In this presentation, we will discuss types of documents and records that will be used within the auditing of revenue process. So we're thinking about the auditing of revenue, the types of documents and records that will be involved. We're going to be listing out the types of documents and records, which can seem like a boring process, but it's a very important process for a couple different reasons. First, a word from our sponsor. Well, actually, these are just items that we picked from the YouTube shopping affiliate program, but that's actually good for you because these aren't things that were just given to us from some large corporation, which we don't even use in exchange for us selling them to you. These are things that we actually researched, purchased and used ourselves. Acer 27 inch monitor. I've been using an Acer monitor as my primary monitor for a few years now. This is the first Acer monitor that I have used after having used a series of different brands of monitors in the past. The Acer monitor has been performing well and I'm trusting the Acer brand more and more as I use the monitor. I have a 27 inch monitor, which I think is ideal for what I do, which is of course the screen recording and the editing. If you would like a commercial free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com where we have many different courses. You can purchase one at a time or have a subscription model given you access to all the courses, courses which are well organized, have other resources like Excel files and PDF files to download and no commercials. One, these are the actual documents that we're going to go through. We're going to have to ask the client for. So we're going to have to go to the client. We're going to have to dig through these types of items when considering the auditing of revenue. We need to know what they are. We need to go and get them. The second thing that's really important here is because most accounting, many people that go through the accounting process, learn the debits and credits much better or more detailed than they learn the related documentations to it. And therefore they don't, oftentimes when we go through the accounting process and we learn accounting, we may actually have the financial transactions in terms of debits and credits down a lot more than the documentation that is related to it. Auditing is a great practice that gets us in tuned with what are the documentations related to the financial transactions that are involved. We need that of course for the auditing process, but we also need it if we're just doing business or we're working on the GL side of things or just working with accounting software because all these things are going to basically use this type of documentation in order to trigger the financial transaction, the debit and credits that we have learned. So we have to understand the documentation so that we can understand how to apply the debits and credits into an accounting system, into the accounting software. And that's something that many students pick up in the auditing type of process. So type of documents and records. We've got the credit approval form credit approval form for credit sales. So if we have a credit sale, obviously a sale on credit, we haven't gotten cash up front, the entity must have a formal process to determine if the customers are credit worthy. This is obviously oftentimes going to be some type of thing that we want to check into depending on the type of industry we are in the sales process that they may have might have a high degree of basically non payment in it. And if there's a credit approval process, we want to make sure that the credit approval process is in place so that there's more likelihood than of course if you have the credit approval that the payment will be received when you make sales on account. Customer sales order shows the details of the type and quantity of products or services ordered by the customer. So that's going to be the customer sales auditor again shows the details of the type and quantity of products or services ordered by the customer. Then we have the open order report. This is going to be important for the auditor a report for all customer orders where processing has not been completed. So if we have some kind of system where there's going to be items where the processing has not yet been done, we need to know what the open order report is because if the work has not yet been done typically we shouldn't be recording the revenue until the point in time that the work has been done. So we need to know what the system is when the revenue is going to be recognized when the work is done so that we can test that system. We have the shipping document typically serves as a bill of lading. It has information on the type of product shipped, the quantity shipped and other relevant information. So we want to basically be able to check those shipping documents because the shipping documents if we're talking about goods that are being shipped out are often the point that we are going to recognize basically the revenue. In other words, the revenue for goods that are being sold typically happens when the goods are delivered in some format. The goods are delivered. How do we test when the goods are delivered? Well, if the goods are shipped from a warehouse or something like that, we would need to be able to look at the shipping document. And that's going to be one way that we know the quantity of goods as well as when the shipping actually took place and therefore be able to tie that out and consider when revenue was recognized. Then we have the sales invoice used to build the customer contains information on the type of product or service, the quantity, the price and the terms of the trade. So obviously the sales invoice is our invoice. So we usually call it an invoice from our side to the customer. It's going to be the bill, right? And we're sending out the invoice to the customer. They are receiving the bill. Therefore, this is going to be usually the point in time with a lot of accounting software might trigger a sales process recording revenue at the point of time the invoice happens. But note that that really if they're shipping goods, the revenue should be recorded at the point of time that the shipment happens or when some type of delivery happens, whether it be FLB shipping or FLB destination. So we're going to have to be looking at the relationship between these types of items and when the system, the accounting software is recording the revenue with relation to them and see if there's any kind of timing difference issues that we need to consider. Then we have the sales journal after sales invoice has been issued, the sales need to be recorded in the accounting records. The sales journal is used to record information about the sales transactions. So the sales journal will be a specialized journal that's just going to show the basically the sales type of reports. This might be a report that we'll have to print out. If we're using accounting software, we might have to ask for basically a sales journal, a sales report. The names can differ. Note that when we go to different types of industry, different types of companies, they may have different names. The accounting software may generate reports in different types of formats. So we need to understand, you know, what the general name is of the report and what it is that we're looking for on it so that when we get the report, we can recognize that we have indeed gotten the information that we need if even if it's not by the same name. Then we have the customer statement mailed to the customers has details of all sales cash receipts and credit memorandum memorandum transactions accounts receivable subsidiary ledger. This is obviously going to be really important when we consider the sales process and consider the auditing of accounts receivable itself has an account and detail of transactions for each customer. So the subsidiary ledger remember when we think about accounts receivable, of course, we've got accounts receivable representing what is owed to the company by customers. We then break that out by not just the GL by date as all accounts are broken out on the general ledger by date, but also by subsidiary ledger, the subsidiary ledger breaking it out by customer. So now we have the same detail broken out by customer. That's going to be important, of course, for accounts receivable accounts receivable aging report summarizes all customer balances in accounts receivable subsidiary ledger. Each account is classified as either current or placed into one of several past due categories. So this is a similar type of process the on the on the balance sheet, we got accounts receivable that represents what is owed to the company by customers. Then we're going to break that out by by customer subsidiary ledger, but also an aging report subsidiary ledger type report, which will break out who owes us the money, but also break it out by how old that money is or how past due it is. Is it current? Is it 30 days past due? Is it 90 days past due? That'll help us to value the accounts receivable and see if the collections are actually happening in a timely manner with regard to the sales on account remittance advice. Part of the customer's bill that is returned with the payment. So when we think about the remittance, when we receive a bill like a utility bill in the mail or something like that, that little slip that you're supposed to fill out the amount and then send it back, that's going to be important within the return internal controls process. Because when that goes back to the system, that remittance you can have a check in the envelope, you can have the remittance that will then come back. And those two things will typically be recorded and go to different departments and be recorded as a form of check in balance. So when we're testing the internal controls, so it's going to be an important document, cash receipts journal used to record the cash receipt of the entity. So we'll have the cash receipts journal. Again, with an accounting software, it might be that we're going to be asking for some type of report with relation to the cash receipts journal, which may not be named exactly the cash receipts journal, but obviously we're looking for a report that has cash receipts on it. Credit memorandum used to record the return of goods by customers. So this is going to be important for the recording of revenue as well, because the credit memorandum, which is usually something that many times within even the accounting process that you ask the bookkeeper or the people in the accounting department, what's the journal entry behind the credit memorandum? They don't really know, right? It's obviously because it's backwards, it reverses the sales. So we have to understand that the credit memorandum is typically going to be the reversal. There's going to be some type of return and therefore it's the easiest way to think about it. The transaction related to it is going to think about the sales transaction that will typically be reversed and then make any kind of adjustments such as sales instead of sales, you've got the sales returns and allowances. So anyways, the credit memorandum form can be a little bit confusing to analyze when you have those returns because most of the times when we think about accounting and we think about the sales process and the return is a little bit backwards in our mind. So credit memorandum, we have the write-off authorization, authorizes the write-off of an uncollected accounts receivable. Final approval is often done by the treasurer.


Hello, everybody, and welcome to our presentation. Today, we will be talking about Contour, a high-performance, multi-tenant ingress controller for Kubernetes. First, let's go ahead and introduce the team that's working on Contour. My name is Michael Michael. I'm the product lead and a director of product management at VMware. As part of our team, but not present here, is Steve Kreese, a staff engineer at VMware. Tong Liu, the engineering manager, also at VMware. And I'm going to pass it back on to Nick. Go ahead and unmute Nick. Hi, everyone. I'm Nick Young. I'm the technical lead for Contour. I'm a staff man engineer at VMware. And I am in charge of the overall direction and architecture of Contour. Hi, everyone. I'm Steve Sloka. I'm a senior member of technical staff here at VMware. I work a lot on the envoy integrations to Contour. Hi, everyone. I'm James Peach. I'm a staff engineer at VMware. I've been working on Contour for about a year. And I contribute in most of the different areas. Cool. Thank you all. And we have our Slack channels, IDs on the bottom. So if you need to reach us, we're all available on the Kubernetes Slack channel as well. So let's take a look at what Contour is today. So Contour is an open source Kubernetes ingress controller. And it's providing a control plane for the envoy edge and service proxy. We're really aimed with a mission to be the best ingress controller for Kubernetes. And lately, we've been accepted into the CNCF back last summer as an incubating project. So we plan to bring together a lot of the cloud-native community within the CNCF landscape and deliver an amazing ingress controller that meets your needs. We support dynamic configuration updates and multi-team ingress delegation out of the box while maintaining a lightweight profile. And I'm going to switch over to Mi Young, our technical lead to go through some of the highlights of Contour. Yeah, hi, everyone. So Contour was started in September 2017 at Heptio. It was started by Dave Chenney and Steve Soko, the original members of the team. And at the time, Contour was aiming to be a high performance, as Michael said. Contour was aiming to be a high performance ingress controller with a focus on multi-tenancy, simplicity, and being able to source your ingress conflict from whatever objects in there, whether that's ingress, our HTTP proxy CRD, or the new service APIs. A really key part of Contour's philosophy and goals all along have been to really keep the units philosophy in mind and to be a tool that does one thing well. And that thing is ingress, Kubernetes ingress. And so we've worked really hard on Contour. I've been on here since for about just over a year and a half now, I think. And we released version 1.0 last year in November 2019. And yeah, as we've kept going, we've, as Michael said, we've been donated to the CNCF and incubation level in July, which was amazing. Really great. Really glad to have been a part of that. And we've recently released version 110, which has a bunch of new awesome features which we'll go into later. But yeah, I'm really excited to be a part of this project. It's been a great journey for me being able to work on and then lead an open source project like this. And I'm really looking forward to where we go next. All right. So I'm going to walk through a quick architecture overview of how Contour is implemented and deployed. So you'll see here we've got traffic from the internet, which comes in from outside your cluster. It targets typically a load balancer. And this load balancer's job is to send traffic to a fleet of envoys running in your cluster. So Contour uses Envoy as its data path component. So all traffic routes through Envoy. Envoy is another CNCF project. And again, it's the reverse proxy that Contour implements. So Contour actually in this architecture is the configuration server for Envoy. So it implements Envoy's XDS server. So Contour's job is to watch the cluster for things like services, endpoints, ingress objects, and secrets. When it sees any of those things change, Contour then builds a new configuration in memory and streams those changes down to Envoy. Envoy then can take those changes without reloading and then serve traffic properly within your cluster. So again, the traffic comes in from the internet, hits load balancer, routes through Envoy, and then to your back end applications. Thank you, Steve. And we're going to see a demo later on of some of the next generation work on Contour here. So let's switch over and talk about some of the latest developments in Contour. So James, you've got the baton. Thanks, Michael. So as Nick pointed out, we've done maybe 10 releases in the last year. So we're actually adding features quite frequently. Some of the things we've been working on recently, the big one is external authorization support, which we'll talk about in more detail soon. We've also added cause support, which is really useful for anyone doing web applications or single page apps in JavaScript. We're working on Envoy XDS v3 support. So Envoy has done a major new version of its API, and we're taking full advantage of that. One of the things we've been doing as the number of releases is kind of improve the integration of Contour with other projects in the ecosystem. So load balancer IP status is one of the features in that area. We now support client certificate, client TLS certificates for the Envoy proxy. We're working on ARM support so you can deploy Contour in your ARM images on your ARM platforms in the cloud and TLS client certificate validation. There's a project in the Contour ecosystem called NetContour, which allows Knative serving to use Contour for its ingress support. And finally, we're working on a Contour operator, which will make it easy to deploy Contour and Envoy and also to have multiple Contour deployments. Can you go to the next slide, Michael? So external authorization is one of the earliest user requested features for Contour. And what people want here is a way for the platform and the Contour deployment to provide a single authorization mechanism that authorizes and authenticates users and means that individual applications don't have to worry about implementing it. So you can get a consistent authorization experience across all your applications in the cluster. So you can a lot of, excuse me. So some people will use OIDC. Some people will use LDAP. But basically, as far as Contour is concerned, it doesn't matter what you do, where you can build your own server and do your own custom authorization mechanism, or you can pull one from the broader Envoy ecosystem. For example, Istio's Auth service can be used with Contour and everything will work fine. The general architecture for authentication is shown here in this diagram. So a client will do a get request to Envoy. And there is an extension service at CRD, which the operator has already deployed. The extension service at CRD represents a binding between Envoy and a external authorization service. Contour will configure Envoy to send requests to the external authorization service on every request that comes from the client. The external authorization service will either accept or reject the request. And if it rejects the request, it can redirect the client so that the client can obtain any kind of authorization information that it needs. Then when the client returns, the extension will authorize that request and will forward it to the upstream service. Thank you, James. So let's take a look at all of this in action. And a lot of exciting work has gone into enabling external authorization into Contour. And this is actually one of the highest requested features for Contour. So next, I'm going to stop my sharing here. And Steve Sloga is going to share his screen and walk you through what it looks like in real life. Steve. Cool. Hey, thanks, Michael. Thanks, James, for that intro. So here we're going to walk through actually implementing what James just described there on the screen. So what I have here is I've got a cluster running and I have Contour deployed to it. So what I can do is I can go ahead and get all the HTTP proxies that I have in my cluster. So here I've got three of them. And this is a typical site that you might see in your cluster. So my domain name here is stevesloga.dev. And I've got a TLS secret on here. And that comes from Let's Encrypt via CertManager. So these are all Let's Encrypt certificates that were dynamically configured. So there's a couple of other proxies here for the marketing team and the blog sites. But we won't worry about that for this demo, at least. So just to prove that this works, we can come into here and let's go ahead and check out the site. And what you'll see here is it's got a simple echo server here. So this tells you that, hey, this is the default site. Here's the request and here's the headers. So we'll use this site here just to kind of validate how this authorization stuff is going to get implemented. So the first bit we're going to do, again, this is the same diagram that James just talked about, is we're going to go ahead and deploy some prerequisite bits to deploy this external auth service. So again, it's something that we deploy in the cluster. So first what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and deploy a namespace for all of these. We're going to put all of this stuff into this namespace called ProjectContourAuth. In that namespace, we're going to create a service account. And this is going to be used for our authorization server to be able to look for secrets in the cluster. It's going to use these secrets to be able to pull out passwords. In this demo, we're going to use basic passwords or basic password auth, which is very simple. But we can extend it to other types, as James mentioned. So once we have this cluster rule, we'll create a binding. And then we'll also create a quick little cluster issuer here. And this is going to let us create some self-sign certificates for the auth service inside the cluster so that communication between Envoy and the service is all secured. Cool. Let's go ahead and deploy this first bit. So we'll send this one over. All right. So we're going to create all of those. So now we should have a namespace called ProjectContourAuth down here. You can see it's seven seconds old. All right. So next, we're going to go ahead and deploy our actual auth server. And that's this external auth service a bit right here. So this is here. Here's our service we're going to use for it. It's called HTPassword. And then here's the deployment. So down here a little further, you'll see this is the image. This is actually a project that the Contour team has out in its Contour repo. So there's a couple of different auth servers that we provide for you. There's a simple one that's used for unit testing. And then this one's used for basic auth. So again, this is what we're going to demo today with HTPassword. So the image here, this is V2. We're going to run the HTPassword auth server over port 9443. And we'll reference some secrets, our certificates, that come from secrets. And you'll see those secrets are volumed in here through passwords. The source of the secret here is going to come from the certificate. So in the previous step, we created that self-sign cluster issuer for CertManager. Here we're actually going to request the password from CertManager or request the certificate. Sorry. So we can secure that communication. So let's go ahead and deploy this bit. OK, so we created the service, the deployment, and the certificate. So if we go ahead and get pods in the namespace ProjectContourAuth, what you'll see here is I have this auth server now running. Similarly, I should have a secret in there. And it's called HTPassword. Again, that matches the certificate that we requested. And you can see that one's 14 seconds old. OK, so back to our diagram here. We've got this auth server bit deployed. Next, we're going to go ahead and deploy some secrets for this. So what we need is some sort of user database. So in here, this secret has, and it's kind of A64 encoded. But with HTPassword, we actually created a user called user1 with password called password1. And we created user2 and user3. And that's all done up front here in this secret. So whenever the auth server spins up, it's going to look for the secret and then use it to become the source user base for our users to log in. So we'll kind of apply this one. OK, so now we have that. Next, we're going to create this extension service. And again, back to our diagram here, we have this bit all deployed now. So now we're going to create this extension service. Again, as James mentioned, the goal of this is to help integrate this auth service into our contour infrastructure. So now we can reference this auth service from our HTTP proxy. So if you look at this, again, this is called extension service. And we're going to reference the service we created in step two here, this deployment. So HTTP password is the service of our auth server, again deployed here in this orange box. Let's go ahead and create this. OK, so now we have our extension service created. Finally, that's all the bits. Now we just have to tell our HTTP proxy that we want to turn auth on, right? And we'll do that here. So this is that root proxy that we saw originally. And what we're going to do is we're going to add these little bits here. So this authorization bit now within the virtual host lets us reference an extension service. So here you can see referencing this HTTP password. Again, that was created in this step four here. And it's in the namespace project contour auth. So now once we apply this, Contour will then tell Envoy that on new requests coming in, we want to have this authorized. So Envoy will then forward this request out to our auth server. The auth server will basically do a thumbs up or thumbs down depending on what it receives. And then the request will either be denied or it'll be allowed through into your application. Let's go ahead and apply this one. So we configured our root real quick. We can check for errors. So we'll get our proxies again. You can see we have no errors here based on the status information. So what we can do now is we'll go ahead and curl for this. So we'll do a quick curl for slash secure. And you'll see that I get a 401 redirect here. So this 401 response tells me that I'm not authenticated because I haven't passed any users in. So again, based on our authorization flow, I'm not allowed to come in. But if we grab the second one here and we actually pass a user. So user one with password one, now they see the request comes through. The only downside to what we've done here is that the secure path has security, which is what we want, but the other one doesn't either. So it looks like I already stepped ahead of myself and configured that for us. So what we've done is in your routes, you can apply some auth conditions. And from here you can say I can disable my auth policy. So what you'll see is on the slash secure we have auth, but if I hit slash dev or slash, I still get the 401. So what we'll do is we'll go ahead and apply this auth policy to our route, which basically will allow our route path, which is slash to not require authorization. So we'll save that and we'll apply the route again. Cool. Now when I curl for the route, I'm not required to have authorization, but if I add slash secure, you can see now that is secured. So I'm required to log in before I do anything there. So hopefully that's a quick overview of authorization in contour. There is a nice guide out here on the contour website. I've been looking for more information, which walks you through what we just talked about, also with some flow diagrams and everything to help explain this a little better. That's all I have back to you, Michael. Absolutely. Thank you, Steven. Thank you team for working on this. And obviously as you are users, you wanna implement your own authorization providers and extensions into contour. Coming to the contour channel, talk show up in our community meetings and office hours and tell us what it is that you're building. You might be able to redirect you to an existing solution or help you out. So we're here to make sure that you are successful with your ingress needs. Next, I'm gonna switch to Nick Yan, who's gonna talk to you about the roadmap and where we're going. Everyone again. So yeah, we're obviously, as a public open source project, we have a public roadmap. First starters with our public roadmap, I probably should say, this is our current directions based on our current priorities. This is an open roadmap. So it's really open for you to come and say, hey, I really need this thing straight away and I wanna build it or I really need this thing very urgently and I need you to build it. If you need either of those things, please come and talk to us. This roadmap is not set in stone. It's a living document and we're up to change it with the reason. That said, the current things that are on this slide are some of the things that we're scheduled to do by the end of this, hopefully by the end of this calendar year. So the first one is redlining. That's being able to plug an external service for rate limiting in a similar way to what we did with the external auth so that you can rate limit particular routes or services. So this one in the past, it's been very difficult to figure out a design for how we were gonna do this, but luckily in order to do external auth, we needed to build the same features that we needed, which was that extension service CID. Also, we're looking for some, we're hoping to get some more deployment support done by the end of the year. So right now we've got projects working, running to create an operator and to have an official helm chart for Contour. There is currently an unofficial one and we're working to build, bring that one and make it official. And the purposes of both of those are to just make it easier to get Contour installed, but also to make it easier to install Contour in a variety of scenarios. Currently our install method is that we provide you with an example deployment that will get you up and running. But then because it's supplied as a series of YAMLs, there's no way for us to give you options. And so both of those things are a way for us to give you options. The third one here is a bit more complicated to explain. We've historically when that project started, we were a very small team, two then three people when I joined and we had a lot of features that we needed to build. And so we needed to stay focused on the ones that were the most important. And one of the things that we didn't put much focus on at the time was configurability. I think we all missed to begin with the real importance for a centralized property team of being able to tweak a whole bunch of options about your requests, timeouts, and a bunch of other details. And so since I've become a tech lead, one of the focuses for me has been really opening up and finding sustainable ways to allow people to configure all those things about Envoy that you need to configure in a centralized property that we haven't allowed you to in the past. And so we're really hoping to close out this and to put, to sort of make adding new Envoy config to just the AU and something that we do all the time and it's done in a relatively standard way. So that's sort of that this road map item means. The last one and probably one of the most exciting ones for the future of Contour is service API support. So the service APIs are a project of Kubernetes SIG network that is about building a new set of APIs described services inside the cluster and how they get traffic, how you get traffic to them from outside of the cluster. That is, it's kind of a replacement plus more for both Ingress and the service of type load balancer that you have in Kubernetes right now. It's a huge project with huge scope that we need to cover. And so if you're more interested in this side, certainly encourage you to get involved in that project. There's a lot of work to do. But yeah, one for Contour, the thing that we will be wanna look at doing is making sure that we, once the service APIs are actually released, we are able to take those objects as a source for config in the same way that we can currently take Ingress objects or our own HWP proxy CRD. And the exciting part there is that this is going to be eventually the new way that we configure. It's Ingress V1, it's gonna stay around for the foreseeable future, but this is gonna be the way that you'll get all the Nifty bells and whistles that it's very hard to do in Ingress V1. So yeah, that's most of our roadmap for the end of the year. We've got a few other sort of maintenance things that are on there by the end of the year, big one is as Michael said earlier, the XDSV3 change that XDSV2 for the support from Envoy at the end of the year. So that's really important to finish that one. But yeah, those are probably the biggest things for until the end of this calendar year. Further out than that, we do have a few things on the list, but you, the roadmap is pretty open. Please come and talk to us about other features that you want. And then I'll hand back to Michael to write it up. Thank you. Thank you, Nick. So we've taken a lot of time so far talking about what's going on in Contour and from a technical standpoint and some of our features. But you know, we want you to come and help us shape what Contour looks like tomorrow. We're a vibrant community. We have multiple ways that you can engage with us. You know, I'm gonna go through some of them right now. So we're on the Kubernetes Slack under the hashtag Contour channel. We have a mailing list where you can get updates about the project, new releases, and also ask questions. You can interact with us on Twitter and the Project Contour. We have our GitHub repos where you can come and see all the work that's happening in real time in Contour. And we also have a playlist on YouTube of all the community meetings that we have. So if you wanna know about something that happened in the past or missed a meeting, go ahead and view that. Overall, the Contour community is super vibrant. Our ecosystem is super engaging. We're welcoming to new users, but let's go through some of the project statistics. We have 2,500 GitHub stars and that number is growing. 430 contributors, 400 forks, five maintainers, 55 releases since we started, 130 contributing companies, 731 Slack members and more, blogs, Cubicon talks, Twitter followers. We want you to be part of this community. Come and help us deliver Contour. We have about 10 minutes left for Q and A, so feel free to ask anything that's near and dear to your heart. Thank you all from the Contour community. Thanks, everybody.


All right, welcome everybody to this first panel at the Indian School of Business. I'd like to start out with thanking the panel members first for joining this. My name is Aasthegranade and I will be your host today. Why are we here today? And there are a couple of things that come to mind. In my career, we just spend, let's say, two decades of working across different continents. And I was just sharing this with our esteemed colleagues a couple of minutes ago in a breakout group. I've had the opportunity and actually the pleasure to work with a number of supervisor, bosses, mentors. You name it over my career that have helped me build and come to the partner level that I am today. Now, given today's world of agile teams, you have tribes, the ability to mentor, I find the time that supervisors have to mentor is reducing. And so with the last five years, we've been doing a lot of work with institutes such as yourselves to share insights from external market leaders of what does it mean to be a successful leader. So these are the two key parts that we would like to talk about today. So now with that being said, what I would like to do is just do a quick round of introductions with our esteemed panel members. I want to start with Richard. And just a little bit of context, you certainly can look up Richard's LinkedIn online. And I'm sure you already have done so. And all the panel members are going to get a number of requests after this for joining. But, you know, what I want to say is I met Richard a few months, several months ago, and we had one breakfast meeting with him out in Bangalore, right between the pandemic, I think. And I left that breakfast with some absolutely fantastic ideas, not just on what we do at Hydrican Struggles and the launch of our business, but at a personal level, even after I talk about two years, two decades of my career, there were some sound bites that Richard gave me that are still with me today. So with that, Richard, not to put you in the spot, but maybe you can do a quick 30 second introduction also. Okay. I am currently the board member of KPMG in Middle East, which is the lower Gulf practice. Earlier, before that, I was the CEO of KPMG in India. I had many roles before that was my last role there. And I've been in consulting or accounting all my life, 38 years in this order, which 13 years, which I find very valuable to me was not in the big four. It was in a medium-sized firm. And my view, I learned a lot there. So all people who think you don't learn in small organizations, I can give you a few tips, what I learned there. Yeah, that's it. Aastik, thank you. Thank you, Richard. Chris, I'm going to go next with you. And while we've just met recently, Chris, you're well known in the industry. I will say, I started with saying I have two decades of experience. I have less hair than you probably, but I will say you have three decades of experience. And now, I'm the group head of Human Resources and Infosys. Without going into, again, your LinkedIn profile, Chris, would you like to share a couple of nuggets with us as you're introduction? Hello. Good evening, everybody. A pleasure to be here. I think I've been, as I said, across various industries, worked for over 20 years in Unilever, Airtel as the head of HR, and now with Infosys across very different industries. I think what I was passionate about is I was also the recently the national president of the National HRD network. I think the key thing for is a passionate is really looking at how to mentor and help people around. And I think that's what I'm really pleased to be joining this call. I'm looking forward to really sharing some insights with you and also here and learn from you on the challenges and some actions that you all are taking. Thanks. Thank you, Chris. And last but not least, Stephen. I've known Stephen now since I joined Hydragun Struggles for 18 months. We've had a call at least every month through the exception of one month. And what I would say is the most refreshing and handed to the point of view that has made me think deeply about a number of topics. So Stephen, with that, maybe you can give us a little 30 seconds on your background. You're too kind. And I'm embarrassed by the mono nature of my career after listening to Chris's background there. So Stephen Macalindan, I'm the regional leader for Hydragun Struggles is executive search business in Asia Pacific in the Middle East. I am in Hong Kong, where I have lived for nearly 30 years now. I've been in search for 35 years or so. I have my own company for many years and sold that to Hydrax and went to work for them. So I was in the unique position age 44 of never having had a boss until I started at Hydragun Struggles. And now they're very kind to ask me to look after the business for them in a sort of senior partner way. And then my day job is that I am a partner in our financial services practice, specializing in banking of all kinds across the whole region or principally in China. And my one bit of advice to anybody with a LinkedIn profile is find a good photo and never change it. I certainly have never changed mine. Interesting one Stephen. I think we all do that, right? We all keep the photo that we had from my, I certainly have one from my early years, but maybe it is time to change it. I don't know. Listen, let me start this conversation out. We do have a series of questions. One of the was raised for me just as we started this out with a breakout group. We talk about strengthening your brand, right? And we tend to often confuse the brand of an organization and an individual brand, right? So what we want to talk about and focus on today as you go into the workforce. And some of you have five, 10, 15, 20 years of experience. The brand that you individually create is the legacy that you're going to leave behind. At Hydric and struggles, we often say that the organization or the workforce tends to follow in the shadows of their leaders. Now this set of individuals on the screen today, you are the leaders of tomorrow. So the question that I have for you as you go through this next 45 minutes is start thinking about what is the shadow that you want to cast? You have got from point A to point B doing certain things. But to get from point B to point C to point D, you are going to have to jump the curve and do things very differently moving from, let's say, an individual contributor to a collective cohesive leader. And in a nutshell, that's what we're trying to lead towards today and get insights from our esteemed colleagues. So with that, one of the first parts I'd like to start with, and Richard, if you don't mind, I'd ask you to get us started here today, is if you look at the characteristics of a leader, what differentiates a highly successful leader today? Thank you, Azthik. And good evening, everybody who are joining in this conversation. I think it is truly a privilege to be speaking here on leadership. Now for me, I've not had a kind of career which is by design, it just happened. And like I was saying, I spent 13 years of my early life in a mid-sized firm. And I think one of the biggest learnings I got there was that I got a mentor very early in life, the owner of that firm. And so while he mentored me in the sense, I used to observe him, I used to learn from him. And one advice that I believe everybody, try and get a mentor as early as possible in your career. Some of you already worked, maybe you already have mentors. And some of you may be still looking out for that mentor. The mentor is somebody you trust, you admire, you want to treat them as a role model. So I think one is getting a mentor very quickly in life. I think leadership is not about titles. Leadership is not about positions. It's about how you actually create more leaders and how many lives you actually touch. Because when you achieve a leadership position, you go up that rank at LIDAR. And I always say that life is a circle. All the people you meet on your way up are the same people you meet on your way down. You treat them with respect. They will treat you with respect on your way down. That's a very, very big lesson. And I think Aztec, you did a good point by talking of this brand because many times we confuse the title and position we have. We get privileges. Let's not hide about it. So if you've got a particular title, you get privileges which come with it. But we should all know it's temporary. And we need to earn the respect because when the titles are stripped away from you, people respect you for who you are and how you conducted yourself. I think it's very, very important. So leaders need, so if I take these qualities and say leaders lead by example, they need to put purpose before profit. And one of the things that I learned very early in my life, I never called it higher purpose. But it was something that I practiced very closely which I now call higher purpose. And for me, it is firm before self, right through from my first organization where I worked. It was always with the organization, individuals don't matter. And how do you bring a personal meaning to the high purpose? You want people to follow you, you need to bring a personal meaning to it. They need to see that you live the values you talk about. Values are not on your screensavers. I mean, you see at KPMG, we have all these values written out there, but they're not about what being on the screensavers is about how you live.   You need to care for your people and it's not, it's so much more important today. Us taking today's time in this COVID period, how many times leaders have called up their employees and asked about their well-being and said, okay, how are you feeling? There's not much you can do, but at least ask them how they are feeling, make them feel wanted. And leadership is about being service of others. It's about how you make others successful, not about yourself because you will succeed, but how do you make others successful? So qualities like empathy, humility are very, very important in good leaders. You don't need to beat your own drum. People will beat your drum. You're good. People are going to talk about you. It's not about creating a very fantastic profile and putting a great picture with a great suit, with a Italian tie and saying you're great, but it is what is inside you, how do you feel and how do you actually put it? So leaders need to, you know, always somebody asked me, so what does a leader do? So a leader inspires people.  Do they look up to you? Do they want to follow you? Are they actually aligned to your vision? As leaders we all have a vision, but can we get people aligned to that vision because that is the biggest failing of leadership. Let me tell you, when people and the leader are completely misaligned on the vision and that's where all the fallings take place. So that influence which you can have actually where you take all your thoughts, ideas and convert them into actions and leadership is all about execution. How well you execute your plan, which you put forward. And I would use one term today and I'll just leave it there. In today's time, leaders need to be antifragile and it is, I just want to leave this thought. Yolk and we can discuss it at some point at a time when you have a larger discussion. I think you need to be positive. This was one thing I learned from my mentor, be positive, be a problem solver because today what you're facing, what do leaders face? They get problems, right? You've got to give a solution to it and you need to be, you need to have a foresight. You need to be able to see new trends coming up and you should be able to work to actually deal with those trends. So leaders need to be visionary. The last thing before I know, I don't want to take too much more time is they need to delegate and empower people. You want to be in part, we want to be in part, I want to be in part. How much do you empower people around who work with you? I think that is very, very important. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for Richard for starting us out. There's some profound insights. Even I did some notes over here. I'm certain that others are too. Krishna, if I could build on that a little bit and talk a little bit about what differentiates a leader today, could you add on to perhaps what Richard was talking about, maybe starting with the purpose piece? Yeah, I think I just want to take a minute just to go back to your original thing about this whole leadership brand. I think just to make it simple for every in all of us and I think this is a good thing. What is your leadership brand? I mean, that's something each of us have to ask ourselves and how will you know that? It's about if I ask the crowd, hey, what do you say about Tarun or what do you say about Aziz? What do you hear back is your leadership brand? Yeah, that's what you build. If people say, yeah, here's a guy who is passionate, etc, etc, etc, that's your brand. So leadership brand is what people talk about. And the brand could be different. It could be something internally, something externally. So I think that's the first thing in terms of what do people kind of know about you? What do people really see in you? And they'll only see in you something that is distinctive. If you're average, they won't say anything much. They'll say, fine, he's a good guy. But that is where you got to really say, what is the edge that I want to build? And that's very important. And leadership without an edge is not really going to go make things change. And you can choose whatever range and that's based on your strengths, that based on what you're passionate about, various things. Some people may choose the edge of being like, I'm more of a people guy, I'm going to be mentoring them, I'm going to be developing them, I'm going to be coaching them. So those kind of people when you hear, hey, what do you say about Alpah or somebody? Then you'll hear, you'll hear think back about this great leader, the coach people, etc. There could be others who say, listen, I'm going to be really all about vision. I'm going to be talking about the conceptual, I'll inspire people through the future and all that stuff. That's another type of thing.  Sometimes difficult to be good at everything. You have to choose, you probably have to have trade offs. And I think that's very important. So therefore, my personal view is, choose an edge, work on it because that's very important because that that will differentiate you from the others. There's got to be some hygiene. I mean, you can't be a kind of a completely disastrous people leader and say, I want to be only your strategy.  But I think there is a little bit of an hygiene, but if you want to be a great leader, choose what are the areas that you want to really be world class and choose and build on those. There's just one other point I want to make here. I found this very, very useful. When you look at anybody's career or anybody's thing, a career is like, I see in my own view, I see it like a DNA strand. It's a DNA strand of two things. If there is one about the kind of jobs you've done, the skills you have, what you have done, your CV, it'll say, I've done this, this, this, this. That's one part of your career. The other part is how people see you, what you are. That's the second part of the DNA. Early on in our careers, I think we focus more on the kind of jobs that we're doing. That's what people see. You've got these kinds of experiences. But slowly you're building up the other story also. You're building up what you are. It's not coming out very prominently in the early stage, but it will come out very prominently in the later stages. That's the one that you've got to keep in mind. Because when you really become, all of you are leaders, we're going to go now, pass the second half of that thing. Now it's very important for people for you to build what you're known for, what is the legacy you're going to leave. That's very important. That's what you've got to define for yourself. That's where someone will have a purpose. Someone will have something else, but you've got to build it. You've got to be building that narrative for yourself saying, this is what I'm going to be known for. This is the legacy I want to leave and start working on it. I think therefore, as I said, while there are various things that are good for leaders, work on something which is distinctive for you. Work on your age. Choose whatever you're good at, whatever you're passionate and make that. Also, keep in mind that our career and what we're good at is a DNA strand of the jobs you've done and what you're good at, what people talk about you. Both these are there, they intertwine. The first half of your career, it's all about what you're doing. The second half of your career, it's about what you are. Therefore, that's what you've got to build as you want to be a great leader. I'm getting chills as I hear this. I recall, if I go back to my days in Singapore, passing one of these boards and there was a note that said over there. I don't remember the distinct exactly the letters, but what it basically said is, in the end of the day, do you want to have a signature or do you want to have an autograph?  When we talk about this unique value proposition, you call it brand, I may call it the shadow that a leader has, how people look at you. Steve, if you could come in please and perhaps comment on what differentiates a leader and maybe build off what we spoke about here in terms of the legacy, the brand, the shadow for us. I think it's all about authenticity. We're developing things that Richard and Chris said. The leader of today that we assess and we're asked to assess on behalf of corporates, be they local or multinational around the world, government institutions, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of it comes down to the same thing these days, which is you need to have a very authentic shadow. There can be a world of difference between what you say as a leader and what you do and what shows through how you act every day in the smallest ways include, and in addition to the big sweep of your grand strategic vision, people can see that authenticity. I think we see it a lot in sporting leaders, very easy to see that kind of charismatic leader coming through, but we're seeing that more and more in business now, this new kind of very authentic, highly empathetic leader. Thinking about it based on our conversations the last few days, the person who really stands out for me a lot these days is Jane Fraser, the new CEO at City Group. I think the way that Jane has gone about delivering the kind of new message that she wants for a bank like City, which is very caring for all of its people, from the most junior people who are there on internship through to the people who've been there 30 or 40 years, showing concern for people's views, particularly if you're going to try and bring younger people along with you, you can't dismiss the ideas that they have because they might not be naturally where you feel comfortable discussing. You have to bring everybody with you and you have to be a very, very, the kind of leader who has a very broad tend to bring everybody in with it. As we assess these days, more and more it comes down to those two things, a very simple level. It's a genuine desire to care and to drive the business forward in a sincere way and the empathy and the authenticity that comes with that, you can't fake it. People will see it. The interview panel will see it and when it comes to the final decision about who should get a role and who shouldn't get a role in a room of technically superb people, it almost always comes down to those facts. Thank you, Steve. We see we're getting a set of diverse insights over here from the team and we surely will capture some of these insights and then share it with you afterwards. I want to double click a little bit into some of what I know, having spoken to the MBA graduates, a lot of them that we have hired into companies over the last few years. In your opinion and Chris maybe we could start with you. A little bit of a double click and a challenging question here. In your experience, where can MBAs, MBA graduates contribute the most and can you give us an example of what made derailed them? I'll set a little bit of context for this. A lot of times when I go and I do these sessions on campus, most of the MBAs are technically astute even when they get at a superior leadership level, profound insights and they can spin data around my mind using the Monte Carlo approach and saying here's the probability of a product being successful and here's the risk of it, right? But could you tell me a little bit about now going back to my question with that context of the technical side you spoke about the experience, where can an MBA graduate therefore contribute the most? And I will ask the second question in there, what perhaps derails them when they get into the workplace? What derails them? Both sides. No, I think this is like a Pandora's box, we can go on talking about this. Well, I personally believe MBA graduates can contribute anywhere, they know the name every job. I think that I don't think there's anything we can see you guys can't do this or can't do that, I think they can do everywhere. But let's see where they can really make a bigger mark or where and what do they need to do to really make a bigger part of the business. So that's very important. Let me just step back and I like this kind of just thinking about jobs. In most jobs, there is a part which is all about a strong analytical part, there is a strong part where you do, so therefore when you start off your career, you do a lot of analytics, you do look at, that's the thing. But as you grow in your career, you've got to now look at the bigger picture much more. You've got to see the patterns a lot more. You don't have to do so much of the analysis, you've got to start saying, well, what are the patterns? What do I see and how do I link those patterns? And that's where the MBA graduates come in. And I think, and not all, and I won't put MBA or not MBA.  They've also got the concepts to think the big picture and see the patterns. So the successful leaders, the successful MBA graduates are the ones who start moving on that thing much faster. You do your analysis, but you're not stuck on it. You're looking at the patterns, you're thinking about it. You're kind of saying, this is how I see it. And that's what is a hallmark of a great MBA because you know the concept. You've got the overall framework, you've got the analysis. How do you link it? How do you do, I mean, in Unilever, we used to have a very nice saying, which I even now think called a helicopter view. And what does that helicopter view mean that you go down into details and do a lot of analysis, but you also go up and look at the big picture, look at the strategy, look at the patterns that are there. And I think that's what a great leader or should do. And I think MBA, MBA people are probably most qualified to do that. So therefore, just to reframe the question, a great MBA person, because he or she has got all the kind of background to do both these elements has to do that, has to have that helicopter view and move that. So that's one area. So any job where you want to be successful, do the analytics, the analytical part, get to the details, but quickly look at the big picture, quickly look at the patterns, quickly see what you can do and keep that picture in mind. Because that's sometimes very difficult. Many people fail to do that. They end up being too engrossed in one versus the other. So therefore, the ideal leader has to really start working on it and doing that. So that's number one. The second one is, again, you start off being a kind of individual contributor. And as you grow in your career, you become a leader of leader. And that's where many things that Richard said comes in, because you now have to start delegating a lot more. You've got to put your team and your company ahead of yourself. All of those are very important. And I think they will only come when you're sure of yourself, when you're kind of, when you have self-confidence, that's important. So you've got to start building that and that will help you become a leader of bigger teams.  So you MBA teaches you that. But therefore, you've got to start saying, how do I move from being just a contributor to a leader of teams? And that means thinking broader, that means kind of putting the purpose of the company, putting your company and team ahead, you know, developing people, giving them space, delegating all of those. And that means reducing your ego a little bit, but kind of, you know, ensuring that there is this humility that comes in. And that's, again, a hallmark of a great leader. And MBA helps you do that because it gives you all the, all the concepts of that you are agile and flexible in doing both parts of this. Yeah. So therefore, that's the thing. Now to the last question that Astik asked, which is about what D-ray is leaders? Yeah, what D-ray is what good? I think this is a very, very important question. And, you know, I'll go back, I mean, to my old experience in Unilever, we used to have a very solid MBA, you know, management training program. And they were all like, you know, great leaders, et cetera. But we could easily see the D-raylers in the first three years of their jobs. Yeah, easily. And there are three key D-raylers that are there. The first D-rayler is arrogance. Yeah. People who are just arrogant, they don't learn. Arrogance is the first D-rayler because arrogance about what you've read, you may be a topper from Aayam Amtabar. But here you are, when you're doing like an area sales manager and doing a district in Karnataka, you've got to respect the local people. You've got to respect the practices. You've got to listen to them. Yeah. And you know, people who be chairman of Unilever are the ones who really sat down, listen to people and learn from them. Yeah. So humility is very important. So one of the big D-raylers is arrogance. Yeah. And what does arrogance do? It doesn't make you learn.   The second D-rayler is think about getting too, in a way, I wouldn't call it maybe perfectionist or too much stuck in this analysis and not looking at the big picture. That's the other D-rayler because people don't grow. So you become like too much into analysis, getting too much perfection of your model, but not saying, okay, what do I want to achieve at looking at the big picture? So that's a second D-rayler. That's that's it. I think these are the two big ones, you know, and there could be others. The third one, I mean, if I were to just kind of, you know, force that is about not being, not having this ability to learn, you know, people say, I think that's the third one because you have to be open to risks and open to learning. You know, and people don't do that, then you won't, then you won't do. And that's another big D-rayler where people are trying out new things are open to learn saying, okay, I want to learn from people. And that's what opens you up to things like talking to a mentor, talking to peers, talking to older people on the shop floor, talking to older people on the field force, you know, just talking to clients. I think that's that's that curiosity is very, very important. And if you don't have that, that could be a big deal. So it's a long, long speech, but I just thought I'll just outline the three that I've seen are big D-raylers that that exist. I love the thoughts. Stephen, would you like to add to that from what differentiates them and perhaps what's the challenge? Sure, we tend to see MBAs later in their career because we're working mostly at CEO and board level. But when I have access to MBAs sort of newly minted, I think the things that come through that are nice to see are the fresh thinking. There's always new ideas coming through the MBA programs, things that people who are in the business all day every day don't necessarily know about or engage with. So fresh ideas, new thinking as it's coming through the best schools is always fascinating to see and enriches the business. And the enthusiasm that people bring out of MBA school to put those new ideas to work in the field, the momentum that comes with that is always a very, very desirable thing to see. And it enriches an organization and can really make it even a new burst of energy. I would develop Chris's point on the D-rayler. I think it's a narrowness of thinking and a didactic, overly didactic style. When you've learned something and you want to tell everybody about it, that's great. But there comes a certain point where you do have to sit back and listen. And I think not being able to listen and not being able to move away from that hard-earned thing that you spent the last couple of years learning to perfection and seeing that in the round and gaining the wisdom of people who might have less academic experience than you do, but have a lot more of the wisdom of being there on the shop floor every day with customers every day and really knowing what it is customers wanting. So I think the biggest D-rayler is a lack of listening capability. Wonderful, Stephen. You know a lot of the work that we do with kind of the upper middle management is about building inclusive, influential leaders. And this talks to the fact that you may know the answers to everything, but you don't have to put it out right away. You have to bring your team along with you is I think what also Chris was saying. Richard, would you like to add on to and if I could reset the question because we've gone through a couple of different insights here is where do you think MBA graduates and whether it's now or five or 10 years from now, where can they contribute the most? And could you give us a few ideas of what could be the D-raylers? Yeah, so thanks Azthik. I think both Chris and Stephen have spoken a lot. I don't want to get into that and I'll just add a few things from my side. I think MBA graduates are especially from ISB where you take mid-career and the kind of training, the learning you get is really phenomenal and the kind of people who come out also. And the one big issue that I have with the entire MBA program and as I see it, especially in today's time, is there is not much emphasis on business ethics. And we have seen organizations, shareholder value getting destroyed by wrong behavior of the leaders and I'm not talking just the CEO, I'm just talking of leaders who sit on the top table. So I think there needs to be a much more emphasis on business ethics and how important it is, especially in the technology world in which we live and everything is tech-enabled and technology is good, it was supposed to be a unifier but it's actually gone the other way around in many cases. It can be misused, it can be used, it can be misused. So I think that is one definitely something that I would look. The second one which I would see is how innovative are you in the way you're going to work because today all the current business models have been challenged and I'm not sure in the B schools we are talking about the new age companies which are coming in, which are now actually center stage, the startup economy, etc. which are now got all the values, I mean if you take all the new companies, so are there sufficient learning for these new age companies, for the MBAs, so maybe that is something that needs to get done. Secondly, while we are doing our course, we are in a very highly competitive spirit with each other, we're trying to outdo each other, we're trying to be the best, we're trying to get the gold medal, etc. And you come into your work, the whole world suddenly gets shattered in front of you because now it's no more about competition, it is about how do you work collaboratively in a team, how do you come together and make the organization successful and you work with your colleagues, so that's a big mindset shift I would say and so while being, while doing an MBA I would say we should, the one thing which I didn't talk on leadership pasting when you asked that first question on leadership, I think one very important aspect of leadership is networking and I will say the strength of an individual is the network you build and we should not get worried about the network because we build networks at our levels as we work the organization that network because that network is also going up, our current network is also all the values are going up, so network is the biggest asset you can have as you hit the top, at least in our consulting practice I can say the biggest network, the biggest asset is our network, if you don't have a network you won't get a partner's job anywhere, I mean they'll say useless and I would say the other very important point as you'll come out into organizations is because there's a whole crowd there, how do you differentiate yourself, how are you very different from the rest, do you make an impact, so I mean things around soft skills it's about content, I mean both are important, content is very important, Chris spoke about it, it's really important but how do you put it across, how do you connect the dots, how do you are able to look at the bigger picture and I know I'm repeating it but I think what Steven said about listening, I think it's so powerful and I remember Nelson Mandela once said that he learned from his father who was the tribal leader that he would go and sit in these tribal meetings, he was ahead but he would never speak, he would let everybody else speak and so Nelson Mandela asked his father why don't you speak, you're the leader, he said no I want to listen to everybody and then I will have my last word because what has happened, two things you achieve, one is you make everybody feel wanted, everybody's ideas taken maybe you get some great ideas then you want to change some of your thinking while getting those ideas, so I think listening skills is very, very important and I will not under-emphasize it and you know Chris spoke about arrogance but and I completely agree with him and I've seen in my personal career people just falling off, I mean they go down a slippery path you cannot climb back but you need to have an attitude, I would say but be careful don't let the attitudes spill into arrogance but you need to have an attitude because once you have that attitude you need to be premium, you need to think premium, you need to think that you're very different because that's when you bring value to an organization because you are a brand ambassador for that organization and you're a brand ambassador for yourself so remember these two things being the brand for yourself and I will say the brand the way I look at it is it's like I used to work in KPMG so somebody calls up KPMG says I want a show to come and work on my project that is the brand he has built right, so they come to KPMG but they've asked for a particular individual and that's the brand that you want to build and forget I'm talking consulting but that's the only business I know honestly but I'm sure this is applicable to all organizations and that brand let me tell you once you hang up your boots is going to pay you a lot of dividends because a lot of people are going to come back to you because that's what impact you have left on them and the last one I will leave with you before I go off on this one is critical thinking is very important creativity as you all go into your jobs there will be you know service orientation how I mean we have spoken about it I don't want to negotiation skills are very important negotiation skills are very important they are critical actually because you're negotiating all the time you're negotiating either with your boss you should negotiating your colleagues with your customers with the suppliers everywhere it's about negotiation so that is very very important and pay attention with these kind of items are being taught to you while at your school at school or while you're studying yeah thank you Mr. Richard I'd say you know I realize we have a mix of consulting here but I'd be honest most roles today whether you're on the product side on the sales side on a delivery side consulting and I'm not me I don't mean to say consulting as in a role at a KPMG or a hydrant our roles are as consultants right most of the MBA graduates that are they're facilitating they're influencing so the consulting part I think is critical for all of us I know I'm going a little bit off track here with a set of questions but we were vehemently nodding when we started talking about the networking part so I'd ask Chris or Steven if you want to jump in any opinion on how networking is something that can help you as perhaps you grow your career and it may not be right as you graduate but over the next 15 years I asked if Chris will have insights into that from his role that none of us could ever see but I wanted to pick up on one thing that Richard said about negotiating negotiating skills are absolutely crucial and the I used to think and I think a lot of people on this call today will think I used to think good negotiating was I win and you lose and that was a good negotiation I've learned over the years from watching clients and my own negotiations painfully at times that that's not a good negotiation at all a great negotiation is where everybody gets something from negotiation and something is left on the table I'd really encourage everyone to think of negotiating in every aspect of the business life in a holistic way think about what the long-term gains are going to be from that and my experience of 35 years of negotiating it pretty much everything is when there's something left for everybody that's a good negotiation because then you have something that's a sustainable agreement I just I thought that was a super point I was going to pick up on Chris would you like to jump in perhaps on networking or do you want to reflect on another point of view or there perhaps no that's fine I think networking see I think we've got to look back look step back and say why do you need to network yeah and I think there are a couple of reasons and you know and I'm trying to talk a bit about that there is a network within the company and there's a network outside the company yeah so these are two important things you gotta network within the company is important because you know in most companies a lot of work is done through those networks you guys have all worked you know right I think you've got to have those kind of internal networks I think what do these do these networks help you understand what's happening help you get you know get things across you know that's very important so look at how wherever you go in any company look at how do you build that network because and there are and it varies from companies to company yeah there may be some companies where internal network is far more important than anything external because you've got to get a lot of things done and for for functions like HR and finance the internal network is crucial because you know we can't get anything done without getting the internal network and working with people yeah so therefore it may that's very important so I think and and building that internal network is critical because you know key functions that you work with key key influencers or leaders with whom you can you know you need to really work because in the end work in large corporations is all about sometimes selling your ideas it's about pushing things you know and nobody's going to say Bob is a great thing I'll do it because there'll be three others who will say why not this so therefore you've got to have those networks you've got to influence you've got to talk and that's where this building the brand becomes very important that's where your reliability that's where you're you know what that you know if they know that yeah Rohit is x y z then I think you can build that network yeah and that that's very important now let's look at the external network why is that external network important I think two or three things firstly the external network brings in lots of ideas which is very important you know most one of the things that most of us are guilty of is becoming too internally focused and not externally focused yeah and that's why I also been telling my leaders go and look at building an external network look at what's happening what is happening in the environment what's happening in the startup ecosystem and see how you can build that that's very important because it gives you you know in terms of a picture of what's going to happen you know and helps you connect the dot help you look at the big picture that's why that external network is important it also help you with your professional contacts yeah it'll help you and if you're in sales especially in like b2b sales or in consulting it'll help you with your business because unless you have an external network you can't grow your business so in jobs like sales or consulting the external network helps you with your business in any other job I think the external network helps you when you want to really look at you know and there you got to choose people you know don't go look for people who will give you those ideas therefore even networking has to be planned you know look for different industries join you know identify there are lots of groups where you say what's happening I also follow some thought leaders so you understand what's happening in your own industry so two or three kinds of networking one is in your professional group one is an industry generally what's happening so all that will help you really build that network it'll help you connect and get new ideas and network so I think networking that way has got to be it's not just I want to go have a cup of coffee and I want to you know I go to LinkedIn and become friends with somebody that doesn't help it's networking it's not the number but the quality and the focus of how you build that network you know that's very very and it'll vary from different roles you do for sales and consulting that's crucial so you got to do it in a much more critical way than the external network. Beautiful thank you for that question listen we have about 10 or maybe 15 minutes left right I want to fast forward a little bit here and perhaps ask you a set of questions that takes us into the future so we started talking about leaders today and what is expected what do you need to do differently how do we need to look at a number of different leadership attributes if we fast forward ourselves right let's say to 2025 maybe let's even say 2020 which is a good you know eight years ahead of us at this point I did do the math guys I can talk about Monte Carlo but the math is still coming to me right if you look at 2030 how do you think leaders will be different in terms of technology orientation geopolitical outlook how they manage a multi-generation workforce or customer base do you see things evolving what will be different let's say by 2030 Stephen would you mind if I start with you there especially as you work with some of the leaders in the top of the road. Well one of the things that's fascinating me is the businesses in more traditional times pre-covid were really about running the business making a profit etc all the traditional things that we were always taught a business are one of the things that we're seeing as businesses evolve is the and Richard talked on it the moral dimension the need for companies to have a viewpoint on the world to have a viewpoint on things like climate change and other sort of hot topic issues which traditionally companies wouldn't necessarily have thought were part of their remit more and more and more we're seeing the the leaders of the future of people who have not so much strong opinions on those things but up to date with current thinking and can debate it with people I think this is very very important as we scale up to deal with a younger generation of workforce coming through who have as it would appear to be from some of the data different impulses for what they're looking for from a company so I think this this moral ethical much more out in in the world every day rather than just the basics of profit and loss and market share and IP and things like that I think the leaders of the future are going to have to have they're going to have to be very well versed in the themes of the day and have a view on how their company is working within that within that conversation because I think the ubiquity of social media and how that informs people's views of a corporate and what a leader is is going to become more and more and more a relevant issue so how you can face off against that how comfortable you seem in doing that and whether you step in only landmines along the way which I think the more you're out in the public world talking about these things that are not just your quarterly results the more issues there could be there so I think it's that that broader interaction with the with the world as it is today could you ask yeah no I think the I think Stephen kind of gave a great idea of what the future is I think if you look at what are the changes in the future I think three or four things yeah this focus on purpose social impact because you know that's becoming a big area so I think leaders have to be conscious of that the second one is we're going to have a much more diverse workforce you know I think multi-generational you know and then the amount of diversity in a workforce is going to increase phenomenally you know every country everywhere you're going to see the growth of diversity but leading and managing that diversity managing multicultural workforce is going to be very important so leaders of the future have to really be very good at that you know inclusive and diverse kind of that's that's the second one the third one is I think what really is going to happen is you're going to see a lot more the speed of change is going to be much more yeah so you're going to have technology changes you're going to have much more industry kind of you know I've read somewhere that the the average life cycle of kind of company on the you know the New York Stock Exchange has come down by almost half over 30 years so you know the companies will get business models will get kind of you know questioned therefore as a leader you've got to be you know ahead of the curves you've got to keep learning and and be much more much more what we call as there is this new word which I like actually called growth mindset you know it's not about being fixed in your thinking but being flexible saying listen what can I learn how can I learn how can I move forward yeah so having that always curious experimentative growth mindset with Satya Nadella talks so very well about so I think that's going to be very very important as we go forward so I think those are the three or four things which are going to be more important in the future and Chris you and I spoke a few weeks ago about kind of the adaptive intelligence hunger for growth right how do you get beyond your core and be curious to think beyond even if you're the technical expert in an area how do you use that insight to go beyond right things are evolving very fast Richard can I pull you in for a couple minutes on that question also yeah so I think a lot has been said I'll just take on one or two dimensions on it the first one is on the future of business there is so much of change happening forget COVID even pre-COVID technology was so pervasive in our lives we were looking at a very different I think COVID is fast forwarded everything if you ask me it's taken us five years ahead to what we would have got to I mean we're doing this call is an evidence of that you know zoom was always there but we never used it to this extent so I think the important point is how are leaders looking at the new trends that are happening I'm just giving a small example we have already seen the payment system already disrupted right but let me tell you there's a really big disruption going to happen in the payment systems are we ready for it are we ready to see what's going to come come about it so leaders the point why I'm making just taking this one point it was leaders need to think ahead and they need to plan and say okay is Bitcoin going to come in is there some other way of currency which is there because a digital currency is just a faster way of the current currency it's not really bringing efficiency in but you know the new way of underlying you know monetary transactions are they going to happen but I think the more important point is our state which we have not discussed today and I want to raise two points here one is agility of the leader of how agile is he and I think Chris raised it you know how quickly they are adapting change but how agile is the leader going to be and is able to change with the time able to see what is there and also at times realize that you may be the CEO but you're not the right guy to lead there's somebody else is better to lead it and I think you have that humility to say let this individual lead it he'll do a better job than me I think that kind of collective leadership is going to come in and I can tell you very clearly with a lot of funds and a lot of financial companies now saying investors saying that we will only invest in companies that are following ESG right and they're not going to invest so if you are not following sustainability and Chris you have worked in a company called Unilever and Paul Pullman was the guy who brought sustainability and people laughed at it and there was a loss and you know everything but see where that has become their biggest competitive advantage so these are actually in a way bottom line driven it's no more you know good to have it is actually helping your business and giving a competitive edge so I think leaders need to lead from the front and they need to believe it and be a champion of it not just come in you know give some lectures and you know and then move on with it so I think purpose integrity these are going to be very very strong kind of things and the next generation you know like even while I was in KPMG we already had various generations working and let me tell you they are questioning the status core they are questioning the very basic in fact you wonder who's interviewing who because they ask you a lot of company you're a lot of questions as to what does your firm do how does it actually deal with this situation how are you looking at environment and you know what is your views the company firms view on that so I think they are much more aware they are much more knowledgeable than what we were at their age and I think this new generation is going to drive the change what they want to see and I think that's where companies will have to get to if they want and also the new workforce my view is this gig economy as we call it today and Krishi must be aware of this may become mainstream because you know there are two ways one is generalist I think the days of generalist in my view my view is almost over I mean you will not be able to you need to be deep specialist in areas and one company may not need you for eight hours so one company may need you for two hours and you go and sell your time to another company for another two hours and I think the deep specialization is going to take you there so upskilling so just doing your MBA from a great school is good but lifelong learning is going to be your thing so we'll have to get ready for that and one last point I would like to leave it's got not related to this question but it could also be how do you build relationships and authentic relationships because I'll tell you a relationship building is very very important for the network also which you're going to build but and you know we are all transactional I have some work with you I think I'll call you and do that work and then I'll be off but there is no true relationship building and I know when we did a survey many few years back to ask the clients as to what is the one reason you appoint a firm for consulting and the one number one reason was relationship number one not the technical all everybody's expected to be technically good relationship is number one and I think that is something which all of us need to build it means a lot of investment and I will leave one small tip with you if you help a person when they are down and out when they bounce back you can be rest assured you will so don't you know break your relationship because somebody is going through a hard time in life keep that relationship going because they helped you many times while you were you know going through your hard times please remember that and and they will come back and I've seen it personal examples I've got enough in my life to say that they do work and they give back in my many fold. I want to pick up on something you said about agility and we genuinely believe that five eight years even now we're seeing agility as one of the key differentiators right and for the folks on the on the call that are dialing in if you look at our website so you look up agility with others websites also right you'll find that there are four components in there so from a framework we look at it as one is I think what Chris you mentioned a little bit about foresight your ability to kind of build your own crystal ball but do that with the knowledge that you have to kind of start looking with intuition into the future the second one is adaptability everything we speak about today is the ability to to kind of pivot at the drop of a dime right there's constant change shift in technology learning is critical we think about learning and relearning adaptive intelligence let go what you know and try to learn more be more curious and the last part we look at agility is around resilience and with this constantly shifting world we're going to have to learn how do we reset every time for resilience whether it's waves whether it's economic situations whether it's you know there are going to be a number of instances your personal aspects in your life that change are going to need a certain level of resilience in this global world I'd like to ask the panel members to think about if there's one thing from your years of experience one piece of wisdom or a nugget of wisdom you would say you want to leave behind with this next generation of leaders what would that one piece of wisdom be Richard could I start with you for me I think it would be trust because we need to build trust in ourselves and we have realized everything works around trust authenticity trust and being genuine about what we are doing because if we are genuine I think half the problems all the question which came up can all be answered with that so genuine trust authenticity I would just leave that as thank you Richard Stephen we've talked a lot about lifetime learning I see so many leaders who start off very brightly with great ideas and then somewhere in their career their views on things become ossified and they stick to a particular way of looking at something or thinking about something and they can't adapt to the way the world is changing Chris said things are changing faster and faster and they're going to change faster and faster again that's not good nor bad it's just the reality keep an open and active mind at all times or just about every aspect of business life because that is going to be there that's the trap that you can fall into to stick to a perceived way of doing things and then a second point would be genuine caring concern for the people you're leading if there's one single aspect of leadership that we're always looking for we ask people why do they want to lead do you just want the title of you genuinely want to make a difference and making a difference yes it's about having a vision for the business it's about having a view on on revenue and profitability and all of those things the really successful leaders I think are those who really have genuine care for the people who are working for them I think much has been said I try and summarize my three words for it yeah not one but three words I think the first one is what I would call as a learning or a growth mindset yeah I think that's very critical yeah as a leader you've got to say how do I keep learning you know and look at every opportunity as a learning opportunity that's number one number two is I think of you know Richard spoke about it Steven spoke about it this I would say is this having the purity of intent you know in terms of what it is and the authentic and authenticity I think those are very critical because they are the ones which will define you you know as a leader so you know be clear about you know have that have that authenticity in how you really work and and and let all your actions be driven by you know what I would still learn an intent which is pure yeah I think the last part is we all have to you know all this is good but you've got to yourself talk about what kind of a leader you want to be yeah I think put that picture of that yourself and work on it yeah keep on revising it and say this is what it is because leadership is all about you know being the better version of yourself yeah and therefore it needs work you don't we don't realize it but it needs continuous work but that's something I would urge all of you to really put an aspirational version of yourself and start working on it thank you Gresh I want to add two points from this one in my career having worked in in different places in incorporating and consulting in my own form a number of different things I think one thing that has been core to my soul that I've had to learn and adapt is what I call is grit and that's the ability to just manage and deal you spoke somebody who spoke about the the interaction the politics the drama that changes the ebbs and flows and I think that inbuilt grit is something that you build in time but you constantly need to start thinking about how do you strengthen your own personal grit is the one part I'd say the second part and we're going to close on this is I find having worked with the number of mba uh cohorts over the last 45 years especially with isb listen you guys are going to go you guys and girls I mean are going to go into the workplace and you are the stars of tomorrow but what I find is something that Roger Federer the tennis player Roger Federer said a few years ago was when Novak Djokovic and and the team came into the play and this is now I'm forgetting the name as I say Nadal sorry when Djokovic and Nadal came to play with him the entire game of tennis got raised multiple levels and it wasn't just Roger Federer speaking about himself he said because they played so well our entire game went up and I think it's up for this cohort of leaders to not just look at yourself as an individual but how do you collectively bring up the game of the organization that you're in working with your colleagues who are smart smarter or as smart as you to take that forward right how do you increase the level of your game going forward so listen guys we have about five minutes left I know in an hour and a half at least with the isb students blocked out we have used the entire time I would personally like to thank Chris Richard and Stephen for the time you've taken I recognize that this is one uh Stephen it's late on your end uh getting late into the evening um Christian and Richard this is a lot of time out of your schedule I love the fact that we are all contributing to its delivering on this next generation of leaders and last and if not most important here who has been a constant support at isb to run these programs right what you learn in school at university is critical that will get you one mark more than the person next to you but what's going to get you beyond in your career to become the leaders of tomorrow is probably everything that you have heard today so with that thank you to the audience thank you to shiv and again Richard Stephen and rich thank you for