Thriving in the Age of Disruption

Can Big Hairy Audacious Goals Make Good Products and Life Go Bad? Ms. Radhika Dutt (USA)

March 02, 2023 Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra & Ms. Radhika Dutt Season 1 Episode 34
Thriving in the Age of Disruption
Can Big Hairy Audacious Goals Make Good Products and Life Go Bad? Ms. Radhika Dutt (USA)
Show Notes Transcript

The author of Radical Product Thinking, Radhika Dutt poses some thought-provoking ideas that challenge conventional wisdom on broad vision statements and Big Hairy Audacious Goals (or BHAGs).

We've all heard about BHAGs. But does focusing on them (like Steve Jobs did) actually make for better products and a better life? The obsession with just being big and 'go big or go home' can sometimes mean that we forget what's the problem we're solving for.

Join Dr. Ramesh and Radhika as they discuss radical product thinking and see if you can apply these insights beyond just building great products, to creating a happy and meaningful personal life.

To learn more about the entrepreneurial mindset with Dr. Ramesh, get your copy of The Big Jump into Entrepreneurship 2.0 on Amazon.com or www.Dr-Ramesh.com.

If you're interested in building crisis resilience, Dr. Ramesh will be launching her new book on the crisis ready mindset in the first half of 2023. Make sure you follow Dr. Ramesh on LinkedIn so that you’ll get her new book alert!

Host: Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra, Author, Podcast Host and Founder of Talent Leadership Crucible

Guest Speaker: Ms. Radika Dutt, Author of Radical Product Thinking

#EntrepreneurialMindset #USA #unitedstates #RadhikaDutt #Author #RadicalProductThinking #BHAGS #MIT #Dr.RameshRamachandra #TheBigJumpintoEntrepreneurship2.0 #CrisisReadyMindset #TalentLeadershipCrucible #Thriving #AgeofDisruption #productthinking #product

To learn more about the entrepreneurial mindset with Dr. Ramesh, get your copy of The Big Jump into Entrepreneurship 2.0 on Amazon.com or www.Dr-Ramesh.com.

If you're interested in building crisis resilience, Dr. Ramesh will be launching her new book on the crisis ready mindset in the first half of 2023. Make sure you follow Dr. Ramesh on LinkedIn so that you’ll get her new book alert!

Host: Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra, Author, Podcast Host and Founder of Talent Leadership Crucible

Guest Speaker: Ms. Radika Dutt, Author of Radical Product Thinking

#EntrepreneurialMindset #USA #unitedstates #RadhikaDutt #Author #RadicalProductThinking #BHAGS #MIT #Dr.RameshRamachandra #TheBigJumpintoEntrepreneurship2.0 #CrisisReadyMindset #TalentLeadershipCrucible #Thriving #AgeofDisruption #productthinking #product


Ho Lai Yun 00:00 

Hello and welcome to Thriving in the Age of Disruption. We’re excited that you’ve joined us to meet with Ms. Radhika Dutt, the author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. Radhika is an entrepreneur and product leader who advises organisations from high-tech startups to government agencies on building radical products that create a fundamental change.

Today, Dr. Ramesh and Radhika discuss Radical Product Thinking and share some thought provoking ideas. We've all heard about BHAGs or Big Hairy Audacious Goals. But does focusing on BHAGs actually make for better products and a better life? What if the obsession with just being big can sometimes mean that we forget what's the problem we're solving for.

Listen on and see if you can apply this and other insights, beyond just building great products, to creating a happy and meaningful personal life.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 00:55

Radhika, welcome to the Thriving in the Age of Disruption podcast series. We're so excited to have you here. I thought it'd be really great if you can start off by introducing yourself. You could share a little bit about your childhood and where you grew up. I know that you spend time in different parts of the world.

Radhika Dutt 01:13

Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. My journey was across many continents and countries. I grew up in India til I was 12, then lived in South Africa during South Africa's most historical times, I guess, from ‘91, which is right after the apartheid laws were abolished, until ‘95, after the first democratic elections were held. So some of the most momentous periods and I'll say that it was definitely something that was character building living in South Africa during those times. Then I moved to the US for undergrad and grad at MIT. And then I've been in Boston since. I had sworn that when I graduated, I was going to move to the west coast and be in warmer weathers. 

Radhika Dutt 

And here we are in January, I'm in many, many, many layers. And we're still here years and years later. It's just that you form a network, a set of longterm relationships and bonds and it's really hard to move away. Except we did take a brief hiatus of two and a half years to move to Singapore. Actually, we lived there from 2018 until 2021. Those are such wonderful two and a half years in Singapore, both my husband and I were really longing to go back. So hopefully we might actually move back in 2024.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 02:22

Oh, that's wonderful. So, I am looking forward to then interacting and spending time with you in person, although I live now in Hanoi, Vietnam. I was born in Sri Lanka and my parents moved when I was six to Singapore in the ‘70s. So, I grew up here. And I studied in Australia, went to Monash. Did International Management exchange program at NYU, did like six months in the two year MBA program, and then got married. It was an arranged marriage, spent my first year of marriage in Boston actually, Fall River.

Radhika Dutt 

Oh, how exciting!

Dr Ramesh Ramachandra 

That's right. Unfortunately, the marriage didn't work out. But I had a beautiful daughter. So, I've been living pretty much in Asia since then, being in Asia, in the thick of things. Somehow, it's always that developing state of things that draws me back as an entrepreneur. I love the startup space. 

Radhika Dutt 03:15

That's a really interesting story. I think you've also lived in so many different places. And I think living in all these places gives you this feeling of belonging, like children of certain culture, where you know, you're familiar enough with so many cultures. But for me, like, it's hard to define what is home, like home is wherever my immediate family is. And that's home.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 02:40

I totally empathise with that.

Radhika Dutt 03:39

Yeah, yeah. My journey across all of these countries, entrepreneurial in many ways, and that first of all, it was always involving moving and moving into the unknown. When we moved from India to South Africa, we'd never seen the country when we decided to move there. Similarly, actually, when we moved from Boston to Singapore, we had never been to Singapore. We decided, “We'll move there and it'll be an interesting experience!” That reminds me of entrepreneurship in many ways. It's this jump into the unknown, right? My career has been around entrepreneurship, as well as actually while I was still at MIT, I started my first startup called Lobby Seven, along with four other co-founders. We built as a team, what you can now think of as a very early version of Siri, meaning we did voice recognition on devices, so that you could interact with your devices using voice, as well as text, but this was like back in 2000. Well before 3G, which was the most exciting thing at the time. Well before iPhones and so on. So, we built our first startup, we were entirely too early to market. Our company was acquired, but we didn't get a huge pay out of it at all. But that was the start of my entrepreneurial journey. And what I realised is that it's this entrepreneurial mindset that you carry into every kind of a role. And so, from there to other startups that I've worked at, or even large companies, my role is always entrepreneurial, even within larger companies where we were launching or creating a new product and growing it. Finally, this entrepreneurial journey brought me to Radical Product Thinking, which is the book that was published in September 2021. Radical Product Thinking is really about how do we create change in the world through our products. And that is really kind of the essence of product thinking. But also, being an entrepreneur, you're creating change in the world through the products that you're putting out as an entrepreneur. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 05:30

You headed out to the US in 1990. That would have been around the time when I was in the US for the exchange program, and then later in 1995, and in early 2000, I started my first startup company. It was a phenomenal journey, because in 12 months, we had raised millions of dollars, we were looking at listing the company. I had, at one point thought I was going to be a billionaire, and then I ended up a year later actually liquidating the company, because two things had happened. One was, there were some issues within the company that I had to confront that were inconsistent with my own value system, and whether I wanted to continue being on the journey. The second part was, of course, the dotcom crash was also happening. The failure was really also a good lesson for me. Because when you go into a business, and you expect it to succeed, and when eventually you fail, it's a different kind of journey. I often wondered at that time, what was I ever going to do with my life. And when I look back now, I see that entrepreneurship was a way of life.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 06:36

I want to now talk about this whole idea of change, because I think entrepreneurship is also about change. I love your book Radical Product Thinking, where you're talking about how to create change in the world through our products? I'm really intrigued, can you share a little bit more about it? 

Radhika Dutt 06:54

One of the things that I really wanted to address through Radical Product Thinking and how you can create change is this notion, in the startup world, which stems from toxic masculinity, this idea that change is created by one or two visionaries who are almost always white and male. And it's this idea that someone top down tells others what to do. And that's what makes you a visionary. And everyone else is just executing. That's really, really not how entrepreneurship works, or being a visionary works. The other idea, which also comes out of a few unicorns that have succeeded, is this idea that to build a successful product, all you need to do is just throw something in the market, see what works, just keep iterating. And you'll figure it out along the way. The reality is, even when you have a treasure chest, a war chest, you really have two to three pivots before you run out of money or momentum. So, you can't keep just trying an infinite number of things to see what works in the market. That, put together with this idea that visionaries are these white males who know what to do, those are the two ideas I really wanted to challenge in the book. So the examples that I use in the book are people who have created profound change in the world through their products, they've affected people's lives, but in a positive way. And they've created world changing products. And these are people who are of all ethnicities and races and people around the world. It's not a Silicon Valley centric view. 

Radhika Dutt 

The second idea that I challenge in how we create change is that it's not just based on, “Let's just try things and see what works.” But rather, that we can be vision driven and create change very systematically. What I mean by that is, as an entrepreneur, you have to think about your product as a mechanism of creating change. The end goal of the product is not just the success of the product in itself, it's really first thinking about what is the change that you're trying to bring about. And it's not disruption for the sake of it. There has to be a certain intended change that you want to bring about. And then your product has to succeed in creating that intended change. So once you start thinking about it in this way, you can start to apply the ideas of Radical Product Thinking to be able to engineer that change systematically. 

Radhika Dutt 

And in the book, I talk about the five steps of engineering change, which is the first step, starting with a clarity of decision. The second is translating that into an actionable strategy. The third is translating the vision and strategy into priorities, then into execution and measurement that's hypothesis driven. And the last element is culture, so that you create the culture that you need in your organisation to have this mindset and innovate efficiently. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 09:47

In your book, you highlight the stereotype that unicorns are led by white, male and that many other ethnicities are excluded from the success stories. We have the same versions of that in Asia as well. I have observed at least in the case of this new rise of technopreneurs, it's been really people are already well connected. 

What you are saying is, at the end of the day, creativity is not just about one or two people in an organization, but it's about unleashing that from everyone else within the organization, because how are you going to sustain the company over time, if you're not giving empowerment to the rest of the employees to also contribute? The second piece is also to challenge this notion that as a unicorn, all you had to do was to go and have your prototypes, and you become so successful. Which actually takes people down the wrong route because we're so focused on fundraising. What do we need to do to get the pitch deck together and to bring in the money? But we forget, then what is the real product or service that we are building? How are we going to deliver that value? And if nobody is going to give us the money? How are we going to sustain the company? Entrepreneurship then becomes all about fundraising and that’s not entrepreneurship.

Radhika Dutt 11:10

Exactly, what you just described, those are diseases that I talked about in the book, like one of the key diseases that we catch, when we do that, you talk about fundraising, and that becomes the measure of success. That's Hero Syndrome. We feel like it's all about just being big and ‘go big or go home’. This obsession with being big is Hero Syndrome, when you’re so obsessed over that, that you forget, “What's the problem you're solving?” And the other thing is when we're just focusing on, “Oh, let's just keep iterating and we'll find our way.” That disease is Pivotitis where we just keep pivoting, it's more like whiplash, and you really lose your way. And that's where you run out of money and momentum.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 11:48

Oh, I suffered from both those things with my first startup, 

Radhika Dutt 

Oh, the same here, you know. These are all hard lessons from experience, no shame in declaring these diseases, they're so common. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 

That's right. That's right.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 12:05

I want to go back to why entrepreneurial mindset is important. I think that in this world of disruption, where we are facing uncertainty every day, I found that as an entrepreneur, being resourceful being able to deal with problem and knowing how to look for solutions, or even to first of all, define the problem. So that it is the right problem that we're trying to solve. Number two is having a healthy attitude towards managing risks, as well as uncertainty. And number three is being really focused on creating value not just for ourselves, but also for our stakeholders, is actually what I would call this an entrepreneurial mindset. 

Radhika Dutt 12:48

I completely agree that this entrepreneurial mindset is just so important to thrive in today's environment. If we're applying this entrepreneurial mindset, we have to start with this clarity of first defining, “What is the problem? Why does it even need to be solved?” Because maybe it doesn't actually. And that finally, you know, we can say, “Okay, so this is the problem. This is who has the problem. This is why the world is unacceptable, if we don't solve it.” Now, we create this alignment, this clarity of purpose, then finally we can say, “Okay, so what does the world look like when the problem is solved? And how will we bring this about?” Once you have this level of clarity for yourself, you can set out to solve whatever the problem is.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 13:30

As a parent, which aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset would you like them to develop?

Radhika Dutt 

You know, you are asking, “How do I apply this or what is it that I hope my kids get out of this?” It was really funny. My kids were playing a board games once and I heard my daughter saying to my son, “You know, you can't just pick cards at random, you need a vision, a strategy.” So I can only hope that this is one lesson that they apply beyond board games.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 13:55

If we had that vision, and we held on to it, it doesn't matter what kind of action we take today, or what we have to change tomorrow, because the vision will guide us and keep us on track. 

Radhika Dutt 

To your point, that clarity of vision, often when we don't have that, it's hard to be a leader who's really giving your team, this clarity of “how do I make decisions”, because when we have a clarity of vision, then we're able to balance it against the reality of short term business needs. Because when we're making decisions, what we're constantly doing is we're thinking about how am I balancing the long term against the short term. And so you need this clarity of the long term, because the short term things are the things that are always very obvious. The fact that your business needs fundraising, you're going to run out of money, if you don't get this, you need this big client, all those short term needs, they're going to keep hitting you all the time. And those are the most obvious needs. Unless you have clarity of vision, I like to think of it as the Yin and Yang, if you don't have the clarity of vision, you're just completely moving to the dark side. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 14:59

That's right. I run a consulting firm, which does corporate culture change work. And that's exactly what we have to juggle between, which is to create that long term vision, and then have these short-term milestones that the company is having confidence in meeting and seeing that they're actually altering their performance and results over time. And then before they know it, five years down, they've actually accomplished far more than what they said they were going to do. 

Radhika Dutt 15:27

There are two aspects to this. So, one is people across the organisation taking ownership of the vision. The second part of this is leaders actually empowering people to make decisions and communicating the rationale of how they trade off the long term against the short term. So the first aspect of this when I mentioned getting people to internalise the vision and make it their own. This is the piece where I go back to the toxic masculinity of how we think a good vision should sound. We've heard that a good vision has to be broad, aspirational, never changing. In the US we keep hearing this term, it has to be a BHAG, or a big, hairy, audacious goal. And to me, a vision has to be absolutely none of the above. 

On the contrary, that vision has to be detailed. And it has to articulate the who, what, why, when and how, which I described earlier, like, whose problem are we solving? What is the problem? Why does it need solving? When do we know it's done? How you're doing it? It's more like an essay than a slogan. And so, what I advocate for and Radical Product Thinking is - Don't worry about the words, it's this ‘fill in the blank statement’. Really work on answering those deep questions. The most important part is, don't just do it as a leader. Because that's the idea that we have, that you know, it's the leader who sets the vision. 

Instead, do this as an exercise with your team. Get them to think through the whole what, why, when and how. And so the leader and the team thinks about this vision for the company. But you also need a vision at a product level. So, every product team creates and writes their vision in this who, what, why, when and how ‘fill in the blanks’ format, and you make sure that it aligns to the top down. But the point is that this way, you cascade the vision up all the way from the company level down to the teams. And this helps people understand, “How does this apply to me? What do I do with it?” That's the first part of it, right? Getting people to internalise the vision. The second part is actually giving people the autonomy to balance vision against the short term. So, the way I like to think about this is using a two by two matrix that I like to draw, where your Y axis is vision. So, is this good for the vision or not? Because now that you have this clear vision, you can actually determine if something is a good vision to it or not. And the X axis is, is this good for survival or not? And survival as a startup is most likely financial survival. But if you're in a big company, it might be the support from your stakeholders or your bosses. And so, you can evaluate is this good for the short term or not? And so, things that are good for the vision and for survival, those are what I call the easy decisions. Those are the easy decisions, but if we always just stick to the easy decisions, we are being only short term driven, because we're constantly thinking about survival. 

Sometimes we have to invest in the vision, which is where it's good to the vision, but not good in the short term. And the opposite of investing in the vision is sometimes we have to do what we need for survival. But maybe it's not good for the long term vision. So, an example of this is where you need to win this big deal. And customer says, “You have to build this feature for me.” And so, you grudgingly say, “Okay, fine.” But you have to recognise that as vision death, because if we just do these things over and over, it leads to the disease I call Obsessive Sales Disorder, where we kind of forget about the vision,  and all we're doing is just thinking about survival. Making decisions is, as a leader, not just telling people what is the right trade off, but rather, using this two by two to communicate how you're thinking about trade-offs. So that when you're not in that meeting, when your developers writing code are thinking about how they're going to write this, they're making the right trade off. When your engineering managers, your salespeople, they're all thinking about trade-offs in the same way, this is the communication that needs to come from good leaders who have this entrepreneurial mindset, who are communicating with clarity of vision and how to make decisions. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 19:32

Wow, that's a really elegant framework to think through what people can do in the implementation of a vision. Twenty two years back, when I made the decision not to do the listing, I could see that I was dealing with the vision fit. We had the prospectus ready, we needed to get the sign off of board members and shareholders and one shareholder wanted additional shares. And that to me was like corruption, bribery. And I couldn't deal with that, I decided that I was not going to list the company. And if it meant that I had to close down the company, I would do that. So, in that moment, it was not just long term, it was short term, it was everything. To your point, we can use it personally in our lives as well, that simple Y axis and X axis decision making in a nutshell.

Radhika Dutt 

What you just said, I mean, it's so beautiful. What you did back then was investing in the vision, right? And it's such a huge decision that you made. And that was a big investment in your personal vision of what you thought was right or wrong. If we're being mindful about business, it's really thinking about this vision versus survival for ourselves as well. And being mindful about the decisions that we're making. Sometimes it's so easy to look at the work that we're doing. And just think about the little piece that we're contributing to, without thinking about the bigger picture. 

 And I'll give you an example. There's a really good friend of mine, who had a job offer from one place, and she was comparing job offers. In the end, the place where she chose to go work was Google. The way she was thinking about it, she was like, “Well, I'm only working on identity verification.” So it's very easy to look at your own little piece and forget about sometimes, what is the digital pollution that it is creating in the world? What are you actually contributing to the world? What is the change that you want to be part of? And that is kind of our personal vision versus survival that we need to think about. Very often, our job, sometimes we need to question, “Is that truly a vision fit?” Like the change that that entire product might be bringing to that world? Is that a good vision set for you? And there are no right answers. Because these are hard questions. You know, this is like saying, “Well, okay, so would you work for Apple, but not for Google?” Like it's really hard to answer that, there are so many things to think about. So, there are no right answers. But my ask of people is to think about your own vision for survival so that we can be mindful in the decisions that we make, because the reality is, we vote for the world we want to create with our labour, we vote with our labour, and you have to choose where you want to place that vote. 

And increasingly, it's become harder to vote with our money. Because when you have big tech, you sometimes don't really have a choice. I was booking flight tickets recently. I mean, I can't vote with my money. Honestly, the choices are so few I'm kind of stuck with, “This is it”, and increasingly, I'm realising when we can’t vote with our money, really, the only option we have is to recognise that we can vote with our labour and to recognise that as a society and want to change that. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 22:45

And I think the younger generation, they realise that and that's why we talk about the great resignation, and we talk about the millennials and the younger ones, they don't want to do jobs that are just jobs. They want to have meaningful and purposeful lives. That's the shift that we're seeing today. 

Radhika Dutt 23:04

That's right, a lot of Gen Z, they don't have the kind of optimism about the world that I think we had, you and I growing up, right? Because when we were growing up, that was the golden age of technology, where we had this belief that technology is going to create progress for humanity, that the world is only going to be better because of technology. And I was talking to a few kids recently. And what was shocking to me was their disillusionmentwith technology, where they are saying, “Well, we don't believe that technology is making the world better.” Some of the responsibility that, I think all of our listeners, like everyone has, we have to create a world where we're not fraying fabric of society, that the technology, the products that we put out, are actually creating a better world that works for all aspects is really important. And that's how we create progress for society, right? And we've lost sight of this idea of creating products that create a world that works for all, 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 24:06

We recently set up another company with a family business that we are working with, and they have on their Y axis, maximise human potential, but on their X axis, they have sustaining societies. So, when you look at the trade-off between human potential as well as sustainable societies, then you need to make that hard decision of what kind of investment you will make, because it's not about making just profit, it's about the betterment of the collective. 

Dr.  Ramesh Ramachandra 24:43

Let me move on to crisis ready mindset. I define crisis as a setback. And I think it's critical that we understand how to deal with crisis, which can be a personal setback, or even a global situation, because we are dealing with change. And sometimes when change is unmanageable, that is, it is beyond our own coping mechanism, or the kind of resources that we have, we may feel stuck. And I've had those situations in my life, whether it was in running the business, or it was personal as in my divorce. I'm sure you've had setbacks in your life or failures. And how have you dealt with that and what had you get back into the game?

Radhika Dutt 

In terms of setbacks, for me, dealing with it has always involved having a support network, and being able to have people that you can truly rely on and completely be your authentic self with. There was one place where I was working and it was really such a toxic environment, that it was a huge setback in my career. And I felt like you're having to just leave so abruptly from such a toxic environment. It made me question a lot of, “Should I be doing something differently or kind of what went wrong there?” And I'll give you one other example that I found that it took me a long time to process. As I was working in my career, there were times when I was passed over for promotion. And what happened was, every time, I noticed when I quit a job, the person who was hired after me was, first of all, a male white that came in at a higher salary and a higher title. But I did not notice the first two elements. I always noticed only the last two, which is there was another person who was brought in at a higher title and a higher salary. My question was always, “What did I do wrong?” So, in terms of setbacks, I guess here are a few thoughts, right? The first thing is, honestly being introspective and seeing what can I do differently? A lot of the elements of what I have learned taking this facilitative approach, sharing rationale, sharing this clarity of vision, etc. A lot of the leadership skills that I've learned have come from these setbacks, because  the realisation that you have to be so much better as a leader, to be able to fight for what you feel like you deserve. 

So that's the first thing. so being introspective because there's so much you can learn from it. But the second piece of it is really to not internalise failure. Because like you're saying, there are so many things outside of your control, realising what you have control over or what you don't, and be able to distance yourself from that feeling that you have failed. And that part is super hard to do. It's so much easier to say in retrospect. But as we're experiencing that setback, it's definitely not easy to do. And I don't want to make it sound like it is. When you're on the happy path and everything was going well, mindfulness during that time, takes the edge off a little bit when dealing with setbacks and these hard times. Not that it's easy, but it helps you kind of accept and manage. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 28:03

So what I'm hearing is that it's important to develop a support structure, a network of trusted people, be it family or friends, so that you can talk to them and share with them authentically, what you're dealing with. Two is, developing the practice to actually introspect. It's almost like taking responsibility for what you did, or you didn't do that might have caused this situation so that you don't keep blaming yourself or the situation, but you can at least come to peace with it. And number three,it’s very important not to internalise the failure because, yes, the business might have failed. Yes, you might not have gotten the job. But that's not about you. It was just that opportunity and it didn't show up. It's like feedback of that situation. The last piece, which I find really intriguing, because you talked about actually being mindful of the happy moments, 

Radhika Dutt 

When you're in a happy state, if you can practice mindfulness, then it's so much easier to be able to be mindful when you're in tough times. Meditation, when you're dealing with hard times, is much harder as a practice. I think that that aspect of being present and experiencing every moment and realising that there's joy and all these little things, I think that's such an important reminder. I think that's really beautiful.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 29:28

Where are you in your spiritual journey? 

Radhika Dutt 

I discovered meditation about a year ago. And it's been really transformative for me, it's been really helpful. It's transformative in the sense that it really helps your kind of be more present.It's hard to describe what I mean by transformative even, I guess it's something to be experienced. And it's harder to describe, but just the ability to feel in touch with your consciousness, and you are not your mind. That was really, I think, very powerful to be able to separate kind of this thing where I am who I am, this consciousness, but it just happens to be in this body. But each of us, we are more than just these bodies, and this realisation that we're all here to love and be loved.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 30:14

So it is really the exploration of how you're not separate from the universe, or you're not separate from each other. And being part of the collective, how do you actually find peace? Being also yourself? 

Radhika Dutt 

What you just described is so beautiful, I try to say some of these words to my husband sometimes. And he says, “Okay, you're just throwing a bunch of words together. But I don't understand what you actually mean.” 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 30:42

I actually had an interesting experience when I was in the deepest moment of my personal crisis in ‘97. And I remember that I just come out of the shower, and I was looking at myself in the mirror, and I really got, “I am Me”, irrespective of what roles that I played, because at that point, I was confronting the fact that I was not mother, I was not daughter, I was not employer, I was not a business owner. And so if I didn't have these roles, then “who am I” was like, “Oh, my God.” I just got that I am Me. It was earth shattering. And to remind myself of that moment, I kept then shaving my head bald for about 10 years, maybe. But then I found that I became addicted to doing that. Because the very moment you shave your head, it's fine. Then four hours later, the little bits of your hair starts growing back and I observe that my ego and attachment also comes back. I was trying to recapture for myself that emptiness. And then I realised that was not the emptiness as much as just knowing that I don't need to get attached to who I am just because I have these roles to play, these positions that I hold or these physical things and it just had to be bringing more and more awareness to that, so that every day, I could practise it in different forms.

Radhika Dutt 

Oh, what you’ve described, I mean, it's such a beautiful moment, right? This feeling of ‘I am’ and that's it, like ‘I am’. But it's one of those things where you kind of have to experience it through meditation. And then you wish you could experience it all the time. But the more you seek it, the more elusive it is. And you kind of have to just practise meditation regularly without seeking to just be at peace, right? 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 

That's right.

Do you think that it is possible for us to live a simple life and what is a simple life for you? 

Radhika Dutt 32:43

Wow, I think in the age of phones, constantly buzzing, I'm not good at dealing with our interrupt driven life. And so I think my ideals are what is a simple life, is a life where we can be present at every moment. And we're feeling in touch with our consciousness, always feeling ‘I am’ and feeling aware, as opposed to just blindly going about all that we go about in our day. That is the ideal simple life. But I think that is kind of what we all strive for. It's not easy, but I do feel like we can achieve it. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 33:20

So that's the struggle, right? There is the goal that we have, or the expectation of what is a simple life. We struggle through it, I think there might be two levels of that simple life. Because in our own minds, as ourselves, we can bring simplicity and be simple, because it's more from a mindset. But then when we interact with the rest of the world, it becomes more complex, because of the roles and the positions we have, and the obligations and the expectations that we have to fulfil.  

Radhika Dutt 

As mindful as you can be, right, the moment you open your LinkedIn feed, and start reading your feed and there goes simplicity, and you feel like, “Oh, I need to do this, this and this, and this is what I need to achieve.” And if we can kind of go back to this feeling of ‘I am’, regardless of whatever role etc, that I hold, thinking about just ‘I am’ and this bigger purpose of feeling like we're here to love and be loved, I think that is simplicity right at its core.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 34:16

What is sustainability for you? I mean, how does it show up in your personal life, or in your workplace? 

Radhika Dutt 

To me, sustainability is two things. One is sustainability in terms of Earth, and what is sustainable, so that we don't incur the devastations of climate change any faster than we already are. So that's one aspect of it. But that's more spoken about. I want to add to the definition of sustainability, where there's what I called ‘digital pollution’ in my book. It's what we're doing to society through a lot of our products, and the change that we're creating in society, you know, the increased polarisation, both in terms of wealth and ideology, the elements of digital pollution. 

It's not just Earth sustainability, but also thinking about how we can build products without fraying the fabric of our society. So, avoiding what I call ‘digital pollution’. In the book, I talk about the different forms of digital pollution, which is eroding the information ecosystem, it’s eroding privacy, raising inequality, and fuelling polarisation. These kinds of pollution that are affecting our society as a result of products that we build, that is unsustainable for our society, for democracies to thrive. And so that's another form of sustainability that we need to be aware of, and that we need to realise kind of how our work is contributing to it. Earlier, I was talking about voting for the kind of world we want to create through our labour, like voting with our labour. If we want to think about sustainability, we have to think about not just, you know, recycling and using water carefully, etc.But also thinking about - How am I voting with my labour? What kind of a world am I creating? Is it making society more sustainable? Or is it fraying the edges of society? 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 34:57

It's interesting, because we, in our own consulting practice, also take on the definition of sustainability being one where it's the ongoing thriving of a living system, it's more than just depletion of natural resources and its devastation on climate change. It is fundamentally about us as human being because we are living system, and how do we ensure the ongoing survival and thriving of the system, we have to look at the inter linkages and the interconnection with other subsystems that we operate in. And I guess, technology is one big piece of that system. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 36:41

Wow, I like that. What you've described is that if we saw ourselves as a living system, then our relationship to work to technology to all the other stakeholders is also critical and we have to be conscious about that interrelationship and interconnection.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 37:02

International Woman's day is coming up, and what's your wish for women in 2023? 

Radhika Dutt 

We have to build products that create a world that work for all and to me, it's so important because what we build in this world, all these products we build, they affect people's lives, and it affects society. And we need more women, we need diversity in these leadership positions, so that we can build a world that works for all. And so that's my hope to see more women in these leadership positions, being able to influence how we build, that we can move away from a lot of the toxic masculinity that has existed in the entrepreneurial and startup world. You asked me earlier, what is one piece of advice I would give women and that one thing I would say, which has been the biggest learning in my career, is introspect, but without internalising failure. S learning from mistakes, but without internalising failure. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 38:03

If you had to use three words to describe thriving, what would those three words be ? 

Radhika Dutt 

Growth, joy, and peace. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 

Oh, lovely. I think I had another podcast guests say almost the same three words yesterday.

Radhika Dutt 

Oh, really?

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 

That's right. But in a different order. 

Radhika Dutt 

The fact that you had such a diverse set of guests, I really appreciated that. I love the authenticity of your podcast, I really liked the mix of business, as well as mindfulness and so many different perspectives. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra

So, Radhika it's been great chatting with you. I have enjoyed our conversation, getting to know you and doing this interview. I look forward to many more conversations and hopefully in person too. 

Radhika Dutt 38:45

Yeah, it was such a pleasure. I'm really glad we got to connect. I really love the fact that you get to connect business to spirituality and I enjoy listening to a lot of it.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 

That's really great. Thank you.

Ho Lai Yun 38:55

Thank you for joining Dr. Ramesh and Radhika today. We hope that you’ve found some of their insights useful to help you create not only great products, but also a thriving and meaningful life.

If you're interested to learn more about the entrepreneurial mindset, check out Dr. Ramesh's book "The Big Jump into Entrepreneurship 2.0", simply click on the Amazon link provided in the podcast description. In addition, make sure you follow Dr. Ramesh on LinkedIn so that you’ll get the latest insights from her and our amazing podcast guest speakers.

Next up, we’ll be celebrating International Women’s Day on March 8th. Join Dr. Ramesh to hear from  Datin Paduka Marina Mahathir, who is a Malaysian socio-political activist and writer. A fearless voice for gender equality, religious freedom and justice, she is also the eldest child and daughter of the longest-serving Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tun Mahathir Mohamad.

Bio:
Ms. Radika Dutt
Author of Radical Product Thinking

Radhika Dutt is the author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. She is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in five acquisitions, two of which were companies that she founded. She advises organizations from high-tech startups to government agencies on building radical products that create a fundamental change. 

She is Advisor on Product Thinking to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Singapore’s financial regulator and central bank. She serves on the board of the independent publisher, Berrett Koehler, and the Association of Product Professionals. Dutt co-founded Radical Product Thinking as a movement of leaders creating vision-driven change and is a frequent speaker at business events and conferences around the world. She graduated from MIT with an SB and M.Eng in Electrical Engineering, and speaks nine languages, currently learning her tenth.

You can follow her on her blog and learn more about Radical Product Thinking at (https://www.radicalproduct.com).