**Terry**: [00:00] Hello, and welcome to episode 20 of the Mindful Wealth podcast. We have with us today Rajen Makhijani. Rajen is a TEDx speaker, an author, and a client partner at Korn Ferry, a consulting firm. His career has spanned interesting things from movies to leadership coaching to being in the social impact space. We found some of his stuff so interesting that we had to have him on the show. Rajen, can you tell us a little bit about you and what you do?

**Rajen**: [00:34] Currently, what I do is I am a client partner with Korn Ferry. That means that I go out, speak to clients, and hopefully win business to help them with their leadership and organizational challenges. That's what I do.

**Jonathan**: [00:52] So this is the first episode of season 2, but we are still all about mindful wealth. We talk about mindful wealth, true wealth, true life success—I've heard it referred to variously as happiness or well-being as well. How would you define true wealth?

**Rajen**: [01:09] To me, I don't know if it'll fit into your frame, but the opening lines of a particular book by a spiritual teacher at an ashram really stayed with me. I'll use that. It says that **an experience is to life what a brick is to a wall**. And so, if you fundamentally want a life of well-being, of happiness, of joy, then think about every brick of the wall. If each of the experiences ends up, in the net, being more about being happy and joyous, then basically you have a happy life.

**Jonathan**: [02:02] I don't think that changes it at all. I think that's exactly what we want from this. That's a great answer. Thank you.

**Terry**: [02:07] So, I wanted to poke a little bit at what really spoke to me in your TED Talk: this difference between us and the "other you," as you express it. That there are other people our lives touch that we have assumptions about or that we maybe have trouble understanding. For me, this really touched me because I work in real estate doing investing, and I do a lot of low-income housing. In that context, it's sometimes very difficult to understand some of the choices that the tenants make or some of the social problems that they face. Sometimes one is tempted to just say, "Well, make different choices." But you unpack some of those choices, and you try to give us a bit of insight into how we can be more understanding and bridge some of those social divisions. So, I wonder if you can maybe summarize that for us and show us how you saw a way out of these divides that we face?

**Rajen**: [03:11] It's a divide that has been profoundly disturbing for me. Every time I have been able to discover that common humanity, right from childhood, it has been profoundly joyous. To me, this is something that springs from fairly deep within. The summary of the TED Talk—or TEDx Talk, to be quite precise—is that we have sort of divided ourselves into some kind of subspecies. We look at each other with feelings of strangeness: "I don't understand why you do this." Our frames of reference are different, and we end up making judgments about the other.

**Rajen**: [04:09] My exhortation was that I had the opportunity to traverse across some of these—what I call the **glass wall of class**—and to take a peek at the other side. What I found was that the other is actually just another me. For all of the divisions and duality that I see apparently, actually, they're trying to solve for the same things that I'm trying to solve for. Their choices seem different and weird to me because I don't quite understand their context.

**Rajen**: [04:48] The real-life ways in which I discovered all of this were through three experiences of putting myself into the context and shoes of others. One was this 9,000-kilometer train journey across India. I really developed through these experiences... I've spoken in the talk about me then becoming a screenwriter because I really wanted to immerse myself in other characters and see life from their point of view. And the third one was to become what in North America would be more closely identified as a grassroots volunteer for an Obama-like campaign, which took people that were completely from a non-political walk of life into politics and into the grassroots to go and learn about the life of people that one would ordinarily not be hanging out with.

**Terry**: [05:51] I think what I'm hearing is that there's a sort of participant observation backdrop to what you're saying. Is your advice—because I guess we're looking for advice in terms of how do we implement this in our lives—would that be your advice? To go and explore and participate?

**Rajen**: [06:19] Yes, absolutely. I would say that we're all celebrating the journey of man into space, but there's a lot of unexplored space just two blocks down.

**Jonathan**: [06:34] I am curious about the folks that you saw that were running up against these specific constraints—the specific one being bribe versus taxation. Who solves that? Step one is to understand that they pay a lot of taxes in bribes, and they are delegitimized because of the way that system works. Who solves that? In the United States and Canada, can we solve that? I'd be amazed if we could. So is that something that has to be solved on the ground there, or wherever the location is? And then how do we agitate for that?

**Rajen**: [07:16] From the "arranged gap year" to arranging a gap year for yourselves, from being a part of Rotary or any of these kinds of missions and volunteering—which would be direct action—but you're right that that doesn't necessarily solve the problem. It's the classic starfish story: a boy is on a seashore and there are these starfish that have been washed ashore, gasping for oxygen. The boy picks up a starfish and throws it back into the sea. Somebody comes up and says, "Listen, how are you going to solve this? There are thousands of starfish that are dying here. How will this save lives?" He just picks up another one, throws that back in, and says, "Well, this one was saved." That's what volunteering can do.

**Rajen**: [08:30] At a more systemic level, I would simply say this: I think that **the developed world has a disproportionate impact on the lens that the rest of humanity uses to frame and view situations, to frame and view policy.** I would say, right down to your Facebook post and your own thinking, start to champion a different frame. Start to champion the fact that, listen, they are not the ones that are illegitimate; it's just we've defined it in a particular way. They're actually paying for the same goods and services that you and I are paying for, and perhaps are actually paying much higher.

**Rajen**: [09:24] The first step has to be empathy and compassion, not out of some kind of moral high ground, but out of a very rational ground. Very practically speaking, these are the folks that are paying taxes that are not being accounted for. In that sense, we need to elevate our game to say, "Okay, how can I recognize what you are doing?"

**Terry**: [09:47] So that's a nice segue into the next question. I read in one of your articles you talking about the **triple bottom line**. I'm assuming that's a win-win-win that is for social justice, for organizations, and for ourselves. We're really interested in how your personal striving for success, or organizations striving for success, can be done in a way that's socially responsible. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

**Rajen**: [10:17] First of all, there are many areas, or most areas, where the win-win-win is actually possible, particularly if a more long-term approach or time horizon is taken into mind. Let us also be honest that there are certain areas where the win-win-win will require collaborative effort. It's a little bit like if there are two teams playing soccer, and they realize actually this game could be made a lot faster or a lot better if we somehow did something to the stadium or to the ground to change the environment, the enabling conditions in which we are playing the game.

**Rajen**: [11:10] If both teams just had 11 players each... now if one of the teams said, "Yeah, actually that would really make the game really good," and then both teams would probably attract more spectators, make more money, and so on. It is true that there are certain contexts in which if only one of the teams realized this and took two players out, while the other team continued to play with 11, in the short run, they would be scoring more goals and winning more matches.

**Rajen**: [11:39] So there are those problems where society, governments, industry associations on their own, consumer forums—the power of the collective—all of these will need to come together and say we do need to put some investment aside, and we need to make sure that that doesn't penalize one player over the other. If that is taken care of, then there are indeed multiple use cases of the win-win-win being a reality.

**Jonathan**: [12:21] Rajen, could you say something about **Leadership by Results**? What is that?

**Rajen**: [12:25] Leadership by Results is a way of thinking about leadership where it's characterized by three things. Number one: you draw a very clear distinction between leadership and tourism. You don't send people on leadership courses to say, "Hey, you might learn something and meet new people." If that's what you want to do for your people, send them to the beach. Send them to museums. They might like something, they might learn something new, and yes, they might meet some new people.

**Rajen**: [13:00] Here is a top three business agenda that we're really trying to solve for as an organization. It could be external-facing client revenue or cost, it could be organization building, I need to build a successor pipeline, I need to digitize the business, etc. It could be impact-oriented. As long as it is a top three board agenda. Now, if this is the big, hairy, audacious goal that we want to set up and really pursue, which creates the "gulp effect"—which is when I think about that goal, I go, "Hmm, okay, that's going to be a tough one."

**Rajen**: [13:58] In this context, what kind of knowledge, skills, and mindsets—most importantly mindsets—do I need to shift to be able to effectively address these challenges and realize these big, hairy, audacious goals? And then the last piece being that now that I've taken a look at self in mirror, we've all done that together as a top team in the context of a big, hairy, audacious goal. Now let's think about how can we bring about the best of us, which is the systems, processes, strategy, whatever else is needed for the business, to make sure that we are now all aligned towards this top three board-level goal.

**Rajen**: [14:49] So in other words, Leadership by Results is making sure that leadership is contextualized to a big business goal. Leadership is seen not just as an individual game but as taking an entire intact team together. And the third is to stay accountable to results. If this is the big, hairy, audacious goal that we went in for, then let me make sure that I'm measuring whether we actually got to that or not.

**Rajen**: [15:27] By definition, leadership would not be a one-time event; it would be a journey. And so it has to make sure then that all of those support and challenge elements are present over a period of time that takes you through the journey to the attainment of the big goal.

**Terry**: [15:51] So, I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about **ESG**. That for me was a new... I'm more from the real estate space so we don't have too much ESG consulting in on-the-ground real estate. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what that is and some of the challenges that you face with the type of consulting that you do.

**Rajen**: [16:13] ESG is Environment, Social, and Governance. This has now become really a revolution across the world. It was Milton Friedman who had famously said that the business of business is to do business and to earn a profit, and that is its societal contribution. Which in one sense made sense if the contextual factors were lined up in a particular manner. Which means that under the assumption that profits can happen only through genuine innovation and productivity breakthroughs, then overall, as a society, we would all be doing well. And anything else that interfered with profit would be, in that sense, contrary to the role that business has to play.

**Rajen**: [17:16] But the underlying assumption there was perfect competition, perfect markets. Like anybody above the age of when you are still enjoying Prince Charming and Princess Charming fairy tales knows that there is nothing called perfect markets. There is nothing called perfect competition. Distortions in the market are actually the way to make profit in many cases. So then, starting with Al Gore, who brought to popular awareness this whole challenge of environment and climate crisis through his movie _Inconvenient Truth_, it started to come about that the market actually does not price in some of these, what are called in economics as "externalities."

**Rajen**: [18:11] Now the thinking has evolved. What is being agreed upon—not just by governments but by institutional investors, and about 74% of institutional investment money, which is several trillion dollars—has signed up to this pledge that we will not make investments where ESG considerations are not taken into account by businesses.

**Rajen**: [18:48] And there's a good reason for that. This sort of ties back to the win-win-win and the triple bottom line that we spoke about earlier. Even if you were to take the heart and the compassion and everything out of the equation and keep it perfectly rational, from an investor's perspective, if you are a polluting industry, if your business model is based on sweatshops or bribing big governments... people were thinking that with the pandemic, all of this climate change and everything would start to take a bit of a backseat because companies would be like, "Listen, I need to survive." But actually what seems to have happened is that all of those doomsday projections of climate change risks... what started to be apparent was that the pandemic could only be the trailer, the movie being climate change.

**Rajen**: [19:57] So I think what's really happened is that investors... earlier in our conversations CEOs would say, "Look, I'm totally for all of this, man, but what to do? The investors want a return." Now it's flipped. The investors are saying to management, "**What are you doing about this?**" And they're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I pledge to be carbon neutral by whatever date." And then they're now trying to figure out, "Dammit guys, how do we do this?" So that's kind of I think what's going on at the moment.

**Jonathan**: [20:28] So let's say a company recognizes and says, "Hey, we need to figure out this ESG thing." But some companies come and say, "Hey, we need to be more profitable," or "We need to have operational efficiencies." When someone comes to you and they say that, and you say, "Well, think about this impact thing," how much support do you have from within the organization, within Korn Ferry, to push this? Is it seen as an agenda? Is it seen as something like, "Hey, this is really important, it could be impactful both from the bottom line and from social impact?" Do you have a lot of support? Do you feel like you're alone? That's the general question. In the consulting environment, how do you feel as somebody who believes this and who has spoken very publicly about it?

**Rajen**: [21:13] The first principle in leadership coaching is that you cannot coach somebody that's not on the pitch. You cannot coach somebody that doesn't want to be coached. No matter how good a coach you are, no matter how passionate you are about coaching or the game. So I think one has to understand both the limitations and then I'll come to the privilege of being a consultant.

**Rajen**: [21:43] The number one very strong advice: don't try to be an activist in that setting and try and impose an agenda of, "But you know what, actually you should be looking at something else." No, that's what they're looking for. Now, within that, if you are both convinced, knowledgeable, persuasive, and genuine that here are the ways in which the operational efficiency agenda can be supported by energy efficiency, by distribution of your sourcing locations across the world rather than to the sweatshops because that's de-risking yourself, and so on... So it has to be done within the umbrella of what the client is asking you for. If we genuinely do believe in the triple bottom line, we don't necessarily have to go and ask others to believe in the triple bottom line if they're asking for the profit part of the bottom line. If we are knowledgeable, credible, persuasive, resourceful, creative, and authentic, we can say, "**Yes, I'm giving you those ideas which actually are going to help your operational efficiency.**"

**Rajen**: [23:14] And to your question of is that a lonely battle? Not really. It does involve the challenges that anybody with any kind of new idea has always had to face. Because one of the easy ways of operational efficiency could be, "Okay, let's just fire some workers." So there would be those that would be like, "Why are we doing all of this when there's a straightforward solution available?"

**Rajen**: [23:39] The second point regarding Korn Ferry specifically... I'm literally coming off of a coffee last evening with a fellow colleague who's very successful. He's talking to me about the enormous burn rate that colleagues are facing, particularly junior colleagues, and the kind of energy that they are deriving from being able to work on some of the projects that I'm leading—with UN agencies, with the nonprofit space, with the impact ESG space, etc. And he's like, "**You know, forget about the heart—I have a talent retention challenge, and you are the answer.**"

**Rajen**: [24:38] We're ourselves trying to segment the market and trying to see who will actually listen to that story. And I think there are three kinds of folks that will listen to that story. Number one: if you're a part of a global supply chain, particularly here in Asia, that supplies to Europe and to North America, then ESG is a business imperative. Because otherwise, you will lose your B2B customers. Second is if you have any international capital that's being invested by global players, by institutional money. Those folks are already signing up those pledges and they're going to be asking you ESG questions. Make a choice: you want to be embarrassed in front of them or you want to be a couple of steps ahead? And then the third point is what I just mentioned, which is that of talent and human capital. Particularly if you want millennials, if you want the more creatively inclined, innovative workforce that is seeking more to be engaged. So: talent, financial capital, global supply chain. Let's talk ESG.

**Jonathan**: [25:58] Is the talent issue global? I know in the United States, absolutely, millennials are saying, "I don't want to work for a place that does anything bad," and they're leaving. They'll absolutely leave the job. Is that true globally as well?

**Rajen**: [26:11] Well, here is how I would say it's a yes and a no. This is where I go back to the class question. If I talk about Asia in particular, and perhaps a little bit of Africa... There are certain countries and cultures like India, parts of Africa, where there is a fairly strong social consciousness. And with that, there are many in the educated millennial class who are making exactly the kinds of choices that you just spoke about.

**Rajen**: [26:56] Then there are cultures that perhaps are, let's call it, more oriented to prosperity in the more traditional sense of the term. As well as there are those who... you know, India just before the pandemic actually was at a 45-year high in terms of its unemployment. Now in that context, now when you broaden the definition of talent not just to cool millennials on mobiles but when you think about it as a larger labor force... I mean frankly speaking, if somebody can put two square meals on the table, in those classes, then that's what they're really thinking about.

**Jonathan**: [27:44] That speaks to your privilege. That's the privilege of thinking about "green" ESG. It's a privilege to be in that space for sure.

**Rajen**: [27:52] Absolutely. It's a privilege and a responsibility. Because the "other" doesn't have that privilege, so not only do I have to think about it from my own standpoint, but I have to make sure that the systems that I and my forefathers have perpetrated... because of which the other does not have the privilege of thinking about it, so I need to be thinking on their behalf as well.

**Jonathan**: [28:13] And when you weigh in the fact that the "other you" is the one that experiences the downside of the global warming, that responsibility is even greater.

**Rajen**: [28:21] Yes. There is a shocking statistic. I mean, I don't know if you've been to India?

**Jonathan**: [28:26] No, I have not.

**Rajen**: [28:31] You would have noticed the amount of begging that happens in the cities at the traffic lights. It's enormous. A shocking statistic that I read from Arundhati Roy, who is a Booker Prize winner, is that **seven out of ten of those folks are actually displaced by man-made droughts or floods due to dams, deforestation, and such man-made climatic disasters.** Now for a moment just let that sink in. Seven out of these ten people who are knocking at your window with little children in their hands that are barely clothed, with swelled-up bellies, and with these women sleeping on the streets with the risk of rape every night on the pavement, were living in their own little homes in green villages where they had been living since their ancestral times.

**Rajen**: [29:43] If somebody from somebody like us—a consultant—said, "You know, we could do a hydropower project here, we could build a dam here and it would give electricity to those factories there," and we'd build all of the employment models and the economic prosperity and everything else... and frankly, not just for the capitalist, but for the people that we would generate employment for, etc. But our frame did not take into account what this would do to these areas. Our frame did not take into account that when I was on the laptop in the car and I said this beggar to just go, this nuisance... **I was creating seven more beggars.**

**Rajen**: [30:26] So I think, back to your point of what can somebody do? Frankly, awareness is huge. Because then my laptop and my presentation would start to look slightly different.

**Jonathan**: [30:37] It dawns on me that structurally, the people making decisions are all economists, and we need to have more sociologists involved.

**Rajen**: [30:44] Absolutely right. And even if it were... economics itself needs to be a subset of sociology. I'm going to the very first statement that we started off with. If the only currency that the economist understands is that of the billionaire as measured by money in the bank, and consumption spending, and market cap... **The economist does not use the currency of: what is the experience of life that we are generating for the nation?** If the economy is only being measured on GDP and on the stock market and these metrics, then all of these bright minds are trying to optimize something which is not necessarily correlated directly to the experience of life. And so if what we are trying to do as a collective is to enhance and elevate the experience of life for a country, for the nation, for humanity... if that's their goal, then to chase GDP growth rates and all of these market caps is... we're playing the wrong game. We're putting some of the best minds to play a game where the goalpost is here, but we're all shooting slightly right of the goalpost.

**Rajen**: [32:16] It was just fascinating. I can recommend this book to you as well as perhaps your next interview if you're interested, by this feminist who has written this book called _Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh_. Do you know Shah Rukh Khan?

**Jonathan**: [32:29] No.

**Rajen**: [32:30] He is the biggest movie star in the world with 2.1 billion followers.

**Terry**: [32:46] No, I do know him! I just never heard it said. I've seen it written, I've just never heard it said. Anyway, sorry.

**Rajen**: [32:55] He has just half a billion [more followers] than Brad Pitt. So, this is written by a World Bank economist who's also a feminist. She talks about how she went on the field to do research and she found that the women... she was trying to understand women's economy at the grassroots. And she says that, "I found them completely bored and disinterested in my questions. So then we started chatting. And of course, what did we chat about? Bollywood. And of course who? Shah Rukh Khan. Okay, of course. And their eyes lit up." And she said, "That's when I figured out, actually, let me just investigate this phenomenon."

**Rajen**: [33:47] And she's written this entire book which investigates the economy from a feminine perspective. Which investigates incomes, livelihoods, economic growth, aspirations, consumption, all of this from the woman's perspective. Where having a higher income that results in a more alcoholic husband is not exactly growth. Growth is when there is higher income, but it's actually pivoted to more affordable and better education and health outcomes for the family. It's a fascinating challenge to how do we think about economics and the goals that economists ought to have.

**Jonathan**: [34:48] If you can make that introduction, we will definitely read the book and interview her. That sounds fantastic. Terry, what do you think? I think we've taken 15 minutes more of your time than we asked for. I appreciate you being on. This was a great conversation.

**Terry**: [35:00] Yeah, and I really want to say thank you. It just felt very uplifting. You know, I feel like we've had a couple of economists on the show and they point to these big structural problems and then you kind of get off the call and you're like, "Ugh." You know, yes, there's a lot of problems, but we don't know what to do about it and we don't see a way forward out of it. And so I found this interview to be really, you know, uplifting. So thanks for that.

**Rajen**: [35:26] Thank you so much, Terry. And thank you, Jonathan. Clearly, there's a lot of your own being that you brought, which was that of open space and listening. I must just be very truthful and say not every conversation and not every person that I meet ends up feeling uplifted. So it has something to do with you as well. So thank you.

**Jonathan**: [35:56] Terry, you want to give him next steps? When this is coming out?

**Terry**: [36:00] Yeah, so we're looking at about a month turnaround. So I guess we're now beginning to mid-February. And then we send the social media links and the links to the podcast and stuff like that. So, yeah.

**Jonathan**: [36:16] All right. Thanks, Rajen.

**Rajen**: [36:17] Yes. Thank you.

**Terry**: [36:19] Bye-bye.