Being Future Ready, with Harish & Ramanand
(Read the transcript below)
There is a lot of talk about "being future ready", but most of this centers around specific technologies or certifications and don't address higher order thinking and behaviors that will improve people's competitiveness at a more fundamental level.
Choose to Thinq is an exception.
Watch this conversation where Harish and Ramanand are guests on The Startup Operator, sharing info on how Choose To Thinq helps individuals and teams inculcate systems that can 'uplevel' and transform them for the future. Some of the things they talk about include tips and systems that help you get future-ready, developing key habits such as reading, and a few favourite recommendations.
As they say on The Startup Operator site, “this is a great episode to help you think about small changes you can make to compound your results”.
A reminder that if you want to be Future Ready, CTQ helps you every step of the way. Three easy ways to get started are Choose To Thinq’s open Telegram channel, free weekly smartletter ‘The Upleveler’, and the more in-depth FutureStack Compound, which can help you bring about the transformation you seek.
READ THE TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE
[Start of Transcript]
[00:00:00]
Roshan Cariappa: Welcome to a very special episode of the Startup Operator. My guests today don't fit the typical definition of startup founders. But what they're working on is super relevant to our audience and I thought we should definitely talk. So I have Harish and Ramanand, who together founded Choose to Thinq in 2014, as a means to help individuals and teams uplevel themselves. A lot of their work focuses on being future ready, but from a very unique perspective. So I can't wait to understand more. Welcome Harish and Ramanand. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Harish Kumar: Thanks Roshan.
Ramanand: Thanks, Roshan. Thanks for having us.
Roshan Cariappa: Choose to Thinq is... what do I call it? Is it an initiative, a project, a startup, a movement? How do you define Choose to Thinq?
Harish Kumar: We're also trying to figure that out!
Ramanand: What we've done, this is in the spirit of being future relevant, that the future builds on the past. So in some sense, not fitting into a label, we see it more as a feature than a bug. In the sense that we have borrowed elements from the world of startups, the world of consulting, the world of individual gig freelancers as well. I think a lot of those elements come from different places, and we haven't really said that, since it doesn't fit into a mould, we should reject it. Instead we're just, I think, building the car as we ride the journey, as it were. So the car looks a little odd and different. We are comfortable with that.
Roshan Cariappa: I think it also fits with my pet theory that quizzers have a fascinating outlook to life. Because you have these various realms in your head. [00:02:00] I mean, you have these frames of references from, it could be cricket, or it could be geography, etc. You guys have a different way of looking at it. For those who are listening, Harish and Ramanand are avid quizzers as well. Harish, on a daily basis, what is it that you guys do?
Harish Kumar: We work with both individuals, as well as with corporate clients. For individuals, we have something called CTQ Compounds, where we help people build a daily habit of reading, something which is sustainable. We also help people get better at future relevance through something called FutureStack. These are things which are primarily meant for individuals. The start of the day actually goes in making sure all these people have got their reading articles for the day and things like that. Whereas, as we get into the day, it gets more of the work with our corporate clients, where we are doing everything from consulting, to helping them engage with their employees, a little bit of learning, a little bit of things around how to design different events that they have. Some places where we actually deliver those events, some places where we will just give design inputs. So all of that goes on the corporate side.
Every day is, part of it is very similar, it gets repeated the next day. But a lot of that is very dynamic, keeps changing. A lot of our engagements with these clients are also such that sometimes I keep using the word, it's like the roving midfielder role in football. You have to play number 10, number nine. Sometimes go back to your box and defend as well. So yeah, [00:04:00] it can go into any of these areas. That's how our day goes.
Roshan Cariappa: You mentioned you work with individuals and with institutions or corporates. So, let's talk about your work with individuals. One of the things that you do is inculcate a reading habit as such. Do you want to talk us through how that happens?
Harish Kumar: Ramanand, do you want to go ahead?
Ramanand: Sure. I think the broader... just connecting it back to future relevance... often heard of the whole notion of compounding and this is established in the world of investing and finance. It is the investing community in some sense that has taught us the value of compounding in other realms. So most famously, people like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have spoken about the compounding nature of knowledge. They famously said about reading 500 pages a week and how that helps your compound over time. So we took a cue from that and we're looking at this from what is it that helps compound, or what are the strengths that can compound for individuals over time. Reading is an example, and reading is something that for someone like Harish and me, it is part of our operating system for a long time. That's what leads to quizzing, leads to reading, leads to further discovery, the kind of people we hang out with. It's a very natural state of affairs for us. For a lot of people, that is not really true. Or for them, it has given way to other pursuits.
We were actually building the system for ourselves, we said that we are all readers, but one thing that we really lacked is width and diversity. So if Harish's favourite sport is football, [00:06:00] his roving midfielder metaphor will come from football. Is there a way for him to look at analogies from outside that and broaden his perspectives?
Similarly, for me, it could be a different set of things. So I think reading, quizzing, these pursuits have been compounding pursuits for us. A few years ago, we decided to try and deliberately build a reading system for ourselves. That's what led to what we do for others. The idea is quite simple. If you look at what you should read every day, the biggest thing that people reach out for is a book. Books are of varying sizes; some books should probably just be a blog post. So you have all these variants, with books, and people often these days don't get through books. There are other competing reasons for that.
So, what we did was, we said, we'll curate a set of articles for... it began with ourselves, and now we do that for others. We curate articles that are reasonably short, something that you can get through in one setting, say 15 minutes or so, and there is a different choice every day. And here is also where it's almost the opposite of something like Netflix, or the abundance economy. We don't give you abundance. We say, this is the one thing that you should read today, you read it, and you've done at least 15 minutes of reading today, and whatever else happens in your day, that is an achievement for the day. And then we build things into it. We are into habit design, behavioural design. So we brought in elements of positive peer design, small groups. What we've realized over time is, when you have committed people who opt in, and the groups are well designed, and well moderated, these things are something that you can do every day. [00:08:00] You don't have to struggle through a book, and think that a reading habit is not for you. It is more of a system that's missing rather than something wrong with you. So that's an example of something that we built first for ourselves. Then, people started knocking on our doors and said this is interesting. Can we be part of it? That's how the CTQ Compounds offerings were born.
Roshan Cariappa: That's very interesting, because reading is one of those things, I think nine out of 10 people will say that they would want to read more. However, it's one of those things that often gets left behind, especially in the world that we live in, where there's a lot more rich media, there's plenty of other distractions available and so on. Let's take a step back and figure out why someone has to read. And Harish, you might want to step in here. Why is it essential for let's say, an IT industry professional, or someone else doing something that may not be connected with the arts, or whatever it is, why is it necessary for him or her to read?
Harish Kumar: Going back to the famous Steve Jobs quote of connecting the dots: the more dots you keep collecting, it's so much easier for you to then look backwards and connect. You will always connect those dots backwards. When you are connecting those dots, you will never know whether this is something which is going to immediately give you some so-called ‘ROI’. Then it becomes a question of as many different domains and as many different viewpoints that you can add to your mental models. As you keep adding them, it slowly coalesces over a period of time and that's when you can start drawing those analogies from different worlds and try to make sense of what's happening.
Earlier, [00:10:00] it was probably easier to get away without reading too much. Because, there were set things that you were expected to do. You could just keep doing, just deliver what is expected of you, and you'll be fine. There's job security and all of that. But now with the world changing at such a rapid pace, all domains are actually intersecting with each other. I wouldn't even say this is something which only the forward looking people should be doing. Now, this is almost part of making sure you have job security, because now it is expected of you to make those connections. In everything from how you actually improve the way you are delivering in your job, since you said IT professionals, to even what clients are expecting from these guys. You absolutely need to know what's happening in different domains. Can you draw some ideas, draw some inspiration from a completely unrelated domain, like sports or media and fit that into the world of finance? These are things which you just need to do. It's not a choice anymore. I think this should be part of the job requirement for people to add these different sources in their curiosity diet.
I wouldn't say reading is the only medium for doing it. I am perfectly fine with someone actually consuming information in the form of podcasts, interesting podcasts, they could be videos. They could be any of these media formats as well. But having that breadth, having that variety in their curiosity diet is extremely important. [00:12:00] I think that's where having that system also becomes very imperative because otherwise, you will tend to just stick to the things that somebody has recommended, ‘Oh Roshan has said, this is good, I will go and check that out.’ And that's it, till the next time Roshan actually recommends something to me, I'm waiting. So that cannot be the case. Reading, I would say, assume it as consumption of knowledge in various formats. Reading is great, it comes naturally to a lot of people. If you're listening to podcasts, do that as well. But keep looking for variety.
Ramanand: I just wanted to add to what Harish said. We think that being systematically curious is a big component of your future relevance. It so happens that a lot of material is in the form of the written text, especially the so-called Lindy text, stuff that has been around for a long time, and is in the form of books. So reading is a kind of a muscle that helps you access that. However, as Harish said, we are not very anal about reading. I think, if you can get it from a really good podcast, more power to you.
Roshan Cariappa: The way I look at it, the most obvious means of utility from reading is you're able to access some kind of knowledge and you're able to reference it maybe in a conversation or something that you do. But if you look at it from a higher order perspective, I think it alters your mode of thinking. Because I can remember one or two books that completely altered my mode of thinking. Like Taleb, for example. I'm not exaggerating, but there is one me pre-skin in the game, and there's one me post-skin in the game. It completely alters your mode of thinking in everything that you do. [00:14:00] That is a true pursuit in terms of reading, and re-reading actually. I tend to re-read a lot of this stuff as well. I've heard this from plenty of other people, who read for context as such. Ramanand, I want to pick up on something that Harish mentioned, which is a curiosity diet, and you referenced it as well. What is this curiosity diet?
Ramanand: Just like you have a diet for food, which takes different parts of nutrition, taste, sometimes you're just consuming for pleasure. So, the idea is to have some kind of balance. While you have your vitamins, you're getting your doses of sugar as well. I think it helps to think of curiosity in the same way. That's where the analogy can be made that you read for pleasure, or you listen to a podcast because you want to stay abreast of developments in your domain. So, it really helps to unpack your plate, or your thali and look at it, 'Am I getting my news in the right quantity?' Because I think in the last decade or so, a lot of people have realized that news isn't always very good for us. We were always as a generation, our curiosity diet was news in newspapers, in terms of your school textbooks, your libraries, they set the agenda for your curiosity diet. But we have realized that how the media operates, how even social media operates.
So, if your curiosity diet, in some sense, or the information that you get, is all of these unhealthy carbs, or a dopamine equivalent of sugar, and so on, and so forth, then who's setting the agenda for your diet? So, it helps to look at it with the same analogy. Over time, what the smarter people have done, [00:16:00] they've learned to take charge of their diet. They have a little bit of the fun, the sugar, and other kinds of things. But they have consciously taken out certain things from it. It helps to look at, what are you consuming? Why are you consuming it? How is it keeping you healthy? Is this for tomorrow? Is this for the pleasure of today? That's what we mean by a curiosity diet.
Roshan Cariappa: And it's not just from a utility perspective, but even from an entertainment perspective. We're just constantly bombarded by things that may not be relevant to us at all. So much so that it dims the experience of something that could actually be interesting. There's a certain sense of fatigue, once we've moved from the scarcity to abundance era that we're living in. Literally, you scroll down your Twitter feed, and you have 20 or 30 pieces of information, staring you in the face. Everything from something that happened in Syria to something that happens in Koramangala, fourth block or something. It's just a very wide range to digest and assimilate, I feel.
Ramanand: It also does change the way you think, like you rightly said, changes the way you think, as well as the way you feel. So, just your diet can do that for you. Curiosity, information can do that for you as well.
Roshan Cariappa: I realized this about three or four years back when I was having almost a physical reaction to things that I was reading on my Twitter. I caught myself feeling a certain way and I decided to just curate my Twitter timeline since. I mean, unfollowed a bunch of people, muted people, blocked people, whatever, blocked a few words, and so on and so forth. Since then, I can attest to the fact that I'm a lot saner. At least I don't have that visceral sort of reaction to seeing something, which can actually [00:18:00] be pretty harmful in many ways. Harish, in this sort of a dopamine-heavy world that we live in, how do we choose to curate what we consume?
Harish Kumar: It boils down to being deliberate about everything that you are doing. We tend to set some lofty goals from time to time for the next year, or next six months, or whatever, where we at least look at a broad division of what are the kinds of things that we are looking at. I think Ramanand has an excellent post as well about that, which I'll pick out and send that across to you. You can add that in the show notes. But generally, if you can look at what are the timeless things that you want to know about, there are always some things that you ought to know. But, you should have probably known them when you were 20 or 25. But for whatever reason, you did not read them, or you did not get to know them, you did not learn them. You're always playing catch up there. It is not going to get covered in one year.
So, just sort of temper your ambition there, you are not going to finish all of that this year. But at least if you make up at least 20% progress, I think that is great. Because you're still going to be behind the curve in many other topics. If you make those kinds of buckets, where there's this timeless wisdom, there are these things that you should have known in your interest areas, or you wanted to at some point, but somehow you didn't make the time or you didn't find the resources back then. Look at those things.
There are always some great pieces of work that are coming in from authors/podcasts which are currently being shipped [00:20:00] out, in this year, in the next year or whatever. So, having an eye on what are the things that are going to come out, have space for that, and then leave some space for serendipity, leave some space for a completely random topic. For me, probably taxidermy might be something that is completely left of field at this point of time. But you can learn something from there as well. Leave some space for that as well. And then if there's still some time left, some space left, then you leave that for all the things that get the outrage factories going. That's how I look at it.
Roshan Cariappa: That's a very important point you mentioned: serendipity. Because I think, anytime you talk about a more structured consumption habit, or reading habit, people tend to think that okay, you will recommend that you read Marcus Aurelius seven hours a day, and meditate on those pithy quotes and whatnot, or maybe pick up The Economist or whatever. Serendipity is super important, I would say. Recently, I started reading this book called The Body by Bill Bryson. It's just so out of left field. It's something that I would absolutely not pick up, but because I like Bryson, I picked it up, and it's just literally what it is. It's the body. And he talks about various functions and whatnot, and it's just filled with so many interesting nuggets. It leaves you with a sort of an awe, in terms of man, how the hell are we alive? We're just really special creatures in that sense.
Roshan Cariappa: Reading is one aspect of it. The other is absorbing this, and really gleaning wisdom from it. Because I do know people who do 40 books a year or 50 books a year, maybe higher and so on. They're voracious readers, but I often wonder how do you absorb so much information? There are the 1% of the 1% types who've been reading for a while, who have that sort of mental model to glean the right things from whatever they consume and curate it for when it might be useful for some time going forward. But Ramanand, for an average Joe, like me, who probably does 15-20 books a year, let's say. How do I figure out a way to absorb the information from whatever I read and also have [00:24:00] it ready for future reference?
Ramanand: First of all, let's dispel the notion that quantity has anything to do with it. You might be reading 15-20 books a day, and it might be the best 15 in your life. I think we should set the quantity point aside. And you're right, that absorption, or the act of connecting those dots that Harish mentioned earlier, is equally important next once you've collected them. One example I can give you is, I mentioned our own reading system that we built for ourselves. It's actually been over 1000 days that we've done this, reading one article about a book every day, a book summary every day. What we instituted after the first 100 days to kind of raise the bar for ourselves was to get everyone to reflect a little bit on that summary. So everyone posts one takeaway every day from the book. It's a small slice of a summary of a book. But what it does is it turns your mind into more active gear.
As there is an input component to curiosity, if you have an output side to it as well, in the case of some people, it is maybe blogging about it. In some cases, it is teaching someone or making a summary of the book in your own words. In fact, one of the things that we offer to some of our clients is a quizzified version of a book. So we'll say you come, we'll put this together for you in an hour. What it makes us do is really get into the heart of the book, and turn it into something and try and distil the essence of it. Exercises like that just get you to engage with the material at a far greater depth, then if you're just reading it cover to cover, and it's just a conquest on your bedpost, [00:26:00] in a sense, and you've moved on to the next item in your bookshelf.
Putting yourself in an environment that gets you to deeply engage with the material, because you do it as a commitment to someone else. Or you're part of a group of people that means to do that, or like what you do. You've committed to put out a certain rate of episodes. It makes you look for people, talk to them, engage with them. I think that is a great way of absorption. There are other compounding habits, like note taking, and things like that as well. But the principle remains the same. Get something out from what you took in.
Roshan Cariappa: Fantastic. I just pick up pieces of what I read and explain it to my wife. Simple things like that, I find it distils your learning from whatever you read and consume.
Ramanand: I just wanted to add two things. One is that since we spoke about Taleb, we've taken a cue from Fooled by Randomness and said you can be fueled by randomness. Another great master, I think a lot of people like to quote, is Richard Feynman. Feynman's method famously is to kind of explain to a younger version or someone who...
Roshan Cariappa: To be able to derive everything right?
Ramanand: That's where the power of someone like Bill Bryson comes in, because it is like a one-man index, who takes you to different parts of the world. To complement The Body, I would also recommend to you a book called the...
Roshan Cariappa: A Short History of Nearly Everything?
Ramanand: It's about the house. Bill Bryson's book about a house wherein he visits each room in a house and explains why did we end up with the kitchen? Why did we have salt and pepper on our tables and not say, cumin and cardamom? So I think, people like that are great [00:28:00] role models in terms of assimilating and then explaining to others.
Roshan Cariappa: Absolutely. One of the things that you guys referenced also is the FutureStack. While reading this one pretty integral thing to it, I'm sure there are other components as well. So Harish, what are these other essentials in the FutureStack that you would recommend?
Harish Kumar: The idea of FutureStack comes from this book by Scott Adams, where he talks about How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. It's a very long title.
Roshan Cariappa: I love that book.
Harish Kumar: He talks about some of these skills, and he says, it's much better for someone to be good at multiple skills, rather than being this one trick pony. And he's listed down these things, which we thought were like some of these timeless skills that you can have. It should probably be in the list that the World Economic Forum also puts out for future relevance. Excellent ones, right? Like public speaking, some amount of design, accounting. Everyone needs some bit of accounting, or at least appreciation and understanding of accounting. Again, if you go back to the book by David Epstein called Range where he talks about some of these champions who actually have had exposure to multiple sports and multiple fields as well, from Vincent van Gogh to Federer actually playing football and cricket and other sports before zeroing down on tennis. So you actually get to learn, pick from these different skills and different areas, and then you can really be very good at one thing.
If you apply that to the realm of say, knowledge workers, or [00:30:00] corporate professionals that we are looking at these days. They tend to put their blinkers on. Either they're very good at marketing, or they're very good at sales, technology, one of these things. But, if you look at the CXOs, in fact in many of these companies, these CXOs actually move from, say, an HR role to a finance role to a CEO role later. Why do they do that? Because they're able to bring that knowledge from different functions. That's what makes them these better leaders. So how can we build that (a) exposure, (b) getting their hands dirty with some aspects. And these days, it's so many different things having an impact on your career, on your day to day life in these organizations, you need to know about everything, from persuasion, to no code, to sustainability, to storytelling, all these things are important.
Of course, given your work life and lifestyle, you will probably not be able to do a 12 to 16-week deep dive into each of these areas, immediately. But what you can definitely do is have a bit of exposure, get your hands dirty, do some small things. You at least know something about these things. So that if and when the time comes for you to do that deep dive, you are not starting from zero or from the negative. You actually have some idea about how these different areas impact your career, what you ought to be thinking about.
We work with a lot of corporates, these days. The in-thing these days is to think about AI/ML and everything that they're doing. So, somebody who's working in HR will be tasked by the [00:32:00] CEO or the site head saying, 'Oh, why aren't we using AI/ML in recruitment?' And this person has absolutely no idea what to do there! That's where having that exposure, and then what are the options for you? Your options are, if you are in HR, and if you've never had any exposure to technology, and you've just been given this almost like a directive that we need to have AI/ML in our recruitment process in the next two years. Are you going to go and take a course on Coursera on AI/ML? That's going to be too much for that person to get started with. So that's where getting that right kind of content, which will expose that concept, just get them started, and the relevance of that particular topic in their area. If they can get that, then they can get started. They could eventually go and take that course that we are talking about. But that should not be the first thing that they get started with. These are all aspects that helped us start thinking about this idea of FutureStack.
How can you build a talent stack, which will help you stay relevant in the future? That's where the word 'FutureStack' also comes from. That's the FutureStack offering that we have, where we have people from a very diverse background. We have somebody who's probably 50+, who spent his life as a technology leader, and is now exploring different areas, just so that he knows, 'Okay, where's my next career going to come from?' to somebody who's an HR to someone who's a hard-core engineer. There are these varying backgrounds that people have. In some cases, they're taking that [00:34:00] step in a very proactive manner. It's not like their hand has been forced, as of now, to start thinking about their next pivot in their career, or whatever. But they know that this is something which they need to do to stay relevant. That's what they're doing with FutureStack.
Roshan Cariappa: Fantastic. I think corporate careers for a while, we've all been straight jacketed, right? It's sort of liberating to see these cross functional roles evolve as well. If you look at it in our personal lives, there is some element of finance that all of us have to know. There's some element of health and wellness that all of us have to know. There's some amount of psychology that all of us invariably pick up. We're very multi-dimensional people. But then somehow for a long while, once we stepped into the office, we were software engineer, three, or quality assurance four or whatever it was. And it's good to see this sort of a cross functional sort of skill set stack is evolving. So Ramanand, if I was, let's say, a startup guy, what are three or four skill sets that I should pick up in order to be better, in order to be future proof, and in order to be way more effective at whatever I do?
Ramanand: As a startup person, your mind-set is probably in the right place already. You're a little more tuned in, you're a little more agile. I think that gives a lot of us the base. But I think what startup folks often get wrong is they've adopted a different set of blinkers. Some of them, it is all about tech, for some of them, it is about raising funds. You don't want to swap one set of tunnel vision for another. I think given what we're seeing around us, [00:36:00] one, the nature of media, the nature of investing these days, all of these are hypotheses. You add these to your stack, and you pull them out as a Swiss Army knife from time to time. So I think in that we would definitely put skills like storytelling, because the reach that you get with a well told story these days is phenomenal.
The second is persuasion skills. I think the great entrepreneurs already knew that or figured that out along the way. But I think now you can go and learn persuasion, in a very tangible, concrete fashion. And I think to sell, you have to be a great persuader. Someone like me, who came from a research background, had no exposure to sales. Now I have to stand on the street, in some sense, and attract attention and get stuff sold. So how do I contribute? Maybe I don't do that. That might not be my full time role. But as a part of a small organization, I have to throw my weight behind that wheel. So I think persuasion is the other thing. It also comes in handy in terms of getting people to go along with you. It's hugely underrated.
A lot of new media literacy skills have come in. What we are doing right now, I didn't know I would have done this five years ago, because the tools were not democratized enough, there wasn't enough of a set of platforms that helped you get your message out. So I think this new media literacy, as we would probably call it, being able to come on a podcast, being able to run your own video show, as it were, maybe even making a persuasive pitch over video, which is a different combination of skills, [00:38:00] in 2020 has become extremely relevant. So some of these have become almost something that you have to have as a professional, whether it be a startup professional or not.
I think the last thing is habits that help you stay a good entrepreneur. I think I'll turn it back to what you said earlier about health, about finances, you still cannot take the eye off the ball, when it comes to that. So how do you integrate these habits as part of your life? So you're not burnt out, you're not looking at a balance that is depleting. All those kinds of things. I think they still continue to be relevant for an entrepreneur in the future.
Harish Kumar: I would add one more thing there. I've been talking to some of my batch mates from my B-school, and we just completed, what, 18-19 years out of the B-school. I was asking them, “what did you learn in the last 20 years?'' One thing that has been consistent across everyone that I spoke to, is that we should have probably given more importance and attention to the so-called HR courses, back when we were in B-school. Because they realized that after the first four or five years, everything that they did, it had to do with people. So just understanding people, and understanding these cognitive biases and what makes people think in certain ways, is something which people sort of stumble upon after a period of time.
But given so much of work that has already been put out and the kinds of interesting things that people have done in terms of studies, you don't really need to take all that time to actually figure that out yourself over two decades. [00:40:00] But you can actually short circuit that by learning about these things, because whether you're working in a startup, which is building bots, to be working with only bots, you still need humans to work with. Either you're selling to humans, or you're working with humans. And that's something which I have seen is usually a late realization. You know, people feel that, 'Oh, I should have started giving attention to this much earlier.' That's one more thing that I would say for people in the startup world to know more about, understanding these biases and how people think. A lot of that feeds into things like persuasion and storytelling, because that's what you're leveraging upon. But yeah, just understanding people and understanding how they think, is one area that people should definitely be doing more often.
Roshan Cariappa: In startups, there is this whole cliché of the Steve Jobs moniker. 'I am right, I know it, you better follow me' sorts. People fail to realize that there was one Steve Jobs, and there is probably going to be one Mark Zuckerberg. For the rest 99.999 and whatever percentage of us, it's important for us to drive consensus. Otherwise, you're not going to get anywhere, really. The lightbulb moment for me was reading a little bit about David Calderoni and seeing how persuasion itself can be a skill, it's the science. You don't have to fight these all or nothing battles. You can learn to negotiate where literally, both of you can win. Seeing these things has been a sort of a revelation for me.
You might also be running into who we call Gen Z's or millennials. And obviously, they have a whole other mind-set altogether. [00:42:00] Harish, I wonder if you can take us through how the Gen Z's and the millennials are looking at some of these things in terms of their career, in terms of building skills, and so on.
Harish Kumar: Again, we've seen these people, when we actually try to sell to someone in the corporate world, usually they are these CXOs, CHROs, who are of a certain vintage, and the one thing that they're really scared of is, 'Oh these are 20 somethings who are coming in, who have absolutely no respect for our principles of work, their lifestyle is very different’, and all of that. But in our experience, there are some things which remain common. There may be probably more allegiance to self, than to the organization. But also, it's equally true that if the organization is espousing certain values, which are in sync with what they believe in, then there is a much stronger connection than it was. It's a much broader generic sweep that I'm making right now. It wouldn't have been that much strong on the values front for say, the 40 year olds, where they would say, 'You know, this is something that's for public consumption, work is different, and I am different as a person.'
But for these 20 somethings, probably the values that the organization stands for, are what are in sync with their values, then there's going to be a lot more of that bonding, and they are going to probably give a lot more. And there are other things which have always been true, in terms of you give people the autonomy, you let people make their own decisions, they will always have a better drive, to go [00:44:00] ahead and do something like that. The advantage here is that these people are seeking that kind of autonomy right from the beginning.
Probably for the earlier demographic, you were not sure whether you should be giving that autonomy, how will that autonomy be taken. On the receiver side also, they were not sure whether they want that autonomy, they were better off being directed in a certain way. Out here, it's very simpler in that sense, and they're asking for autonomy, 'You better give me that autonomy.' You give them that autonomy and see how things are going. Also given the forces that are at work, like things like the gig economy coming in, and we earlier spoke about so many different areas now, having a direct impact in every career. That's where I think these people who are graduating and who are just joining workforces, now they're already thinking in those lines. It's not something which is a switch for them. They're much more at home dealing with these kinds of landscapes in the organization than the others who probably require a little bit of stability. 'Okay, let me know how my year is going to look like,' is something that people of a certain age are going to ask. Whereas, these people will probably not say, 'Let me know,' because they are not going to take it that way, they're not expecting someone else to tell how their year should look like, and they're okay to embrace whatever is going to come in next.
These are broad generalizations that I have made. But I think they're quite fair assumptions to make in terms of how these people look at work. This is obviously the reason why there's so much tension as well, because a lot of the decision making [00:46:00] authority figures, in some of these companies, at least the bigger companies are still slightly from a vintage. Whereas, the people who are actually doing are all of this kind of a mind-set. There's this perennial conflict.
Roshan Cariappa: I don't know, to my mind, it's a little bit of a dichotomy, actually. Because when I run into people who are 23-24, they want to be really mission driven, and so on. But at the same time, I don't see that sort of an investing for the long term, or investing in compounding as such. It's a very tough challenge to solve for managers and leaders itself. So Ramanand, if you are a manager, if you're a leader at a startup, how do you invest in, in your words, upleveling some of these people? What do you invest in and how do you enable the transition for them?
Ramanand: I think what you said is absolutely true. And it's not just for youngsters, even the middle level folks that we speak to, our entire mental map... if you've lived in India, or you've lived in broadly this generation of the last 20 years, you have some exposure to options, but you still hold stability, you still hold people telling you get that job first. All those things are still very closely ingrained around us. So I'm not going to dismiss people for missing that.
Also, we are humans. I think we prefer the immediate return to the long term, the deference of reward. With any form of compounding, the results come at the end. And all you see until then is a slow drip of something happening. Therefore, [00:48:00] what managers should do, or anyone like us who's trying to get someone else to change their mindset, or get them to uplevel is to first accept that this is a natural state of affairs, and we shouldn't necessarily label them or dismiss them as slow or backward looking, and things like that. That is the first battle to win, and it's more of a personal battle to win.
The second is, I think, in the spirit of show and don't tell, is to be a model. I think a lot of people, if they model the behaviour that they want others to adopt, especially people who look up to them. We say this to parents, we say this to leaders, if you want people to read, you pick up a book first, you have that book lying around you. You start talking about what's great in the book, and let the others follow.
I think the third part is just the power of the corporate treadmill or any kind of treadmill in pulling people along. I think in 2020, we've seen what happens when that treadmill comes to a halt. Because a lot of things that happen to you at work are because you're part of the system that just takes you along with it. How do you design an environment or a system wherein this really becomes a very natural part of that? For instance, some people do these internal talks, on future oriented topics. They'll invite a speaker, they will get someone from within to speak about it, just ensuring it survives for a year, two years, three years and doesn't fizzle out, which is often there. A lot of these initiatives go and die.
If you focus on making sure that their systems are sustainable, you constantly have them running every month, every year, whatever it is, [00:50:00] it's your cadence, I think those things pay off. So to summarize, be that model, don't label people too early, and build these new treadmills that take you along even whether you realize it or not.
Roshan Cariappa: For some of the managers or leaders who are listening, how should they measure these outcomes as Ramanand rightly put it, you have to invest for the long term. But Harish, how do they know that the habits that are forming, or they're investing in their team and so on, is showing some measure of success, or they're pointed in the right direction? What would be some milestones in your opinion? Because some of these things like for example, reading, and some of the talent stacks that you mentioned, it may not be very obvious for people in such a way that hey, this is stuff that I can apply on Monday morning. So, how do managers and leaders learn to understand where the team's headed, and if they're headed in the right direction?
Harish Kumar: I don't think there is any measure that you can use and apply for something like this. And that in itself is the reason why these things don't get taken up. All the things that give you that disproportionate advantage are long term, take time. It's almost impossible to measure. How can you actually measure knowledge? It's impossible, right? But you then tend to use some proxies, saying, oh, somebody has actually done this, whatever, class 12 plus engineering. So some knowledge would have got accumulated is a proxy, it's a leap of faith.
Because over the years, it's been drilled into your brain that this leads to some accumulation of knowledge. So let me take this guy who passed out from this college or whatever. And because all of this has happened in the past, [00:52:00] this person will now deliver in my organization. So, it's more or less a leap of faith that you're making everywhere else as well. That's where the challenge is with building all these habits that Ramanand was talking about earlier, that you don't have that corresponding measure, corresponding metric that you can look at. And because now it's so easy for the bean counters to actually start questioning, okay, now what's the return on this? So you will say, even people who have a little bit of conviction in that, they'll say, but I have other battles to fight. I'm not going to pick up this one more battle to try and convince these people that this is important. That's how all these things go down the drain. You've started some series of talks, you invited four people, and then you run out of energy, you run out of people within your immediate network, and you say, there's nobody to own this initiative in my company. And that's where it drops.
Now, it's so easy for someone like Steve Jobs to say that yeah I'm going to connect the dots. This typography class that I took back in college is why I made the iPod, or why design is so important in Mac. So you will say, yeah, that's one Steve Jobs, and you are again looking at all these things like survivorship bias, and confirmation bias, all these biases are coming, because you're talking about Steve Jobs. What is that manager in this company who has some 50 people reporting to her, how is she going to say that no, all these books that people need to read, it is important, and they have to consume this? It's impossible to have a measure there.
I think that's where the leaders need to make that leap of faith and say that, yes, these are things that are important. [00:54:00] With things like vitamins, or any healthy food, you actually get a return the next day, right? But still you take them. You take the medicines, when you are in a hospital, those are the ones that can immediately show you some return that yeah, I'm getting rid of my pain or whatever. But all the other things that you do, it takes time. You should not try to manufacture a metric just for the sake of it, because it is not going to do justice to what people are looking for when they ask for this metric is my take on it.
Roshan Cariappa: I think it's also a lot to do with culture as well. Simple things like having a library in your office, for example, sends the right signals. It also inculcates the sort of behaviours that you want to see in your team. Having an open forum or a talks sort of a feature on a weekly, fortnightly basis, getting people to learn, to share, maybe do book reviews, and so on and so forth. Small little things that really add to everything that people are doing. But the broader point, I think what I can glean from both of you is that you need holistic individuals, you don't need machines. Machines will do machines' work. You need a lot more holistic individuals. That is why all of these complementing skill sets, which may not be so obvious to even be there in that realm, are important. So, Ramanand over the last six years, what are some anecdotes, what are some outcomes that you've seen? Some transformations in people that come to mind?
Ramanand: Looking back, quite a few of these unexpected events that have happened to us, come to mind. For instance, in our compounds, recently one of our reading [00:56:00] batches that we had, the first one completed about 500 days recently. People in that group, they looked back and said, if we started on the first day, and started reading War and Peace, we would have died by now! Some of them were a little surprised as to how far they had come. We were also not really expecting some of these milestones to go by, like our 1000-day journey, because by the end of the 1000-day journey, it was just another day in the life of Choose to Thinq. That was one thing that instantly came to mind.
In corporate settings, one thing that we are happy to have contributed to, from this holistic point of view, so a client that we worked with, they have been winning an award for innovation. So we've been helping them with fostering innovation. I think a lot of these things have been about how do you persuade more people to take part in internal innovation, when you're really not getting the innovators prize, which in the outside world, someone who's working in a startup is doing it for a big pot of gold.
But in a corporate environment, that pot of gold is a lot more tempered. It comes in the form of visibility, in the form of better prospects, or being labelled and seen as an inventor. So, a lot of work went into getting people drawn into some of these programs, getting them to listen to some of these interesting concepts. A lot of people in this world have not heard of people like Taleb, for instance. And risk is such a huge part of any form of innovation. These are the kinds of things, and when people now [00:58:00] we see them confidently talking on stage, kind of building, stitching together, some idea that they came up with, and taking it to fruition. We've had a few of these cases along the way.
Over time, given a broad enough horizon, I think what happens is that you'll get so habituated to the system that you rarely notice these milestones going by. It becomes like yet another day in the life of Choose to Thinq. I don't know if Harish has any other anecdotes to add.
Harish Kumar: Yeah, I think it's very similar. There've been a couple of people in our reading Compounds, where we have actually had their spouses also join after a certain point of time, because they said, the spouse was wondering what is really changing you? What is this, which is responsible for this change in this person? And they said, 'Oh, this is why it is happening. Why don't you also join?' That is a very heartening thought for us that something like reading and something like this being done over a period of time is actually making a change in someone. How they think and how they work and how they lead their life. Eventually, that's what you are looking at. I'm sure everyone who writes a book or creates any content, a podcast or a book is actually looking at some kind of change. Some kind of change in terms of thinking, of doing work or whatever. We've managed to do that with a few people. Nothing better than that.
Roshan Cariappa: Fantastic. We're almost at the end of the podcast, and I would be remiss not to ask for book recommendations from you guys. I know, you can give us a whole litany of things that we could look up, but I'm going to limit it to three. Your top [01:00:00] three recommendations and maybe you could focus on our audience as well of startup operators, founders, investors, and whoever is listening. So, we can begin with Ramanand, your top three books that everyone should read.
Ramanand: Thanks Roshan for taking me first because I know, in going second I'd have this blank... when asked to recommend, you just go blank. My number one pick these days is Alchemy by Rory Sutherland, the ad-man and who works at Ogilvy, because I think he's in a fascinating job of drawing influences. I think he is a perfect example of why one should literally have an open mind. My second recommendation, which is by now an all-time personal favourite is Thinking Fast and Slow. Again, one of those books that have changed my life the way I think, there is again, a version of me before the book, like you said, and a version after that. The third book, I would have said Factfulness, but I know Harish will want to say that. I will go with the Scott Adams book, How To Fail at Almost Everything And Still Win Big. That I think is again a very fascinating book in terms of how you can be seemingly ordinary but still try and have a shot at an extraordinary life.
Roshan Cariappa: Right. Harish?
Harish Kumar: Factfulness, like Ramanand said, I think it's one of those books. Thinking Fast and Slow is like a zeroth book for us. We start with that. We consider it a must read for everyone. So, Factfulness is one. The Power of Moments is another one that we are big fans of again, by Chip and Dan Heath. Almost every book that they have written, whether it's Made to Stick or Decisive are great books. But Power of Moments, I [01:02:00] thought was something which is very relevant for the kind of audience that you just mentioned. Because a lot of times you need that elevation, you need those moments. Those are the moments that are memorable. How can you engineer those moments is what that book talks about. Factfulness, Power of Moments, and the third one I would actually not put a name for, but any good autobiography and it could be anything from something like Out Of My Comfort Zone, by Steve Waugh or any of the so called business leaders like Steve Jobs or whatever. But good detailed biographies/autobiographies. Out Of My Comfort Zone is an all-time favourite of mine. Any other thing, something which is detailed and is honest, it could be Open by Andre Agassi, any of these, I think are must-reads.
Roshan Cariappa: Fantastic. Ramanand and Harish, it's been awesome talking to you guys over the last hour. I'm sure we could have gone on for another hour, talk about books and whatnot. Maybe we should do that sometime, where we pick up four or five books and go through what each of us learned out of that and what we liked. So before we leave you, where can people find you? And how can people access Choose to Thinq courses?
Harish Kumar: Choosetothinq.com is our mothership website. We are on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Similarly, CTQ Compounds, if you're looking at joining any of the compounds, CTQ Compounds is where you will find all the compounds that are available. And just search for us on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'm @bvhk on Twitter, Ramanand is @quatrainman on Twitter. These are all channels that anyone can find very easily.
Roshan Cariappa: Superb. Thanks, guys. It was wonderful talking to you, and all [01:04:00] the best for everything that's coming up.
Ramanand: Thank you so much, Roshan.
Harish Kumar: Thank you.
Roshan Cariappa: Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, then don't forget to subscribe to us on your favourite platform, and share this episode with all of your fellow Startup Operators. Also, follow the Startup Operator on LinkedIn and Twitter for more updates. Stay safe. Take care and see you soon on a brand new episode of the Startup Operator.
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