Built for Legacy: Keys to Leading Productive Teams That Matter

Recently at Belong, we've started a Podcast Series called Accelerate where we interview India Inc's Business Leaders on a wide range of business themes. A recent podcast that I ran was with Sudeep Ralhan - Senior Director Human Resources, Walmart Labs India on the theme Built for Legacy: Keys to Leading Productive Teams That Matter. 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 Sudeep 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 Sudeep Ralhan, senior director for Human Resources at Walmart Labs, India. He is responsible for driving the people agenda for the fast-growing, technically, proficient and innovative workforce at Walmart Labs, India Delivery Center. From acquiring to retaining to developing talent, Sudeep leads cross-functional HR teams whose role is as much about immediate delivery as it is about building the organization of the future. Sudeep has nearly 17 years of experience across the IT, BPO, and FMCG industries in a diverse set of roles, spanning multiple geographies. 

Prior to joining Walmart, he has played strategic leadership roles with organizations such as GSK Consumer Healthcare and Accenture. Thanks so much, Sudeep, for making time for our conversation today. 

Sudeep: Thank you for the very fancy introduction. I hope I am able to live up to it. 

Aadil: I am sure you will, Sudeep. The theme of our podcast Sudeep today is "Built for legacy, keys to leading productive teams that matter." I get started with my first question, it's a rather longish question. A combination of megatrends today is reshaping our talent landscape. You know, disruptive business models and new technologies are forcing businesses to evolve fast, fueling high demand for talent. And there is also businesses pivoting to different business models, thanks to the need of the hour, digital transformation. There is a lot of uncertainty in terms of how and in which direction the vectors of a company will align and move. Uncertainty is uncomfortable for everyone though, whether it's political turmoil or a reorganization at your company, employees who are concerned about their future are likely to be distracted and unproductive. How does one really go about solving for this, Sudeep? 

Sudeep: Yeah, so there is this interesting quote that I came into which is, "Hardships often prepare ordinary people for extraordinary destination." It's a quote by C. S. Lewis. I mean, that doesn't mean that everyone needs to go through hardship, but I think we shouldn't be afraid of uncertainty either. Uncertainty and the kind of destructive change that we are seeing around us will obviously create a different future, but that doesn't mean we necessarily need to be afraid of it. There are all sorts of tensions around it, but I think as long as those energies are creatively channeled and utilized, it's fine. But the thing is, how do we as organizations react to it? I see most organizations reacting to it like parents do, which is trying to create an ecosystem that is like a cocoon as much as possible, that's bit like a bubble and trying to have their employees stay away from this kind of madness and change. 

The need of the hour, however, is to actually do the opposite, which is to embrace that change and embrace it in a way that makes it productive for our teams and our businesses. And that's where I think two parts of the organization have a critical role to play. I mean, the leaders and the HR team. The leaders need to do a lot of things, starting with just the basic fact about putting yourself in your team's shoes. Being a little more empathetic, understanding what people are going through. You may have the bigger picture and you may be tuned to what's happening in the larger world, but does every single person who is part of your team, are they aware of it as well? And related to that therefore is a second point about constant communication. They have to be out there talking. The age of leaders being stuck away in boardrooms and just connecting with the teams in formal reviews, that age has gone away. You need to be out there on the floor connecting with people, having conversations, so you are able to pick up both formal and informal points and respond to them. You will be able to guide the organization through that period of change and uncertainty that you spoke about. 

Third is to also adopt the behaviors that you want to see in the team. I mean, disruptive change is going to mean that all of us need to act and work differently. A lot of times I have seen leaders just paying lip service to that. For example, let's take technology. If you want your teams and your entire organizations to be agile and to be extremely advanced in terms of being able to use technology and collaboration tools while you yourself are stuck in a corner office asking your EA to connect you every time you are going to use a collaboration tool, well, you are not walking the talk certainly. And you are certainly not being a role model for the behaviors that you want to see in the team. I think that's something that's really critical. 

And the last part is having the right kind of conversations and asking the right questions. There is an entire philosophy called "Appreciative inquiry," which talks about appreciative leaders placing equal value on the process as well as people. And therefore, nurturing the right kind of conversations and positive conversations to identify the right questions and build collaborative relationships. That's the kind of leaders you need today in order to deal with the kind of uncertainty that you spoke about. 

The second part of that equation I think is HR itself. The biggest question that I would challenge every CEO and CHRO is your HR team equipped to really manage the disruptive change that is sweeping around us. Digitization for example, and that's a reality. Consumers do prefer a seamless experience across channel. They prefer real-time information, intuitive, etc., etc. All the technology that we were reading about a few years ago, whether it would be big data or machine learning or artificial intelligence, that's a reality today. But if you look at HR, has HR being able to build its own agenda and own systems in a way that is representative of the world around us. And that's important because, like you spoke about, if employees don't see a connection between what they are seeing in the world around them and the experience that they have in their workplaces, they are going to feel a dissonance. 

And HR has a huge role to play in that. So HR, from a strategic point of view, needs to reinvent all its processes in a way that makes sense in the new world, and even from an employee service or associate experience point of view needs to get digital. The world...Thankfully most organizations have moved away from that world where an associate or an employee had to go and stand at someone's desk in HR and wait for an audience. But it's now reduced to sending emails and waiting for responses in 24 to 48 hours. But whereas the need of the hour, if you look at consumers and if you treat your employees and associates as consumers, ubiquitous, mobile led experiences, right? I don't know how equipped HR is to do that. I think leaders and HR need to play their role in creating the right kind of ecosystem that allows our teams to benefit from the change rather than, like you said, get frazzled with all the uncertainty and get distracted and unproductive. 

Aadil: Oh, excellent answer. What a couple of observations, Sudeep, that one, I think, you raised this very interesting transition that has happened where earlier people had to go and typically queue up like in a bank to HR's desk to get things done. But look at today, what's happening for example, at Accenture I was last week interviewing Srikanth, who is the managing director at Accenture, and there I came across this bot that they have built that answers most self-served questions and 80% of the questions that come in can be answered automatically. It's the 20% that takes time, but then 20% the AI is smart enough to send it to a human who can actually answer. 

The second thing that you actually talked about is building an agile environment and I think that's where this whole India Inc's enterprises are moving towards. It's not really about a cost-based economy, but it's really about a purpose-driven and an agile function. Our next podcast is going to be on agility with Prasad Menon who is the CHRO at Cleartrip, that's happening later this week. 

The third one is the question that I had for you where you said nurturing positive conversations. I think easier said than done, but what's your view? Maybe a couple of...maybe a minute or two in terms of how can we actually go about nurturing positive conversations? 

Sudeep: It may…cliché as it may sound, this really starts at the very top. I would encourage every CEO and CHRO to really think about what is the flavor of the conversation that is happening at the very top and that's going to flow down. I have seen instances where dysfunctional conversations are sweeping through the organization because of the impact of one or two critical reviews that happened with right at the very top of the organization and the kind of flavor that took up. I will go back to the point about appreciative inquiry, etc. You have to ask the right kind of questions to generate positive responses and to channel that energy a little constructively. Or you could go back to your tradition hierarchy models where your reviews or your conversations are only about spotting what's not working fine, what's the issue and giving feedback to people and telling them what they can do better and then letting that become the thread of conversation through the lines. That's really my thinking. I really do believe that if you have the most senior leaders in the organization making a very conscious effort on this front, I really do feel you can impact the culture of an organization much more than you can through fancy programs and stuff like that. 

I am old school in that sense, I do think programs and so on have a role to play, but I think the true element of culture really comes through from the conversations, especially at a leadership level. 

Aadil: Excellent, Sudeep. Sudeep, let's go to my next question. Today we all have too much to do and too little time. As a boss/manager, one may have already learned how to plan, prioritize and streamline their work, but how does one really help their team members do the same? 

Sudeep: I would even question that basic assumption that one has learned to do the same. With the pace of change, I mean, not only change is a constant, but the pace of change is increasing, right? The complexity of the world that we are dealing both internally and outside is increasing constantly. You feel that you have learned the ropes and then in your next year when you are doing something completely different and you have to unlearn a lot of what you are doing. I think the point about productivity is actually something that puts everyone irrespective of hierarchy in the same level playing field. We are all learning new tricks every single year, every six months, for that matter, and trying to keep pace. I think we all need to learn together and that's my key message here actually. 

You have to know A, how to share what you are learning. And two, to learn from people. And you have to have role models. There could be a recruiter in my team who is able to generate the maximum amount of leads and offers in a month but is able to do it without compromising on personal life or without going crazy. And I would love to sit down with him or her and just learn about what they are doing and get that person to spread their learning across the team. That's a critical part of it. 

The second part of it is also to even bring the topic of productivity front and center. I don't know how many teams are even talking productivity all the time. People seem to take uneven workloads, uneven productivity for granted, which is a shocker to me. You have to give productivity the importance it deserves in a team conversation and you have to bring out points. There was this McKinsey Global Institute Research which said when people are connected right, the productivity can increase by some 20% to 25% each year, which means that you need to invest in the right kind of communication standards or team norms which set the rules as to how team members interact with internal and external stakeholders. That's an investment you need to do if you want to talk about productivity. 

You also, I think, as leaders have to...if you really want to impact the productivity of the team, you have to get down in the trenches and get your hands dirty. You have to know the nuts and bolts of how your team works. Because as your landscape changes, as your demand increases and as you scale up, how are you going to make sure that your team's productivity increases exponentially as well? The only way you can do that is if you really understand the nuts and bolts of how your team is working. I think these three would be my three key tenets of focusing and increasing productivity on the workplace. It makes sense? 

Aadil: It does. Sure, it does, which brings me to my next question and this is a completely new breed of people who are entering our workforce which is now called the Generation Z, as if the millennials were not enough, this is an entire new breed of people who are just... 

Sudeep: I find it difficult to keep pace with the blending actually, yeah. 

Aadil: But with Gen Z I think they have got this zeal and drive to scale fast and everyone seems to be on a rocket ship of solving problems as of yesterday. It's like LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman used to always say, to him startups are always about jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down. And when you look at Gen Z, it seems like they have really, really embraced this mentality. The question is, how do you keep people from taking on too much today and burning out? It's really about life is a marathon and not a sprint and how do you communicate this because you are right at the top and you are scaling teams at scale, how do you bring this to life? 

Sudeep: You know, interestingly enough, coincidentally, I just sent a quarterly update to my team a couple of days ago. And that's exactly one of the points that I spoke about in that communication as well and then coincidentally used exactly the same words, that it's a marathon, not a sprint. Not a lot of people get that. The funkiest thing to do is to tell everyone saying, "This needs to get done as of yesterday." I don't know what this thing they are sounding like, some Hollywood producer or some Wall Street banker or something. But the fact is that we are in a marathon and we are not...unless you are really functioning in a startup that is just raring to go and is seeking to establish credibility in the face of tremendous competition, you don't need to get things done as of yesterday. You are surrounded by these huge organizations which have a full engine running. 

First, I would just tone down that as of yesterday stuff that everyone is constantly on about. But having said that, I mean, the reality is that people are getting burned out very fast. People are operating in increasingly fast pace in critical crazy environments. The short-term solution to that which everyone has is take a break and go for a vacation which is good but that's a rather symptomatic response to things. At the deeper level what I would encourage is people just to develop deeper relationships and take time out to connect and socialize with each other. I know, it again seems counterintuitive in today's day and age when we are talking about remote teams and flexible teams and all of that stuff. But that doesn't mean that remote teams can't socialize or connect either. You can take time-out to do that. 

But I think the importance of human connect and human connectedness as a way to counteract stress and burnout is really high. I think remote teams do that. I have seen teams that have worked remotely and they have worked together for couple of years at a stretch and never met each other. They were all in different parts of the world. But they have made it a conscious principle to say out of every 60-minute meeting, the first 10 minutes is spent on just talking to each other about what's happening in their lives. It makes things so much better when it comes to feeling better about being there at work. The fact is, I mean, it's still just one part of the team. The large parts of our organization are still working together. I would just encourage people to take breaks, go out, talk to each other and just build human relationships because whether it would be personal or professional lives, relationships are your countermeasure to stress. 

And that brings me to the second point which is about people just taking breaks. Breaks should not be a bad word. There is this New York Times article by Tony Schwartz which says by some study conducted, working in 90-minute chunks can actually increase your productivity. But leaders and managers, for that matter, have to stop thinking of breaks as unproductive time. It is actually enablers to productivity. So taking time-out during the day, doing whatever you need to do preferably connecting with people or like I do, sometimes I just look at Facebook, for example, and take five minutes to flip through Facebook. But I think having those breaks is important. 

The third part of it is also on the organization. We know that wellness is a buzzword nowadays. Everyone is focusing on wellness and for good reason. Not every associate or employee may take on the programs or offerings that you have to provide to them. But even if you are just having communication around it or programs around it, at least it makes physical and mental and emotional health a part of the conversation and reiterates the importance. But having said that, I mean, all of these three are very organization-centric views. My last part of this would also be back to the individuals concerned to say, take responsibility. It's like careers. You take care of your career. Similarly, you take care of your physical, emotional, and mental health. And there are enough things that you can do as an individual, whether it would be taking breaks or connecting with people or using more productivity tools or collaboration tools or just going for meditation, for that matter, whatever works for you. But you need to take accountability instead of, which is what everyone does, which is keep cribbing and blaming, "Oh my boss is so and so and the organization is crazy," and blah, blah, blah. I mean, however crazy the world is, you do have the opportunity to take a step back and do what's right for you. I think people also need to take responsibility for their own mental health and, like you said, prevent burnout in this crazy environment we are working in. 

Aadil: Bang on. And what I loved...in terms of what you said in your first point, Sudeep, was it's really about building relationships. One of my mentors always taught me that relationships are the only things that matter. Today, we are living in this global environment where all of us need to get shit done. When you really want to get stuff done, I think that will happen because you've built relationships and not because of anything else. And if you really want to build relationships, then that does require an incredible amount of investment of time in just getting to know each other with a clean heart and no objective in mind. Like you said, it's about taking those breaks, hanging out with people and getting to know them and I think that's how one can build a positive culture. So excellent, excellent piece of advice that for Gen Z, but not only for Gen Z but to a lot of us millennials as well. 

Sudeep: I think it's for everyone, honestly. People tend to forget that all the time. People tend to deal with complexity and ambiguity through incredibly complex RACI matrices and org charts and process flows but the real answer to dealing with the complexity and ambiguity, which is inherent in our environment right now, is relationships. That's how you deal with it. 

Aadil: Bang on, bang on. Going to our next question, Sudeep, I was looking at this research from MIT Sloan and it reported that 79% of companies in the Fortune 1000 and 81% of manufacturing organizations currently deploy empowered/self-directed/autonomous teams. These teams are basically left to run themselves with some or little guidance from an external leader. At first, it seems contradictory. Why should a self-managing team require leadership at all, after all doesn't the group manage itself? What are your thoughts here? 

Sudeep: Yeah, I mean, while self-managing teams do give one, the feel of a no-leadership style but even self-managing teams do require a specific kind of leadership. A team that is autonomous in terms of its activities and its decision making still needs direction from the right kind of stakeholders and the leaders in the organization. And therefore, it requires a different role for the leader to assume. The leader is not going to be taking day-to-day decisions or developing action plans or giving order, but what the leader will be doing is to use the teams in their...optimizing their skills, for example, building their capability for example, building the right kind of connections with the outside world, making sure that they are getting the right kind of leadership. So you do need leaders even for so-called self-managed teams. It's just that the nature of leadership differs. But the question that the organizations need to ask themselves is, are we selecting and grooming the right kind of leaders? 

Most often than not, even in today's world where everyone is talking about agile teams and self-managed teams, the choice of leaders that you take for teams is dependent on functional and technical skills but not on the kind of leadership that a team needs. That's where the dissonance comes in. Because you have got leaders who are born and bred in traditional hierarchal setups suddenly being given charge of self-managed teams. Or you have the reverse sometimes, and that's kind of mistake that I think organizations tend to take. So it's not a question of whether the teams need leadership, they do, but it's a question of what kind of leadership and what can organizations do to spot the right kind of leaders and connect them with the right teams. I think that's where the, like I said, the dissonance creeps in. 

Aadil: Very interesting, which brings me to my next question which is really about design thinking. A lot of people in the C-suite these days have been taking about design thinking but interestingly, if you look at it, lot of people in leadership come from a design background. Which brings me to this question that with transformation happening today at unprecedented scale, is there a need for large organizations to look at their org design really to ensure that they are competitive and relevant and can design thinking if be brought on be an advantage at all? 

Sudeep: No, absolutely. And I don't think it's an if at all. It's a question of when and I think most organizations are realizing that with the kind of disruptive environments that they are faced with constantly. Anything that give them a competitive advantage, whether it would be scale or whether it would be consumer insight or even the talent pool for that matter, can be replicated extremely quickly. And you have upstarts coming and just slipping the rug from under the feet, so to speak. The only way for organizations to remain agile is by constantly reinventing themselves and the root to reinvention oftentimes lies with org redesign. Think about it like a sci-fi movie. If the landscape is to constantly change, then the architecture in that landscape will also constantly change. Architecture in an organizational context is the org design. I think the challenge comes in to what your point is about design thinking, and whether you are really applying the right kind of design principles when you are doing that. For that matter, a lot of times organizations are "reinventing" themselves or redoing their org design without actually talking to experts about it, which is what is scary. 

Then you are just in that vicious cycle of action for the sake of action, and thereby confusing yourself and your entire organization at the same time. And that's a reason why so many...going back to your first question that you asked about change and people feeling distractive and unproductive, a lot of times employees feel that because they are not able to see the rationale for this constant change in design that the organization is trying to do. And the reason is because they are not able to see the principles behind it. Because leaders are often not even using the right kind of expertise or even talking to the right kind of experts including internal HR partners. Their assumption is we know what's best for the organization, we will quickly change it, and then give it to HR to say, "Now hire the right kind of talent or rescale or do whatever you need to do." But the reality is the experts, whether it would be HR or someone else, needs to be in that conversation right at the very start. They are also able to provide the right kind of people advocacy that's important to be kept in mind as you are redesigning the organization. I think that's the piece which I think the communication part of it, the principles part of it is what organization tend to slip up on when it comes to organization redesign. But otherwise it's an if question anymore. Every single organization that I know of is constantly doing whatever they can to rethink their org design, sometimes much in advance to say that, "This is the future, this is my business strategy five years down the line and therefore this is the kind of org redesign I need to reinitiate now to be able to prepare itself for the future." Most organizations are doing that. 

Aadil: Does this have to also sink in with Workforce Planning? 

Sudeep: Absolutely. That's why I said, I mean, it needs to be a much more cohesive conversation, rather than what it is today which is leaders getting up and fiddling with boxes on a whiteboard. It needs to tie in with external trends. It needs to tie in with design-thinking principles. It needs to tie in with long-term Workforce Planning and a lot of time, organizations are doing all of these things in parallel without talking to each other. And that comes back to the completely unrelated point, which is about how CEOs themselves need to have that kind of orientation built in. Only the CEOs they are going to be able to string all of these multiple pieces together to actually make a transformational impact as opposed to just tinkering with org design and believing that's going to help reinvent the organization that they are leading. 

Aadil: Sudeep, then your advice to the India Inc community on three things they must do today to build and lead productive teams that matter? 

Sudeep: It would be extremely presumptuous of me to sit on a high horse and give advice to India Inc. 

Aadil: We are just looking for advice. 

Sudeep: So maybe what I will do is I will just summarize some of the point we just discussed. To me the key lies in three or four things. First is setting up the teams for success. You have to get it right at the start. You have to think about, what is the right kind of org design, what is the right kind of capability, what is the right kind of mixture of talent that you need. What is the right kind of leader that you need? And you need to set that team up for success if you really want to build productive teams as opposed to doing postmortems later, which I think is part of that point about selecting the right leader as well. Our leadership development programs or our succession plans or our assessment criteria, is that aligned to having the right kind of leaders leading teams that we spoke about? Not necessarily. So that would be my second point. 

The third point would be about just building self-aware teams. A critical part of teams today is that you can't use the traditional command in control mechanisms. So the teams themselves have to be extremely self-aware about what's working, what isn't working, what is the kind of feedback, what are their own strengths as a team, what are the development areas, what are the capability gaps. That's the kind of conversations teams should be having transparently to be able to be successful. 

And the last part I would say is just examine whether your HR team is set up for that kind of success as well. Because the way the HR team is set up, the way the HR team is thinking about its strategic programs, down to its basic employee associate experience is a key determinant of how successful your teams will be. So you need to examine whether the HR teams itself are set up for success. These would be my three or four pieces of advice. Makes sense? 

Aadil: Absolutely, it does. Thank you so much, Sudeep, and that's a wrap on our formal questions. 

Sudeep: Very nice. 

Aadil: Now we will come to the much more interesting informal questions. 

Sudeep: I am just scary about this. 

Aadil: Through which hopefully our audience will get to know you a little better as a person. So we will get started with this in what we call the "Rapid Fire Segment." 

Sudeep: Am I allowed to pass on the questions? 

Aadil: No, you can't pass. I think you should have a go at all of them. 

Sudeep: Okay. 

Aadil: This is much like Karan Johar minus the hamper with "Koffee with Karan." You got five seconds... 

Sudeep: Except that I also need to be politically correct, which I should try to remember. Okay. 

Aadil: We will get started with that, you got five seconds to answer each one of these. 

Sudeep: Oh my God, okay. 

Aadil: And we will try and see if you can make these quickly. All right. The first one is, when you think of the word "successful" who is the first person that comes to mind and why? 

Sudeep: Okay, you may consider this as a weird response but my grandmother who I think demonstrated great agility throughout her life and with extremely modern and forward thinking in her approach. She, I would consider as possibly my emblem of success in her life. 

Aadil: That is an amazing answer. I have never heard anything quite like that before. Fantastic. The second one, the most useful product or service you've bought in 2018 for less than $100. 

Sudeep: I haven't come across anything. I could name a couple of apps and solutions that I have tried, I don't want to say them, but I have been quite disappointed so far. 

Aadil: So nothing? 

Sudeep: Nothing. 

Aadil: Okay. We move on to the next one. You are a new addition to the crayon box. What color would you be and why? 

Sudeep: Blue I guess, because it's nice and works with everything, goes with everything, collaborative, versatile. Yeah, blue I guess. 

Aadil: Very interestingly, you know, most of the CHROs that I have met have gone with blue. I soon will start a research at what so tricky about blue. A lot of CHROs just pick blue. 

Sudeep: Yeah, I agree. We should stop people from wearing blue as well. I know you are wearing blue but...yeah, I mean, blue is just too ubiquitous now. I would have changed, I call myself purple I think. I am tired of blue as well. Let's go with purple. 

Aadil: Awesome, awesome. So you are changing your answer to purple. All right. Do you get time to watch television at all? 

Sudeep: Yeah, I am addicted to Netflix and all the stuff. 

Aadil: What's the one television/Netflix/Prime character you absolutely adore? 

Sudeep: Adore? 

Aadil: Yeah. 

Sudeep: Daenerys, Mother of Dragons, I completely adore that character. Though people very rudely tell me that I am more like Sheldon myself, but in my mind, I think I am like Daenerys. 

Aadil: All right. Fantastic. Coming to books, what's your favorite book? What's that you recommend most of us should read? 

Sudeep: Well, I don't know about recommending what everyone should read. I think anyone who wants to understand the complexities of India should just read "The Great Indian Novel" by Shashi Tharoor. It's one of my favorites. I also love the "Sea of Poppies" trilogy by Amitav Ghosh. I read mostly fiction though. I think these two are...and I am reading Somerset Maugham's biography right now which I think is intensely fascinating for anyone who wants to build a career in the kind of environment we live in today, a creative career. So on top of my mind these are the three books that I will recommend. 

Aadil: Excellent, excellent. The most interesting person you follow on social media? 

Sudeep: I don't follow anyone in particular. 

Aadil: Not much. Okay. 

Sudeep: I follow my own organization's leaders and they are at varied levels of interest but no one I can think of particularly. 

Aadil: Okay. At which store would you like to max out your credit card? 

Sudeep: Too many. I will just be safe. I will go to Macy's in New York and I will max out and probably go beyond max if I can. 

Aadil: Awesome, awesome. Three things still left on your bucket list? 

Sudeep: I don't have a bucket list unfortunately or fortunately. 

Aadil: Seriously? 

Sudeep: Yeah. I just take things as they go. So there is no bucket list. One of the things I do want to do in the near future though, I want to teach, or I will start teaching again because I love teaching. And I want to see the Northern Lights. So two things I want to do in the next one year. 

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

Sudeep: Should I reveal that? 

Aadil: Absolutely. 

Sudeep: I always want to know what they think about the company and what's their perception as an outsider about the company. I think that gives me a lot of insight about A, the kind of homework they have done, and two, about what their view is about how their alignment would be with the company. 

Aadil: Now what kind of answer would more often than not get them hired? 

Sudeep: No, there is no silver bullet, I am sorry. 

Aadil: Let me put this across. What's the one trait you would look into someone if you'd really like to hire him? 

Sudeep: Agility. 

Aadil: Agility? 

Sudeep: I think agility is the single most...agility and connected to that mobility are possibly the two single most important traits in getting hired in today's world irrespective of level...entry to leadership. 

Aadil: Fantastic. All right, Sudeep, very, very well done. I am sure if I had a hamper you would have won one. 

Sudeep: Thank you. I am glad I meet with your approval. 

Aadil: I am in New York next week. I will try and see if I can get you a hamper from Macy's. 

Sudeep: Yeah. Thanks. 

Aadil: No promises, but I will try. 

Sudeep: You can just mail me a gift voucher, that works. 

Aadil: All right. But that's a wrap, Sudeep. Thank you so much for this. I am super pumped to go back, have this edited in our studio and then push it up live to Apple Podcasts. 

Sudeep: This was a good conversation. It gave me a lot of thinking points as well. So thank you. It was a good conversation. 

Aadil: All right, ladies and gentlemen, so this is Aadil and Sudeep at Walmart Labs office in Bangalore signing off. Thank you so much. 

Sudeep: Thank you.