Simon Brown (02:10.19) So hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Simon Brown. I'm one of the co-authors of the book, The Curious Advantage. And today I'm here with my co-authors, Paul Ashcroft and Garrick Jones.

Paul (02:21.859) Hello.

Garrick (02:24.891) Hi there.

Simon Brown (02:27.27) And we're delighted to be joined by Abhijit Baddari. Hi Abhijit.

Abhijit Bhaduri (02:32.042) Hi, thank you for having me.

Simon Brown (02:34.718) thrilled to have you. So a big welcome to the Curious Advantage podcast. So, Abhijit, you're the former general manager, global learning and development manager for Microsoft. You're also a bestselling author. Forbes has described you as one of India's most interesting globalists. You've also been honored as the number one HR influencer by Society for Human Resource Management.

As well as all that, you also teach at the doctoral programme for chief learning officers at the University of Pennsylvania, and you've collected a million social media followers. So that's a lot that keeps you busy. So can you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are now and the journey that you've been on?

Abhijit Bhaduri (03:20.666) I've been working on a bunch of different projects simultaneously, so I think that sort of describes it all. So, for me, it's never really doing one straight line and doing one thing. I always try and sort of figure out something else to do and something else to do. And then, so my wife always says that if there are...

you know, 24 hours in the day, you make it a point to pack in stuff worth 28 hours. So, so I think that's an accurate description. So sometimes, yeah, it is way too many things. I think it's sometimes not a good thing also.

Simon Brown (03:53.034) Hahaha

Simon Brown (04:05.782) And so in your latest book, Career 3.0, six skills you must have to succeed. You mentioned that the old model of learn, earn, and retire isn't viable anymore, and that we needed a new approach to navigate through the complex and uncertain landscape of work. So tell us more about that. So tell us, what is Career 3.0? And yeah, we'd love to hear more.

Abhijit Bhaduri (04:35.906) Thank you. So I, you know, realized that when, when you look at how careers get shaped, they can be shaped by one of the three factors. It's either change in the way that we work, you know, which is that, you know, imagine when you are changing from steam as a method of production to electricity, I mean, that's one kind of a shift. So you are seeing a similar shift when it comes to artificial intelligence and generative AI is of course, you know, the latest in that particular space.

is completely changing how we work. What that immediately triggers is, you know, the second factor, which is the skills portfolio that people have. So some of the things become obsolete, some of the things become more powerful, some of the things you start doing in conjunction with technology. So that's the skill set. And the third element is actually the workplace, you know, and that also changes.

in response to this, that your business models will change, the way that you engage talent will change, the number of people that you have will change. So sometimes you have more consultants and less full-time employees and all those kinds of shifts. So work, worker and workplace are the three variables that sort of work together to create careers. Historically, they've all remained static, so you could just get educated.

that took care of the skills that you have and that you learn, earn and retire. One of the things I started to see that a few years back, you started to see this whole shift towards a second side gig. So you add another hobby or something that you're monetizing. So your people, and historically it's been there. I mean, people who are working, the CEO will be on the board of another company.

Simon Brown (06:00.075) Mm.

Abhijit Bhaduri (06:22.594) And sometimes you find that somebody works to teach children on the side, they volunteer their time. Now I'm simply saying that career 2.0 is where a side gig gets monetized. So that's your second archetype. The third archetype is really where you have multiple skills monetized in multiple ecosystems. So one of them...

Simon Brown (06:36.45) Mm-hmm.

Abhijit Bhaduri (06:50.23) doesn't necessarily give you an advantage in the other, and that's your career 3.0, which is how this book came about. And that's triggered by, you know, A, that we are living longer. So, you know, living to be 100 is going to become more and more common. We are going to be less impressed to hear that somebody's just on 101, we are going to be less impressed with that. The second is that the shelf life of a skill, IBM research talks about it as two and a half years.

And the third is that even the lifespan of an organization, the number of employers, that's dropping. It's barely past the teens. So a combination of all this is really upending everything that we have known about careers, so that learn, earn and retire is completely gone.

Paul (07:39.215) I love the book and the concept and the subtitle, six skills you must have to succeed. So tell us what are the six skills and what is your favorite that we really must focus on?

Abhijit Bhaduri (07:45.07) Mm-hmm.

Abhijit Bhaduri (07:52.15) So the six skills are really that the first is that you must really be able to learn something by yourself, something that you have not been formally taught, which means that knowledge has not been structured and given to you and you learn it well enough to be able to monetize it. So that's the first one. The second piece is that once you learn it, proof of that is that you are able to teach it online. So why online? Because then...

that sort of expands your reach and you know, you know it well enough to simplify it and teach others. So that's your second skill. The third skill is that in the process of teaching, you become part of different ecosystems because you know, you're in an online world, the people who are learning that skill come from many different ecosystems. So you become part of multiple ecosystems. The fourth is that you have to be a great storyteller to be able to hold.

people's interest online. So that's your fourth skill. The fifth skill is that you must have a very strong brand in order to be discovered. And because otherwise people don't know who you are and that no matter how good you are, you can't get discovered. So that's powerful to have a strong personal brand. And the final piece is that you have to have a portfolio of skills, pretty much like what a venture capitalist has so that you are...

expert in some skill, you're beginning to learn another skill and the third skill is probably something that has become obsolete now, it's no longer very valuable. So this juggling of the skills along an S-curve, you know, that is really what the venture capitalists do. So that is really the summary of the six skills. My favorite one I think would be really the portfolio of skills.

Garrick (09:44.937) Ah, of course, all of it. I love the fact that you be so clear about what's happening digitally and the ecosystem that we and the next generation are inhabiting. You know, a number of things come to mind when we wrote Curious Advantage. One of the questions we were pondering on is what do we teach the next generation? The digital world can seem very narrow at times and the bandwidth can seem narrow. And curiosity...

was linked to learning and was really how we landed on it, because you need to be curious in order to keep on going outside of the boundaries or keep it open, I think is the thing. The thing I also relate to a lot is the ecosystem, a completely different way of learning, completely different way of being in the world in some respect. We need skills now and the next generation needs skills that we haven't necessarily been taught. The pyramid is no longer the top down, there's a hyper-connected cloud.

as you say, and the thing that really grabs me about the ecosystem is how it's impacting our daily lives, how we're living in different places, and what you say about multiplicity, how we're living in parallel lives simultaneously. You can't be in just one place. You have to have side hustles going on at the same time. These are all important skills, and I'm curious about the ecosystem. Can you tell us a little bit more about how we are supposed to...

successfully navigate this new world.

Abhijit Bhaduri (11:17.558) So, I wish I had a very clear answer, but you know, the way I would sort of think about it is people with multiple interests, you know, the curious mind, you don't really see a division between the subjects and the world is becoming so complex that it is increasingly more difficult to segregate, you know, a subject and say this belongs to this subject and not to the other. So

For example, if you look at the Nobel laureates, most of them are now, the prize is given to a group of two or three people who've collaborated sometimes across disciplines. So, very hard to say that, when you say biochemistry, is it more of bio or is it more of chemistry? Or is there no physics involved? Or computational biology, if you look at the fields that are emerging, they're all sort of really an amalgam of different skills.

with different disciplines. So when you think about it, when your curiosity sort of spans more than one discipline, you automatically start meeting people who are at different parts. You know, so for example, I've always been fascinated by the world of mass media. So, you know, I've been interested in, you know, radio. And so when you, I used to do some work at a radio station earlier when I was growing up.

And so then you get to meet not just, you know, the voiceover artists, you meet the news readers, you meet the people who are doing the sound production, then you meet the electrical engineers there, you meet the people who manage the studio settings, you know, all of that. So you begin to see all different professions who are part of that ecosystem, which means to take an organizational construct, you know, you find everybody in that organization chart, you are able to sort of really see

they are doing, how that connects to that particular ecosystem. So when you move across to another ecosystem, for example, when I started to write, you know, for newspapers, you begin to see that there is a similar kind of a, you know, hierarchy. You have editors, you have journalists, you have, you know, investigative journalists, you have film journalists. And so there are sub-disciplines and you begin to see all of it as creating this. So,

Abhijit Bhaduri (13:41.174) when you step back, you get a much broader view of this. So then you add in your experience, let's say with television. So I did a little bit of work on that or theater. So you begin to see that there are, you begin to find a lot more common rather than the differences. When you look at it from a distance, you see differences. When you begin to connect the ecosystems, you begin to see a lot more pathways that are common. So I think that's the way I would describe it.

Garrick (14:07.354) too.

Yes, so you're encouraging us to take a holistic approach, look at everything you're connected to, not just your one discipline, and explore, learn and be curious, learn the languages, learn what they're doing, because that enriches what we do today. That's what I'm hearing. I love the fact that I imagine you as a radio DJ, perhaps. But the other thing I'm also intrigued about is, if you've written a book called Dreamers and Unicorns, which is all about leadership,

Simon Brown (14:28.686) I'm sorry.

Abhijit Bhaduri (14:34.932) Yeah.

Garrick (14:39.825) And what does it mean to be a unicorn or a dreamer in this context?

Abhijit Bhaduri (14:45.506) So I use the term dreamers and unicorns to describe majority of the organizations that you see, you know, when people start their little, you know, solopreneur adventure, you know, they have one or two employees and they get started, you know, in the entrepreneurial journey. That's the dreamer. They want to do something. They've got a plan and they've got a product idea in mind sometimes. Five friends come together. The unicorn is when they reach a certain scale, which, you know, addresses.

a large geography. You know, the people that I was interviewing were all these people who had their product reach different corners of India, which is a fairly large country. You see them going about and that takes a long time to scale up. So what was really common to all the people who had scaled up were people who had invested in leadership, talent and culture. And then, you know, there are two other categories, the market shapers. You know, these are people.

whose products change lives. You know, these are the people, every day the largest brands, if you take, you're in today's world, when they say the big seven, these are companies that have really sort of changed and redefined sectors or redefined a certain way in which we live and work. So those are the market shapers. And then you have a category in between each one of these, which are the incumbents, that these are the people who've not been able to innovate. They haven't been curious enough and therefore,

they have just withered away. They might have had an advantage and then they have just given it up. And the common factor for success was, these are all the people who fail to invest in leadership because the leader sets the vision. Talent, which is that you get the set of portfolio of skills together. And then you have culture, which keeps the people that you've hired. Because it's probably easier to acquire talent than to retain and...

get them to be continuously aligned to the vision and excited about it. So that's the premise of the book.

Garrick (16:46.577) Yes, I'm excited. That's, it's fascinating. I'm excited about India. When you talk about India, there's so much to learn from India. I always remember talking to one of the government some years back when they were talking about putting the optical fiber backbone into India. And they said, don't talk to us unless you can help us put 600,000 villagers in place in two years.

and they achieved it. And there's a lot we can learn about scale, I think. Same with the railways in India. Nobody knows how to scale quite like the Indians. I mean, there's so much coming out of some of the older cultures, but also of course, lots to tell about pointing to the future. I'm fascinated about brand and also what you talk about personal brand and why that's important in the SQL system.

Simon Brown (17:16.75) I'm going to go to bed.

Abhijit Bhaduri (17:44.518) Yeah, you know, when we had Career 1.0, your personal brand didn't quite matter. You were employed by a certain company and your business card was really your brand. So if I say that I work for so-and-so company and I flash my business card, if you think about it, that's how people would introduce themselves. They would say that, you know, I am so-and-so person, I work for this company. That's what they would say. But increasingly, we find that, you know, when you, the moment you have

a career 2.0 model, you know, what happens is your identity also shifts and gets divided between two different fields. So you know, there's someone who's very famous in India, who's a qualified medical doctor, but is actually also a singer, rock singer and has is much better known perhaps as a singer. So this person called Palash Sen is a doctor, but is better known as a

rock singer. So when you think about it, what is he? I mean, he's both. He's a that's an and kind of a, you know, identity is a doctor and a singer. When you look at, you know, the career three model, you are juggling three or more identities. So you're a YouTube star. You are also, you know, a writer, perhaps. And you also have a job in some particular company that you're running. When you look at these kinds of things,

the ability to get discovered actually comes from having a strong personal brand. And I think it's important to have a strong personal brand, even if you're employed inside an organization. So the question is that, you know, if people are in a job, that means person brand doesn't count. No, it does. Because when you think about in an organization, the people who are really continuously tapped on for the bigger projects, you know, they are

tapped on for the high potential opportunities. Those are all the people who have strong personal brands, whichever way, it may not be in that conventional sense of having 500 followers on Instagram, but it's actually about being known for the work or the expertise that you do. So in the book, I actually talk about personal brand, not in terms of the numbers, but in terms of skills, because in the skills economy, that's what is going to be far more important than,

Abhijit Bhaduri (20:10.778) just having followers because you could be doing anything. You could be, you know, people to all kinds of these crazy challenges and you got it up thousands of followers. That's not necessarily a personal brand because what are you really known for? What will people think of, you know, when they have a problem, which problem will they go to you for only you are the go-to person for that. That's to me, the personal brand.

Simon Brown (20:37.038) I'm intrigued whether under the, as you sort of move from, I guess, that career one dot O where you have a single role and therefore a sort of single brand career two dot O, you have your sort of side gig and then career three dot O you, you end up wearing many hats. Does it lead to greater authenticity in your brand? Because actually you, you have to show up in so many places that you need this sort of consistency across. I mean, the example of the.

the medical doctor and the rock star. I wonder there, is it a consistent authentic brand between the two or is it two completely, completely different brands and you're sort of change changing hats between the brands and sort of have the complexity of I'm one character here and one character here and I'm intrigued on what you see around the authenticity side of it.

Abhijit Bhaduri (21:27.406) I think that's a great question because, you know, some people actually deal with it sequentially, you know, so and it happens because, you know, they were trained to be, you know, pursuing a certain kind of a profession, then they shifted opportunities and they start doing something else. Now, if you think about it inside an organization also, you know, as people become people managers from individual contributors, you are having to juggle.

two things, you know, you have your own work and you're managing the work of the team. So that's your career 2.0 kind of a model. The classic definition, if you look at a CEO, the CEO is actually your career 3.0 person that manages the outside and the inside, managing, you know, sometimes the different geographies, different functions, different stakeholders, the board, you know, the media.

And that's truly, you know, in a classical sense, that is truly a career 3.0 role inside an organization. But there are people who can follow exactly the same thing outside. So it's not really fragmentation of the identity. It's actually, it just integrates it better. People, when they struggle with it, you know, they are still trying to piece those little bits together and they get overwhelmed.

But that's also something that happens when you take up something new, when you become a people manager for the first time, it is very, very overwhelming because you seem to be constantly losing track of what you have to do. And then you go back to managing the team and then you kind of think, oh, my God, I'm not doing my own work. Then you do that and you think the team is going haywire. So people do travel that for a bit and then they find the rhythm. So you just have to give it enough time. So.

Simon Brown (23:10.798) Thanks for watching!

Abhijit Bhaduri (23:18.498) That's how I define it. So it's not really something which can't be done inside an organization.

Simon Brown (23:24.046) Yeah. And, and the final question on brand as well. So, I mean, you've evidently been very successful in building a brand. You've, you've got a million social media followers. You've, you've a successful author. You've had a very successful career through corporate. So what would be, and maybe this is in the book, but what would be your advice on, on building that personal brand? Cause I imagine a lot of our listeners are sort of sitting there thinking, how, where do I start to build that brand?

What do I need to do to actually do that? Do you have any tips that people could adopt in order to build their own personal brand?

Abhijit Bhaduri (24:00.374) You know, by definition, personal brand is something that you discover for yourself. But I, you know, I can share what I sort of, when I look back and try to connect the dots. I would think that I started by actually bringing in my hobbies into the work that I do, you know. So I've been interested in writing and drawing and you know, sketches and all that stuff. So.

Simon Brown (24:05.034) Cool.

Abhijit Bhaduri (24:26.85) back in the day, and this is definitely going to date me when I talk about that. So when you would have those transparencies used in classrooms, you know, when I would be teaching in college, I would, instead of having just text, I would illustrate them with little cartoons on the side and do that. And, you know, that was something that I would do pretty regularly.

And then later on when I would write on blogs, you know, I would write about the work that I was doing. So, you know, that I would write about, you know, all the work that I was doing with my clients, all the work that I'm doing or reading about, you know, a book review. And I found, you know, I used to do these little notes, which are sort of really you take a visual summary because I think visually. So when I read a book, even your book, when I've read, I really loved it. And.

Simon Brown (25:21.411) Thank you.

Abhijit Bhaduri (25:22.126) I have a, which I'm going to sort of publish pretty soon. And, you know, I said that this is a book, here are some things that struck, struck in my mind. And I illustrate those. And then, you know, of course, when you put it out in the public space, you do add a little bit of color and all that to show off a little bit. But but when I would do those, somebody just simply said that, why don't you publish these, you know, along with the article? So I said, that's a great idea.

Simon Brown (25:32.273) Mmm.

Simon Brown (25:40.27) Fantastic.

Abhijit Bhaduri (25:50.686) So I started adding those. So slowly over time, if you see the transition is exactly the same, you bring in your hobbies, you integrate them into your work, and then you sort of in that case, you build a fairly unique combination that you are able to do something which is essentially you, because that's the only way you can sustain it over time. And then it's something that people enjoy and derive value out of. So it's not done for you yourself, but...

This is a way in which I learned because it simplifies something in my head. Hopefully it simplifies things for others as well.

Paul (26:27.339) Abhijit, one of the things that is certainly changing the skills landscape is gen AI. And I know you're researching and you're writing on this topic in particular, in the book, you talk about the AI phone moment that we're going through. Could you tell us a bit about your perspective on how gen AI is, is changing the landscape for organizations?

Abhijit Bhaduri (26:47.362) So I think when you look at, again, if I were to go back to that work worker workplace kind of model, if you see, Gen.ai is redefining the threshold of what we consider to be an expert. So let's take a very simple example. Most smartphones have had, you know, the kind of technology that improves.

an average person's photographs dramatically. So, you know, even the average person can take phenomenal photographs today. So you see Instagram. I mean, that's a so work has changed, which means the way we take photographs has changed the skills required to be a professional photographer. That threshold has become substantially higher. So I have friends who are professional photographers. When you see their photographs, you can still make out that wow.

that looks like an amazing photograph, just the way that they've composed it, all the effects that they have used and all of that. But even those, you can today, you know, substitute some of that with Gen.ai, because, you know, Gen.ai also generates photographs. So an artist, I mean, I illustrate stuff, but I was just thinking that something like this, which would, you know, so I illustrate something that I've read, I illustrate those, you know, in drawings, but Gen.ai could...

do its own version of something like that. So the skills that you need, they are going to change. And the workplace models are going to change because every single role that the organization has, has to be divided into three categories. That you have to see the tasks that can be done by humans alone, which could be, let's say, motivating somebody or all the things that you are doing through relationships and conversations, those get to be done by humans.

There is work that gets augmented by technology, Gen.AI. So you know, there are already people who are writing with Gen.AI, they are drawing with Gen.AI. So it's all of that. And then of course, you have organizations which are creating opportunities and services based on exactly what we talked about. So this is the AI phone moment, the iPhone moment, if you will, just pronounced in a strange way. But yeah, that's what it is.

Paul (29:06.647) I think you're right. I think we're not yet seeing, maybe you can tell us what these are, but I don't think we're yet seeing the new business models, truly new business models that the GenAI technology is presenting us. I mean, are there some that you're seeing at the moment? Like, you know, when they are with the iPhone, the Uber and any of these location based devices only work because you're holding a mobile device that knows where you are in your hand, right? As you say, it enables a new business model.

Abhijit Bhaduri (29:21.978) Yeah, I mean if you

Abhijit Bhaduri (29:34.43) If you look at the recent example of this company called Klarna, they actually used Gen.ai to completely change the customer service experience. And the customer didn't realize that they actually find that it's improved dramatically. It takes less time to respond to the customer and solve the problem.

Paul (29:50.069) Mm.

Abhijit Bhaduri (30:01.382) And it's different from the bot that we experience in so many places that's sometimes pretty annoying. But here in this case, it actually made a big difference. The result of which was they were able to, you know, now for the people who are doing that particular job, they did lose their jobs to AI. But I think what it'll mean is that just what we use humans for, that concept is going to change. The interesting element of that is...

you know, a company called Teleperforma in France, they lost about a billion dollars of their valuation, the market cap, because of what Klarna did, which means, you know, even though it is something which is happening in a different time and space, it can impact you. So, you know, yeah, it's just a completely different notion of competition because you know, we used to in the earlier industrial model used to have

Paul (30:46.024) It's shifting the landscape, right?

Abhijit Bhaduri (30:58.45) you know, the organization was like a fish tank, you know, so It was different from the rest of the world outside We are now in a world where the fish tank has become part of the ocean So you cannot say that you know we are not going to respond to this think of the social issues that Organizations have to take a stance on and it backfires and we've seen many such examples of the best of brands really You know get it wrong. So I think the notion of many of these things

what you communicate on, what belongs inside the organization, what doesn't, where does work get done? Every single assumption of ours is getting challenged. You know, so should people work entirely from home, sometimes from home, never from home, on some occasions at the start of a project, you know, they need to be in the office or every day in the office for how many hours in the office on some days in the office. Think of the number of variants.

This is completely, and I kind of think that the pandemic was the biggest digital transformation project for the world, because a lot of assumptions that we had about the world of work completely got upended because you don't need to have synchronous timing for being in the same office and at the same time. That got challenged. What a fundamental assumption that was.

So I think lots is happening and it's an evolving landscape. I kind of somewhere in the book, I kind of mentioned that it's like day zero of, you know, the next journey. So really so much is going to happen. We are just seeing the beginning of it and serious business months are very evolving.

Simon Brown (32:25.387) said

Simon Brown (32:46.626) So we're talking with Abhijit Paduri, who's a globally sought after talent management advisor and a LinkedIn top voice and lead learning and development at Microsoft worldwide. He's also the former chief learning officer for Wipro. He's an alumni of PepsiCo, Colgate and Tata Steel. And he's the author of the bestselling books like the Digital Tsunami and Don't Hire the Best, as well as his latest book, Career 3.0, The Six Skills You Must Have to Succeed, which we heard about earlier.

He's also honored as a distinguished alumni of XLRi. His prolific writings are featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal and more. So we're thrilled to have Avidit on our podcast with us. So Avidit, I'd like to come back to the Dreamers and Unicorns book. So you talked about how leadership, talent and culture are the sort of the three things that differentiated the unicorns.

So I guess all organizations have some sort of leadership, they have some sort of talent and some sort of culture. And it's interesting that we reference some research in the book around how actually it's not culture that differentiates high performance, it's certain types of culture that differentiate high performance because a culture could be negative or positive, toxic or positive. So what are the traits around sort of leadership around talent and...

around culture, the things that took these organizations to be successful when others failed along the way.

Abhijit Bhaduri (34:20.458) You know, in retrospect, after I read your book, this was one book I wished I had written. I felt extremely bad that this was, you know, such a fantastic book. I loved your book, The Curious Advantage, because at the heart of, you know, what we talk about,

Simon Brown (34:28.101) Hahaha.

Garrick (34:32.873) Great indeed. Thank you.

Simon Brown (34:41.486) Thank you.

Abhijit Bhaduri (34:46.826) The culture of curiosity is really where it all begins. And it's extremely hard to sustain, even if the head of the business is a person who has a great idea, they need to assemble a team of people. So the leader sets the vision and says, okay, we are going to move from driving always in the north, we are going to go northeast or northwest, whatever. So they set the direction.

they decide where the investments are going to be shifted from and to. So the as is and to be vision is defined by the leader. But when they do that, every time there is a reshuffling of the talent that you need, you know, so work that was very much valued in the past no longer is that important. And people have to shift skills. So some people do, some don't. So in the in the places which have done well.

in making these kind of transitions, they have actually prepared their, they've invested heavily in learning and development. I mean, that's one of the very heartening factors for me personally, you know, as somebody. So, you know, I think the process of investing in the skill building and actually preparing a person to do a different set of tasks than what they were used to.

Simon Brown (35:57.854) Likewise, that's very reassuring.

Abhijit Bhaduri (36:13.426) That is done very smoothly on a continuous basis. And you can't do it as a panic stricken response that, OK, my God, this is happening now. Everybody needs to do this. Those kind of initiatives really always fail. You know, the moment and learning the moment is done, you know, through coercion or through, you know, forced measures that you have to complete this without which you don't get promoted or whatever. Those models just don't work. So the skills portfolio needs to be.

moved smoothly to respond to the shift in the marketplace or the opportunities or the vision of the leader. And the culture of curiosity that lets people try out different things, continuously go and sort of tweak the model and try out different things, take different career paths, come back if they don't like it. Those kind of opportunities are really the defining differentiator. So I found that there are companies which are

Garrick (36:49.511) Well.

Abhijit Bhaduri (37:12.806) able to do some of these things really well. And I was privileged to get a close look at some of these things. I also got a chance to look at companies which don't do a good job. And that's really something that triggers the framework. And you say that, wow, I mean, here is a company which was so successful in the past. Why haven't they done it? And if you see very few dreamers become your gods. So that's evidence.

Garrick (37:32.897) Shit, I want to...

Simon Brown (37:33.282) Mm.

Garrick (37:39.425) Abhijat, I wanted to ask you about evidence of corporates who are under threat, if you like, from the changing world, or they consider it as opportunity. How does one as a corporate support Career 3.0, for example? What needs to change in the mindset to enable you to support this new world?

Abhijit Bhaduri (38:03.266) So I think one of the pieces is that if you look at a broad trend, and I'm going to sort of link it to that. So if you see a lot of technology when it emerges, it actually emerges as something that you play with. I mean, even if you see Chad GPT when it came in, they said the reason why they were able to drive adoption to such a huge, massive extent.

It was pretty straightforward that they, you know, did not say that rewrite your business model with this. They just said, write a crazy limerick, you know, create a birthday card for your dog, you know. So when you do that, you are encouraging experimentation and you are triggering and tapping into curiosity. And that I think is at the heart of how organizations need to look at skilling. So how do you build that kind of a curiosity through play?

Which means that, you know, if you look at how children play, they, it's very fluid. It's not defined by rigid rules. You know, they will sometimes mix the rules of one game and bring it into another. And then they say that, oh my God, there's leading to too many fights. Let's go back to something like this. And they keep evolving. They try out different things. And I think, you know, organizations, when they get too obsessed with measurement and productivity,

on day one, before they have released a skill building process, there's enough conversation about how are we going to measure it? What is going to be the measure? How many hours should they have to take this? The moment you have that mindset, that's a very industrial age mindset. What it does is people start to game the system. So, we've all heard of this example that when they put on these courses, which you can just simply tap through and complete.

Enough people do that. They go back to cooking dinner and they have this stuff happening on the side. They keep scrolling past each slide. You're actually not building the skill because you have to give people learning content must have a pull. If your learning content does not have pull, that's a problem. That needs to be addressed. And it happens because you are not starting off with that.

Abhijit Bhaduri (40:25.938) obsession with measurement and you know you have to complete five hours of this and three hours of this. Let people play with it they'll probably land up doing much more and they'll land up building much deeper set of skills. The moment you know if it's human nature when you tell people you have to do this they instantly revolt. I mean there is you know research which shows that when children were asked to play with magic markers and they said you have to use these magic markers.

The moment they put that have to and made it mandatory, the children say, but we don't like playing with magic markers. So, you know, that's what human beings are. They don't respond well to push. So learning comes from a pull methodology.

Garrick (41:03.46) It is.

Garrick (41:09.929) That's brilliant.

Paul (41:10.379) I want to go back to your favorite, as you said, of the six skills and how to build a portfolio of skills and careers like a venture capitalist and to be provocative. One of the ways venture capitalists work, as I understand it, is they place several bets and they expect some of those bets to pay off, but they expect and understand that quite a few of them won't. How does that mindset work? Which a bit like in curiosity is an openness to failure.

Abhijit Bhaduri (41:30.83) Mm-hmm.

Paul (41:39.743) as it were, how does that mindset work from an individual's point of view, but also from an organization's point of view when they're investing in skills and in their career, do we want to try and fail fast when we're doing that to build that portfolio of skills?

Abhijit Bhaduri (41:55.89) I think that when you look at that portfolio mindset, you've got to sort of see that everything that you are learning today doesn't necessarily get used right away. So being able to pick up a couple of things along the way, maybe it is something that you will bundle and then use it in some other shape or form. I mean, those are some of the things that organizations just have to be more comfortable with.

So, for example, if someone's trying to learn a language, today most companies, if they don't have an immediate use for it, they will say that, why are you keen to learn that language? Except for the fact that when, let's say, this person's skills are most useful in another country where that language is being spoken, you already have somebody who has learnt it because they love doing that and they've done it out of their own free will.

you're able to build a lot of those kind of skills which you can always connect those dots. So in some sense, the mindset of collecting the dots, you know, has to be encouraged a lot more and connecting the dots will be defined by the circumstances.

Garrick (43:09.638) Yes.

Garrick (43:13.457) Yes, we think we've seen some research recently about companies that are offering broad education, not only technical skills, but you know, if you've got a certification, you can also choose to perhaps do a guitar course or learning course, or something that seems on the outside, but which really builds the skill set of the human being. Companies that are offering broadest available and so available these days with the content online.

are getting better results and are getting better learning results. So there's a trend we think toward, just as you say, that broadening of what it means to be in learning and development. Development is huge and it covers so much of the whole human being as you talk about. I'm interested in what are you personally most curious about right now? Abishai?

Abhijit Bhaduri (44:11.231) I like to learn from people who are in the creator economy. I'm always fascinated by the world of creation. Because if you look at the creators, what happens is they're continuously learning and experimenting continuously. Every single piece of work that they do, they are trying out a new visual, they are trying out a new software, they are trying out a new angle, they are trying to address a new audience, they'll change the setting, they'll do that.

They experiment on a day-to-day basis and that's how their influence grows. I think one of the ideas that I had tried out with one of my clients, I mean, I kind of, you know, then unfortunately I moved and I didn't get to complete that project. But the idea that I was working with is for the initial portion of building a skill, invite these creators, you know, the influencers and creators and different platforms. You know, you have...

Instagram influencers, you have LinkedIn influencers, you have, you know, other Twitter influencers. You get them together and ask them to create content, you know. And these people will take the most boring ideas and turn it into stuff that generates curiosity because they're really trained to generate curiosity. And once people are curious, they travel the rest of the distance by themselves. So you don't have to have this whole model of curiosity.

the police element of learning that, you know, you better learn this kind of a model. People will do it on their own. So leverage, you know, a set of creators and they'd be very happy to work with, you know, yet another set of the audience, potential audience. They do that because most of these creators already have an audience in your organization. So I think it's just taking it to another level altogether. So.

Paul (46:05.867) I think it builds on your point about ecosystem and connected to the network. While you're creating that pool, you're starting the fire, you're starting that attraction into learning, but then you're saying you can let it go. I think what I heard you say earlier is from an organizational point of view, don't be too attached to the immediate outcome, because you might not see the value tomorrow, but this may come further down the line.

Abhijit Bhaduri (46:09.696) Exactly.

Abhijit Bhaduri (46:29.274) And also that technology itself changes so much. I mean, think about when ChatGPD was released. We said, okay, it's good for writing limericks. I mean, what good is this? But today there is a business case for using some of that application. Let's say there is Sora, which now does cat videos of 60 seconds. And people say, oh yeah, I mean, so why would we care about cat videos? True.

But tomorrow it could change the way that you write your learning content. Imagine what it could do. That could be such a game changer. So I think the ability to take... You know, the other piece that I think has changed is we spent far too much of time looking at creating perfect learning content, which has very little shelf life. So you spend months together creating content and saying that, OK, this has to be programmed like that.

Content has to be something which is real and in real time. So here is something that has happened. So let's say there's a large event that is happening in the world, wherever you are. Linking that to the content that you are doing, a creator does it every single day. So they do that, they link that, they build that content and they make these two things connected. They pass it on to the learners inside the organization. They play with that content.

even if they don't necessarily get to participate in that world event, they've understood with yet another example, OK, this is what this content is really all about. This is what it's all about. And the skill gets built automatically as a byproduct. It's not the main aim. The main aim is to listen to the story and watch that thing fascinated and you're curious about it and say, what next? You know, so they work so much on everything from, you know, when you when you write a post.

You spend as much time writing that headline and saying that, is this going to be more attractive? You try it out, you do this, and then you get it done, but you still have a deadline. So you do it quickly. You don't spend six months developing that headline. Yes, it will be perfect, but the moment would have gone. So I think just being able to, that to me is the real risk taking and learning and development that organizations have a possibility of exploring.

Simon Brown (48:50.702) So we're coming close to time. I've been frantically scribbling notes of all this rich, rich material that you've been sharing with us, Avidjit. So some of the things that we've covered over the course of our conversation. So hearing how you somehow managed to defy time and pack 28 hours into a 24 hour period. We heard about the work, the worker and the workplace and how we've gone from Korea.

1.0 where we would learn, earn and retire, through career 2.0 where we had a hobby on the side that maybe we started to monetize, and now career 3.0 where we actually have multiple skills in multiple ecosystems. You shared some of the trends that are happening around how we're hopefully all gonna start to live to 100 or at least the life expectancy is gonna extend.

We heard about how the shelf life of skills is changing and that the half life now being two and a half years and how actually the lifetime of organizations is also dropping and becoming shorter. Then you took us through the powerful six skills to succeed from your latest book. So learning by yourself through not formal learning or sort of unstructured learning, the power of them being able to teach those skills online, how we should become part of.

ecosystems and you also shared how we can learn across those different ecosystems and see the parallels between them, that we should become great storytellers and then that we can discover our brand and create those strong brands in order to be able to be discovered and share some good advice around how to do that as well. And then some great conversations around the portfolio skills and the venture capital approach to skills, embedding in multiple skills

expiring summer coming. We heard about your other book, Dreamers and Unicorns, the value of leadership, talent and culture as a differentiator between organisations that succeed and those that didn't. Good advice around bringing your hobbies into work and some of the examples around how you've done that as well. And then dived into Gen. AI and some of the changes there with the AI phone moment and some...

Simon Brown (51:08.386) fascinating case studies of recent examples where AI has really disrupted as well. And then the power of a culture of curiosity as well and the impact that can have. Lots there. If there's one thing from all of that maybe our listeners could take away, what would be your sort of one parting advice for our listeners?

Abhijit Bhaduri (51:32.078) I mean, I think, you know, I'm going to sort of steal the phrase that you wrote in my book, you know, when you gifted me your fantastic book, The Curious Advantage, you wrote, Stay Curious. I think that to me is the essence. It really is the essence of careers, you know, to be, it's not going to be about where you're working or what kind of work that'll keep changing, you know, in terms of fluidity.

The people who are curious will really thrive in this world.

Simon Brown (52:07.918) Thank you. Well, you've certainly demonstrated to us that you very much fall into that category of a curious person and it's been a great conversation. So a big thank you for joining us. Avidit.

Paul (52:18.891) Pleasure speaking with you, Abhijit. Thank you.

Abhijit Bhaduri (52:18.946) Thank you so much for having me. So good, thank you.

Garrick (52:19.053) Yes, actually. Brilliant.

Simon Brown (52:23.566) So you've been listening to a Curious Advantage podcast. We're curious to hear from you. If you think there was something useful or valuable from this conversation, we do encourage you please to write a review for the podcast on your preferred channel, saying why this was so and what you've learned from it. And don't forget to give us a five star rating while you're there. We always appreciate hearing our listeners' thoughts and having a curious conversation. Join today, hashtag curious advantage. Curious Advantage book is available on Amazon worldwide, audio, physical, digital, or audio.

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