[CTQ Smartcast] How to be Future-Relevant in a Shape-Shifting World? With Abhijit Bhaduri
Abhijit Bhaduri is the Founder and CEO of Abhijit Bhaduri and Associates. Forbes has called him ‘India’s most interesting globalist’ and he is also LinkedIn’s Top Voices for 2020. He is an advisor to businesses and has authored interesting books like ‘Don't Hire the Best’, ‘The Digital Tsunami’ and very recently ‘Dreamers and Unicorns’.
In this Smartcast, hosted by CTQ co-founder BV Harish Kumar, Abhijit has talked about the five shifts in the world of work that are changing and shaping businesses and what will be its impact on businesses in future.
Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.
Follow CTQ Smartcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or on your favourite podcast platform.
(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)
SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
Five shifts in the hybrid world of work
How can one adjust and thrive in these changing times?
How can employees get better at handling diversity at the workplace?
The role of curating the content for individuals and organizations.
Media: The superpower behind building the culture narrative
PLUS
What one thing remains unchanged in this ever-changing world
AND
Abhijit Bhaduri’s take on content and leadership
LINKS TO BOOKS, PEOPLE, AND IDEAS MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST
BOOKS
Don't Hire the Best by Abhijit Bhaduri
The Digital Tsunami by Abhijit Bhaduri
Dreamers and Unicorns by Abhijit Bhaduri
PEOPLE
Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
Gillian Tett, Chair FT Editorial Board (US)
IDEAS
If you enjoyed this Smartcast, you will also like Dr. Anand Deshpande On Lifelong Learning And How To Stay Relevant In A Changing World
TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
00:00:00
Harish Kumar: Abhijit Bhaduri needs no introduction but I'll try to do that anyway. Abhijit is an author and an advisor to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Forbes called him ‘India's most interesting globalist’ and he has been voted as Asia's number one expert on learning among the 10 best in the world. He’s also LinkedIn’s Top Voices for 2020. He's written interesting books like ‘Don't Hire the Best’, ‘The Digital Tsunami’ and his latest book is called ‘Dreamers and Unicorns’. In this book, Abhijit talks about five shifts in the world of work that are changing and shaping businesses all over. On CTQ Smartcast, we are always trying to bring interesting insights about future relevance. So this was a great opportunity to talk to Abhijit about these five shifts, they're almost like the Porter's Five Forces model in my mind and what does it mean for businesses? How should leaders and individuals think about making sense of these changes? And their impact on what they do? We covered a lot of areas of mutual interests like culture, employer branding, social capital, cultivating the right mindset and of course curiosity and curation. The chat was so interesting that I have promised Abhijit to record another episode with no time limit so that we can cover the future of work in more detail and also venture into other mutual areas of interest like Kishore Kumar and Satyajit Ray. If you are interested in storifying and deliberate orchestration of your culture, please do check out our website. You'll find links to subscribe to Smartcast of course, our Weekly Smartletter and a Telegram Channel where we share anecdotes, articles, discount codes and prompts, that will help you think about upleveling for future relevance. Till Abhijit and I figure out our calendars to schedule our timeless chat, you have to make do with this episode which is top-notch.
00:02:18
Harish: Hi Abhijit, welcome to this CTQ Smartcast.
00:02:22
Abhijit: Hey, thank you so much, Harish. Thanks for having me.
00:02:24
Harish: Yeah. Like I said, it's a pleasure and a privilege to have you on this. A lot of our viewers and listeners follow you. I know that for a fact. What you write about and what you talk about is very close to our hearts as well. So I'm really looking forward to the next hour of conversation with you.
00:02:43
Abhijit: Likewise. So am I.
00:02:45
Harish: Yeah. So Abhijit, at CTQ we work a lot about future relevance for organizations and individuals. So in that context, the book that you've written and what you have talked about in that book is extremely cogent and important. Just to give context for the rest of the conversation for our audience members, can you talk about what these five shifts in the hybrid world of work are?
00:03:14
Abhijit: So when I wrote ‘Dreamers and Unicorns’, this was written pretty much within a couple of weeks of the pandemic hitting the world. Some of the research is actually dating back to just a little before the pandemic, I was contemplating doing a little bit of workaround how the world of work is going to be impacted with various forces that are happening. And we sort of look at things like political shifts that are happening and so this has happened post-pandemic that you get the US to sort of have a certain kind of a war with China about tech. They banned some things and the Indian government banned that. So suddenly if let's say you are working in TikTok as a content creator, suddenly your life changes. So those are political things. There are economic factors, social factors, tech factors, etc.; o all of that together. I talked about five different kinds of shifts. One is, the organizations which are going to survive are going to be boundaryless. That's your first shift and by boundaryless, one of the best examples is that Apple designs in the US, build the products with let's say the Foxconn labour. Then it uses the parts drawn in from Japan and Korea, and sells it in Germany and looks at the profit in Ireland. Each time you pick up a product, we don't realize that it's really going and doing the entire circle around the globe. And that's a good example of, you know, boundarylessness. You look at Google, what business it is. I mean it's not just a search business, it is advertising, many other factors such as driverless cars, automation, they're working on increasing life expectancy, Google satellite, and various kinds of things. Knowledge and data may be at the heart of what is common to even Apple or Google or Amazon. But they are different businesses and they have all evolved in this boundary-less model. So this is probably one of the big ones. And when you look at boundaryless, you can look at, you know, Amazon, which is the e-commerce company that actually has a Prime Video, which is a fantastic way for them to not only look at what people are searching and buying but also the emotional cues of the individuals. So that sort of becomes a really powerful way and we'll come to that because one of the shifts which are there is the ability to understand emotions. Therefore, which is the second shift that I'm talking about, being able to understand emotions is a great business and it's also going to become very important for leaders. You combine the first and the second shift, for example, it just throws open a different set of economic possibilities. The third shift which one should talk about is the existence of polarities. If you think about e-books versus paperbacks. We've been having this debate that now paperbacks are going to be gone. But it's not true in India. It's still less than 30%. Even in a place like the US, it's about 36%. And you know you do find paperbacks existing. Yes, digital is growing but it is still going to be an ‘and world’. So you will have freelancers and gig workers but you will also have full-time employees. When we try to sort of look at the world we will have to take a nuanced view. You have to manage an ‘and world’, its polarities. Both will coexist. Yeah, so you look at what's happening in the job market, you have nine million open jobs in the US, and you have a high rate of unemployment. And then there are salaries which are going through the roof. Somebody who starts off with 36,000 a month eventually triggers a bidding war and lands up getting a salary of 1.1 crores. So you sort of look at that and say this doesn't make sense. But then you say that there are also people who are losing jobs where they have no idea where their next meal is going to come from. So you will see these polar opposites exist and I think the role of the leader is going to be to manage the ecosystem rather than just the organization. Which in some sense brings me to the fourth one, which is the ability to understand intangibles. You look at the roles of saying the influencers. You have the influencer for a brand that can create huge value through 280 characters. And one of the richest people on YouTube is a 10-year-old kid who reviews toys who just says “Yes, I like this toy and I don't like this toy,” and makes 23 million out of that and employs his parents. So a lot of these things, in a traditional world of work don't make sense, but these are the shifts that you will see more and more. So, the ability to understand emotions becomes a very significant part of let's say design. That’s how better UX is created. Better UX leads to stickiness, etc. The impact of emotions in the world of work. Or for that matter, take the fifth one which is the Perpetual Beta, which is that nothing will remain in a static frame. You think about it, go back to the early days of the pandemic. We thought that okay, the pandemic is going to last for two weeks, maybe three and then we are done and we are back to normal. So just hold on. So you hold your breath for three weeks and see nothing happens. And then you say that okay, so another month or two. And then you say no. Somebody says that you will get vaccines only in September and it's only after that. And then we have vaccines. And the question is which vaccine? The problem is not whether you have a vaccine or not, but you have too many vaccines now. Is this better than the other? Do I trust that or the other? So emotion becomes important. But also you are in Perpetual Beta and then you've discovered that these people are not taking the vaccine. So the problem is not that you don't have a vaccine, you have a vaccine. And then there are people who are saying, I don't want to take it, whether for religious reasons or health reasons or shortage, that we are not giving it to the kids. If you can't give it to the kids, then the teachers can't go back to work. But if teachers don't want to take the vaccine even if the kids are there, can they do this? So now look at the world of work, it's been completely topsy-turvy. The next time somebody says this is the new normal. There is no such thing as a new normal. It is something that is evolving. It is like the river, it is evolving. You can't step into the same river twice because you are different a minute later and the river is different a minute later. In this case, it is the same thing. The world of work is becoming like a river, everything is different. Work has moved home. Your sleep time has become the time when you're watching movies. Movie times are when you're doing work. Work time is when you're watching films. It's just completely topsy-turvy as if the world of work has been put into one of those blenders and somebody just turned the switch on and we are just waiting for things to settle. But chances are that it is going to be that blender for a bit.
00:10:43
Harish: Yeah, I think that is a fantastic preface to our conversation about it because you've thrown in so many different analogies which make it very concrete. What I found very nice is the ‘and’ part of what you're talking about right? When you're talking about boundaryless thinking, it is not that, like you're saying that organizations should be only digitally native because you are going to have the paperbacks versus the Kindle example that you gave. Those traditional channels are still going to continue. And how do you see that panning out in say the context of India, where there is still the whole notion of India and the so-called Bharat. Do these five forces or five shifts or five changes hold true in that context as well?
00:11:29
Abhijit: Oh yes, it will hold true. I mean it was just a very simple element, you talked about the ‘and world’. You will see the retail chain. So you will see the supermarket and the big malls at one end. And then you will also see the local kirana shops. It survives because it handles emotions. They know your needs, they know the family. So they know that mother likes this brand of tea and then that if you're getting a visitor who is a fancy visitor, you will get this. And so they understand the nuances of the family in terms of emotions. The supermarket does not, but the supermarket has efficiency. You can put the order on an app and they can deliver it in 20 minutes. But you are reaching a world where any one of them is not enough. You are going to need to have not just know the app and the digital part of it, but you will also need to have the relationship part of it. So the ‘and world’ will continue in India as well. And India has always been a very boundaryless setup. We've taken lots and lots of influences and adapted them. So it is a very interesting culture where you don't actually have two distinct blends. Ganga and Jamuna always blend together to create a very different flavour of the water. India is in that zone. So it is a very unique market and it's got its own set of nuances of social systems. Every region is different. I mean look at how incredibly super diverse this country is. Every state of India has cuisine where from appetizer to dessert, everything is different. But even within the state, it will change by caste, it will change by family tradition, it will change by dietary norms, that will change by day of the week. That today there is only vegetarian food and today there is non-vegetarian. In the same country, you'll have Navratra where the Bengali celebrate with pork, non-vegetarian food and the Gujaratis will celebrate it with vegetarian food. So it's a land of complete extremities. There are people who will not even have onions and garlic and then you have people who are at the other end of the scale, all kinds of meat is eaten. So it's a super diverse country and where it will pan out, I think India is going to create a very different model of the world. We have taken different models. You've started with an Indian version of let's say whichever company, global organization, you see an Indian version of that. Effectively, the survival of any of these is going to be based on understanding the nuances of India. For example, e-commerce may have started off being a copycat of Amazon but at the same time in India with the distrust of credit cards, cash on delivery has become the norm and now everybody else has to do it. Suddenly it is not that you are sort of changing the rest of the guys to start using credit cards but yes that is going on. But you now have a very different model of cash on delivery. At the same time you look at the text tag that is coming to India, you know you have the Aadhaar cards and the Jandhan system. This infrastructure with the UPI systems that have come in, just suddenly makes it possible for everyone to have a digital wallet. You're sort of paying through that and it's become more secure. So India in some strange ways is actually leading the world in many different aspects. Also like I said, India is the perfect example of an ‘and’. We are in both extremes.
00:15:30
Harish: Yeah. Not exactly a parallel but trying to draw a parallel. So like you spoke about how you have the entire spectrum, in your individual capacity you work with startups to unicorns to market shapers. So how are different companies of different sizes and scales, and of different origins handling these shifts in India?
00:15:59
Abhijit: When you look at one of the things I talk about in ‘Dreamers and Unicorns’ is that it's the startups and I call them dreamers because they have dreams of growth and they have dreams of what they want to be. Then you have the unicorns where you have a national presence and market shapers have a global presence. That's the broad outline. I think each one of them has, what is common to all of them is that now more and more you will see leadership, talent and culture will become the three growth drivers. So the leader has to set the vision. For example, I'm working with a company that does branding through music. And they are now going to go global because they've got some fabulous work done across the world. To grow from dreamer to let's say unicorn and then market shaper, they will need to not only build the business, but they will also need to build the organization. So I think because the world of work has turned into this blender as I described with the five forces, they will have to address leadership, talent and culture with far greater deliberation than what organizations have done. I did some work for a financial products startup. And it's quite interesting, they've just barely got about seven people in the team right now and it's a Singapore based firm. Yet if you look at it, they are spending time trying to work out what is the mission of the company? Why do we exist? How are we going to deliver it? How will it show up in our HR systems etc? And you would never have seen a startup looking at all these things because these are always, you know, even a few years back, we would have said that this mission and vision and all that stuff is something that you put on a poster and then forget about it. It's pretty interesting, they're looking at the mission and vision as a way of making choices and who they work with and how they will grow the business. So I think that is a huge shift that I see and it's an incredible thing that you're looking at polarities, you're looking at the power of the brand. The last 12 months or maybe 18 months now with the pandemic, if you look at that, I've had way more work coming in the way of individuals spending big money on building their personal brand because when they are making career transitions, whether it's from being an individual contributor to a mid-level person or from a mid-level more commonly to a senior-level person or sometimes through transitions that the person decided not to pursue that particular work, either voluntary or involuntary. Both cases are there. You figure out, what do you want to do? Where are you likely to be more successful? And then after that, you build your communication system to tell the world that I'm no longer A, I'm now B. So they should start thinking of you. That means crafting your social presence in a certain way, talking to people in a certain way and building on those skills and then meeting the clients in a certain kind of way, it's just a complete reinvention of the ecosystem. If you pause for a minute, think about it, what we said, the leader of a large market shaper has to worry about the ecosystem because the largest company has to worry about government regulation, the FDC, all the things about copyright infringement and data security. In Europe they have GDPR. You have to worry about that. So does the individual. For the first time the challenges that an individual faces are in no way different from the challenges that let us say the large system is facing.
00:20:00
Harish: Yeah. So that's very interesting because that's been a recurring theme in our Smartcast interviews as well, where we have asked leaders about when is the right time to do this thing around building your culture manifesto. And the most successful people have always said, it is always the first thing that you do because all your choices are going to depend on what kind of organization that you want to build. So having that done first is extremely important. Is something that I've been hearing more and more because otherwise, the previous notion was that you wait first to find that product-market fit. First, it is the survival issues and then you get to this but not anymore. These are very interesting trends that we're seeing. Also, the fact that you talked about the individual social capital that you're talking about. How you build that personal brand is in no way different from how an organization should be thinking.
00:21:02
Abhijit: Just perfect. And likewise for the individual also, the best time to sort of building your personal brand is today. You build your network, you build your brand, you build your skills, you sort of address the ecosystem before you now need to do it. You always carry that spare tyre in the boot rather than thinking of buying a spare tire when you have a flat, it's really like that.
00:21:28
Harish: Yeah, again, it's an excellent analogy there. I think you're perfect when it comes to showing, don't tell. You give the right analogy and all the right examples at the right moment.
00:21:39
Abhijit: Thank you.
00:21:42
Harish: So just extending that question about how leaders are thinking and how they should be thinking about trying to be more future relevant. Trying to build their organizations to be more future relevant. If you think of these five forces that we're talking about. To me, it's almost like this Porter's Five Forces model. It's a parallel to that when I'm talking to you. Acknowledging these shifts are happening is one thing, right. But are there any skills that you're talking about, mindsets that you're talking about and how do you get better at that? One thing is to say yes, these are shifts that are happening. These are going to affect my organization and me as an individual. How do I make those or do the small net practice or things that I do to be able to be more confident about handling these changes and actually thriving in these?
00:22:35
Abhijit: I would look at a couple of different things. One is to build a greater sort of diversity in the talent pool. Now you're looking at many of the large organizations who are saying that you don't need to actually do four years of engineering to be able to get the work that you're doing, you can do this particular skill where you build your skill through this little course or short term courses. You build the skill and then the rest of it, you sort of work on the job and then you build your proficiency in that. So you acquire the basics of the skill and the job becomes the place where you build proficiency and that becomes the way of retention. So in some sense, we are seeing that leadership, talent and culture are becoming more and more cemented and it's like a concentric circle. What you are really looking at, I think you are getting exposure to other sectors, being able to think about the organization from the outside in is the basic shift. We've always thought that you benchmark for everything, you want to declare a holiday for some XYZ reason, you always call up your five peers and say, are you guys doing this tomorrow? And then most of them say we are doing it. You make a decision like that. Today you will see that even if you are a huge market shaper, some kid sitting somewhere in the back of beyond can upset your model or can capture a market hugely faster than some of the largest players too. So I think the distinction between the set of things that impact large organizations versus what impacts an individual they have merged both in terms of possibilities and the challenges. So if you see that things about relevance and irrelevance impact the individual and impacts organizations. Your product-market fit is valid for the question for the individual and it is valid for the organizations. In many ways this mindset difference, that I don't need to invest in it, that's for the big players to do. Those distinctions have gone away and if you look at many of the things that are coming up. There are new models and new opportunities where I think the opportunity for organizations to start experimenting, let's say I try to identify talent. Can there be new methods of doing it? One way to think about it is you can interview me and ask me, “Are you comfortable handling diversity?” And it's only a crazy guy who will say that “No, I'm not comfortable handling diversity. I'm not good at it.” Then how do you identify those little intangible dimensions? As we said, that's important. The emotions that get generated in my mind when I work with people who are very different from me. How open am I because it's also eventually a predictor of your diversity and innovation? Your innovation actually comes from a by-product of that. Your agility comes from the degree of openness that you have. Oh, I used to do this but there's a better idea, let me adopt it. So openness is a huge predictor of your success in business. Having said that, how do you identify that without asking for it in an interview? Yeah. So maybe one of the ways to think about it is that one option was, I was brainstorming something with a client of mine. And I was saying one option could be to look at the person's friend list on social media, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or some such thing. Is my content something that attracts people from outside of my country? How many such people are there? What percentage? Okay, agreed, the larger percentage may still be from the country of origin or whatever. But then what is the percentage? Is it one percentage out of 1000? Is it 500 out of 1000? Is it 10 out of 1000? It gives you a degree of openness, and also what is the diversity and the people who I'm sort of creating in my ecosystem? Because these are things where I'm not putting up a performance. In an interview, it's a performance, which is why when people say, “what's your greatest weakness?” You say, “I work really hard,” and those kinds of things. We’ve seen those memes floating around and it's a joke. So you can't answer many of these things, ask these in an interview, but you can find out what the person is doing. For example, there are audio platforms and there are platforms like Mentza where you can sort of have a conversation that gets recorded and you can listen to it. So I may not have been part of this conversation. I can listen to it later. And as I listen to it, it builds like a web history. The equivalent of that as you know, it creates an audio portfolio. These are the things that I've been interested in. You can figure out that I was an HR person who have been interested only in the talent part of it. Have I also looked at music, have I looked at astronomy, have I looked at the science ones? Have I looked at the finance ones? It's a far better predictor of you trying to hire somebody who needs to be very open in the role as a measure of success than to ask me, are you an open person? Of course, I'm going to say yes, but then you find that I have no curiosity on this. So it's probably a far bigger predictor of how I can be innovative or not on this. So that's how I would define the shifts.
00:28:31
Harish: Right. That's very interesting. A follow-up question to that, as you've spoken about identifying what are the tendencies that you're looking at in a candidate. But you also have a huge pool of existing people in your organization who may need to be up levelled, reskilled, whatever you want to call it. Right? And how do you, A, identify them? Because you may not be putting them through an interview or an exercise like this. One is to identify what are the things that you're looking at now, we're probably getting into the learning phase. And how do they then get better at handling something like diversity? I was talking to somebody now, this is probably the first time in our corporate history where people are actually working in companies where they're, you know, daughters and sons are also working in similar roles. So you have everything, all kinds of diversity including ageism that is catching up now. How do people get better at handling something like say diversity and all the different changes that we just talked about?
00:29:43
Abhijit: Yeah. If you again go back to, very quickly, those five factors. If you sort of really looks at that. How do you build boundaryless thinking where you don't get caught up with the fact that okay, this guy is not an engineer, he/she cannot pick up this particular skill. Companies still use weird systems like the caste system which is you know, you are from a premier institute and somebody is not. So you will get 100 bucks more than the other per cent. These distinctions are quite meaningless and archaic. And I think the ability for the ways of hiring needs to change for the people you're bringing in. But more importantly, what do you do with the existing people? Because they were brought in for a different context and the context has changed. So we have been in that blender, how do you handle the post-blender model? And in that situation, I think you're looking at exposing people continuously to different sorts of stimuli. Some people respond to videos, some people respond to audio, some people respond to conversations, some people respond to very different media platforms. Yeah, some people respond to a 15-second stimulus. Some people will read the 12-minute article. So one important piece to think about is that our preferences on media and platforms have radically changed. Sometime back the CEO of Netflix had said something very interesting that we are competing with sleep. Can the person choose Netflix over a sort of sleep? So he perhaps said it jokingly, but I would sort of really turn back and say that every organization’s content today competes with distractions. Not just Netflix, but it could be anything, whether it is movies, doing sudoku or spending time with the family or getting up and taking a walk or making tea which I brew for like half an hour and I stand and watch it. We are for the first time working in a world where the supervisor has no role in our life. So the role of the supervisor has disappeared and we are looking at a lot more autonomy. When you have autonomy what matters is am I motivated to do the work that I am given? So here is where I think you know all our hiring systems have so far focused on finding out if I can do the work. So the ‘can’ model of thinking is can I do this calculation because I have a math degree. The bigger question to ask is why you've got an entire cottage industry spawned on employee engagement, which I think is a ridiculous idea because if the work isn't interesting, nobody tells you that you need to go and play golf if you're a golfer, let's imagine. Nobody tells you, I'm going to incentivize, you better play golf, okay, you better improve your game. Who incentivizes you when the kid is trying to go from level one to level two at robotics. Nothing. So there are a whole lot of things. It's a myth that human beings need to be motivated through motivational talks. That's a completely archaic notion, which I don't know how you picked it up. Work itself is either motivating or it's not. So we can put up a pretence and do things for the time being when we are not motivated, even though we can. The real question is what do I want to do? If you focus on using that as your hiring criteria, suddenly you’ve changed the game because now you're really talking about it, you can build this momentum based on the fact that I'm motivated to do this. I am signing up for more classes. You don't need to incentivize, “Hey, listen, Harish, you better do this course, you have three more days to complete it now.” Then people think of ways to bypass it, you will put it on the screen and then you go make your coffee and come back after having tea to switch it off. As far as the office is concerned, you've done the course but you haven't learned anything. So motivation becomes very important. The desire to build mastery comes in only when you want to do something. The final pieces are autonomy, mastery and purpose. Daniel Pink’s model is a very very simple thumb rule which I really love. Why am I doing, what am I doing? You know whatever I'm doing, is it for my kids, is it for myself? Is it to build bigger houses? What am I doing it for? Wherever the motivation is to do it for somebody else, who I care about, the loved ones. Therefore understand your emotions, when you do it for somebody else you are going to be driven to do it on a continuous basis. It's never a one-off because let us say I want to do something because I want to buy ABC. It's transactional. I buy the ABC and then I'm done. But when you do something you create a business, let's say to solve the healthcare crisis in India, you are going to be motivated. That's why the people who are driven by that purpose work like maniacs. Now, that may not be the best possible outcome. You need to have divisions and variations, different matters. You don't have a need to tell the entrepreneur that hey listen, you better go back to the office because it's your company. Nobody has to say that neither does anybody have to say that too many of the people who join because the purpose is so motivating. So if you are solving real human problems, I don't think you need to worry about motivation and purpose and all of that. We need to look at human beings through a very different lens today.
00:35:55
Harish: Right, yeah. One thing that you mentioned about people consuming content in different formats and different ways appeal to different people, Right? So is there a role for curation in that very deliberate content? We actually have a term for this very say, curiosity diet. It's like your thaali, where you have different food nutrition groups, you also have space for dessert, which could be the very random thing because that is what is going to probably bring that serendipity into your information that you're consuming. So is there a role for curation in the content that people are consuming both from an individual standpoint as well as for an organization?
00:36:42
Abhijit: The answer is yes. If you really look at it, it needs human beings and technology to partner together. Today, when we started our conversation, I was talking about how you compete with the most invisible things. Your competition comes from the most invisible products. You look at how home food has changed. Home food today competes with stuff that I can order from a restaurant. So suddenly, nine million restaurants become the competition for your cooking skills or your ability to cook up variety. Because let's say the kid says today ‘I want to have jalebi’. The mother will say no, we'll make it on Sunday because then I can do this and that. At the other end, the kid says to the dad, ‘Why don't you make pasta?’ Dad says, ‘I've got a call, I will do it for dinner’. The kid can order in from one of the food delivery apps. So I think suddenly when you really look at the same model when you have abundance, you actually always need curation. Abundance and curation go hand in hand because when you go to a place where you like everything, I mean it happens to me when I go to an ice cream shop. You see like, you know, so many flavours. I do one of the two things. So I either say, okay, you know what, I want chocolate when you kind of just don't even try it. You know, tried and tested, we do that. The other is when you're trying to be adventurous, you are open to trying out different things. You taste five different things and in my case at least I am not much wiser except for the fact that I have tried five more flavours of ice cream. However, when the shopkeeper says, have you tried this particular flavour? The other day I went there, he said this is guava and chilli. I said, “Geez guava and chilli in ice cream. No, I don't want it.” He says it’s really good, try it out, if you don’t like it, it’s on me. I ended up having that and picking up a box to bring home, right? So curation is the way you will discover the gems, you will have your own path. You will have your tried and tested. So which is why when Netflix says 97% match or 99% match. I'm already primed to believe I will like it and you show me something which is 50% match and I'm saying why are you even showing me, I'm not going to watch it. 70% match, if I have nothing else to watch, I don't know, but maybe not. So the moment the algorithm figures out that anything less than 95, I will not watch, it doesn't matter, they take it out of my system. Simplify. Curation is a process of simplification because most of us when faced with choices more than two or three, we go crazy, we don't make great choices. So, if you are asked that, okay, tell me which song of Kishore Kumar do you like? I just can't answer that question because there are so many of them. Now you specify and say the 80s. Okay, I still have too many of them now. You say songs from the film, Ghar, I'll say, yeah, I love that. So, I think when you narrow it down to two or three, it enables you to make better choices. So, media and content actually need to be curated.
00:40:36
Harish: Right. And do you also believe that media and content have become super powerful in building that whole narrative around your culture and what you believe in?
00:40:48
Abhijit: Always, the media helps ideas get amplified. How do you know that this is the hot new thing, this is the trend, this is the best. So the media is how you are doing it. There is only one big difference. A simple way to understand the challenge of media is that today if you were to talk to 30 of your friends or in any of your WhatsApp groups in school or college, you would say that which is your favourite TV program that you watch? Assuming that people still watch TV because there's a percentage who say we don't even watch TV. You will discover there is nothing which is in common. So this whole model that we will go and watch this film together, somebody will say, oh but I've seen that film, somebody will say, I don't like the music. We have become far more individualistic in our consumption because of that it is that much harder to find common factors. Because we have become a market of one. So it has become that much tougher. Go back a couple of decades were at least in India music was common. The radio played, it was the same channels, you heard Vividh Bharati, you knew the same songs. Therefore games like Antakshari actually came about because everybody knew the same songs. It's a very uniquely Indian kind of a process at least in some of the communities here is a very unique form of entertainment. Impossible to see it in many of the other communities because the choices become more fragmented. Simultaneously when people still play Antakshari, they still sing the old songs. Because that's a common language we have learned, not that you don't know the new songs, you still do. Some of the younger people do have yourselves, but your first recall is always that. Because it was a shared experience. Today, because I'm listening to music in my years and not through the amplification process. It's a 1:1 experience. I like one particular song from the movie which you would have never seen or heard of. So I think it has become that much tougher. It's so fragmented, you need somebody to create clusters and make them available. And I think that's the role of the curator that you asked about.
00:43:09
Harish: Right, yeah. Just to extend that, what is the role of curation and media in the context of employer branding in terms of an organization conveying to their entire ecosystem, their employees, potential candidates, partners, customers about what they believe in both external as well as in internal?
00:43:33
Abhijit: So I think there are a couple of different reasons to invest in employer branding. And like I was saying, that's been one of the fastest-growing segments in the last 18 months that I've been working on with a bunch of individuals and larger corporations. The reason is employer branding lowers your cost of talent acquisition very simply put. Let's imagine there is an unknown employer brand, maybe they do fabulous work and are just what you would have loved. Then there is well-known employment, let's for simplicity and it's one of the companies everybody knows about. If you took a role, if you had a choice, to be more specific, let's say the larger, more well-known brand offered you slightly less of everything that was there. The majority of the people will still accept that not everybody. That is the reason why sometimes back, companies would even say this is the premium you pay for working with us. I remember that there are some of the companies which have been popular at the campus even though they didn't pay the highest salaries, they would say this is the premium you pay for joining us. Yeah. And everybody valued the experience that they got and yes, they would also crib in the evening saying, they pay us so little. But they were on day one at the campus. So I think the employer brand is built, in their particular case. It was built through generations of people saying “Phenomenal place boss, I just learnt so much out there.” Then the next generation comes in knowing fully well that yes, salary is going to be less, but I will learn and I can make up for it. So, I think the cost of a very powerful employer brand is this. An employer brand in some sense makes the filtering process easier. It tells you that it's a certain kind of company. Yeah, let's say if you kind of think that it's a company where you're supposed to work in a certain kind of fashion. Those in advertising and have worked in an advertising agency, they will tell you that in advertising because it's a creative industry and you've got a client deadline and in those days, you have to put the ad on to the television. And let's say it's supposed to go live at 9:00, you don't have a choice but to give it by, let's say a certain time in the evening, by 5:00, you have to give it to get cued and then you'll play at 9:00. You give it at 5:15, I'm sorry, but it can be played today. Tomorrow, yes, but today it can't be. Therefore, it is completely sacrosanct, people will do those crazy round the clock things and sort of do that. When you are looking at telling people about the career and culture as the two big pillars of employer branding. The more you can do it in multiple channels, especially in the uncluttered channels. You put a TV spot, most people don't watch television, so how are you going to reach them? So I guess the question is if you do it in multiple channels in ways where you can showcase the career opportunities and culture, it should attract the perfect place because think about it when you work with a placement agency, you are not looking for this person to provide 50,000 resumes for one job. Maybe you want two or maybe you want a third one, right? So again, back to the choice question, you would want that in a perfect world, only those real, ideal three people apply. Then you can spend time and energy finding a great fit. Okay, this person will be great not just for this role, but also for the next role that I'm thinking of. We can do all that, so I think the opportunity to do that kind of work becomes possible through employer branding. Finally, of course, it builds trust, builds market share, it builds your share of mind everything, so that's really the way. The reason why people will stay in a particular company is also its culture and the brand. Your brand is also made up of leadership, talent and culture, so in that sense. That's how IPL works, you spend a certain kind of money. Younger players would be willing to forgo some kind of money just because they want to play in a certain team. So it's everywhere.
00:48:15
Harish: Yeah, I think that's again very instructive. A lot of what we do with companies is actually building a repository of stories that show how people live their values. Because that's a great way, especially during these days when it's become difficult to influence people because your physical environment is not the same one anymore. People are working from their bedrooms. So what are the cues? What are the levers that you have to influence people's minds to get them into that zone that now, I'm wearing the hat of my employer, I'm going to think like that. A great way to do that is to actually show these real stories of people you actually connect with. So yeah, I think this is very much in line with what we've been thinking and doing. A couple of questions on these changes. I think you and I both agree that these changes and shifts are irreversible. But despite knowing that change is the only constant, humans want to or tend to cling onto something from the past, right? In your opinion, what from the earlier days remains unchanged in this new world of work?
00:49:30
Abhijit: Personality. The personality of human beings has not changed. That's in fact, which is why I wrote this book called ‘Don't Hire the Best.’ We try to sort of match people with competencies that you are very good at doing whatever work you do and we hire on the basis of what people can do. As I said, motivation comes from personality, its wants, I want to do this work. I want to be known as the best guitarist, then the person is going to spend their time and their fingernails bleeding, they will still go ahead and keep practising. Look at where we put more energy, the things that we get paid to do or the things that I mean, this is assuming that you are doing, you know, things which you are not necessarily motivated to do versus let's say hobbies. Nobody pays you to do that, you improve or not. It's only your joy. Nobody cares about it. Oh, I've become a better gardener than yesterday. Nobody cares about it. And yet it brings out our most passionate work, people will talk about it and those to me are some of the indicators that we should be paying attention to that. What are the things that I am passionate about? When we look at that and I know that this is one of the cliched questions, we look for people who are passionate and my own reservations for it, but maybe that's a conversation for another day. But I think when you look at the kind of things which people are really passionate about, their eyes shine, they get into this and they always will end up saying that maybe I spoke way too long for this, I'm sorry about it, I think I got carried away. That's a great indication of what the person is genuinely concerned about or compassionate about. This is something that the person wants to do and is going to invest their own time and energy to become better. Repetitive tasks that I will do on my own just because I want to get better at it is what is a great indication. So therefore if you see anything, the people who are really at the top of their profession are the ones who don't need to practice. They are already at the top. These are the guys who actually continue to chip away and move from 99 to 99.1 after like six months of practice, he's improved it by 0.1. That's the motivation for you. There were these videos of Neeraj Chopra floating around of how he was practising and he was doing this, he's gone through surgery in his right hand and now he's sort of from there comes back, picks up the skill, re-trains his hands, and wins the Olympic. See it's not winning the thing at my neighbourhood playground, you're just changing the arena in which the guy completes. That does not happen only through skill. Skill is a very small component of this whole thing. It is a skill, which is propelled by that motivation and absolute desire that I will give every ounce of my DNA to make it work. So that comes from dreams. It comes through all the intangible things which we can’t measure. And therefore one of the biggest challenges, learning and redevelopment is that we've gone into this model where we keep thinking that for every learning show me the RoI etc, which is why organizations are so terrible at learning. So it's like asking, I'm not going to pay for swimming lessons, what if you never drowned in your life? What is the RoI of the swimming lessons? Right? There's no RoI. So yeah, that's where it is.
00:53:15
Harish: Right. And I think what you're also mentioning is about the state of flow, right? I think David Epstein talked about it in the book ‘Range’ where he compared these really world-class performers. He says when you compare the really world-class performer practising versus a moderately good performer practising. I think it takes the example of skiers or something like that. He says the world-class performer actually makes a lot of mistakes and that's because they are going out of their comfort zone. They're actually testing themselves, pushing those limits. And that's why they're making those mistakes in the practice, which is why they do well when it really matters. So, I think again, it's a question of how you are motivating yourself to keep pushing yourself, breaking those barriers and not being satisfied and “I'm going to continue doing this.”
00:54:13
Abhijit: Yeah. In every profession, especially in the arts, you will see that some of the finest actors will agonize over the tone of the voice. You know, the finest singers will not only worry about the words, but they've also got the tune and the words and they've obviously understood. They will spend time in the intangibles. Is this the emotion that you want to convey? One of my friends who is a music composer was talking about the fact that at that point in time, the singer who is now one of India's biggest singers spent a whole lot of time trying to say that, the song is being done on someone who is getting married and the singer was unmarried, she says that I don't know whether I've got the right emotion. Does it have the degree of tentativeness and anticipation and joy and this is it coming through? And spent weeks perfecting the nuance of the emotion rather than the tune and the scene which was, in any case, a by-product that was getting built. So I think the way we look at things needs to be and the arts is a great model, by the way, I'm a big fan of that.
00:55:23
Harish: Yeah, so in the last 18-20 months, what have been the shifts in your life?
00:55:30
Abhijit: Personally, as I mentioned, it has a lot to do with the mix in the business model that we offer. Some of the things which were smaller percentages of what we would do, that grew dramatically. The work that we do in terms of brands and all of that has grown, the individuals as well as organizations. The second thing that has been, I've been really pleasantly surprised by the ability of, we are not a very large organization or anything of that sort. But the ability to work with global players in what we do, I think has been very, very surprising and very pleasantly surprising for me. So I'm totally blessed with that. The downside is, I'm a person who draws energy by going out to meet other people. So if that opportunity is there, I'm always the first one to sort of do that, but sometimes you know for multiple reasons, you are not able to do that. In some sense, it kills a little bit of me every time I am not able to do that. I love to travel, I love going out to meet people. The conferences on Zoom are not the same. So I think it's something that I miss hugely. That's been a big part of me that is withering away.
00:57:00
Harish: So have you had more time to spend on your other pursuits and interests, art and drawing and things like that?
00:57:08
Abhijit: Yes, I have been. Right now as we speak, I'm taking a class on watercolour painting. I've done a class and you know, doing some video editing, I've done a little bit of a thing, working with a friend on improving photographs that I take etc. It's quite interesting that the person tells me that it's not about the technique of the camera, I use my mobile phone to take photos. It's about what you observe and which is exactly what a very well known writer told me one time that writing is not about grammar and how you cleverly use these words. But writing is about observation, which is the rise of intangibles that we spoke about. So yeah, that's been an opportunity for me to invest in that.
00:57:59
Harish: Right. So has the role of audio-video content in what you are doing gone up significantly in the last 18 months? Do you see this as a trend or skill that leaders should also pick up more?
00:58:10
Abhijit: Without a doubt. At the beginning of the year, I think if you go to my LinkedIn in the newsletter, you will see that at the start of the year I wrote about the four Vs. Video, Visual, Verbal and Vernacular. It's the four Vs. So videos like Youtube do about a billion hours every day, so that's mind-numbing. They do in a quarter, pretty much the equivalent of what Netflix does. So just in terms of scale where the video is. Look at what visuals do. I'm one of the biggest fans of this visual medium of simplifying something and creating the sketch notes that I put wherever. That is sort of something that I used to do for my own note-taking and all that, but eventually, I found that it's something that can be of value to a lot of people. So I started putting it out there and that's also helped me grow my readership. Vernacular is where I haven't done that much work, but I'm contemplating translating one of my works of fiction into Hindi. Because I've never written in Hindi before and doing that, I'm getting my ‘Dreamers and Unicorns’ translated into Bengali through someone else. Hopefully, make that available to people. I want to play with that. And finally, when it comes to the audio part of it, the vocal or verbal, whichever where you call it. Audio is going to become really huge. If you see, just look at the sort of opportunities that have come up in audio. Whether the rise of podcasting. Podcasting was not something that everybody did or listen to, but today that's so common. You look at the popularity of the streaming audio which has happened, audio has this great ability that you can multitask. You can multitask and sort of do various things, it's easier to learn from something, but it sort of builds a personal rapport with the person whose voice you're hearing in your ears. It's a very, very deeply personal relationship building medium. So, I do work with this audio platform in helping them design the product differently, taking into account different users because I think that's where the future will be. You will use it for hiring, in education much more powerfully. For example, at one of the B-schools with which I am associated, they get the students to build audio novels to document different aspects of their learning and their journey in these two years of the B-school, which is such a powerful methodology. It is something that will stay with them forever. And it's just you keep that on your novel on your phone, like another song that you've saved, you can forward it. You can do all this and it's documentation of your time which is going to bring back a lot more of the memories because audio is very powerful. I don't know if you've ever had a chance to listen to it on all the LinkedIn lives that I do and Mentza circles that I do. I use a little 18-second audio clip which is like a signature tune. I work with this group that creates sound brands, sonic branding. They sort of say that this three-second sonic brand is the shortest distance between the brand and the listener’s heart. It builds an emotional relationship. So the ability to play and create content in a creative format and the audio version is massive. You can use sound effects, you can use the background sound in many ways to create an environment that is more trustworthy. For example, you can hear the sound of the birds or whatever you're in the background and while traditional audio tries to make it clean audio. But today there is a lot more focus on authenticity. For example, one time when I was interviewing Annie Murphy for my LinkedIn Live, suddenly the power went off. I was stuck with just the light of the laptop screen on my face and you know, it looks really surrealistic and like a horror film, but that's still, you know, and I thought, “Oh my god, the listener must be getting annoyed with it.” But most people said we understand it gives us proof that it's real and you're not clinically segregating it or trimming it. You're just serving that little piece. It's not like that, it's not packaged. It's strange how the grammar of what is good and bad is getting defined because of the pandemic in multiple ways. We are used to, in the video calls, when you're doing a Zoom call with your colleagues and your kid comes. Yesterday, I was chatting with some colleagues. The kid came in and sat plonk in the middle of the two colleagues and said, I also want to talk to this person. It's very rare, a person will turn back and say, “What is this kid doing here? Please get rid of the kid.” Accept that this is your life. The work has moved into your home and the home has not moved into your office. So work must abide by the norms of home. So it will be a new world. As I said, the blender has been turned on. So we are going to have to live with a different set of norms.
01:03:56
Harish: Right. On that note, Abhijit, this is fantastic. There's a timeless Test played between England and South Africa once and they had to end it because the ship was about to leave. So they just had to end it. Otherwise, it was supposed to be a timeless Test. I wish we actually do one more recording, which is going to be timeless. We're not going to be bound by any limits and we can continue this discussion and a lot of things to talk about including Bollywood. So, but that is for another day. Thanks a lot. This was great, Abhijit.
01:04:27
Abhijit: Thank you so much for having me here and much appreciated. Thank you so much. If any of your readers want to reach me, they can drop me an email at abhijitbhaduri@live.com or follow me on social media. I’m fairly responsive to that, happy to connect with them.
01:04:48
Harish: We’ll link them in the Show Notes as well. Thanks a lot.