Bhushan Sethi: Staying Relevant in Leadership

In this episode, I sit down with Bhushan Sethi, Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the largest professional services firms in the world, to explore what it really takes to sustain performance in consulting—an industry defined by intensity, constant change, and high expectations.

We talk about the pressure to stay relevant in the age of AI, the mindset required to endure at the top, and the personal drivers that shape how leaders operate over time.

02:30 – Career Path to PwC
From Deloitte to PwC and specializing in financial services

05:00 – Life as a Partner
What the role actually involves—clients, teams, and accountability

06:50 – Consulting in the Age of AI
Industry pressure, transformation, and changing expectations

10:40 – The Pressure to Stay Relevant
What keeps him up at night

14:50 – Evolving as a Leader
Feedback, intensity, and leading different generations

20:20 – The Personal Side of Leadership
Daily routines, energy, family, and tradeoffs

29:40 – Success, Identity, and What Drives Him
Imposter syndrome, upbringing, and defining success

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Today's conversation is with Bushan City. Bushan is a partner at PwC, one of the largest professional services firms in the world, where he advises large financial institutions on enterprise transformation. His work sits at the intersection of business, technology, and people, helping organizations rethink how they operate and increasingly how they integrate AI into the way work gets done. But to understand his perspective, it helps to understand the environment he operates in. At the partner level, consulting is uniquely demanding. It's an industry built on billable work, constant delivery, and high client expectations, where leaders are juggling multiple engagements, driving revenue, leading teams, and staying relevant in a model defined by intensity, speed, and continuous performance. His career has taken him across firms like IBM, Deloitte, and now PwC, building client relationships, leading large-scale transformations, and shaping how organizations evolve. Alongside that, he teaches strategy consulting at NYU Stern, staying close to emerging thinking and the next generation of leaders. But his lens was shaped much earlier. He grew up in the UK to South Asian immigrant parents in an environment that was often racially charged, where education, discipline, and the need to prove yourself were not abstract ideas, but expectations. That belief in learning and staying relevant continues to shape how he leads today. In this conversation, we explore what it takes to sustain leadership in a high-performance environment. Staying relevant in the age of AI, navigating pressure, and the habits and trade-offs that define those who endure. And then not long after you left PWC. And I've always been curious what led to that moment or that decision at that time in your career to transition to PWC?

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Well, it was a delight working with you. And even though we haven't seen each other or spoken for like 16 years, I remember those days fondly. I mean, consulting, consulting is only as good as the people you work with. And when you work with tremendous people that are curious and have a lot of energy, you really have half a chance to have a good business and a good team. And so I remember I remember you fondly as well. Yeah, I was doing a lot of um operating model work. It was the time of post-financial crisis. I'd started to specialize in financial services. I was working with a lot of the banks on how they met their regulatory requirements, how they needed to get leaner and take out costs in a responsible way. And it was just the early times when they were also thinking about things like how do they think about a different risk culture. So yeah, I love those times in our prior company, but I wanted to specialize in financial services and had a great opportunity at PWC to lead a practice around the human capital agenda in financial services. So I joined in 2010. Deloitte's also a great firm. I took I learned a lot and I have to have good friends there, evident by this call, but also really enjoyed the time at PWC and being able to build out practices, multiple practices since the one I started.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Bushon, we were talking a few minutes earlier, and I didn't realize that you really have been a career consultant. You've really traversed the larger consulting organizations throughout your career. Now you're what coming up on like what 16 years with TPWC?

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Yes. 16 years at PWC. I started with PWC back in the UK and had um spent a few years here in the US as well. Our consulting business was sold to IBM. I went to IBM and then I joined a Lloyd and then back to PWC. So, yes, the best part of 25 to 30 years, there's a lot of commonalities around like the problems you solve and the importance of having good business acumen, building good client relationships, developing and managing a team and having sustainable performance that even though the the tools and the technologies have changed, but the core aspects of how you address an idea around a business problem and bring value to your clients on recommendations that they can actually implement and create value, that that hasn't changed.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Give us an idea about the kind of work that you are engaged in.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

My role at PwC now is I'm a partner in financial services. I lead one of our major accounts. I work with clients right now around transformation. And so what that means is how they optimize their investments in AI, how they address regulatory considerations, how they drive both growth and also efficiency through kind of cost management. There's an intersection of how do they organize work, how do they structure their organization, how do they think about the talent strategy and how do they drive change that goes that that permeates across all of those. But yeah, my major clients are financial institutions. I've worked with a couple of tech firms over the years as well. But yes, it's transformation very much enabled by AI right now.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

I want to set a little bit more context, though, around what you do and get a really good feel for as a partner, what does that mean? What are you responsible for? What are you accountable for?

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Yes. So I'm responsible for leading one of our accounts, which means I I manage the relationship and are responsible for everything the firm does at this one financial institution. I also am involved in selling and delivering work around kind of the AI and the transformation agenda. So I manage teams. It could be two projects at a time, it could be five, it depends on scope and size. I also coach and mentor people in the firm, whether they're on those projects or not. And then I get involved in some of our thought leadership and and research and and some other things, you know, like like teaching at Stern. But but the core aspects are serving clients either through managing a large account or delivering work.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

You're a career consultant, you've been in this industry for a long time. What are you noticing now about the industry, the pressures that you're feeling in the consulting market?

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Right now, there's a couple of things that are happening. Many businesses are changing their business model, investing in AI, and have to drive that return on investment. And so there's a lot of excitement about what could be possible with the tools. There's also a lot of fear and anxiety they have around their own job security, their own relevance. If some of these tools can actually perform significant amounts of roles, what does that mean for me? So we're we're noticing kind of the hopes and the optimism, but also kind of the anxiety with our clients. Everyone's looking to do more with less. Everyone's looking to free up capacity. We're also in a in an uncertain time economically, geopolitically, societally, and that's seeping into the workplace as well. So it's it's still an exciting place because it's around change. There's definitely a heightened sense of anxiety and pressure, but there's opportunities. There's opportunities for people early in their career, emerging leaders. My personal perspective is specialists and expertise is really even more important in a world of AI because you can't reimagine a process without understanding the sector and the function that you're working through. So skills that you've got through reps and experience, like business acumen, the ability to build relationships, the ability to read a room, understand if your recommendations are really going to be executable and drive value. These are skills that have accumulated over a number of years. So I still believe that for the right people who are combining sector and business acumen with AI, there's demand for those services, whether you're internal in a in a financial institution or on the external consulting side.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

This challenge, though, around AI and talent, I imagine it's also internally for cons within the consulting industry. How are they managing that? Because now it's like you know, consultants would be deployed onto a project, you're deployed onto a project. That's the model. Are you noticing that clients are that some of the work that consultants did before is now being replaced by AI?

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Slowly. So we're slowly changing how we work through the deployment of tools. We obviously have to do that in a responsible way. But yes, we are we've got analytical capabilities, we've got the ability to vibe code, which means that you no longer have to create a PowerPoint, you could actually create a visualization tool for a workforce plan for a client and actually show them that and sometimes actually co-create with that either in their tech environment or yours. So the model that we're embedding AI and the new tools in in the work that we do. We're going to go through a series of experimentation to see how this works, how it's embedded, how we're actually building out those tools. Many of us are now building agents to make some of our tasks more efficient. We're leveraging agents that the firms have built or the tech vendors have pre-built so that we don't have to go through basic analysis any longer. And again, the the bet here is it frees us our time to do more strategic thinking, more problem solving, more implementation of the of the recommendations. But we are definitely all talking about it. The change is much slower than uh and the adoption is much slower from every company out there, but it's definitely um changing um you know how we're working.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

When you think about what's happening in the market, your role as a partner at PWC, what keeps you up?

SPEAKER_00 10:41

So when we first met, I kind of haven't changed in that. I um I worry about personal relevance. I worry about am I being relevant? Do I understand the sector? Do I understand the business model? Do I understand the competitive environment? Do I understand how recommendations can get executed and drive value at clients? So I'm maniacally focused on that. And so I want to continue to be relevant. So I'm using all of the different tools that we've invested in as a firm. I'm continuing to stay close to sector news and industry news. I spend a ton of time with clients in the market delivering and executing on work, but also spending time with think tanks and speaking at industry conferences, both in the US and outside, because I think that that's that's important just to stay relevant. So what keeps me up at night is can I be relevant? And if it can be relevant, then I'm going to be helpful to my clients, to my teams here, my you know, the firm, but also my family, because jobs like that defines my I get a ton of happiness about solving business problems. I I really enjoy my job. I wake up every day excited with new challenges. Yes, we all have good days and bad days, but I get very energized by business problem solving. Whether that's right or wrong, we could debate, but I do. I also started teaching a class at NYU Stern four and a half years ago during the pandemic on strategy consulting 101. So I just I enjoy that energy of being in a classroom, it's three hours a week, you know, for five months of the year. So it's not it's not a a major kind of undertaking, but I get a lot out of it. I learn a lot from being around students and the cases that they're working on. And I think if you have domain expertise uh around a topic, one of the best ways to actually demonstrate that is building a new generation of leaders and domain experts in there. So hopefully I'm doing that to some for some of my students uh as that.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

You work with large teams. Have you noticed a shift in the the talent and the way that these teams work now?

SPEAKER_00 12:51

The relationship between workers and work has changed since the pandemic. I think that's an obvious statement, but it really does show up in things like mental health. Mental health is something that's talked about in workplaces. And we by and large are more inclusive and we are more caring about you know inclusion and the impact of things like mental health and well-being on personal productivity. We have younger people in in workplaces that are digitally savvy, sometimes AI native. They also want to work, they're also motivated by different things, maybe their personal well-being, maybe the opportunity to learn. So people have changed in terms of kind of their interactions with work, what they value. And so we as organizations, large organizations, small organizations have to adapt as well. When we started in the workplace, there's probably a lot more candid feedback that you would get. There would be a lot more hours worked. Whether that's efficient or not, there would be the apprentice model where you sat in rooms and ideated with people. I think people want to work smarter these days. No, I'm not saying they're not working as hard as we did. It was different. We have tools and technology. We're now open to thinking about our whole lives and our whole people and to say, do we have time with a family? Do you know you can't just even though I do work a lot, you can't just simply work all the time. And so you have to be able to like rest and recover. So I think that the energy and the motivation has changed, but I think that's a good thing. And I think that young people get a hard time sometimes for maybe wanting to set their boundaries, but they're probably improving it for the rest of us in terms of that now it's okay for us to set our boundaries.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

So for you specifically, Bushan, how have you had to change the way you lead in order to meet kind of these changes and the way that this new generation worked?

SPEAKER_00 14:56

So the first thing I do is I make sure that I get lots of feedback. And sometimes the feedback isn't stuff that you want to hear. So there have been definitely times earlier in my career in more earlier leadership roles where I did get some feedback for pushing people too hard, for making people kind of work longer hours, for you know, maybe people are a little overwhelmed of me. But it was really important to get that feedback. So, you know, if people feel that you're a bit intense, or if people feel that you're not taking the time to explain things, you've got to kind of come back and say, you know, how do we explain? How do we teach in a better way? How do we make sure that people are gonna get to different places at different speeds? And that's okay because we need we need a broad set of people kind of in workplaces. So I've adjusted by getting by getting good feedback, I've adjusted by making mistakes and getting in getting the feedback, but I also realize that leadership's not a one size fits all. Even today, in today's you know, age and generation, like people are different, they're motivated by different things at different you know life stages. And so we've got to make sure that we personalize. I try and personalize my approach because some people are motivated by going on that and they want to go on that learning experience, and they'll ask really good questions about the industry or the underlying technology. Some people want to just get the work done because it's stuff that they've got to get done, and they want to be focused much more on how do we execute. And so we've got to just meet people where they are in terms of different leadership styles. And then the final thing is back to the energy levels. I've also got to understand that not everyone's gonna be an extrovert like me. Some people get energy by observing, some people build confidence through observing, and so understanding that that even on kind of the way that people interact, the the way that people reset, the way some people might like to go for a walk, or some people like to run, like whatever it is, people people are gonna like reset and recharge in different ways.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Have a unique lens. You have this lens with which you operate, uh one from this internal vantage point uh of serving as a leader at PwC. But then this other lens that you have is this vantage point into how leadership actually plays out within organizations. So you've had this front row seat of leadership across so many organizations. What patterns do you see in leaders once they reach the top?

SPEAKER_00 17:36

I would say that leadership, it's about knowing yourself. And so what can make you incredibly successful, maybe because you've got some domain expertise, you've produced really good results, you've been successful in how however you want to measure that in terms of promotions, your business has improved, you've developed more economic security, that's great. But what we got also understand is the model will sometimes change. And so maybe it's it's being vulnerable and asking for feedback, it's understanding that you can never rest on your laurels and be complacent, to understand that sometimes if you're having a bad day, it's understanding how do you reset, how do you ask for feedback and become vulnerable, how do you personalize your your approach to different people. But if leaders aren't continuously asking for feedback and looking to learn and better themselves, whether that's on the human skills, on the business skills, on the storytelling skills, then they're gonna get found out in in some way. And it's they're gonna be less productive, they're gonna create less value, and they're probably gonna have less fun.

SPEAKER_01 18:48

I talk a lot about sustainability on this podcast. It's the premise for the reason for the show is what are you noticing as far as lifestyle factors or habits that work well and things that don't work well?

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Yeah. I'm a big believer that leaders need to take care of themselves first. So practicing self-care in whatever way or shape or form that means. For some people, it could be making sure that you're dropping your kids off. For some people, it could be phoning your significant other. For me, as I've said, it's you know, I like to sweat in the morning and I like to run. But whatever you can do to practice your self-care and take care of yourself, so, so important. And then the other aspects are, you know, you've got to stay relevant, you've got to be able to manage people, you've got to be vulnerable, you've got to be agile in today's environment, and you've got to be comfortable with reinventing yourself. If you grew up in a marketing function that was writing campaigns and getting out into the market, and now that that a lot of that work is gonna be fueled by AI, it's like, what relevance are you gonna have? Are you gonna move into a product role or a sales role, or are you gonna be a super a super AI-charged marketer? So being comfortable to reinvent yourself. But for me, the most important thing a leader can do is practice self-care because if you don't take care of yourself, you'll you'll not be as effective to your organization or to your constituents or to your family.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

I want to talk a little bit about you now and and your own practices. You talked a little bit about running. What does a typical day look like for you?

SPEAKER_00 20:25

I wake up, I try and run, I um, you know, I will have some calls with different clients, different pursuit teams. There'll be calls where we have to review different stories and presentations we're putting together for clients. I'll be involved in client meetings where we're actually building out consultant deliverables and so be engaging there. Sometimes that's in person, like I was downtown with a financial institution today, hence the tie. It's sometimes in person, sometimes not. There may be some client entertainment, you know, a dinner or a lunch that would typically happen, you know, once or twice a week, all with the team. So it's pretty full on. Sometimes there's travel involved, and sometimes I I would, you know, probably once or twice a month I'm speaking somewhere in the US or globally on topics, and that's kind of the the the focus in terms of it's highly relationship driven, it's very social, it's very in-person, whether that's kind of physically in person or or via kind of video conferencing tools. But it's all around are we making progress on either a sale or the delivery of a program to draw value for our clients?

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Your work requires you to be on intellectually at a very high level. Uh stakes are high, emotions may be high, the pressure is intense. What is that demand from you on a daily basis that that people may not really see?

SPEAKER_00 22:00

I think everyone needs to have their own standards. Like my standards come, and again, right, wrong, or different, and you all understand this from my country of origin. My parents were Indian, my parents have passed away, but they instilled the value of education and learning. And so every single day I wake up, I'm like, are you learning something? Through every interaction, you know, how do I become more educated? And some sometimes I actually do this to extremes because I we all have a little bit of imposter syndrome and we all don't feel smart enough. So sometimes, and especially with the AI tools, you go research more, you go read more, you write more. We all try and overcompensate. I mean, there's a reason why I try and write papers and speak at these events and teach at Stern because I'm obviously trying to cover up some learning insecurity. But I think it's important for us to know ourselves, to say, like, learning in education gives me confidence that I know what I'm talking about. It's one reason why I share so much on social media, and I know that people listen and people get benefit from it, and people learn and take some of those learnings as well.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

You're an avid runner. What is it about running that is important to you?

SPEAKER_00 23:13

I started running competitively in marathons after my my father died when I was in my early 40s, and I just continued ever since. It helped me get over the grief. Um, I live in New York City where we run a wonderful marathon, and it's a beautiful day when you have your kids and your wife come out and cheer you along the route. Now run 17 marathons in places like New York and Paris and San Fran. And it just to me, it's just um it's a way to just release. I do run listening to podcasts, so it's a way for me to um to stay relevant. I don't just listen to business ones, I listen to ones around topics that are important to me, like my English football team that's that's terrible that we won't talk about, that is a bane of my mental health right now. But no, the the running is just it's just my time, it's motion. I like the feeling afterwards, you know, I like to sweat, and I know that I'm a better version of myself once once I do that.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

The consulting lifestyle is not easy, it's very demanding. Deadlines pop up last minute very often, sometimes, and and you do have to kind of sacrifice those personal aspects of what's important to you and have been married now for about I think you and I were talking, maybe you were married one year before me. So about 20 years now, 21 years. Um you have three daughters. How have you managed to sustain what's important to you with them?

SPEAKER_00 24:41

Having a support system at home around this and and whatever that looks like to you as an individual is absolutely critical. My wife works full-time, but we have three kids. You can imagine we're we're growing up in they're growing up in New York, so it's it's very busy, lots of demands. I don't spend so much I try and make it home for some dinners. I don't always succeed around that, and sometimes I'm traveling. I try and keep the weekends and spend time with with my kids. And for me, vacations are really important. And I take my kids on nice vacations. Like my kids and I like to ski. We like to, you know, one of my my eldest daughter and I climbed Mount Fuji when we went to Japan last year. And again, this is a privileged issue because not everyone can, you know, have the ability to. I didn't grow up in a world where I could go to Japan, etc. I didn't grow up with kind of much at all. But for me, it's important to just again figure out the support system. And however you you can spend time with your kids, with your significant others, it's important as a way to recharge, but you need that support system around you, otherwise these things unravel very quickly.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

What are your non-negotiables when it comes to what's personally important to you?

SPEAKER_00 25:57

I don't want to work with people that I don't think will support my long-term interests. Like we can disagree on certain things, but if there are if there are people that I just don't think like I don't appreciate their non-negotiable, you know, values, whether it's about race or, you know, sexual preference or tolerance, I I don't necessarily kind of want to work with them. I want to work with good people on important business problems. I don't want to work with clients where we're just going through the motions to say, can you provide a set of recommendations that may or may not get implemented? I want to work on stuff that's meaningful. I want to be able to spend time with my kids. My eldest child's going to be going to university. So I probably have like very few defined non-negotiables because I think that stuff evolves. But I know that I want to work on meaningful business problems. I want to build meaningful client and team working relationships. I'm very proud to say, and you'll test me to that, that when you've worked with people for 25, 30 years and they're still in touch with you, even though you don't work in the same company or they work at a competitor, you know that you've done something right in terms of building people's trust or being relevant to them. So I just want to build meaningful relationships, work on you know good projects. And now increasingly, and like, you know, as I'm 53, I want to be teaching the next generation.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

I want to make sure that you're an adjunct professor at New York in Stern, correct?

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Yes. I want to be teaching the next generation, whether it's formally like the role at Stern or informally through my client interactions and my interactions with my team. And that's one thing I'm proud of that people will say, if you ask people for their honest, honest opinion, they'll maybe say, Yeah, he pushes us pretty hard. He's sometimes quite intense, he's thoughtful, but most of them would always say they've learned something. They always, and that's like I feel good. I just I need to work on making sure that everyone feels positive about the experience. And that I personalize my leadership approach.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Is intensity part of what's made you successful in this business?

SPEAKER_00 28:10

We come from an intense culture, you and I. We come from a very results-driven culture. It doesn't sound good when you say it, but yeah, I'm results-oriented. I think you have to be in this business. There's going to be times when we can, you know, be less intense. But there's always times in consulting projects where it could be an intense two-day workshop that we have to design and travel for that is going to need more working hours than others. So we just kind of manage those peaks and troughs.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

Is that the same level of intensity that you carry with as a husband and as a father and as an avid traveler and as a runner? Is that the same level of intensity that you carry there?

SPEAKER_00 28:51

If you talk to my kids, they would say, whenever we travel, he makes us walk everywhere. He wants us to explore all places. Like we went to many places in Japan, we went to many places in Hong Kong. So that and they would also say he pushes us to learn about the local culture and to practice some other language wherever we are in the world, from Croatia to Japan to India. So I just think gratitude is so important. The only travel I did as a kid was going to India. I've now got the ability to show my kids the world. I want them to be grateful. I want them to learn. And I hope we pass that on to their kids. So, yes, guilty as charged, I'm probably an intense travel companion.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

You're you've reached partner, which is not an easy, not an easy achievement for those who aren't sure what it takes. It takes a lot, a lot of commitment. It takes a financial commitment, it takes an energy commitment, it takes a lifestyle commitment. Now that you're there, how do you define success?

SPEAKER_00 29:54

I want to be able to look back and for people, if people were to say and describe me to say, What's my experience with him? I would want clients to say he helped move our business forward. He gave us good ideas and helped implement those in the right way. He was insightful, he was pragmatic. I want my teams to say, we're better consultants having worked with him. We learned a lot, both good and bad. And I want kind of, you know, other people that I'm interacting with just to say we respect what he brings it to the table. Consulting is a very competitive industry. Um, you've got to be really good to sustain a differentiated perspective. Hopefully, you know, people would say he does have a strong point of view, he has a perspective, he's a thinker, he's been thinking about the future of work and and talking and writing and consulting on it, you know, the best part of 15, 20 years. And you know, in the last two or three, we've all been, you know, AI transformation consultants. So there's some of the there's some of the things. But I think it's really important to to think about the constituents that we're trying to influence and to say, how would they describe you? And again, in all honesty, not telling us what we want to hear, etc. And then the other thing personally, and I and this is again, we've all got our demons inside. For me, and this I think comes from the Indian origin, is respect. I want people to respect that I'm capable at you know some parts of the job. I want them to respect that I have some sector expertise. I want them to respect the fact that I've got my clients' best interests at heart. So just being respected for me is an important piece that I know that that's important for me, like in the workplace and in the home place as well.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

Do you feel you have that now, or do you still need that validation from your clients?

SPEAKER_00 31:49

If we're sitting on the therapist couch here, Sweta, um, I'd say that I have imposter syndrome, I have deep insecurities, I cover them up by speaking, presenting, dressing relatively well. But deep down, I I'm that 12-year-old kid who's trying to learn voraciously because I don't think I'm good enough. And that's come from like what was instilled to me as a as a kid. My my dad used to say, you gotta work hard. We grew up in, as you know, we grew up in London where it was very racially charged. We have a lot of kind of racial abuse and bullying. But his counsel to me was you gotta like overcompensate, you've got to work twice as hard as he described, the white, the white man, and you still only get half the returns. And so these things have like been with me for the best part of 50 years.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Yeah. I almost call it an imposter syndrome, the pioneer syndrome, because we come from immigrant parents and they, in essence, were pioneers. And so it's really taught us on how to never really get comfortable and continue to charge for. So to a certain extent, maybe it's that fear of failure or that fear of being, you know, not good enough. But it's what I think it's required to continue to pioneer.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

And one of the values that you've you've talked about is just continual learning, which I think has been one of your differentiating strategies with your Yeah, which is why you kind of mentioned the immigration thing, which is why I'm also pretty vocal on social issues that I have domain expertise on. I I think I know something about immigration and workplaces, and I just think that the more that we can be pushing immigration that's made this country amazing, and what we need to be doing on, you know, getting more getting more young people into the country, getting more skilled labor into the country, where I write on things like H1Bs. Again, it's it's a personal piece, and I have a platform, so I I feel it's my responsibility. Just one thing on accents. It's ironic about workplaces. My parents both had Indian accents, they were ridiculed, especially my mom in the workplace, and kind of what does your mom do? She was a what you would call a paralegal, and so she was in the workplace, and people would would, you know, she'd wear a sari to the office or a sort of Achamese, so an Indian dress, she would speak with an Indian accent. They they changed the name from Sudesh to Sioux because they wanted it to be kind of you know anglicised. And here I am in the US, I get a lot a lot more credibility because I have a British accent. And I'm the same person, I'm probably less smart than my parents, but just because I don't have the Indian accent, and in the US, obviously the the UK accent is um is appreciated more than it is in the UK, um, it's just it always makes me um makes me smile and sometimes makes me upset that you know my parents were, you know, there was open racism in the workplaces in the 70s and 80s. Yet here, even though we have some issues, by and large, we we have much more inclusive and Indians of all all kinds have done incredibly well in America.

SPEAKER_01 35:00

When you think about how you lead yourself, not your clients, uh, not organizations, but how you lead yourself, what is that one word or phrase that defines it?

SPEAKER_00 35:14

When I lead myself, I think of someone who's driven. And whether that's too intense and you know, I you know, maybe I work too hard, or maybe I don't have enough balance, and maybe I don't have enough time to relax and be introspective. But I think it's um I think I think of myself as it being driven. What I want people to talk about, and I'm trying to work on this, is kindness. I want people to say consistently over the next few years, especially as I I'm kind of at the you know, at the more senior end of my my career and later in in my my life, I want people to say he was kind. Because I probably wasn't as kind earlier in my career in as an early leader, and I'm really trying to focus on that on the in the last you know five to ten years. So I would hope that people would say made us feel good, he made us feel better, and we know he was driven.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

Thanks for listening. I hope today's conversation gave you a moment to pause and to consider not just how you lead, but how you're living along the way. If this episode resonated, consider sharing it with someone navigating their own version of leadership at the top. You can also continue the conversation by following on your favorite platform with the handle Lead Style Way. Until next time, live fully to lead fully.