Season 2, Ep. 12 | ‘Bridjr’ To More Human-Designed Experiences: Part 2 Transcript

More Elephant Intro

​[00:00:38] Jason Rudman: So Anita, as we pivot from the personal and a rich outline of vulnerability and things that got you here, observations you've had, you have this really, really unique ability to, I think, step outside of yourself, see what's going on in the world. That causes me to ask you about Bridjr's journey, the company that you have, you started in customer experience consulting. What led you to become a change momentum company?

​[00:01:07] Anita Ghosh: Ah, there's so much to unpack in this.

So, when I started Bridjr, we were deeply rooted in customer experience, informed by human-centered design. And specifically, what we were trying to help our clients understand is that when you think about experience design, there are a set of functional attributes, which is where most organizations at the time and honestly, still today, focused their attention.

And, technology has made that focus on functional attributes obsessively creating blind spots in organizations. 

The thing about functional attributes is that they are almost wholly commodified—whatever you're doing on your acquisition app, your onboarding, anything digitally, is probably something your competitors are doing and it's not the space for differentiation.

The space for differentiation is a deep understanding of the emotional attributes, the expectations of your customers, that you can't see. That's where we began and it was, and still is, quite powerful helping organizations understand that balance of functional, emotional, and invisible attributes.

What we started to notice is the consistent issue that as projects were getting executed, there was this functional focus around delivery that lacked a singular thing consistently— human adoption. That was our aha moment when we realized that these great insights weren't enough, they had to translate into real structured adoption that worked within how the system actually delivered projects.

And so over the last five years, what we've been doing is building solutions tested to market. We've worked with hundreds of clients, impacted probably at this point, hundreds of thousands of end user customers and our system is an operating system for change momentum, and that's very intentional.

I want to talk a little bit about that because the way that we manage change has to change. Even the language of change management is such a signal to how we think about it.

My observation of most organizations is the way they manage change is they think of change as a problem that needs to be contained. Think about the language around on budget and scope. Think about your dashboards to the board, right?

We're trying to tell a story of a problem with a narrative that needs to be controlled, and usually that narrative, quite unintentionally, is about demonstrating progress—around outcomes of completion, grounded in implementation, not value creation, not what really matters to the end user.

[00:03:56] Jason Rudman: Yeah. So much to unpack that, right? That’s why I knew I was going to love this conversation and I could personalize it on many levels.

So first off, I like to think that you help leaders like me and organizations that we work in to have More Elephant ‘ears’ on. 

We've got to be open to a digital world. You know, at BECU, we are mobile first, human always, because there's a human element to what we're creating in financial services, and I think you're doubling down on that where you would say that transformations are challenged because they often overlook, in your words, the human experience.

So change is constant, right? We live in a VUCA world—volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous. Companies invest huge resources. You can go on to McKinsey or Harvard Business Review, and every three to six months, they'll have an article that says why transformation is difficult and that eighty percent of them fail.

I don't know what the actual stat would be, but it's pretty high. Right? Large number of transformation efforts don't actually deliver the promised results.

​[00:04:58] Anita Ghosh: Yeah.

​[00:04:59] Jason Rudman: Why, in your mind, do so many transformation initiatives struggle to deliver. And, what is missing?

[00:05:06] Anita Ghosh: The simple, consistent thing that gets overlooked is behind every strategy, every technology, every cultural shift, every project success will either happen or stall based on the human adoption piece. And what's happened is we've become so obsessed with technology when what we really need to do is become obsessed with people who use technology.

And so, we use the word adoption and I bet if I was to poll a hundred different leaders, we would get a hundred different descriptions of it. I will share that my observation working with most organizations is when I look at their roadmaps, tactical and strategic, there is usually very little to no investment on true adoption effort.

Yeah, there's a lot on implementation and there is a lot on quote unquote change management, which looks like the work streams that we're familiar with—you know, around communication and the programmatic management of those activity based measures on budget, on scope.

Human adoption is about something very different and I'm going to say something quite provocative that I stand by very clearly and can prove after five years of running Bridjr.

We’ve been trained in business to believe that flawless execution, really strong execution, is the path to success and that is wrong. 

Adoption is the path to ROI.

​[00:06:29] Jason Rudman: Mm-hmm.

​[00:06:30] Anita Ghosh: What does that mean?

Think about one of your bigger projects. As a leader, think about a big project on your roadmap. When you're in execution phase, you're actually spending money. Maybe you've got a tech team, some software developers, et cetera.

Let's just say that's two hundred thousand dollars [$200,000] a month of run rate—while you're delivering that project, you're not making a single dollar.

[An] unintentional blind spot that happens right now is the day that we plug in the technology or turn that capability on, we're going to see ROI, and the data is very clear over three years, that transformation stat that you cited, it hasn't changed in thirty years.

Peter Drucker, thirty years ago, said seventy percent of transformations fail. Studies from big firms in the last few years have validated that even as recently as this year. So seventy to eighty percent of transformation initiatives are failing three decades later. That stat hasn't moved, and yet the capital investment in transformation initiatives has grown exponentially over the last 30 years. 

 The gap on ROI is this human adoption piece, and as I just said, execution and implementation, you're spending money. What we mean when we talk about human adoption is the solution that you're implementing, however tech intensive or not, you get ROI when the people who you intend that solution to serve, whether someone in your organization, an employee or staff member, frontline person or an end user customer loves it, embraces it, and uses it.

​[00:08:03] Jason Rudman: Right.

​[00:08:05] Anita Ghosh: In order for them to love it, embrace it, and use it, reverse engineer how you create the probability of that. You actually have to understand what matters to them and that is a gaping hole in transformation initiatives.

There is a behavior organizationally, that started again with good intentions when business was simpler, to jump to the solution and get to the requirements gathered and move to market very quickly. That's actually costing us a ton. 

[00:08:37] Jason Rudman: This is more than journey member orchestration and building out the happy path and saying, Hey, let me go, you know, visit with a couple of customers or prospects. It's actually an entire ecosystem of managing your investment. And we should add, as well, probably weighed down in legacy companies by significant levels of technical debt, right? So, it is a bigger challenge on the ROI curve because systems or end of life, end of support, you've got a significant buildup of technical debt.

So the operating system for successful change, how does that work? And how does that interface with legacy systems, legacy company, legacy processes, legacy strategy?

[00:09:25] Anita Ghosh: Okay. I love this question. Thank you for asking. Before I talk about the solution, I want to spend time talking about a different aspect of the problem we started with around that transformation failure rate.

We were talking about is three decades of history that shows us most organizations are not getting ROI on their intended transformation investment. So what's happening?

Every organization starts with a roadmap where they allocate capital dollars and projects, right? And if we thought about where that sits on a balance sheet, it's sitting below the line, those are expenses. For those investments and expenses, assumptions are made on how ROI will be achieved to impact any set of KPIs; increased sales, NPS, member experience, productivity, and efficiency. And those things are sitting above the line. Those assumptions that are sitting above the line are rarely met for the reasons we talked about—the lack of human adoption, not having the right human insight.

A profound insight that I want leaders to think about; not only are we not achieving ROI, our inability to create human-centered systems level solutions that are grounded in human adoption is creating compound debt and it's an invisible debt that's killing ROI in every organization.

The five facets of compound debt that are unfolding, so you've already talked about the technical debt. Technical debt has been happening for many years and, in the early days of digital transformation, that was understood because there's going to be a natural set of technical debt that happens when you're migrating from legacy systems to new systems. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about, the invisible debt that people don't see, is the behavior of jumping to technology solutions that are commodified with the priority to be delivering on time, on budget, on scope, in the absence of human insight on what matters.

How does that play out? It plays out in project change requests, scope change, going to market and not getting results, having to pivot. We've all lived this, we've all seen it. There is a monumental cost to that—trillions of dollars annually from market data wasted—because of this fundamental gap.

The next compound debt lever that happens is operational debt. So, a stream of work that often gets missed that we capture within our operating system for change is the workflow reinvention that has to happen for every new solution that you implement.

In the business case on most investments is that we're going to be able to extend and scale this capability across the organization. Rarely do we see that happening. Organizations fumble and the reason they fumbleis back to the behavior of the thing we're trying to deliver is on time, on budget, on scope, then by default, excludes the very important work of how do we build a workflow that captures the new process, the new way of doing business that we can then scale and extend. In large organizations, in certain types of businesses, for example, frontline staff, you'll often have people who've done the job for many years, sometimes decades and so there's a lot of tacit knowledge sitting in individuals that isn't documented, isn't formalized. And now, you're trying to introduce something new and expecting the human behavior of those people to pivot on day one. So operational debt is a huge, huge expense.

[00:13:04] Jason Rudman: So when we say journey mapping what we normally go to is—I was thinking about this with a team recently—we have been appropriately narrowed in our scope to get something going, we've applied any number of processes, Kaizen Six Sigma. The team has appropriately scoped it.

The question I had is in the context of the end-to-end, not just the member journey map, but also the employee journey map, how does this fit in? Part of what's embedded in your operational debt is the notion that we have to reskill and upskill teams to meet the moment because the ball has been moved much further downfield than anything that the teams have experienced before.

And in my mind, you've got to have a deliberate journey map that points out what you're ultimately solving for, the steps along the way, your operating cadence, what's your operating system in what order are you actually going to tackle those challenges?

[00:14:07] Anita Ghosh: Yeah, absolutely spot on. And the problem that you just spoke to around the people impact is the third form of debt, which in conversations with CEO, is the number one thing that keeps them up at night. The cultural debt.So people are left behind and changed. What we know we're seeing is change fatigue and a built mistrust, an erosion of belief because the same failure rates that we're talking to in stats, people are experiencing day-to-day. They know, right? They know that they're not getting results and when they are not seen for the impact that's happening to them through change, disconnection happens, and directly impacts productivity.

All of that gets to the fourth form of debt—brand debt. All of those things then directly impact the assets that most organizations deem as most valuable. And then ultimately the thing that we're trying to achieve around elevating the experience, there's an experiential debt that comes from all of the things getting missed.

And when I talk about the impact of that on the balance sheet, it is way more exponentially more than the investment that most are making

[00:15:21] Jason Rudman: So the cultural debt to me is really, really interesting because for many companies commoditization and ultimately, transformation for what in this world is probably table stakes for most,there's a number of industries we could go where transformation initiatives are to enable companies to remain relevant… I loved what you said about the cultural debt because I think the additional challenge with the change fatigue, many of our teams are just saying can we just take a pause?

​[00:15:56] Anita Ghosh: Yeah.

​[00:15:56] Jason Rudman: Chasing parity that's not a strategy, right? Who defines parity?

I think what you're proposing and what I think you help companies do is envision a leapfrog moment, right?

How do you envision a leapfrog moment if all you're doing is transforming to try to keep up? On that transformation train, you're actually not leading; somebody else is defining that journey for you. The leapfrog helps close the fifth pillar of what you described, the experience stat and let's go financial services. A checking account and a credit card largely is a checking account and a credit card. You can put some bells and whistles on it. 

​[00:16:32] Anita Ghosh: Agree.

[00:16:32] Jason Rudman: It's the brand, the marketing and the experience of that form factor that creates winners and losers.

[00:16:42] Anita Ghosh: Oh, I'm loving this conversation. Okay. Your point on the impact of debt and the train of transformation running, how I describe that is it's the bridge to nowhere.

Organizations are in the hamster wheel of spending more money than they have ever spent before, working on more than ever before, but we're not actually moving forward because of this gap that we've talked about.

And what the operating system for change momentum is doing is showing them the bridge to impact based on three pillars that are informed by data that we've gathered over the last five years, testing these solutions to market and they solve precisely the gaps that we're seeing in transformation.

So the pillars of the solution, the operating system, are strategy, systems and soul. And in strategy, I want to be really clear. We're not reinventing the wheel on strategy. Most organizations have done some strategy work, maybe even engaged a third-party supplier; what we're doing is addressing the gap in strategy that we see over and over again. Here's an alarming stat—the top twenty frameworks that are used for strategy, the seven S’s, the five forces, the things that we're all familiar with, that we've all had an experience with. 

Actually challenge every leader after this podcast to go and dust off the deck. Go look at it.

[00:18:11] Jason Rudman: Are you calling into question the use of an MBA? I don't know where this is going…

[00:18:14] Anita Ghosh: No, no. A lot of appreciation for MBAs. What I'm highlighting is a massive blind spot in strategy that hasn't evolved to an experience focus. Those frameworks, if you go back and revisit, don't actually include an input around what matters to the customer— shocking and, as I'm saying it, it may even sound impossible.

But we have done this study over many years and we sit with clients and look at their strategy and simply point out the reason you’re feeling friction on the execution of your strategy is that you don't have a clear understanding of what the customer wants, what matters to the customer.

Most strategy frameworks, the top ten, top twenty, are actually informed by what the market is doing and what your internal levers are, strengths and weaknesses, and how to optimize there. Those things are necessary and important. They are not the sources of growth and differentiation to the point that you made earlier. It perpetuates the game of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ in business.

So that first pillar of strategy is about bringing the capabilities; human-centered design, human factors, deep research, the articulation of emotional attributes and the experience. Closing that gap for organizations, that set of capabilities necessary in business now, most organizations don't have them and some even still resist and reject them. See them as optional investment.

And I can, through that compound debt story, absolutely quantify for an organization what it will cost them if they don't ground their strategy and execution roadmaps in human insight. In fact, the best productivity and budget cost cutting hack is to have data that tells you what matters most to the people you serve. The number of projects we see that are getting executed with tons of dollars behind them that nobody wants is mind blowing. I’m just like stop doing things that nobody wants. 

[00:20:26] Jason Rudman: Oh yeah, it's hard. If it were easy, we might not need Bridjr, but we do.

So, two follow up questions. What you've talked about is a bold, innovative manifesto of sorts that has to be balanced with practical business reality.

So for everything that you said, there's end-of-life systems, there's some basic blocking and tackling that needs to be done. So how does a business bridge that? How does that work? And then you've talked about five years of journeys with various companies. Can you share concrete examples of your approach that drives real ROI and measurable impact with Bridjr as the bridge…?

[00:21:09] Anita Ghosh: Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about your first question on how do you help organizations execute on feels like a manifesto for change? 

And it is, we think about this way of operating as a revolution, and I don't shy away from that. What I'm calling out is we talk about change in innovation and transformation in tech in any number of aspects. What we see is that business, as a practice, has not transformed at the pace at which we're consuming technology, right? So a revolution is required.

We need a new system to respond to the complexity of what's happening  and the impact of technology. So, the middle part of our strategy, systems and soul is really about that. How do you take what's important and align it to your strategy and then build a plan for execution.  That component of the system is informed by what we call five sets. One of them is tool set and that's the technology; the other is skillset, then mindset, then team set, and soul set.

So, I want to talk about a few that might be new to people. Tool set is obvious. And what's  interesting is when we meet with organizations, we have a diagnostic tool where in under thirty minutes, we can do a quick assessment of where there is risk in their roadmap.

Most transformation budgets are ninety percent tool set, ninety, back to the gap on human adoption. If you don't address the other four sets, you are guaranteed to not achieve R-O-I and you're guaranteed to create compound debt. When we talk about workflow reinvention, what is the upskilling that's required to consume the technology and  get the ROI. Mindset has been talked about a lot around change fatigue around leadership,  a growth mindset. All of that's really important, but the mindset and soul set piece have an interconnectedness.

To enable a growth mindset, people have to feel seen in the face of  change;  they have to feel cared for and they have to believe that as they're developing a growth mindset, it's possible.  Soul set speaks to how  you leverage change momentum, not change management, to  build belief within an organization. Think about the typical change communication plan. Rarely does it speak to these aspects of change.

I'm going to give you a very classic example. We  have a specific offering around change communication and transformation for C-suite and when we do our analysis of change communication, what we typically see  is a narrative around the from and to story. The where you are today, what's happening in the world, what's changing, and then an articulation of the North Star, and  throw in whatever visual of climbing the mountain, running the race, or the marathon, right?

[00:24:16] Jason Rudman: You're being a little trite there. You're like throwing the visual…

[00:24:19] Anita Ghosh: Yeah. I am because I want to put a spotlight on the blind spot. That formula worked in simpler times. That formula doesn't work after three decades of failure. People know better.

And so, what actually needs to happen in change communication is an acknowledgement of the messy middle of change and it sounds obvious, but I'll use a different example of how that gets missed. Think about a quarterly town hall and the standard template for those gatherings. A significant amount  of that content is some sort of progress update that looks like green check marks or hitting certain milestones. We work really hard to tell a positive story of change, and it's important to celebrate the wins, but telling that story in the absence of the other reality…we know that people are struggling, change is hard. There is a lot of uncertainty [and] actually creates this erosion of belief and then this productivity gap. 

[00:25:23] Jason Rudman: Because the team is saying, you do see this, right? Because we're in the trenches every day. Your call to arms there is acknowledging, really abundantly, the messy middle.

[00:25:23] Anita Ghosh: Yeah.

[00:25:34] Jason Rudman: And that is cathartic to teams because they want to ensure that leaders  appreciate and understand the complexity of what is underway.

[00:25:43] Anita Ghosh: Yeah. An example  in the soul set workstream, within our operating system, we have a number of tools and solutions that we will activate. One of them we call sharing the scoop;  it's a communication framework to help leaders communicate in that messy middle.  It's an acronym that stands for the key communication components that leaders need to address in that messy middle.

First thing is communicate what's the same. In the absence of communicating what's the same,  people begin to make their own conclusions, right? Then communicate very clearly what's changing, then communicate—this is the hardest one usually for most organizations and leaders—what's uncertain because again, we've been trained that when we speak to large groups of teams, the way that we can quell the concern and the fear is to communicate certainty. 

But that's not the world we're living in. In fact, certainty minimizes the opportunity for change to  be positive for us to learn and grow through it. Only after you've communicated what's the same, what's changing and uncertain, then can you communicate what's possible and positive.

When we've implemented  that one framework, that one tool within organizations,  operationalize it within the system through things like share the scoop, standups, now we're embedding that mindset of that level of transparency within the organization, and that might look like biweekly leaders join with teams and they share the scoop.

[00:27:23] Jason Rudman: Yep.

[00:27:24] Anita Ghosh: So important to close that gap on mistrust and begin to build belief.

[00:27:32] Jason Rudman: We talk about this, I think as leaders, most leaders  have realized that they've got to roll up their sleeves and doesn't believe that their role should be to sit in a quote unquote  ivory tower and just command and do stuff and wait for it to happen.

I think a leader worth their soul is going to roll up their sleeves. As a leader, you've got to get into the work to pull the work apart with the team, not having all of the answers but, to your point, getting into the mess probably more deliberately and re-architecting a way through in a very, proactive, deliberate way. 

[00:28:05] Anita Ghosh: Yeah. I'm so glad that you said that. I want to take a moment to talk about what's happening with leaders.

[00:28:12] Jason Rudman: Hmm.

[00:28:12] Anita Ghosh: And I say this as a former leader working in large enterprise, having walked in your shoes, I don't think there has, in history, ever been a harder time to be a leader than right now.

The magnitude of change in multiple facets: market, technology, human behavior. The pace at which it's happening, the scale , the stakes are very high, and  it's the mission of our work. Most leaders show up every day with very genuine desire, sense of purpose and intention to do the right thing. They want to have impact. They want to bring people along. What's missing is the how.

It's back to the revolution in business. The practices of business over the last few decades that have become embedded and ingrained have to evolve…have to.  I have a lot of hope, but even more than hope, I have a lot of belief because I've seen it, I've seen it work with clients, I've seen it work with leaders. 

We speak frequently and when we share the path from a bridge to nowhere  creating compound debt to a bridge to impact that can create compound value, leaders get it. What they're looking for is how to do it. Show me the way. 

[00:29:38]Jason Rudman: How to operationalize it.

[00:29:39] Anita Ghosh: Exactly.

[00:29:40] Jason Rudman: No conversation these days goes without a mention of AI and machine learning. And every Harvard Business Review that I pick up and I read,  I think every  one is about reskilling and the impact of AI, et cetera. How is that showing up in your conversations, in the work that you're doing? How does that impact, if at all, the operating system that you described?

[00:30:02] Anita Ghosh: It has made the need for an operating system that designs for systems in human adoption even more crucial.

AI will be a huge enabler within businesses. It is also a commodified capability and the thing that we're seeing is a pattern in most organizations; AI is usually about productivity, savings, and efficiency gains. And it makes sense, that's a starting point. There are good reasons to sequence that way. If achieved, that should fund the future of experiential initiative.

Here's the thing; we have  decades of digital transformation to learn from. Think about the business case for digital transformation in the last two decades. It went something like this.

When we implement this digital capability, it will take cost out of the system. It will make us more efficient and productive. We'll drive to self-serve and the other part of that equation was the efficiency gains that we get from those kinds of investments in digital will get reinvested in advice and human connection. 

Second half of that equation is what we have missed. With the rise of AI, our opportunity is to learn from what we missed . and through a system for change that links technology with human adoption, do it differently to get that ROI sooner.

[00:31:24] Jason Rudman: So that puts even more pressure on not just the cultural debt piece, but  also the experience debt piece and the brand debt piece, right, because those three things, from an AI perspective, become even more interrelated and more cause and effect…

[00:31:43] Anita Ghosh: Exactly.

[00:31:43] Jason Rudman: ..as you make the transformation.

[00:31:45] Anita Ghosh: Yes, exactly that cause and effect piece, if you can solve for those things, that's what creates the compound value.

And there's a couple of things that I want to highlight. What we'll sometimes see is a resistance to spend on these new capabilities that are fundamental to business going forward. It's perceived as optional and incremental to how businesses run today. And there's truth in that. The point that I'm trying to make through that economic value story is the cost of the bridge. The investment that you are going to make in those five sets is significantly less than the costs by not achieving ROI and the  associated  compound debt, in fact, that very small investment offsets the compound debt.

 So mathematically, it's a myth that that investment won't achieve ROI; it's  the necessary investment that will enable ROI.  Then, when you implement a systems level solution that's designed for human adoption, that's designed to be scaled across the system so that all of those capabilities that you're investing can extend and scale so that you can achieve the ROI in the business case; that's where you get compound value.

We're now entering a space where we're not looking at ROI in a specific project. We're looking at the interconnectedness of an investment in frontline capability to have better advice, conversations with an AI tool, because those things have been thoughtfully considered around skillset, human adoption,  that's creating exponential growth.

[00:33:23] Jason Rudman: Yeah. There is so much power in the design for human adoption. My day job, as the chief member and digital experience officer for one of the most remarkable credit unions in the nation,  you cannot divorce the employee experience from the member experience. You simply can't. And so, what I love about designing for human adoption is it brings that connection together in a very, very forceful and deliberate way. So, I  wanted to highlight the power of the human adoption element and putting that front and center because it's beyond the customer or the member. It is anybody and everybody that touches whatever it is that you're trying to solve.

[00:34:06] Anita Ghosh: And that investment in human adoption enabled through the system. It doesn't break the bank. What it requires us to do though is break bad habits.

[00:34:15] Jason Rudman: It doesn't break the bank, it requires us to break bad habits! 

We should probably just end there, but we are not. All right. This is a fun fest right now.   What I love about your arc of evolution that has gotten you to the success that Bridjr represents is that you were once on the inside, right? You were in a large company trying to do great things, trying to have impact. So now you're on the outside.

Does this model then work across industries? Is it agnostic to domains or have you seen it really, really work in specific context?

[00:34:51] Anita Ghosh: It is agnostic and I will share that's been an evolution in our learning. I was working in financial services before I started Bridjr, so  the obvious evolution was to start this work in financial services.

We've since done work across all sorts of sectors: restaurants, hospitality, and technology. And the principles that I talked about around strategy, systems, and soul are industry agnostic. In fact, the similarities around what's happening within organizations to execute change are very common.

The other thing that we've learned is there is also great value in being an outside of industry expert. So, you know, when we have done work in hospitality, we've often competed for that work against suppliers who have been experts in the industry and the reason we won is because we came in with fresh eyes and external perspective that challenged the paradigm of how they were operating. So\, we lean into that. I'm excited by that. In a good way, continually puts us in a place where we're leveling up and learning.

And for me, the ideal partnership is where both parties unlock something in each other that's better in the leveling up, right? Even the client unlocking something in us because of the collaboration, the challenge, how we work. I love [it] when that happens on our projects. It's a very intentional thing. It's a deliberate thing. It's also about who we choose to work with and who chooses to work with us.

[00:36:31] Jason Rudman: Yeah, I promise anybody that was listening that we did not script this ahead of time. However, the tagline of More Elephant, why we do this is listen, learn, live, better.

I think you just encapsulated that with the opportunity to partner with a like-minded organization, and together you listen, you learn from each other, and you ultimately enable whoever you're serving to live better, whatever that outcome is.

[00:36:58] Anita Ghosh: It's so beautiful.

[00:36:59] Jason Rudman: Yeah. Thank you. You just, you tee it up. So, five years has gotten you to this point. It's just you've dropped so much insight. And seriously, I knew. I'm so excited for this conversation because I think that…

[00:37:13] Anita Ghosh: Me too.

[00:37:14] Jason Rudman: …your team and you have put in the work, you've been able to look across a number of industries, take a step back. You've won in industries where you were able to bring an outside-in perspective, which  in these times of challenge and change, a fresh approach, a paradigm shift, a leapfrog moment, is actually needed.

What's the future you envision for Bridjr? And you also mentioned the importance of leadership and leaders and so, how do leaders fit into that vision?

[00:37:47] Anita Ghosh:  So, the future of Bridjr is we're no longer a consulting company and I think this is actually a very interesting story.

We are a company that has a set of solutions that have been co-designed with our clients over the last five years and proven to work. And, the way that I've designed those solutions is informed by my experience of being a leader, working with suppliers in organizations where it's very difficult to operationalize a consulting output in the reality of your business.

The way that we've designed our solutions, we think of them as instantly deployable, appreciating assets. That is the bar that we hold for every product and solution that sits within our suite in the operating system. So, what does that mean?

You're not getting a report from us, you are getting an output that, on day one, is instantly deployable within your business and creating ROI and it has been designed to be scaled, to be an appreciating asset, within your organization. We've  worked with clients to change the paradigm on funding conversations.

Very different when you are trying to get funding for a project expense that the output is a set of artifacts versus the output being an appreciating asset that's actually elevating your organization and creating compound value. 

That is, in a few lines, the summary; the evolution of that is walking the talk of what we tell our clients to do with their customers. It's me sitting down and understanding what are the pain points of leaders and organizations around the investment they're making. How do we help them close the gap on accelerated ROI and how do we actually help them get from commodified  transformation to real differentiation and growth.

What you're going to see from us in the next couple of months is the launch of our product suite. It's what we've been doing over the last five years.  I'm so excited to bring it to market.

And you know what? I'll say very humbly the way that I've grown Bridjr probably defies every piece of advice that you will read in every entrepreneur book and magazine. I didn't go to market with heavy marketing. I've been relatively quiet. Virtually all of our business comes by invitation, referral, repeat business, word of mouth.

But for me, there could have been no other way because I'm applying the principles of strategy, systems and soul. It's informed by human insight; that means you  have to be willing to spend time in the market observing what consumers need, building products and solutions, and testing them, proving that they work, building them so they can be scaled and extended, and then building belief.  Relationships and getting results for clients where they become believers.

For me, it couldn't have happened any faster for it to be real and feel like it's guided by integrity, the kind of integrity that we bring.

[00:40:52] Jason Rudman: Right. You talked about a pillar. You know there's part of the operating system is about the soul, right? And it's very clear, just listening to you, that your business is built with soul at the heart of it. I think even the way that you describe if we've done the partnership right, we deliver an appreciating asset.

Using that language for a business leader is remarkable in how rare it is to hear that as an outcome. It's not that there aren't artifacts left behind, it's not that there isn't a deliverable, but very often that deliverable is  you have to go and implement that as opposed to what you're saying is, the work that we do leaves you with a practical ready-on-day-one implementation that you can justify payback and ROI in a shorter amount of time, which is nirvana for many business leaders. That's… 

[00:41:52] Anita Ghosh: being able to have the impact that we're all here. 

[00:41:54] Jason Rudman: Seeking to do. That's right. Yeah.

[00:41:56] Anita Ghosh: That's exactly it. 

[00:41:57] Jason Rudman: How can listeners start working with Bridjr? Learn more about the incomparable Anita Ghosh. How do people connect with you? 

[00:42:06] Anita Ghosh: Well, first of all, I really welcome just real conversations and so... 

[00:42:12] Jason Rudman: I can attest to that. 

[00:42:13] Anita Ghosh: Yeah, yeah. Oh, I love people just reaching out, so please find me on LinkedIn. I'll be tagged in the promotion, so please find me. 

[00:42:21] Jason Rudman: You will. We'll make sure that we do that.

[00:42:24] Anita Ghosh: So please reach out directly like just no qualms about that.

You can also go to bridge to impact.com where everything we've talked about today, we share more on. We  share the system and this story of  compound debt to compound value to help leaders understand these are important pieces of context and principles for all of us to absorb and then think about and then get to the how.

So that's bridge to impact dot com, and then find us on LinkedIn.

[00:42:55] Jason Rudman: Awesome. This is our first extended podcast. I think it's a mark of how remarkable I know you are and how people who've worked with you know you are, and I'm just excited. And I can't wait to see what happens when more people appreciate how they can work with your company,  work with you and move from a bridge to nowhere, to a bridge to somewhere.

[00:43:23] Anita Ghosh: Yeah. Thank you. 

[00:43:25] Jason Rudman: And have impact.

[00:43:26] Anita Ghosh: Thank you for that, Jason. And thank you for your generosity. Really, really in business, there's something about all of us just leaning into the best of humanity, which I know still lives within all of us.

[00:43:44] Jason Rudman: Yep.

[00:43:45] Anita Ghosh: But the complexity of how we do business, we sometimes lose it and you have been such a champion and advocate pushing me to get onto the podcast far before I was ready. And I can't tell you how much that means to me.

[00:43:57] Jason Rudman: I am here to tell you, you are always ready. You are always ready. So, thank you for taking the leap with More Elephant and thank you for demonstrating the power of what it means to  have two ears. It's the power of actually listening more because when you listen more and you engage with like-minded people, great ideas, great innovation, great impact happens. 

That can be in financial services, it can be in environmental sustainability, it can be in equity, inclusion and belonging in this very interesting world that we're in right now. I think that's the power of bringing like-minded community together. And not shirking away from the responsibility to leave the world a little better than we found it.

So thank you. Appreciate you joining us.

[00:44:45] Anita Ghosh: Thank you, Jason. Thank you everyone for listening. 

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