Play To Potential Podcast

GUEST Sanjeev Aggarwal and Hari TN have seen the "scale-up movie” in different contexts. Sanjeev was the Founder CEO of Daksh that he eventually sold to IBM. He is now an investor at Helion Ventures and Fundamentum Partnership. The have recently co-authored the book - From Pony to Unicorn - Scaling a Start-up sustainably. From Pony to Unicorn lucidly describes the X-to-10X journey that every start-up aspiring to become a unicorn has to go through. The book effortlessly narrates the fundamental principles behind scaling. Peppered with anecdotes, insights and practical wisdom, the book is a treasure trove of lessons derived from the authors' rich personal experiences in both building and guiding several start-ups that went on to attain the 'unicorn' status and became public-listed companies. In the conversation, we speak about how Founders should think about scaling up, the three different rhythms of an organization that is scaling up, how organizations should think about transitioning senior leaders, being d

GUEST Bruce Feiler is an American writer and television personality. He is the author of 15 books, including Council of Dads, a book that describes how he responded to a diagnosis of a rare cancer by asking a group of men to be present in the lives of his young daughters. His latest work explores the power of life stories. Drawing on interviews with Americans in all 50 states, he offers strategies for coping with life's unsettling times in his new book, Life Is In The Transitions, published in May 2020. Informed by the sifting and coding of life story interviews across America, Feiler examines what gives our lives meaning. Adam Grant called the book, one of "The 20 New Leadership Books for 2020”.  In our conversation we speak about the notion of anytime life transition, how resilience might be the wrong attribute to have during transitions, the three phases in a transition, the power of stories in navigating transitions and much more. In a world where the rate of transitions we all will go through is increa

GUEST Ramesh is a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, and a leader in the Pharmaceutical and Organization practices. He is the Global Dean of the Bower Forum, McKinsey's program for CEO learning. He is a member of McKinsey's Global Social Responsibility Council, and sits on a few non-profit Boards in the Education sector in India. He also has been through the unimaginable trauma of losing two young children to cancer. I was keen to speak to him to get his perspectives on leadership given his experiences at McKinsey and how we can all deal with lifequakes when they hit us given what he has been through on the personal front. We speak about how CEOs should discern their mandate when they take charge, how they should focus on not just doing but being, how he has reinvented several times over within McKinsey, How he has architected a Personal Board of Advisors and how that replenishes him, how he and his wife have dealt with the twin shocks that they have experienced and more.  Published in Feb 2021. HO

GUEST Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi is the president and CEO of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2020, Priyadarshi released his book "Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life”. In the book, he speaks about his walking away from his school at the age of 10 based on some dreams he had been having from the age of 6. He speaks about the various twists and turns in his journey that has now brought him to MIT.  In 2009, Priyadarshi founded the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT to design and disseminate innovative programs on teaching secular ethics and human values. The Center for Ethics has 6 Nobel Peace Laureates as its founding members and its programs run in 5 countries while poised for a global reach. Published in January 2021. HOST Deepak Jayaraman, the host of this podcast series, works with Leaders and Organizations with a growth mindset and helps them play to their full po

GUEST Dr. Ashley Whillans is the Volpert Family Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School. Professor Whillans earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Her research seeks to understand the associations between time, money, and subjective wellbeing. She is particularly interested in understanding how individual, organizational and societal factors like gender, workplace policies, and income inequality predict how people value and spend time and money, with possible implications for well-being. Published in December 2020 HOST Deepak Jayaraman, the host of this podcast series, works with Leaders and Organizations with a growth mindset and helps them play to their full potential. He strives to spend significant upfront energy in understand the nuances of the context and then armed with the mutual trust and understanding of the context, strives to be of value as a (behind the scenes and discreet) Coach / Sounding Board for their journeys. LinkedIn profile here.  ABO

GUEST Vinay Sitapati returns to the Play to Potential Podcast on the back of his recently published book - Jugalbandi - The BJP before Modi. The book begins with the creation of Hindu nationalism as a response to British-induced elections in the 1920s and moves on to the formation of the BJP in 1980 and ends with its first national government, from 1998 to 2004.  The book also traces the entangled lives of its founding leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. Vinay digs into various moments to really understand what made their six decade relationship tick. He teases out the secret recipe behind their cohesiveness despite twists and turns in their respective fortunes. He says that what kept them together was fraternal love, professional synergy and, above all, an ideology that stressed on unity.  This podcast is for information and learning purposes only. All content and opinions expressed in this podcast are that of the guests and are not necessarily the opinions of Deepak Jayaraman or Transiti

GUEST Ashish Dhawan is the Founder and Chairman of Central Square Foundation (CSF) and Ashoka University. He worked for twenty years in the investment management business and ran one of India’s leading private equity funds, ChrysCapital. In June 2012, he left his full time role at ChrysCapital to focus on philanthropic work in education. Ashish is an MBA with distinction from Harvard University and a dual bachelor’s (BS/BA) holder with Magna Cum Laude honors from Yale University. Central Square Foundation works on system reform in school education in India. The foundation has 60 team members who work on grant making, research, policy reform and policy implementation. Ashoka University is a new liberal arts institution that aspire to transform higher education in India.  In our conversation, we spoke about how Ashish set markers for himself at 30 (to become an entrepreneur) and 45 (to move towards social impact) and has made choices in line with those markers. We also speak about the various pathways he cons

GUEST Marshall Goldsmith helps successful people achieve positive, lasting change in behavior; for themselves, their people, and their teams. He has four decades of experience of helping top CEOs and executives overcome limiting beliefs and behaviours to achieve greater success. He has received several accolades over the years. Thinkers 50 ranked him as World's most influential leadership thinker (2015 and 2011), top ten business thinker, top rated executive coach (2015, 2013, and 2011). In our conversation, we spoke about staying relevant over the long term, ROI in Coaching, the path to excellence, getting behaviours to stick, the art of asking good questions that open up new possibilities and what matters in the end given his work with several leaders. This had a slightly different tonality from a typical podcast conversation. Very often Marshall would slip into a Coaching mode and get me to reflect on several key questions. I hope that you find it as purposeful as I did. Published in Oct 2020. HOST De

GUEST Venkat is the Founder of GiveIndia, a platform that strives to bridge the gap between two sets of people - People who want to give, who want to try and make a difference along with those that are doing phenomenal work but don’t know how to reach out to the people that want to support them.  GiveIndia was born on April 28, 2000 out of the belief that equal opportunity is the cornerstone of civilization. All human beings must have the same opportunity to succeed in life, irrespective of the circumstances they were born into.However, this is far from true. GiveIndia strives to change this inequality. We speak about Venkat’s journey, his childhood, his time at IIMA and his early career choices before he moved into Philanthropy. We also discuss some of the questions people end up having around giving - 1) Giving time versus money 2) Raising Giving children 3) Our relationship with money and how it impacts our Giving decisions 4) Givers that inspire him Published in Oct 2020. HOST Deepak Jayaraman, the

GUEST Whitney Johnson is the CEO of WLJ Advisors and one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50. She is an expert on helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals. Whitney is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning and an executive coach and advisor to CEOs. She is a popular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times. In 2019, she was ranked #3 on the Global Gurus' Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals. In 2017, she was selected from more than 16,000 candidates as a “Top 15 Coach” by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith. Whitney was the cofounder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, through which they invested in and led the $8 million seed round for South Korea’s Coupang, currently valued at more than $9 billion. She was involved in fund forma

GUEST Atul Khatri is one of the top Stand up comedians in the country. In his previous avatar, he used to run a successful IT Business with his brother for several years. When he got tired of the business routine, he tried his hand at DJing and Bar-tending before trying his hand at comedy in Feb 2012 as part of his new year resolution in 2012. 7 years later, he had a Netflix special featuring 47 comedians from 13 countries around the world.  We speak about his journey, mid-life reflections and how he rode two horses (IT Business and Stand up comedy) for a period of time before he took the call to do Stand-up full time. He also speaks about how he had to balance passion and pragmatism  as he transitioned from the world of Business to the world of Stand-up.  We also spent time talking about his response to COVID-19. He had a series of shows lined up in US and Canada from 13 March to 13 April. He speaks about how he was in Canada on 10 March and the world started falling victim to Corona and started shutting

GUEST Sir Andrew Likierman is the former Dean of the London Business School. He has been researching the topic of Judgment for several years. He is the senior National Independent Director of Times Newspapers Ltd and an NED of listed insurance company Beazley Group and of Monument Bank. His former Non Executive roles have included Bank of England and Barclays Bank Plc.  We initially spoke about his journey through life and his various choices including his arc of curiosity around measuring things that are hard to measure that eventually led him to studying Judgment.  His thinking has been published in the HBR in Jan-Feb 2020 issue. Podcast published in August 2020.    HOST Deepak Jayaraman, the host of this podcast series, works with Leaders and Organizations with a growth mindset and helps them play to their full potential. He strives to spend significant upfront energy in understand the nuances of the context and then armed with the mutual trust and understanding of the context, strives to be of value a

GUEST R Gopalakrishnan is a man of many identities. A Board Member, an author, an advisor, speaker and a teacher. Apart from having an illustrious career in Hindustan Lever and Tata Sons, he has been on several Boards over the last few decades. He has authored 12 books since 2007 (that is a run rate of about a book a year if you think about it). He spends his time on Boards, as a Mentor and as a Corporate Advisor, as a speaker and as a Teacher. He is an Executive in Residence at SP Jain and a Distinguished Professor at IIT Kharagpur. While there is a lot of wisdom to mine from him, we tried to anchor the bulk of the conversation around his book Crash where he profiled about 15 high profile CEO appointments that didn’t quite work out (that includes Vikram Pandit at Citigroup, Anshu Jain at Deutsche Bank, Carly Fiorina at HP, Vishal Sikka at Infosys and more. He looks at common patterns across some of these transitions and distils them in the book. We unpack some of that in this conversation.We first speak ab

GUEST BJ Fogg is a behaviour scientist with deep experience in innovation and teaching. At Stanford University, he runs the Behaviour Design Lab (earlier called Persuasive Tech lab). He spends about 50% of his time to Stanford and 50% to industry innovation. On the industry side, he trains innovators to use his work so that they can create solutions that influence behaviour (focus areas include health, financial wellbeing, learning, productivity and more).  He is the author of the recently published book - Tiny Habits. In this book, he breaks down his model for human behaviour that he has developed based on years of research. The formula that underpins this model is B = MAP. He says that Behaviour (B) happens when Motivation (M), Ability (A) and Prompt (P) come together at the same moment.  In our conversation, we explore the various elements of this model and also discuss how we can contextualise it to the current situation we are in given COVID-19.  Published in June 2020.    HOST Deepak Jayaraman, the

GUEST Jennifer believes that leadership is one of the most vital renewable resources in the world. This might be more true than ever as organizations across sectors and around the world are facing an unprecedented amount of volatility and change. Jennifer designs and teaches leadership programs, coaches senior teams, and supports new ways of thinking about strategy and people with clients facing these dramatic shifts in complexity, volatility, and change in their workplaces and markets. She blends deep theoretical knowledge with a driving quest for practical ways to make leaders’ lives better.  Jennifer also supports leaders one-on-one as a leadership coach. Over the last decade, Jennifer has developed The Growth Edge Coaching approach, which she describes in her book, Changing on the job: Developing leaders for a complex world (Stanford Business Books 2012). She supports clients to find their current growing edge and then make choices about how they want to grow, and she teaches coaches around the world tr

GUEST Raj Raghunathan is a professor of Marketing at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, where he relies on themes from psychology, behaviorial science, decision theory and marketing to explain consumption behaviour. He also studies the impact that people’s judgments and decisions have on their own happiness and fulfilment. Based on his research, he teaches a very successful online course on Coursera on Happiness (named A Life of Happiness And Fulfillment). His book (titled, If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?) was released in the US, UK, and India in 2016.  In our conversation, he speaks about his journey to researching happiness and his take on why so many people around us who are smart and successful but not necessarily happy. He talks about some common pitfalls people get into and some perspectives on how we can prioritise (not necessarily pursue happiness) in our lives.  He is an alumnus of BITS Pilani and IIM Calcutta. This conversation was published in May 202

GUEST Matthew Paul Walker is a British scientist and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the book - Why We Sleep (NY Times Bestseller, #1 Sunday Times Best seller). Previously, he was a professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the impact of sleep on human health and disease. He has published more than 100 scientific studies and is the founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science.  A lot of us grow up with the narrative of sleep being a residual figure in our lives where getting work done at the expense of sleep is seen as a victory of will power and mind over body. The reality is that there are dire consequences of trading off sleep for work or for exercise and it often shows up several years later. Given the delayed feedback loop and possible lack of attributability, many of us possibly end up ignoring it. Sleep constitutes about one third of our time on the planet and the quality of sleep po

GUEST Jennifer Petriglieri is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and the author of Couples That Work, a book on how dual-career couples can thrive in love and in work. Her award-winning research and teaching focus on identity, leadership, and career development. She is particularly interested in how people’s close relationships shape who they become professionally and personally, and how moments of uncertainty and crisis make us who we are. She was named one of the world’s best 40 business school professors under 40 by Poets & Quants. Her research has appeared in the Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Learning & Education, and the Journal of Organizational Change Management. It has also been featured in the Business Week and the Harvard Business Review. A British citizen, Jennifer earned a PhD in Organisational Behaviour from INSEAD. She also holds an MBA from IMD, Switzerland, and a BSc in genetics from Nottingham Univer

GUEST Lynda Gratton is a Professor of Management Practice at London Business School and is one of the World’s foremost thinkers at the intersection of leadership, the world of work and careers.  Over the last 20 years Lynda has written extensively about the interface between people and organisations. Her eight books cover the link between business and HR strategy (Living Strategy), the new ways of working (The Democratic Enterprise), the rise of complex collaboration (Hot Spots and Glow) and the impact of a changing world on employment and work (The Shift). Her last book (100 year life) that she co-authored with Andrew Scott (Prof of Economics at London Business School) has fundamentally shaped a lot of my thinking and the choices I have made in the last few years.  Lynda’s work has been acknowledged globally - Lynda is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and has chaired the WEF Council of Leadership. She chairs the Drucker Prize panel and is on the governing body of London Business School. In 2017, Lynda

GUEST James Clear is the Author of the book - Atomic Habits that has sold more than 1 Million Copies globally. He is the creator of The Habits Academy and runs the website jamesclear.com where he writes about habits and human potential. The central question he is trying to answer through his work is “How can we live better”. He has a weekly newsletter where he shares some of his ideas and this goes out to more than Half a Million subscribers who benefit from his thinking. To subscribe to his newsletter, you could just got to Jamesclear.com.  In our conversation we spoke about several elements that he has covered in the book. We first spoke about his journey and how he came to studying and researching habits. We then spoke about how we should think about building habits in the right areas. James says that we need to work hard on the things that come easily to us! We explore that in the context of transitions and relate that to the notion of keeping the identity small. We then dive into the notion of the plat