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1. 

   E37 · 1 May 2023 · 38 min

   Is your business at war?

   This week your host Sneha will take you inside businesses at war, through the voices of those fighting in the trenches. We’ll hear how the same war — the war against inflation, a funding winter and shrinking markets — is being fought differently in different businesses. We’ll see how war sharpens, and sometimes disfigures, a business. We’ll see what is martyred and what is protected. This is what a business fighting for survival looks like. Tell us , is your business fighting for survival?

2. 

   E36 · 25 Apr 2023 · 26 min

   MBAarbarians at the gates

   MBAs – love them or hate them, but you can’t ignore them. Over the years, they have taken over every business vertical – general management, sales and marketing, growth and strategy, human resources, and even product and technology. Name it, they have been there and done that. But there was one bastion that remained unconquered by the MBAs for the longest. One last holdout – hardcore finance. Sitting at the apex of this pristine castle were the chartered accountants. Crunching numbers and calling the shots, out of reach and beyond attack. Or at least so they thought. Compliance used to be…

3. 

   E35 · 17 Apr 2023 · 34 min

   Amazon and Meta are wrong about managers.

   In the last few months alone, Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce announced that they were going to begin the process of flattening their organisations. That they were going to have fewer and fewer hierarchies in their organisations. Fewer hierarchies means fewer managers. The pattern here appears to be that in tough economic times, when efficiency becomes paramount, businesses are rethinking their need for managers. And concluding that they don’t need that many. Because managers are expensive, and then you need managers to manage managers. And people to manage paying, looking after, and hiring…

4. 

   E34 · 10 Apr 2023 · 30 min

   Vibe Check: Gen Z on what Gen Z wants

   You've heard about them. You've worked with them. You've thoughts around them. But have you really heard from them? In this episode, I speak to Kaavyya Kesarwani (Growth & Community, Juno), Sherina Poyyail (Policy professional, Ex: The Quint), Bhavya Narula (Founding team, GrowthX), Sindhu Shivaprasad (Chief of Staff, Obvious) and Shashank Baliga (Writer, a major OTT platform) to understand what the 'new kids on the block' think about careers, workplaces, and whatever else happens in between. Subscribe to The Ken: https://the-ken.com/ Hosted, Written, and Produced by Shreevar Chhotaria

5. 

   E33 · 3 Apr 2023 · 38 min

   Here's how to empathise with your manager to get what you want

   Here are some messages Cost to Company has received over the past months. “I believe working with GenZ is the toughest thing I do at work. They look at their jobs as a means to the next job. This has dramatically reduced their qualitative output, even if their quantitative output is enough. “ “Workplace hierarchy is its absurd with GenZs”. “There is an increasing gap between values of older generation and new generation of knowledge workers”. “There is a huge mismatch in expectations that millennials have in the workplace.” From this vantage point, It sounds like generations are tussling it…

6. 

   E31 · 20 Mar 2023 · 52 min

   Special episode: how work and workplaces have changed in 30 weeks.

   In this special episode of Cost to Company, the tables turn. Snigdha interviews CTC hosts Sneha and Shreevar about how work and workplaces have changed in the last thirty weeks. The short version: they’ve changed dramatically. This episode is the long version of that answer. Sneha takes us into the evolving relationship between the employee and employer, into how power has shifted in response to larger shifts in the economy, just in the past seven months. And how that has changed the way we work. Shreevar talks about how careers have changed in response; and what a resilient, enduring career…

7. 

   E30 · 13 Mar 2023 · 30 min

   What's It Like Working For A 'Frugal' Company in 2023?

   Everybody is cutting costs. Not because they want to. But because they have to. A few months ago, edtech giant Unacademy announced that they were making frugality as one of their ‘core values’ to focus on profitability. But can you really be a frugal company if it’s not in your DNA from the very beginning? In this episode, I speak to Somnath Mukherjee (AVP Business, Zerodha), Rahul Deorah (Finance Lead, Dezerv), and Kavya Jain (Product Manager, FreeUp) to find out what its like working in a frugal company. And why every company can’t be frugal, even if they want to. Subscribe to The Ken:…

8. 

   E29 · 6 Mar 2023 · 25 min

   The interns are rising.

   Internships are booming. Internshala has been reporting jumps of between 30 and 80 percent jumps in internships listed by businesses year on year, depending on which year you look at. The same data says that more and more businesses are offering paid internships. Demand for interns is going up. And if you ask recruiters, they’ll say that the number of internship applicants is also going up. Supply of interns is meeting its demand. Both sides of the market are growing. And because of this, workplaces and careers are changing. The fundamental lines we’ve always known and understood between…

9. 

   E28 · 27 Feb 2023 · 34 min

   IT Employees Are Finally Unionising. But There's A Problem.

   Gone are the days when unions were something that only caught the fancy of the blue collar workforce. After a slew of unending layoffs, white collar employees in the IT sector are finally waking up to the bells of unionisation. But it’s not without a myriad of unobvious roadblocks. The path to collective bargaining wasn’t easy. But no one knew it would be this hard. In this episode, I speak to Sreyan Chatterjee (Lawyer/Researcher; Ex-Reuters), Harpreet Singh Saluja (Founding Member, Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate) and Suman Dasmahapatra (National Convenor, All India IT &…

10. 

    E27 · 20 Feb 2023 · 31 min

    Moonlighting, not for money, but to upskill.

    There’s a specific idea we have about moonlighting: a trend that emerged in the pandemic. Engineers tasked with sitting at home and delivering their product saw that their skills were so valuable, that it was possible to extract more money out of them by working in two places at once. So a person would either consult with multiple organizations on the side, or work in more businesses than one, using the skills they had already, to extract more income out of it. But this episode, what we’re talking about is entirely different. This is moonlighting not to extract more money for the skills you…