Of just how we treat people. So I think if I kind of go. Go with it as, like, whether you're performing high or performing low, we want to work with you to get to where we think you should be or you think you should be, and if not, we want to help you go to the. Find the next thing.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Whether it's like, you know, like, let's talk about it, because I think, like, this, the, you know, the recruiting. I didn't know you were a recruiter, by the way, back in the day. So was I. So, yeah, the aspect of recruiting interview and bringing someone on and then aspect of letting people go, those are kind of two really interesting and seemingly traumatic experiences that we all have. How can we make both of those experiences less traumatic?

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Right. And then that's where it comes from is this kind of concept that me as a leader have, like, you know, could just point at somebody and say, you're fired. I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I don't think we should just, you know, look at another human being just fired.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: You know, I think. I think we have to work with folks to move them across. And first of all, like, if you have someone on a team that you're, like, that quick to fire, you have to first look at their hiring practices and where that came from, which probably takes us all the way back to the job description for sure, and stuff like that, which is probably a whole other episode that we should think about in the future.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, yeah, it certainly is, but I kind of Wanted to go a little bit in that direction. Just a bit because like you got to figure, right, you're. One of the ways to reduce trauma in that experience is by reframing the experience as a, as not familial. Like if you think you're with your family and then you get fired, that's a serious trauma.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: Wait a second. I thought all these people were my family. I thought they loved me. I've just got the, you know, I got my, you know, I got stabbed in the back or you know, whatever. They're betrayed. Strange, terrible, right? And you know, it's hard enough to separate from a company and even if you're a great team player and things are going well, sometimes it doesn't happen for you because like, you know, the environment changes and you know, you gotta go. And there is that, you know, there's a whole undercurrent of we are all replaceable. In a company like we are. There's always somebody who can do similar job, but they might not do it the same way. They may take into. But there's always something. We're all replaceable.

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Daniel Nestle: That said, you know, we, Part of the reason we're replaceable is because somewhere in the files, the dark. I picture it as like an X filesy type room with a pull out aluminum cabinet, some guy smoking a cigarette, like opening and riffling through these files. Somewhere in those files is a box is a form with checkboxes and things like this that says what I do. That is where there's a fundamental problem. And like if I'm thinking about it as a team and I have like, you know, I'm bringing the team together and I'm having. And I'm in that Netflix kind of culture where it's like, all right, do I keep, do I, you know, do we keep this person? Do we lose this person?

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Daniel Nestle: There's gotta be a chance or like an opportunity when you're kind of talking to somebody who may not be a keeper right now, maybe a lower round draft pick, whatever, you know, but you're like, you know, and you're, you have, you're willing to put your, your reputation and your own job on the line for it. But like, there's got to be a moment where that person can then raise their hand and say, look, you're right, I'm not a really great power forward, but my God, can I do super well for you as a guard? Because like, you know, like there's and I'm. I know, mixing sports, I'm not a sports guy. But the point is, right, I didn't.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Even catch that one.

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Daniel Nestle: I mean but, but the point is, right this is where now the enterprising individual has this ability to build their own kind of career. And there's an example that I heard from our friend Ethan, right, Ethan McCarty. Ethan's talk about an employee who has, you know, a young again in smaller companies is much more possible. But you know, an employee who has essentially created her own ecosystem of tools and technologies and AI, et cetera, that she's like a one person, kind of like a one person band, right. She can do all sorts of different things that even three years ago a 20 something year old could not even think about doing. She has, you know, she has her core job but she also has now operational capabilities, she has analytical capabilities. She has all these other things put built it around her.

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Daniel Nestle: This is only going to get better for all of us if you're able to do that. But how do you put this person in a job description that's like you don't, you can't.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: Just gotta build their own.

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Pinaki Kathiari: It's fundamentally strange. In fact, I share another quick story. I was consulting with an organization and they were looking at like looking to build like a team and you know, they're having trouble like finding people for like the roles and stuff like that. And then like finally there was like a few people that stopped at me and said like I'm really interested in this and oh wow, we need that. And someone else like I'm really interested in this. And we're like oh wow, we really need that. And then you know, I was like cool. We were, now we're starting to like pull together the team. Then I was kind of like I was talking with like, you know, the head there and you know they were like oh that's great that these people are involved.

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Pinaki Kathiari: So here's like the job description and like I'm going to orient them to the job description. And I was like oh wait a second. They just like raised their hand that they were passionate about this. You're about to take that and like kind of meld it in with a whole bunch of other things that you want. And like it was one of the first, this was a true story not too long ago. And it just really got me thinking of how we're just trained to think of putting people into these job descriptions or boxes. And I'm just like, but this person really wants to do this. That. Now, granted, there might be things within this job description that they might enjoy doing. And in another side, you might be. You might be smothering this passion that they have.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: By. By kind of not. Not focusing on it. So let's kind of grow this aspect and think about a career, as in not. Here's what you do for the rest of, you know, this year until you get your promotion or whatnot. But you know what? Let's start here. And then once we. Let's build upon that, let's just constantly keep building upon it around your passions, around the things that you enjoy doing, because you're going to be stronger and you're going to be more fulfilled doing the things you enjoy doing, and you're going to feel good about the organization that's supporting you. Right. You know, you said, we both said earlier how, like, career paths are all squiggly lines.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Right. But in a corporation, it's just boxes and stuff like that. But what if an organization could squiggly line around with you?

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Set that in motion in a good way. Like, what. How'd that feel?

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Daniel Nestle: And how, you know, how would that feel? And, you know, I'm not entirely optimistic that the current structure of especially hr, and I'm not villainizing hr, believe me, because I love a lot of HR people and they've been wonderful friends of mine.

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Pinaki Kathiari: I love HR people, too.

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Daniel Nestle: But the fact is that when I was a manager or when I was a leader and you're looking to promote somebody, there's these forms to fill out. There's like, okay, what's the new job description look like? Okay, what's the midpoint of the salary for that particular job description in this particular market? It's like, there are no answers really to these questions. So maybe it's more like, maybe there's a. Because something you were just saying just made me think, for some reason of Legos. Right. So you've got, like, you've got your core job description. Right? You got your core job description. That's the duck. Anybody can build a Lego duck. Right. So you have a box of Legos. It takes six or eight Legos to build a duck, Something like this, but they give you.

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Daniel Nestle: But when you start your job, you have a box of 40 or 50 or 60 Legos.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: And, you know, within a short amount of time, you can reconstruct the duck. You can make a better duck, you can build a car. I don't know what it is, but I think that's sort of what AI does for you in your career.

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Pinaki Kathiari: It. That kind of makes sense, right? It does. It kind of like helps you figure out build whatever you need to build. Right. Because building it seems to now become easy. It's what to build, what to do that's going to be the thing. I'll also say about job descriptions. I don't hate job descriptions either. For everyone listening, we use job descriptions. I use job descriptions as a communication piece as, like, here's the base of what we're expecting. But I still do look at it just like you're saying, let's add Legos on top of that. So it's not. And I say in my job descriptions that it's not to say that you're going to do all of this all together at once at the same time either. Right. Because that's important to know.

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Pinaki Kathiari: But as far as, like, where this is going, it's like the ability to build it has become really easy. The ability to build it has become easier. But our job descriptions are still rooted on. Here's how you build it. Right. You got to send this press release every. This respond to these media things. Right. The thing I look at most, and one thing I incorporate in all of our job descriptions is the overarching problem you're solving or the overarching goal that you're trying to achieve for the. For the organization. Because. Right.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: It's like teaching somebody how to play. Play chess. You got to win the game, but I can't tell you how to move the pieces generally, because as soon as your opponent takes the first step, like, yeah. Everything changes.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: So in that way, a job description can't tell you how to exactly do your job, but I think it should relate to what you need to achieve, what you're responsible for, and then leave it up to you to kind of figure it out.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Because when you're talking earlier about, like, performers and things like that, I've been in situations where, like, somebody that I work with did something that I was like, I wouldn't have done that. That's wrong. I should step in. I should figure that out. And then I just stopped for a moment and be like, wait a minute. What if it works? What if I'm wrong? I said, let me let that go and see what happens. And the one story I'm thinking about in my mind worked out super well. Better than I had thought, better than if I had interjected. So if we're kind of like, you know, looking at just managers to, like, look at people and be like, bang, you're fired. Bang, you're fired. There's nothing like looking at me to say like, where am I? Skeptical of my own thoughts.

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Daniel Nestle: Right, yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Earlier on you talked about mindfulness. So really like understanding where is this coming from? Where is this fear coming from? And is it real? Is it a fact or is it just a fear? Because fear is not real. Right. Fear is.

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Daniel Nestle: You choose. It's a choice. Right.

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Pinaki Kathiari: You choose. Danger is real, but fear is out there. So those are the things I think about. It does take a really different way of thinking. And I think over the multi generations that we've all been, that humans have been in the workforce, we've been trained and we've been just. We're like in the Matrix in a way.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, true.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Some of us will fight to stay in the Matrix because the steak tastes so good.

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Daniel Nestle: Absolutely, you're right. And it's a great way to think about it. There's, you know, the only, the last thing that I'll say because I did want to. Boy, oh boy, this. Does this really have some implications?

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Pinaki Kathiari: I don't know if I talk too much.

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Daniel Nestle: No. Oh no. I'm the one who, like, I'm sure when I put this through Fireflies, it's going to give me a percentage of my talking. I'm going to be like, shit, talk too much again. But the.

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Pinaki Kathiari: I came to listen to you, so.

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Daniel Nestle: Oh, no. The point I was trying to get to is like, is okay. We've been talking about job descriptions. Like, we have so much change happening around us all the time. We have the advent of AI, we have all this, you know, we don't know what's going to happen next week. You said earlier today is the worst day that we've ever seen with AI. You're absolutely right. Like it's. Or that we will ever see with AI. That's what Paul Reitzer, who heads up the Marketing AI Institute, always says. I mean, I hear this all the time. Today is the worst AI you will ever see. It's absolutely true. By the transitive property, I suppose. Is it the transitive property. The users of AI, Right. Are also currently the worst users of AI that you will ever see.

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Daniel Nestle: So there's so much that's going to keep changing in that respect. Even in the world of comms, we're so used to creating these yearly plans and, you know, our budgets and blah, blah, and so on. And you know, I've always had discomfort with that simply because I have, it's hard for me to maintain my attention for a year. But, but now though, there's a legitimate excuse, which is that I don't know that we won't be able to do a hundred times more content in three months. Maybe we will.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah. That you. Yeah. So it's definitely possible.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. So when that opens up good content, that's another story.

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Pinaki Kathiari: But like. Yeah, but like what you're trying to do. I've seen people automate like amazing things.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. And that's just one example. Like what? Like, so how do you play? Like, you don't plan for a year. I think now we have to plan for 60 to 90 days and that's it. And when you're planning for these short kind of sprints.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: Right. How can you possibly also hold people accountable to a one year goal? Right. It's, it's just a, it's sort of a little broken to me now. Let's put a pin in that because that's a whole nother conversation. But before we go, because we are kind of up on it here, you know, I, I love talking to Pinaki. We could just keep going in any number of directions. But final thoughts about this kind of corporate culture of the future, like what are the two or three things that I think that you think companies and communicators, et cetera, really need to be on top of right now to surf this wave of change?

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Pinaki Kathiari: Oh, that's a really good question. Specific, specifically in the realms of internal comms. Right. And companies. You know, I think I need to.

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Daniel Nestle: An open question.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, no, it's open question. It reminds me of, for a podcast, why does it feel so wrong to be human at work? We took it on. We, we did a first time ever what we called the UN panel discussion where basically the, the audience at the conference, they were essentially the panel. So we kind of posed certain like questions to them and things like that. But we started kind of, we started by asking them like to group up by table and say what feels wrong at work. Right. And so like the number one like thing came up across the room is this concept of reactive, proactive thing. Right. Like right now they're always running, always reactive and they're getting more and more added to their plate and feeling hesitant to say no. Right.

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Pinaki Kathiari: I think that's one of the things that's I think happening right now. I think mindfulness for leaders, I think is going to be really Important to, like, say to yourself, I have this idea. I think we should implement it. But let me check on my. My people first. Right? Let me check on, like, is what are you doing right now around this? And could we put this into the. Into the slate for the future? More times than not, I'm hearing like, oh, I just got this idea, or I just heard this from, you know, this. This book I read. We got to do this now. We got to do this now, and we got to do this now.

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Pinaki Kathiari: And then if every leader is doing this to kind of probably prove their mark and also to, like, kind of substantiate their, like, several years in that organization while they're kind of gearing up for the next thing and stuff like that, you're kind of leaving this mess behind, and you're leaving people at this place where they are getting burned out. They can't. They're not equipped. It's not safe enough for them to say no. Because I know the best internal communicators or the best communicators or strategists that I know. If you give them something like this, they'll let you know that, all right, this is doable. This, this. And this is not doable based on what we have.

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Pinaki Kathiari: So if you don't set up that right environment where people could tell you what's doable and not doable, you're setting yourself up, the organization up, and your people up for failure. Yeah, I might have gone all around in different ways, but I think if that's one thing that came up that was super loud and clear during this panel discussion or unpanel discussion.

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Daniel Nestle: And, you know, I think it's one of those things that. That doesn't matter what happens with technology. You know, it takes mindfulness and confidence. Right. Bravery to really do what's best for you and your team and to fulfill your job as a communicator. I think it's totally true. I'm. Yeah, I'm. I am. I'm eager to see how AI may help us do that. Not to do the actual bravery for us, but to give us enough headspace that we're able to kind of think about it.

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Pinaki Kathiari: I could totally see it. We're working on it on the product side, too. Like, yeah, one day I'll be like, hey, how busy is Daniel Nessel and can he take on this extra project? Oh, yeah, it should.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. Should be able to tell you.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah. Yeah, should be able to tell you.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. I mean, some recent guests of mine have talked about some. Some Very specialized AI applications they're doing in the area of leadership. And there's something called Alex, which is a coaching virtual coach. Right. So you can check in with Alex and, you know, Alex becomes your AI coach and you can be kind of sort of talking through your leadership skills with Alex. And of course, it's just like, you know, baseline stuff. Another person, Deirdre Breckenridge, she was talking about. That was David Alberton, by the way. And Deirdre Breckenridge is talking about facial recognition for emotional communications using an AI recognition kind of tool. And it's like. It's. These different things are helping us with leadership. Right. But fundamentally, you know, we're the ones that have to be on top of the.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: When to say no, when to say yes. It's such a hard skill and such a hard kind of habit to manage.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Up to, like leadership as well.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Just be able to, like, say things like that. But those are something. There's a lot of things that. Oh, yeah, we could talk about in that realm. But that's kind of one of the things that kind of popped up in my head because it was just last week, it was the number one thing that came out and we had an amazing conversation about it.

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Daniel Nestle: Interesting. Yeah. And. Wait, what was that? What'd you just say? Did you just say burn the entire organizational structure and create an entire new org chart? Is that what you said? Oh, I don't know. I thought I heard a little bird whisper.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Have you ever read the Valve Handbook? Employee handbook? It came up. This was years ago, probably like seven, eight years ago. Have you ever heard of it? Valve is a video game company.

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Daniel Nestle: No, no, I didn't.

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Pinaki Kathiari: But they have a total, like, flat structure. There is no organization structure. People just kind of clump up into projects as they wish and. Very successful video game company. Yeah. Curious to see how it works out. But I. And it was fascinating to me at the time. The handbook was all illustration, as if it was like a LEGO instruction.

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Daniel Nestle: Oh, sweet.

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Pinaki Kathiari: It was all. So it was super easy and stuff like that. And then. Yeah, look it up. Valve Handbook.

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Daniel Nestle: I'll look it up. Valve Handbook. But I would imagine that there's a. There's a critical mass.

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Pinaki Kathiari: There's a critical mass because at some point it turns into a popularity contest. There's isolationism. There's things that happen with the lack of governance as well.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. So, you know, can't.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Interesting.

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Daniel Nestle: We can't turn our back on the essential human aspects of being human. The tribal aspects that we have the, the, you know, the social structures that we seek. You know, it happens. The bigger you get, the more kind of tribal we do end up getting. That was a, that was a Gladwell point I think from with the tipping point. But anyway, this has been awesome. I can continue to talk with you Pinaki, anytime and I'm sure I will. But for now, everybody out there, if you are looking for Pinaki, check him out on LinkedIn. His name Pinaki Kathyari and his name will be spelled properly in the episode title. You can Also check out localwisdom.com to see Pinaki's company. It's great. First of all, it's a cool website.

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Daniel Nestle: I love the way that you do your bios with icons and little cool blurbs like, okay, I don't need to read through four paragraphs of who Pinaki is. I can see that he likes travel to India and he's got, you know, he likes science fiction. And I get it, you know, just by looking at your, your little icons for a second. But check it out. Local wisdom.com and I suppose Resource Hero as well. Look up, check out Resource Hero. Is that resourcehero.com resourcehero app.com resourceheroapp.com Anything else, Pinaki, that I've missed? That, you know, IABC. Check out the IIBC. Anything else?

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Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, check out everything I'm a part of. No, nothing. Nothing that you've missed. Dana, thank you for having me on the show. I mean, and also thank you for just the great conversations that we always have. Like it's one of those things where like, you're one of those folks where we could probably do this for hours and never get bored.

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Daniel Nestle: I am sure that everybody could tell when they're listening. So Pinaki, thanks. You're going to come back again. I mean, I know you will. So this is not goodbye, but it's certainly like I'll, you know, we'll chat again later. Thanks so much for coming on.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Thank you, sir. See you later. Be well.

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Daniel Nestle: Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know at Dan at trendingcommunicator.

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Pinaki Kathiari: Com.

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Daniel Nestle: Thanks again for listening to the trending Communicator.