Play to Potential Podcast

GUEST Ayse is an accomplished Industrial Designer and has worked with Brands like Herman Miller, IKEA, Amazon and Toyota. She is the author of Design the Life You Love and gives lectures on Design the Work You Love to corporations. She was on the Fast Company’s list of Most Creative People in 2017 and on the Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 people that are likely to shape the future of organization...

GUEST Dorie Clark is an American author and executive education professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She has recently published her 4th book - The Long Game - How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. Her previous books include Reinventing You (2013), Stand Out (2015), Entrepreneurial You (2017).  She completed her Master in Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity Sc...

GUEST Rajiv Vij is a life and executive coach, author and speaker. He works with senior leaders of several Fortune 500 companies and other large organisations across Asia and India and has been a coach to industry leaders. He also voluntarily coaches a number of founders and leaders of social-sector organisations. He is the author of Discovering Your Sweet Spot: A Soul-searching Guide for Creating...

GUEST Harsh Mariwala is Founder and Chairman of Marico, an FMCG giant well known for brands like Parachute and Saffola. He has recently Co-Authored the book - Harsh Realities (Published by Penguin Random House) along with Management Guru, Ram Charan. The book is a story of how Harsh broke away from the shackles of family-run Bombay Oil Industries Ltd, which was a commodities business to set up a p...

GUEST Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is one of Google’s and Silicon Valley’s most respected leaders. She has worked at various tech and media companies including Google, Amazon, NewsCorp, Yodle and Polyvore. At one stage she was heading Latin America and Asia Pacific in Google in 2008. She is credited with building Google’s presence across 103 countries in LATAM and APAC. She has recently authored the bo...

GUEST Lloyd Reeb is a successful real estate developer and owner of retirement housing who made a mid-life transition, looking for greater meaning, joy and impact in his second half. He has had the privilege of investing 20 years helping leaders plan their second half. He helped launch the Halftime Institute, a global team that teach, coach and connect successful men and women in pursuit of signif...

GUEST Harish Bhat is the Brand Custodian of Tata Sons. He has had a ~35 year career at the Tata Group and has held several leadership roles including COO - Watches and Accessories Business at Titan, MD & CEO of Tata Consumer Products, Chairman of the Board at Tata Coffee Limited and more.  He is the Author of four books. "#Tata Stories", 40 timeless tales to inspire you. "An extreme love of co...

GUEST Katy Milkman is the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and holds a secondary appointment at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. Her research explores ways that insights from economics and psychology can be harnessed to change consequential behaviors for good, such as savings, exercise, vaccination take-up and discrimination. She has also recently...

GUEST Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School.  Amy has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked #3 in 2019. She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organizational learning, and her articles have been published numerous academic and management outle...

GUEST Over the last year and a quarter, since March 2020, a lot of us have been thrown into this work from anywhere world without any prior preparation. It is like being thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool without any prior training. We have had to figure out our own response to the evolving situation. While there has been no shortage of wisdom and webinars, I have been looking for a resea...

GUEST For many of us, the last time we learned a new skill was during childhood. We live in an age which reveres expertise but looks down on the beginner. Upon entering adulthood and middle age, we begin to shy away from trying new things, instead preferring to stay nestled firmly in our comfort zones. Beginners asks the question: why are children the only ones allowed to experience the inherent f...

GUEST Dan Cable is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Dan’s research and teaching focus on employee engagement, change, organizational culture, leadership mindset, and the linkage between brands and employee behaviors. Dan was selected for the 2018 Thinkers50 Radar List, The Academy of Management has twice honored Dan with “Best article” awards, and The Academy of Man...

GUEST Sally Helgesen, cited in Forbes as the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership, is an internationally best-selling author, speaker and leadership coach. Sally’s most recent book, How Women Rise, co-authored with Marshall Goldsmith, examines the behaviors most likely to get in the way of successful women. It became the top-seller in its field within a week of publication and rights have...

GUEST Dr. Jennifer (Jen) Goldman Wetzler is a leading expert on Conflict and Organizational psychology. For two decades, she has advised senior leaders at global corporations in a wide range of industries as well as at large non-profit and governmental institutions. She is the author of Optimal Outcomes - Free yourself from conflict at Work, at Home and in life.  Earlier in her career, she was Dir...

GUEST Bill Carr is the Co-Author (along with Colin Bryar) of the recently published book Working Backwards - Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon.  In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon expe...

GUEST Sanjeev Aggarwal and Hari TN have seen the "scale-up movie” in different contexts. Sanjeev was the Founder CEO of Daksh that he eventually sold to IBM. He is now an investor at Helion Ventures and Fundamentum Partnership. The have recently co-authored the book - From Pony to Unicorn - Scaling a Start-up sustainably. From Pony to Unicorn lucidly describes the X-to-10X journey that every start...

GUEST Bruce Feiler is an American writer and television personality. He is the author of 15 books, including Council of Dads, a book that describes how he responded to a diagnosis of a rare cancer by asking a group of men to be present in the lives of his young daughters. His latest work explores the power of life stories. Drawing on interviews with Americans in all 50 states, he offers strategies...

GUEST Ramesh is a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, and a leader in the Pharmaceutical and Organization practices. He is the Global Dean of the Bower Forum, McKinsey's program for CEO learning. He is a member of McKinsey's Global Social Responsibility Council, and sits on a few non-profit Boards in the Education sector in India. He also has been through the unimaginable trauma of losing tw...

GUEST Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi is the president and CEO of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2020, Priyadarshi released his book "Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life”. In the book, he speaks about his walking away from his school at the age of 10 based on some dreams he had been having f...

GUEST Dr. Ashley Whillans is the Volpert Family Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School. Professor Whillans earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Her research seeks to understand the associations between time, money, and subjective wellbeing. She is particularly interested in understanding how individual, organizational and societal factors like ge...

GUEST Vinay Sitapati returns to the Play to Potential Podcast on the back of his recently published book - Jugalbandi - The BJP before Modi. The book begins with the creation of Hindu nationalism as a response to British-induced elections in the 1920s and moves on to the formation of the BJP in 1980 and ends with its first national government, from 1998 to 2004.  The book also traces the entangled...

GUEST Ashish Dhawan is the Founder and Chairman of Central Square Foundation (CSF) and Ashoka University. He worked for twenty years in the investment management business and ran one of India’s leading private equity funds, ChrysCapital. In June 2012, he left his full time role at ChrysCapital to focus on philanthropic work in education. Ashish is an MBA with distinction from Harvard University an...

GUEST Marshall Goldsmith helps successful people achieve positive, lasting change in behavior; for themselves, their people, and their teams. He has four decades of experience of helping top CEOs and executives overcome limiting beliefs and behaviours to achieve greater success. He has received several accolades over the years. Thinkers 50 ranked him as World's most influential leadership thinker...

GUEST Venkat is the Founder of GiveIndia, a platform that strives to bridge the gap between two sets of people - People who want to give, who want to try and make a difference along with those that are doing phenomenal work but don’t know how to reach out to the people that want to support them.  GiveIndia was born on April 28, 2000 out of the belief that equal opportunity is the cornerstone of ci...

GUEST Whitney Johnson is the CEO of WLJ Advisors and one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50. She is an expert on helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals. Whitney is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning and an executive coach and advisor to CEOs. She is...