Podcast Themes

Stephen speaks about how he initially focused on the business side of things while his father was the “larger than life” thought leader. He speaks about how, over time, his insights around the high cost of low trust have emerged and how he has found his voice a thought leader over time.

Raghu speaks about his journey on three fronts as an action researcher – Understanding how Systems work, Study of Yoga in depth with Krishnamachari, Process work with Prof Pulin Garg. He also speaks about how he has experimented and engaged with institutions like the Murugappa Group, TCS and Core Healthcare. He speaks about how he has used some of these organizations as a laboratory to try and develop some leadership development and culture building approaches that have been tried and tested.

Ayelet speaks about the link between our approach to optimizing or satisficing in a certain domain and our identity. She goes on to say that our identity often helps us prioritize across different choices and the extent to which we push ourselves in a certain domain.

We normally think of empathy when we think of the way we connect with others. Ayelet speaks about how we could build a deeper connect with our future selves and how that can act as an inspiration for us to make meaningful choices in the present. She speaks about the discount rate we apply on the future and how that can lead to us either over-indexing on the future or ignoring it depending on what we do.

Dan speaks about the role of regret especially around transitions. He refers to the Japanese art form of Kintsugi which is about embracing the negatives and bringing beauty because of them and not in spite of them. He also refers to the work of Herminia Ibarra who speaks about acting your way into a new way of thinking.

Ravi speaks about how he thinks about Specialization and Generalization. He uses the metaphor of Birds and Frogs to talk about the ability to adapt to new environments. He urges us to be a Swiss Army Knife rather than super specialty special purpose knife that could lose context if the environment changes.

Ayse speaks about why she thinks Nelson Mandela is one of the Master Designers of Life she admires. She speaks about how he evolved through the various twists and turns he went through. We connect the dots with some of the insights we learnt about Gandhiji from Dr Ramachandra Guha.

Rajiv speaks about how he thought about stepping off the corporate track despite being on a very good wicket at Franklin Templeton. He speaks about the growing dissonance within and the quest for purpose and self-improvement that led him to this path.

Lloyd speaks about how we get interested in a certain topic or an area and how it slowly grows to becoming a part of our identity. He speaks about how we can look for some of the cues from the past to see how we can reflect on some of our experiences that move us and see if there is an opportunity to lean in towards any of those as we architect our lives.

Sukhinder speaks about her decade long journey with David Lesser and speaks about the different ways in which he added value to her. She speaks about the benefit of cumulative context that David had that helped him work with Sukhinder to reconcile various pieces over time and across her distinct identities.

Katy speaks about one of the attributes of Dr Max Bazerman, her advisor (who has a track record of having several of his students in reputed colleges around the world) when she was a PhD student. She speaks about how he would behave when his students would often face a bump or deal with a rejection and come to him for advice. Katy says that rather than focusing on critiquing the work content, he would focus on encouraging the student, highly counterintuitive for a lot of us.

Dan speaks about how we can think about our strengths when we are at an inflection point. He goes on to say that recognizing our strengths is not about being stuck to the past but really about stretching into new areas that could help us lead a more authentic life and sometimes cues for this could come from domains outside of work.