Callum Laing promises a board role within 60 days. I will be honest, I raised an eyebrow too. Then I got my first board seat within 30 days, and my second within 45. So I came into this conversation as a bit of a believer, and left as a full one.

Callum Laing is the founder of the Veblen Directors Program and author of Boardroom Blueprint. 25 years, 100+ M&A deals, around half a billion dollars in value created. Most of us assume a board seat is something you wait to be handed. Callum's whole point is that it is something you build. This conversation is him showing you how.

Three ideas worth stealing:

Everything you think holds you back could be your biggest asset to someone else.
Too young, too old, wrong country, niche network. A company chasing the youth market wants that 23-year-old in the room. The thing you apologise for is the thing they are looking for.

The CARES framework for getting into the right room.
Connections, Authority, Reach, Equity, Service. Connections get you in the room. Authority makes them listen. Reach multiplies your luck. Equity means you stop watching everyone else make the money. Service is the mindset that scales you.

Boards hire people who win races, not people who memorise the rulebook.
Knowing every governance rule is like learning aerodynamics to drive Formula One. You show up an expert on aerodynamics, and the first question is still, how many races have you won. No one is dismissing the weight of governance. The trick is knowing where it belongs.

Whether you are eyeing your first board seat, rethinking what your experience is worth, or just quietly wondering if that room was ever meant for you, this conversation will change how you see the door.

About the Speaker:
Callum Laing is the founder of the Veblen Directors Program and author of Boardroom Blueprint. A partner at Unity Group and former chairman of MBH Corporation, he has completed more than 100 M&A deals across 25 years and helped create around half a billion dollars in shareholder value. His work now focuses on opening the boardroom to first-timers, women, and people from non-traditional backgrounds.

About the Host:
Dolon Mitra's work spans capability building, assessment, and succession planning, so the right leaders are ready before the business needs them. Coaching for engagement is what she loves most — it's how she turns capable leaders into ones who can actually navigate their organizations towards growth.

A thought-provoking episode of What Growth Takes! Hosted by Dolon Mitra.

Most leaders chase the next tool. Krish Shankar, former EVP and Head of HR at Infosys, draws on four decades of experience to show that tools change but fundamentals don't. In this episode we break down what actually gets the best out of people, and why the winners in the AI age will be the ones who understand people the deepest.

Ideas worth borrowing from here:

· People run on two engines, rational and emotional and leaders must work both: The rational drivers are the people around, challenge, recognition, growth, and a larger purpose. The emotional drivers are optimism, happiness, pride, and gratitude. They are intertwined, not separate

· Organizational justice is how you make any transition feel human, especially the AI one: It comes in three parts — distributive justice (is the outcome fair), procedural justice (is the process transparent and fair), and interactional justice (are people who disagree still treated with dignity, not stigmatized as troublemakers). Get these right and people will accept even hard decisions.

· Tomorrow's leaders are systems thinkers, not just managers: Leaner organizations need fewer people, but people who can imagine, orchestrate, and think at a whole-systems level. And the gap between one level and the next will only get starker — being good at one no longer guarantees you'll be good at the next.

Whether you're leading through disruption, rethinking how you build teams, or just trying to stay relevant as the rules keep changing, this conversation offers a rare, grounded perspective.

About the Speaker:
Krish Shankar is the former EVP and Head of HR at Infosys and author of CATALYSE: Power Up Your People Ecosystem. Over nearly four decades he has led HR across Hindustan Unilever, Bharti Airtel, Philips, and Infosys, served as President of the National HRD Network in India, and now advises leaders and organizations through his own venture, Krish Shankar Partners.

About the Host:
Dolon Mitra's work spans capability building, assessment, and succession planning, so the right leaders are ready before the business needs them. Coaching for engagement is what she loves most — it's how she turns capable leaders into ones who can actually navigate their organizations towards growth.

A thought-provoking episode of What Growth Takes! Hosted by Dolon Mitra.

Most leaders learn to reinvent once. Devinder Kishore, SVP Marketing, International Operations at Schneider Electric, has done it again and again. In this episode we breaks down what actually makes reinvention work, and what quietly takes companies and careers down when it doesn't.

Ideas worth borrowing from here:

·       Asymmetric human intelligence is the part AI can not copy: If enough sources say something consistently, AI treats it as true. That's exactly why it can not differentiate you. AI gives everyone the same consistent answers. The human edge is behavioral observation and out-of-the-box thinking that isn't sitting in any dataset.

·       Look outside-in, not inside-out: A professor once pointed out that since 2008 every one of his PhD students was researching Android, not Symbian an early signal Nokia missed. Watch external signals, even university research. Nokia kept calling its phones "multimedia computers" while customers were already searching for "smartphones."

·       Build cognitive diversity, do not recruit replicas of yourself: Bring in people who genuinely think differently. Gender is one marker of that, but so are culture, age, and experience. A team full of people like you can not challenge the status quo.

Whether you're leading through disruption, rethinking your own career, or just trying to stay relevant as the rules keep changing, this conversation offers a rare, grounded perspective.

About the Speaker:
Devinder Kishore is SVP Marketing, International Operations at Schneider Electric, leading marketing across 95 countries. Over three decades he has built brands, teams, and growth engines across Unilever, Nokia, Microsoft, and Schneider, working across India, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Finland.

About the Host:

Dolon Mitra's work spans capability building, assessment, and succession planning, so the right leaders are ready before the business needs them. Coaching for engagement is what she loves most — it's how she turns capable leaders into ones who can actually navigate their organizations towards growth

From Writing Code to Designing Intelligence A thought-provoking episode of What Growth Takes!

In this episode, Jaswinder Ahuja, former Corporate VP & India MD at Cadence Design Systems and a 35-year veteran at the intersection of technology, leadership, and policy, joins Dolon Mitra to explore what's really happening beneath the surface of the AI boom.

After this, you might rethink where AI's real value actually lies and who is really responsible for making sure people are not left behind.

Here are the key takeaways:

• We're still in the "infrastructure" layer of AI — the real value sits above it: Most AI investment today is going into chips and power, the foundation layer. Jaswinder says the internet played out the same way: infrastructure first, real value later. The next layer, agentic AI included, is where the bigger opportunity lives, and it hasn't fully arrived yet.
• Technology moves at the speed of trust, not capability: Self-driving cars have had the technology for over a decade but still aren't everywhere, because nobody has agreed on full gamut of liabilities. AI adoption works the same way: it is not how smart the tech is, it is how ready the rules and ethics are.
• Keeping people in the equation is bigger than any one company: Businesses will chase the bottom line, and that's not a flaw. That is exactly why policy, society, and leadership matter. They rae what keeps people at the center as AI scales.

Whether you're building in tech, leading a team through disruption, or just trying to make sense of where AI is really headed, this conversation offers a rare, grounded perspective from someone who has spent three decades inside the industry shaping it.

About the Speaker:
Jaswinder Ahuja is the former Corporate VP and India Managing Director at Cadence Design Systems, He is a founding member of the VLSI Society of India, former Chairman of the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association, and a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from VLSI Society of India. He now works with startups and venture capital firms shaping semiconductor industry strategy.

About the Host:
Dolon Mitra, her work centres on leadership capability that hasn't kept pace with a fast-scaling business, and leadership that looks strong on paper but isn't converting into real performance. She helps organizations close both gaps, so leadership growth keeps pace with the business, and shows up where it matters most, the results.