Greetings. This is Hitendra Wadhwa and welcome to Intersections! We call this podcast Intersections, because so many times, we get very confined and limited, sometimes unconsciously, if not consciously, because of silos, because of boundaries, because we get so caught up in certain boxes that we trap ourselves in. Therefore, the role of Intersections is to help us dissolve those boundaries, to zoom out and see things from a more integrative and whole lens. Because when we do that, flashes of new insights, new connections, new creativity and possibilities emerge.

Today, it is my great pleasure to actually hand over the hosting responsibility to a dear friend, a colleague and a mentor, Raghu Krishnamoorthy. Raghu is the former CHRO of GE. Over the course of a few decades at G.E., he established a remarkably successful path for himself, for example, going all the way from being the CHRO for GE Aviation, which is when I first got to know him, then the Chief Learning Officer for GE, the Chief Talent Officer, the Chief Human Resource Officer for GE Healthcare and ultimately for the whole global enterprise. He moved on from there upon retirement, to pursue a PhD in leadership at University of Pennsylvania as well as a partnership with my team and I at Mentora Institute, where he has been a beloved colleague as an executive director and a senior executive coach.

Raghu has since then graduated. He's now Dr. Raghu Krishnamoorthy. He's also taken over stewardship as the Director and Chief Learning Officer program at University of Pennsylvania, while simultaneously working with my team and I and our clients at Mentora.

Raghu, it is a pleasure to have you with us. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you. I'm going to hand over the reins to you. Raghu was kind enough to say, “Hitendra, let me actually steward the show and then draw some things out from you, because you have just come out with a book and we want to talk about that among so many other important things around the future of leadership that you're going to weigh in on.” I'm happy to do that. Just before I do that, I do want to say what I've seen over the last two years, is just this incredible passion you have for learning. This curiosity that makes you interview and soak in all kinds of thinking from others, trends and themes out there and then repackaging them in a way that allows us to make sense of our complicated times. And it's a gift to have you with us, Raghu. The floor is yours.

That is so beautiful. You pointed to some really powerful shifts and trends that are going on right now in the business world. The unionization is actually one of the fresher ones. Restructuring is around the corner. I was at Heathrow Airport just a couple of days ago, getting stuck in that lack of manpower situation, with baggage claim taking 3 hours before we were able to retrieve a baggage with no announcement, no update, no nothing. It's as if the airport has just completely given up. Restrained to the ultimate and just given up on being able to be operationally efficient or even in any way accountable. I also want to highlight that when you combine this with social disruptions that are happening around us as well, from the mental health crisis, the political and social divisions, the geopolitical challenges, the question about what is the role of businesses in society. Is it purely to produce investor return or something else? Well, what is that something else? And if some employees pull you one way and then others don't want to have you take an official position or change that much, it's a tough spot that any of the leaders and managers of organizations today are placed in both from the outside and inside.

Raghu, I have been studying these things more from the outside. I had humble steps in my career at McKinsey and doing startups, and then I ended up in business school 20 years ago. You had a long and a storied ride at one of the preeminent organizations of its time, a conglomerate, at GE. So you've seen a whole lot of these dynamics play out in past decades. And I'm just curious, can you put this in perspective for us, for those of us who don't have that kind of experience as you do. Like, how close or far from normal is this? If not normal, there have been exceptional moments in the past where change and uncertainty and all of that has been foisted on leaders, managers and organizations. How different is it? Or is it different at all from cycles like this you've seen in the past?

Yeah. Let's then lean within. As you so thoughtfully put it, not just lean in, but lean within. It seems to me that in this context of change being almost inexorable and unavoidable, continual, imperative, and one which the pace is so searing, the role of any decision maker, any leader, any person in a position of responsibility, 70 or 80% of what you do in a day might be very programmatic, might be things based on how things have been done in the past and you probably just are able to very comfortably operate by instinct, by past judgment. Then, about 20% of what you're doing now and then, you have to really go deep and slow down, be creative, soul search and assimilate from so many other sources and people. But today, it seems like most of the things that you have to do, most of the things that are on your desk every morning require more of that conscious, deliberate, thoughtful, experimental evolutionary work. So it appears to me that it's possible that a number of leaders with the pressures they face, the uncertainty, the need to bring in much more of cognition, the engagement and thought and connection with people and collaboration. It is a recipe potentially for leadership burnout.

Yeah, it strikes me that this may be a great time for all of us to become students, like you have, in the last few years. One of the things perhaps we can study is just how history could guide us about how in the past iconic figures, people who have left a really positive, beautiful mark on humanity with their leadership, perhaps sometimes stretching over decades, how is it that they actually ended up comporting themselves at times when there was a fair amount of disruption and change and they were actually pushing for some of that themselves? And therefore, what are some of the practices they were engaging in that made them overcome this kind of expediency bias or experience bias? I'm thinking about Lincoln's Civil War. It was obviously a hugely disruptive time, going through something unprecedented in America's history. Then, you have Gandhi and the movement he was trying to lead in India, Mother Teresa doing her work. These are people, as you know, are well loved by me in the research that I've been doing over the years which, I've dedicated chapters to in the book.

I think there are a few things that we can turn to for advice and guidance to our inner circle of inspirational figures like these.

Oh, how beautiful! It links to something I like to say, which is, great leaders are great followers. Typically, when we have used that expression, which has been used at times in business that, leaders need to be followers, the frame for that has been followers of their people. But, I think the frame we are talking about, which is what I prefer and I like to talk about also, is that they are followers of their inner voice. They are really engaged in the discipline of listening and surrendering to that inner voice.

It moves me to share a story which is, there is this American journalist who was very inspired by Gandhi and his movement and went over to meet him in India and at some point said, “Mr. Gandhi, you speak so actively about the need to listen to your inner voice and be guided by it and that it's so important to you. A lot of people claim to follow their inner voice, sometimes to really dangerous and bad places in what they take on and what they do, where it's quite clear that they were in some ways quite delusionary. So how do you know for sure that it's the right voice that is guiding you and not some kind of wrong, misguided voice. And is it the case that you first really validate and prove to yourself that it's the right voice and then you surrender to it?” And the journalist reports later, he said, Gandhi looked at me as though, is this all that you have understood about my movement, my teachings, my methods? Because it seems so far away from what I truly mean. And then he says, Gandhi actually explained his facial expression to me. He said, “Actually, it's the complete opposite. It's not that you first have to convince yourself that it's your inner voice, and then you surrender to it. It is the opposite. You first surrender. And it is in that act of surrender where you are beyond attachments and ego and insecurities, that then you can feel secure that what you are listening to is actually your inner voice.”

Yeah. One of the things that I've really over time realized is so critical is to make idealism marry pragmatism. Each of us, from inside, has a certain heroic aspiration, a certain purity of purpose and a desire to manifest beauty in some ways that are very personal to who we are. And at the same time, we are in this messy, muddy world around us. Whatever the conditions and the times that we live in, sometimes people think that you're talking about the workplace, but I'm talking about just like every aspect of your outer life. Because, sometimes even in one's family relationships and even the societal expectations around us, we're not perfectly seeing ourselves fit in every which way with regard to the expectations and asks and desires of people around us. Whether it's on the personal or professional side, sometimes that can be very messy and muddy. That's the pragmatists that also need to merge. As I think about some of these things you're saying about the great resignation, people pulling back, going more to their core values and wanting to express them, I also wonder if along the way they'll discover like, “Oh, wow, but I also need to make money. I do have a certain hunger for wanting to be liked, loved, applauded and rewarded on the outside and I kind of miss some of that because I am trying to do my own thing, but I'm really struggling with making money. I joined this organization with much more of a beautiful purpose. But it's not really doing financially good as well.”

I've actually seen that. I've seen that with a couple of people close at hand who left to be pursuing a more idealistic career, then got grounded more on the pragmatism of what they felt they needed out of life, financially and otherwise, and ended up moving back to a more mainstream corporate thing, which really is not as much a source of passion for them, but it is giving them the practical things that they want to do.

One of the things I want to offer from that and one of the things I talk about in the book is that when we get more purpose driven, we also have to know what things to say no to and part of that no is just like simplifying life so that if you can get to a point where you can be at peace, you can be happy with less. Less consumption, less of what's the minimum financial requirement I have for my family and I to be, perhaps less cars in the garage or whatever? For those of us who are not financially completely free and independent, it's those kinds of disciplines that then actually make us very free because the range of flexible options for us in life just start to dramatically expand. I don't know what you think of that.

Yeah. Well, that's a very powerful shift if that's actually happening, not just at an anecdotal level, but something more thematically across that generation. After all, at some level, we should all be humble enough to realize that if you look at the history of the last few hundred years, pretty much every generation at some level or the other has in a positive way outdone the previous one. Which is why, even with all the shaking and stirring that is happening today, we've ended up in a much better world today than we were a hundred years ago. And that was quite a lot better than 200 years ago. From that vantage point, these Gen-Zs in another 30, 40, 50 years when they're taking over the world, they're probably going to create a much better world than ours.

I love it. One broad frame in which maybe we could place this with the HR kind of hats that we might wear for a minute is, intrinsic versus extrinsic drivers of motivation. We have operated in business for so long with the assumption that people are economic maximizing agents, very rational, very much about optimizing their financial and other similar material outcomes and that's certainly an undeniable part of the human motivation system, and that's the external one. Yet at the same time, if that's the only one you operate with at a team level, at manager level, at an individual level, at an organizational level, you're just missing out on so much more richness there is to human drives. What you are just citing here is Raghu, that yes, one of those drives can actually be more of the resilience and meaning that the right purpose and alignment with your values can bring, which you just spoke about and you talked about in an inspiring way how there are so many Gen-Z that are actually starting to activate other alternative systems of motivation. But then, love is another of those motivation systems within us where when the heart is on fire, then just fundamentally one is so driven to do heroic and beautiful and selfless work without necessarily the need to feel you're going to reciprocally get some material or psychic-like acknowledgement.

It's funny, it reminds me of the story about Abraham Lincoln. He was once going with a senator in a carriage somewhere, and he was asserting to the senator that basically human nature is fundamentally selfish. It's about serving one's own self. Now, this is someone we know in history, who is actually a remarkable figure for the very selfless leadership he had. He was basically arguing for how selfish human nature is. And then at one point, he noticed that there was a sow, a female pig and her two little piglets. He saw that there was a marshy terrain, maybe there's been rain there recently and these two little piglets were basically swirling in that marsh, almost being sucked in by the swampy conditions probably to drown and ultimately to die. The sow was really almost shrieking in some kind of pain at seeing the risk of losing her two little ones. So Lincoln actually asked the carriage to pause and then he steps out of it, and then he goes over there into those muddy, marshy waters, rescues those two little piglets and puts them back in the safe refuge of their mother. Then he comes back muddy and all into the carriage. The senator looks triumphantly at Lincoln because he'd been having an argument or a debate about it. And he says, “See, Mr. Lincoln, you were wrong. Human nature is not selfish. If it was selfish, you wouldn't have done what you just did.” And then Lincoln looked at him and said, “But I did it for me. I did it for me because I would have been in so much pain if I had allowed this moment to pass and just ignored it, so I did it for my own joy.”

That's so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. What a great story. I can only imagine how she will be receiving it and how lasting an impact it will have on her. What you've just exemplified here, as you've said, is not just the broad kind of quality of love and how, as an experiment, you've discovered that in a selfless capacity, when you put it out there, it ends up benefiting you yourself.

I talk in the book about how sometimes we feel very paralyzed from acting upon that instinct. As much as we have great intentions and aspirations about what we want to do, we feel quite helpless about being able to have really any material impact at times in the life of the suffering soul who's in front of us. At times, in the context of the causes that we really believe in, because they seem so intractable and large, and meanwhile I'm just a drop in that ocean. Oftentimes, many of us are not doing anything or we struggle with it. For example, if they just lost a loved one, what is it that I can say or do right now which will ever be of any help to them? Because I'm so minuscule compared to this gravity of loss that they've just gone through.

The thing that I've learned through so many stories and studies like this, is that, actually it matters. It matters to put your love in action, even in small actions, even just a symbolic action. It may not be something that can materially, fully and permanently and scalably change everything in what it is that is causing the need, hunger, pain or something out there, but having put your love into some small, simple action. That was the message and the value that I have seen in Mother Teresa's. They may not have been able to cleanse the whole ocean of humanity. Whatever little drop, whatever little thing for them, that was significant and meaningful and gave them peace of mind.

Actually, more recently, just before I had to put the final kind of dotting of I’s and crossing of T's in the book, I actually came across a very satisfying research, some signs which shows that you actually become more at peace with yourself when you have certain aspirations like that and you just give some expression to them. It could be a simple expression, a small expression, or a limited expression. In your case Raghu, you can't fully turn around the life of this individual that you're talking about, but still you put your love into action.

Yeah. Very well-put. I think there's a resource out there. I may not be able to immediately get it right here, but I can point us towards that, which is, there is some great research in the positive psychology movement that has started from UPenn. There's a list of 24 universal values. I think that community, at some point, had put up some resources about giving us examples of how you put creativity into action on a random day in your life. How do you put humility into action? How do you put transcendence into action? How do you put gratitude into action, etc.? And it's a great resource for those of us who are drawn to the idea of making these things very tangible and very expressed in our daily lives.

I want to come back to the theme of love that you brought up. To your point, when these leaders have been very human centric, what I find is that this is not merely an intellectual choice. It's not merely an awareness. These folks were incredibly in love with humanity. Then naturally so, that love starts to flow. The dedication, commitment, and purpose starts to flow. The attunement, the empathy, the compassion, the connection all that starts to flow because they're just deeply in love. You can't be in love unless there's something about the other side that you are in awe of, that you find magical, that you find really pure, beautiful and soaring and you feel very connected to it. Without those conditions, how can you be in love? In some ways, I felt like one of the seeds we have to sow in our lives is this capacity to live in a state of appreciation.

I'll give you an example. Steve Jobs is not traditionally considered in mainstream consciousness to be one of these love oriented leaders. But actually, I see him as a tremendous force of love that was expressed through many of his actions in unique ways. We may have only so much time to go through something like that here today. More of that to be read. If you read the chapter on Living with Growth in my book, when we think about all the genius that he was able to unleash in terms of creativity, design, innovation and all of that, where did it come from? Where did it start? Was it because he just had tremendous insight into the future of products and technology and all that? No. What was different between Steve Jobs and other technologists of his time and other folks that were doing innovations in his time. What was different about Steve Jobs is, he really believed in humanity. He believed that within every human being, laid somebody with high design sensibilities, somebody who would choose if they were given the choice to go for something which was highly well-designed, gave a simple and beautiful and compelling user experience, even if it cost hundreds of dollars or more than the traditional mainstream product there. That's what he did. The cost of phones was going down. The Nokias and Motorolas from 200, 150, 100, and they were fighting over how many more features and how many more buttons to put on those phones. Incredibly complex devices. You needed all kinds of orientation and training before you could use any of them. But, as consumers, we weren't really thinking very much about what's the alternative? We want the price to go down and we kind of want more features and it's just going to be messy and complicated. He just pierces through all of that into our soul, and he sees at the level of our soul in humanity somebody who is really able to make good design away from poor design and is able to use good design. Then he tells his people to go ahead and design this and do this, and then he introduces the product in the market at a price point, which is a multiple cost of an average phone. And typically, the logic has been that that's a premium pay. It will attract a certain luxury segment because it's x3, x4 the normal price. He doesn't sacrifice market share. He actually dominates market share with a x3, x4 premium price product. So he completely destroys that tradeoff that we find actually in price demand kind of elasticity, where price is high, demand is high, because he actually activated another dimension of who we are because he was in love with humanity. He saw possibilities in us that nobody else was seeing, including sometimes our own selves.

Gandhi saw the same thing. He saw peace in people, whereas everybody else said, “Well, when there's a revolution, then people will be very bloody and fighting oriented.” But Gandhi saw peace even while there was a revolution to be done.

Mother Teresa saw compassion in people. It evoked and drew out compassion even in people like feared dictators who would eat from her hands and say, “Mother, you remind me of my grandmother.” Others were shivering in their skins at that time about being in front of the Sandinista rebel, General Noriega, who I have a story about in the book about Mother Teresa and him.

So anyway, I just wanted to offer that up to make a great point about a lot of this human thing starts from what's your relationship with humanity? Do you see positivity and beauty and magic in people? Because if you don't, then maybe that's the first place we all have to start.

Yeah. I'm with you. I feel a sense of optimism as well. I think that, sometimes the path of evolution is incremental and it's about learning and mastering the tools of the trade and getting to find an inside route towards ultimately being an agent of reform. Sometimes, there are moments that come, where you realize that actually so much of the old order needs to be dismantled, that it might be better just to start from scratch and start building new systems and new ideas and new approaches. I think I'm seeing a little bit of that happening now, which is what is accelerating change that is no longer a spend of five years, then ten years and then 15 years and then incrementally add your little imprint to the world in law or in medicine or something. But the possibility today of just complete reinvention starting from scratch with certain more fresh ideas, core building blocks that are out there in the society, those possibilities are there. I'm fascinated about when we look back, 20, 30 or 40 years later to see what kind of constructive, positive revolutions were wrought on that.

Oh, that's beautiful! Lincoln, in the midst of all the crisis and the criticism that was being hurled at him, some saying, you're going too fast. Another saying, you're going too slow. He said, “Look, I just want to conduct the affairs of the state so that at the end of the day, I may have lost every other friend on Earth except that one friend who is deep down inside of me”. That potential is there for all of us to strengthen. In fact, that's my greatest wish for the next generation, the greatest wish that don't listen to your friends. Don't listen to me, don't listen to Raghu or anyone, but develop a really strong, clear, humble, open, surrendering attitude towards attunement with the universe and with nature as it expresses itself to you through the subtle stirrings that arise within through the inner voice. If that is what we can give as our message and our guidance to the next generation, what a lifelong asset they would have with them to kind of help.

It's been a great joy to have you with us. You always are so replete and rich with new stories, new statistics and new perspectives on things. It's so refreshing every time we have a conversation. I know we've had a couple of them in the past in Intersections and now this one here today. Very grateful. Good luck in your new role at UPenn as well. You're stewarding a really important responsibility in taking the offices and organizations and really helping them learn the most cutting edge of what it is that we can today offer for advancing human potential in organizations. So excited for the journey that you're going on and looking forward to your book coming out.

Just to close it out, what would you likely think your first book will be on?

It's such a beautiful way through which to channel positivity through one's own errors of the past, which is like, it is because of my errors that future generations will not make errors. If I can actually codify and help create some teaching and learning out of it, so humanity on the whole grows from the investment that was made in my life experience. How wonderful

Thank you. Take care. Bye.