Productivi-Tree: The Human Side of Productivity

Sameer Ranjan holds a US patent for an AI platform that measures the nine soft skills your resume never shows. He gives the resume about eighteen months before it becomes obsolete for most white collar roles.

He started as a mining engineer, graduated top of his class, worked a thousand feet underground with five hundred people under him, then walked away from the field entirely. Today he is CTO and co-founder of Catenate Corp and founder of Cognitive Sprints AI Labs.

In this conversation we get into why companies hire for job skills and lose people over soft skills, why an AI interview cannot do the one thing an interview exists to do, and why hiring managers get measurably worse at reading people after 1pm.

What we cover:

Why nobody has ever survived twenty years at a company for being a great coder
The three failure points in how companies select people today
Sympathy versus empathy, and why the difference kills AI interviewing
How MayaMaya builds a digital twin from behavioural data over time
Personality drift as an early warning system for burnout
Where the privacy line sits, and who owns the data
How to audit your own soft skills this week without any platform
Which soft skills map to healthcare, IT and sales
Why the resume has eighteen months left, and what replaces it
What organisations get wrong about measuring productivity

Chapters:

0:00 Hired on day one for skills, kept for years for personality
0:47 Who Sameer Ranjan is
1:58 From mining engineer to AI founder
3:58 What boardrooms decide vs what actually happens
7:37 People, process, technology: why hiring broke
10:18 Where companies get hiring wrong
12:58 Inside MayaMaya
14:57 Why adults are as confused as students
17:28 Can hiring managers actually read people?
18:52 Tracking personality over time and catching burnout
21:05 The privacy line
22:42 Beyond employee surveys
25:49 How to audit your own soft skills
28:21 Which soft skills fit which industry
32:41 Will resumes disappear?
35:25 What organizations get wrong about productivity
39:21 Quickfire round
41:15 Cognitive Sprints, MiraMira and money as a personality

Guest links:
Sameer Ranjan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sameerranjan009/
MayaMaya: https://mayamaya.us/
Catenate Corp: https://catenate.io/
Cognitive Sprints AI Labs: https://www.cognitive-sprints.in/ailabs

Resources from Santiago:
Free Productivity Assessment: https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
Free productivity tools and templates: https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/free-productivity-resources
Productivity newsletter: https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Newsletter
Website: https://santiagotacoronte.com/
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AI has made information cheap, but wisdom is more expensive than ever. Andrew Winton, CMO at Digital Advisory and creator of BOOM Marketing, explains why executives confuse the two, what governed advisory looks like next to a consulting deck, and why senior leaders are building portfolios instead of climbing one ladder.

Guest Links
Andrew Winton - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/globalmarketingleader
Digital Advisory: https://www.digitaladvisory.com
BOOM Marketing (Qosmos): https://boom.qosmos.ai

Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most productivity advice focuses on improving your output, but it often misses the source of real progress: the quality of your thinking. Michael Lukich, analytics executive, former Georgetown professor, and author of "The Stoic Systems Thinker," argues that the real leverage is upstream. In this episode, he explores the modern thinking crisis, the DSRP framework, fluid versus crystallized intelligence, and why Stoicism and systems thinking may be the same discipline, separated by 2,000 years.

Guest links
Book, The Stoic Systems Thinker: https://www.stoicsystemsthinker.com/book
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukich/
X/Twitter: https://x.com/michaellukich
Solver School, Poker and Analytics: https://www.youtube.com/c/solverschool

Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Tilove spent decades watching brilliant ideas die before they became anything real. In this episode, he breaks down why initiating tasks is harder than doing them, names the six emotional "F-loads" that make you take the off-ramp before you even know it, and explains how irrevocable action and embracing ugly work can finally close the gap between idea and execution. He also shares what a second-grade report card from 1980 taught him about his own ADHD, and why he doesn't believe the superpower framing.

💬 Guest Links:
Website - neurodiscipline.com
Book: Split Second (available on Amazon)
Email: adam@neurodiscipline.com

🤫 How Productive are you Really? Take the Free Productivity Test - https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
🎁 More Free Productivity Tools and Templates - https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/free-productivity-resources
📩 Join my Productivity Newsletter - https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Newsletter

🤝 Let's Connect:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiago-tacoronte/
X (Twitter): https://x.com/TacoronteSanti
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Noémi Beres, founder of Podcast Connections, breaks down two sides of podcasting most professionals ignore. First: how to use podcast listening as a genuine productivity advantage -- learning faster, matching content to activity, and building better habits around audio. Second: how to become a podcast guest, write pitches that land, handle imposter syndrome, and turn a single interview into long-term business relationships. If you consume podcasts passively or have been sitting on the idea of getting on the other side of the mic, this episode is for you.

Noémi on LinkedIn: search "Noémi Beres" (look for the microphone icon next to the name)
https://www.podcastconnections.co
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.