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Guest: Julian Treasure, Founder, The Sound Agency | Author, Sound Effects

We live in perhaps the most connected age in human history — everyone has a platform, everyone has a voice, and increasingly, even machines can speak for us. But are we actually getting better at communicating?

Julian Treasure has spent decades exploring two deceptively simple human abilities: how we listen and how we speak. His TED Talks have reached more than 170 million people, and his mission — "to regenerate the world's listening" — exists because almost everyone believes they're already good at it, and almost no one is. In this conversation, we go past the talk to the practice: why leadership listening is in crisis, the four-letter frameworks (RASA and HAIL) you can start using in your very next conversation, what AI can never replace in a human voice, and the one piece of arrogance Julian had to unlearn before any of the rest of this was possible.

Key Quotes

• "Listening isn't a capability. It's a skill that you can master, develop, learn, and grow through."
• "Almost everybody thinks they're a good listener. In fact, almost nobody is."
• "Listening is the foundation of our democratic societies."
• " Learn to listen, because listening is the most wonderful way of growing as a human being." 

Book Recommendations

1. Sound Affects: How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet
2. Inspire Someone Today - Ignite Your Purpose with Timeless Insights From Industry Pioneers

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Guest: Saurabh Gupta, Founder, Zeux Innovation

We live in a world where answers are becoming easier to find. AI can generate ideas, analyze information, create options, and increasingly do things that once required years of expertise. So perhaps the advantage is no longer simply in having the answer — perhaps it's in noticing what others miss, asking a better question, understanding the problem before rushing to solve it, and having the judgment to know what actually matters.

That's where design gets interesting — not as a profession, but as a way of thinking. Our guest, Saurabh Gupta, has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of design, business, and human behavior. As founder of Zeux Innovation, he's seen how better design shapes products and experience — but this conversation goes well beyond design itself.

We talk about why everyone is already a designer whether they realize it or not, why most organizations are good at spotting a problem but bad at defining it, why the real skill behind insight is learning to stay quiet, and why — in a world where AI makes building cheap — belief, not product, is becoming the real moat. Saurabh also shares how a boarding-gate argument and a Subway sandwich order became two of his sharpest lessons in noticing, and closes with a six-word discipline anyone can use to cut through noise in their own life.

Listener Action

Before your next project — personal or professional — answer three questions in six words or less each: Who is the user? What is your offering? Why will people use it? Saurabh's challenge goes further: write the story of your own life in six words, with a real beginning, middle, and end.

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Guest: Kavi Arasu is the founder of Flyntrok, a change consultancy built around deep listening, reframing, and human-centered organizational change. He writes the weekly Friday Fable series on LinkedIn and has kept a personal blog since the early days of blogging. 

 Part 2 of our conversation with Flyntrok founder Kavi Arasu goes somewhere more personal. We get into the discipline of noticing — a practice his father drilled into him with a five-rupee bus fare and one repeated question — and follow it into his Friday Fable ritual, where two decades of collecting stories from science, sport, and everyday strangers turn into the one-line reframes thousands of people wait for every Friday. He tells one live. We close with his Power of Three, a story about a CFO's bathroom whiteboard, and a message about what "human first" actually requires.

Quotable Quotes:

 "You don't know how high you can fly unless the rope breaks." 

 "Hold lightly to your experience, and hold tightly to the situation in front of you." 

This concludes our two-part conversation with Kavi Arasu. Part 1 — on change, listening, and AI — is available now. 

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 Guest 

Kavi Arasu founded Flyntrok, a change consultancy built on deep listening, reframing, and human-centered organizational change. He spent two decades in leadership, talent, and organizational development roles inside large companies before going independent. 

Episode Notes

 We talk about organizational change as if it's a project — define the future state, build the roadmap, execute. Kavi Arasu, founder of Flyntrok and a two-decade veteran of leading change from inside large organizations, argues that's exactly where we go wrong. In the first half of this two-part conversation, we explore why busyness gets mistaken for progress, why senior leaders are often the biggest roadblock to the change they're championing, why success teaches us worse lessons than failure does, and what deep listening actually requires in a world of dashboards and notifications. 

 Key Quotes 

Success is a bad teacher, and you have to... I would always, always recommend that leaders sit with their successes 

Senior leaders have to consider themselves as part of the problem. It's not something that they do to the rest of the organization. 

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 Episode 184 — The Champion Builder ft. Sanjeeva Singh 

He learned archery by watching. As a schoolboy volunteering at the 1982 Asian Games, Sanjeeva Singh had never held a bow — he spent his days fetching targets and water for the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese archers training on the field he was assigned to. He watched. He applied his Class 11 physics to what he saw. Within two years he was a national junior champion.

That same instinct — watch closely, apply what you know, teach yourself if nobody will teach you — took him to the 1988 Olympics as an archer, and later built the Tata Archery Academy from nothing in a Jharkhand tribal belt nobody expected to produce a world champion. It's the same instinct now building India's first rural integrated archery academy, from the ground up, in a village in Deoria, Uttar Pradesh.

In this conversation: the myth that you can't be a serious athlete and a serious student at the same time (he was both, at once); the "ruthless" standard he holds his trainees to and where the line sits before it tips into harm; his own framework for what it takes to build a champion mindset — four Ps, four Ds, and willpower; and why, at nearly 60, he chose to build his most ambitious project yet in a place with no sporting infrastructure at all.

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Certainty Is a Trap  ft. Rhea D'Souza
Sixth Anniversary Season · Inspire Someone Today

Rhea D'Souza has spent nearly three decades inside the messy reality of organizations and leadership — and has spent most of that time looking for answers in places most consultants wouldn't think to look. She's looked at how forests regulate themselves without a CEO. How ant colonies solve coordination problems that would stop any org-design firm in its tracks. How a murmuration of starlings — thousands of birds — moves as one, with no central command, guided by just two principles.

She is also the author of Conversations with Grief in Brief — an illustrated book she wrote and drew herself — and the co-creator of Notes to Them, a quiet corner of the internet where anyone can leave a note to someone or something they've lost.

In this conversation, Rhea and Srikanth move across four kinds of terrain: the philosophy underneath her polymath path, the case she makes for tribe-building as the leadership capacity our organizations are missing, the role of biomimicry in designing workplaces that actually breathe, and grief — what it is, what we get wrong about it, and how to compost it rather than bury it.

One line from the episode that stayed with us long after recording: 'The scale is artificial. The path is real.'

What you'll take away

• Why Darwin never said 'survival of the fittest' — and why the misquote has quietly broken how we build teams and reward performance
• The difference between a group, a team, a tribe, and a community — and why you cannot build a community (you can only create the conditions for one to emerge)
• The two principles that govern a murmuration of starlings — and how Rhea used them to help 13 people change the minds of 2,000
• Why belonging is a feeling, not a thing anyone can give you
• What composting grief actually looks like — and why 'time will take care of it' is one of the most unhelpful things you can say
• The one question a Kenyan tribe asks anyone in their village who falls sick — in any form — that Rhea believes is the most powerful therapeutic question she has ever encountered

Mentioned in this episode

• Conversations with Grief in Brief — Rhea D'Souza (illustrated reflective fiction, Amazon.in)
• Notes to Them — notestothem.live (a grief sanctuary, co-created with Suraja Kishore)
• asknature.org — the biomimicry reference database Rhea recommends (founded by Janine Benyus)
• Homer's Iliad and The Odyssey — Rhea's Power of 3 recommendation for business school curricula
• Kabila Consulting — kabilaconsulting.com

Listener Action

Visit notestothem.live before you go back to your day. Leave one note — it doesn't have to be for someone who has died. It could be for a job you left, a friendship that faded, a version of yourself you've outgrown, or a dream that didn't become what you hoped. Just notice what it feels like to give it somewhere to go, outside your own head.

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In this episode of Inspire Someone Today, Srikanth sits down with Shrinath V — product strategist, startup coach, Google Developer Expert, and the writer behind the Substack Blind Spots to Big Bets — for a conversation that refuses to let you off the hook.

Shrinath has lived through two layoffs at companies “built to last”—Motorola and Nokia—and turned those career disruptions into a consulting practice, a writing practice, and a clear view of why most organizations keep making the same costly mistakes. He talks about why NPS is a dangerous proxy, why the AI-first rush is largely performative, why India’s real advantage in the AI age is its ability to thrive in chaos, and why the biggest blind spot most professionals carry is a competitive mindset they’ve never examined.

More than anything, he leaves you with three questions worth sitting with today — not someday.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• Why two layoffs — at Motorola and Nokia — were the making of Shrinath’s consulting career, not the end of it
• What large corporations teach you that no MBA can — and why the lesson usually arrives as a shock
• The difference between being unable to see a blind spot and being unwilling to see one — and why each needs a different kind of help
• Why NPS scores, AI-first strategies, and user personas can all become dangerous traps if you mistake the metric for the truth
• The most common blind spot Shrinath sees across leaders regardless of industry, seniority, or company size
• Why India’s real superpower in the AI age is adaptation, not invention — and what that means for your career
• Three questions every professional should ask themselves once a year — and why we keep avoiding them
• The Listener Action: a 15-minute exercise to surface your own blind spots, starting today

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Episode 181 — The Inspired Leader ft. Anil Sachdev

Anil Sachdev wrote his life's mission statement at 19. He is the Founder and Chairman of the School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL), founded Eicher Consultancy Services and Grow Talent, and has spent five decades helping individuals and organisations discover what they are truly capable of. His new book — The Inspired Leader: Seven Practices to Unlock Your Leadership Potential — is the distillation of that lifetime of work.

In this episode, Anil returns to Inspire Someone Today for a rare second appearance. The conversation moves through the origins of his mission, the profound lessons of his Eicher years, the architecture of The Inspired Leader, and the one thing he believes can change a life this week.

What You'll Hear in This Episode

• The 1971 war, a youth forum, and how a 19-year-old found his mission by raising ₹5,000 for a martyr's family
• Why Vikram Lal — the man behind Eicher — visited a junior employee's home seven times during a 40-day illness, and what that taught Anil about leadership
• The Two Biggest Lies about leadership — and why Anil chose the word 'lie' over 'myth'
• Dr. James Doty: from a broken home at 12, to world-leading neurosurgeon and founder of Stanford's Center for Altruism — a story of what a single conversation can unlock
• SOAR vs SWOT — and the miracle of the SOIL campus that was built in six months by a contractor who had never built an office building
• J. Krishnamurti's choiceless awareness — and what it means to become the witness of your own mind
• What breaks trust most in modern workplaces, and the three ingredients that rebuild it: competence, credibility, and fairness
• Why declining the Director's chair at both IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Bangalore was the right call — and what it cost
• The two AIs that matter more than artificial intelligence: Appreciative Inquiry and Aspiration to Inspiration
• Anil's Listener Action: one small thing, starting today
  
  

About Anil Sachdev
Anil Sachdev is the Founder and Chairman of the School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL), one of India's most values-driven business schools, co-created with 32 companies. He began his career at Tata Motors in 1975, spent over two decades at Eicher Group — heading HR, Operations, and sitting on the Board — before founding Eicher Consultancy Services (1991) and Grow Talent (2001). He has been adjunct faculty at ISB, Indiana University's Kelly School of Business, and CEDEP/INSEAD. He is a Trustee of Chinmaya Mission. Anil wrote the Foreword for Sri's book, Inspire Someone Today.

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What makes someone feel truly at home — in a hotel, a homestay, or their own life? For this 6th-anniversary episode, Srikanth sits down with Priya Vishwanathan, who gave 35 years to the Taj and IHCL, helped build the ama Stays & Trails homestay business, and then did the hardest thing of all: walked away at the top to find out who she was without the badge.

This is a conversation about hospitality as a way of living — honesty, genuine care, and the thin line between service and servility. Priya shares the day-three moment at the Taj that nearly ended her career, why "complaint is a gift," how her team kept a 90+ NPS by cooking to each guest's taste, and what luxury means to her now (hint: it isn't marble). It closes on reinvention, burnout, and a definition of success that reframes the whole show.

In this episode:

• Why her mother's "Atithi Devo Bhava" became the Taj's "Guest is God"
• The angry guest on day three — and the advice that saved a 35-year career
• "Complaint is a gift": turning hostility into learning
• Service vs. servility: protecting your dignity while you serve
• Building homestays families trusted with their ancestral homes
• The father's study table they refused to move — and turned into a story
• Good to great: curated meals, the tea-coffee station, coffee in the garden
• Today's traveller: the global Indian, entitled but willing to pay for experiences
• Leaving at the top, burnout, and learning AI at 50+
• Luxury redefined as peace, quietude, and living on her own terms

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A résumé can look inevitable in hindsight, but the human story is usually messier and far more useful. I sit down with Jack Madrid, whose career spans Citibank, Ayala, MTV Philippines, Yahoo, Multiply, and now IBPAP, the organization that represents the Philippines' IT-BPM industry. We talk about what actually travels across industries when your job title changes, and why relationship management is not only about clients; it is also about learning to manage up, sideways and down inside real organizational hierarchies.

Jack shares the moment that rewired his confidence: an eighth-grade debate where he was terrified to speak, then heard his own voice and realized he belonged. From there we explore a practical idea for anyone who stays quiet in meetings: the wasted opportunity of an unexpressed opinion. We also dig into the mindset behind a non-linear career, including trusting instinct, learning from mistakes without living in regret, and staying open to lessons from any conversation. His rule is simple and challenging: if you have to choose between engaging with a person or looking at your phone, choose the person.

We also go straight at the anxiety of our time: AI and the future of BPO and knowledge work. Jack argues the bigger risk is not artificial intelligence itself but complacency, and he explains what “moving up the value chain” means for frontline workers in practical terms. We close with an underrated leadership lever that costs nothing and changes everything: kindness. 

If you find this helpful, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review. What part of your career are you ready to reinvent next?

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