Creating a Unique Organisational Operating System

The words 'Operating System' are often referred to in tech speak as a system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. Operating Systems like Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and different flavours of Linux today help us manage not only our computers and work but to an extent our lives as well - and they make it incredibly easy. On that note, I was wondering what it would be like to create a unique organisational operating system as a platform that could help people thrive at their workplaces which lead me to Srikanth N R - Managing Director, Human Resources at Accenture.

At Belong, we recently started a Podcast Series called Accelerate where we interview India Inc's Business Leaders on a wide range of business themes. And I for this particular question that I had in mind, I thought approaching Srinkanth and having a conversation around Creating a Unique Organisational Operating System and turning into a podcast would be apt. You can choose to listen into the podcast on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Soundcloud or Stitcher . Since we were getting a lot of requests for written transcripts of the podcast, we decided to publish them as well. Below is how my interaction with Srikanth went.

Aadil: Welcome to Accelerate, Belong's podcast channel where we interview India Inc's who's who across business functions to get a sense on what's on their timeline in 2018 as business priorities. This is your host, Aadil Bandukwala. Today we have with us Srikanth N.R., Managing Director, Human Resources at Accenture. Srikanth currently heads human resources for technology centers in India at Accenture. In his role as the HR leader, Srikanth is responsible for providing HR service delivery and talent management while leading the talent transformation agenda for the technology centers in India. 

Prior to Accenture, Srikanth has held various leadership roles in the human resources function across the IT/ITeS industry in companies like Sonata Software, Mphasis, Altran Technologies, IBM, and Infosys. He has over two years of valuable experience in various facets of HR service delivery, learning and leadership development, change management, process and governance. 

A key technology enthusiast, Srikanth is interested in people analytics, digital learning and all things insights. Thank you so much Srikanth for making time for our interaction today. The theme of our podcast today is your own OS, Creating a Unique Organizational Operating System. Srikanth, leaders in every industry tell us about the myriad problems they are trying to solve in their organization today. You know the stuff like, "We need to go faster, be more innovative, make better decisions, break down silos, work horizontally, simplify a structure, focus of the customer's skill without losing what makes us great, be more agile, change our business model, the works." How does one really solve for all of this while still riding the bus? 

Srikanth: Thank you Aadil. The age old saying, "Change is the only constant" is more true now than ever. What this calls for is shift on four different paradigms: a mindset shift, a skill shift, a behavioral shift, and system shift. What I mean essentially by mindset shift is willingness to be a perpetual student. Avariciously learn more and stay relevant in the context of times that are changing. Skill shift, I think the era of generalization and generalist is fast moving away and we are now looking for specialization and mastery. Behavioral shift, no more in terms of individual contributor or a functional specialist alone but you are somebody a part of a larger team, ability to collaborate and leadership direction is towards collaborating for outcomes and impact. 

The last one is systems shift. Rethink the way in which we operate, be it in terms of organizational structures, be it in terms of systems and processes, or be it in terms of anything else that we want to look at from a systematic perspective. That to me is how we will have to continue to change and this is an everyday job at work. 

Aadil: A very interesting thing that you mentioned about, Srikanth, here you said, it's not really today about being an IC or a people manager, but this is kind of changing. Tell us more about this in terms of how do you see people jobs evolving? What do you see people leaning towards? What is it that leaders really want as part of their people strategy? 

Srikanth: Let me take it two levels and this is, one I would say, what is our ability to work with machines? Coworkers who are no longer humans or humanoid coworkers is a reality. How do we learn to leverage that for the best? You and I as human beings are endowed with something which is uncommon with machines yet. One is, intelligence to think and emotion to operate. I would think about it in two different paradigms. One, efficiencies that are driven by machines. Machines can interact with huge amount of data and give you vast results in quicker time. Human beings have the ability to work with complex interpersonal skills and use data efficiently and effectively where required. So the machines will give you the efficiencies that you are looking for and the human in the organization should leverage these efficiencies to provide the effectiveness of his or her role and efficiencies that will complement the effectiveness to give a greater experience for people. 

Aadil: That is very wonderfully put, Srikanth. I think it's excellent. The way you said, today it's really about managing not only people but also machines, but I think what's more important is how do leaders go ahead and figure out, how do you have that balance of what do you get out of people and what do you get out of machines, because this has never happened before. For the first time will we be interacting with machines at the level at this unprecedented skill. We all saw what happened at Google Duplex when they announced the Duplex technology of how now machines are able to call humans across different touch points and make appointments for them. How do you prioritize and where should people go to upgrade themselves? 

Srikanth: Let me put it this way. It is a seamless environment in which we are working. At home, I am sure, to reach here most of us would have taken an Uber or an Ola. On the way you would have surfed on news and shots to understand what's happening in the current scenario. You would be browsing things here, there. Maybe if you are somebody like me, if you had forgotten what to order or buy for your son or your wife, you would have done that shopping while you are stuck in Bangalore traffic, would have caught up with an episode on Netflix or Prime. And all this is happening while you are still traveling to a place. Earlier we would have...these were seven different independent events that would happened sequentially. Look at it, what it has done. The 45 minute or 1 hour Bangalore traffic that we would curse is actually a pleasure for many of them to look forward to catching up with reading or watching their favorite episodes or listening to music which otherwise is all limited in a context where it is, whatever. 

So the personal and professional lines are blurring why when you come into an office you have to be extended with age old systems and processes. I firmly believe that large organizations and businesses till date have been built for adherences and compliances in the human resource function. Adherences, compliances are necessary because we need to follow the law of the land in which we operate and in the true spirit of it. But it has always put the employee farther away from what it is and it has always been organizational-centric culture that we have promoted. 

What I would look at is that if I were to be the center of the universe as an employee, what does it translate into? My experiences cannot be siloed that I have a fantastic experience with the front office but a very poor experience when I have to interact with the payroll department in the back office. The experience cuts across silos and therefore what it means in any of it, is what we call as "my experience." We have changed the operating paradigm to move away from employee engagement to employee experience. 

Aadil: Absolutely. 

Srikanth: And the experience covers, I can rattle out, there are six pillars that we have...that we thought are closer to any individual in terms of his or her career with Accenture and three basic tenets on which they are built. The basic tenet is your physical infrastructure, your technical infrastructure and the culture, the core values of the organization that are nonnegotiable. The six different pillars start with my team. Who am I, where do I belong, what is it that I have. So the concept of a team becomes much more smaller as you become larger. This is about five years, three years back we used to talk about how do I behave like the largest startup? And then we realized the largest startup is something that any startup has an emotional connect and an ongoing exercise of communication that helps people, transparency, personalized solutions. We used to call them ad hoc[SP], but now you look at it, it is personalized. Transparent in what we are doing. Agile and iterative. And all these things are what are the tenets of my experience. So you have my team, where do I belong to, what happens to me, my career, what does it mean, where is my learning, what is my opportunity, how do I move in my career, why I am here in Accenture. I come, I work, who's going to take care of me? We call it my wellbeing. A truly human self, bring your whole self to work. If I am part of the physical wellbeing, the mental wellbeing, how do I get recognized for the work that I am doing that comes under my recognition, what changes for me and what it is. 

I am somebody who is recognized for all that I offer to the firm, but I have lot more to offer which is my passion. How do I get a platform for that? We call that as my passion and then all said and done, are you somebody who is open to listening to me and taking my feedback which we call as "my voice." So these are six pillars. As I said, the tenets of it are listen and involve people, personalization, transparency, remember to be agile and iterative. Things work, good. Things do not work, move fast. 

Aadil: Excellent, excellent. I think the personalization factor, I couldn't agree with you more, it's so important today that we need to personalize experiences, phenomenal to see that you are doing this for such a large organization at scale. So very, very excited to hear about that. But I picked up on one word that you said. You said, you used the word "agile" a couple of times and I think a lot of firms are moving towards that environment. I was looking up this research according to McKinsey lately, which was talking about how lean management has already played a significant role in putting in place process, capabilities, tools to improve how businesses really operate. But the digital age today has increased opportunities for businesses today who know how to react and the difficulty of getting it right. Your thoughts Srikanth on building a unique operating system at Accenture from a human capital standpoint. While I know you talked about the six pillars, what was the thought process? How did this start because we all start somewhere but the end point sometimes is what you really wanted or it could be completely different. How did it start in your case? 

Srikanth: Okay, I will have to walk back couple of years back, 2015. Siri, Ok Google, all these things were making it. The thought process was what if I had a digital people advisor. Any information that is static in my mind is to be looked at and open for anybody. Whether I have it on my mobile or I have it on a website, it is accessible information that is need to be there. So I think in the first place, everybody thought we should put anything that is commonly used information, which is static in nature that information can be uploaded and made transparent. The transparency limits are still there. What about personalization? I do not want to know your age, I do not definitely want to know your compensation or my compensation to you. But you and I are entitled to know what it is for ourselves. So we looked at it and said what can be the area that we can personalize? And those personalized information has to be relevant to me. 

The third aspect of it in terms of when we were talking about additional people advisor was to really look at it, you can have chatbots which will give you standard FAQ answers. You need that chatbot to evolve into something beyond a standard FAQ response to personalize information that is limited to you. That means, you have information that is about you, available to you at your time and your pace. So you do not call up or wait for your HR people advisor or somebody to come into the system. Cuts out a lot of flab in the system. 

The third aspect of it is how can I...I know what is all that information that you are having, everything that is there, we have built data around or we have captured enough data but we have been also very responsible in looking at how much of that data can be used. So we are looking at areas where a digital coach can be put in place. I will give you a simple example. It could be as simple as, we are joking about it, you go and ask the digital people advisor when is your next public holiday in Bangalore. Yeah, there is a long weekend coming sometime, I do not know when next, but there is something coming long weekend. That is static information. By the way, the next day or the day before is a floating holiday. You have taken only one floating holiday against two. Would you like to take that? That becomes personal. 

Aadil: Right. 

Srikanth: That information is relevant. By the way, you have not taken your vacation and it looks like you can reschedule some of your meetings and businesses if that is going to be lean, would you want to also combine this with your vacation preceding or after the leave? Look at it what it can do. I am just taking a simple example of a leave data which is holiday information which is on a calendar, a leave data which is personal about you, and also an option to look at your work life balance if there is any which is what you will come to me as an individual and ask "When is the next holiday?" I will say, "Go and look at it." So anything that is not intruding into anybody's personal area, space is something that we can look at it and this becomes...it's a coach. Saying "Would you like to?" "Thank you, we do not want to." 

So that's one part of it in terms of the organization journey. When that happens, Aadil, the way we wanted to look at it is, as I mentioned, we are built with cumbersome processes for adherence, compliance. We cannot do away with that. But can we change the experience? A simple thing and I keep joking about, after Moses gave the Ten Commandments, I think we HR professionals in India have been the biggest dictates. "Thou shalt" kind of a story was always there. So I as an individual, I am not able to relate to why I should fill up my time sheet on time or why is attendance mandatory or anything. 

On the contrary, if somebody explains what is the impact of this on my business and what am I contributing, I think I will become more amenable to listening and do it the way I would like to. That opportunity is there. When you are building it for process, systems, compliances, there is a lot of process fat as I would call it. There is adherence, somebody sooner than later knows how to circumvent a process. We superimpose that process with a Band-Aid and to measure the efficiencies on top of it we put somebody to measure that process. Then we end up a simple process could possibly have 27 different steps. If it is that, then how do I manage this? Whereas in the new world digital era, I do not want cumbersome processes. There is already information that is available about and which I should be able to use and provide you with options. To choose the right option is your responsibility. That's how we change the whole thing. 

We were doing all these engagements. It was good, great. But over a period in time, people started looking forward to those engagements more as an attendance rather than engagement. There was nothing soulful about it. It was 5 o'clock you will meet here, 5:15 somebody will address, 5:25 you will go on stage, 5:35 you will collect your awards. The award had no meaning because the people for whom I did that work or who helped me do that work and achieve that were never there in the audience. 

Make it real time, give the feedback, whatever it is, recognize the person instantaneously. That to me is the biggest way in which we have shifted this whole paradigm. 

Aadil: Excellent. I think with the influx of the millennials, most of us millennials want things real time. Like you said, if that feedback can be given real time, I think the impact of that can also be measured 10x. Otherwise it gets lost in transit most of the time. 

Srikanth: Right. 

Aadil: Excellent. Srikanth, two words, digital transformation. These are the two words that have been on most of the C-suite's mindset today. But like most shifts in the industry, it takes time for people to adapt to new structures, new businesses, new procedures and a great deal of basic [SP] knowledge precisely the kind that becomes most valuable gets lost in the process as dissatisfied employees believe, says Harvard Business Review research. Given the cost and difficulties involved in finding structural ways to unlock value today, is it fair to ask the question, is structural change the right tool for the job? 

Srikanth: When we say structure, are you talking about organizational structure, are you talking about process? 

Aadil: Org models pivot in real time because businesses feel that this is the need of the hour and that obviously has an impact on org design. 

Srikanth: I will take it very...I have limited experience just to the IT/ITeS services sector. Let me take that as an example and say how things are moving. And this is my own theory. Wave one was all about talent going in search of work. So you had brain drain, whatever. Before your time, people used to stand in front of USCIS, all of us used to go and tease him [SP], seen our cousins go and settle there in the U.S. or wherever the work was happening, talent was moving towards it. Wave two was the global delivery model, whether you call it offshore, nearshore, westshore, whatever shore, everybody that was work coming closer to where talent was. And that's wherein the...especially the southern hemisphere and the eastern or oriental block a lot of work started moving in time. That maybe mid '90s to early 2000 with the technology explosion, internet, and the cost of computing becoming cheaper. 

I think the wave three is really where...and one thing that offshoring or onshoring or westshoring did was help break any complex job into structured pieces, it was much more easier to be instruction driven and executed by somebody 10,000 miles away. 

Aadil: Right. 

Srikanth: Now, wave three is, I would call, operating on two axes, one is innovation and two is automation. Enough quantum computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, everything we keep hearing about digital wave and digital era is all there. The second half of the chess board that people talk about is real. We are seeing that...you are young to know that, but I am seeing it from '84, '86 boot floppy to where it is on my phone. We see that and say what is happening around this entire system is innovation and automation. You innovate for revenue and you innovate disruptively. Automation, because you had built the scale of operations with ability to break work into meaningful pieces, logical pieces and it was process driven is easily getting automated. What does it translate into in context of the organizational structure? Earlier you had a pyramid and you were leveraging the pyramid, cost efficiencies were being measured in terms of pyramid. You heard all these stories about India or offshoring being done for cost advantage to becoming a talent advantage which is reality. 

Today when you are looking at it, you are not just looking at cost or talent, the pyramid is actually you will still have work for which you will use the pyramid to leverage. There is also newer areas of work where you have to bring in experts and they don't necessarily need to work as a pyramid or a hierarchy. The hierarchy is giving way to what I would call as a network of experts. For want of a better term, I tried. Who will come in there are experts, there is a social media expert, there is people management expert. There could be a technology expert and then you build something which is very, very specific for the organization or that attends to the problem of the customer. What does it translate into? The entire work and the mindset is changing into a consumer-centric mindset. And that consumer-centric mindset you are not going to...whoever thought that a simple matchmaking algorithm would become a full fledged business like a matrimonial site or a graph theory can be used to figure out how to leverage your professional contacts and connects? 

These are interdisciplinary roles or jobs that are coming into it and you will see most of it happening around. In that context, there is no hierarchy. You bring in your specialization, you bring in your mastery, you deliver and you move on to the next. So the work is becoming rather than a job to a project. 

Aadil: Right. Very interesting the way you said, we are moving from the pyramid structure all the way to almost like a matrix structure but it's almost like a marketplace model where you are bringing in the right experts with one razor sharp focus which is solving the customer problem. 

Srikanth: True. It's a network organization or a fluid workforce that one has to be prepared to manage and work with. 

Aadil: Which is very, very close to my next question Srikanth, which is, I was reading Aaron Dignan's blog and he mentions that today the fastest growing most profoundly impactful companies are using a very, very different operating model. All these companies are lean and superfast learning machines. They have an intense buyers to action, a quick tolerance for risk, express through frequent experimentation and relentless product titration. Are you seeing similar trends in India per se? 

Srikanth: I believe yes, we are seeing and I will put it this way. You have no option, but to change. Given that as the context, you do see a lot of change that is happening or coming in the way how people would have behaved, especially in the human capital management. So no longer are you measuring anything for process completeness. You are going to be measuring process suitability. In fact, process is becoming a bad terminology in the HR world if I can use that. What you want is experiences. And experiences cannot be a statistical value. Experiences are therefore going to be individualistic or it is going to be in a very stratified group. So you have to look at it in terms of not one size fits all, but what is it that is going to be. And all these things are going to be happening, as I said, if machines are going to give us efficiencies, we have to learn to use them. 

What the machines cannot do is give the effectiveness of an interpersonal connect, which when armed with the data that a machine can give, will help individuals as, like you and me, manage our businesses or as stakeholders or in our interactions with people much better. So I would put it the other way around also in terms of one skill that I would look at where people in the human resources function need to learn or overall in this digital era, is an ability to ask the right question. We in the Indian context at least, most of us had never been thought to ask questions. We have been taught to tell answers or recite answers. So the ability to ask the right question will give you the right answer. 

Aadil: Bang on, bang on. We will quickly come back to this whole thing that you rightly said earlier Srikanth which is giving feedback to people real time is extremely important. And going back again to the McKinsey research that we were discussing, performance management is becoming more real time. That is gospel truth. Metrics, goals used to be daily and weekly and they used to guide decision making. But these metrics today increasingly are being supported by joint incentives, not just for individuals, but tailored to each level of the organization so that you can reinforce behaviors to demonstrate that customer impact that the org needs. This is happening regardless of organizational boundaries. Is this happening today in pockets or you think companies are really moving in this direction? 

Srikanth: I think three years back when everybody was talking about moving away from the Bell Curve. What was the Bell Curve doing? The Bell Curve did two things successfully. One, statistically significant it told you where exactly are you on the sine curve, left extreme, right extreme, or are you part of the significant 66% in the middle. So what happened? We spent hours of time debating about numbers, not about names or individuals. We did not talk about performance. We talked about where exactly are we going to meet the curve. This is universal truth about any organization and I may be arrogant to say that most organizations did that in some form or fashion. When you say we stopped looking at Excel spreadsheets or systems and look out for numbers and say, 60% great performance, 40%, we have never looked at what is the intrinsic talent or the passion that an individual has to bring to or offer to me in the organization largely because we had a mathematical model which served its time and purpose of growth and standardization but it did not really look out for the bright sparks or anything. 

I believe personally, each one of us have some talents to offer. It probably is not getting tapped for the right reasons. All of us have our strengths, but we have always been told where our weaknesses have been. Change the focus and ask what is it that you can offer, what is your strength, where can I use that? I think there is a profession and there is a passion when the old poem that we read, my occasion and occupation were one and the same, that's when my passion shows and I am the happiest point in my life. A happy employee is not going to be bothered about what is incentivizing them and not. But you will be fair in incentive part of it. Nobody is asking for a favorable incentive. Everybody wants a fair incentive for the work that they are doing and the way they are doing it. We do not want people to come back and tell you how bad was your performance 11 months ago and how they had to save you for the remaining 10 months. 

Instead if you had told me that 11 months ago that I was going down the wrong track, I would have probably been a much more happier person talking this. So real time conversations become essential. Real time conversations then tell you the course correction as we talk about experimentation, tolerance for failure. Failure was a very bad term. It's a taboo. But if you do not fail, how do you know where you are going to do the next one? 

Aadil: Absolutely. 

Srikanth: But you cannot be a failure. It is okay to fail, but you cannot be a failure and accepted. Your ability to bounce back is what these conversations, timely conversations help us with. 

Aadil: Bang on. Excellent. Excellent point Srikanth. Srikanth, I come to my last formal question. I have a few informal questions for you, but my last formal question. In today's environment of scale, organization might start really small. For example, you know, medium or slack. But they can get big also really fast. It could be like Airbnb or Uber or Elon Musk's Tesla. And ultimately, even dominate markets, much like your Amazon or Google or Facebook. What's your advice to people irrespective of size or scale on creating and going ahead much like you have created these three tenets of Accenture and then six different interfaces or experiences in the form of My Voice, My Rewards, the ones that we just talked about. What's your advice to people on creating their own unique organizational operating system? 

Srikanth: First I would say, have our ears close to the ground. Understand what is that people want and there is nothing like "I know it all." Learn, accept feedback, open-minded. We do know that nobody expected Airbnb to become such a big one. A few years back Airbnb was something like another app that was being floated around but then look at it in terms of their market capitalization. One is that. But beyond that everybody is talking about the experience around Airbnb. Nobody is talking about the cost. So it has made travel for every individual an affordable one. 

So keep it simple, listen to what people have to say, and design for the people not for what I believe or you believe to be the organization principle. There are principles, goals, values. The values are nonnegotiable that everybody has their same set of or similar set of values. We create that, build the foundation strong so that the rest is there. And I would believe in today's context, nothing is cast in stone. So have the ability and the humility to accept that, you have to change faster to remain alive. That's the whole thing. There is humility on one side as a personal trait people have to offer. Attitude is one. Humility is what will help you accept. Learning from other people and other disciplines. I think the second one is in terms of quickly see the direction in which you are going and pull yourself back to where it should be. It's okay to fail, but do not fail for too long. 

The third aspect of it is agile, iterative. There is nothing, as I said, cast in stone. So willingness to change and look at it from sustainability, not just scalability alone. And last but not the least, if I can impact anybody personally in one aspect at least every day in their life at work, I think we have more happy employees than the people who are coming in and going for the brand association. 

Aadil: I think wonderfully put. I think one key takeaway that I am taking away Srikanth from this discussion is you have got to design for experience and you have got to design for delight. You know, a lot of us go ahead and work backwards. It's not really about going ahead and working backwards, but it's really designing for the ideal customer experience in mind. I think, fantastic analogy. 

Srikanth: I am glad you brought that because I was lost for those two words, experience and delight. It is moving away from...it is like any other consumable services that we are used to. And you do not want the user interface to be bad. 

Aadil: Bang on. Excellent. Srikanth that's a wrap on our formal segment but I would love for our listeners to get to know you a little bit personally as well. So we are going to do this thing that is called the Rapid Fire segment. And here, like the name says, I would love it if you could give your answers in less than five seconds. That way, people can really get to know you a little bit. And if I have your permission, I will get started. 

Srikanth: Sure. 

Aadil: So the first question Srikanth is when you think of the word successful, who's the first person that comes to mind? 

Srikanth: Abdul Kalam. 

Aadil: And your reasons? 

Srikanth: Very simple. I think he had the opportunity to stop at any point in time. Circumstances did not deter him. Imagine the person who sent...put India in the missile map was also the most benign humane that one could have ever had as a president and the first citizen of this country. And I think he is largely an inspiration and a goosebump moment for me. 

Aadil: Awesome. You are a new addition to the crayon box. What color would you be and why? 

Srikanth: If it was a shirt, I would have gone, wardrobe would have been blue, but since it's a crayon box, I think green. 

Aadil: Green and why? 

Srikanth: I think it signs prosperity, it's a sign of growth. It is not about control, it is about vivacity and opportunities to stay fresh. 

Aadil: Excellent. I think vivacity and staying fresh, excellent. Srikanth, do you need to watch television at all? 

Srikanth: Yeah, I do. 

Aadil: What's your favorite television character? One character that you absolutely adore? 

Srikanth: Instead of a television character, I can always say Calvin and Hobbes but television character, I would still think...left behind...it's still the Star Trek generation in terms of it. For me it is Spock. He was always a person with a solution and people like to search for a problem to go to him. That's how I would look at it. 

Aadil: Incredible answers, Spock. Incredible. Srikanth, if you were isolated on an island and you could bring only three things, what would you bring? 

Srikanth: Lot of water, this is a well-rehearsed answer. Lot of water, since Kindle will not find chargeable...enough books, and I think endless amount of music to listen to. That's it. 

Aadil: Onto books then, what's the one book that you would recommend most of us read? 

Srikanth: It's a little dated one. I think, I like this book for a very different perspective. Different stages in life threw up a different perspective, I think, Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead. It's an ancient one. 

Aadil: Oh yeah, Howard Roark. 

Srikanth: I thought you would say Howard Roark but that is phase one of your life everybody believes Howard Roark is this who was going against the stream and he is the one who is going to be my...I think that is when your ideologies are very strong, you want to change the world. Midlife when you read it, I am just talking about it, when I was in high school, my hero was Howard Roark. When I finished my graduation, post graduation, I think my hero changed from Howard Roark to Dominique Francon because she seemed to be the person always in control of the situation. And later on when you read it years later, you realize what an idiot you have been. The person who is calling the shots is Ellsworth Toohey, not any of these guys. And so to that extent to me that's a book that has appealed to different age groups and different perspectives depending on the stage of your life that you are in. 

Aadil: Absolutely. But I think like you said, it's the ability to bring such different characters that have an incredible amount of depth in them, that's been Ayn Rand's forte and I think at first when you start reading the book it's like "Man, this is going to take so long" because she has got the ability to describe each and everything in detail. 

Srikanth: The first 125 pages are laborious. Between 125 and 300 you do not know what happened, then you actually want to go back and read the book. 

Aadil: Fantastic, fantastic. Srikanth, which store would you max out your credit card? 

Srikanth: I think it would be Amazon or Flipkart, one of those, if I am not patriotic, but today it is okay. Walmart or Amazon, does not matter. 

Aadil: Right. Three things still left on your bucket list. 

Srikanth: Definitely want to learn scuba diving. 

Aadil: Oh, fantastic. 

Srikanth: I have an option to do a complete road trip across the Himalayas, east to west, west to east, and that's on a two-wheeler. And I would probably like to also do a complete Kashmir to Kanyakumari walk. 

Aadil: Awesome, awesome. My second last question Srikanth, what's the one question you always ask a job applicant? 

Srikanth: What do you really want to do in your next role? It's not about title, designation, or anything. What do you want to do in your next role? I am interested in knowing that how far are people able to think about the impact they can do, create in any job. If the answer is something like I want to manage this, I want to do this, supervisory or managerial, their task. They definitely do create impact but they do not create a recognition or a legacy. I would look at it and ask what is it that they are keen to do in their next role. 

Aadil: And the one quality that you see in people that you would hire them more often than not? 

Srikanth: I think if somebody says I do not know about this question, I cannot answer, I would be more than willing to accept that as an answer, select the person than reject the person. 

Aadil: Authenticity then becomes... 

Srikanth: Authenticity becomes paramount because they are showing a willingness to at least tell you what they do not know. 

Aadil: Awesome, awesome. Excellent, excellent. Thank you so much. That's a wrap on our podcast Srikanth. This has been wonderful. Really, really exciting stuff. I have learnt a lot today. Super charged to go back, get this processed at our studio at Belong and then put this up on Apple podcast. So thank you so much for joining us today. Really enjoyed doing this with you. 

Srikanth: Thanks Aadil and really I was quite stressed but it went off well. Thank you. 

Aadil: Thank you so much Srikanth.