Where can we apply GenAI to our work to accelerate progress? We talk about this in conjunction with drugs! and marketing tools! and more! and also touch on the incredible progress in AI of the past few weeks. For our previous thinking on AI, check out ep 8, last season.

As free-thinkers and believers in agency, we were very surprised to realize in this conversation that we believe obedience has its place -- and can be required to create big, complex things that take belief, when sometime's logic and data would tell us something else. Join Kahran and Divya to explore where to use discipline, where to use obedience, and how compliance comes into this mix in this week's episode, one of our favorites.

We always applaud courage but not always daring? Daring is for rogues and courage is for knights, whether they choose to be good or evil. Do we always want to foster courage, but not always daring? Divya and Kahran explore this topic, and share stories, tidbits and a sprinkle of joy of life in-between.

How leveraged are you, and how afraid are you of looking at your assets in your life as being leverage-able? In this episode we think on the word leverage, both from a personal finance side and a social side. How can you leverage what you have, and what does it mean to leverage social connections, as different from capital assets? In our exploration of the word and the concept, we spend some time to define the word, and also define how its typically used. We think about how you can value a company based on how leveraged they are, and what makes something over, or under, leveraged.
As always, stories abound, and we chortle with delight at minutia.

This episode we talk about spaces and how Divya has a resistance towards designing them because of a lack of heuristics and Kahran shares how he thinks about spaces. A major part of being open to changing your mind is the process through which you change your mind and reorient yourself in a new direction. Fortunately we were recording this time when we came across something that one of us changed our mind on. This is a different than usual episode where we do a lot of active problem solving collaboratively, and arrive at some actionable items by the end of our conversation.

What leads to you building trust? Where do you start from in trusting things? Are you like Divya, and start from 0, or like Kahran, and start from +10? Does it change for you depending on the context?
We talk this week about the Westin in Paris, the Oberoi hotels, and other moments that have gone wrong and how those moments have built emotional trust. We also talk about how brands can delight you, including some luxury clothing brands in New Delhi and one of our perennially favorite examples, Nike and the Nike Run Club. Kahran shares some stories about working with his father, Pradeep Singh, and Divya shares how Pradeep has inspired her to run up and down the 11 flights of stairs in her homes.
We think about how the stories we choose to tell build trust, and demonstrate the values of our organizations — and how leaders of organizations can seize control of that journey by being deliberate about the stories they propagate and share.

What drives loyalty? Why do we spend lots of time with some brands, but don’t feel loyalty towards them? What about the opposite — sometimes we feel very loyal to brands we may rarely purchase from? This week we talk about BTS, Nike and other brands that drive lots of loyalty among their customer base. We quickly agree that having multiple points for people to “meet” the brand is important, but what happens after that — what drives a customer down the path of loyalty? Is it always necessary that the customers feels they have disproportionate value being given to them from the relationship to move further down the loyalty journey? Or is there something deeper around values alignment? Divya raises some strong points around expectation setting, and how many brands a customer can be a super fan, or regular fan of, from a capacity point of view. Kahran brings up his experience with finding detergent, and falling in love with the flower brand, Farmerr.in, to strongly push the point that values are what has driven him towards loyalty to brands. We also briefly talk about startups in India in the 1990s, the recent move away from differentiating on cost alone in the last few yeas, and how well understanding their own values has impacted businesses we’ve worked with.

How do we grow to care about things? Does a sense of care result in loyalty? What is the difference between caring and being invested? This week we set off to talk about how people grow to care about brands, things and other people, but end up spending more of the discussion on the why question -- why do people start caring about those brands, things and other people? We also spend some time talking about how we think about what we will grow to care about in the future. We spend a little time on OCD vs OCPD, briefly bring up the show "White Lotus", the book, "Turtles All the Way Down", and AI-generated art as well as ChatGPT, and why we care about seeing joyus as a successful company.
Kahran also shares a few stories of his recent wedding, and Divya has some great metaphors, as always.

How can you better prepare yourself to make decisions, especially when you have been putting off that decision? This week we talk about strategies for making decisions with uncertainty, and share our hypothesis for making what keeps us from making decisions and how (we think) we can get past those key decision points. We also share some thoughts about how we’ve struggled with our own marketing and branding, how cool we think potatoes are, and the idea of having a decision day — a particular day when you know you will make a decision (or multiple decisions) about something.

Are there always more customers? Is there always more attention? Is this way of marketing, and life, sustainable? This week we think about time-bound behaviors! When is a solution right for now, and how does having an end-date make it easier to deal with difficult things? What keeps us from designing with an end date in mind? How does it change when its a personal habit versus a product or a company solution? We discuss this from both of those lenses -- personal and product-design focused -- and think about off-boarding experiences that are done well, and not so well. We also spend time thinking about products that have successfully evolved their product base and their changing needs through the customer lifecycle.