Professor Rishikesha Krishnan is the Director of IIM Bangalore and a leading expert in strategy and innovation. With over 140 publications spanning from academic journals to the popular press, Professor Rishi is an accomplished author and thought leader.

In this conversation, Subbu and Professor Rishi discuss the steps to enable innovation in any organization, how to tap into the creative potential of employees, dealing with honest failures, and much more.

Key Topics

0:25 - How Prof Krishnan was inspired to study innovation

2:00 - Biggest takeaways from researching innovation through all these years

3:35 - Four steps to successful innovation in an organizational context

7:10 - The pipeline, velocity and batting average problems when driving innovation

9:15 - Day-to-day behavioral factors that may slow down innovation

11:40 - The 'jugaad' way of innovating

13:10 - Low prices don't always equate to poor quality or sub-optimal user experience

16:00 - Have we crossed a tipping point in the startup ecosystem?

19:05 - Maximizing the creative potential of your people

22:30 - How to deal with honest failures

24:43 - The impact of managerial practices on driving an innovative culture 

29:00 - Building and encouraging communities of practice 

31:28 - Decoding empathy as a construct in design thinking

36:10 - Expanding methods to conduct customer immersion in the digital era

37:00 - Exciting innovations in the health-tech space

Anand Narayanan is a Vice President at Beroe and dons the dual hat of Head of Marketing and Head of HR. Beroe is a global SaaS-based procurement intelligence and analytics provider.

In this conversation, Subbu sits down to discuss how Anand and his leadership team have instated a people-friendly work environment at Beroe. In particular, the discussion focuses on Beroe's successful experiment with implementing a 4-day workweek for all of its employees, which has been in force since 2017.

Key points

0:50 - About Beroe and it's organizational history + operating context

8:30 - How Anand Narayanan took on the mantle of HR Head at Beroe

12:30 - Confronting the reality of high employee stress

16:00 - The pivot from effort-based to productivity-based output

18:00 - Strategies to arrest attrition 

25:00 - The genesis of the 4-day workweek idea

26:30 - Ideating with different flexi-work models keeping in mind peak-productivity

29:30 - Debating the pros and cons with the management team

31:00 - The announcement and conditions of the 4-day workweek experiment

35:15 - Praise from the ultimate stakeholders: customers

37:00 - Recruiting and working with a core group of change evangelists

39:45 - Cultural reaction to the change

43:35 - Results of the experiment - impact on productivity, customer feedback, employee engagement, culture

48:00 - Being ready when Covid hit in 2020

49:00 - How meetings are managed at Beroe

57:00 - Feedback on Glassdoor and actions from the management team

1:00:00 - Is the 4-day week the future of work?

1:06:30 - The facets of culture that enabled a 4-day week at Beroe

Egbert Schram is the Group CEO at Hofstede Insights, and an established speaker and sparring partner on the topic of how, where and when the culture factor impacts business and organisational operations. He has worked in the field for some two decades and in over 40+ countries with clients such as GE Healthcare, Central Bank of Nigeria, UNDP, Coca Cola, to name a few. Egbert holds various additional roles in organisations such as the Forbes Business Council. He is the Chair of Finnish Dutch Chamber of Commerce, and on the Amcham advisory board in Finland.

Egbert's style is provocative yet delicate, focused on making a complex topic understandable. Subbu and Egbert discuss culture at the societal, national and organizational levels, how culture develops, the link between organizational culture and strategy, and much more.

Key points

4:00 - Geerte Hofstede's legacy of culture studies and application

8:00 - What is culture?

11:15 - The interplay between national and organizational cultures

16:00 - How does org culture develop and the role of leaders in shaping culture

20:35 - The link between strategy and organizational culture 

27:30 - The reasons leaders don't nearly focus enough on culture

31:00 - Organic approach v/s active approach of managing org culture

35:20 - How can employees play an active role in shaping org culture?

39:00 - Leading with purpose

41:10 - The journey to culture change

45:30 - Direct v/s indirect culture change

48:45 - The biggest myths about culture and how to overcome them

54:30 - What's new and upcoming in the field of measuring and developing culture?

Raj Raghunathan is a professor of marketing at the McCombs School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches one of the most successful online courses on Coursera on the subject of happiness, titled - A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment, and has a written a book on the topic called - If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?

Subbu and Professor Raj discuss what motivated him to research a not-so-lucid topic as happiness, a working definition of happiness, the seven sins and habits of the highly happy, prioritizing happiness, and how leaders can facilitate interpersonal trust in an organizational context.  

Topics

• 2:35 - Correlation between career success and life success
• 6:00 - Definition of happiness
• 9:00 - Happiness as a construct for organizations (Affective v/s reflective)
• 12:45 - Functional advantages of happiness
• 13:35 - Happier people tend to be more productive
• 15:30 - Non-energetic joy
• 19:30 - The 7 deadly sins of happiness (and the 7 habits of the highly happy)
• 19:45 - Chasing superiority v/s flow
• 22:30 - Leaving happiness on the table by being more cynical than we ought to be
• 24:00 - Mind addiction v/s mindfulness 
• 24:45 - The fundamental happiness paradox
• 26:45 - Why organizations don't pay enough attention to employees' happiness
• 34:30 - Being overtly control seeking and what to do instead
• 35:05 - Psychological Reactance v/s Psychological Safety and Employee Voice
• 38:00 - Quality of decisions in teams that don't encourage psychological safety
• 40:45 - The Dispassionate Pursuit of Passion
• 45:35 - Post-traumatic growth 
• 51:30 - The application of 'Smart Trust'