 Sorry about that, we are going to move on ladies and gentlemen, but before that I would like to remind everyone that we have an official hashtag and the hashtag for today's event is hashtag E4M conclave, that is E4M, C-O-N-C-L-A-V-E, E4M conclave, so do keep those tweets coming. As you all know ladies and gentlemen, the nominees for the impact person of the year 2017 have been announced and as has already been mentioned, the winner of this prestigious title will be announced in December, if you could just have a look at the A-V right now please. So thank you everybody who was part of the company and jury who could allow me to be the impact person of the year award and we hope to see all of you there if possible and since this event is basically the underlying theme is marketing, we will move on to our first keynote session which is a rising tide, why diversity in leadership matters, the speaker as has already been mentioned is Mr. Kata Mare, he is the CEO of FCB, an IPG owned global fully integrated marketing communications company with more than 8000 people in 109 operations across 80 countries. Together with global chief creative officer Susan Kredle, Mare is leading FCB's transformation to become a creatively led agency known for delivering never finished ideas that are both legacy making and equity building. For such market years as Nivea, Levi's, Nestle, Fjord Chrysler automobiles. Without further ado, I would also like to tell you this that ad week has named one of the power 100 top industry influencers in 2015 and 2016 and advertising age honored him as one of its 40 under 40 in 2014. Mr. Mare was also recently honored as one of the four A's, 100 people who make advertising great in 2017. So let's put our hands together and welcome Mr. Mare all the way from New York. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. I know the theme is innovation but I'm very happy to be kicking off talking about what I think is part of innovation but more important than innovation which is change. Innovation is led by change and I have a fundamental belief that we as an industry and frankly a lot of other industries not just in India but globally have got to change and they need to change and get more diversity in leadership. It's an honor to be here nor I promised nor a long time ago that I would be here but I think there's no more proof that we have work to do than to see the candidates that were just shown on that film. All brilliant people but all men. Not one woman was on that film. Not one woman. So we have a lot of work to do and I thought I should play my role to tell you a story and I hope it's helpful. So the first question you might have is what is a white heterosexual male doing on stage talking about diversity and that's a fair question. So I would like to tell you two sides to why I'm on stage talking about diversity. One is my personal story and then I want to give you a professional context as you go over global company. This is my mum with my twin boys. It's a little difficult sometimes talking about this. I lost my mother a year ago and this was taken about six months before she passed and these are my twins. She was also a twin. This is my mother with her twin brother some 75 years ago and they look rather cute. My uncle and my mum. Here's where the problem arose from a very young age. My mother had that extra chromosome, that mojo. So there's this wonderful story when they were children and they were in the field and they were picking carrots. And my uncle was sort of sitting there, take a carrot, look at it, enjoy the view, put it in the basket. Wait, maybe take another carrot, look at it, put it in the basket. My mother was on the other side picking carrots at 100 miles an hour, getting as many carrots as she could, putting them in the basket. And it was sort of illustrative of their different mentalities. See, my mother grew up in a very German paternalistic household where it was all about the man. And my grandfather had a very, very successful business. In fact, it was Hugo Boss's biggest rival in the 1950s and 1960s in Germany. And my grandfather brought them both up, telling my uncle that he would run the business one day, that it was his right to run the business one day. And that my mother should raise children. My mother never wanted, she wanted to raise children. But she was a creator, she was an artist. She loved, she loved doing things, creating things. She was an alpha type character. And she spent her whole life trying to prove to her father that she was as worthy as her brother to be able to have a successful business career in life. And I grew up as the child living with collateral damage of that. Right? Of seeing, you know, everyone saw this very confident lady. She ended up right before my uncle bankrupted the family business in 1985. She took $100,000 out of the business. And she started her own career in life outside of Germany. And she became one of the top interior designers and developers in the world. And she rebuilt her fortune. And she rebuilt her life on her own terms. This is what people saw. They saw the success. They didn't see what she had to do every single day to prove that she could do it as well as her brother. And I have to tell you that's just wrong. And for me to see as the son, the sacrifices that she had to make in order to give me the opportunities that I've had to be on the stage today is something that has profoundly affected me. And I didn't really realize that I was so affected by my mother and seeing what she had to do until I did this implicit bias workshop I'll talk about in a minute. And I uncovered the fact that I had this slight bias of women over men in the workplace. And I couldn't understand why. And I had to unpack that. And what I realized was I felt this deep injustice for the fact that whether you're a man or a woman, you should be judged on your talent. And you should be judged on what you want to do with your life, not on whether you're a man or a woman. So it's quite deep rooted in me as you can probably tell. And that's my personal story of my mother. But I want to switch to the professional side as a CEO. So people that think it's fixed have their heads buried in the sand. I want to tell you two stories. The first one is an executive, very, very successful executive who works for me in America. And she walked into my office one day. And I could tell she hadn't been herself for two or three months. And she was a little upset. And I said, you know, what's wrong? And she said, you know, I feel uncomfortable bringing this to you. And I said, you have to talk to me. So she told me about an incident where three months before a creative director from a sister company, it was a sister company, it was an associated company who had been working with us, had sent her an email that was titled, girl exclamation mark. And then there was a whole email basically bullying her, making misogynist statements about her, and frankly destroying all her self-confidence. This is one of the top executives in advertising. And for three months, she bottled it in. She was made to feel guilty in that she had to coat with it on her own, right? And nothing happened to this individual because unfortunately didn't report into me and no action was taken that I thought should have been taken. But she should not have been enduring that. This is 2016 that's happened in. There's this amazing program in the United States called Year Up, which tries to take people from poorer backgrounds and educate them through like a university degree and then put them into the workplace. And there was this African American lady, very, you could tell, shy, smart. And I was talking to Year Up and she stood up and she said, I was working at a holding company. One of the companies, and I won't say which one because I don't think that's the point, because I think this happens everywhere. And she had been brave enough to come out of poverty, to get herself trained when her family said, don't waste your time. There's no chance you're going to get a job. And she fought her way out of poverty into this training program. She got through the training program into the agency world. And her direct boss came up to her in the third week and said, what are you doing? You need to stop trying to be so cute. You know, stop trying to be so cute all the time and try and do something productive. Words matter. This poor lady had her whole self-confidence destroyed after getting herself from there to here. He didn't even know. I think he was so unconscious to his bias and his behavior. He didn't realize what he was doing to this person. This is in 2017. So, you know, the Harvey Weinstein thing is the extreme and I think we have to be very careful with what's going on there. I think most of you are familiar with that, what's been going on in Hollywood. But that's the extreme. It's the day-to-day occurrences that we have to be careful of. So, I'm telling you those two sources. One of the things for me as a CO is when you listen, you only have to listen for 20% of the time to understand that there's a problem here, that we have to fix the opportunity for women at work. And it's as important for the men in the room and for me as a man as the women to do it. Otherwise, it's going to take forever and it's never going to happen. So, some examples. This is not an anti-Trump statement just to be clear. But this was, but this is an example of what happens when you only surround yourself with people from your own background and from your own gender. You know, this is Donald Trump signing something about women's rights, signing legislation about women's rights. How can you have just men talking to you about women's rights? It doesn't make any sense. And here's the problem when you do that. We're a marketers. So, forget innovation. Let's talk about basic marketing. We're trying to talk to men and women. We're trying to talk to people of different religions. And if we're trying to be creative and we're trying to make a difference in the world and we're only surrounding ourselves by our own voices, you're in an echo chamber and you don't speak to the people you need to speak to. You don't get the results that you need to get. And this is pretty interesting. Someone on Instagram did this. Now, can you spot what's strange about this picture? Probably in the back of the room, it's going to be harder. So, someone did this on Instagram and they said, look, it takes a few seconds to realize what if I told you I photoshopped the same face onto every man behind Trump? Would you have noticed if I hadn't said anything? That's the problem when you have only men in a room. That's a problem when you're a leader only surrounded by men. You start to see mirror reflections of yourself instead of the people that you're trying to talk to. So, I've just been traveling the world doing my business planning. And this campaign broke right before I started traveling. So, I was in California at San Francisco and I took some of our executives, not just our executives, the agency. They had breakout groups to meet my teams. And I asked all the women, I said, I hope you're comfortable and if you're not, please don't say anything. But if you feel you've had ever had harassment at work, however, it doesn't have to be the extreme, but if you've gone through this, would you say me too? 100% of the women that I spoke to individually in groups, 100% of the women said me too. And I, as a man, I was like, 100%. I would have guessed 30, 40. Because I'm a guy. I would never know that it was 100%. And that's pretty humbling. So, you know, I feel I'm not even sure it's appropriate to ask here with such a mix in the room and I don't want, if you're on the spot and you don't feel comfortable. But I would like the women here in any capacity, if you feel in the workplace in any company you've been at, me too, can you put your hands in the air? One, two, yeah. Thank you very much. And thank you for being brave enough to do it. And it talks to me about the culture here that people didn't feel comfortable for all of those who fell that way to put their hands in the air. That's why we need change. One day in one of these meetings someone will be able to say, can you put your hands in the air and be able to put her hand in the air that felt that. And that environment doesn't exist here yet today and that's something I'm responsible for and everybody who's a leader in this industry is responsible for. I think, so people say, how do you do it? What's important? And I want to be clear, we have a lot of work to do. We haven't got it right at FCB but we're working really hard to try and get it right. And step one for me on all this discussion is let's get everyone to admit there's a problem. Let's be brave enough to say we've got to get this right and then we can have a conversation on how to fix it instead of hiding it uncomfortably under a rug. This is my two partners, Susan and Nigel. We just finished a global meeting and we got a little emotional as you can see. But we all believe passionately in it and you've got to start at the very top and you've got to hire diversity in your leadership team. If you work at an agency, if you're at a client, if you're in an industry where there are no women in management, you have a right to ask why not. And if the management don't change, I would leave. Easy to say. But I'm trying to make a point. And what's interesting is once it starts at the top and your leaders feel accountable for making this world a better place, it goes all the way through the organization. Then it becomes easy to get that diversity. And these are some of the brilliant, brilliant women that we have. And one of the things I've learned is that it's more insulting for women to have a token woman on a management team than no woman on a management team. Women want brilliant, talented women to be leading the charge at the front to inspire other women to move up. And I think that's really important. And so I'm really proud that we've managed to recruit so many brilliant women into our organization. Just to give you some highlights, Susan helped create the modern M&M characters. She is an icon of advertising, and she's been instrumental in us transforming our company. Swati, who's sitting here. I don't know how many of you know Swati. She's a gem. She's amazing. Inspires me all the time. And was voted one of Impact's 50 most influential women. You know, when Swati, I don't know, I hadn't told her I was going to talk about it, but when Swati took the job, there are emails that one day I want to have published between you and Susan, where Swati talked about what it was like to be a mother stepping into the C-suite with all the insecurities, all the concerns of being a woman taking on that big job and how it would go down here in India. And Susan replied, I felt that way when I stepped up to the job in Chicago. I felt that way too. This is what will happen if you do it. This is what will happen. And that email exchange was quite magical, and that's what we need to do, is to give confidence and celebrate brilliant women moving up into management. Dana Mayman, this is one of the most powerful, successful women in marketing. She took a business that was $30 million and turned it into a $350 million business. She started with 60 people. She now has 1,500. These are the people that we need to be celebrating to encourage more people, women, to move up into management. Nandini. Nandini is here today. Nandini was made agency CEO of the year two years in a row. So not only was she the first woman to get this award, she did it two years in a row. These are the people we need to celebrate. So I also want to be clear. One of the things that drives me crazy is when people go, yes, but it should be about the talent. Right? It's total bullshit. And I want to excuse my French. And I would like to give you a concrete example of why. There is institutional issues that must be addressed by all of us. And if we don't address it with all the best intention in the world, things won't get fixed. I'm guessing not. So Free The Bid started in America a year ago. So I want you to imagine you're a client. Free The Bid, essentially now, we've got 98% of our bids in the last year did this. When you do a shoot and you do a three bid with directors, one director has to be a woman. One of the three. Because for decades, there were none. And here's why this occurred. So take a client. Pick a client. Any client. What client should we take? I don't want to pick out an individual client. It's not fair. But a random client. Imagine you are a big car company. And you say, you're the marketing director. And you say, I have a $1 million shoot. You go to your agency and you say, I have a $1 million shoot. This is hugely important for the sales of my business. This is hugely important for my career. If we screw this up, I'm out of a job and we don't get our sales. So do the three bid. I want to have directors that have a lot of experience in $1 million shoots. And I want to see their portfolio. I want to see what they've done so that I know that I'm reassured that I'm getting a director that will deliver. I'm spending a lot of money. Sounds reasonable, right? Here's the problem. The top 10 directors in automotive are all men. And because those are the ones that have done all the multi-million dollar shoots for the last 40 years. If you do a three bid, they're all men because all the top 10 are men because they're the ones with the portfolio. And what do you do? You give the latest million dollar shoot to a man. And so the man is then building his resume further so that the next time, guess what happens? So you can see how you've got a structural problem that you have to break when you have these brilliant, creative, talented directors who are women who just can't break in. So you have a simple thing. You're going to have those two men put one woman into the bid. After one year, I think we have something like 30% of the bids have gone to women. So you have to change the structural cycle. And in India, I think if we have an honest conversation and go, what are the equivalents of this in India that we need to fix, how do we as an industry come together and go, how do we fix this? That's not a talent issue. It's a structural issue. There's this amazing workshop called Unconscious Bias. I'm going to ruin it for all of you because I'm guessing you can't do it. But the way it works is you put in a room on these round tables, you put your executive team, any team you want, and you have five tables and you put five resumes and five backgrounds about the people on the tables, and you vote out of 100, and you vote out of 100 as someone. And every time you do this exercise, anywhere in the world, you come back and one table votes 90 out of 100, another table 70 out of 100, another table 50 out of 100, another table 40 out of 100. And here's the catch. It's the same resume. It's the same profile. You know what the only difference is? The name on the top and the picture. John Smith, white male, always the top of the list. Right? The lady with a Muslim name and a picture of a Muslim lady always low down on the list. That's the only thing that's different. When you go through that workshop and you're doing it with enlightened, smart people who want to make a difference in the world, you realize it's this unconscious bias. There's things that we can't help. It's just how we were raised. And again, just taking a step back and trying to understand who we are and why will help us change how we think about things. There's also this wonderful exercise online just by the way you go and you hit these buttons at 800 miles an hour. And then at the end, you'll answer these questions. You have like a nanosecond to think about it. And it'll tell you afterwards what your natural bias is, how each of you were raised. It'll tell you whether you have that bias between straight people, black to white. It's very, very eye-opening experience. And I think that journey of discovery is really important before you can work out how to make a difference in the workplace. This is another thing which has absolutely blew my mind. So I was talking next to a professor from Colorado and she shared this with me and I've totally stolen it from her. So when you interview a pool of people, any job, any career, why not, and there's three men and one woman, what are the odds of the woman getting hired? Zero. Or pretty damn close to zero. One will hopefully get through the net. When you have two women in a pool of four, what are the odds of a woman getting hired? 50%. So when we start talking about oh, well, you know, it's just unfortunate, we put a woman in there, we interviewed a woman. That's what happens. If you believe in this and you take this seriously and you say when we interview people we'll have 50% women, 50% men. Actually, I'm trying to get the stats to make sure it's totally true, but what I was told after that I met this professor, she said, actually if the pool goes to five people and it's still only two women, the odds are still 50%. And it goes to six people, it's two women, it's still 50%, just having those two women in the pool. So we don't let people get away with it when they tell, oh, we interviewed, we absolutely interviewed a woman. No, no, no, but we had to go for the best person. Do not let people get away with that. So as you can see, I get quite hot under the collar on this topic and there are some structural things that we need to fix. But Susan, who's my creative partner who I talked about, she said, will you just shut up, you're driving me crazy, it's depressing when you start pointing all these things out to me. But I did pretty well and there were women before me who did pretty well. Can we just please celebrate the brilliant women? And she really taught me a really important lesson, which is I think whether we're talking about gender equality for women, we're talking about rights for gay people, we're talking about people of color in America. I think there's a sort of structure that I believe is important. You've got to acknowledge there's a problem and then you've got to fix the structural issues and you've got to celebrate the people that broke through. And so we had a meeting in South Africa. Swati, you're appearing again, I love it. We had a global meeting in South Africa where we had some brilliant women on stage and Susan changed it from where are the women to here are the women. And we had 100 people, 47 of them were women. It was awesome, I have to say. And again, what's fascinating to me is when I listen to them talk on the panel the stuff they said was like it was a revelation to me. I'm a guy. It's just the things you say. And I can't believe it's true. Like little things, there was someone on the panel I don't know if it was Swati or by the way we have Joanna voted one of the most creative people in the world, the only female CCO of a top 10 creative network in Brazil. Our CEO in China I can go on, she runs the number one shop marketing agency in America. So we're talking about brilliant women and they were talking about what it was like to go to conferences before. And one of them said I used to be there, there'd be 100, there'd be 5 of us and I'd be like okay that's normal and I remember going to amazing ones and there were 10 women out of the 100 and I remember looking around going wow there are a lot of women around here and I'm a guy going really 10 out of 100 is a lot of women like that can't be right. They went yes. And this meeting had 47 and the whole dynamic of the meeting the discussions on the work the discussions on clients the discussions on how we're going to make a difference in the world was so much richer from having that diversity in the room. So I think the hero of the women is incredibly important. So I've talked a lot I finished with work because we are off-roar in the creative business that I think makes the point. The first film that I'd like to show you we did for the UK government to get women back into exercise and I'm incredibly proud of the work that the team did and it shows that I think you have to also if you're in a craft you have to make sure that you use your craft to try and advance this whole conversation if you really want to make a difference. So this is the work that we released for This Girl Can. Two million fewer women are playing sport regularly. That's compared to men. Despite this, 75% of 14 to 40 year old women say they want to be more active. So what is putting them off? Well lots of things actually all with one common theme the fear of being judged. So how could sport England inspire women to give judgement the finger and give exercise another go? We showed that healthy bodies aren't always ripped bodies. We celebrated cellulite jiggle the jiggly bits and soaps the screen with sweat. Poster sites featured women in all their unphotoshopped glory. Seeded content told real stories of the personal barriers they'd overcome. We showed that healthy bodies aren't always ripped bodies. We celebrated cellulite, jiggle the jiggly bits and the personal barriers they'd overcome. And a social media algorithm found women expressing exercise anxieties so we could reply with words of support. It's fair to say the word got out. This campaign is genius. That is so empowering. It's called This Girl Can and the message is if this girl can anyone can. My reaction was finally and women everywhere were inspired to put their fears behind them and become girls who can. And it's just a really fun, amazing uplifting advert that really gets me going in the morning. So that was what we did for the UK and that campaign continues to grow. But what I'm really proud of is that we're now starting to do that type of work in India as well. I think we have to be brave and try and have this conversation. And I'm really proud of the fact that our FCB Orca team partnered with The Times of India to bring this topic to the fore and I want to show the first piece of work that we've did for them and there's a follow-up piece of work that I really wanted to share with you but I was told I wasn't allowed to because it's not being released until when? Tomorrow. I missed it by a day, damn it. But I wanted to show you the first round of work which I'm really, really proud of. I think this is a topic that deserves to be out in the open and that we should all play a role in. I always thought that this was something important to talk about for women but actually this whole talk is for men because I've been down this journey and I'm still definitely not at the destination I'm learning every day and I just implore people to listen and for the men who are in charge to acknowledge that this needs to be fixed quickly and coming back to my dear mum I stand here before you in her honor. Thank you. I'm still trying to do it without tearing up so thank you very much. Smody, that was for you. I think there might be a Q&A. Sorry, I'm doing your job too. If I may request you to just take one of the chairs. Thank you so much for that session. I think I speak for everyone when I say that session and all the videos that you showed did get to us. We had a sneak preview at that but we're going to move on to the Q&A session and I would like to invite on stage Ms. Vani Gupta Dandia Marketing Director, Indian Snacks Foods, PepsiCo India on stage please. She will moderate the session. Ladies and gentlemen, let's hear it please. The stage is yours. I'm with emotion myself. I'm finding myself a little caught up now because I think it was just such a brilliant moving presentation honestly and I'm glad I missed one of you. Because I think there are just so few, there really are. So, Kata tell me given your professional position given the fact that you're right at the top do you feel diversity? Do you feel the agenda of women or diversity in general in the broader definition do you feel the pressure of diversity? For me I think if you're a CEO and you listen to your employees it's something which you get excited about because you know it's the right thing to do and you know you can make a difference. I think we have to be careful though because right now diversity is a word being used a lot because of what's going on out there in Hollywood and in other places and I had an interview, it was by an Indian journalist I promise it wasn't nor and it wasn't anyone in this room it was by another Indian journalist had about four or five interviews in Cannes last year and I swear to God this was a true question one of the journalists said to me now that diversity is important do you think the bigoted CEOs need to be more careful? And I'm like no they don't need to be more careful they need to stop being bigoted CEOs right? Should a bank robber be a more careful bank robber? No, they should stop robbing banks and so I think we have to be very careful on this topic and I think what's really important is that women demand of their leaders you know where are they like when women are not getting when there's nominations and it's all men I think everyone has a right to say why are there no women? and I think we have to get the discussion out in the open and then we can work out how to fix it like I said we still have a lot of work to do at our agency I don't want to feel like I'm preaching by any shot of the imagination but I think this is a really important topic and diversity fuels creativity and fuels our clients' businesses so this isn't just doing the right thing it makes sense for business Here is a bit of a controversial question but I'm going to ask you anyway so if you were to look at our report 80% of the most advertised categories and brands are all targeted at women and yet when I look at the advertising and the marketing fraternity there are very very few names which are women's names at the top you took names of Swathi and Nandini and there is a Ruchi but there are very very few there are very few names which are women names at the top one only thinks of top shots as mostly being men do you think that there is something we should be doing to change this glaring paradox and you did talk about free the bid and you talked about how there is a structural problem over there do you think that as companies we should almost mandate by policy that at least some positions at the top or at least at the top to begin with be manned necessarily by a woman or be a woman I think it's a brilliant point and in America what's starting to happen is in pitches clients are demanding to know what the diversity is at the agency and if you don't have the diversity you're not on the pitch list I'm advertising I don't know the association for clients here what the equivalent is but I think you should get together and say give us a bit of time but starting in 2019 we will not pitch or work with agencies that don't have at least 25% of their leadership women you see the big get out of jail free which is not a get out of jail free which drives me which I think is just wrong it's saying yeah but the industry 50% women 50% men but ask the tough questions in leadership positions it's not 50% and so I think the agency association in India and everywhere should get together and say that's a leadership council why are they not saying we commit I don't even know how many people on the agency association are men or women I generally don't know but I'm guessing it's 50-50 but if it's not is the association saying let's get to that and then let's tell our agencies our expectations of that I think you know we've got to accelerate this I went to a festival here in India two years ago and at the festival I was again very honored I was at the front row with by the way some amazing marketers and brilliant executives they were all men and the only woman I remember on the front row was flown in from abroad I mean if you digest that for a minute that's scary in this day and age in 2017 and here's the other theater when I meet the women who we have like you and I meet you see Nandini and Swati and Savita and the more you're all brilliant and it's like why would the industry not insist on having more of you in leadership positions I have I was telling Swati about this you know when I read her blog there's a piece that she's written which is called My Dirtiest Secret The Dirtiest Secret at the workplace and I have to read out something that she's written because I read it and I called her up immediately and I said thank God thank God you've written this because you like literally picked the words out of my heart and I didn't know how to articulate it but you have so she says my male colleagues have judged me and hinted that I'm a slacker I've looked at the watch pointedly around, they've looked at the watch pointedly around 5.30pm and said isn't it time for you to pack up men often think it's a very cool provider thing to stay back at work in office they even get that president of the world tone when they call their wives and girlfriends to say I'll be late it doesn't work like that for us women we want to kill ourselves if our kids go to sleep without seeing us we're scared of what the class teacher might think of the shabby homework we don't want to send our children to birthday parties without gifts so we come home and we do all the stuff that we have to do we then stay up late at night we do it privately quietly with no show and tell it's the way it is with us so next time you pack up your bag at 5.30pm do it with your chin up and chest out we women do double shifts men don't do you think what she says makes sense and do you think that there is something that organizations can do more to build empathy for the double shifters well firstly I would never argue with Swati I've found out that she's normally right so I try not to argue with her too much I mean it's also beautifully written isn't it when you have a gift with words it's hard to argue with something so beautifully written I think I think all industries in all countries in the world are trying to work out how we can have more flexible hours for people how we can be more understanding of different people with different workloads and lives I think it's very very important but what I hear there which is actually more interesting than just the hours is when you talk about that president CEO like I'll stay late you know that to me talks about that lack of understanding of what women are going through if you're calling them out on that and again it's been really hard for me when I was in my 20s you know I was I like my sports I like doing my thing I was focused on my career I was in my private time trying you know dating and trying to find you know and ended up getting married and had my life I was sort of in this tunnel vision with my career I wasn't really listening or observing what women were going through and women were certainly not coming up to me saying so let me tell you my story about what I experienced from men today it was only when I became a CEO where I first have this amazing HR partner that I started to really understand so my I think there are improvements happening but I can't stress enough for me it's about listening it's about truly listening to what women go through and you can't but I guess things have to have to change like that too much now since diversity is such a management and such a leadership buzzword I wonder sometimes sometimes if women's capabilities like genuinely capable women if their capabilities like you were talking about you talked about many examples including Yera and you know that what is this cute thing you're doing but I wonder if sometimes women's work is actually undermined because diversity is such a buzzword you know I don't know if women over here in this room might have heard comments like after all you're a woman you know have you ever faced anything like this or would you have would you have the buzz on anything like this that might have come up to you in any context this is why for me it's important that the male CEOs who are in charge take action when I arrived in this job I fired I'm not sure if I'm allowed to I fired quite a few people for cause with a zero tolerance policy but the first one I did I heard about an incident that was just unacceptable and I got on a five hour flight flew to the office and was there when the person was fired and flew back again and then fast forward six months later I was in Brazil and the COO was late for a meeting and he said I was just talking to my team about how we have to really work at trying to get this right and I told them how you fired someone on the spot when they didn't and I said that you know about that and he looked at me and said Carter everyone knows about that so I think you know to really get seismic change and from what I heard talking to you and to you know I think India like everywhere else has a lot of work to do we have a lot of work to do I think you need the CEOs you need the people at the very top to be decisive and to be seen to be decisive now we don't always get it right one of the problems is that we don't always get the information either for legal reasons because the person won't HR aren't allowed to talk to us about it or women don't feel comfortable speaking up in their organization because they're direct bosses don't create that environment and so it's really difficult I mean I look back and I made one or two decisions I would have made differently had I had all the information so it's really hard to get it right I have a flip counter question which is while there is this you know on one hand women's capabilities might be undermined on the other do you think that there might be pressure for boards at the top to actually recruit women or people from diverse backgrounds only because they have to put a tick mark like almost like tokenism exercise you did talk about how it's almost an insult and you'd rather not do that but I wonder again if we have so many CEOs in this room if that might actually be something that is done because it has to be done I think the first part of the question I bloody hope so I hope CEOs are feeling pressure and boards are feeling pressure to recruit more women and in different parts of the world diversity people of color onto boards I hope that's happening and I hope everyone in this room is putting and me are putting pressure on people to do that I feel pressure to do it but luckily I also want to do it I think the real challenge like I said earlier is you want to make sure it's really insulting at least this is what women tell me and it certainly resonates it's insulting to have token women which I think is what your second part of your question goes to and I think we've got to have brilliant women and women who deserve to be there not put there because we have to fill a seat but again I think frankly that's a high class problem if we're having that discussion it means there are a lot of women in the board room and we need to get to that discussion and right now I think it would be interesting I don't know if there's journalists in the room I don't know the answers in India so I haven't really looked into it because Rohit's had me in client meetings and press meetings and agency meetings since I got here but I think it would be interesting as an industry to look at in the media to look in advertising to look at the clients and forget the troops look at the C-suite, look at the boards of our industries and see and maybe it is 50-50 I don't know and then if it is I'm burying myself in a hole but if it's not let's print it let's all say to each other these are the statistics and we will fix it in the next three years and what we need is to give women and give women who are in the audience who want to be CEOs who want to be CCOs who want to be CSOs to give you the environment and the courage to step up because we need you we need you I think it was a brilliant presentation thank you so much like I said you did have me a little overwhelmed with emotion and I loved your mum's story I didn't mean to get all choked up at the end I'm trying to get that under control because it's a little cheesy but it's quite raw still for me I don't know it was very genuine but I wonder if we might have time for we've run out of time oh our time is up sorry you're having too much but thank you so much Carter lovely talking to you thank you so much if you could have you on stage just a little while longer I would like to invite on stage Mr. Sandeep Khosla CEO midday if you could please come on stage and felicitate yes you are required as well thank you so much Mr. Khosla oh wow much appreciated thank you so much Mr. Khosla