Meet The Disruptors: Prasanth Nair Of Double Gemini On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Don’t fake it until you make it. That said, I’ve spent a long time thinking I was an imposter. Be the sun, and the entire solar system will fall into your orbit. In the same vein, be authentic, because if you’re anything else, you will never be.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Prasanth Nair.

Prasanth Nair is the founder and product architect of Double Gemini, a productivity transformation company that designs processes to improve productivity. He is an expert in the fields of productivity processes, project management, and change management. His creativity, determination, attention to detail, and ability to connect with people at all levels, puts him in high demand in the productivity marketplace.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I’ve always had a knack for processes. I’m good at taking complex things and simplifying them to help people and processes move forward. Going back to my university days, I had the mentality that if I am going to use my time, I should use it wisely. So, I would build processes for studying, and figure out the most efficient way to take an exam.

This desire for maximum efficiency and productivity followed me throughout the various jobs I held post-college, from pizza delivery driver to produce stock boy. I’d ask myself, “what’s the most efficient way of moving this produce around?” I always found it fun to work these types of problems out.

When I moved to New York in 2000, I started Double Gemini, which at the time was primarily a project management firm. Simultaneously, I was working on launching software companies, but as the contracts and projects for Double Gemini got bigger and bigger, it soon became clear that project management was my sweet spot. In 2004, I built my signature email organization process the Stack Method, when I felt overwhelmed by the number of emails constantly flooding my inbox. Email was killing my productivity and stressing me out. I needed a better way.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

Essentially, I’m advising workers to take the way they traditionally conduct business — from how they view and respond to emails to how they schedule their day — and completely turn these processes on their head. For example, the program I developed, Stack Method, views emails as actions, not messages, and focuses on organizing emails into action type to help workers tackle their tasks in the most efficient way.

My philosophy is that whatever I do in my personal and professional life should also be helping to move humanity forward. To that end, our vision at Double Gemini is to accelerate humanity’s ability to solve the world’s greatest problems. We exist to create environments that improve productivity. And when we work with a team or organization, we can help them accelerate the pace at which work is done in a really significant way.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

As I previously mentioned, Double Gemini started out as a project management firm, and we were managing initiatives upwards of $60 million. Along the way, I built out a set of techniques to help me and my team stay organized and productive — techniques around writing emails, managing meetings, spearheading projects, organizing files, etc. I had clients periodically ask me to teach them these techniques, but it never occurred to me that they would be valuable as a stand-alone solution.

That is until one day, my colleague Micaela said, “maybe the universe wants you to move in that direction.” A lightbulb went off, and I realized I had completely missed my calling. It wasn’t project management, but productivity. I took her advice, and 11 years later we are a thriving productivity transformation firm helping people across the world. It’s ironic how the things that are most valuable are sometimes the things we take most for granted.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

I’ve had many — maybe even countless — mentors along my journey. I truly believe that everyone has a little bit of genius to offer, if you get out of the way and listen.

Here are just a couple of those mentors who truly made an impact.

Joe Coughlin, former CEO of Coughlin Logistics, proved you can completely shift an organization’s trajectory by buying into a philosophy. While all organizations boast a “customer first” viewpoint, he truly lives and breathes it. He wove this philosophy into the DNA of his company and it changed everything.

Mike Gustafson, president of Search Discovery, reads and studies more than anyone I’ve ever met, and he’s extremely humble about it. What’s more, he has created a learning organization. His employees are required to regularly learn new things, take exams with 100 percent pass rates, and apply what they’ve learned. As a result, he’s built the strongest team of data analysts, scientists and engineers on the planet.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

The word “disruptive” is thrown around a lot today, but I think to truly be disruptive, you not only have to do things differently, you have to do things better — and in the process create positive societal change.

One example I’d consider to be a positive disruptor is 3D printing in medicine. While the application of 3D printing hasn’t become as wide-spread as perhaps originally predicted, the technology is game changing for the health care industry. 3D printing has allowed doctors to offer more personalized medicine, provide better patient care and realize more positive outcomes.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

Humble. I’ve seen over and over that once your ego gets in the way, your progress stops. Stay humble and you’ll always learn.

Joy. To so many people, everything is serious and their work and lives are reflective of that. I think that viewpoint constricts us. It’s so much more rewarding — and you produce remarkably better work — when you start from a point of joy.

Attention. Attention makes everything better. Attention to listening makes your relationships better. Attention to your work improves the quality of your output and outcomes. Attention to yourself gives you deeper insights on who you are and what you can become.

Grit. I once took an honors college calculus course. A good portion of the students were smarter than me, but I outworked them and got the only A. Grit and determination are more important than intelligence.

Be. Don’t fake it until you make it. That said, I’ve spent a long time thinking I was an imposter. Be the sun, and the entire solar system will fall into your orbit. In the same vein, be authentic, because if you’re anything else, you will never be.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

Our mission at Double Gemini is to help the world move forward by making it a more productive place. Looking ahead, we’d like to partner with organizations that are trying to solve the world’s most pressing problems, from climate change, to health crises, to food and water shortages. We’ll offer our transformation services pro bono and train their teams on how to work in a more accelerated, efficient and lower-stress way.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

I identify with Andy Raskin’s view of organizational success. I regularly read his column in Medium, and one such piece that particularly resonated with me is called, “How Great Sales Narratives Drive Urgency.” Within it, he discusses one way of creating a sense of sales urgency, which he calls the “Undeniable, Relevant Change in the World.” The idea is that while businesses may be OK with the status quo, what will happen to them if the world around them is evolving, but they don’t adapt?

This is a philosophy that guides me in the work I do every day — sure, the processes your company or your employees are using may work now, but are they being pushed to their maximum potential? And are they agile enough to adapt to changes, or are they so set in their ways that a change in process could be their downfall? Our hope is that by helping businesses achieve productivity transformation, they’ll be better equipped to handle changes to their industry, or to the world at large.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“From the point of view of one who creates, everything is a gamble, a leap into the unknown.” — Yayoi Kusama, contemporary Japanese artist.

It means don’t be afraid, because creators must be fearless. Focus on creating, not on the results. The outcome is out of our hands, and that’s OK. I find it particularly inspiring. It gives me license to try and do things that have never been done before.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Thank you for the kind words. I have always been driven by the desire to create a better world — and I’ve found that my way of doing that is through what I call a productivity movement. The workforce is experiencing massive productivity losses due to the destruction of attention and the lack of collaboration. Employees are expected to multitask to an impossible degree, which only leads to a decrease in productivity. And with companies moving to hybrid or remote workplaces, models of collaboration have completely changed.

There is a productivity void that needs to be filled, and the mission of Double Gemini is to help create environments that improve productivity by designing processes to maximize individual attention and team collaboration. We’ve seen that when organizations overlay these processes, they achieve a complete productivity transformation by maximizing employee knowledge and output and creating equal access collaboration between employees working inside and outside of the office.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!


Meet The Disruptors: Prasanth Nair Of Double Gemini On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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