Productivi-Tree: The Human Side of Productivity

You build a strong case. You bring the data. You explain your reasoning. And the other person still says they need to think about it.

Patrick van der Burght has spent 25 years explaining why that happens. He is a founding member of the Cialdini Institute, one of the top ranked Cialdini Certified Trainers in the world, and a business partner of Dr. Robert Cialdini. His clients include Google, Apple, Canva and Cisco.

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In this episode he walks through the research on how people actually decide. Around 95% of decisions come from System 1, the fast intuitive part of the brain that runs on shortcuts. Yet when you sit down to write a pitch, an email or a proposal, you are consciously thinking, which means you are in System 2. So you produce logic and justification for a part of the brain that handles a fraction of the decisions. The result is not a no. It is an indecision, and Patrick argues those indecisions are where most of your lost yeses live.

He then walks through all seven universal principles of persuasion, with workplace examples for each: Reciprocity, Liking, Unity, Social Proof, Authority, Consistency and Scarcity. Santi pushes back on scarcity fatigue, brings a real case from a Swiss retailer that deleted 350,000 unverified reviews, and asks what happens to authority when people start trusting AI more than experts.

The through line is ethics. Manipulation removes choice. Persuasion surfaces the reasons a yes was already there. One holds when the boss leaves the room. The other does not.

- Around 95% of decisions are made by System 1, the fast, automatic, shortcut driven part of the brain. Attention spans have dropped from 20 minutes in the 1980s to about 7 seconds, which pushes that number higher every year.
- Most professional communication addresses System 2, the slow logical part, which handles roughly 5% of decisions. That mismatch creates uncertainty, and uncertain people postpone rather than refuse.
- Manipulation removes choice. Persuasion gives options and lets the yes surface on its own. When the decision comes from inside the other person, the behaviour holds without supervision.
- A gift with a condition attached is a reward, not a gift, and it does not trigger reciprocity. The downloadable ebook behind an email form is a lead magnet, not a favour.
- In a study on email negotiation, sharing personal information before talking business dropped deadlocked negotiations from 30% to 6%. The effect came from the number of similarities uncovered, not the volume of information shared.
- Do not introduce your own credentials. Have someone else do it, before you speak, so every sentence lands with the weight it deserves.
- The most persuasive average review score is 4.2 to 4.7. A perfect 5.0 reads as filtered or bought.
- The word "because" raised compliance in the photocopier queue study from roughly 64% to 93%, even when the reason that followed it carried no information.
- AI understands persuasion science but has no situational awareness. It does not know your relationship history, so it picks the wrong principle for the moment and invents supporting detail.

💬 Guest Links:
Patrick van der Burght LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-van-der-burght/
Ethical Persuasion Unlocked podcast - https://ethicalpersuasion.com.au/podcast/
Patrick on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@ethicalpersuasion
Patrick on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ethical_persuasion/

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/
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Career strategist Sonal Bahl, who has screened 250,000 resumes as a former HR Director at GE and PwC, breaks down why high performers get passed over for promotions and shares the Candy, Vitamin, Painkiller framework for career positioning that actually gets you seen.

Key topics

Career transition from corporate to entrepreneurship
Common patterns in high performers who are stuck
Candy, Vitamin, Pain Killer positioning model
The importance of visibility in career advancement
Strategic approaches to job search and personal branding

💬 Guest Links:
Sonal Bahl, Website: https://www.superchargeyourself.com/
Sonal Bahl, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonalbahl/
Sonal Bahl, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/SuperChargeYourself

🤫 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

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
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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
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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.