Podcast Themes

Hitendra’s career arc — pure mathematics at St. Stephen’s, applied mathematics at MIT, strategy and behaviour at McKinsey — is a story of progressively widening the lens while staying close to one’s core. In this segment he reflects on what drove each transition and what mathematics left behind in him long after he moved on: a discipline of precision, pattern recognition, and the search for core truths.

Jennifer Garvey Berger speaks about the different stages of adult development and what the transitions look like from each of these phases. She specifically speaks about the transition from a socialized mind to a self-authoring mind to a self-transforming mind.

Neeraj Aggarwal speaks about how he approached leadership when he was the head of India. He speaks about how he strived to move everybody a little bit to the right of the bell curve wherever they were. He goes on to speak about how the Asia leadership role is much more about inspiration than specific direction.

Alan Eagle speaks about Bill’s role during some of his key transitions in his stellar career at Google. He speaks about the fact that despite his clarity of thought on the business front, when it came to making decisions for himself, there was an element of irrationality. Alan goes on to speak about Bill’s role in ensuring that Eric made sound choices at those crucial moments.

Alisa Cohn speaks about the phenomenon where the Founder, as the company scales up, has to give away some part of the job that he or she really really enjoyed. As the company scales up the Founder often needs to get involved with the building of the company and not really the specific activity or function that really brought him or her energy. And that can be a non-trivial transition.

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy speaks how one could possibly discern some of the elements around values fit while considering an opportunity at the very top. She speaks about how some of these could be unearthed in a conversation and how we could reference some of these from the ecosystem the leader operates in.

Ramesh Srinivasan speaks about how he has stayed relevant over the 26 years in the Firm and how he has taken on different responsibilities to align his professional pursuits with his personal passion.

R Gopalakrishnan speaks about how leaders coming in from one context can effectively adapt to a completely new context especially when they do not have a working knowledge of the new space. He underscores the importance of humility, openness to learning to build trust and come up the learning curve in the new environment.

Andrew Likierman speaks about how he came up with a framework to measure judgment. He also speaks about the nature of research he did to get to what was judgment and the variables that go in there. He also speaks about how the framework has evolved over time as he did his research and particularly speaks about the role of values in judgment.

Michael Watkins speaks about the specific challenge when start up entrepreneurs bring in seasoned leaders as they transition from a start-up context to a scale up context. He talks about some of the elements that the entrepreneur and the incoming leader need to bear in mind.

Matt Dixon speaks about how athletes come to him with excellence in one or two domains (cycling, running, swimming) but have to quickly come up to speed in a totally different area to be competitive in a multi-sport context. We discuss the parallels between this and how Functional leaders need to transition to General Managers.

Michael Watkins lays out the key challenges involved when a leader gets promoted and transitions to a context where he/she has to lead a team with several individuals who used to be his/her peers earlier. He gives some useful insights on how leaders could think about re-engineering the relationships while walking the tightrope between being a “Napoleon” and a “Super-peer”.