The Current Crisis and the Role of Human Capital, Purpose and Resilience

I'm very happy to be here with you, Xerxes. It's really quite an effort that you're putting forward to explore the boundaries of human context, so I'm happy to be invited to this podcast. If you want to know a little bit about me, I'll go ahead.

I've got a tri-identity, in a sense. I am of mixed heritage, Chinese Indian. They call people like me Chindian, or I don't know if it should be Indchin or whatever way it should be. I was born in Malaysia, and I moved to Canada when I was a teenager, so my tri-identity includes different national identities as well. And then I came to Europe a couple of years ago. It's now about [two] and a half years that I've been settled in Germany. So it's been really interesting to carry different market knowledge, cross-exchange, and see where that can go.

In terms of my background, I've held a few different roles in different sectors. I started in hospitality, and that was really wonderful, in Canada. Then I went on to banking, and hit the last global crunch right in the smack middle of it, because I was working my way up. I did leave on good terms, and I learned a lot from that. And then I joined the Clinton affiliates cohort with Frank Giustra, in Malaysia. I did quite a bit of work in Asia as well. There I got my first taste of working with government agencies, the broad-scope work of national public impact. And then I started to consult.

Now I find myself in Germany, largely advocating sustainability, especially in the social and governance categories. I work very much with companies that want to transform themselves from within, and I create links for them to do that. So that's just the high level of what I do.

Oh gosh. Because I have a dying urge to change something. What I do is really interesting: brand integrity requires crossover fields, and an ability to understand what agility can actually do in these situations. We're at a crisis time right now. So what I've always tried to do is build proactive measures into an organization that will sustain jolts like this.

Oh, massive. I think I've had a few turning points, and it has very much to do with my transition through life: moving to Canada as an immigrant, as a PR [permanent resident], and then coming back to Asia and repatriating as a foreign-trained Southeast Asian talent, and finding that continuity in my career.

But the big jarring point, the big point that changed me, was probably the realization that I offer a unique perspective, and I always will. And if I don't insert that value into everything I do, through whatever resources I have, then that opinion and perspective will never be heard. We need more perspectives for diversity to actually work.

Hmm. Well, I work with quite a different array of people. On one hand, I work with funds and venture folks, and I think there's a big change in all these industries that have the ability to see a pattern or a wave, and money is one of the easiest. On the other side of my pond are folks in the startup industry and burgeoning tech, and largely what I do is build in their human capital structures, and what that can mean in the future.

So for my field of work, a lot is still to be determined, because we have different pockets of talent that don't really fit with each other. Right now there's this talk about on-demand talent going up, and companies finding new ways to support that, IP attrition. But I think everyone's figuring out how to sustain people. So it's difficult at the moment.

What has changed for us, I can share, is that I've had to become a lot more empathetic, in a different way. I've always tried to be empathetic rather than sympathetic about someone's situation, and about how they commit to their self-progress or their professionalism. But now there's a need to just connect with people and give them what they need and what they want. Whether it's attention, or just listening to difficulties that are very personal: a boss now, or a leader now, or a team player now has to become even more human. That's something that I've realized. It's difficult when you own your own effort: you have to make more time for that now.

Long gone, I think, are the structures where we used to all clock in, put on a hat and then clock out. Now you really have to face the reality that you're responsible, in a way, for a person's state of mind, even more so than you ever were before. So I've had to change the way I ask questions. I've had to change the way I approach vulnerability.

I do see some scary agency-like trends. I've worked with a ton of agencies myself, never in their shoes, but working with them, of course. And I think there's a lot of skewing of solution thinking: if you address vulnerability, you'll address it all. If you address diversity, you'll address it all. Those kinds of thoughts are a little bit misleading as well. I find a lot of our teammates are searching for that one-word solution for themselves, to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But at the end of the day, what they need is a team that works with them in reality. And that's a lot different.

I think so. I think those who have resilience will probably see it through in a different way. It's just a matter of what the counterweights of our systems are these days. If we're working with the same structures we've worked with before, and we're resilient through that, that's good too, because those were the structures before. And you have all these new structures, new business models, new sustainable community structures and funding structures that are trying to come through and prove themselves. I think it just is a matter of all sides of the perspective being as resilient as possible.

So we will come through, if we are resilient and methodical, and maybe a little bit slower, and a little less satisfied with our returns, or immediate returns. Nothing is sustainable on just immediate dopamine, or immediate gratification. Those things have to be worked in, worked into an SOP and stuff like that. So I think these are the micro methods that everyone needs to look at. There's a lot of talk, but it's really hard to actually do it, I've noticed.

It depends. It's very industry specific and very sector specific. On one hand, if I pick, let's say, a Sustainable Development Goal, and cut across from the for-profit to the not-for-profit to the social sector, and see what's being done, there's a lot of lack of clarity, in a sense. You see jobs still being posted for positions, showing that the companies are actually keeping those pathways through. But a lot of the companies we work with are not exactly very open to giving announcements at the moment. A lot of PR work is being reshuffled, and all the initial hopes that a lot of these entities had are not exactly working out the way people want. There's still so much being done, that's the truth. There's so much going on. But a lot of organizations are not sure how to communicate those priorities into the future.

So it depends. If you're Adidas, and you received the funding that they did right now, and you're so clear, and you already had a very clear, dedicated move into conservation work, then it's easier for them. They're probably going to show more traction and more resilience, because they were already on the same purpose. But companies that are finding that now are probably getting really jolted.

What I find is that a lot of people [don't] want to come out with stories, so I have to pull it out even more. I say: hey, talk about your environmental work, talk about the emissions. And the pushback right now is: but why would I do that? We have to address the job loss. We have to address other PR stories and brand stories that are more important.

It comes back to basically allowing your colleagues to do what they do, and trusting them. And maybe, if there's cross-field anxiety from HR to front-end sales, then those anxiety points also have to be aired out a little bit more. So there's a lot of hesitation, is what I'm seeing. A lot of hesitation that's unnecessary. And then I find out that it's largely because of a lack of trust, or a lack of prioritization, or just people not finding their way to the end of the tunnel.

And some folks are looking at new careers, but they're unsure. So you've got a lot of leaders who have not had their chance to really, truly lead, who are frustrated, and who are pushed into looking left and right and losing their own sense of purpose. It's pretty debilitating. I think a lot of people feel like they can't do a lot. That's tough.

Huge, huge. It is unfortunate that we need stress and pressure and scarcity to make us innovate and create. It is unfortunate that, as a human species today, we always need a little bit of stress for us to actually produce something.

But those who were already on that path of adjusting themselves and committing themselves to something greater than monetary instruments or social capital recognition, all these other things that don't really give you resilience for your own career, your own charge, however long you're blessed to stay on this planet: I think for those who started that, life is probably a little bit more palatable right now. And they probably know how to work within that context when they look at their colleagues left and right. They know how to coach and bring that person on, and say: hey, I was doing these things. I was writing a journal every morning. I joined the 5 AM Club. I did all these things around my life so that I could uphold my purpose. I didn't know my purpose for a long time, and I did this, this and this to get it clear.

That kind of soft skill, that ability to look inward and outward and be accepting of where you are, is helping a lot with the people and the teams that went down that path. But for the teams that didn't go down that path, it's a shock. I see teams that we try to work with again and again, and they go back to the same thing: oh my God, I can't believe this has happened. It just takes time.

Those who are practicing purpose understand. They would see the value of a target picture, a simple format that shows why, when, what, how, and where you are in that. And when you tell them: okay, now let's take this tool, which is a very simple canvas tool, and use it for another purpose, maybe mapping a flow in a supply chain, or mapping a gap between cross-sectoral relationships, they're ready to invest more of their acumen, even to provide an opinion that maybe they're not too sure of, but they have a hunch. So there's more intuitive ability with the people who have gone down that route.

Anybody who basically had a personal coach who talks about purpose, or who has done some company-wide programs or training, is a lot more susceptible to allowing their skill and their intuition, which is their personal ability, their soft skills and aptitudes, to actually flourish and take them further. For those who have not, it's really a tough time. So: a lot of empathy, a lot of how-tos, simple steps, I did this and I failed, a lot of that kind of sharing.

Oh, definitely. You see ESG funds, for example, and bond indexes coming up with even more clarity. We've seen some success happen in a lot of countries. But now, more than ever, I think people are looking from all angles. Whether you're an investor or an issuer, or a startup working with a fund that has an acceleration fund for you, everyone is now starting to become a little bit more interested in benchmarks like ESG, responsible investing or the Sustainable Development Goals. People, I think, have the opportunity to take a deeper look.

The unfortunate thing, though, is that when you overlay a lot of these frameworks that we have out there, it becomes extremely convoluted again, in the world of sustainability and impact. And there are not a lot of people from other fields, like communications or PR or branding, who are crossbred like myself, who come in and do a lot of work to clarify that.

So while there is interest, the genuine talent who want to come out and do something different, like yourself, find themselves still asking the same questions again and again: why does this framework matter? Are the decisions we are making, based on a lack of clarity from multiple frameworks, actually going in the right direction? Or am I doing the same thing I did before, when I had all the security of my career, for example, before COVID-19?

So some people are pressing on for higher personal standards, individual thought, and some people are not. And I do see a need for a lot more candid conversation. If you don't understand something, just say you don't. I hate being by myself, alone, and finding that everyone just puts on a hat. I'm also representing a very different voice most of the time. So all this kind of stuff, I think, has to stop in the way we interact about things. While there is interest, there's still not much clarity.

I think it's indirectly part of my work, but it's always been there. I've been in CSR since 2006, 2007. I've been working in corporate governance, CSR qualifiers, running campaigns, doing all sorts of galvanizing, and then using that for the rebranding after restructuring. I was a greening ambassador. I started a bunch of SLPs on my own at that time, which have survived all these years, and won company awards and recognition from industry players and stuff like that.

But I remember the grassroots of it. I remember when I started it, and I remember the human fight against it. When I said, let's not have styrofoam cups, let's have paper cups, everyone went: it's going to burn my hand. In Canada everyone wanted hotter drinks. I said: why? It's a small change. And I found myself at a very early age leading upwards, but having to use negative marketing, having to use fear, having to use all sorts of awful storylines to make people change. And I thought: gosh, this is terrible.

Then I moved to working with a bunch of agencies, as a public fund owner, running talent strategy for countries. So then they came to pitch to me instead, and I was like: okay, let's put all these agencies together and see what they actually do, the return on value rather than the return on advertising. All these metrics that they use didn't matter to me. I just thought they were all dopamine boosters that don't really give me a quality database that I can work with, because the kind of people I was looking for were a different echelon of people. I was looking for people who have resilience, not just a global career, and who have something unique to offer.

So throughout my career, purpose has very much been a point guard for where things should go. It's maybe been easier for me in some ways to understand my purpose, because I was born of mixed heritage. I was always positioned as such. I was always having to compete to prove a lot of capabilities, at least I felt so. So for me, purpose number one was always to do what I thought was a better standard than the status quo.

And I've never thought that the status quo was ever good enough, because I come from a medical family, and we always just very humbly say: no matter what it is that you do, humankind seems to move one step at a time. But sometimes we move in the wrong step. So for me, it was never called purpose in my household. It was called: you better do something [beyond] the norm. Go [for] what you represent.

So for me, it's been part of my career, but for other people perhaps it's not. And I do sometimes wish I had a different purpose, for example saving turtles, something that was not related to my skin color or my representation of a minority voice. I do wish I could flip between them. But what I found out in adult life is that you can't do it all at the same time.

Before this crisis, I was really advocating for strong legacy brands that hold up a cultural identity to look deeper at themselves, at their corporate governance and their CSR. I typically pick up annual reports and go to shareholder meetings as an investor myself, pull up a bunch of friends who are in that field, and talk about certain things that could be better. And then if there is something that we can improve, we will improve it. So before, CSR was always about picking up a better role, because I've always worked from the employer branding stance. Ten, twelve years ago, it was different. And because my career started in transformation, I'm always looking for when that earthquake is going to happen: do we have a robust enough identity that will bring us together?

The focus was: okay, let's get companies' comms and HR to work together better with their strategy team, and build those structures in. Now it's become a desperate run for human capital understanding. And that's really difficult, because a lot of companies don't want to expose those things at the moment, because they're not sure what they want to do. I don't know when those doors are going to really open. But I suspect I really have to start to focus on recruitment firms and what is happening in talent as well, and then probably delve a little bit more into labor laws and how things are working there. So it's a lot of putting different generational perspectives in a room, getting everyone excited about a singular point, and just going that way. Otherwise there's not going to be much help with anything.

And I think in a lot of markets right now, if you look at the V-curve that Washington is expecting to return, it's not going to return if you don't watch job attrition next to unemployment, for example. If companies are still pushing out their best assets every two, three years, every five years, you're not going to build anything for the future, because that big white space is still there. That's where the new business models are, and that's where the money is.

I could tell people 15 business models that I could do in my little think-do tank. But do I do it under my brand? No, not necessarily. I do it under other brands. I help other brands. Should I join a fund? Sure. But it will probably take me time to figure out if they're actually on the same value spectrum as well.

So I think human capital is a topic we have to get into collectively, everyone, and impact. Because if you can't sustain this big flux that we're having right now, and if you don't know what the MNCs mean when they talk about human capital, or what the SMEs mean, or what the solopreneur means, then we're going to miss each other. Again, it comes back to crisis-caused empathy. So this has to be raw.

And it's unfortunate when sometimes you bring up the word human capital and people say: I don't really want to talk about it, I'm dealing with it, until that's done we can't open up that conversation. And I was part of the banking industry before, during the other crisis. Not much has changed. So why would you change now? If you're uncomfortable to talk about it, you're uncomfortable to talk about it.

But questions like: are our companies, our organizations, doing good exit interviews? Are they still understanding people's personal goals? Are they building personal purpose plans? Do they want to know those things? Do they want to know that their employees are looking for jobs on the side, and that they're just sticking around in this job now because they have to? What can you do to give them more value, to make them feel more valuable? Things like that. So I think human capital is huge.

And it's just the beginning of the numbers that we see, and that's really, really sad and really unfortunate. The other worry I have is the recovery rate. No one's talking about the recovery rate in the talent space. Let's face it, one leg of the entire organization is people. It's people who hold everything up. But I don't see a lot of content coming out about how they're going to recover.

To help your brother and sister. That's it. If you see someone who needs anything, just do it. That's what we need. It's those basic inclinations to just present yourself as a fellow human person living through the difficulties of life, and saying: look, I want to give you a hand. And being able to also take the rejection of someone who was maybe not secure enough to receive that help from you at that time. But you have to just keep doing that.

I think we've made our systems and our businesses and everything we do so complicated that we forget that: just turning around and saying, hey, what do you need? I can give you a connection or something like that. So if a lot more of that comes back, that would be a lot better.

I don't think picking dramatic elements and pushing people to share, or doing anything like that right now, is a good idea. It's more: I'm here for you, this is what I have. And if we talk about companies, a lot more transparency would be nice. Less packaged collateral, which people like me are very good at doing, and more knowing where the real value is and isn't. So it's a lot of shifts in that way.

One way that we're doing it: instead of talking about tasks with some colleagues, or the youth board, for example, we just do it right then and there, and that shows: I'm here for you. Even though I don't see you, and I'm not in an office with you, and I don't get to be there with you: come with me in time, come with me in the existence that we have, and let's be very humbly appreciative that we can be here together. And I truly try to be very granular about that.

I think as a female, it's maybe also easier in some ways to be more caring. But I need to do more of it. That's what I've learned now, and that's hard on a lot of people. One thing I've seen is that people can't keep it up. But maybe together we can. So who knows?

I think, again, it's creating a buffet of options that people, human beings, can engage in, as human beings first. And the world created these options, for example in tech media, with Facebook and social channels and so on. I was one of the first few people who, although I used social channels to generate leads, never used emotional marketing as a system. I never believed in it, because I come from a family of medical professionals. If I were to do that, I would undo the work of all the neuroscientists and neurosurgeons in my family, and all of those who were fighting for Ayurvedic treatment, cannabinoid treatment, psychedelic treatment, versus the typical pharma-driven agendas.

And I've been part of that pharma-driven agenda since I was a child. I used to do the medication stock. And I always used to ask questions like: why this medicine versus this one? This one has kidney failure as a side effect. Why are we doing it to the world? Why me? I was a very irritating kid.

So I think if we don't become clear, essentially we're not giving people options. We're doing the same thing again and again. It's a real struggle. For us with TACTHUB, we want to turn 70/30 into our contributions to youth talent development. And that doesn't mean we're giving up on the Gen Xers or the baby boomers or anybody else. No, that's not the point. We just have to reconfigure how we work, and we want more peer-to-peer sponsorship rather than just mentoring. We've worked with quite a few mentoring entities, and we find that not to be our business. If we were interested in marginal earnings with IP sharing and all this kind of stuff, maybe that would be our business, but we didn't want to do that. So there are nuances that have to shift with our rule: 70% going into the development of that. And that's a new profit structure.

Before, it was a personal home savings structure: keep a level of life, then spend that on education and self-enrichment as a human being, to improve your skills and stuff, and save it. That was an old, old rule. But now I see a lot of entities also taking this approach of just directly giving profits back. For us, the challenge will be, of course, to eventually be able to share our financials openly. Some funds do it, and they use different metric quantifiers. But we should be able to at least show, in some way, even though we're very small, how we actually do it.

If we don't improve on these transparent ways of building business models, and if we don't shorten the learning for people to be able to do that, it's going to be really difficult, because in every cohort you join, there's an agenda. Swimming through that agenda and getting that basic level of learning is insane. If you could just walk down all the ventures in Palo Alto alone, you'd be gobsmacked. And at the end you feel incapable, confused, the same things again. It's just a bad, vicious cycle.

So I really want to see a lot more companies put up maybe an annual letter from the owner, saying: this is why we're doing this, this is what we're doing, and we are moving this amount of money to this. Or: we're trying this business model out. If you like the idea, come join us. Here are your profit margins, here are mine. Something to that point. Otherwise this distrust is going to continue. At least that's what we're learning with our youth board. There's huge distrust, and that's directly becoming mental health issues, and directly becoming dependencies on our medical systems. So I think transparency gives people hope.

I wish I didn't play the game so much, and helped people more. Put my hand on their shoulders, had a coffee with them. I do wish I had connected more authentically, and I'm a pretty authentic person, if there is a barometer. But I do wish that, especially because I come from a field where I packaged stories for a group. Gosh, what is it all worth now? There were always these rules of the game, and so much time got wasted on all of that.

I ended up becoming a VP anyway, of a little company, but attached to very big pockets and a big conglomerate, in the mobile telecom industry, which we call mobile virtual network operators or aggregators. So the amount of knowledge I had was tremendous. And I do question myself: what did I do with it? I didn't really offer any transparency. It was actually a lot of times my job to hide that.

That's something that I really look at now and think: geez, I could run a day sprint and explain all these different strategies and formats, built to expose only this much in the communication pipeline, because we assume we're going to have this control. And then suddenly we're in a situation where: does it really matter? Because if you look at capitalism: if you stimulate, and you are open, you'll get your front runners anyway. And they will build little companies and little families and little pockets of good and all of that jazz. I really don't regret that.

But it's a common thing I hear from a lot of people, a lot of us sitting in these positions who have had senior leadership: now, of course, we question how we spend our time. I was always in CSR, always in impact, always in sustainability, so at least I have some brownie badges. But at the same time, I'm telling myself it's not fair to myself to hold onto those. On one hand, I say I have an innate purpose to represent a marginalized perspective in my own way, my own little liberal way. Then what did I do to allow that?

So I think a lot more consciousness of how I spend my time. And maybe for me, it's going to be taking a little extra time early in the day to figure out: how am I going to connect on a human level today? Am I going to be more patient? What's my theme? What's the terminal value about myself that I'm going to change today? That's something I'm trying out, and it's been nice. Nice to end days, look back and think: oh geez, maybe I should have exercised this value more, earlier.