How can you foster a more inclusive and innovative workplace in a polarised world?

In the latest episode of the Happier at Work podcast, Bhushan Sethi, a partner at PwC and an adjunct professor at NYU Stern, returns to the podcast. He shares his expert insights on the evolution of workplace trends and challenges, particularly focusing on navigating polarisation, DEI rollbacks, and the impact of AI in the workplace.

Bhushan discusses the persistent uncertainties in today's work environment, highlighting how geopolitical events, technological advancements, and societal issues influence workplace dynamics. He emphasises the importance of open dialogue to foster understanding, innovation, and productivity. Bhushan also shares actionable strategies for maintaining inclusiveness and leveraging AI responsibly to drive business outcomes.

The main points include:

1. Navigating workplace polarisation by fostering open and reasonable dialogue.
2. The impact of evolving technology, particularly AI, on organisational change and workforce skills.
3. The critical role of clear communication in adapting to return-to-office policies.
4. Challenges and opportunities in upskilling and taking a skills-first approach to hiring.
5. The societal and business implications of the rollback of DEI initiatives.

Join us as we explore these pressing issues, where Bhushan shares valuable insights on creating a happier and more productive workplace.

Do you have any feedback or thoughts on this discussion? If so, please connect with Aoife via the links below and let her know. Aoife would love to hear from you!

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Connect with Happier at Work host Aoife O’Brien:

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Previous Episodes:

Episode 50: Bhushan Sethi on the Future of Work

Episode 150: Navigating the New Business Landscape with Bhushan Sethi

Episode 200: Reskilling Diversity and Building a Happier Workplace with Bhushan Sethi

Bonus Episode: Bhushan Sethi on Building a Happier Workplace

Mentioned in this episode:

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Bushen, you're so welcome to the Happy at Work podcast. I know we've had this conversation several times before. This is your fourth time to come on live. And just by sheer coincidence, you happen to be on episode number 50 and then episode 100. And then it kinda turned into a bit of a joke where it was like, let's have you on every 50 episodes. So here we are, episode 250, which is kinda hard to believe. So for anyone who hasn't met Busan before, he is an absolute expert in his area. He's a partner with PwC in New York, which is my favorite city, by the way.

And, also, he's an adjunct professor on the MBA program in NYU Stern. So he works with a lot of financial services professionals and people who are dealing with clients, essentially. Bhushan, would you have anything to add to that? How how have I done on that introduction?

Wonderful. Thank you. And delighted to be back. Live live live from New York. You know, it's early morning here, but I know it's one of your favorite cities. So, this is a real background. It's not it's not fake.

I never even thought about that. So for anyone who's watching on YouTube rather than listening in, we have an amazing view of the Empire State Building right behind. I never even thought that it was fake, but, yeah, maybe some people are like, oh, it's like that San Francisco Bridge there in the background. Brilliant. So I had to listen back to our episode from is at this stage, it's four years ago, so episode 50. And we it was at that stage, four years ago, we're still in basically the height of the pandemic. We hadn't been in the pandemic a year yet. Things were still on very much on lockdown and the kinds of things that we were talking about.

And I'd love to understand a little bit more about how things have evolved since then. So the kinds of things that we spoke about were people's well-being and actually asking people and listening, like, how are you? No. How are you really? And it being okay for people to really share what was going on. So that level of vulnerability that we had at work, things like psychological safety and the role of leaders, especially in creating those psychologically safe environments and looking at productivity in quite a different way and with more flexibility and focus much more on outcomes, customer experience, and measuring things like that instead of like, oh, well, you know, I clocked in two hours extra, so I take two hours off and and that kind of mentality. Have you seen any changes or evolutions in how we approach those kinds of topics these days?

Yeah. I would say the first thing that, that has changed is, you know, back four years ago, we had a level of uncertainty, didn't we, about about return to office, about vaccines, about, kind of, you know, remote working being kind of durable. Going forward, like, right now, 02/2025, we still have a level of uncertainty. It's just different. It's geopolitical. It's how we deal with social issues. It's still, unfortunately, return to office, which is this polarizing discussion. Yeah.

But the pace of change with technology and we're about two minutes in, and we'll talk about AI because we have to

Yeah.

Because it's one thing that's driving so much change in organizations, both hype, both fear. It's driving a ton of investments. It's displacing work and changing work all over the globe. And so that's that's a phenomenon that the transformation tech driven change, is a big phenomenon that we're seeing right now. But, and it's also unfortunate that the world seems to be in the world of business and and the world in general seems to be less kinder. We've all seen the, the rollback of DEI. Yeah. We've seen businesses taking less stances, it seems, on social issues when they were very comfortable taking issues on social issues, racial injustice during the pandemic and post.

And we've just seen that that that coarseness in our society and in our dialogue. You can't have a reasonable debate with anyone about any issue. Everyone's so polarized. It's a them against us. And so big picture, uncertainties there. Tech driven transformation is still a big phenomenon. But, I just hope and it's it's a theme of this podcast, happiness at work. I just I just wish the business and our world and our society could just figure out how to be a little kinder.

Yeah. It's it's interesting you say that. And and, you know, we're not gonna go down we're not gonna get too political in this conversation, but I've always been of the you know, why can't we just all get along? Like, I don't understand it's the polarization that bothers me more than anything else. Like, how do people arrive at such different conclusions when, you know, from my own perspective, I'm like, it's kind of obvious what's going on here. But there's other people who have vastly different opinions to me, and it's it's pitting each other or pitting pitting people against each other essentially to say, you know, you're right and I'm wrong. And it's not really about that. It's about trying to get a level of understanding of, well, how have people arrived at these conclusions and why do they believe what they believe and why can't we be more open to what other people believe and, and accepting of what other people believe because that's the world that we live in.

Yeah. What's really important on this topic of polarization is many business people I talk to say, you know, politics, social issues, keep that out of the workplace. But if you can't reasonably disagree, if you can't reasonably listen and learn from someone's perspective, whether it's about a social issue, a political issue, a lived experience that's very personal to them, then from my perspective, you can't innovate. You can't improve. You can't, reasonably debate. You can't think about new marketing campaigns, new product launches in your organization. So there's a there's a real business reason why it's important to kind of think about these issues that are happening outside the workplace, how they do affect people, and how, like, we spend so much of our time, whether it's virtual, whether it's in person at work, to not talk about issues that are happening, and to turn a blind eye to what's happening in the world around you, it's just it's just it's wrong and it's unproductive. But that doesn't mean that you spend twenty four seven on social media worrying about stuff.

But there's there's things that are that are gonna be really personal to one person about Ukraine or about Israel or about abortion that we we just we wouldn't be human if we didn't acknowledge that those issues were going on. And if people wanted to talk and wanted to share, then it's okay.

Yeah. It's it's it's so interesting that you say that because it always has been. We don't talk about politics and you don't ask people how they voted and all of that kind of thing. But I think you raise such a valuable point there. To be able to have these conversations is to get a better understanding of someone else's perspective, is to drive innovation, is to challenge your own thinking, and why do I believe what I believe and what if I saw things from another perspective? Then it creates this space to challenge everything and to challenge maybe how we're doing things currently, which brings with it as, you know, innovation allows us to do things a little bit differently. What if we what if we tried this? But it's always been so very much we don't talk about those things at work, but at the same time, if we want to bring our whole selves to work, and I think, again, this is a fundamental principle of what I talk about is bringing our whole selves to work. And I had this conversation, on the podcast with Sheila Walsh not too long ago where it's our whole selves, but it's our professional selves. It's like not our whole wholesales.

We're still showing up in a very professional way, but we're we're able to share what's going on for us, our perspectives, and why we believe what we believe.

The older I get, if, I I think that people should be more open books, around all of this stuff. And, yeah, I wouldn't have done that in my twenties in the workplace, but, you know, I talk about on social media with my running. Like, people know that I run. I talk about football and, you know, my social media is open. And so it's you know, people know that I love to travel. People know that I excuse my children. Like, it's okay to, like, share that stuff. And, again, it doesn't mean that I'm trying to say that, you know, everyone should be running and everyone should be, you know, kind of traveling in the way that I do and and everyone should be sharing their life online.

But I think it I think it's okay to, to be more open and and share things that are relevant to you.

Yeah. And things that you enjoy doing. They're the things that make you you, I think. I love your football updates. I have absolutely no idea about it, but I get that it's like it's a relatively small team. You're based in New York, so maybe it's hard to find somewhere to to watch it. And they are not always successful, but it's still so much fun to go and and watch it and get together with a few other supporters.

Exactly. Yes. We're we're a struggling team. I'm a Spurs fan. We're a struggling team, but we won last night, so I'm sad. So I'm really

Oh, that's good. That's good. So why don't we come back to some of these burning topics at the moment? The big one, I think, that I'm seeing a lot of is the return to office. We call it the return to office debate, and, again, I have a few podcast episodes specifically on this. What are you seeing out there? Like, I'm like, what I'm thinking is the JPMorgan, like, that's one that really stands out to me. They created this amazing new head office, and they're mandating people back, and it's having a knock on impact on some of my clients who are based here in Ireland. So I'm just curious, like, not necessarily for them, but in general, what are you seeing out there and the impact that it's having?

Yeah. My, my perspective on this, and it may it may not not everyone's gonna agree with this. I think I think what people need right now is clarity.

Yeah.

So whether it's five days a week and, you know, and JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs and many of the private equity firms have been very vocal on why they see that as important for their culture. And if you want to work in that institution, it's a choice. And you know that that's how work gets done, and that's important to them. There are other firms. There are other banks out there that have actually said, we'll be three days, and we're gonna stay three days.

Yeah.

We set a rule that we want people by and large 50% in the office, but we also say we really encourage young people, especially early in their career, people who missed out on the in person onboarding during COVID

Yeah.

To spend more time in the office. Mhmm. Or for us, it's our client sites. So I do think that people need clarity in organizations on what their leaders expect. And whether you disagree with that leader, and if you're in the tech sector and you don't wanna be back five days a week, you can take your human capital elsewhere.

Mhmm.

And, again, I think that there should be exceptions. I think that there should be accommodations. We need to really make sure that we think about working parents, caregivers, people need accommodations. But, again, for me, that's just good management. Yeah. If you need if your team member needs flexibility and needs to work from home for a few days or a few weeks or in a different location as long as his tax rules are okay. That's good management. So I just I just think that we've allowed this to become polarizing.

We've you know, the media never gives up on this story. I was speaking to a a reporter recently. It was a friend of mine. And I said, you you keep talking about return to office. We've been talking about it for five years. You keep publishing it. And he said, I get he said, and he said, I always think this topic needs to go away, but it's our most read thing. It's what people wanna hear about.

I just Oh, okay. Interesting.

Yeah. Wish that people could just get back to how do we implement the work? How do we redesign our business model? How do we think about putting AI in responsibly? How do we drive productivity? How do we innovate? How do we upscale people? Like, the real work of the work as opposed to where the work is done. It's it's back to the point. It's very polarizing.

It's it it's so but it's such an interesting point, isn't it? Like, from a journalist perspective, from the media perspective, they're giving people what they want because people are reading it. They're probably being nosy about, like, what's going on in that? What's going on in that other company? Or what are people really saying? For me, what I'm hearing out there is it's the challenge between being in the office and I and I love that that there's the opportunity as a early career, you know, in your twenties to be in the office five days a week. That's how you learn. That's how you have a social life. That's how you make connections. But then the pull for, well, I'd rather stay at home because then I don't have the one hour commute or the forty five minutes or what however long you spend commuting, then I don't have that. Then I have a bit more flexibility to maybe go to the gym in the middle of the day or to make my own lunch at home or whatever it might be. So there are these two kind of competing things where, you know and in the office, maybe I get to stare with more because I bump into more people.

At home, I have time time to think and I can do my deep work. So there are those balances, I think. Something I personally miss is the interaction, being part of a team, being in an office with people, but I get that the the kind of big barrier there is the but it means I have to get up and I have to get out on time and I have to do and I don't have the level of flexibility that I would have if I worked at home.

I mean, one thing I would add to that, Aoife, is and again, from a business perspective, you build better social skills when you're around other humans.

Yeah.

Really important. It's much easier to, like, have good a good bedside manner when you're around other human beings as opposed to on a virtual call or on social media. Yeah. We still have a loneliness epidemic with lots of different cohorts, whether it's it's young men, whether it's kinda young people in general, whether it's single people. You know? We have so being a just I'm a big believer that being around other humans makes us better better professionals

Yeah.

And better humans.

Yeah. And I think it's so important at that early career stage, you kind of learn just by watching other people, by observing their behavior, by hearing them on calls, how do they interact with clients, how do they how do they deal with specific situations. I think you can see that. On the loneliness thing, it's it's a funny one because it is an epidemic, and maybe some people don't even realize that what's going on for them is that they're lonely. I don't think you have to be alone to feel lonely. I think you can be cut off from very specific things that you need as a human and so you can be with other people but you can still feel massively lonely. Like that's, you know, it's something we've talked about it a little bit on the podcast, not too much, but I think it's important to to address it. That, like, it helps by being around other people and you might feel like you want to stay at home and maybe that's a sign that you are lonely, that you don't want to take the steps to to interact with other people, but it I think it is really important to have that kind of interaction as well.

And like I say, it's something I really miss doing the work that I do. A lot of stuff I do is online, although some of it is in person, which is nice as well. The other thing that opportunity.

Sorry. Sorry. One missed opportunity on the whole return to office piece is Yeah. Having traveled around to a large number of tech firms, a large number of financial institutions all over The US, we haven't redesigned the workplace. So remember four years ago, we would talk about how do you redesign the workplace, how do you have collaborative kind of how do you make it a destination place, how do you make it experiential. I travel around to different companies, and people are just in offices on their Zoom calls. We haven't really, really it's not a great experience.

Yeah.

You just have a lot of bodies there. Now, obviously, there are in person meetings, but there are lots of people that are just in closed offices. Offices. And so there's there's an opportunity there's an opportunity there to to really rethink it.

Yeah. To rethink, like, what are we doing here and how can if we're gonna be in the office, how can we maximize our time that it's interactive and we're not just going there to, you know, from an employee's perspective, just sitting there on Zoom calls, I could just do that at home. From a leader's perspective, how do you create a greater sense of belonging by having more in person interactions with the, you know, with the idea that, okay, so this is gonna drive innovation, but if we're in meetings and if we're interacting with each other, we're not necessarily getting that deep work done. You schedule that for another day when you're gonna be at home. So I think really thinking about how work gets done and forgetting, like, this debate of, like, where. It doesn't matter where we get the work done, but it's like how we're actually approaching work. Really, really good point, I think. The other thing that we touched on was this idea of the layoffs.

Like, I'm seeing massive layoffs in Dublin, especially because it is one of the tech hubs, one of the EMEA hubs or the EMEA hub, should I say, for a lot of the tech firms. And I imagine it's something similar whether in New York or or other Hopes in The US. What are you seeing out there and and the kind of the impact of that?

Yeah. So, you may have seen we've actually got a new president in The US, and, there's a lot of efficiency.

Have noticed.

Yes. You may have missed that. There's a lot of efficiency and, Yes. And layoffs happening in in the government sector. Yeah. We're seeing, you know, headline unemployment now ticked up to 4%. It was it was, you know, 3% for a significant amount during the time during the pandemic. There are there are calls that it might even go up to the kind of the high fours.

They may not go to 5%. So we're we're we're definitely seeing, we're seeing more more corrections there. But by and large, the government, employs it to small population. The tech sector here in The US is a small population. Yeah. The labor markets are still strong. The challenge here is our labor force participation. We need more people in the workforce.

We have an immigration challenge now, but, you know, we we need more skilled workers in the workforce. So everywhere I I look at organizations, yes, there is some corrections happening, and some of that is efficiency led, and some of that's gonna be AI led. Google publicly, talked about 25% of its code is now gonna be generated by AI. So if you're a software engineer, that has a knock on effect of you or maybe the number of software engineers you need. So the layoffs are happening. I I I would say, again, it's not like the two two thousand and eight financial crisis where it was much more significant. My my advice to to business leaders are, you know, as you're thinking about installing technologies, you're thinking about efficiencies and and looking at kind of where and how work gets done. You've got to think about those things.

If there are people that are gonna be unfortunately transitioned, how can you help them with with upskilling, connecting them to your network, etcetera? Yeah. And so anyone who is is gone through that transition, I think it's really important to to figure out where you can invest in no regrets upskilling, taking an AI class, you know, learning about a new industry, getting your brand out there through LinkedIn, through writing blogs, especially with AI. So much easier to write good content, and use AI as a as a thought partner as opposed to just generating your content. Yeah. So there's a lot out there that that people can do to

Yeah.

To raise their skills and also raise their profile.

Yeah. Can can we touch on that a little bit? Because I know we talked last year about the upskilling and the the huge gaps in the kinds of skills that are required. And then maybe we talk a little bit more about AI. So I'd love to know, like, how has that evolved, this idea of the skills gaps and what kind of skills people need in the workforce today and where are the gaps still happening? And we can talk about AI then in a little bit as well.

Yeah. So one of the things we talked about last year was taking a a skills first approach to to hiring. It seems

so much about that. Like, it's it's it seems to have kind of exploded just in the last couple of years.

Yeah. It it has exploded in terms of talk, the action around

taking Okay. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. So media. Media. It's getting a lot of media attention.

Media and also, you know, guilty as charged, people writing thought leadership and publications on it. Yeah. So as a reminder to to people, taking a skills first approach to hiring means we don't hire for narrow job descriptions, ten years of experience, these level of qualifications. We hire for a set of skills. Some of those skills could be resilience, agility, the level of business acumen, acumen, your ability to build relationships with with clients, your knowledge of digital or technology. You could have got those skills in different industries. Yeah. If you want to work in wealth management in a bank, you could have got those skills interacting with clients in an auction in an auctioneer.

Yeah. You could build service skills, you know, working in a coffee shop. You could also, you know, build service skills, you know, working in call centers. So it's taken a skills first approach to say, are there adjacent skills? And so the big hope around that was that more firms would take that approach and that we would hire and we would get broader access to labor pools, we'd get more people entering the workforce. Firms are realizing it's really hard to do at scale.

So

I see pockets of it in areas around technology. I see it at the campus entry at the, at the kind of the early career, the early career part, but it's hard to scale that kind of typically in an organisation. Once you're in an organisation, you need to make sure that you're clear on people updating their skills, you can match people to internal roles and have internal mobility. And again, technology type roles, project management type roles, transformation type roles that lend themselves more to that. It's hard to take a very skills first approach in very deep technical roles. If you're running r and d in a pharmaceutical company, or if you're kind of a a very technical cybersecurity professional, then you need, like, be

You need very specific. Yeah. Yeah. I always think like a a doctor, a lawyer, a pilot, for example, they need to have very specific qualifications in order to practice what it is that they're doing. So it's not for every single industry, but I I do love that approach. I talk less about skills and more about strengths because everyone has inherent strengths that they have, and those strengths will lend themselves to specific skills. Even if you don't have the skill yet, it's something that will be easier for you to develop if you have a specific type of strength. So I think it it's it's important, I think, to to understand what your strengths are.

And again, I've spoken about this, I've spoken about this on the podcast, but it's really interesting that we're talking about this stuff, but it's it's much, much harder to put into practice, especially as you say, at scale. So we might try and do it for maybe entry level, but actually it's a bit harder. It's a bit more of a struggle to do that across the board for every single thing.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So one of the other things that we can talk about again going casting our mind back to this new president that we might be aware of, is the DE and I and the, what is it, the executive orders that he's signed to basically, you know, change change the month of March to Irish awareness month or something in the you like, yeah. No confidence about that. But, basically, yeah, like, revoking the types of initiatives. I mean, this has been happening for for quite a while in terms of the pulling money away from DE and I initiatives, especially. What are you seeing out there in terms of the impact? Because if I think what I know about DE and I and the research that I've read is it's really important from a business innovation perspective, from a revenue perspective, from dealing with clients and understanding and innovation. But Yeah. We're pulling money away from it, because we're seeing leaders or perceived leaders in the space doing the same thing.

So we think, oh, maybe we we don't need to invest in that, or maybe we just need to wait and see what's gonna happen there.

Yeah. And so for those who haven't been tracking in The US, we've got executive orders, and we've got potential legislation, which means that the job descriptions, making, jobs available to certain minorities, or some certain kind of type types of people, based on gender or race, is potentially going to be illegal. And I say potentially because, you know, some say that, you know, it can still be challenged in the courts, etcetera. What's happening on the ground is most organizations in The US are taking a risk based approach to say, because of pending legislation, we have to make changes to statements on our website around around diversity. We have to update our job descriptions. What's happening on the ground? So that's that's, my personal opinion is that's terribly sad, and I would love to see some businesses actually have more backbone and and lobby the government around certain things in the way that we're very comfortable with lobbying around things that are important to our business. We were comfortable lobbying, or at least being vocal on social issues during the pandemic, you know, post George Floyd murder. So it's kind of an interesting thing, but, again, that's my personal opinion.

But, truly, what's happening on the ground in inform is people are continuing to think about inclusion. They are continuing to have diverse teams. They continue to see the business case. They might be calling it something else. It's terribly sad that we can't talk about words like inclusive

Yeah.

Because it feels woke. It's it's it's bad that DEI has been tarnished, and people who are DEI professionals have unfortunately been tarnished in businesses, in quiet talk, you know, on social media. But the most progressive companies, the most successful companies, they have diverse workforces. They have diverse practices. They will continue to embed inclusive behavior in things like performance management because it just makes good business economic and kind of workforce sense.

Yeah. But they have diverse clients as well. Like, this is what I don't understand is you need to put yourself in the mind of the client, especially from an innovation perspective. And the one I come back to again and again and again is when Apple first had their health tracker, and they didn't have period tracking on it because there wasn't a woman in the room to say, hey, guys. Here's something that women might need to track on a very regular basis. I think it's since been corrected, but probably for the majority, myself included, I use a different app to do you know? Like, it's it's it's just beyond me. You have to put yourself in the mind of the customer. You have to have that diverse workforce to reflect who your customers are as well.

Yeah. And, Aoife, back to the societal point around DEI. What's interesting it it you know, firms are kinda walking back their DEI commitments, yet racism is on the rise. So in the Edelman Trust Barometer, which comes out every January, it's been published for twenty five years, They surveyed 33,000 people across all, types of workforces, countries, demographics. Two thirds of them actually said racism has kind of, increased. They've experienced it. Wow. They they talk about, trust.

Business is still the most trusted resource, but that trust in businesses is dwindling. Yeah. And the other most scary part of it is four out of 10 of those survey respondents think that hostile activism is acceptable. And what that actually means is they think it's okay to belittle someone's reputation on social media, damage property, and even commit violence.

Right. It

and they see it as justified because of whatever cause they have. So there's something wrong with our society that racism and prejudice is increasing, yet we're walking back commitments on DEI. Yeah. And pea and and 40% of this population think it's okay to justify hostile activism

Yeah. You

know, for a cause that's important to them, whether it's a social issue, a geopolitical issue. It's just Yeah. It's a fracturing of society that could bring this back to business. These people are in workplaces. These people are being led these people are being hired and developed in organizations. These people are at our companies, and so it's incumbent on all of us, whether you're a colleague or a business leader Yeah. To talk about these issues, to bring these issues, to to understand what would actually cause someone to, hostile activism and think it's okay to damage, you know, property violence or damage someone's reputation, spread disinformation online.

Yeah. Going back to that earlier point then of being your whole self at work and opening up these conversations I think is really important. So if we're saying there's a rollback on DE and I and increase in racism, can we say, you know, there's potentially a relationship there?

Possibly. Yeah. Absolutely.

Does not imply causation. Yeah. I get that. But if this is what we're seeing, then, you know, this potentially is, you know, the impact that it's having.

Yes. And, again, it takes courageous leadership, courageous organizations to put those issues on the table and say, you know, it's okay, you know, to talk about it. And going back to JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon has been been very open that they're gonna commit all of their focus on racial inequity both for customers, and for for employees.

Yeah. Brilliant. Love that. We love to hear things like that. We've covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you feel that's kind of hot topic at at the moment that we haven't

necessarily touched on? You mentioned AI and upskilling. Oh, yes. Maybe just kind of, you know, the sixty seconds on that. Many organizations now are in their second innings around AI. So they've gone from experimentation to now launching. They've built these use cases. They've deployed it in areas like contact centers, even in the HR function, you know, in the marketing function. Many organizations have given people access, whether it's tools like Copilot that we use here at PwC.

And people are starting to use it, you know, in their roles. There's also a lot around the reskilling. The the reskilling around not just how to prompt and how to use AI and how to understand the underlying data and how to to need the need to verify it, but also kind of the responsibility. I think it about the risks of it, the risks around the information, understanding the training data, but also the skills around the critical thinking. Because if you can't, it's it's a major accelerator of a technology. But if you can't critically think about what do I wanna use AI for, How do I use it to augment the role that I have? How do I use it to drive better decision making, in the sales process? How do I use it to to, accelerate my marketing campaigns? If you don't have that critical thinking and the business knowledge, you won't drive the benefits of AI. So we are seeing a lot of AI deployment. We're seeing a huge investment around AI upskilling, but it's not just the technical AI skills.

It's about risk and about governance and about business and critical thinking.

Yeah. I think yeah. It's such a good point as well. Like and for me, we had this conversation on the podcast last year, which prompted me then to share about this is how I use AI for the podcast. But since then, I've started using AI. I won't mention which brand or whatever, but I've started using AI in my business. And the way I've used it has evolved so much because you can see, well, this is what it can be used for, and this is, you know, how it helps so much in my day to my day to day. And like you say, as a thinking partner, not as someone who just blindly does all of the stuff.

And I know, like, other things that I've seen, AI can replicate your voice. Obviously, we're recording this on video. You can see me live. We're having a conversation, but you can create podcasts with, using AI now, and I have enough content that it probably could replicate my voice and and create something for me, which is a little bit scary, but also a huge time saver for me. But I will do an updated episode to share, like, this is how I use AI in both my business and my personal life because you can use it for so many different things. And like that, coming back to your point about the critical thinking, like, it's stepping back and thinking how best can we use this technology to achieve what it is that I'm trying to achieve going back to this idea of the outcomes. You know we want to really focus on business outcomes. How are we going to achieve those outcomes and how do we use and leverage technology to be able to to do that, to realize those outcomes?

Yeah. And to underscore a point around AI, we we had this conversation with our students at Stern where they were asked and we basically said, you have to use AI as part of your research. If you're on a you're using whatever whatever whether it's enterprise, chat, GPT, or whatever it is you're using, if you're not using it to understand the industry, to un to accelerate your research and understanding of your client and its business model and its drivers, then you're being inefficient or you're not being curious. So you absolutely have to use it. Mhmm. All of our clients expect we're using it to kinda build knowledge. But there's two things that are really important. One, you can't put any proprietary data in there, and you can't say, you know, bank x is looking at this or this regulatory issue.

That's that's completely cannot be done. But secondly, you can't outsource your critical thinking to AI. Really, really important that you're still thinking through, what do I wanna use this for? What questions do I need to ask? What data do I need? What insights do I want to look to drive? What hypotheses do I want to test? And so using it again as an augmentation, as a thought partner, as a as an agent, you know, working together with yourself is is is the fusion that Yeah. That we can all have. And and like you said, there are so many use cases inside and outside the workplace.

Yeah. And I think even just challenging what it what it throws back at you. You know? It's like, that's not quite what I had in mind, or can we tweak this slightly to be more, you know, to, look at it from a different angle, for example? You know? There's all of these different things. You have to really have that that, you know, I suppose the going back to your point, the critical thinking of how how is this gonna serve me. So, Bhushan, before we start before we hit the record button, we said we would do an Adam Grant style lightning round. Are are you are you up for that?

Absolutely.

Brilliant. Let me just pull up the questions now. So we have how could leaders make the case for investing in talent during uncertain times? So I know this is a big thing that I get asked about all the time when budgets get caught, when when they can't necessarily get the funding that they need.

The leaders that that that can invest in talent and kinda make that case are the ones, that really have good metrics in place to talk about outcomes. So if you wanna invest in training for your Salesforce, driving a line of sight to how that's gonna generate, more sales funnel or more revenue, at certain clients or open up a new buying center in a client as is gonna be super important. And I still see measurement, as an area where firms can do a lot to improve. So we're really good at measuring outputs or production metrics. Was it created? Was the training created? Was it delivered on time? How many people took it? But we're still struggling with some of the effectiveness measures in terms of the quality and not just with the training good. Did people did people say they liked it? But did it actually build the skills or change the behaviors

Yeah.

So that you actually can see those results in the marketplace? Did you drive that revenue? Did you drive out cost saving? Did you kind of, improve your speed to speed to market? Those sorts of things. So I would just say, have good measures in place. Really challenge that you're measuring the right outcomes, and it has a line of sight to whatever the the profitability drivers are of your business.

Yeah. What I find oftentimes is that there'll be, you know, they'll they'll my clients will run a training, but they're not necessarily looking at the outcomes over time. You know, what why did we do this training to begin with? And let's have a look and let's track that and be able to measure it to be able to request that's, you know, similar to kind of training again because we saw the direct impact that it had. What would you say one strategy for improving retention that is being overlooked at the moment?

Human leadership. What I mean by that is managing by walking around, engaging with your people, having random, you know, fifteen minute, coffee conversations whether virtual or in person, but just just engaging with your team and being being a good human and talking about work or non work and just just listening to them.

It's so funny. I was just listening to something the other day about that. Didn't necessarily say human leadership, but it was the leading by walking around, which you kind of think is, like, is that actually work? But I think when you're being visible and when you're striking up those conversations with people who are doing the work and asking them questions like what's getting in your way and being able to remove those obstacles for them, I think, makes a huge difference and it shows that you're actually listening to your people, not just kinda asking them, but you're listening and you're acting upon what it is that they say. If you could give one piece of advice, one piece of career advice to a mid career professional, what would it be?

Be the storyteller of your own, experience. Really important to be able to tell your story, whether that's orally, whether that's written on your CV, whether that's your social media profile. But being able to, like, make sure that your story is easy to tell in terms of the skills you have, the value you create, the experiences you you have. And whether we like it or not, a lot of that is gonna be on a social media platform. Whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's videos, that you that you've uploaded to to a LinkedIn or a YouTube, whether it's, you know, a one page CV, it's really important that you can succinctly tell your story.

Brilliant. Love that. It's like a having a pitch at the ready to say this is who I am. This is what I stand for. This is what I bring to the table.

Absolutely.

Love it. And the question, as you know, that I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, what does being happier at work mean to you? And I don't know maybe we can have a think about how that has maybe evolved over time as well.

I think there's a big link between being happy at work and happy in your life. For me it starts with life like I run-in the morning that makes me happy.

Yeah.

I like to travel that makes me happy. I I try you know I I'm fortunate enough to have like wonderful experiences with my kids like we went skiing in Vermont a few weeks ago. We were traveling in India over Christmas. And so, it's doing the things you like, and, obviously, you have to be fortunate enough to to have a job that enables you to have that lifestyle. But for me, it just starts with, like, being happy, you know, in your in your home life and whatever you do kind of outside of work. I think that drives everything.

Love it. So for anyone who wants to connect with Bhushan, you can do that through LinkedIn, I think, is the the best way. I'm not gonna give out your your Instagram, but I'm sure people will reach out if they want to to follow on the personal side of things as well. But thank you so much. This has been such an insightful conversation. Really, really enjoyed it today. Thank you.

Great to see you again, Aoife. Next year in New York.

Next year in New York. K.