Thank you, Professor. It's always a joy having this conversation with you. And I must confess, that was a very eloquent introduction. I always get embarrassed because I always feel introductions are pretty one sided. They only talk about the good things. And I must confess a lot of things that I've done are not necessarily as good as it sounds, but I really appreciate your fantastic introduction. Thank you so much.

I may have to rewind a little bit. This was in 2010. I get a call from the executive board; they asked me to fly down to Germany. I'm having this conversation with the board member and he said, "fellows, we do have some challenges at SAP Labs in Bangalore in India and we want you to take this up and fix this issue this as quickly as possible." In many ways, that call was a defining moment for me in my career. I was pretty young and I hadn't realized that I could be ready to take such a big step in my career. So, when the executive board member asked me to take up this challenge, it was a little overwhelming, not realizing whether I could pull this off. So that was a huge moment for me from a career point of view.

So, to give you context, ACP Labs is one of the second largest R&D hubs of ACP worldwide. SAP is a German multinational Lab. India was the second largest R&D hub with more than 5000 employees across India at that time. The board felt that there were three major issues we were fighting at that time- the first was we had seen a massive decline in employee engagement, which was a very important metric for the company. We do this annual employee survey and found that there was a dramatic decline of almost 13 percentage points in the engagement of the overall employees. The second thing we realized was that our attrition rates were at the all-time high. And thirdly, was that a lot of the employees had reached out to the global leadership and said that they had lost trust in local leadership. Those were the three major challenges that the board felt that I should immediately resolve.

As I said, I know I did not have the experience to do any of that and I did speak to a few of my friends and said, "do you think I should take this offer and do you think I can do this?" And honestly, the good news was that the board didn't give me any options, so they just asked me to do it. So sometimes when you don't have a Plan B, you just have to do it. A few of my friends did say that this could be a life changing moment if I could pull it off. But I also recognize the downside to it because this is going to be an incredibly hard journey. I took it upon myself and I asked my wife about it and she said, "yeah, let's do it." She was extremely supportive. We relocated to Bangalore, and I started my role on 1st of April 2010. And I jokingly say it was April Fool's Day. I don't know whether it was any indication of anything, but that I remember that date very clearly.

I think the first thing I realized was, you have to be very open to share the problem. So, the first activity that I did was reached out to almost 200 employees across different levels to really understand what the biggest challenge is that they're facing. But more importantly, what I did was I reopened the blog. There were thousands of comments. Many of them were not so positive. And I said, "let's look at that, because maybe the problem lies somewhere that we didn't really know what the people are thinking." And I kind of consolidated the key problems into five actionable areas. I put it out there in front of all the employees and say, "I've heard you. I think these are the big things that you were speaking about. But here is the bad news. I don't know how to solve it, but I think we can solve it together." I think that was, for me, the most important step.

I look back in retrospect that I went in with an understanding that the solution can be built together with the employees. So, I reached out to the employees and say, we are starting these five projects, but this will be extremely time bound. This is part of my 100-day plan. We will solve this problem together. And this is a very counterintuitive approach. Sometimes we have this superhero thinking in our mind that you are the head, you know all. I actually flipped it and said, I don't know what the problem is, but I'll be extremely transparent with how we are going to solve it and measure us on the progress against these five projects, which I felt were the most important things that needed immediate attention. I think that was the first and the most important activity that I did. And, I found so many people volunteering to work together. You suddenly started getting the energy of the people to solve a problem that was important for them.

Oh, all the time. In fact, I wouldn't take any credit for any of the ideas that came because it was all ideas from the employees. But what was very important as a leader was to be decisive. You will sometimes get overwhelmed with the number of ideas. But I think the role of a leader is to figure out what is the most important one and be very decisive and execute it. I think execution is so key. I will give you two specific examples to give a context. I realized was sometimes the best ideas are not the big, earthshattering changes. Sometimes they're the small ones, but they matter a lot. So, two things I heard constantly as feedback was that the organization was pretty large, and it had become extremely bureaucratic. So, a lot of engineers said, "I'm spending a lot of time doing things, which is not my core task. If I'm an engineer, I want to write beautiful code and make great products. But can you help us reduce all the impediments on the way?" We looked at what the impediments were, and we looked at the various processes.

One surprising thing we found was how much time it took for our employees to get their claims reimbursement. People said it took them six weeks before they got the money back. And when I looked at it, I said, wow, that's a lot of time because people are waiting and some of them have large claims because they made international travels and so on. We looked at not just this process, but we looked at many processes and we started a project called Challenge One. And we said our objective is to ensure that the process that duchesse people have the lowest time in terms of the SLA. So, we want to bring down the hassle of every process to one day. After some brainstorming, one of the employees came up with this brilliant idea that they think we could bring it down to one day.

But I put a boundary condition. I said, you're not going to get more resources, you're not going to get additional budget, and you can't break the compliance rules. You have to figure out how to work within these three constraints. Guess what? It was the finance department themselves, because they knew what the process. And I remember launching this and sending email to 5000 employees. And I said, "you know what? Starting today, if you put a claim in, you will get the money in your bank within 24 hours and you will get an SMS, which says this money has been deposited in your account. And I said, if you don't get it in 24 hours, here is my phone number. Give me a call." And it was pretty scary, honestly. Every morning we used to have a dashboard we used to look at. OK, there are 500 claims. How many of them did we give it? You know, where we were able to process within 24 hours. Of course, there was some mining issues. But over a period of time, that became the norm, and it became so popular that it suddenly reached the media stories. The Times of India called and said, is this true? You know, I hear that you can do a claims processing in one day. What software have you used? I said you didn't do any new software. He's just, you know, cleaned up the process, which was 10 steps to maybe two steps. And that's all we did. You can come and do an interview. The average time in the industry was four weeks, we did it in one day. That immediately raised the trust of the employees. The employee said, here is a leader who wants to solve our problem. We didn't build a new product or anything, we just removed an impediment. And people started believing that now leadership is working in our interest. So that was probably the simplest thing we did, but it also had the highest impact.

I think one was to be bold and ambitious. One of the things we did also was we said, we want to make ACP Labs a great place to work. This is an annual survey that is done. We've been participating for many years. We said, what does it take to really break into the great place to work survey, which is typically around between eight hundred two thousand companies participate, and we want to be playing in the top league. I made this bold commitment that we will become the number one in terms of a great place to work over the next few years. So that was very important to keep a certain goal which was ambitious and aspirational. So that was really the end game that we were aspiring for. But I'll give you one small instance, which I think is very important. When I looked at the attrition numbers we were in higher double-digit numbers.

A significant portion of that attrition was because we found that a lot of our women employees and yet at that time, 30 percent women employees, they were going on maternity leave and not coming back. So, they would take a maternity leave, but for whatever reasons, for personal reasons and other things, they were not coming back to us. And so, it was very interesting that we had these five mothers who came back and said, I would like to work on this this problem statement and the suggestion they gave us first was, can we build a creche within the campus? It looked like a big ask, but we looked at the pros and cons and, after going through a lot of challenges, we built a camp, a creche for children within the SAP camp was actually just on the boundary of the SAP campus. And guess what? In two years' time, our attrition went down from 95 percent to five percent, which means of all the women who went for maternity leave, most of them actually came back and continued working there. And in two years' time, we were voted the best place for women to work in the whole country. So that was, again, a very pivotal moment when I look back. And even now, we all are extremely proud of having done that, you know, and that was a huge step in including our employees in that holistic journey. It was not just about work, but we also wanted to take care about their families.

In 2012, which was when we were aspiring to be number one, we were 23 out of 800 companies, but that was the first time we broke into the top 25, they only give a ranking of 25. In 2013, we were if I remember, we were number five. And in 2014 or 2015, we became number one. So, in the last three years, we've been either number one or number two. Great place to work in India.

Yeah. This was deeply intertwined with my journey that I shared in the first part. So, you know, April 2010, I take over this, left as ambitious 100-day plan, and we're doing a lot of stuff. And in I think it was in the month of June or July that, I had gone out for a dinner and through a conversation somebody pointed out to me that my son may have some challenges because he was not making eye contact. He was at that time was 15 months old. And we didn't see any challenge in him yet. You know, his development and growth were as expected. But most of my friends noticed that he was not making eye contact and he was kind of doing the same things over and over again. He was looking at things that were constantly rotating. And during that conversation, he said maybe you should take him to a doctor and check if he has any issues, he could be on the autism spectrum. And you know, I didn't well, I took it seriously, but I went home and really checked. What is autism like? The Internet has these simple ways to check if there is any issue. So, I looked at all the behavior of young kids who could be autistic. I was I was taken aback that my son was showing many of them in very subtle manner.

And so, I had told my wife to let us bring him to a doctor and check him out. After almost three months of going to specialists and therapists, he was officially diagnosed with autism spectrum. This is a condition for life but with therapies, you could see great improvements. The specialist told us that we don't know what level he is on, whether he's mildly autistic or he's severely autistic. He said time will tell but get on to some therapies immediately. I remember that moment, on one side, I was riding this high wave of this success of running this large organization and trying to turn it around. And on the personal side, I was shattered. It was my only son, and they said it was a condition for life. So, what seemed like a perfect, well-crafted life suddenly seems to all go out of the window in just a moment. I remember reaching home after that diagnosis of my son, locking myself in the bathroom and crying. And I said, there goes my perfect life. And I really had no understanding of how to handle it. And like everybody who goes through this, I went through my initial reaction of denial to going through depression in the sense that, you know, I was struggling with myself. Why did this happen to me? What have I done wrong? You know, how do I handle this? That process was incredibly painful. I think was a huge moment in my life.

So, I struggled with this for maybe a month or so, and it was funny that people react to the circumstances very differently. My wife was pretty strong. She was, up and running the next day. She was like, okay, what do we do next? And I was not able to let go. I was still kind of stuck in my old place of why me? Why did this happen then? You know, what does the future look like? But I think that was one conversation with my mentor, Dr. Kiran Bedi, and during the course of conversation, I really broke down and I said, you know, my son is diagnosed with autism. I really don't know what to do. And then she said something incredibly profound, which allowed me to see the situation completely differently. And she said, most people spend their entire lifetime not knowing what their purposes are. You are incredibly fortunate that you found your purpose. And what she meant was, see, you are a very fortunate person.

You are in a position of power and authority, and you have the financial means, and you have the network. And as a father, I'm sure you will do everything to take care of your son. But how do you use the situation that you are in to not just make a difference for your son, but others who are less fortunate? Obviously, your primary responsibility is to take care of your son but use your position and your network and your influence to change and make the world a better place for many other kids who are less fortunate. And I don't know but when I heard that, it was like a switch completely turning on in my mind. And suddenly, I move from seeing myself as a victim, to somebody who could be an agent of change for this particular challenge. But while this sounded great, what do you do?

And so, my real journey started when I was trying to understand what the problem is, not just with autism, but I was trying to understand the landscape in India and what is it that I can contribute in a meaningful manner. So, the journey of discovery really started after that phone call. Even then, I didn't know what to do like everybody else. I was watching all the TED talks and talking to people and trying to understand. And I was in a journey of discovery for the next few months.

Yeah. I think the journey from then still continues today. It's been almost a decade since I've been on this journey. There have been a lot of highs and lows, but it's beyond doubt the most fulfilling part of my life. I'll tell you about a few highlights in that journey. The first is that I reached out to a lot of parents who were in a similar situation like me. And I asked them the same question, what is the biggest worry that you have? What is the biggest challenge that you have? And after speaking to many of them, I realized almost all of them was fundamentally talking about just one issue. They said, we don't know what to do after we have gone, who will take care of our child? What future does he hold? It kind of went a step deeper. In fact, I remember this conversation with a parent who said something that really broke my heart. He said, "my wish is to live one day more than my child." And I think that was the most painful statement I've ever heard.

So for me, that was the thing that I was trying to understand and find some way forward. And what I realized, especially with children on the autism spectrum, is that many of them are pretty gifted and they can do a few things very well. But most of them have two challenges which are universal, one is, many of them have communication challenges, and the other is that they are not very social. Because of these challenges, we realize that many of them are not meaningfully employed. So, there's a huge population of people who are on the autism spectrum, and the data shows it's one in 65 right now and it's getting much higher right now in terms of the number of cases. So, imagine if you have such a large population of people are on the autism spectrum. Most of them are not gainfully employed. That becomes the biggest worry of many of the parents, that these kids grow up to adults and they are never independent.

And one thing led to the other. And I and I happened to meet a Danish entrepreneur. His name is Thorkil Sonne. He had the same situation, as his son was autistic. And he said, "if nobody gives them a job, maybe I will." So, he started a company which employed only people on the autism spectrum. And he grew that to almost 100 employees in Denmark, 80 of them were people on the autism spectrum. The remaining 20 were so-called neurotypical who managed these 80 of them. And he found out that they could differentiate their business because they were hiring people on the autism spectrum, because they brought in unique strengths that others didn't. And I was blown away by this idea. I said, wow, so you are actually hiring autistic people because they are better than the others, at least in some aspects?

And I was so excited that I asked my executive assistant to go with me to Denmark. We flew to Denmark and spent a couple of days trying to understand what he was trying to do. I came back and I told them, let's hire people on the autism spectrum. And people were like, is this real? Most of the people whom we looked at in the community didn't have a college degree, they mostly had education only up to middle school or high school. So how do we hire these employees are on the autism spectrum. We realized that if you focus on a specific task, and in this case, we looked at software testing as a task that people on the spectrum could do better than the others, because they could focus on a specific task. They could do the same things repeatedly without getting bored. And they had very high level of accuracy.

And luckily, I had a team of a large team of software testers. So, I hired three employees on the autism spectrum. As I said, they had no college degrees, but they joined us happy. And over 18 months proved that people on the autism spectrum whom we had hired were better than my engineers, they had higher accuracy rate. They never got bored. And they had great attitude. And very interestingly, the team that they worked in saw a massive spike in engagement. And I am not saying this is purely because of that, but there were clear indications that hiring these people also increased the morale of the overall team. I think, one of the most breakthrough things that happened and it was nothing but a series of coincidences. I spoke about it at the World Economic Forum. Our CEOs heard about this initiative at ACP Labs, India. And then in 2012, 2013, ACP made this bold commitment that they will hire one percent of our global workforce with people on the autism spectrum. And that, I think, was one of the most landmark announcements ever made by corporate for a disadvantaged part of the community. And it's been one of the biggest successes stories of SAP. I think one of my personal high points was in 2019, the best innovator award, which is typically given only to either an individual or a team out of 100000 employees. It's called the Hasso Plattner Founders' Award at SAP. It's like the Oscars. It was won by one employee who was hired as part of the autism program.

Yes, he was from the finance department, and he built a product which dramatically reduced the processing time of many of the financial documents. Across all the competition, his idea was considered the best, not just the idea but he implemented it himself. He was an employee from our office in Argentina. You see what started in Bangalore is now across the globe. More than 150 companies have implemented their own Autism Network program. And the employee who got the opportunity was in Argentina. I mean, I would have never thought that a small act of hiring three employees would have such a massive ripple effect.

Let's not take away the part that I always say that there are the day-to-day struggles. He's now 11 years old, he's nonverbal. Our biggest challenge is to really understand what's going in his mind, because he's not able to express himself. And that creates a lot of frustration. One of the reasons I moved to the U.S. a few years back was to provide him with a better education. He's doing well. His health has improved. He's now on six standard and he communicates through his mother and me. So, my wife and I are kind of his communication partners. He's able to communicate by what we call us using a letter board so he can point at Alphabet's and shared his thoughts. And it's just incredible how amazing he is and his cognitive abilities just out of the world. And we never knew that. You know, now he's able to write sentences. And, you know, it's just amazing how he's able to think in extremely profound ways for Gadhafi's age. But we are only able to know that because now he's able to at least express himself in a few words. Professor, life has been kind to us so I think he's doing well.

I think this was one of those moments in our lives. And we struggle hard. Sometimes we think that, you know, this is too hard. And she said something very profound. She said, fellows, why don't you change the world for one while I change everyone for the world? And it came from a place where she was also very successful at SAP and spent a decade at SAP, but she gave up everything to take care of my son. And I recognized the fact that it was way harder for her than it was for me. But she had to give up on a lot of her ambitions to take care of my son. Luckily, she got back to work right now. But, you have to look at it from two sides, but also come together. So, I make it a point today that I am an integral part of his classroom activities. In fact, as soon as this school gets over, I will be doing his physical training classroom on Zoom. I think that you have to contribute in equal measure, but maybe you look at one aspect more deeply, and she is looking at the other aspect more deeply. But I have great regard for what she has done and what she continues to do. But we sometimes come from two different directions. As long as we meet together and have a common understanding, I think that's something which is what we're always striving always to do. And I always say when people see such glowing things about me, I keep saying, why don't you validate my wife. You will not necessarily agree to most of it, but I think she's been a great partner in this journey.

I didn't know this. I will be happy to come visit your bookstore and even volunteered because, you can see my backdrop? It's full of books. I'm a bibliophile. And books and autism. And, you know, this is my interest. Congratulations. And I will surely visit you in New Jersey when I am there next time. That's my promise.

When I look back at my journey, I am who I am largely because of my upbringing. My parents, a lot of people have played a very important role in that journey. When I look back, the idea of being curious and the idea of not giving up are probably the two most integral aspects that I've learned from my parents. I'll give you two specific examples. My dad started off in Indian railways at the early level of his career. He won a national award for one of the top engineers. He's retired and he's 78 years old now. And he runs a hospital, a school, and a college in his native village. All as a service to give back, he's 78 years old, and I can tell you I wish I was as energetic as him when I reach 78. He is super busy. He's always trying a way to serve the community and he's not going to make money or anything. So, when I have that benchmark, I haven't even started about what is possible. Every time I ask him, he says a very simple statement. He says, "when you give more, you live more."

I remember one conversation very profoundly when I was growing up. My dad and mom were having a conversation at night, and they were extremely worried because they didn't have enough money to pay to make the wedding of a maidservant. So, there was a servant who used to work at a home. They had a young daughter and she wanted to get married. And my parents were discussing how do we raise the funds money to get that daughter of the servant married? Those are the conversations I've grown up with. They never differentiated who's who. So, giving has been a very integral part of the DNA that I have seen. Maybe I lean towards that idea all the time. And maybe I'll close this with one thing that I always say. When Dr. Kalam was, former president, he was asked, what is your definition of a leader? He said, a leader always asks a question, what can I give? So, it does resonate with me that the whole idea when you give more, you not only live more, but you also get more. And if you do it in a way which is pure, I think purity of intent is incredibly important in that in the end, it's not about just giving and signing checks and so on. But how pure is your intent? And it can be extremely small forms of giving. So, I think that has played a huge influence in my life, Professor.

I think I I'll come back to this whole idea that sometimes I say that success is overrated because it's very singular. We think that the individual is successful. But people don't realize there are so many people who've contributed to that person's journey. So, success is never singular. And everybody has contributed a little bit to making who you are. I think once you recognize that success is not entirely yours, the whole idea of a self-made man is so overblown. And I think the Bagua professor says this idea of equal anonymity is not take those guys too seriously and not to take those laws as entirely your fault. I think if you can manage a little bit of anonymity, you can sail through a lot of life.

Yeah, I think we are living in very challenging times. And as a technologist, I'll probably leave to just one key insight for all the listeners. I think my take is that the biggest challenge that will come out of this crisis is that the inequality levels will increase. And you can see that with all the data, the rich is becoming richer, the poor getting poorer. So you see a wider divide in the society, which I think can create some social unrest and other issues. We should be extremely careful of what we are seeing right now. A lot of the people think the solution to all these problems is better technology, the thing that it is the holy grail that will solve all problems. And I will go back to what Gandhi said way back in the 1940s. He said that you have to be grounded in strong moral values. If technology is not grounded on strong moral values and purity of intent, that technology is not going to solve the problem. So, while all the technology tools we speak about and all the new things are incredibly powerful, but I think we should never underestimate that what is most important in this time is leadership, which is grounded in strong moral values and pure people. So, I would request everybody to be on a journey of discovery. This has never happened before, so there is no blueprint of how to get out of the pandemic. I think we'll all have to go deep inside ourselves to find the solutions.

Thank you, Professor Tandra. It's an honor to be part of your show. And I wish all the listeners good health to work to their maximum potential. All the best to everyone.