 Hi there, my name is Abhijit Baduri and I work as a coach and also an advisor to organizations and individuals who are seeking to upskill their entire workforce or just really rethink their career strategy. In this particular podcast, I bring to you some really incredible guests who live this life which in my book, I've defined as career 3.0, where they bring in multiple things from their life, their hobbies become mainstream, it becomes a source of revenue, their passions and many other fields which are unconnected to what we really think of them as. That becomes another source of revenue and they are just leading far more interesting lives and this is the world that we live in because as we know, artificial intelligence is going to change number of things about our careers. It is going to change the way that we live, the way that we work and we just really need to rethink our career using completely different yardsticks than what we built before. Without any further ado, let me bring my guests on. Elliot Massey, one of the things when I was sort of really thinking about how to introduce you, I kind of thought that this was going to be really confusing because I sort of know you in two different avatars of yours. One is of course, I know that you're the person who's coined the term e-learning which is sort of really created a specialization in human resources by itself. E-learning is really you're the man who's done that. You've done it over the years, defined the profession. It is another side of yours which is far more interesting to me which is that I know that you were nominated for a Tony Award and that was for a Broadway show and you've done several Broadway shows, you know, which as I've mentioned that what should I describe you as as a person who's into e-learning or what? I mean, your insight actually says that you are a researcher, educator, analyst and speaker. Well I think the word that pulls it together for me, my friend, is storytelling. I am passionate, all my life I've been passionate about the power of the story. And if we think about what we've done in learning and training from when we did it in a classroom, when we do it on a virtual experience, when we do it in a module, in each instance we are helping to create a story that ignites, enables and empowers the learner. So on Broadway we're doing the same thing, we're putting an experience on stage that will ignite and motivate and inspire the audience. And ironically there's much we can learn from each of these arenas. So what links it together for me other than that I am clinically unable to do just one thing at a time is that I wanted a duality in my career and my life so it became the world of learning with technology and then the world of Broadway and we've now produced 41 Broadway and off-Broadway shows. So a great honor to be in both of these worlds. Which is a typical term that I've used in my book which is saying career 2.0 which is two different fashions, two different ecosystems both are monetized. And how do you build that capability? Because when you started your career what did you really want to be and how did you make those choices? I was probably one of those people that today would be defined as a special education student. I was a challenging student. I was curious, I was born with a speech defect but I overcame that and I was always interested in the dynamics of what happened in a room at our house in the park and it led me to a an interest in both the psychology of what we do as groups and that was right next to what we do as we pull together for learning and early on I became a geek and a nerd. I went to a technical school for boys in New York City way back in 1967. I was given some technology training by IBM there for what were little mini computers. So I had this dual interest how do people work and how does technology work? They merged together into an interest first and foremost about learning and then with a focus on how does technology change that. And before doing what I did in e-learning I was very involved in helping to build the computer training industry and I worked with Lotus and IBM. I worked at Microsoft. I worked with you don't remember the name anymore but WordPerfect and all around this concept that as new technology came out we would have to understand and learn how it worked and probably one of the premier moments was when Bill Gates asked me to be the host of Microsoft television for nine months on the rollout of Windows 95 and every month I went to Seattle and we did a two-hour satellite show for geeks nerds and programmers around the world on the upcoming of Windows 95 and I probably expressed my freedom back then when I told Bill Gates you can't script me program me or pay me. I was like to do it and I'll do it in my own style but it was a wonderful experience and that later on led to the world of e-learning. How would you have described yourself if you were on my show that day versus today you know what has changed. Well the internet is what changed. We had what we might call e-learning before the internet. It had other words computer based training or we sometimes called it a mainframe tutorial but when the internet happened suddenly the opportunity that we could connect individuals anywhere anytime and in that connection we could give them a set of tools and resources where they'd be live or they'd be asynchronous to do learning. That became the wow. I had a meeting with the senior executives at IBM and they had been pushing and somewhat trying to point that they own the phrase e-business and we knew about e-mail and e-commerce. So I said well what about e-learning and I thought that would be wonderful and the senior executives liked it but the marketing people said nah that I'll never take and I said okay I don't want to own it but I'll just start using it in the public domain and that was sort of the beginning of that phrase and it was literally in the first five years of 1990s and it stuck and e-learning is really different today. We never would have thought that you and I could be in front of computers far away and do a synchronous produced moment like this. So really it was about how will technology connect and the e-changes it could be electronic but more importantly it could be enthusiastic it could be everywhere anybody it can evolve and so it's been a very exciting journey to look at how we build it and by the way the journey is just beginning you know as we think about what the role of AI will be what the role of robotics will be wearables I think this is going to be a process that continues to evolve for the next decades if not hundreds of years. So I like the way that you described it you know you say that e-could stand for many things it could be everywhere it could be you know everyone make any word everyone and now you're also saying that AI is going to change and learning on so which I completely agree what is going to be different what are some of the things that organizations are not doing today which they should be doing well I'm going to use an interesting analogy if we all remember back 10 years ago 15 years ago you probably remember going to a restaurant with four of your friends and they gave you the menu and you ordered the dish and 15 minutes later the waiter or waitress brought the dish I challenge when that happened the last time because now you go to the restaurant with four of your friends and immediately they go but can we get a different bread and can I have that sandwich without that sauce and could you make sure it's not got protein in it or not have gluten and in other words we have become a society of customization where we want and I totally accepted and I'm one of them we want things optimized for how we want that I really believe that the next stage in learning is that we can provide a lot of customization and a lot of targeting of what people want and I'll give you a good analogy of this you know let's say you are walking somewhere in your neighborhood and you will see some people who are working in their jobs and they could be very professional jobs or clerical jobs mechanical jobs sanitation jobs and my guess is many of those people if you ask them aspire to do something different my maybes were more but you know what very few of them want to go back to school very few of them want to take a course but they would like to get better get better at a skill and get better in their career so what I think is coming and I think this will be AI I think it will be a change in how we think about the marketplace and the job marketplace will be the ability for people to continually be learning and gaining the skills needed to do the next thing that they do whether it be in their current job current organization current city current career and I don't believe that it's gonna just emulate courses I think it's going to be much more experiential much more personalized opportunity for people to practice opportunity for people to collaborate and I think AI will put that in there I also think our social media will put it in there and ultimately I think we are going to have very different models of what a life of careers is gonna be your 3.0 may become 10.0 as we think about all of the chapters of what our careers will I'm intrigued about your passion for Broadway how did that start what were you into theater and everything in school and college you sort of really became a producer not necessarily enacting so that's an interesting perspective yeah but don't ask me to act don't ask me to sing and please for the most part stop me from dancing I was already producing conferences over the years I did 29 conferences on learning that we literally had hundreds of thousands of people from around the world so I understood what was involved if you want to produce a great event you've got to have an agenda you've got to have a culture of trust you have to deal with the cycle of excitement and boredom that people have and I've always enjoyed going to theater I'm not an actor and producing the conference it's like anything where you bring people together you have to create an environment a culture you wanted to have engagement you need to have trust I'd always been interested in theater but never thought about a role there as you know as a professional in that and one day it dawned upon me well maybe all my skills of producing conferences have a little bit to do with producing a Broadway show and so I reached out to a Broadway producer who was very excited not only to have me involved but to have me write a check as part of being a producer and we immediately connected and he validated that that was something that I had a passion for and so over the years I've done more and more Broadway shows and sometimes as a Broadway producer you're involved in everything most of the time in my role I'm involved in putting money in in conversations about marketing in conversations about what the culture of the show will be eventually you are on the board of directors of that show and I have learned so much from the world of Broadway that by the way I wish we brought into the world of work I mean a good example on Broadway every time you go to see a Broadway show there are four to five people backstage prepared on five minutes notice to take over the role of somebody who might get sick on the stage well you're gonna have that we learned in the pandemic that we don't necessarily have that Broadway shows do lots of rehearsals where we literally go too many songs take that song out or let's change this or let's pick up the pace I wish in the world of learning that we did more of that rehearsal and beta testing and the like and then finally Broadway shows have an arc you know they are either 90 minutes long or maybe they're two hours and 10 minutes with an intermission so you've got to build your story with an arc and if it doesn't have an arc people fall asleep or leave or they certainly don't tell their friends to come there so I've been able to apply my world of learning to Broadway and I've been doing more and more to take what we do in Broadway and bring it back into the world of learning and talent you sort of made one transition of your skills the way I look at it is in my book career 3.0 I talk about the fact that how do you take your skills from one ecosystem and take it into another so you took your ideas on learning a computer-based learning and all of that to produce conferences we're just like a adjacency if you so it's similar but not identical then you take a completely different field and bridge them together so connecting the dots on completely different fields which is harder to do when other processes different no they're both difficult to do because what you have to do with them is you have to take a skill you have and transform it very often you have to use different language so I find that one of the most interesting elements of that and you have to recalibrate or retune your expectations one of the things we know in the world of Broadway that I don't think we know as well in the world of learning is that it's not about getting it finished and delivering it it's about absolutely impacting the lighting and getting performance out of the audience I wish we brought that same standard let's think about onboarding that happens in organizations all around the world and we do it because we've got to do it from the legal and HR and talent point of view but do we always evaluate whether or not the audience got it I bet if we did we would do a very different approach to onboarding but a lot of when you shift these roles is you've got to leave your arrogance behind I went from where many many many people knew me in the learning world where nobody knew me in the Broadway world you know and so you leave your arrogance behind you have to become a learner and so I spent lots of time learning going to watch shows talking to producers getting to know students of theater and then finally you need to radically translate what you believe are your core best competencies so what I know in the world of e-learning is different than what I know in the world of Broadway so you have to be able to do a pivot shift but for me that's kind of not too difficult because if you're collaborative then you call on the people or colleagues or organizations you know that can extend and cover those parts where you're a beginner or just a learner I wouldn't sort of understand this whole process a little more you know you are really successful in the world of learning and you get into a different ecosystem where you're not known you're a nobody you're kind of really starting at the bottom of the and that is the process of learning when you're an expert different from the way of learning when you are a beginner and novice or the process is similar as a learning guru what do you say for that and I accept people will use that word guru or master or something like that I can do honor by it what I kind of view is that I've got deep experience I've got high degrees of self-confidence and I have a brand that people get and bluntly when you have those things you can get away with crap to be honest meaning because people expect that what you say will be right I remember one time I went to give a speech about five minutes into the speech I realized they expected me to do a very different speech than I was doing and I kind of shifted but I made it funny and like and everybody thought they had a great time and I went oh wow I should have really prepared better for that but because of my familiarity or brand I get away with it you move into another field and suddenly they're not looking at you and to meet it you know they don't know you because they went to your conference or saw you on television or read your 12 books so your self-confidence is down your brand is down what I find you have to do and this is my advice to all the people who read your book and watch this and I know you and I resonate with it ironically don't become an expert become a voracious learner become a learner you see when I'm a learner I actually get expertise points so in the Broadway world I would go into a meeting and somebody would say wow what we're going to really do is a totally different way of laying out the stage and doing that I go wow I've never done that before can you explain to me how does that work can I ask four or five questions and sure enough in those four or five questions a little bit of my existing expertise comes out if I lied by going oh yeah I know that or B if I was overwhelmed by and go I don't know anything about that in both cases I would give away my power but when you are a voracious learner I'm never admitting I have a weakness I'm instead celebrating I have a curiosity because curiosity is what gives us that thing now there's one other piece that I think is enormously important and as you mentioned this we have to give ourselves the permission to have a soft or safe set of failures on the way to success so if somebody would come to me and say tell me about some learning strategies I can give you a whole range of strategies from Fortune 500 companies over 40 years but if somebody came to me and said you know we want to bring an elephant into our show and we've never had a live elephant in the show what would it look like and it's not necessarily a wedding from India in the show but somebody injects an elephant into it I would accept that in the process of figuring that out we will have a failure it may be that the elephant isn't toilet trained it may be that the elephant makes too much noise or starts singing another song I was moved by Leslie Odom Jr a very famous actor from Hamilton who came to speak at one of my learning events who wrote about the need for us to fail our way to success I have a safe way to fail at something because when you fail at it and you acknowledge it and you recover from it and you adjust to it when you succeed you have a confidence level that's validated by failure I don't ever want to get on an airplane in which the pilot hasn't been in a simulator where they mocked up an accident because in fact by failing in that simulator God forbid I need them to save me in a crisis they will have a higher level of that so that's one of the differences that when you are brand new don't pretend to know more than you know walk your curiosity in a non obnoxious but a powerful and pervasive way this is one skill that you build a lot of you know humility and just the ability to deal with emergent scenarios what you might define as adaptive learning the performing arts actually really thrives on that because when I used to do a show on radio one of the things that you are always prepared for is that in those days you rise to use viral records and quite likely you put that on in the record skips so what do you do and do you kind of make a little pun or you crack a joke you kind of say something and you sing with that little piece all the while you're scrambling at the back you're not trying to put that thing back on track and that really teaches you a couple of different things it teaches you you can never be prepared and so you rehearse and you kind of work harder on your script and you think oh my god I believe somebody experienced something even worse then what happens what do you do how do you make up for it and how do you keep the audience experience continuous so that is an incredible thing to do how do you find time to practice that though because you have a full-time role you're a successful conference producer and you're getting into a different area how do you manage time well some of it is you have to figure out that you don't fall in love with structure I early on got a gift it's not the direct answer but it's a round about answer for my second professional job I got fired the person that fired me was a friend he said you're very very good at what you do but you're horrible at being an employee of a large organization and I started to argue with her and I agree yeah I thanked her and we went on to become friends and go cross-country skiing together part of what allows me to do that is I didn't try to do that in large gigantic infrastructures you know and you know you've worked in and out of those structure the bigger the infrastructure the harder it is sometimes for us to be a total outlier around our career so I chose to be very involved in a modestly small size but high impact organizations conferences were perfect for me because I could do something with a team of 15 that touched 5000 people and so that's one of the ways the other way is to realize that you don't have to do it all that anything that we do whether we're cooking a holiday dinner at home for friends and family or we're building a gigantic new python program ultimately you're going to collaborate with others I think by becoming a good collaborator it bought me the time that you said hard to get and I really valued that time of being able to try things now I also think by the way that most success is in time-based it's effort and creativity based so in some cases you kind of think about something for a few hours a few days a few weeks a few months or even a few years and then boom you do it but it wasn't that you did it on the spot that was preceded by all the cognitive processing and all the conversations that we have with with people and finally when we fail it's good humor it's funny I mean obviously no one heard but you're at one time I brought one of the leading thinkers in the world of knowledge management into my conference by satellite and I met him and he was amazing I brought him by satellite from Boston from a major university I don't know what was wrong that day but he was supposed to be there for 40 minutes after five minutes I was falling asleep it was terrible I don't know why so I took a risk I walked over to the head of A.B. and I said move the satellite this slowly so within about three minutes we lose the satellite beep from Boston oh no the satellites moving oh well well I'll I'll come and we'll do a videotape with you and it went off and I told the truth to the audience I said it wasn't his day and I went and I did a videotape with him after it and he was amazing but sometimes it's not your day and if you can have the courage to own when a failure happens and actually have a little bit of fun with it I think it's wonderful I worry in the VC market the venture capital market we're so wanting to become the next billion dollar company that we often don't make enough failures along the way because some of those failures lead you to ultimate success that's part of my approach have some fun with it when you fail you sort of are starting for the benefit of the audience I'm going to summarize a couple of things one which struck me was Elliot is someone who started his career in the learning space and sort of then moved on to do a little pivot and started producing conferences and then did a gigantic shift by sort of working with his passion for Broadway becoming a producer in this whole process some of the lessons that you mentioned one was if you stay curious it helps you to leave your ego behind even though you've been very successful in one ecosystem you're a nobody in the other system and you can learn better but while learning you know the process of learning you can still build on your previous experiences and you still you don't give up your past but you don't get overwhelmed by the fact that you don't know this new ecosystem and that's particularly useful when you shift organizations or you shift functions within an organization or live in a different country or go to a different kind of a sector the other thing that you talked about was that you didn't quite thrive in a large organization's ecosystem sometime you got to really decide in my book I talk about work worker and workplace that shows the kind of workplace that helps you in the journey point where you are now in your career and you talked about failing your way to success which is a very interesting phase which is that how do you create little failure points so that it's not overwhelming it doesn't set you at completely but you're learning enough to keep moving one pace ahead of the rest of the people the last point which I liked about what you said so far and those of you who are joining me right now I'm talking to Elliot Massey the guy who coined the term Eli and as the author of 12 books and I was asking him about his career journey and if you want your career journey to be featured in this podcast you drop me an email but I also want to talk about the fact that you say that it's important to build your success through hard work and a lot of people kind of say that it's about being in the right place at the right time what matters more circumstances or hard work or it's both or the relationships it's a tough one you know it's it's sort of looking at when you know a relative of yours has great soup that you like eating to try to ask them what's the one ingredient that makes it that great soup and they're they're gonna tell you it's it's everything I'll use some words that are similar to what you extracted from me intensity I like the word intensity most people I know who become successful have put in an intensity to that process which may be measured in time it may be measured in hours it may be measured in travel it may be measured in their own investments in that but intensity is one of the pieces I think another piece and I go back to that word that you echoed from me curiosity I believe when I'm in that position of hiring somebody either to work in my organization or I've been on boards of directors of companies the number one thing I look for is the person curious now we want to make sure they have the skill that they need but I am more interested is are they curious so I always what are you curious what are you reading right now what confuses you in life what's one area that you think is changing that you're gonna have to change to adapt and if I get a blah answer for that I walk out I'm not hiring that person and then I think the final piece of this and it's a tough one and I say it with the privilege of having been successful in my career financially I've sold some of my companies to venture capital companies so I am all the things of somebody who can say they've been successful I never had the objective of making a lot of money in fact most of the people I've met along my way and I've gotten to know many billionaires and a couple of my good friends are billionaires not one of them did it to become really rich they did it to solve a problem I have a friend who got very involved in looking at the way in which we could do a much better job dealing with diabetes and he ended up Dean Caiman who invented the segue he invented the diabetes pump because his brother was needing to regularly test his blood and give himself injections I believe we should take the money out of it meaning yes we want to ultimately make money but the people who I know who are happy aren't happy because what their paycheck says they're happy by what they are creating by what they are part of by what they are doing and so don't be stupid about money but if you define yourself by money I don't know that's a that's a very risky thing as my friend Ken Blanchard a very famous business author would say is the day when we go and they put us into a box none of your stocks portfolios cash or properties go in the box with you what goes in the box with you are the people that you've met the relationships you've created and the things in the world that you helped to get a little bit better so I wish actually we uncoupled some of our conversation about financial success and instead really looked at how do we solve problems AI is amazing amazing it's going to do wonderful things it's going to have wonderful challenges I don't even want to read who's making a lot of money in venture on right now you know that's a casino game you know what I'm really interested is the person who just yesterday said we now have found a way in which AI can do a better reading of mammogram x-rays to rapidly let somebody know while they're still at the mammogram center whether it's a higher degree of positive or negative and we need to follow wow you know that's what turns me on in terms of where creativity comes from that's a beautiful expression she was saying I was thinking of it I mean instead of being financial billionaires is there a way that we can be relationship billion you know where you you know start to build those relationships across ecosystems at the more diverse the better and I've always found interesting people are interesting because they hang around with other interesting people they don't all sort of fry in the same pan and you know they're meeting they're the same old guys and if you are in the corporate world you are particularly proud to do this that you are meeting people from your company other companies competitor companies and you're kind of saying oh you know this is what they are doing this is what they're competing with they said if you meet with people who are in a puller opposite set up you know sports people artists broadcasters influences all kinds of interesting people and learn about their life you're more likely to be very successful in the work that you do because you're connecting the dots I was in a taxi cab a good number of years ago in Washington DC and there was a gentleman there he had come from another country he was driving the taxi and we had a long ride it was about 45 minute ride and I asked him what did he do and he said well he was an IT engineer back home but he didn't have an IT credential here I said oh wow well you could go get some and he said well you know my situation is such where I'm supporting my family I don't have well at the end of the day and it wasn't a lot of money I made a decision to send him a check to pay for getting his IT certification he had the skills he didn't have the certification his life changed now I'm not saying wow Elliot was a hero there but if I hadn't have a conversation with somebody who was in a totally different role my driver in a taxi I never would have realized we had something in common which was technology and careers and then he said I'll pay you back I said no no no pay it forward when you can go to another person who has been an immigrant and you pay some of his education or her education to do that so I think you're right we have to make sure even in this age of social media where we get very siloed rake out of that silo look I'm 73 I regularly love talking to 17 22 32 42 52 and 62 year olds because if I just talk to people my age I'm gonna have a very narrow view I didn't get tiktok and I'm not a big tiktok fan but I found an artist who I had produced on Broadway who had a baby who has a million and a half tiktok viewers oh wow she and her baby do almost every day now by talking to her and I got to understand that cohort that that's one of the most exciting things that they can do not my style but if I'm gonna be in the world of learning it can't just be about my style I've got to be in a broader a broader role but you've got to have the relationships that open up those doors for you and I think you bring in a very interesting point that we automatically assume that because I learned by reading a book that's the only way to learn and it's not I mean you know it can be podcasts when we tiktok can be and there are enough people who are doing that of course there are enough people selling snake oil as well on tiktok but then you have enough people selling snake oil in the classroom so yeah I want to shift the conversation to your skin and storytelling I have particularly enjoyed a lot of your videos because they've really created a story around something fairly profound but it doesn't come across as pompous or you know wow I'm gonna now give you the special wisdom it's really not how do I become a better story teller what is your method of doing that well first of all I always ask every celebrity or well-known person I've ever interviewed I always ask them tell me about how you learned storytelling whether it was Michelle Obama or Malcolm Gladwell or Steve Wozniak or other people from other roles and almost inevitably they point to a one generation away family member their uncle their aunt their grandmother and sitting on the floor in their house or their cabin or their tent and hearing stories so that's one of the pieces is that we need to go back into our roots to understand secondly we need to understand that stories are songs they're songs but they're songs without music the music is where your heart comes into it and you know the worst thing in the world for me is when I go to a conference and somebody bought a book called jokes to start my speech with and I go oh my this is going to be a long hour when I go out to give a speech I never know how I'm going to be getting the speech so I get in the front of the stage I go hi there and something I see something and I might go wow I love that hat oh where did you buy that or I'll say something and what happens in that moment is I become authentic rather than script okay and there's an interesting skill set that we don't talk enough about maybe you and I should write something about it because I think we could listen from both the experience you've had in India with Bollywood and entertainment in mind which is that storytelling requires storytelling requires story listing now the problem and you've got you all have a friend a relative a boss a colleague who tells a story and they don't care if anybody is listening I have one person who will tell that to me at lunch and I could walk away and they're going to keep talking for 10 minutes story listing I learned by talking to the president of the Mount Sinai hospital system in New York and he said it's really important that our doctors not only are good storytellers but they're story listeners even to the point of saying here's what the results here's what your diagnosis is now tell me how you're going to tell your sister that and you listen in that sense that is a really important piece but remember I went back to the song when you know a song you don't know that you know all the lyrics until you start to sing it and then the lyrics come out so when I do storytelling I don't have a script in front of me I usually have six bullets because I know when I hear that bullet it triggers the the conversation that I want but I am looking at that audience I'm engaging with that audience and finally what you have to realize that your ability to tell a story is much longer than their ability to actively listen to a story very often when I'm doing interviews for CEO or another job I'll bring one of those digital clocks and I go okay I'm gonna ask you could you have 180 seconds to answer and the clock showing and they freak out initially I tell them I really want to hear the answer in three minutes you know and I kind of warned them ahead of time but I really believe this is a skill that you can get better at you have to get feedback and don't think by watching yourself on tv you're going to get better because you'll watch the way you thought you were not the way you are and it's not about being pretty or handsome or having a perfect voice or having precise sentences it's about are you real are you and to follow from Chris who's the head of the TED organizations he said tell a story it has a natural curve it starts it gets to the big point and then it comes to an ending that pulls it together nicely and they used to you know when TED talks started they were an hour then they became a half an hour then 18 minutes TEDx talks now are 12 or six minutes long because they found that the duration of the story is inversely related to the impact of the story so sometimes shorter is way way way way better and that also explains why when you watch a lot of improv comedians their improv artists will pick up something in real time they'll start off by saying that today while coming across this I this happened at the door and then they build a story around that and then they take it from there which is so essential I hired general Colin Powell to come and speak and I assigned it hired him once before four or five years early and he's a wonderful man his daughter is a Broadway star and he came in and he was ready to give his speech and he turns to me about 10 minutes before he says you don't want me to give my speech I go no get up there and have a conversation with me and the audience and he gets up there and he goes hi there I'm Colin Powell I'm from the Bronx any of you from the Bronx and four or five women yeah we're from where you're living and it was the best speech he ever made it was dynamic and by the way he got all the good points into it but it felt like a natural conversation with an audience of 2,000 people that takes guts and permission to do that but that is some of that I worry sometimes when you see some of the CEOs of tech companies and you see them and they're out there in their black shirts and their pants they've rehearsed it 44 times and the like you know and I'm always wishing that the teleprompter would get stuck or something like that you know I remember Steve Scully when he added up Apple was lowered to the Boston stage and the hoist got stuck halfway down it was a great moment he made it safely to the stage but it doesn't come from memorization it comes from authentication that you've got to be authentic in that process how do you build authenticity is that something you practice and get or do you take those lists and do it yeah it's a couple of things I mean we're friends so I'll say number one is you really look out the audience and you realize they're just like you they go to the bathroom they sleep in pajamas at night you know they have good mornings and bad mornings so you have to eliminate the differentiation between you and who you're talking to that we're very similar we have to be in different roles but we're very similar and the other piece is that you have to not go back to your memory but you go back to your experience which one thing if I would somebody said Elliot what's your favorite Broadway show I could tell you what I've memorized to say and then it would come to me and I go you know I was in the Longacre Theater on 48th street the first night prom was there I remember when Caitlyn Kinnan and took her guitar and she strummed it and without any other background the theater came alive about kids who are outliers that was my best moment of theater now what I just said is what I said I went back to experience that I couldn't have given you the words I've said before but to be authentic I had to go there I had to emotionally go there it's one of the things by the way I've always loved about I've been to India many times I always love watching a film at the end where all of the actors dance because no matter what their role was in the end they're celebrating that they did this amazing show together and it's is it stage yes is it hyper rehearsed probably not it's of that moment it's living that experience this is why I kind of believe that the business world would be so much better if we learn from oh my god in the business world everybody says oh there is no hierarchy and you know I'm just like you but you know it is really pretty real whereas in the performing world your experience means nothing because you could have done 50 successful shows and the 51st could bomb and you know it's a bit like sports it's a real time it happens and the audience may not laugh at the best line that you thought was there and they might figure out something which you don't even think was funny it was just something you thought of at that moment so that's the spontaneity that you've been in last night we had staying here a friend who is on a tour of a Broadway show called The Girl from the North Country it's music by Bob Dylan it's kind of sad story well they're touring the United States and they're going to go to DC next and literally the day that it started yesterday about 20 minutes before the show started they found out that one of their lead actresses was sick and could sing so they turned to her understudy who had never done this role on stage she had been rehearsing it and said in 20 minutes you have to go out and play that and I watched it last night now I knew that she was the understudy she was amazing I will tell you she probably was better than the person she replaced because at that moment this was her moment now we think about that in the world of business how do we find that time when you step up to the moment when you are you're there I teach a lot of MBA students I tell them when somebody asks you a question occasionally say let me think about that for two minutes and I want to then tell you the answer and get quiet and think about it and go inside yourself don't think this is a quiz show game I got to give my quick you know Morgan Stanley answer in you know in 14 seconds and when they take those two minutes you go that was real so I'm with you I think what we do in the performing arts we need to bring there I think we need to honor what we've learned in our religions what we've learned in our cultures what we've learned from our families and from our communities absolutely and that is what truly is about bringing your best self to work your entire self to work all the aspects of yourself the strength and the weakness and not be afraid to call it a weakness because that's the other thing that we've almost stopped thinking of 80 as a weakness so yes it's nice to think of it as a developmental opportunity but you know if you don't confront it yourself how are we ever going to sort of progress and you and I know we're both collaborating on this you know we're really interested in bringing the world of learning and bringing it more into the world of human resources and we're in collaboration with SHERM organization and the reason I want to do that goes way back to the research my colleague Josh Persson is done people aren't leaving jobs to get more money they're usually leaving a job because they want to go someplace where they can learn and be developed and so I really believe no matter where we are in this talent field we ultimately are about growing the talent base the skill base the career base of the people that are with us and every now and then you look at somebody and you go you're doing a fine job but I have a sense that you're not growing in this job would you like to and maybe they're at a year when they don't want to grow and do some and that's fine but it is really important for us to make sure that the world of HR isn't just about benefits compliance and and those elements but it's really about skilling and growing skills and building careers and building a lifelong pathway of life success which makes them easier to be part of organizational success and which is when you know you really think of really taking up this whole challenge of recreating organizations which you enjoy and you look forward to the day you don't kind of say that oh my today is a Monday and you don't kind of say yesterday is a Friday and the weekend is here because you know why is it that you have this kind of a distribution when you think of your career how much of it was shaped by the skills that you had how much of it was shaped by the relationships that you had and I think relationships are a big piece of it I feel really fortunate that I've gotten to know many amazing people some of them very very famous and some of them not famous but equally powerful I also think it comes from allowing yourself to be excited by things and this is aiming at curiosity every time you and I speak I think of something else I want to talk to you about or read or and allowing yourself to be this curious boy I mean I tell people I'm a 73 year old curious boy you know and now I have enough money to buy the books that I want or to to have the conversations but enabling yourself to get excited and to then be impacted by people and then ironically if you were with the diverse set of people it will lead to experiences in 2006 I went to Africa and gave out malaria nets in Mali and one of the people on board was Malcolm X's third youngest daughter that we hadn't spoken in about 15 years and a couple months ago we connected and and I got invited to Malcolm X's 90th birthday party with Spike Lee at the door welcoming me I would like not because I was an important person but I had created a relationship that led to experiences so value the people that you know and you never know never never know what can come out of that relationship which is very different from how people view networking networking is because you hang around with somebody or you connect with somebody as long as you are going to get something from that person whereas what you are describing is how do you sort of really build authenticity in the work that you do in the relationships and even the storytelling that you do all of them really have the core foundation of authenticity we are but sort of really coming to the last couple of minutes of our show you've written 12 books how do you write a book if somebody wants to write a book what is your two or three big tips write a paragraph show it to people if they like it write a page show it to people if they like it go write an article and an article can be three pages or pages now for 99 percent of you stop there because you have enough for an article and you know this and I know this very well getting it from an article to a book is a lot of work and in some cases stop at an article because a lot of people may not read the book but if you want to go to a book then you need to really think about it what we've been talking about a story tell what's the arc of the story and realize one of the challenges right now is that people are into very immediate consumption of things so be prepared to write the book my friend Jennifer just wrote a wonderful book about women as CLOs well the next thing she needed to do she needed to read the book because it's an audio book and then she went on our book tour that she's on now which is not simple but you're going to dozens if not hundreds of places and promoting but start literally start with that paragraph that page that article and then if it's right it becomes a book or you can do what I did for a few of my books making a anthology where I wrote the beginning I figured out 12 chapters I went to 11 other people to write the chapters and it was easier for me and bluntly probably better than if I had written all 12 do that and the one thing to keep in mind is it doesn't have to get commercially published to be a value it's wonderful if it gets commercially published but you put that article I wish in our learning and HR field every day we had people writing summaries and autopsies of things they did we tried to change on boarding it totally didn't work this is what happened yeah or we changed the way in which we do our employee interviews and it worked and I wish that every day I could find 100 of those articles on board to to read not just waiting for the book called perfect on boarding you know or a thousand tips for interviews I wish we had a way of sharing our knowledge and our ahas in real time thank you so very much and it it's just so fascinating to see the 73 year old boy whose curiosity extends from learning technology being a geek people celebs ordinary people taxi drivers storytelling what a phenomenal journey it's been I am so grateful that you came and shared your wisdom with all my viewers and I look forward to staying in touch with you thank you very much if you have any questions you can you know write to me at abhijitbhathuriatlife.com and who knows if your story is interesting we'd love to share it with a larger number of people on that note thank you very much for being here thank you bye see you