 Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are joining us from, welcome to season four, episode one of Dreamers and Unicorns. My name is Abhijit Bhaduri and I work with organizations as the talent branding strategist and I also work as an executive coach to several leaders which in different stages of their career. And I work with organizations which are Dreamers, which is like, you know, 20 member organizations and I've had the opportunity to work with giants which are market shapers with trillions of dollar in market cap. But today I'm going to talk to you along with the guest, you know, and this particular season is going to be all about technology and talent. So I kind of really thought that, okay, who is a person I should have as my first guest, you know, somebody who can talk about technology, somebody who can talk about talent and you know, how it is evolving, et cetera. And so therefore I decided to, you know, come up with a person, I'm just going to read out his bio. He's a business leader, author and social entrepreneur. He's currently UNICEF's special representative for young people and innovation. The founder of something called GAME, G-A-M-E which stands for Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship serves on the boards of Hitachi Rockefeller Foundation. This person was also the chairman of Microsoft India, which is where I actually got to know him. And then of course, you know, also was on the board of Bank of Baroda Cummins, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, ladies and gentlemen, now no prizes for guessing. We have on season four, episode one, the very first guest who is Ravi Venkatesan. Ravi, welcome, welcome to the show. Hey Abhijit, good to see you again. And frankly, I'm relieved to be back on your show because I wasn't sure after the last one you'd have me back. So thanks. You're the only person who's been on the audio version of my podcast and the video version. So that should say something. Yeah, so that's a, and we are opening season four with you. So you have a lot of responsibility. You have to live up to all the hype, no pressure. This is how it is going to be. So thank you so much once again. No, thanks. And fire away. So Ravi, when I was reading out your bio, I had a deep feeling of inferiority when I read that. And I said, oh my God, I mean, here's the person who's done all of this. And it really made me feel terrible about myself. And is this a reaction you get pretty often? Not really, but you know, but it's not surprising either. But what I'd say is, look, don't take all these resumes at face value. All resumes, including mine, you know, put up, we put our best foot forward. We present to the world the story, the narrative of our work life that we wish people to believe and what it conceals doesn't, not intentionally, just because of space. What it doesn't talk about is all that happened along the way. If we talk only about our successes and achievements and milestones, we don't talk about the setbacks, the failures, the many things you've tried and didn't work out, the toil, the effort, all those sorts of things. So it's, yeah, somebody once gave a metaphor of, you know, watching a duck on a pond and you probably heard that too. It looks like it's gliding along and then underneath the surface is all that effort and churn. Furiously peddling away. I'm going to sort of talk to you about your new book. I read it and Ravi, I of course wrote a review of it on LinkedIn. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah. That's cool. That's awesome. Okay, there you go. So I thought I'd do a, and you have Bill Gates, very subtle, who endorses it and says as the world grows in complexity, Ravi's guidance to be curious and adaptable has never been more relevant. Ravi, what was it like to work with Bill Gates? Well, look, I was fortunate that I was at Microsoft at a time when he was still quite active. The reason I was at Microsoft, I must tell you, I don't know if you remember Rajiv Vasudeva at Egon Zender. So Rajiv was the head of Egon Zender in India and one day he called me and said, look, I know you're very happy at Cummins, but you're not looking for a change, but there's a company that's interested. I said, yeah, look, but right now I'm kind of busy. Then he said, well, it's Microsoft. I said, oh, okay, that's very interesting, but I'm the last person they should be looking at. I'm the least qualified person. In fact, I said in those days, I didn't even do my email and my secretary used to print out email and give me a folder and at night after dinner I'd mark it up and hurl it back the next morning. So I said, this is obviously a long shot. So Rajiv finally got frustrated. He said, look, just get on the plane and go. How often are you going to have a chance to meet Bill Gates? And those days he was still interviewing senior people. So I went, it was supposed to be a 20 minute thing to make sure I had a pulse or whatever, but it ended up being an hour long conversation and I was just totally impressed that Bill had so much curiosity. The thing I remember most about that one hour in November of 2003 was his interest in the diesel engine business that I was from, his interest in things happening in India and so on and so forth. After that, I got to spend lots more time because Bill loved India and I think India continues to have a very special place in his heart. And so he had begun the shift to the foundation so he was very engaged with India, both from the foundation and Microsoft. And so I got to spend tons of time with him and in particular, there was this one episode where it was very late night that we took off from Delhi, ATC had some problem, by the time we took off at the end of a super long day, it was past 11, Melinda was with him on that particular trip and Bill can get into an argument. And this was the most sort of trivial argument that I think had to do with the number of PCs in the Chinese army and estimating that. And so whatever, then I decided I was also tired, Bill was wrong and I wasn't just gonna concede. So we got into a huge debate and then finally he said, well, I guess you're right and went quiet. And then Melinda passed him a dollar bill and he signed this dollar bill. I was wrong, Bill Gates and passed it to me, which I framed, that's my retirement plan. So, no, but he had this enormous ability to fight around ideas and didn't care about hierarchy, seniority, what's right is what mattered and the ability to change his mind if he was persuaded. Then more recently in 2018, I went to him for funding for game and it was nice to see him when he did a review, as you would imagine, of our plan. Sure. And then he said, let me think about it. And then months passed, so I said, okay, well, and he finally said, okay, here's the money. I don't think it's gonna work, but yeah, let's see what you do with it. So he's willing to- That's very motivating, it won't work. It is extremely motivating to prove him wrong. So any case, yeah, I have an enormous amount of admiration and liking for him. I know he's going through a tough patch right now, but my respect for him is still what it was. When somebody looks at your career and sees that you've written a book about careers, it's quite likely that the person's gonna say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, that we can talk about careers and it's a big deal. I mean, he's been chairman of Microsoft and also Mumbai. He can always say, oh, it's very easy to do this and you should do this. For us lesser models, it's different. We need to struggle, we have to do all of that. But when I sort of look at, when I read your book, actually I was struck by a couple of different things. I'm gonna sort of take the first part of it and say that when you look at career planning, you've gone through a certain kind of a career graph. What if somebody is gonna start off their career today or somebody's at the midlife crisis, they're having questions about their career. And then there are people who are, past the midlife crisis towards the end, they're wondering that, should I retire at a certain age? Should I do something else and do what and all of this? I mean, do you think, if you had to sort of paint that, obviously what works at age 20 or 25 doesn't work at age 30 or 35 or suddenly doesn't work at 50. How would you describe it? Well, you've asked, first of all, you've asked two questions and one, the second one is so open-ended that it could take all of the time we have. So look, even in my preface, the opening, I acknowledge that it's very easy for some reader to say, yeah, it's fine for Ravi to say he's had this charm live and he's sitting on his perch and now he's giving some gyan. And why I wrote that is because, and I start out the book, Abhijit, as you know, with Carol Dweck's quote, which says it is impossible to determine a person's potential and it's impossible to imagine what just years of hard work and passion can accomplish along with a little bit of luck. And I think that is very true for my life. When I look back at my start, it was fairly inauspicious in the sense that I was a very timid, young person. I had so little self-confidence when somebody entered the house, my parents' friends, or I would go and hide under the bed in the dark bedroom. I was very mediocre at studies. I was even worse at sports. The other guys, I went to a boys' school in Chandigarh and I wasn't by any means the most popular. So if you said, look, what do you think this guy is going to achieve? It wouldn't be much, okay? And in fact, my mother used to sort of scold me a lot about that. Even years later, I'd made it to IIT Bombay, okay? And I got in there to the department of I wanted to by the skin of my teeth. And then of course I found shucks. The people out here like 100 times as smart as I am. Not everyone, but at least some of them. But I was very competitive by that time. So I had to sort of get to the front. And so I compensated for, you know, things by just working five times as hard. And then so on and so forth. I wrote a famous LinkedIn article about the triumph of hard work over talent, which is sort of my biography. Not that I'm not talented, I've got something like everybody. So what I'm trying to tell all our listeners is, man, don't give up on yourself. You just, we all underestimate what we're capable of. But a lot of it is just mindset, determination, hard work, and meeting a little bit of good luck. Now you asked a bigger question, which is this issue of what advice, career advice, do you give people at different points in life? Because certainly their contexts are very different. And again, I talk about that in my book where I say that question is the same. What do I do with my life? The question is the same, but the answer at age 20, very different at 40 or 60 or whatever, right? And also the individual circumstances. So look, the best way I would say it is by using a quote from Carl Jung, who is a famous Austrian psychologist. He says, look, the story of a person's life is in three acts. And he used the word man, but the first act a person sets out to conquer the world. Okay, you're young and you want to go out and conquer the world. And then the second act is when you realize the world is not going to be conquered by the likes of you, you're too ordinary. And the final act, the third act is making peace with it, okay? And so I love this because it's, it felt so applicable to my own life. So, you know, you're when you're sort of 20 to 35, you're out there and it's all about trying to prove something to the world, to yourself about how smart you are and how far you're going to go. Then you begin to realize, wow, reality is different. This is not how I expected my life to turn out to be. Everybody else is sort of zooming ahead in some dimension. They have smarter kids or they've achieved more. They have more wealth and better lifestyle, a better car. Somebody's got a better looking spouse, whatever. And things are happening to everyone else except you. Okay, so that's the second stage. And then you have that third act. So, how would I succinctly sort of give advice? Well, the most important consistent advice across all three stages is go read the book. Yeah, and for those who don't know what it looks like, this is what the book is all about. Yeah, that's it. And it's there on the bookseller near you. But you know, jokes apart, when you're young, and today's very different from when I was young, I think what you want to do is go find the best job you can find. And it doesn't, frankly, it doesn't even matter what it is. Okay, and you know, in my book I say jobs are weird because it's a 20th century construct. The idea of a stable job is almost obsolete except for a small number of people. But I do say finding a job is a good launching pad. Because you get the experience of what work feels like. You know, there's a discipline of getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth and dressing up and going somewhere at least before COVID. There's a discipline of taking responsibility and accountability. You learn some skill or you polish a certain skill. You begin to build a certain reputation. You develop some social skills for all these reasons. Having a good work experience to start with is I think incredibly important. And some people on a call yesterday, some young people are interviewing me. They say, hey, there's no jobs out there. And there's only some Swiggy driver and Dunzo thing and some low level things. And I don't want to do that. Okay, it's a tough time right now. Okay, so in the statistic, which I quote in my book is that in India right now, a young person with a higher education degree is six times as likely to be unemployed as an illiterate person, okay? So that, and that means that a lot of the jobs and work out there is not aspirational. But I say, it doesn't matter, just take it, right? See, you and I were at Microsoft at about this. Yeah, we were there for at least two years together. And I reported to a guy called Kevin Turner, who was, if you remember, the chief operating officer of the company and he's a famously tough guy. And Kevin started out his life in a very humble way. He was a cashier at Walmart, okay? And he grew over the years to become chief operating officer of Microsoft, not bad. And then he's gone off. He just did his IPO last week of some come. So the point is, it doesn't matter where you start. What matters is the mindset and intensity with which you do your work. And then you don't end there, you're just starting there. If I look at my first job, it was horrible. I used to cry on Sunday night Abhijeet and Columbus, Indiana thinking about Monday morning and not wanting to go there to a dirty factory and manage unionized workers the only thing we had in common is both of us didn't want to be there on Monday morning. But that's your starting point. And so you're there, you move on. I would say the second piece of advice for that stage, the early stage is to begin to do experiments to realize what you're good at and what you enjoy and gradually try to swim towards that intersection of what you're good at and what you love doing. Fortunately for me, that was what I was doing, okay? But it isn't often the case. And so I think, and some people call it moving into the passion economy or whatever it is, there's a buzzword for it. But you need to start figuring that out because very quickly you want to move out of being an employee and having this sort of servant mindset and learning to stand on your own feet being independent, being self-employed. Not everybody can be an entrepreneur, but certainly we should have the skills and the self-confidence to be self-employed. And you and I did that at a much later age. And somebody said, what's your regret? And I would say it didn't start earlier. So that would be a second thing. And I would say this is the stage where you want to take the most risk. You look at you, you go to advice your parents and teachers and say, Bete, don't take risk, you know? And that's the worst advice you can give a young person because your risk capacity is at its maximum. The consequence of complete and utter failure of trying something and it is nothing. Okay, later on you've got spouse, family, kids, responsibilities, looking after elder, all that. But right now that hasn't happened. So go out there, live life to the fullest, enjoy it, take more risks and see what works and see how far you can go. So that's kind of the advice I would give for the first stage. Shall I pause here or shall I go on to the mid-stage? So I had a quick, you know, maybe looking for a quick yes, no kind of a thing that if you look at, you know, at the early stage, is it a good idea to start with, let's say a startup kind of a place or should one take a more established organization and work with that? I mean, what would you advise? You know, that's a question that a lot of people talk about. Yes. Are you there? Yeah, yeah, I'm right there. I'm right there. Because you disappeared and I see myself. So look, it doesn't really matter, okay? If the startup and what it's trying to build interest and excites you, excites you, do it, okay? If the established company has made you an offer that you find interesting, do that, okay? There are practical considerations, how much does it pay, blah, blah, blah, but that's fine. But one of the things I do advise is, find a company and an industry that's going places. Okay, if I look back and say, what would one thing, what would I change about my professional decisions? I would have latched on to a company that's more likely to be a rocket ship. And it doesn't matter what job it is, just jump on. And so there is such a thing as catching a wave, okay? And so yeah, so I would say, if you have two choices, see which industry is sort of a bigger wave, which company is more likely to be a rocket ship. And it doesn't matter what the job is, what the pay is, you're gonna learn more and you'll probably get to a higher altitude. So that's broadly how I would answer that question. So for somebody in the mid-stage, you've had a couple of years under your belt, you've got potentially a family responsibilities, or at least you have a certain amount of commitment which is there. And a lot of times, it's incredible, the number of people who I work with as a career transition coach who say that, I don't know, I mean, I don't even know whether I made the right choices in my life is the classic midlife crisis as they say. What should one do with that? It's a great question. When I was reading up and doing research for this book, I read up everything on happiness. And one of the very strong evidences, happiness over time in your life is shaped like a bathtub, okay? So it's very high or relatively high when you're young and then it drops precipitously in the midlife and it's really gritty and tough with a lot of responsibility and this and that and dealing with reality. And then you hit 55 and then it improves again, okay? So these middle overs, the slog overs are really, really, now for a lot of us, okay? And I've been there myself, so it's experiential. And as I said, much of it has to do with reality setting in, okay? You have a lot of responsibilities. You're not the rock star that you thought you were going to be or the world doesn't think you're that rock star. Everybody's busy with themselves. They're not looking at you. And yeah, so and you're feeling like others are buzzing ahead and that's the midlife crisis. And very often we reach a point, Abhijit, where we don't like what we are doing, but we don't know what else we should be doing. And so you grimly hang on because there's an EMI, that here there's a paycheck. You hate the person you're working for, you know? But you just grimly put your head down and say, okay, I'm gonna just figure this sort of one step at a time and hopefully tomorrow is a better day. And the best advice I have is what Steve Jobs gave in his famous Stanford speech, which is for too many days, you find yourself asking the same question, why am I here? It's time to do something different. And how do you do that? And this is where I talk about the need to do lots of micro experiments, okay? It's rare that you sit there and the big opportunity comes, okay? It's rare that you're just sitting there and you can think your way to your future. I think a much better way is to try a lot of things, okay? And then see what fits. So for instance, they say, well, maybe I should go join a startup, but you're a little afraid because you've got this nice fat paycheck from Microsoft. Okay, all right, fine. Can you start volunteering with this startup? Your friend left last year and she's got a little Sunicorn and so you can start spending some time there. That's for you, okay? Or something, you know, I want to go save the planet. I'm gonna do something in climate change. Find your weekends and not volunteer and stick your toe in the water and see is that really just a itch or it's something serious? So you do these things and you don't have to quit your job always in order to figure out that. So I think that's a fairly reliable way I have found because I've made many such transitions often intentionally and you try things and you figure out what works, what doesn't work. And then one day the big door will open with a welcome mat and you walk through it. And you know, is the method of reinventing yourself because you know, somebody did ask this whole question, what does retirement mean to you Ravi? You specifically. It's a very bad thing. It's a bad, anybody contemplating retirement. I'm going to say don't. So no, look, I have watched aging very closely. I watched my parents, my in-laws, number of other friends and there is a huge correlation between being mentally engaged, active, et cetera. And, you know, healthy and happy. And the day you start consciously, you know, slowing down and say, I'm going to retire and you stop engaging with the world and people is when the rot and degradation sets in. So John Rockefeller, who, you know, he was a robber pattern but he said a lot of things which I admire. One of the things he said was a man should, you know, die in the saddle. Okay, that was a metaphor for 120 years ago, but yeah, should be active till the end. Okay, and he also said you should live your life so your last check bounces. So he had many little bits of advice which I've tried to sort of keep in mind. So I think the thing to realize is we're living much longer. A lot of people living sort of tuning into this conversation, they're going to live into their 90s with any little bit of luck. And if you're going to live to your 90s, Abhijit, as you know, you have to be engaged and productive till you're at least 75 or so 80, okay? There's only so much of Netflix that you can watch. There's only so much golf you can play every day. There's only so much lying on the beach. There's only so much fondling of the grandkids because by the time you're 90, the grandkids like 50. Okay, so yeah, so you've got to be engaged and productive. And the beautiful thing is there's more and more role models of people doing amazing things that are fairly advanced age. Now I derive great inspiration from Ashok Soto who lives nearby in Bangalore. And Ashok started happiest minds at like 72 and he's a unicorn and he's still going very, very strong. In fact, I'm gonna do one of these conversations with Ashok and I'm no spring chicken. I just turned 59 last week. And the way I feel is, look, everything that has happened in these years, 59 years, is learning preparation for what is to come next. And the real big act is yet to come, okay? Now look, this may be a framing of my mind and maybe that's true, maybe it's not true. But I think if you believe it, it happens. What you believe is what you achieve is one of the quotes in the book. So what I'd say is the time from the 50s to 75 is very often one of the best times of life. You don't have to prove that much to yourself or the world, okay? You've realized your limitations and come to some terms with it. You made a little bit of money or a lot of it depends. But so you have now, now you start optimizing for the time that is left rather than achievement, right? And so you start doing things that you've always postponed. And at the same time, I think you can take on really meaningful work with a mission orientation. And yeah, that's what I've been doing for some years and there's no slowing down. So this is what I call building a portfolio life. Some things which are traditional and get you some money, if that's important to you and it often is. Other things give you learning a sense of satisfaction from impact, working with younger people, coaching them, seeing them succeed or whatever. So you do those things. And then this is also the time to climb what David Brooks calls the second mountain, which is the inner life to begin to go inwards and ask yourself the big question, why am I here and what is this life about and all that stuff, which you don't frankly have any appetite for when you're 25 and 35 and going like a rocket. So yeah, so I think these stages are not new. Our Hinduism has four stages of life, the Ramacharya all the way to... Sunya's and all that. So these are very, very analogous. You just have to apply it to a more modern context where we are living longer and there are more compulsions and pressures and social media and all that. And one thing that I wanted to sort of talk about was how does education sort of prepare us for it? But I just want to say welcome to all the people who have joined in. We've got lots of people putting in their comments and questions. So welcome to season four, episode one with Ravi Venkatesan. And Ravi, do you want to just show that book cover or should I just show the book cover? This is the one. Let's both show the book cover. I can't get enough of this cover, Abhijeet. Completely. And you know, so it's a lovely book. I enjoyed reading it and I've written a review of it on LinkedIn. So do take a look. And of course, talking of LinkedIn, congratulations. You've been sort of just voted as one of the top people who write about career and leadership and all that. So by LinkedIn itself, so congratulations on that. I'm going to sort of switch gears and really talk about this whole thing of skills because that's what prepares us. One of the chapters I'd really liked in your book was you talk about three meta skills, actually four. You talk about learning agility, the first one, which you talk about the ability to have mental agility, people agility, change agility and results agility and of course, you know, self-awareness. One of the ways I used to always remember learning agility was the phrase mental people change results and they are self-aware. So it just is a nice way to remember that. The second meta skill you talked about was the entrepreneurial mindset. And again, you know, when I was doing the review, I did this little sketch which talks about, you know, what the entrepreneurship is all about. And of course, soft skills. So let's get started. What are the skills that you, you know, let's start with entrepreneurship and we can talk about the others as well. But let me sort of rewind a bit because look, this issue of what skills should I pick up is a very live one, right? Every day somebody comes up and says, young person, should I learn coding? Sure, that's what interests you. Should I do a masters in data science? Why not? If that's what interests you or whatever. The point about all these skills is, yeah, they're useful. There's absolutely no downside to it, particularly the skills which are hot right now. They'll help you get a compensation increase or better prospects and why not? But the thing to realize about all this is they're moving goalposts. I mean, what's hot today is a commodity tomorrow and tomorrow something else is new and you have to learn something else again to keep up, particularly because as I said, we're living longer and the half-life of knowledge is coming down. So in my book, I try to focus on what are durable skills? What are the skills that are most fundamental, which are most likely to be useful 100 years from now, not just two years from now? And that's where I said, look, it seems to me that there are three or four of these. And one of them is learning agility, which you talked about, which is the ability to, when you're put into a situation which you've never encountered to figure things out and be successful. Another one is entrepreneurship, which you just asked about. Now look, not everybody is going to be an entrepreneur or is cut out for entrepreneurship, but in this century, given just how fluid things are and how volatile, uncertain, et cetera things are and the way opportunities come disguised beautifully as problems, we have a strong point of view that everybody needs an entrepreneurial mindset. So what is it about an entrepreneurial mindset? One of the things is all successful entrepreneurs, even reasonably successful entrepreneurs, have a great sense of agency. So they believe that they are more in charge of their decisions than somebody else. A lot of others of us go around through life as victims. Oh, my blaming mother, father, teacher, spouse, manager, HR, someone. Whereas entrepreneurs have a great belief that look, this is all a waste of time. I'm much more in control of my decision. So if I don't like it, I can make some change. Another beautiful difference is that they're able to see opportunities and problems. And one of the things about the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is an optimist sees an opportunity in every problem and a pessimist sees a problem in every opportunity. And this is a mindset that some of us are born with, but you can certainly develop. A third entrepreneurial trait is resourceful, almost no entrepreneur starts out with an abundance of resources and then goes around looking for an idea. It all starts out with an idea that way sort of exceeds resources and they find a way to mobilize and acquire the resources they need. They're very good at solving problems. They're tenacious. They don't give up when they encounter setbacks. Now, all these things are just going to be table stakes for succeeding in the 21st century, whether you're a school teacher or a comedian or whatever else you're choosing to do. And so we said, look, we've got to figure out how to get every young person growing up with an entrepreneurial mindset. So we started out three years ago. My colleague and I, Mekin Maheshwari, who's the co-founder of Game, he started working with Delhi government and now we run the largest entrepreneurship program anywhere in the world where every single school kid in Delhi government schools from grade 9 to 12 goes through the entrepreneurship curriculum. And now we've taken it to Andhra Pradesh, we're taking it to Odisha, Telangana, many other states all over and then through CDSE. And over three years we've demonstrated that kids from the grittiest socio-economic backgrounds can learn these skills as fast as anyone and it has profound positive consequences both for learning and self-confidence and then as well as career success. So this is something I dwell a lot on. And when you sort of, you know, you talk a lot about this whole thing of entrepreneurship, I also think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that you know, every time you complain, one of the ways to look at it is that you're probably focusing on the problem and you are not looking at the opportunity because if there is a problem, somebody else has seen that and has built a business out of it. Every single problem is an opportunity in disguise, okay. So you say climate change, what a catastrophe, of course it is, but it's also the solving it is a 50 trillion dollar economy. I used to complain about the garbage in Kauramangala in front of my street. Okay, that's an opportunity for building a waste management business for someone. I just don't have the sort of interest in that right now, but that's a huge waste management business out there for someone. It doesn't matter what problem you take, it's an opportunity and potentially a social enterprise if not a real commercial enterprise. So the, sorry Abhijit, the thing, this is the thing, the catastrophe right now is people are saying, oh my God, the heavens are following, they're no jobs, they're no jobs. There is an abundance of opportunity, we just don't know how to go after it. We haven't given our people, young people in particular, the mindset and skills to go out there and build things around these issues. That's what we're working on. So Ravi, I just thought I should let you know that clearly the fact that we are both showing your book cover is working like really like magic because Shaheer Fardan says he's just picked up the Kindle version of the book and the royalty will come to me shortly. I can figure that out already. But I want to move to a different dimension. You know, we often talk about soft skills versus hard skills and in your book you talk about the fact that, you know, these are very important. In organizations, you actually see that people, every time, you know, they'll say what's the point of investing in this? How do you know that it has improved? So, you know, this whole obsession with something measurable and it is intangible. So they are harder to measure, they take much longer time to build and, you know, not everybody develops them at the same time, etc. With convergent skills like coding, you know whether you know how to code or not, it's easy to measure. What should organizations be thinking now in view of what you talked about? When they think about soft skills, investing in soft skills for their employees or people investing in soft skills for themselves more importantly, how would you say that? Well, be like Google. Some things Google does really well and one of the, I write about this in the book where some years ago, not long ago, they decided to look at their most successful people who was shot up through the ranks much faster than their peers. So, what is it that these people have in common? And shockingly, it wasn't the best technical talent. It turned out to be people, whether they were technical or not, turned out to be people who had what you call soft skills, which is the ability to simply engage better with other people and the ability to lead others particularly through influence. And so they began to quantify what are these specific skills and it turns out to be the typical things communication, collaboration, working well in teams, the two virtual teams, the ability to lead, creativity, right-brain thinking, lateral thinking, the ability to handle change, navigate change, lead change, these things turned out to be the most highly correlated. And of course today people are talking more and more about 21st century skills, etc. And so it's kind of this interesting paradox because even as a software is eating the world so to speak and AI is gradually able to do more and more of the things we do as humans. There is a growing premium on people skills. When I was growing up and was a young engineer that mattered less. In fact a lot of my managers misbehaved like crazy. So it's a very interesting paradox and what it does say is that your best chance of being successful in the 21st century is to be less machine like and more human. And I'll lay out in the book why that is so. One of the reasons why it is so is most of our problems today are very complex problems. They rarely can be solved by one person on their own. It requires us to work together across departments across organizations even and increasingly across sectors. You have to work with government, social sector, etc. to solve the problem. And many of those people have very different views objectives priorities and they don't want to take orders from you who are you. So you have to be able to learn to lead through influence and persuasion and all these things. That's becoming more and more important. And if you can do that wow you don't have to worry about anything else. People are going to come to you. And that's what I say. I say these soft skills, leadership skills in particular are the defining skill of the 21st century. And so the normalization saying how to measure why should we do it and all that I'd say dump the stock. Yeah, absolutely. I always think that people who ask these questions clearly are living in the 19th century. You shouldn't be working for a place like that. Thanks, that's very heartening. You know I also think that as you are looking at, so I've talked about career one and career 2.0 and career 3.0 and my the thing that I think people should keep in mind is progressively there is going to be a time when I think more people right now it's the other way around more people are employed less people are freelancers and self-employed. You're going to see a reversal of that particular ratio. And so which brings me to this whole question that you know somebody has asked this question. Hariharan has said that how does one handle handle the age bias that companies have. They don't want to hire people beyond a certain age. So, what would you say? Should everyone become an entrepreneur beyond a certain age or how does one deal with this bias? Yeah, so first of all, it's good that you recognize there is such a thing as age bias, it's real. And no matter how old you are or how young you are today, one day it's gonna work adversely. And hopefully long before that, you're figured out how to fly on your own, so you don't care. Okay, that's the point. I think you want to be as fast as possible, independent, freelancer, self-employed, gig worker, where you have a skill and the world values it and you're able to make a living around that. And no matter what age you are, it's possible to go down that path. I don't know how big, when did you last have a job? Was it at Microsoft or did you do something after that? Not after that, I was at Vipro. So, but it's been five years since I've been on my own. So, yeah. For me, it's been 10 years, okay? Yeah, and my only regret is, I should have started sooner. And yeah, as I say, if you have an entrepreneurial desire and you go pursue it, scratch that. But otherwise, your ambition should be to be self-employed as fast as possible. People will say, how scary is that? I think it is dramatically less risky than to be working for a company which is going through convulsions, re-orgs, new manager comes, and you and he or she don't get along. You're out of a job. There's musical chairs are constantly out there and you're anxious with doing crazy things to hold on to your job. Why live life that way? So, I think there's a much better way. And what we're seeing today in many parts of the world, which is called the great resignation, the great reshuffle and all that, is in some part, reflecting this understanding that is dawning on more and more people. So, I read before this, your writings on career three.o, and I say, yeah, absolutely. I agree completely. And I write in different language about the same things. Yeah, I think we see the same trends. And if you really think about it, the sole question of a bias works at every stage in your life. I mean, when you are 20, somebody will not hire you into a role because they say you have no experience. And then when you're 30, they'll say that, oh, you haven't worked in this particular sector. Somebody says you are 50, you can't work here. Bias is everywhere. Yeah, but it's not just age bias, Abhiji. It's always, it's about different. So, okay, you won't get hired because you're female. Okay, so that there's a gender bias or you won't get hired because of your skin color. You won't get hired or promoted because you're a wrong religion or whatever. So, people and organizations will find many, many ways to have in groups, out groups, whatever. And what you want to do is be free from all that game. Okay, why would you want to be part of it? Okay, when you could be flying and soar, okay? Yeah, it's not easy in the beginning because we are conditioned, we want security, safety, there's a monthly paycheck, all these sorts of things. But it's a good, that's all good to get started but you should wean yourself off. All right, there's a question for you, Ravi. I've been asking all those questions. Ravi was a CEO of Microsoft India, possibly had a nice nest egg at 50. What about mid-level managers who might not have great savings at 50? So, good for you to say all this, Ravi. Get real and tell us what we can do, is the question. Swami is asking. I think she's asked a very, very good question. So, I would say a couple of things. First of all, sure I have had and have a nice nest egg, but I also was giving up more. Okay, and so I look at how many people who have much more nest eggs and are still desperately on the treadmill, okay? Because they look at what they're getting and what they would be forced to give up and they stay on the treadmill, okay? I decided, no, I want to optimize for time and what time I have left. That takes some courage, okay? So, point number one. Point number two is I have a whole chapter for you, Swami. Don't know what chapter it is, probably six. It's called how much is enough, okay? So, what is the nest egg that you would feel comfortable with before you can unplug and get off the treadmill and follow your calling? And that's, I don't have an answer for that, you know? Swami has answers different from your answer and my answer, but there's a way of thinking about that question. And I think it's an important question. So, and you should do the math and figure that out, but a lot of this nest egg is not a financial requirement. It's not need. It's greed and insecurity that fuels it, okay? So, you have to answer for yourself how much is real need? And of course we have real needs of taking care of family and commitments and you want some security, but very often we cross that point and it is just insecurity and greed. Brilliant. And, you know, if you only keep thinking about the nest, it'll be hard to fly as my response to that. Yeah, that's a good one, I should write that down. Absolutely. Pavani has a question that what advice would you give for people who don't want to be, you know, in the entrepreneurial world for a very long time? You know, what about that? Well, if you mean entrepreneurship as you need to start a business and employ people and so on and so forth, I fully get that this is not for everyone and nor do you, yeah, need to do it. What I'm saying is you need an entrepreneurial mindset which is shorthand for resourceful, seeing opportunity, being tenacious, blah, blah, blah. And those unfortunately are prime requisites for success in a turbulent world. And I'm sorry if you don't want to be those things, life's gonna be really, really hard for you. So better get on with that. There's a question from Rakesh. He wants to know that, you know, how do you sort of draw on your experiences and advise people that the biggest challenge for an entrepreneur is how do you scale a successful Petri dish execution to a large scale execution? How do you do that? What are one or two things to keep in mind? I don't know. I think they're much smarter people with scale businesses and others who are giving master classes on that. So I'd say go take one of those rather than listen to my 60 second thing. So Girish Matributam of Freshworks, I saw he's got a whole free series on, you know, how to build and scale these kinds of businesses. So I'd say that any number of terrific, terrific entrepreneurs who've done it who are out there giving their perspective, go listen to them. It's a good question. You know, we are in the last couple of minutes here. We are at the 55th. Okay. Yeah, it's amazing. So, the time runs really fast. One last question, which comes from Siddharam Kumbar and says your suggestion to people who are in their 40s, what should they focus on? Having EMI apart from, you know, entrepreneurship, other than being an entrepreneur is something else they can do. People who are in their 40s because they have EMI's to worry about, what would you advise? Not even sure. I fully understand the question, Abhijit. I mean, yes, you know, you have EMI's, you have financial commitments. Those are all part of real life and that too in the middle period. You have kids education to worry about. You may have parents and you need to figure out what is that number that you really need every month and figure out how to make sure it comes. There are two ways of doing that. One is to find and hold on to a job and pray that it continues. And another one is to take a little bit of risk and find a way to make a living around the skill that you have. So for instance, I have over the years got some experience and expertise in a few areas and companies value that. And I charge some money for it. And that's how I make my living. Even Aurangazeb, the emperor who's out of fashion these days used to write the Quran in order to raise money for his personal expenses. So yeah, I think you have to do that. One last question from Surat Sejal who says that there are people who are learning through various online resources, but they lack exposure to some real world company. How do you watch your advice to them? One of the chapters, I don't know which one I've got at the end, a list of about 15 ideas for you to consider. And they're just thought starters. It's not an exhaustive list. So let's say you've learned some skill online, whatever course you want to apply it. Now the problem is if you want a job that'll pay for it, then it may be more constraining. If you say I'm willing to give that, what I've learned for free, there's no shortage of people who are willing to give you a chance to go apply it, right? So yeah, I'd say not everything has to be monetized quickly or monetized at all. So find an avenue in which to go apply that. So you've learned something on whatever, building holographic images, okay? And metaverse is not yet ready to hire you, okay? The BJP might, okay? So go volunteer in the IT cell. I'm just saying, there's always some place that is willing to have your skill and be grateful for it and you can practice and own it. So yeah. Ravi, you know, this is really deep down in personal. What's your next big thing? You know, you talked a lot about going up the S curve and reinventing. What are you doing to reinvent yourself today? Well, there are two vectors. One is an external vector and one is an inside vector. On the external vector, I'm about to take on another mega challenge. And this time it's in climate change and the energy transition that the world has to accomplish in the next 20, 30 years. So I'm involved with a global effort to try and accelerate that transition. I don't think I'm ready to talk about specifics, but in a couple of weeks, it'll be public. But back to my original point, I'm about to take on the biggest professional challenge and that will dwarf some of the other things I've done before and I'm excited about it. I know nothing about it. So I come into it with a child like curiosity and a beginner's mind. So that's one thing on the, and then the other external thing is this book. I didn't write a book to just sell a few copies and move on. I mean, I've taken seven, eight years of intense effort to think about these issues because I think these questions are there in everybody's mind. The questions we have talked about, the questions that have been asked. And I know most people today don't read books. They can barely sort of read a paragraph or a little WhatsApp message. So it's my job to figure out every avenue to put these ideas out and engage them. And I'm going to invest heavily of my time in doing this. That's the external agenda. And the internal agenda is just to become a better person. And so Ravi, if you are up to it, we should actually do some of these career conversations on LinkedIn more often. And so many more people can actually benefit from the clarity of thought. I mean, you sort of put across several different ideas which people can look at. And these are great thought starters. We've had a great audience. I just want to say thanks to all of them. No, thank you for bringing us all together. And this clarity of thought, it's all shades of gray. It's the one-eyed leading the blind. We're all on this journey together. It's just that I've had few more years and more opportunity. And it's important to have this dialogue. And people won't agree with everything you and I have said. That's fine. As long as they're starting the thinking process and they come to their own conclusions, and that's great. So thanks and good luck everyone. And you can come see more of us on LinkedIn and other platforms. But yeah, we'll keep announcing these conversations. I mean, don't forget this book because it's awesome. I read it and here is evidence that I read it and I wrote about it. And of course, I really enjoyed it. Thank you so very much once again. And it's totally awesome to have somebody come and talk about their life experiences with the candor that you did. Thanks a million and see you. Good night.