Hitendra, thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be with you. These are times when things are very dark for all of us. For instance, in Chicago today, there's going to be six inches of snow. It's the sign of times and there is a huge need for all of us to have a sense of belonging, in my opinion.

My past has been less glorious than what you make out to be. When I was a child, I was an extremely poor student. I barely managed to scrape through from class to class. But there was a point in time when I had to make a call. I had to make a call whether I was going to stand still or move forward. It is one of life's intersections, right? When you are facing the fact that you could be the last in the class, you could be the person who will be coughing and stumbling your way through your career. And that's where it dawned on me that I needed to do something better. I was fortunate. I could go into a premier institution with great support from my parents. So it was a transition, not necessarily an easy path, but I'm grateful for what happened, and therefore, I'm thankful for my alma mater and the companies I worked for. They have given me a perspective on life. They've enabled me to take on a journey that has been privileged and blessed.

I can't really answer the question of whether people have it. I certainly could say in my case, I learned. I'm going to give you an example of what happened to me a few years ago. I was in the C-suite, and we had made some tough calls about the organization. We had decided to lay off many people. We had decided to sell some businesses. We had decided to restructure the organization dramatically and drastically. And we had done all this and announced it publicly to our employees, the media, and our investors. And there was a positive reaction, at least from the external world. But what we had forgotten to realize was that the emotions in the organization were still very heavy. Soon after the announcement, we went to have a panel discussion with everyone who worked for the company.

What I noticed was when we went through the panel discussion, my team members and I were celebrating what we had done. Perhaps joking around did not go well with those employees because while we had moved on to the next level, the employees were still heavy with the information that many of their jobs would go away. They could not recognize that, hey, the folks in the senior level are perhaps on a different plane. We could not appreciate that these folks still needed time to come to terms with what was happening to them. I realized then that we had missed the mark completely.

From then on, I've tried to be in the employees' shoes, actually trying to listen to them very deeply because when you listen deeply, life unfolds before you and you recognize and realize that people are looking at the world through their lens and unless you look at the world through their eyes, you're not going to be an effective leader. You may be holding the position, but you're not going to inspire them and engage them. So that made me realize that I had to get to know people first before I did anything else to earn their trust. I needed to empathize with them so that I could frame my reference accordingly.

Let me start with something really personal here, Hitendra. I'm in Chicago. I have two daughters who live in New York City. I haven't seen them over the last three or four months. As New York becomes a hotspot for COVID-19, one thing me and my wife really miss is not having our children with us. They're grown up, but they are our children. And if I could only reach out and hug them, I'd be so grateful to God right now. And that's something we regret every day, not having them here with us. And I'm sure many people are experiencing that. Of course, many people's burdens are not a lot more than mine or, for that matter, yours. We are lucky. But as people navigate through a very dark world without necessarily knowing what's going to come out at the end of the tunnel, I think it weighs heavily on their minds.

People have lost jobs as well and as a result, there's a dual crisis happening right now. There is a health crisis and an economic crisis, and both are exponential and both have opposite curves. So as people navigate both these extremes, they're trying to make sense of what's happening with reference to their jobs, what's happening with reference to their health, and what will happen to their loved ones? How are they going to navigate through this? So it's a profound pause and it hopefully moves from a pause to becoming a positive reset. But we don't know that. So when the unthinkable becomes thinkable, life is altered. And we are going through a life-altering moment right now.

That's a very interesting point. What do you do when you're furloughed? And some organizations are doing some interesting things right now. Virgin Atlantic, for instance, said to their employees that many of these flight attendants have trained in an emergency kit. So they have furloughed their employees. But what they have told the NHS, which is the National Health Service in the UK, is that their employees are trained if any of them are willing to volunteer to help out. Would the NHS accept them? And they just came back and said, absolutely. I think what is great in times like this is for organizations to move beyond skill maximization to a moral elevation, which will at least give people a purpose during these tough times.

The whole thing is, are we looking to get the best out of our employees? Or are we looking at getting the most of our employees? Organizations that look at getting the best out of their employees are the ones that are likely to recover the fastest.

I think very clearly because I'm wondering whether it's time for us to start thinking more about the meaning of their mission because the mission has a destination. When we are unclear about the destination, all we can do is make sense of it. We have to know what we can do now that makes a difference today? And that's all we can do. Today, I was reading about an old 99-year-old man in the UK. His name is Tom Moore and he is a World War two veteran. What he decided to do at his age was walk 100 laps around his garden to raise money for the NHS. And by doing so, he raised 15 million dollars. So even a man who's 99, if he has the determination, can make a difference in times like this. I think those are stories that inspire us saying that everybody has a moment to make meaning and make a contribution in times like this. It's not easy. It's not easy, especially when you're worried about meat on the table or issues of children's school or your health. You are not thinking about higher-level, higher-order issues like Maslow's hierarchy. But the point here is that what we are witnessing is a moment in our lives where social solidarity is coming to play a lot more effectively than the individual. So I'm quite optimistic about the residual effects of what we are going through. But what we are going through is still very heavy and challenging for most of us.

I will go back to something that I did not do right in the late 90s when Asia went through the financial crisis. I was looking after many parts of Asia. One of the countries I was a sponsor of was Thailand. And the currency devalued overnight. We had to lay off thousands of employees. I remember doing that. I was still a young professional. I was very keen on impressing my leaders with what I knew and all I could do, things like that. So I put together a Six Sigma plan of how to lay off employees. We had everything planned. I went on the day when we were supposed to have layoffs in the morning. We started calling people and handing them the equivalent of pink slips in the afternoon. But that day, I heard sirens coming and I was getting distracted because as we were trying to do what we needed to do, the sirens came closer and closer and stopped outside the door. And then I went to inquire what happened. One of my colleagues told me that an employee that I had laid off earlier that day couldn't bear the thought of going back home without a job. And he jumped out of the sixth-floor window to try and commit suicide. I realized I was doing this wrong.

People, especially in those days, were making difficult choices between livelihood and life. In most cases, livelihood was life. And if you didn't have a livelihood like this particular gentleman, you might think you wouldn't have a life. Fortunately for us, he fell and he was seriously injured, but he didn't die. A few days later, my manager called me and he gave him a performance appraisal. My manager told me, "If you didn't take care of this situation. God forbid, if the individual had expired, that would have been haunting us forever."

So my lesson from that point onwards was sometimes we have to take tough actions. But if you don't do it with humanity, with humility, understanding the situation, understanding what it means for the other person, in that case, you perhaps are not going to be relevant in your practice as a professional. I read something that inspired me two days ago. This is a restaurant owner in Tennessee. He had to lay off a lot of his employees. But when he did that, he also told them, listen, I know this is going to be a difficult time for you. It is what I'm going to do for you. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I'm going to have the chefs come in and prepare so that those of you who need it can come and pick up the food anytime you want to. It told me he had to do the difficult thing, but he allowed employees to have that dignity, saying that I'm still here for you. And hopefully, when the lights come on, I'll have you back. But meanwhile, this is the limited offering I can give you. In times like this, I think we need to really think through how we come through as individuals, as leaders, because if you look at the definition of leaders, it is about how you expand other people and how you make others' lives better.

Again, it reminds me of another story. As an H.R. manager, oftentimes you encounter situations where you end up making some hard tradeoffs. I remember one instance when we went through the Great Recession, we had to make sure that we cut out every conceivable cost, right? Solve big-ticket items, all of them. One of the items we cut off was, of course, fruits in the office, but another one was flowers. The cut-off for all flowers in the office was about seven hundred dollars a month. But in times like this, we needed to set an example. And every bite, every penny counts and so we cut off flowers. And this happened on a Wednesday. And I was coming back to the office on Thursday and Friday. Thursday, I didn't see flowers. On Friday, I saw flowers. And on Monday, I saw the flowers back again. And this time I got very furious. I said, how dare the organization defy instructions of not having flowers? We are cutting costs. We need to show the world that we are tightening our belts. And what ended up happening was that I told my assistant to bring the person who's guilty.

The person, a tiny young lady who was our janitor. So Tony is her name. Tony came into the room and I asked Tony, "Tony, didn't you read the memo? Didn't you see the fact that we are cutting costs? And how dare you ask the flower florist to bring the flowers again?" She paused for a minute, thought about it, and looked me in the eye, and said, "Actually, those are not flowers from the florist. These are flowers from my home. I bought them. And the reason I bought them is I know that the company is going through a very tough time. I know that you folks are working very hard. And I thought the least I can do is put those flowers. Sometimes if you have the time, if you have a minute, you can stop and smell the flowers, because what are flowers? They're a symbol of hope. And I thought I'd give you a little bit of a boost by putting in those flowers so that you have hope when you need it." She walked away with that statement. I have never felt more ashamed in my life because I know we have to cut things, we have to manage our budgets and whatnot. But the symbols of hope and motivation that people look for need to be there because there is no life without a heart. So I think for us to be effective leaders, the lesson I learned from Tony was you needed to be a better human first before you're a better leader.

It's a great question, I think for a long time, working from home as an employee was a benefit that people choose, and then more recently, of course, it's become an organizational necessity. As long as it's an organizational necessity and people have an option to go back to the office, I think we'll still be in a position to manage this. It comes from the fact that organizations that are entrenched in bureaucracies overnight have been able to pivot quickly and make this happen. So things that you cannot do if you imagine if you were to try and institute working from home, you have to get the I.T. guys to agree. You have to go to the board. You have to get the employees to agree. But we have been able to do that very quickly. The same thing has happened to empowerment. So you now have to empower people. There's no other option.

So under such circumstances, it is a good response. But long term, I want us to reflect deeply. There is a story about an organization. Nicholas Bloom, who's done a lot of research from Stanford University, shared the story. It's an organization that offered about a thousand of its employees an option to work from home and said if God wants to work from home, he can do so. Five hundred of those people opted to work from home. After six months, they ask the same question again. Only 40 percent agreed to remain at home. 60 percent actually wanted to come back to the office. And there are several reasons for this. At least in my case, my home is my inner sanctum. It is the place I am, who I am, and for the office to come into that space, you are looking not just at the fact that you have the world come in, but in some cases, as somebody pointed out on chat, some supervision and surveillance of the government as well.

My question is, as long as you choose for it to come in, it's voluntary. But if it is imposed on you, you actually have an unwanted guest at home and we have to think twice about making that happen because your home is your temple. That is where you and your family receive the warmth, the connection. Also, it's the place where your dreams and aspirations are embodied. It's symbolic. It's complex. Working from home means that you are actually imposing a formality on the whole equation. That, for me, is a huge shift from work-life balance, because what ends up happening is that work ends up taking precedence. And unfortunately, it upsets the whole balance. If organizations are willing to make a life-work balance, take dominance over work-life balance, then it is okay. On the other hand, if they impose it on everyone, it's going to backfire. And we have to think it through very carefully before we institute a policy.

No doubt about that. I think the realization, for me at least, is the fact that life takes priority. If you look at the wider meaning that this event is teaching us, its work as a concept shrinks compared to the rest of the issues you need to worry about. So organizations need to understand and appreciate that I'm doing that. In all fairness, I think that is far more acknowledgment of the fact that family will become part of the camera frame in the equation. And keep in mind, here are some statistics you need to know. A report came out from labs about remote working.

If you look at people who work from a remote office or the home office, they're often actually the senior people, those who can have a private space or have a separate office space where they're undisturbed. Most people don't have that luxury. We have to end up coming to work because it gives them a different space. And they're able to concentrate, and now it's all intermingled. And you ought to be careful about making sure that you acknowledge the boundaries and allow the employees to separate the boundaries. These are some new competencies that are required. So my lesson is we have to make sure that we acknowledge the limitations of people working from home and take that as a factor of what it means for work and productivity.

Let me react to that. I have a sister who's a schoolteacher. And one of the things she told me was when a child comes to the school, especially the younger children, they're not just coming there to study, but they're bringing with them their nutritional issues and their abuse issues and so on and so forth. And unless the teacher recognizes those issues, they are not going to be effective in communicating the lesson plan. I think the same thing holds true for leaders. Even when we get back to office work, I think, hopefully, we will appreciate the fact that anybody who comes into the door, is not leaving their family behind, leaving their shoes behind. They're coming with them. And how do you factor that into the workspace? Just like employees are factoring work into their living space. We need to become a lot more conscious of what that means for work-life balance. What does it mean for diversity going forward? I think it's a profound moment.

The good news is we've gone through the mechanics. And we have taken some reflex action. Now is the time for us to actually pause and reflect so that we are in a position to use this moment as a learning opportunity going forward. We did not do much of that on 9/11. One parallel I have is 9/11. Because right after 9/11, the world went through a similar time. Altruism was at its peak. Volunteerism was at its peak. But we forgot that soon after. We have, in fact, about a year. Hopefully this time around, we will all collectively learn from what we're going through.

Can you imagine what it is right now? I saw a note about what we do for children coming to the office today? This is the time when most organizations have a day when the children come and visit the office. What if we were to do something similar? What if the CEO of the company or the manager of the team says, I'm going to have a conversation with all your children? What kind of an impact would that have? In terms of the employees feeling the broader reach of the organization and the organization and the leadership enveloping the larger family.

I think let me take a guess here, based on what the conversation took place over the last one hour. First, let's make sure that we start with the question, not the answer because we really don't have a playbook. But having said that, you don't need a playbook. You need to go deep within yourself to figure things out. We are not in a mode of finding things out. We are in a mode of figuring things out, and I think you have to keep the heart and the head together when you do that. That's one important message I would leave us with.

The second thing is homework. Working from home and working from the office are two different things. Don't mix the two. Understand the implications of it and make sure that we create and facilitate the possibilities of optimizing in both senses. I think the third thing is to keep in mind that these are times when you have to make really tough calls. Are you doing them with good grace? Are you doing it with finesse? Are you elevating people as you go through the journey, or are you pulling them back? Are you optimizing for their skills? I think we need to keep in mind that all of this phase comes to a new phase and then there will be a new world coming out of this.

I hope we will remember what we went through and not lose social solidarity. I'm going to give you one example. I saw a story yesterday about a six-year-old and a grandmother who was in her 80s. The story was that these two go to the post boxes in the local area every day. And what they do is they sanitize the post boxes before the postal worker comes and delivers the post. And what they're saying is this is how they can make a difference in the postal worker's life. If each of us carries that same sentiment as the six-year-old, I think we can collectively make humanity better. And that's our aspiration. At the end of the day, what we have learned during these times is the fact that we are trying to figure things out collectively. We try to make meaning and we are better off with it and hopefully, that stays. We don't forget it.

For me, that's the only way we can pay homage to people who have sacrificed their lives for this moment, by being better for their future stakeholders, our children. As we go through changes and we are willing to change overnight, it's a testimony to human resilience. But it's also a tribute to people who are giving their lives up during this moment. What can we do to leave the world better for our children? Today, at an organizational level, at a national level, at an individual level, that's the story of the six-year-old and the grandmother, the grandmother teaching the six-year-old that I can leave a world that is better for you and you can join and participate in that for me. Listen, at this point in time, what I want to say is there is a new sense of love. There is a new sense of community. There is a new sense of purpose and meaning that I hope we never lose against the bleakness of what we are going through. There is a rainbow of possibilities.