This episode is sponsored by an Espresso professional and coincidentally, today is also International Coffee Day. Okay, on with today's show. When you're sipping your coffee in the morning, what are you thinking about? Are you aware of the acidity or bitterness or how the aroma is making you feel? Are you waiting for the caffeine to kick in and help ease you into your day? And what about on your second cup or your fourth, or if you're Jean Marc Dregoli,
maybe even your tenth cup. Jean Mark is an Espresso's general manager of the Oceania region and he loves his coffee. As well as being a coffee lover, Jean Mark speaks about five languages fluently and he's moved around the world for work several times in his career. So what are Geen Mark's secrets to learning a new language in just a few months and what if the best lessons he has learned in how to settle into a brand new country for work? And is coffee something that we can
use to be more productive? My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. So let's head to Jean Marc to learn what actually makes a good cup of coffee.
First of all, obviously the taste and the taste is very personal, so I think you need to find the right blend and the right I would say recipe that works for you. But for me, coffee goes well well beyond to the tastes. Obviously, it's connecting to what I do every day and to my business. So the impact we have on people, the way we do the business as clearly an impact on how I enjoyed my cup of coffee. I feel very happy when I know that, you know, in my espresso or in my longer cup.
You know, we had a fantastic relationship maybe twenty twenty five thousand kilometer away from here, somewhere in Brazil and Colombia, sometimes with some of the farmers that I met personally as well. So I think it enables also some remote human connections.
Now, talk me through your daily coffee routine, what you're drinking and when you're drinking.
I have a lot of coffee every day. The first coffee is early in the morning, after we come back from walking the dogs with my wife, and generally that first cup of coffee is really the one that helps me waking up a little bit. Not not physically, but I think my brain starts really to function after that one. And it's generally a cup with milk. We like cappuccinos a lot, so we start the day with a cappuccino together.
Then throughout the day I probably have between I would say seven to ten cups of coffee, sometimes short, sometime longer, sometimes with a drop of milk, but generally throughout the day it's black coffee, no sugar. Typically after lunch I would go with a short, intense express so and there are moments where I need that larger cup, maybe a little bit lighter in tastes, and those moments where I reflect, where I'm thinking about something, where I relax a bit.
And seven to ten cups of coffee a day, how are you getting to sleep at night?
You know? The last one is probably around ten in the evening. So I enjoy coffee, and I enjoy tea a lot as well, and I drink tea at night, but the coffee is really some saying that calms me. It's my relaxing moment. It's my me time. So I know that there is there is a certain amount of caffeines.
But actually, if if you look at the details, and because caffeine is water soluble, so the extraction and the way you prepare your coffee will have a very important influence on the amount of caffeine you have in your cup. So caffeine is not connected to intensity. So the shorter the extraction, the less the coffee is in contact with water, the less caffeine in the cup. So you may have a bald, intense espresso with very little caffeine, and you may have a very long, watery cup of coffee with
very little taste but a lot of caffeine. So choose the right coffee for the right moment, and you can probably adapt a little bit your intake of caffeine.
I think that's really interesting because that's not necessarily intuitive. You would think that a more intense coffee flavor has more caffeine, but it doesn't. So like, how can we estimate how much caffeine is in a cup of coffee that we're drinking.
Probably between fifty two hundred milligrams of caffeine in I would say a normal cup of coffee. Then if you go into very long cups, then I would say probably a bit more than that. And then there are some varieties of coffee. You know, you have Arabica, you have Robusta, and within those varieties you may have some varieties that
have a little bit more caffeine than others. So I'll give you an example one of our coffee, which is a very intense coffee in tastes as well, but it's also a coffee that has a little bit more caffeine than the others, called Kazar. That coffee has around one hundred and twenty milligrams of caffeine, and generally the robust which is the lower quality coffee, as generally a bit
more cafeine than the Arabicas. So you have to look at all those parameters, you know, the origin of the coffee, the variety, and then the extraction, and then with that you can estimate the caffeine.
Now, your final cup of coffee is very late at night, and I've heard that people are different in how they metabolize coffee, So can you tell me a bit about that, Like, how do people know whether it's okay to have a coffee at ten o'clock at night, or whether they should have their last coffee at ten o'clock in the morning.
Yeah, you know, my wife cannot drink a cup of coffee after three four and she says that, you know, she feels that her body reacts and then she has difficulties to fall asleep. I can have one at ten in the evening and I sleep like a baby again. It goes. I think it's very personal, but I associate really the coffee moment to a relax moment for me. So when I'm at the office, the coffee moment is
connecting with colleagues. I'll go to our kitchen and it's a great opportunity to engage with some staff who have a quick chat. So it's really a connecting moment. When I'm on my own, coffee is more the moment where I reflect, where I sink, where I pose myself in that last cup of coffee. I generally have it while reading or watching something just before going to bed, and it's a little bit my closing, closing of the day, and it's my relaxing, relaxing moment. So up to now
I haven't seen any effect on my sleeping. Maybe this will evolve with time.
And how about decaf coffee, because I'm a one caffeinated cup of coffee person a day, but then I would have a couple of decaf coffees as well. How do I know how much caffeine is in dcat coffee?
That's a good question, and maybe before I answer, I'll ask you another question. Do you feel a different taste on that decaf coffee?
I don't think I do. I don't think so. But I feel like my palette is not as sophisticated as yours, Like I can kind of tell what a good coffee tastes, like good and invented covers, and I am a Melburnie and so I should know, But I don't think I can tell the difference.
I think I think probably no one can tell the difference. We did some test with some very sophisticated palettes like Michelin Star Chefs, and we did some trials and we make them test what we call an alter ego, you know, so it's one of our blends and then the same blends and the same taste profile but without caffeine, and they were not able to make to make the difference. So there are several ways to remove cafeine from the coffee.
There is, I would say, a more industrial way to do it where you use chemical insolvents, and there is a very natural way of doing it, which is using water. In some countries they refer that to the Swiss water method. I think it's a it's a very natural process where basically the green coffee before the roasting, goes through a process where you wash that coffee with water at a certain temperature under a certain pressure, and that releases the
cafe in. The caffeine goes into the water, and then you can evaporate that water and recover the cafeine separately, and your green coffee will be almost without cafine. It's not one hundred per cent without caffeine, but I think it's fair to say that it's probably a couple of milligrams of caffeine in that cup, So I would say two to five milligrams of caffeine versus a normal cup that is probably closer to one hundred milligrams of cafee. So you're close to ninety five percent caffeine free in
the caffeine ated coffee. And the good thing of that is if caffeine has an effect on your metabolism. You can still enjoy the very good taste of coffee sometimes intensity, all the aromatic profile without having the caffeine, So caffeine has nothing to do with taste.
Now I want to switch gears and talk about a typical working day for you, because one of the challenges of your role is that you are based in Australia in Sydney, but head office is over in Europe, and I Espresso is a global organization. There are probably demands on your time at all hours of the day and night. What does the typical day look like for you?
Well, it's a long day and I think you really summarized it very very well. Being based out of Australia and working for a Swiss multinational, it's sometimes a bit of a challenge from a timing perspective, though our colleagues in Europe are quite conscious and they are trying to respect as much as possible the time difference. Sometimes it's inevitable my day starts generally, I would say, when we are not in lockdown, it would start at around six
o'clock in the morning. I would go out with my wife and we would walk for probably half an hour forty minutes with our dogs, which finally arrived to Australia after twenty two months journey from Brazil. But that's a different story. We're very happy to have our dogs with us and our routine is back to normal. So once the walk is finished, we start the day preparing, you know,
breakfast and the food for the kids. It's really a kind of a family family time up to around that would say seven o'clock for me, seven fifteen and then I've got my first cup of coffee and that's where
I kick off the day. I move from the family time to the business time in my brain and start thinking about the day, start planning my day, reading the emails, and obviously I have a little bit of time also for me during that morning beginning of the morning, sorry, where I do what I call the news screening, So
I'll go through news in Australia, news in Europe. It's important for me to maintain a certain connection with Europe, with my I would say my home home country because well eighteen years ago, and when you have an expat life, those little things are helping you, you know, to maintain
that connection with with your origin, with yourself. So this last from seven to I would say eight thirty maximum nine o'clock, and then at nine o'clock my day really starts with team meetings, a lot of conferencing throughout the day where we discuss our operation, we prepare the months, the next months, the activities, we discuss, people, et cetera. Throughout a long journey would be for me up to probably six seven in the evening. Then I would stop
spend time with the family again. And then after the family time, I may have still one hour or two either conferencing with Europe or engaging with my colleagues or my boss and Zerland.
How do you avoid burning out with such long hours?
That's difficult. I've been used my whole life to work quite a lot, quite long hours. I think my experience in countries abroad, in Latin America, you know, the sense of working and time is very different from one country to another. I learned it here in Australia. The work life balance is really important and the long hours is not something that is that natural. When you work in Latin America as an example, and I worked many years in Mexico and in Brazil as well, the long hours
sounds normal. Sometimes It's not as efficient as the shorter hour ear but it's something that you get used to. So I have a lot of breaks throughout the day, moments where I disconnect. Maybe I would go for a short walk, and you know those seven to ten coffee days, those are seven to ten times maybe five maybe ten minutes where I can disconnect a bit. So that's how I'm working. I'm trying to reduce that time. I'm getting better at it, trying to avoid working during the weekend.
I'm getting better at it. And I used one of your advices in one of the conferences that you did, where you were saying, you know, try to plan those shorter meetings. I'm doing that, and now in my planning, a thirty minutes meeting is generally twenty five minutes meeting, so I have always five to ten minutes in between meetings to brace a little bit and to have a break.
Excellent, good to hear you taking my advice. Now shut back. How many languages do you speak?
Quite a few? Quite a few. So originally I'm I'm Italian, but was born in Switzerland. My parents immigrated from Italy after the Second World War, and I was born in Switzerland so I started to speak Italian at home, and I was speaking French outside of the home and that school. And then I was lucky to live in Switzerland, where the multi cultural aspect and plury language is something that is key. You know, in Switzerland we have four official languages,
so you always juggle with at least another language. So I started to learn German at school. I studied it for many years, and then I went one year to live on the Swiss German part of the country. But nowadays German is the language I speak the least. So I would say I'm fluent in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and I like to say that I'm fluent in English as well. Those sometimes my accent and my vocabulary may be a bit limited, and then I have a decent
level of German. So I always say that I speak five and a half languages, including a little bit of Germany.
Well that's four and a half more than me. That is amazing. What are some of the strategies that you have found to be most effective when trying to learn a new language.
So when I was a kid, I was lucky to speak Italian and French, So I think my brain developed a little bit of agility. But I have to say that learning German and English when I was at school was very, very difficult for me, and I was I was a good student, but I was not a good language student. What really made a change is when we decided to have an international experience and we learned it
the hard way. We were sent end of two thousand and three, my wife and myself to Mexico, and we did speak a word of Spanish, and we learn the hard way the importance of the language to really connect with the local context, with people, with the culture. The first six months have been extremely hard for us, but
we were quite disciplined. So we add every day a Spanish class in the morning, and then we define the rule with the people that were close to us and with our colleagues, which we ask them to basically correct ourselves every single time we would make a mistake. And then with time your brain starts to adapt. Just you learned it. You learned it at the beginning the hard way,
but then it becomes very natural. And because we've been living in so many countries, the first thing we do is really learning the language as best as we can, so you're able to communicate, to engage with people, to interact, and to discover the country with different eyes.
That sounds like a very very interesting process. Are there any other tricks or tips that you have found that are really helpful when learning a new language.
Yep, there are, at least for me, there are two things. One is listening to the radio when you commute and listening to the news to radio channel and really family familiarize you're here with the way people speak, the pronunciation. At the beginning, it's very hard, you don't understand anything,
and with the times it becomes really natural. And the second tip for me when you are in the country, but also when you live left the country and you want to maintain your language level, this is really reading in other languages. So I force myself to read a couple of books per year in different languages. So I generally don't read much anymore in French because French is really natural for me, and I try to read at least one book in Italian, in Spanish, in Portuguese, in English.
So it's really maintaining that brain gymnastic, that flexibility in your brain to be able to switch from one language to another. And this really comes with the time, with a lot of exercise. And you know, in my day generally I speak I speak at least two or three language in the same day, being with our head office, being at home, being with my kids. You know, my kids language, their mother tongue. I would say, it's not French,
it's English because they were educated in English. But then we switch to French and then we may make a joke, you know, in Spanish or in Portuguese. So it's really it's really strange. If you would see at our table at home, you would say, those people are really weird.
Wow, it's weird, but yet incredibly impressive. Now, if you wanted to learn a new language, but you weren't living in a city or a country that spoke that language, Like, let's just say I set you the challenge of learning how to speak Japanese over the next six months, but you have to stay in Sydney. What would you do?
Wow? Wow? Wow wow. So I think the starting point and what has been really helpful for us is having this, you know, professional support at the beginning. So I think you need to start with a teacher just to get to get the base, to get the basics, to try to understand how things works in that language, a little bit of vocabulary, but also a little bit of grammar, which is a bit boring, but it's very very important.
So I would definitely start with finding a Japanese teacher or a Japanese person in Sydney to help me at the beginning, and then I think that's where the listening, the watching, the immersion in that world becomes becomes essential. If you could find a passion or an interest that would connect you to that language, I think it would
help a lot. So typically I am in love with food, with gastronomy, with cooking, with cooking shows, etc. So if you like sushi, if you like Japanese gastronomy, then I think this will help you to connect with the Japanese language.
So you could start maybe watching some shows in Japanese and you put the subtitle in the language that you like, so you family you start familiarizing you're here with the language, but you can still read under the translation, and once your level increases a bit, then you put the subtitle in the same language that you're listening to, So Japanese language Japanese subtitle. But I have to say that it's probably a very difficult exercise to do if you're not
in the country. And the other thing is probably it would be very difficult for me as well, because Japanese is not a Latin route. So you know, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese they share something in common, which is their origins. So it's probably much easier to learn Spanish, Portuguese and Italian with time, then switching from Italian to Japanese.
Now, tell me about the career advice that you receive before leaving Switzerland for the first time.
I'll put you back in context. It was two thousand and three. It was my first assignment abroad, leaving the family, just freshly married, and the senior executive at that time that was in charge of the geographical region was going to so it was one of the general manager of Nesley at global level. His name is Carlos Reprezas, a Mexican gentleman international career and he told me Mark, you are going to my home country Mexico, and I'm living
in your home country, Switzerland, so we're switching country. I've been traveling around the world, working in many countries, and I'd like to share one thing with you, and that can help you, and that advice was basically, when you go into my home country, you will find a lot
of differences with Switzerland. Try to focus on the good things you will find in Mexico and try to forget or put on side everything that you like and loved in your home country and try to really enjoy that country at its best, because if you start focusing your mind on all the good thing that you will be missing, your experience will be very difficult at the beginning in Mexico, and that advice has been really good for us because moving from i would say, a first world country like
Switzerland to maybe a developing country like Mexico, it's a it's a big challenge, but we loved it, and we really took that advice one hundred percent and we started to enjoy what Mexico has to offer, the best of Mexico, which is the culture, which is the food, which is the language, which is the travel, which is the diversity.
And since then, that's the advice that we as a family use each time we move and we really try to take the best of the country we're going to and leave a little bit behind us the best thing of the previous country.
I love that advice. And you have worked all over the world. What is like. Tell me more about your approach to starting a new position in a brand new country and workplace.
Yeah, so I mentioned to you maybe earlier. You know, you're getting out of your comfort zone, and I learned to enjoy that quite a lot. So the first thing I would I would do when I arrived in a new country is try to read a little bit about, you know, the culture of the country, the history of
the country, the geography of the country, the people. I would do probably an immersion on the first first week, you know, experiencing the food of the country, trying to travel a little bit to see the diversity, trying to I'm putting myself, you know, quickly in what's what's the context,
and what's the mood there. Then the first the first two weeks, first months of starting the new work in the country, there's a lot of listening, listening to people, you know, listening how the business works, understanding who they are, a lot of one to one with the people, to understand the context, what is really different to what I was used to. I think you get a lot of insight with observation.
What have you learned about Australia and Australians through observation.
So I learned that, first of all, the coffee is something that is extremely important in Australia. Before coming to Australia, would never have said that. You know, there's such a strong coffee culture in the country. And I dare to say more than coffee culture, I think there's a cafe culture. And what shocks me a bit sometimes is to see people walking in the morning from their home, walking and going to their neighborhood cafe and then walking back with
their cup of coffee to their home. This is something that is not that natural for me. We are we're getting used to it, obviously, but that's something that is very that is very different. And then I would say in that coffee culture, the high quality of the coffee beverages in in in Australia, the taste profiles that are a bit a bit different that what I'm used to.
The amount of milk in the cup is really key. Also, you know, you you can find some of the best coffees in the world here in this in this country, which sometimes in other country it's it's it's difficult. And at the same time people are still drinking soluble coffee at home as well, So you you got a little bit the post world, you know, and.
What about the work culture here? So what like what have you noticed that is unique about the Australian way of work compared to other countries you've worked within.
Probably there is a relation to hierarchy that is very different to some of the countries I worked in. So definitely in Australia you can be very close to people and you can have very direct, unfiltered conversation with anyone and that's absolutely normal, which in other countries it may be it may be more difficult even if you as a leader of a major organization you want to do it. There is always a little bit of distance between between people in hierarchy. So I really I really enjoyed that
aspect of Australia. Then I think the work life balance and making sure that you know you are as efficient as par gossiple throughout the day because work is only one part of your life and there is another part of your life. And finding that balance I think it's it's really great, and it's it's going a little bit out of my comfort zone, but I'm trying to learn faster. So there's some very very interesting, interesting aspect with the working culture here.
That's fascinating now for people that want to learn more about espresso, whether that is consuming it within their home or at their office, and particularly for those when lockdown, when they get back to their office. What's the best way for people to do that?
Oh, I think I think you need to maybe understand a little bit of our history. You know, it's it's an innovation and pioneering really history. We created something that didn't exist, and we created because we wanted to be able to give the barista coffee experience at home in a very simple way, so that you could enjoy a very consistent cup of coffee at home without having to invest in major equipment and without having to really master
all the variable of the coffee extraction. That's the origin a lot of innovation, a very sustainable business as well, because since day one, we've been sourcing extremely high coffee quality, and we realize that if you want to have that supply of very high quality coffee, you need to put in place a system where you are very close to the producers, and you need to make sure that you work hand in hand with the producer so that they have a good living, so that you continue to have
a good business as well. And then the third aspect is we are a direct consumer business, so we like that interaction with our consumer. We don't sell our product in supermarket. There's a good reason for that because this is we believe the direct to consumer allows us freely to understand what the consumer wants and to advise them and offer them the best experience. So I would say, if you want to leave an espresso experience, just go into one of our store when possible, and you know,
just enter and ask one of our coffee specialists. You know, seventy percent of our staff are consumer facing, and you just ask them to guide you through what an espresso can offer, and with very few questions, we can identify your needs, what you like, the way you like to drink coffee, and then we can guide you in the world of an espresso and discovering what I call and what we call the perfect of coffee.
Amazing. That sounds great, well, Jean Mark, thank you so much for your time. I've thoroughly enjoyed learning more about coffee and languages and all sorts of things.
So thank you, thank you, Thank you very much. Amanta was lovely to talk to you today. Thank you.
I hope you enjoyed my chat with Jean Mark and maybe you're feeling inspired to start learning a new language. Perhaps. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Jenna Koda, and thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.