 So I was thinking about what to kind of talk to experts here. So what I thought was that, and I'll kind of give you my perspective of what's worse for me over the last few years in large consumer-facing businesses, and how we've kind of used communication in the last two organizations that I've been in to not only sort of connect with consumers and create a brand, but also, more importantly, how it helps us connect internally. So it kind of always comes down to two things, which is staying authentic and safe servant with everything that we do. So the thing about being relevant is, as business leaders, we often grapple with changing consumer needs, what people are wanting to hear from us. And the biggest kind of paranoia is that whether you're going to fall off the cliff or you're going to continue to be a part of each life. And I kind of think about it in a way that what really matters is are we being relevant with our products and services in the life of people that we are impacting. And that's kind of at the base or at the core of understanding what the consumers' needs are and frankly what they really want to hear about rather than an overload of information and pop-ups on people's mobile phone apps. And I think in that, in trying to communicate what it is that we stand for and what really is relevant for people, I think the owners is, before communication professionals, the owners is actually on the business leader. Because at the end of the day, these business teams and the folks who are putting together the products and services are the ones who have the responsibility of understanding what the needs of the consumer are as opposed to the ones. And then come up with something that really ticks and that kind of really makes a difference in people's lives. In my previous role, we came up with three very simple things, which is that, you know, as long as you're on time and as long as you are affordable and as long as you wrap it around in a courteous and hassle-free consumer experience, that's what is the more engaging element that keeps people together over a long period of time. Or for that matter, what we are doing today at OYO as we build out one of the largest and leading hospitality businesses in the world, at the end of the day, all we are trying to do is create affordable, clean and hygienic, safe and secure rooms or hotel rooms or hotel accommodation around the world at convenient locations. That's really what we are trying to do. And it is that consistency of the message that becomes very important when we are talking to whoever we are talking to, whether internal or external. The other big responsibility is being authentic. And here I think often I see business leaders having conversations with communication teams, with PR agencies, consultants and advisors, and they're constantly trying to massage the message, they're trying to tweak it. And I think what really ends up happening is that you get caught somewhere. You get caught in a trap of your own web. And life doesn't have to be really that complicated. So what's always worth for me is just going out there, putting out an authentic message, be original, be authentic, and that is worth with me over a period of time. Now, I was also thinking, as we look at the world of people that we usually end up dealing with, what is that role that each one of these consulates plays? Whether it is the internal communication department, whether it is the role of the advisors and the PR consultants, whether it is the media and the journalists, for that matter, what is the role of the business leaders? So the role of the communication team has undergone a dramatic change. They are no longer just a post office trying to call up an agency or calling up a media house and pushing on you or reacting to something. They are no longer just a spokesperson, but they have actually become the face of the company or they need to become the face of the company because there is no longer that period of time that is available between an event and a question and an answer and a response. The speed at which the news travels, the speed at which people are expecting answers from us, has become so short that everyone who's out there wearing that lanyard is the representative of the department, of the company, and they really need to be the face of the company. The second bit that has undergone probably the biggest change is that as internal communications departments have become stronger and larger, the role of external PR agencies, public relations, corporate affairs, advisors, consultants also has undergone a change or need to continue to undergo a change. And really what's important there is not just go out there and communicate what has happened, but be able to really explain why something is happening or why a company or an organization does something. That requires tremendous amount of understanding of what the business stands for, what is it that the business is trying to communicate, what is it that makes them relevant and authentic in the eyes of the consumer and being able to be almost an internal part of the organization and an extension of what the business is trying to do. The third is that as there is this massive amount of information and as we are going to an onslaught of information and things being thrown at us, I think what's increasingly going to happen is that those journalists, those media houses who are able to bring clarity to a new story are able to kind of take a consumer or take a reader or an audience through that form of war. They are the ones who are going to separate themselves as the ones with the biggest amount of followers. You will notice that about yourself that no longer are we switching on to TV channels which have the highest amount of decibels. No longer are we following Instagram handles that throw a lot of information at us, but taking that extra 10 minutes to really understand what is really going on and the ones who do this better than others will clearly be the leaders. Now over a period of time, obviously over the last, especially over the last five to six, seven years, the digital media, social media has become a reality and we've seen this whole cycle where business leaders would first oppose it, they would try to control it to then now where you're somewhat scared of it, but there are very few who are able to harness this kind of thing. I don't know if you remember the days when there used to be these internal policies that not to use your personal email account while you're at work. All that has completely changed because the definition of when work ends and when personal life starts is something we've got to use. And the medium has become so all pervasive that those who are able to harness the strength of it will come out of it. So what are some of these strengths? But before we get to that, I think there needs to be deep realization that at the end of the day, it is only a medium. There's nothing to be afraid of it, there's nothing to be scared about it. It is just one more powerful tool that organizations can leverage to their strengths. No difference from when Reuters started. I mean, at first, Reuters used to use fidgets to where now we've gone from a full circle of trying to speed up news to now almost organizations telling their PR agencies and communication teams to slow things down because they need more time to react. Life is not going to be waiting because that time has started crunching down. So you need to just understand that that's how life is changed and we have to just react that much faster and we've got to be prepared to be that voice and that space and that authentic communicator of that matter. So at the same time, social media is not the same. I recognize it, it's not the same as why. There are some real dangers that we need to be cognizant of. There is a tendency that anyone who has a Twitter and an Instagram handle feels like they have a megaphone in their hand and whoever creates the most amount of noise feels like they're creating news. And therefore that is something that we must be very cognizant of and we need to know that how to deal with that. At the same time, in times of crisis, in times of war, I've also seen social media or new ways of communicating as being extremely helpful, as being extremely powerful tools, especially three reasons. One, the speed it provides at being able to react to a situation. Two, the unfiltered nature of the ways that someone can communicate. And the third is the details that you can provide in putting out your point of view. Let me explain. In the businesses that I've run, I've always said, we are not perfect. We are far from perfect and we should never think that we are perfect. And we make mistakes and there are things that we will learn from and that we've got to get better at. But the new digital medium allows us, if we are cognizant of it, to be able to react to a feedback, to be able to react to a complaint, to be able to react to a situation pretty much at the speed of light as long as we are watching out for it. So these are some of the examples that I had for my own life. Now, to be honest, we did a hash drop of that situation. But then rather than waiting for the next days, you were able to arrive, we said, okay, we're gonna put ourselves out there and we're gonna learn from this mistake and let's go and see how we can do it better. Of course, MAGI is a much studied case study of how the new communication medium or advertisement or a grand campaign, as long as it has an authentic message behind it, can turn around a company from near brink of disaster and again bring it back up where the company can go out there and the leadership can go out there and reiterate what they really stand for. At the same time, it creates the ability to have unfiltered information. You're no longer dependent on five people, layers in the middle to interpret what you're really saying. You can be out there directly communicating with your audience and be absolutely unfiltered and go out there and put your side of the story out there. You don't have to worry about what the communication team is going to go put out there, what the spokesperson is going to end up saying, how the news anchor is going to interpret it, how the news channel may put a lens on it, how the audience may perceive it. This direct channel of communication allows us to reach millions of people, literally tens of millions of people with the speed and authenticity that we stand for. For instance, on the other hand, we can also create a very detailed point of view. And I'll do a real life example. In the organization that I lead today, we have a bunch of news around, how asset partners are perceiving OYO and the struggles that they're having. And soon, like it happens, the noise starts becoming news. But then this allowed us to go out there, reach out to each and every region, and we operate in over 700 cities in India to be able to bring out those authentic stories and put it out there. So I'll just, you won't have to run through the whole video, but you can just feel a little bit about how we use it. After joining OYO with OYO, we learned how we can run multiple hotels professionally, services, and accounts. I have been with OYO for three years. My effects of business have not grown. And I have complete confidence that they will continue to grow. For instance, we've been together for a year and a half. It feels great that now we are managing those quite comfortably because of the structure support system of OYO. It's been a five-year exciting journey that we've had altogether. OYO hotels have started with a very simple mission. How do we provide beautiful living spaces for the common man? While creating a great set of entrepreneurial partners across the country. In the last few years, we've been successful in making sure that together with our asset owners and partner franchise, we've been able to create a movement of creating better living spaces across the country. And now across the world. We are today committing ourselves to an even bigger mission. A mission to make sure that we can commit even further than that of just business return for our asset owners and partner franchisees. We are calling it OPEN, OYO Partner Engagement Network. What OPEN, the OYO Partner Engagement Network aims to do is take this beautiful relationship and make it structure and make it a center of excellence where we can build on that foundation and scale it up as we both grow. I think it's primarily built around four pillars. It's about engaging on the business side. It's about supporting an entrepreneur. It's about being engaged on a continuous basis and then finally recognizing those asset owners, those partners who just stand out. So we built our core business on the fundamentals of end-to-end hotel operations by maximizing occupancy, generating highest returns. A lot of us have seen a lot of these corporate videos over the last, it seems like there's nothing new in this. But here's what's different. What's different is that we use this to almost have people come and test this out. That is just really true. Or is this just another corporate video? So what we did is we took control of the situation and said, you know what? You're more than welcome to go and talk to 18,000 of our asset owner partner and get a real feel of what is it that we actually do. This again helps us to take control of what is that authentic message that you want to put out there. You get real-time feedback. We're in a business which is a highly capital-intensive business. Traditionally, the way hotels got built or the way design got changed is that you would put together a mock-up room and then you will have people come in and experience it and then you don't know whether it was working or not. Today, we use this digital medium to test how a certain look and feel of a room and a design element is working literally on the basis of how much feedback that we're getting on our Instagram handle. And then we of course use a lot of machine learning to translate that into real business. It also helps us to create a consistent brand by going out there and being able to put ourselves out there and say, by the way, amongst all the 100 things that we're doing these are the 304 things that really matter and we go keep going up beyond that. We're able to get to a targeted audience as pens become as the struggle for getting to the consumer in the small 302, 303, 304, 305 cities becomes a real struggle for consumer companies especially like ourselves and you're trying to constantly optimize costs. This ability to use the medium in various cuts getting to the right consumer at the right time at the right price with the relevant information this was just impossible even 405 years ago. But today what has happened in India is India is a mobile first nation now. If you look at the last 20 years the number of broadband internet subscribers the graph has faced state lines. It has just not moved. But if you look at the same curve for mobile internet subscribers it's a hockey stick and that has allowed us to now do geo-tagging and figure out how a segment of customer in Baddi reacts very different from the same segment of customer in Bareilly and within Bareilly how the different segments of customers are using what kind of product and therefore which one of our eight brands really works in which city and which country. Because every day we are making millions of dollars worth of decisions on which product and service and brand to put. And of course we are able to also use the medium to again keep coming back to what we really stand for. So I'll play you this little brand campaign that we came up with recently. You said the question that I keep getting asked we got eight different brands and what are people doing and then they came back and said what is it that we are really trying to solve as we become one of the world's with the second largest hospitality business in the world today. So what are we really trying to solve? At the end of the day you know what we are trying to solve? We are trying to solve what you and I have always felt growing up in India. You'll get out of a bus or a train in a same city and the first person you start arguing with is a tout and wherever he gets that extra 50 or 100 rupees he takes you to that guest house and then depending on what clothes you are wearing and the bags you are carrying you get start anywhere between 500 rupees to 5000 rupees. I don't know but my family used to have a standard operating procedure. We would get into the room, somebody would check the washroom somebody would pick up the linen somebody would check if the fan is working and if anyone is as young as I am we used to check if the emotion rod is to work or not. And now there are these three or four things that you know are standard and so we said you know what through this whole fog and maze of what we are trying to do we go back and tell ourselves and our consumers what is it that we are really trying to do so we came up with two or three short ad campaigns this is a cool one I want to share that with you In the first few days this was impossible you know a few years ago you know can you imagine the amount of spend and then you could do vernacular we knew what was working what geography and so on and so forth and then it's just amazing ability to reach out at a fundamentally different cost structure than what was possible. At the same time I have at least found that communication can be such a powerful tool to build culture and at the end of the day you know in any business culture eats strategy for breakfast lunch and dinner. So what worked for me is the internal connect that's possible especially with social media we even in my previous organization and even now both at Indigo and OYO we actively encourage you know connecting through the social media platform and we don't have our own internet tool we actually use the public social media platform interestingly I'll tell you a very interesting cool thing so there is a there is a Instagram handle called forever 60 which has started for internal into what is of Indigo. Cool fact is Indigo has about 20,000 employees forever 60 is followed by 150,000 people. So what's that company stand for? Likewise we have OYO connoisseur which now has more number of subscribers than the total number of employees of OYO. So what you stand for you don't have to wait for a glass door survey you don't have to wait for a best way to work survey you get to be able to permeate what your brand stands for into your culture and your culture then permeates through the people into your consumers who ultimately become your brand. Again what works for me I don't know what works for me always is making it personal making it personal making it authentic being out there showing yourself for who you really are and this image of what people perceive you to be as a CEO or the person you and my Instagram handle is a personal handle but there are many things that I share there which hopefully also have an impact on people's lives and unable to share things that work for me and they did work for me. So here is one that I posted I think last Wednesday I think it was about 9 days ago about a mistake that I made 20 years ago in my life so I'll say it to you. So yeah I still remember my first job really well I used to be an intern at this intellectual property law firm called KNF Partners As a young kid I remember my manager R.K. Mr. Rajinder Kumar this is fresh out of college and there was about a month month and a half when I was totally distracted and then R.K. just kind of one day asked me down and asked me what are you doing you know I was going to squander my life and I was going to give up one of the biggest opportunities that I had because I was just totally distracted and I was getting confused and that piece of advice and that conversation I still remember he didn't say much but he drove the point home that fear of having that conversation with someone else again I think keeps me within the straight and narrow. But sharing a mistake that I made 20 years ago a great opportunity to work at a great firm just because I was floating around talking to my girlfriend on the phone but tomorrow when one of my colleagues has a difficult conversation with his manager he shouldn't feel that I am alone in this thing and it never happens to anybody else if it happens to my CEO and he survives there is a possibility to go through some of these things so you become much more real and you make it personal and authentic and it helps me build those cultures too at the same time what has actually changed is that the world between the external external communication those lines are just completely dark blue what we see internally will be out there and what happens out there will affect us internally and it is very important for us as communication professionals to realize that and accept it that that should be realized you cannot say oh this is just an internal email and this should never go out and you cannot say that this came out in a newspaper don't worry about it trash it because you know people are going to rat fish in it the next day it is going to be out there people are going to Google it and it is going to pop up and it is going to pop up on your screen and it is very important for us to understand that these lines have got completely dark second that what is changing is that there is now an overload of information you don't have to look for information information is just going to come and hit you or a gun and therefore what is dramatically changing is what communication professionals often would be asked by leaders like us to do go manage this go stop this story go speak to this editor that's not going to happen it shouldn't happen and it's not going to happen anymore the reality of life is that you have to create a narrative which is authentic and relevant and therefore be able to explain what is that real fabric that is behind that story and sometimes when we make a mistake we have to take it on our skin and go make an amendment and make amendments to it the other thing that I am beginning to push within my organization is why shouldn't communication professionals become take on business roles and why shouldn't business leaders have communication portfolio if a lawyer can go run an airline in a hotel you guys can run businesses for sure so that's the other change that's absolutely bound to happen and that can make organizations much more effective in how they communicate and finally the things that I kind of tell myself basically what it is is no when to open your mouth my advice to business leaders is think about it before you actually go and open your mouth my advice to PR agencies is we don't really need to be out there all the time we don't need to go out there and put out a new story this time it comes back to a very simple thing whether it's a communication whether it is an email or a whatsapp or a brand campaign only go out there and do it when there is a real message there is something real to communicate because there is already an overload of information coming up the second is what would you communicate what is it that you really want to the third is who are you going to talk to you are not going to be able to talk to everyone and therefore that will determine how we communicate and what we are talking about and finally there is a timeline to it there is a target audience there is a a medium that we choose how we communicate to a certain demographic can be very very different how we communicate to a different demographic how we communicate to a certain country or a region of that country is very very different from how we communicate to others these are common sense they are not rocket science they really reflect back and go back for the last 10 months of the year and look at all the various brand campaigns communication campaigns people going out there and shouting from the rooftop what is how many times leaders have gone wrong on just these simple things so that's what works for me I hope it helps you too thank you for all the hard work that you do for the leaders like me so and thank you for having me today