This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
James: Hello, and welcome to Graduate Theory. My guest today is from Sri Lanka and moved to Australia to complete university. He graduated from the University of New South Wales in 1998 with a Bachelor of Mechatronic Engineering, then worked as a process engineer for about seven years. During that time, he also completed an MBA at Sydney’s Graduate School of Management.
In 2004, seven years after graduating, today’s guest moved to Arnott’s, the manufacturer of Shapes, Tim Tams and my personal favourite, the Monte Carlo. He began as a production manager, moved into continuous improvement two years later, then became a manufacturing manager two years after that. In that role, he managed 115 employees and oversaw two biscuit-production lines from raw materials to finished goods.
His next major role was at Kellogg’s, which you might know for cereals such as Crunchy Nut and Special K, or foods such as LCMs and Pop-Tarts. He was the continuous-improvement manager for the Asia-Pacific region, responsible for supporting the three biggest sites in the region: Australia, South Africa and India.
Since 2015, he has been the founding director of Capability Unlimited, where he works with manufacturing businesses to help them move from chaos to excellence. His latest work is his second book, Advance, which provides a practical 12-step framework for implementing strategy easily, improving productivity meaningfully and engaging employees effectively. Please welcome Ishan Galapathy.
Ishan: James, lovely to be here. I can truly tell your guests that you did all that work by yourself. Most people ask participants for some information to make the introduction easy, but I’m really impressed, mate. The level of detail and accuracy you’ve gone into is outstanding. Well done.
James: It was very interesting to research you, so it was definitely not a burden. I learnt about organisational productivity, improving processes and making supply-chain processes more efficient. But I want to start with a question that ties in with your personal productivity: are there any principles from the world of process improvement that you have applied to your own practice?
Ishan: Oh dear. You’ve jumped into the most difficult one first. You and your listeners might become familiar, in the coming days, months and years, with something called the irony of expertise: the plumber’s taps are leaking, the electrician’s lights aren’t working and the cobbler’s son’s shoes aren’t perfect.
From corporate productivity to personal productivity, luckily I do take a little of my own medicine. One principle I use is tracking the most important things: habits. From a corporate perspective, a habit becomes a process; in our day-to-day personal lives, they’re habits. Tracking them is useful and easy.
I recently read Tiny Habits by Professor BJ Fogg, founder of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab. He developed a theory that we’ve used in manufacturing in a different context: do the little things that matter, because they all stack up. One of his students, James Clear, also wrote a fabulous book, Atomic Habits, about how tiny habits can make massive differences.
How do I track my daily habits as a way of improving productivity, or at least staying productive? Let me grab this off the wall. James, can you explain what you’re seeing? Obviously the listeners won’t be able to see it, but let’s see how well you can explain it.
James: I’m seeing a big table where each row has its own habit. I think there might be days of the week across the top. At the intersection of each row and column, you’ve got a green dot when the habit has been done and a red one when it hasn’t. Is that right?
Ishan: Another principle that runs through my work with clients is simplification. I tend to do everything in the simplest way because we’re all time-poor. We don’t need another app or portal to log into.
As you said, this is a monthly grid where I’ve listed some habits I want to maintain, with different categories. There is mind, body and soul: do I meditate daily? Do I exercise daily? Do I do a little daily reading to continue my education? From a business perspective, what do I need to do to make sure I’m staying on top of things?
There are also two categories at the bottom. The second-last one is family, and the last one is gratitude. It’s about trying to stay on track, daily and weekly, and being grateful for something or someone. Practising gratitude is something I’ve been doing consciously for the last five years.
To answer your question, I maintain this grid. There are about a dozen little activities that I monitor daily, each with a red or green dot. A red dot means I make a conscious note and try to get on top of it the next day. That’s all it is, and that’s the one thing I’ve taken from corporate life into my own.
James: I liked what you said about simplifying the process, because there are heaps of apps for tracking your habits and doing things better. Whatever it is, there’s an app for it somewhere. I’m all for building habits, but it can become taxing to go into all the apps and tick them off. Remembering to tick off the habit is almost a separate task, which takes away from actually doing it.
Ishan: You’ve hit the key point. I’m a Gen Xer, which means I’m one of those real pen-and-paper guys. You’re probably younger than a millennial, James. Younger people might not be into pen and paper; they use the phone almost as an extension of their fingertips and probably feel comfortable using technology and apps.
But the point is that it’s not about the piece of paper or the app. That’s simply a preference. What is going to prompt you to track the habit? That’s the key, because I can have a piece of paper and you can have an app, but what’s going to be the prompt? It’s a habit that will snowball into the other habits.
As I say, committing is easy, but committing to the commitment is hard. How do you build a practice that keeps you on top of it? For me, it’s easy to have this piece of paper next to my desk, where I can see it. The first thing I do when I wake up is go through my morning ritual: a bit of exercise, a bit of meditation, then some journalling and a focus on what I need to work on that day.
As soon as I finish, the next thing I do is add the red or green dot for the previous day. That is the ritual. Creating it makes it easy to track those habits and be the person you want to be. It’s not about the app or the piece of paper; it’s about the trigger that reminds you to complete the habits.
James: I agree that it’s important for each person to work out what will remind them to do the thing. You want it to be as frictionless as possible. I liked what you said about having the grid next to your desk, where you see it at the same time every day. If you want to ride your bike, you should keep it somewhere easy to access, not in a shed around the corner that’s secured by three different locks and requires two keys. Which arrangement is going to make you ride the bike?
Ishan: Exactly. It’s about reducing the friction involved in getting things done. BJ Fogg talks about removing that friction in Tiny Habits. As you said, if you want to ride a bicycle, make it easy to access. Make sure you can find your shoes and socks, and keep them by the door. These little things remove friction when you want to get started in the morning.
Once you start, it creates a positive snowball effect. You’re happy that you’ve completed the key thing you wanted to do, and you get a release of dopamine, oxytocin and all those wonderful chemicals in your brain. You start by feeling good and happy because you’ve ticked off the first thing. With that mindset, you focus on your next activity.
You begin the day in a positive cycle rather than turning on your phone to find out what’s gone wrong in the world, who needs you or which fires you need to put out. That’s a bad way to start the day because everything going into your head is negative. I hate being in that place, so I don’t do it. I don’t turn on my computer, email or phone until a good hour and a half or two hours after I wake up.
James: I’ve heard people say that you definitely shouldn’t look at social media in the first hour of your day because it almost primes your brain for the rest of the day.
Ishan: It’s something I’m very interested in right now, but it’s a little premature to discuss because it’s a half-baked idea for my next book. The part I can share is that a lot of work has been done on brain patterns. There are different brainwave states, or states of brain function, that we go through each day.
We move from a deep-sleep state to the peak state we’re in now, where we’re fully conscious and near the peak of our brain function. As the day progresses, it slows down. Between that slowing-down phase and deep sleep is a state in which you’re not asleep, but you’re not fully awake. We pass through it both when going to sleep and when waking up. It has good and bad aspects. The good aspect is that it’s a useful semi-conscious state.
If you’re interested in positive thinking and reprogramming your subconscious mind, many people would say that’s the state in which you want to do that work. The negative aspect is that the reprogramming also works if you start reading and reacting to all the bad things in your newsfeeds. If you wake up thinking, “It’s going to be a terrible day. I don’t know how to face the world,” that gets reinforced.
How many times do people start the day badly and spend the rest of it cursing each new thing that goes wrong, feeling bad without knowing why? I think it’s because of long-term reprogramming of the subconscious mind in that semi-conscious stage while going to sleep and waking up, when people read all that negative stuff.
That’s as much as I want to share, because it isn’t established. It’s an area that interests me right now and will affect what I’m researching for my next book: how do people work really productively? I think there’s a state of the brain that helps us get that 110% surge in productivity. I want to understand whether we can put ourselves into an almost meditative state for a short time to produce our best work. But more on that, perhaps, next year.
James: Optimising your performance, extracting the best from yourself, improving productivity and making sure you do the things you want to do are all interesting. At the end of the day, it’s about doing more of the things you want to do than the things you shouldn’t.
I want to change the topic from productivity to your career. You’ve had an amazing one, starting as an engineer and becoming someone who led an entire region in many respects. You’re now an author and speaker. Did you always have your current destination in mind, or has your career been an iterative process of jumping to the next best thing and ending up where you are?
Ishan: I think there’s a bit of both. Coming out of university, there are serendipitous moments when you fall into a workplace, and for many people that shapes their career path. It isn’t true for everyone, but it’s common. It happened to my dad: he entered the world of HR, while I fell into process improvement quite by accident.
I read a small advert on the university noticeboard asking for a student to work at a company. I wanted work experience, so I applied. That became the start of my process-improvement career: what began as a three-month casual student job became a full-time role the following year.
That was quite by accident. During my time at Arnott’s and Kellogg’s, however, I tried to pave my career towards something I wanted to achieve. We all dream of a career ladder, seek advice from senior leaders, undertake projects and leadership-development programs, and do everything we can to explore the world and learn how organisations work. We then try to take our careers somewhere we want them to go.
It’s a common story: you fall into something and then try to make something of it.
James: I don’t know if you’re familiar with Cal Newport. He’s probably best known for Deep Work, but before that he wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You. It’s about the idea that your passions might not come first; they might come second. You don’t necessarily do something because you’re passionate about it. You get good at it, then become passionate about it.
Your story is similar to others I’ve heard. People get thrown into a new area in their first job out of university—perhaps something they’d never even heard of while studying. Becoming a continuous-improvement engineer probably wasn’t something you were passionate about at university or had even considered. As you progress and become good at what you do, the passion starts to develop because it’s something you’re good at and can tell people about. Is that something you’ve seen elsewhere?
Ishan: When you hit your fourth decade in life—your forties, and you’ve got a few years to go, James—your personal perspective changes. Many people start asking, “Why am I here?” Not, “Why am I here in this organisation?” but, “What is my purpose on this planet?”
I don’t mean that you wake up with that question on your 40th birthday. It’s common for people to start wondering during the decade from 40 to 50 how they can help humankind or the planet, and what purpose they can serve.
At that point, we look back at the lived and learned experiences we’ve had throughout our careers and lives, and try to make meaning from them. In my case, I look through the lens of productivity. For somebody else, it could be sales if that’s what they’ve done. We try to figure out what it all means and connect a few dots in our lives.
Suddenly, you’re making meaning from those experiences and an obsession grows out of them. Perhaps it isn’t about manufacturing productivity. Maybe it’s about helping individuals become more productive beings, and that’s why I was put on this planet. I just had to work my way through manufacturing productivity because manufacturing is one of the hardest areas and a sector that works quite diligently on productivity.
If you’re happy to believe the narrative that you were put on Earth to serve a purpose, it’s useful to look back and ask how you can use your experience. Becoming fired up about that and trying to serve the world is a peaceful and wonderful way of living, making a difference and making a living.
James: I heard you say on a podcast, when I was researching you, that life can be understood by looking backwards, but you’ve got to live it forwards.
Ishan: That’s not my statement; I read it in a book. It’s quite profound, isn’t it? Life makes sense backwards, but you’ve got to live it forwards.
James: Creating that meaning and purpose as your life goes on is very interesting. In your career, you might be considered a high performer. You’ve become someone in charge of so much. Do you consider yourself a high performer?
Ishan: We can be our own hardest critics. I see many areas in which I want to improve. There are times when I’ve caught myself ten YouTube videos later wondering, “How did I end up here?” Then comes the self-reflective thought: “Ishan, you should know better.” There are also days when I think, “Jeez, what did I achieve today?”
In my view, it isn’t about saying, “I’ve arrived; I’ve achieved it.” It’s about being conscious of what you want to do and how to do it most effectively. For example, I want to make sure that what my wife and I do as a family results in the most productive weekend, so I pre-plan it. What are we doing on Saturday morning? What are we having for Saturday lunch? Are we taking it easy on Saturday afternoon, or are we doing some things? I like to put the weekend into major buckets.
My wife is more likely to say, “We’ll just wake up on Saturday morning and see how it goes.” Then we wake up and realise we need to go shopping because of what we’re doing for lunch. She takes life as it is. If I want free time, I almost have to put “free time” in the calendar. Then I say, “Okay, now it’s my free time,” and relax.
I plan because I want to make sure we get the best from the time we’ve been given. I think time is the greatest limiting factor. I don’t want to stress about it, but I don’t want to waste it either. Of course, I spend a lot of time with my boys. I love cooking with them and going for walks with them, but I want to do those things in a planned way that makes the most productive and best use of my time.
I might walk with the boys after lunch, when I’m feeling slightly lethargic, and make sure I read or do something more productive in the morning, when I’m firing on all cylinders. It’s about planning and getting more done. If that’s a way of saying I’m achieving a lot, good. But do I consider myself a high achiever? I don’t know. As I said, we tend to be our own hardest critics, so I won’t give myself that tick just yet.
James: I certainly think you are, so I’ll give you a big tick. When people pursue promotions and move up the career ladder, one approach is to decide exactly what they need to do to reach the next position, set goals and work very deliberately towards the next stage. Another might be to do the best they can and accept wherever they end up—a more laid-back approach that still involves doing good work. Which side are you on? Do you set a goal and smash what needs to be done, or are you more laid-back and take things one step at a time?
Ishan: I was definitely someone who set a goal, then tried to hit it and get the result. But you have to be at ease with the fact that the next career goal may not be totally within your sphere of control. You might have all the right credentials, experience, results and ways of working, but if the opportunity hasn’t arisen, you’re still in a holding pattern waiting for it.
I communicated very clearly with my managers: “Here’s what I’m planning to do with my career. Here’s where I want to head. What do I need to do to get there?” That applied both to the next role and over the longer term. I’ve been very fortunate to have managers who supported and guided me, and gave me opportunities to ensure I was ready to move into those roles when they became available.
It’s good to be ambitious, but not to the point where you become impatient. You have to hold on to the goal tightly with an open hand.
James: That’s a great analogy. It isn’t always within your control, so in one sense you should want it badly and do what you can to get where you want to go. At the same time, you need patience, an understanding that you aren’t the one deciding everything, and some humility.
Ishan: I’ve seen what happens when it works the other way. If you’re impatient and trying to get ahead of the other person, you’re always trying to elbow the person next to you. It creates a toxic culture, where people don’t get along because it’s everyone for themselves.
That’s not how organisations become highly productive or great places to work. It’s good to be driven, but you have to balance your inspiration and desire to progress against the team culture and the possibility that other people are better suited to or more experienced for those roles.
It’s good to be driven, but you must also be mindful. Check your side-view mirrors and look sideways.
James: I also want to discuss continuing to learn throughout your career. You completed your MBA fairly early, only four or five years after graduating. I don’t know many people who have done one at that age. Was the extra study something you deliberately focused on at that time?
Ishan: I always knew I wanted to pursue postgraduate study. An MBA made sense because I was in a management role and knew that’s where I wanted to head. Although my undergraduate degree was in mechatronics and engineering, I really enjoyed the people side and working with others.
The MBA made sense at that point. We also knew we wanted to start a family fairly soon, so we were trying to get a few things done, plan our lives and support my career. The company I worked for supported and sponsored me. Major change-management programs were also under way in the organisation, and I went through related training programs.
It was helpful to undertake that training and the MBA at the time. The stars aligned: the company sponsored it, I wanted to complete it before starting a family, and I could apply what I learnt to programs already happening at work. I’m one of those people who welcomes opportunities with open arms and grabs them.
James: It was good to realise early that further study was something you wanted and to act on it. I’ve spoken to all the guests about following your gut and intuition when you can see yourself doing something in the future. Acting early set you up for later opportunities. Do you have any bad career advice that people should ignore?
Ishan: Obviously, don’t do anything illegal or abusive; that goes without saying. Beyond that, if something doesn’t feel right and you can’t be congruent with yourself—if a little inner voice says, “This isn’t for me”—listen to it.
No matter what others say, don’t second-guess your first instinct. Learn to trust and back yourself. That doesn’t mean shying away from a great opportunity because you feel unworthy or unable to do the job. But if something is fundamentally wrong—perhaps you don’t want to move overseas for a job because something tells you to wait and that something else might happen—respect that feeling.
If something isn’t right, don’t take it. But if an opportunity makes you wonder whether you have enough to meet the company’s expectations, or limiting beliefs tell you that you lack experience and expertise, learn to back yourself. That knot or those butterflies in your stomach mean you’re growing as an individual. Embrace the feeling and go through it. You’ll emerge from the experience as a different person; on the other side is growth. Learn to recognise, manage and deal with that feeling.
I can give you two examples. The first was when I started the continuous-improvement role at Arnott’s, initiating and leading a program for the Sydney site. Our first improvement project was on the Tim Tam line, where I’d been a production manager. I knew the line, the people, the processes and the machines very well, so I was fairly comfortable when I had to lead a team to improve it. I forget the exact goal, but let’s say it was improving the throughput of Tim Tams.
I felt comfortable leading the cross-functional team because I thought that, as the project leader, I had to have all the answers. If they asked me technical questions, I could answer a fair number of them, though not all. We went through the project and solved the problem.
The second project I had to lead was on the Salada line. I knew nothing about its people, machines or processes. Yeast-based biscuits are very different from sweet biscuits, and I almost had nightmares: how was I going to lead this project when I knew nothing about yeast-based biscuits?
Then I heard the voice of Harry, the teacher who had taught me structured problem-solving: “Ishan, you need to trust the process.” I channelled my teacher and thought, “Harry said to trust the process, so I’ll trust the process.” I went through it and learnt much more about how to trust the process and lead a team to solve a problem than I had from the Tim Tam project. That was a moment of growth.
Much later, when I was close to leaving Kellogg’s and leading continuous improvement for the region, I was also involved in developing the global supply-chain excellence program. I was part of the global team that developed the framework—the blueprint for how Kellogg’s factories around the world operated and improved year on year.
As part of that work, I was given the opportunity to lead continuous improvement globally and lead the global continuous-improvement centre of excellence. I had to lead and facilitate meetings with very senior people bearing titles such as senior director, vice-president, global lead and regional lead. I had another moment of thinking, “I’m just the Asia operational-excellence manager. How am I going to lead and facilitate this globally, and develop this part of the framework?”
Again, I had to learn that it wasn’t about me; it was about what I brought to the table. It was about trusting the process and the team, because they were the experts. My role was to lead and hold that space.
Whether it was on-site with the Tim Tam team or on a global scale, the advice I want listeners to take away is to back yourself, trust your instinct and go through those moments of discomfort, because on the other side is growth.
James: I think I’ve heard that described as a catapult: you have to go through the downs to have the ups as well. In a similar vein, I have one question that I ask all the guests. Let’s say Ishan is back in 1998, finishing university and about to start his career. What advice would you give yourself?
Ishan: Funny you should ask that, James. I went to the University of New South Wales, as you said in the introduction, and I was living in Randwick. I distinctly remember the first day I arrived in Australia and in Randwick. On that Saturday afternoon in February 1994, I walked along Belmore Road—or perhaps Frederick Street, the main street in Randwick.
I had all these questions going through my head, from simple things like, “How do I get to uni? Where’s my faculty? How do I find it?” all the way to, “What will my first job be? Who will I marry? Where will I live?”
Recently, I had the pleasure of helping my niece, who is studying engineering at the same faculty, settle into her apartment. My wife and I helped her rent a flat, move in and set up. That evening, I had to grab something to eat. We all know the area like the backs of our hands, so I quickly rushed to Belmore Road to find a cafe.
In that moment, I could feel the Ishan who was on that road in 1994. It was as if I were watching a movie of myself in the third person, walking the road for the first time, looking into the windows and feeling all the questions I had then. I wanted to tell that Ishan, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be an enjoyable ride.” I saw myself telling the 20-year-old version of me that.
At the same time, I saw the 70-year-old Ishan coming to tell the forty-something-year-old Ishan, “You’ve got questions now too. Where to next? Will I be able to make the difference I want to? Is the world going to be okay? Will we travel again?” I heard the voice of the 70-year-old Ishan saying, “It’s going to be okay, and it’s going to be wonderful.”
James: That’s very special, Ishan, and a fantastic story. I really appreciate you sharing it with us. You can tell, just from watching you, that it’s very close to your heart. I think that’s a fantastic note on which to send people out into their day. Thanks so much for your time and your advice today.
Ishan: You’re very welcome, mate. James, I loved it. If anyone is interested in reading about personal productivity, that book hasn’t been written yet. But if you’re interested in learning about organisational, corporate or team productivity, head to advancebook.com.au.
You’ll find a free PDF with a full introductory overview of my entire book. It explains my simplified version of how these mega-companies operate. It’s a simplified version of the supply-chain excellence framework I helped Kellogg’s develop: in my simple way of thinking, what does that framework look like? You’ll be able to read all of that and more, and pick up on the things that interest you. Again, that’s advancebook.com.au.
James: Thanks so much for your time today, Ishan. Everyone, please go and check out Ishan. He’s a fascinating guy. Again, thanks so much for your time today.