This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. All right, thank you so much. You are listening to Bloomberg Business Week. He transformed our next Guest a division of ge Um, and he turned it into the publicly held gen Packed. It's an I T services company managing risk and compliance applications. It's based in India. It has more than nine employees. He however, has been stuck in New York because of the pandemic.
Great to welcome to our audience and to Bloomberg Radio. Gen Packs president and CEO. He's Tiger thiagarag On and he joins us on the phone. As I mentioned in New York City, Tiger, nice to have you here with us. Um, how are you doing so great to be on the show, and thank you doing really well? Um. I guess the Dutch statement has to be calvetted with in these times. Will expand upon that, because you're right, these are unusual times. So tell us a little bit about what your world
has been like for the last six months. I've been I'm based in the in New York City in Manhattan, and I've been operating the company from my home, which is an apartment in New York City, and you know, the global close to a hundred thousand employees who are all working from home or most of them are running operations, uh, consulting, digital engagements, analytics engagements with a lot of our global
clients who are also working from home. And that's you know that that's an interesting challenge which we weren't necessarily all prepared for, but we got there and and at some point in time it you start wondering is there
a time when this will end? And so shifting online, I feel like we're all kind of wrestling with it at this point now several months in, because we're beyond I've said this before in this program, we're sort of beyond the triage stage where you just sort of get through it, and now we have sort of different rhythms and different interactions. We're learning different ways of doing things.
What have you learned you and especially your team in terms of interacting with each other about kind of who you are and and sort of how you operate as a company. Oh so much, Jason, We've learned so much. I'll start by saying that the technologies that we are using that our clients are using that the whole world is using have always been available for some years now. Technology is that allow us to collaborate together, to communicate
irrespective of distance. Um, the reality is we didn't use it to its fullest extent, and now what the pandemic has shown us is the way it can be used. Um, it's very productive. You don't necessarily have to travel every time you want to meet someone, and you can get large groups of people to engage with each other. Now is that equal to socially interacting face to face, having a dinner together. It's not. But you know, I think what the world is learning is how do you mix
and match this? And hopefully, as we come out of the pandemic, can we actually take all the best practices we learned here and bring them into the world of tomorrow. One example would be how inclusive is this current culture where everyone is on a is on a video conference call rather than three people on video conference and ten people in a room. Unfortunately, those three people get left out and that whole ability to drive more diversity and inclusion is a big plus that hopefully we can all
hang onto. Well, what what you know, let's stick with that for a little bit um in terms of d n I, diversity and inclusion. I mean, these are not new topics. You know this tiger, and we've been talking about it for decades, and yet here we are and we're all astonished, and we are shocked at the inequalities. And like I said, they've been around for a while.
How do we, as Jason mentioned to one of our earlier guests, Abigail Disney, you know, how do we move beyond conversation to real action that actually results in significant change so that the world is lifted everyone benefits. Tell it's such a great point. We've been added, The world has been added, We as a company have been added. I think everyone's been added on various dimensions, whether it's
gender equities or its racial equity. As we you know clearly, at least in the US, we're very focused on it these days. But it's been a focus for some time, and yet I would argue not enough has has changed and not enough has moved. I'll start with I think much more transparency and visibility to metrics that shows improvement is something that we have been big believers in. Uh So, tell me the diversity at the top of the company. Tell me the diversity and the board. Show me what
goals you have and what what you know? I'm I hate to use the word, but what targets you have and show me progress against those targets. We all have financial goals that were held responsible for. Why is it wrong not to have Why is it wrong? I mean, why shouldn't we have diversity goals? Because the reality, better solutions get get created when you have diverse minds at the table, and you the way you get divorce minds, it's people with divorce backgrounds divorce experience. So I think
the theory of the cases talked about enough. I think the way your drive action is by driving metrics and by having a little totally agree transparency and metrics. Right numbers they tell you know, when you start looking at an organization and you look at either you know, the diversity and inclusion, you look at the composition of your workforce. When you look at the numbers, there's nothing that you
can hide. Right numbers tell a story that's right, that's right, and and and it's perfectly fine to say, look, I have a goal and it's going to take me some time to hit the goal. However, I've driven improvement this year versus last year in the previous year. And that's what progress is about. It's not necessarily saying already there at the time to Hill, no, I haven't, but I'm
making progress, Tiger. One of the fascinating things about a company like yours is you have amazing insights and windows into a whole pety of other companies, their hopes and dreams,
their struggles during all of this. What's one of the things that you've picked up either that you can generalize or that has really stuck with you about what other companies are dealing with for all of this, Jason, I'll start by saying that the one overaarching seeing that you could capture everything in is a significant acceleration in uh
digital transformation. You know, I think I think it'll be fair to say that most companies, most enterprises across the globe have been on a path to embrace digital into the enterprise, to change business models, to drive efficiency, to drive better experience with customers, and so on and so forth. Just think about accelerating that from a five year journey to an eighteen month journey or a twenty four month journey. And that's what we've been seeing and I think it
applies to every company in every industry. Well, it's interesting, Yeah, I do wonder if we're going to look back Tiger at this moment in time. I don't know whether it's going to take us a year, whether it's gonna take us five years, and just how much this time unfortunately the stress um and the difficulties, but how it really kind of cause so many different changes in how we
do it. Whether it's telemedicine, whether it's education, whether it's the digitization, which we've been talking about and increasingly seeing, but it's really picked up speed. Tell you you you got it. I mean, this is a tragic eight months. The pandemic is tragic. I mean, lives have been lost, Um, lots of people have lost their jobs and and so all of that is terrible. However, you know, we all have to continue to look for So what are we learning from this and what are the things that we
can take forward? And there are so many things. One of this digital thing that we talked about, you know, almost every company in every industry, the switch to online is just amazing. Um, if someone had a five percent penetration on online versus offline, that's now gone to if someone was already that's easily hitting the six mark. Um, everything is moving to the cloud. Uh. All of these were transitions that were happening. Now people are jumping on
it in an accelerated fashion. Um. You know the everyone wants analytics now, real time and insights, real time to take decisions. After all, when you have a highly volatile world where demanded supply spikes up and down, I mean think about it. You know, the first couple of months through the pandemic, the sale of wheat flour I believe went up plus. The sale of yeast went up by forty percent plus, and I never could imagine why. And then I realized people were baking at home. I had
to listen. I couldn't buy flower for a while, and I found we had the Sea of King Arthur Flower on this program and she was talking about, you know, demand like they've never seen before. They had to completely
change their supply chain, right right. So, when you have that kind of volatility, which which would say is going to last beyond the pandemic, because the volatility is going to be driven by many things up and down, you need much more real time analytcs that supply chain can deal with UM and all of that digital transformation and digital technologies are going to allow us to do that. That's got accelerated. All of that should be good because in the end the consumer and businesses get benefit of
that much better experience, much better value. So so you know, hopefully that comes out as the hybrid is the way some people refer to it, which is a combination of everything that we used to do before, but everything that we've learned now, can we mix and match that, create more flexibility and work, create much more online and offline. No one is going to have only offline anymore. Everyone
is going to have an online channel. So so Tiger for you as a CEO, I would imagine not knowing too much about it, but knowing how most big global CEOs operate. You were on the road all the time, You're constantly meeting people. You've got a lot of face time with a lot of your key folks. How has this changed you, How has it changed your leadership? Silent, what do you take with you into sort of whatever
the next normal is going to be? Great question, Jason, so I shot by saying, obviously, I haven't traveled at all since the first few days of March. Uh, it's the longest period ever in my life that I haven't traveled, and it's it's fascinating for someone who used to travel a hundred fifty days a year. And the first thing that crops up is why didn't I think about this earlier?
Exactly the same point on digital technologies, UM, and the realization that when the world comes back to the new normal, I don't think I'm going to travel a hundred fifty days ago. UM. I think I can get by with half of that, maybe maybe one third of that. So we're doing many more conversations with clients than ever before, not less, but many more, ten times more. All of them are virtual, all of them are video and phone,
et cetera. UM. Obviously we are missing the ability to you know, be face to face, go have a dinner, go have breakfast, go have lunch. So the way I think about the world of the future is I think we're going to do many more of these virtual meetings than before. I think it's much more productive. However, every once in a while we're gonna say, John, I'm gonna come and meet you in Chicago. Let's go and have dinner.
So the separation of I'm going to meet you because we're going to do more than just a business conversation. So if I want to do a one our business conversation, I don't need to fly down to Chicago. Let's do a call. I think that's gonna happen. You might say, Jane, I'm going to meet you. Just giving you a hard time, all right, Well, we really really enjoyed it. We hope you'll keep in touch with us because a lot of
insights there. Tiger Thiagarage and he is the CEO of gen Pack, joining us on the phone from New York City,