An experiment. Cornell Tech, 2023. A professor named Karan Girotra takes a class of elite MBA students — the kind of students who go on to found real companies — and pits them against ChatGPT in an idea generation contest. Independent judges score every idea, blind. They do not know which came from a human and which came from a machine.
The result? Thirty-five out of the top forty ideas came from the AI. Not the students. The machine's ideas were seven times more likely to land in the top ten percent. And the judges' purchase intent — would you actually buy this product? — was higher for the AI ideas.
That is not a story about AI. That is a story about productivity. About what humans should and should not be spending their best hours on. About a definition of work that is quietly being rewritten while most managers are still optimising the old one.
What productivity actually is
The word productivity is everywhere. Every consultant uses it. Every CEO has a slide on it. But when you ask a manager to define it, they fumble.
So let me try.
Productivity is not how busy you are. That is the first thing to get out of the way. In Indian corporate life — and I would say especially in BFSI — we have somehow conflated busy with valuable. The person who works late, sends emails at eleven at night, is on every call. That person is admired. But that is activity. Not output.
Productivity, properly defined, is the value you create per unit of effort. Output divided by input. And the moment you define it that way, three things become obvious.
One. You can be very busy and very unproductive. Two. You can be unhurried and highly productive. And three. Most organisations are not actually measuring productivity at all. They are measuring presence.
Take a typical credit operations team in an Indian bank. Forty people, all looking busy. But if you actually map the throughput — applications processed, decisions made — you find that most of the activity is internal coordination. Re-checking each other's work. Forwarding files. Sitting in status meetings. The actual value-creating work — making a credit decision a customer is waiting for — might be only twenty percent of the day. The other eighty percent is the organisation talking to itself.
And nobody flags it. Because everyone is busy. The system rewards visible effort, not output. That is the productivity disease.
This is why we need to talk about three layers, not one. Individual, team, organisation. Productivity gains and losses can happen at any of those levels, and they do not always align.
The individual layer
If I had only one thing to say about individual productivity, it would be this: you are losing the war for your own attention, and you do not even know you are fighting one.
There is a researcher at the University of California, Irvine. Her name is Gloria Mark. She has studied office attention for two decades. Her work shows that knowledge workers today switch tasks every three minutes on average. Three minutes. And after each interruption, it takes about twenty-three minutes to fully return to focus.
Twenty-three minutes to recover from each interruption. If you are interrupted ten times in a day, you may literally never reach a state of deep focus all day.
There is a name for that state. Cal Newport, the Georgetown professor, calls it Deep Work. Cognitively demanding work performed in a state of distraction-free concentration. Newport argues that deep work is the superpower of the knowledge economy, and most modern organisations are structurally hostile to it.
Open-plan offices. Always-on Slack and Teams. Back-to-back calendars. WhatsApp groups for every project. Each one, individually, seems harmless. Together, they make sustained focus nearly impossible.
In the Indian context, this can be worse. We have an additional cultural layer. A junior person who does not respond to a senior's message in five minutes is seen as disrespectful. Hierarchy means seniors can interrupt juniors freely. The result: the people who are supposed to be doing the deep analytical work are constantly being pulled out of focus by the very seniors who need their best thinking.
The four variables that govern your best output
This is where Karan Girotra's research becomes essential. His insight: when we evaluate productivity, we mostly look at average quality of output. But that is the wrong variable for knowledge work. What actually matters is the quality of your best output. And that is governed by four variables.
One. Average quality. Your baseline competence.
Two. Volume. How many outputs you generate.
Three. Variance. How different your ideas are from each other.
Four. Discernment. Your ability to identify the best.
Why does variance matter so much? Because in creative or strategic work, one truly different idea is worth more than fifty safe ones. The breakthrough product, the unexpected strategic move, the reframe that opens up a market — these come from variance. Most professionals optimise for average quality and never push variance.
Block ninety minutes of deep work. No meetings. No phone. No email. Just the single most important piece of thinking you need to do this week. Protect it like a board meeting. Most managers have not had ninety uninterrupted minutes in months.
The team layer
Move up a level. Teams. When does one plus one become more than two — and when does it become less than one?
The most rigorous study ever done on this is Google's Project Aristotle. Google studied 180 of its own teams over two years. Who was on the team mattered far less than how the team worked.
The number one factor: psychological safety. The concept comes from Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School. It is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Without it, the team underperforms relative to its raw talent every time.
The Indian corporate context makes this genuinely hard. Our hierarchy culture — boss is always right, deference to seniority, fear of what will sir think — actively suppresses psychological safety.
The brainstorming bombshell
Here is a Girotra finding that should change how every manager runs meetings. Girotra and his colleagues, Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, published a study in Management Science in 2010. They tested two ways of running idea generation. One: pure group brainstorming. Two: a hybrid structure, where individuals first work alone, then come together.
The result? The hybrid groups generated more ideas, better ideas, and were better at identifying which were the best. The technique most consultants teach — build on each other's ideas in the room — was found to be actively counter-productive. The technique we have been teaching for decades is wrong.
Diverge alone first. Converge together second. Always.
Send out the problem before the meeting. Ask everyone to write their ideas independently. Then come together for evaluation. The convergence phase is where group dynamics add value. The divergence phase is where they destroy it.
The organisation layer
Top layer. The central idea: structure is strategy. Conway's Law: any system you build mirrors the communication structure of the organisation that built it. Your org chart is your operating model.
Most Indian organisations grew up with a particular structural inheritance. We have many approval factories. Companies where the dominant work product is not customer value — it is the internal note that goes up five levels for sign-off.
It is risk-aversion calcified into structure. Every layer of approval was added because of yesterday's mistake. But cumulatively they prevent today's innovation. The cost of those approvals is invisible on any P&L.
Reed Hastings at Netflix argues that a smaller team of exceptional people, given context rather than rules, outperforms a large team of average performers given controls. Talent density. Indian organisations historically optimised for the opposite.
Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints is brilliantly simple: every system has one constraint that limits its throughput. Improving anything other than the constraint is wasted effort. Find the bottleneck. Fix it. Move on.
The single highest-leverage intervention
Push decisions down. Distance from the customer correlates negatively with decision speed. Push the decision to the level where the knowledge actually sits. You will be wrong sometimes. But you will be faster.
What this builds toward
We have covered a lot of ground. Individual attention. Energy management. The four variables. Project Aristotle. The Girotra brainstorming finding. Conway's Law. The approval factory trap. Theory of Constraints. Talent density. That is the foundation.
But there is a question hanging over all of this. Everything assumes work is being done by humans. What happens when intelligence itself becomes abundant?
That is where Karan Girotra's most important argument lives. And that is where we go next time. Episode two — The Age of Abundant Intelligence.
Episode 2: The Age of Abundant Intelligence →
How AI is rewriting the productivity rules — and why most organisations are getting it wrong.