Play To Potential Podcast

GUEST Sudhir Sitapati is currently Executive Director, Foods and Refreshments at Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL). He has just published his first book - The CEO Factory, published by Juggernaut Books.  I have had the privilege of knowing him for the last 22 years right from the day we joined IIM Ahmedabad in the summer of 1997. This podcast conversation is special for a few reasons. 1) It is the first time I am interviewing a friend on the podcast 2) It is the first time two siblings have been on a podcast (I had interviewed Sudhir’s brother Vinay on his book Half Lion a while back). 3) Sudhir speaks about Prof AK Jain of IIMA in the book and in the podcast. I had the fortune of being taught by Prof Jain and happened to interview him in the context of a felicitation function we had organised last year. You can find my interview with Prof AK Jain here.  In this conversation, Sudhir and I spoke about various elements of his book - The CEO Factory. We spoke about a range of topics including how HUL looks for

GUEST William Vincent Campbell Junior (Bill Campbell) was an American businessman and Chairman of Board of Trustees of Columbia University and Chairman of the Board of Intuit Inc. He was VP of Marketing and Board Director for Apple Inc and CEO for Claris, Intuit and Go Corporation. After his active career as a business executive he had a profound influence as a Coach. He worked with the who’s who of the Business world that includes luminaries such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, Sundar Pichai and so on. Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle (Executives at Google) interviewed more than 80 leaders who knew and loved Bill Campbell and shared their insights in the recently published book Trillion Dollar Coach. To honour their mentor and inspire and teach future generations, they have codified his wisdom in this book. In my conversation with Alan Eagle (one of the Co-authors of the book), we spoke about how Bill transitioned from a care

GUEST Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author. With a PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Tasha is the principal of The Eurich Group, a boutique executive development firm that helps companies—from start-ups to the Fortune 100—succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders and teams. Her primary areas of expertise are executive coaching, executive team development, and leadership and high potential development programs.  She contributes to Harvard Business Review and has been featured in outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, Forbes, and Fast Company, as well as peer-reviewed journals.Tasha’s first book, Bankable Leadership, debuted on the The New York Times bestseller list in 2013. Her latest book, Insight, delves into the connection between self-awareness and success, where she shares the surprising findings from her multi-year research program on the topic.  In this conversation, we div

GUEST Paddy Upton is a Head Coach in Professional T20 cricket, Mental Coach to professional athletes, Executive Coach and Professor of Practice at Deakin University. Changing careers, following a second master’s degree in Business Coaching from Middlesex University (2003), and along with Gary Kirsten as Head Coach, Paddy was appointed Mental Conditioning and Strategic Leadership Coach of the Indian National team in 2008. Under Kirsten and Upton, the team attained ICC top test team ranking for the first time (2009) and went on to win the ICC World Cup in 2011. Following this success, Paddy was appointed Performance Director of the South Africa Cricket Team from 2011-2014 during which they became the first team to simultaneously hold the Offical ICC World Number 1 ranking in all three formats of the international game. Between 2012-2018, Upton has been Head Coach in 12 professional T20 Cricket seasons for five different teams across three tournaments including the Indian Premier League, Australian Big Bash Lea

GUEST Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behaviour at London Business School (LBS). Prior to joining LBS, she served on the INSEAD and Harvard Business School faculties. An authority on Leadership and Career Development, Thinkers 50 ranks Ibarra among the top management thinkers in the world. She is the author of the best selling, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing your Career. She writes for HBR and business publications such as Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Times.  In our conversation, we unpack the nuance behind Herminia’s belief “Adults are more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than think their way into a new way of acting”. We talk about how leaders in transition could experiment with different pathways and think about a portfolio versus a full-time role. We also get to the bottom of the catch-22 that a several professionals encounter especially in identity consuming t

GUEST Matt Dixon is an Ironman University Master Coach and a former professional triathlete. He has a master’s degree in clinical and exercise physiology and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Men’s Journal, Men’s Fitness and Men’s Health. Dixon is also the author of two books, Fast-Track Triathlete and The Well-Built Triathlete, available from Velopress.  Matt runs Purple Patch Fitness, an organization that provides a customized training experience for athletes of all levels. This includes multiple World Champions (Athletes that have trained with Purple Patch Fitness have amassed over 400 IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 wins and podiums) and time-starved executives in Silicon Valley (includes Sir Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, Mark Pincus - Founder of Zynga, Sami Inkinen - Founder of Trulia et al).  We spoke about a range of topics including how Matt transitioned from being an athlete to a coach to an organization builder, similarities and differences in coaching elite athletes and

GUEST Michael Watkins is the best selling author of The First 90 Days and Master Your Next Move: The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days, published by Harvard Business Review Press. He is the Co-Founder of Genesis, a global leadership development consultancy based in Boston, MA where he coaches CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. He is also Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at the IMD Business School in Switzerland where he teaches two open programs for leaders in transition, including a 2-day First 90 Days Course popular with global organisations headquartered in the region. He formerly served as faculty at The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Harvard Business School, and INSEAD. In our conversation, we speak about his perspectives around ROI of Transition Support for a leader who is moving in and the timelines that we should bear in mind when we think about transitions. We then spent time discussing three different types of transitions which are covered in details in his

GUEST Kartik Hosanagar is the John C. Hower Professor of Technology and Digital Business and a Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Kartik’s research work focuses on the digital economy, in particular the impact of analytics and algorithms on consumers and society, Internet media, Internet marketing and e-commerce. His book - “A Human’s guide to Machine Intelligence” has recently been published by Penguin Randomhouse in India. The book is a comprehensive overview of the impact of AI and ML on our lives. It is written in simple language and is accessible, relevant and insightful even if you are not tech-savvy and familiar with AI, ML and related topics. The book delves into various implications of AI and ML including how we should think about consuming content, making decisions, diversifying our perspectives, solving for privacy while benefiting from the convenience of AI and more. We spoke about some of these elements and discussed how we should think about stayin

GUEST Rajat Gupta is a former CEO (Managing Partner) of McKinsey & Co. and led the firm between 1994 to 2003 across 3 terms of 3 years each. He was the first non-American CEO of McKinsey & Co. and arguably one of the first Indians to lead a pedigreed organization at a Global level. In 2012, Rajat was convicted on charges of insider trading and sentenced to two years in Jail. He recently published his memoir, titled “Mind without Fear” published by Juggernaut Books. Given most of the press coverage around the book has focused on the nuts and bolts of the trial, I decided not to focus on it. Given this podcast is about learning from people’s journeys, I decided to spend time on how Rajat has grown as a person through his various experiences at McKinsey and subsequently. We also spend time on some of the choices he has made and some choices that he wishes that he made differently at various points in time. If you are looking for specifics on the Raj Rajaratnam trial, Rajat’s dynamic with Preet Bharara

GUEST Falguni Nayar is the Founder and CEO at Nykaa.com. She founded it in 2012 with the vision of making the best of beauty products available all across India. Today, Nykaa.com’s collection includes the best of Indian and International brands across make up, skin care and hair care categories.   Falguni is an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad and initially worked as a Consultant with AF Ferguson & Co and then as an Investment Banker at Kotak for about ~18 years (with roles in International Business, Institutional Equities and Investment Banking). 27 years into her career, she took the entrepreneurial plunge and moved to start Nykaa.com.   In our conversation, we spoke about her formative years, how she thought about her career in the initial years after IIMA and her reflections on how women should think about managing their careers and their leadership style as they go through their journey. We also spoke at length about her transition from the corporate world into the world of start ups when she started Nyka

GUEST  Rich Fernandez is the CEO of Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI). Prior to this he was a Director of Executive Education and People Development at Google.   SIYLI began as an initiative in Google in 2007 when a team of leading experts in mindfulness, neuroscience and emotional intelligence developed an internal course for fellow Googlers. It quickly became incredibly popular within Google and given the interest outside Google was so great, SIYLI was set up as an independent Not for Profit in 2012. Since then SIYLI has become a globally recognised programme and continues to work with Google as well as other Corporate, Nonprofit and Government Organisations around the world.   In our conversation, we spoke about Rich’s take on Leadership Development in a “rocket ship” such as Google and talk about the distinction between performance and potential, something that several organizations mix up. We talk about the various types of attention (open, focused and meta-attention) that we need to

GUEST Stewart D. Friedman is a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Wharton Leadership Program and Wharton’s Work/Life Integration Project. He has been on the Wharton faculty since 1984 and became the Management Department's first Practice Professor in recognition of his work within the fields of Leadership Development, Human Resources and Work–Life Integration on the application theory and research on the real challenges facing organizations. In our conversation, we spoke about how Dr. Friedman thinks about 4 domains - Self, Work, Home and Community and how we can harmonise across the four domains by going after what he calls “4 way wins”. He also talks about positive spill-over effects from one domain to another and urges us not to see these choices as trade-offs but as porous elements with osmosis across them. He goes on to talk about how we can craft experiments and interface with the various stakeholders to create a life that in

GUEST Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. He has taught at the universities of Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, and been the Indo-American Community Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In the academic year 2011-2 he served as the Philippe Roman Professor of History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics. Guha’s books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), and an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002). India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007) was chosen as a book of the year by the Economist, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out, and Outlook, and as a book of the decade in the Times of India, the Times of London, and The Hindu. Gandhi Before India (Knopf, 2014) was chosen as a notable book of the year by the New York Times. His lat

GUEST Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School (HBS), where he has sought for two decades to study the drivers of entrepreneurship in emerging markets as a means of economic and social development. At HBS since 1993, after obtaining degrees from Princeton and Harvard, he has taught courses on strategy, corporate governance and international business to MBA and Ph.D. students and senior executives. For many years, he has served as the Faculty Chair for HBS activities in India and South Asia. He was named the first director of the university-wide The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard in the fall of 2010 Outside HBS, he serves on numerous for-profit and not-for-profit boards in the US and India, including AES, a Washington DC headquartered global power company, and India-based Bharat Financial Inclusion Limited (BFIL), one of the world’s largest firms dedicated to financial inclusion for the poor. He is a co-founder of several entrepreneurial ventu

GUEST  Indranil Chakraborty runs StoryWorks, that helps organisations and leaders harness the power of stories to create and deliver impactful messages. He has spent two decades of experience leading teams and driving change at reputed firms such as Unilever, Tata Group and Mahindra & Mahindra.   He is the author of the book "Stories at Work - Unlock the secret to Business Storytelling” published recently by Penguin Random House. In our conversation, we talk at length about some of the insights in the book. Indranil first demystifies the term “Business Storytelling” and distinguishes it from other forms of storytelling.  We then discuss other elements including how one should listen to stories and collect them systematically, the different applications of storytelling, how story telling bridges the asymmetry that often exists due to the "curse of knowledge”, how one can build deeper relationships through stories, how we can bake in the story-telling habit in our life and more.   The lessons from this c

GUEST Mr Om Prakash Bhatt (OP Bhatt) is the Chairman of Tata Steel Limited and a Board Member at Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC), Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) and Standard Chartered Bank. He started his career in State Bank of India (SBI) as a probationary officer in 1972 and retired as the Chairman of SBI in 2011. I had first met him when I was participating in the Director’s Club programme conducted by Hunt Partners, designed to prepare individuals to be effective Board Members. In our conversation, we spoke about how leaders should think about whether Board roles is something they should consider and his thoughts on what it takes to be an effective Board Member. More specifically, he talks about the distinction between the skillset and the mindset required to be an effective Board Member. He dwelt on how leaders often need to build new muscles of influencing that their corporate career that they may not have built during their career. We also discussed the critical role of Chairperson

GUEST Ambi Parameswaran is the Founder of Brand-building.com, a Brand Advisory Organization. In a career spanning 30+ years, Ambi has handled assignments in Marketing, Sales and Advertising with companies like Rediffusion DY&R, Boots Company and UDI Yellow Pages before dropping anchor at FCB Ulka where he spent about 25 years finishing as ED & CEO of FCB Ulka Group. Ambi has also been a prolific author and his ninth book is 'SPONGE - Leadership Lessons I learnt from my Clients'. The book (SPONGE) discusses some of the key lessons Ambi has learnt working with his clients over the years. It talks about his interactions with leaders ranging across Ratan Tata, Azim Premji, M. Damodaran, Karsanbhai Patel, Dr. Varghese Kurien, Vinita Bali and Rohinton Aga. We spoke about his insights from the book around how leaders take risks, how they leverage wisdom from experts, how they keep connect with their consumer and more. We also spoke about lessons from his journey and his thoughts on building a credible pers

GUEST Arun Maira is a former member of the Planning Commission of India and former Chairman of BCG India. He had a distinguished career in Tata Motors (then called TELCO) and rose to be on the Board of the company. He then had to relocate to the US due to a personal situation and had to reinvent himself at 45. He has written several books, the most recent one being “Listening for well-being: Conversations with people not like us”. In our conversation, we discuss some of his key transitions post Tata Motors to the world of Advisory Services. We talk about how he went about making some of those choices and settled into the new context. We also deep-dive into his book on Listening and discuss its impact on various domains. We talk about the art of asking deeper questions, how we could steer through listening, how we can have tough conversations and give hard feedback by listening, the trade-off between richness and reach of conversations and more. Published in September 2018. HOST Deepak Jayaraman, the host

GUEST Bombay Jayashri is one of the leading Carnatic musicians in the country. She is born into a family of musicians with a rich lineage in classical music. She represents the fourth generation of music practitioners in her family. Apart from her contribution to the world of Carnatic music, she has collaborated with artists around the world including Egyptian musician Hisham Abba, Senegalese musician Thione Seck and Finnish composer - Eero Hammeeniemi. Her collaboration with Sir Ang Lee (for the movie - Life of Pi) got her a nomination for The Academy Award. In the conversation she spoke about how the role of an inspiring guru, her approach to growing as a musician and training for performances. She also sheds light on some of the elements behind team work that play out in a concert when artists from different contexts come on stage. She talks about her experience with Sir Ang Lee and his orientation towards excellence when she recorded the title track for The Life of Pi. Published in September 2018. HOS

GUEST Deepa Malik is a Silver Medalist at Paralympic Games (Rio 2016), an Arjuna Awardee (2012) and a Padma Shree Awardee (2017). She has won 58 National and 18 International medals (and counting) in her sporting career that started at the age of 36. She is paraplegic and was compelled to spend the rest of her life on a wheelchair after choosing to undergo a crucial surgery in 1999. This happened around the same time when her husband was fighting the Kargil War. In our conversation, we spoke about her formative years in the Armed Forces and how that moulded her attitudes and approach to life. We also spoke about some of the key choices she made at pivotal points through her journey (including the decision to go for a surgery that would offer a high chance of survival but would confine her to the wheel chair). We also spoke about her approach towards excellence and how she has trained and gone onto win all that she has. Published in August 2018. All facts are relevant and updated at the time of publishing.