But what exactly is Technology Leadership? | Leading a life with a career in Technology | Ajei Gopal

Thank you very much, Sanjo. For all of you who are listening to this session, and for all of your colleagues, the world you're going to graduate into is quite profoundly different from the world into which I graduated. Right now, we're dealing with a pandemic, obviously there is a recession as a result of the pandemic, we're seeing global trade disputes, here in the US we're seeing broad discussions about civil rights. All of these disruptions individually bring risks and opportunities, and taken together, it is quite a profoundly different world today than it was at the time that I graduated, and it's going to be different in the next 10 years and in the next 20 years. For me, when I graduated from IIT in 1982, which was obviously a lifetime ago, my experience at IIT Bombay was foundational for my success. It helped me navigate through all of the twists and turns that I was facing in the industry and in the broader world. Frankly, whether it was in the classroom, in the hostel, or hiking in the Sahyadris, I made a number of lifelong friends and I learned some critical lessons that have set a foundation for my career and any success that I might have had in my own life. From a career perspective, as Sanjo had said, I started as a mechanical engineer, I switched to computer science for my PhD, and I began my career in research. I had an opportunity to move into the startup world, founding a company. I was a general manager in large organizations for a while, and then I stepped away from the world of technology per se and moved into private equity, working for a company in that space for a few years. Then I stepped back in to become the CEO of ANSYS. I've worked in a startup company, I've founded a startup company, I've worked in mid-sized companies, and I've worked in large enterprises. ANSYS, of course, I'm sure many of you know, we're the leader in engineering simulation software. The company today is worldwide, we have customers around the world, and frankly, whatever product you're using, in all likelihood, the vendor of that product used ANSYS technology or some of our products to build that offering. So we're very proud of what we do; we affect people's lives around the world. We're a multinational corporation, and I really didn't plan my career to get here. I don't have a master plan of how to become the CEO of a multinational company; it just happened. So I don't really have any advice that I think could be actionable on a day-one basis for how you can become a CEO of a public company. It really depends on who you are, the choices you make, how you live your lives, and what your objectives are. But what I thought I would do is share some general thoughts, and then I could take some questions. Until this point, for most of you, the objectives are very clear: you're following an established, straightforward path to academic success. As I said, I came from a middle-class family. My father was an officer in the Indian Navy, my mother was a teacher, and the focus in the family was on education. It was very clear. Even as a young kid, I can remember my grandmother, who had not formally gone to school beyond a particular level, telling me that her expectation was that I would graduate with a PhD. That was the expectation; it was very clear. It was all about academic success. But the further you get from school, the more the rules change. Your objectives change, and there frankly is no template, no one-size-fits-all. You've got to understand what's important to you. These criteria of success will change. In some cases, you're going to make decisions about family, about being with loved ones, about children, maybe about the environment in which you want to live. It's important to understand what's important to you and then to make the changes that you believe are appropriate to achieving the goals that are important to you. What's important to you may not be important to your friends or to other people in your family, and you have to really understand what's important to you. One of the lessons that I've learned is that you really have to do what you're interested in. You've got to focus your career on the activities that will motivate you, on the jobs that are important to you. If you don't know what's important for you right now and you have a choice of two different opportunities, think two jobs ahead or three jobs ahead. Where do you want to be? Which of these will help you get there? Will you be happy there? I've heard a number of people tell me that they're interested in taking a job because it pays more money, but they're not that excited about it. In some cases, I've heard people tell me that they want to pursue a particular career in an area even though it's not very interesting because they'll make a lot of money and then they can go off and do what they really want to do. In my opinion, that's not a recipe for success in life. You have to find that alchemy of talent, of passion, and of course money. In the aggregate, that will help you find the success that you seek. I'll give you one example in my own family. My oldest son, who has a degree in business, his interest and desire for a number of years was to go into private equity, into finance. Then one day he came to me and said, 'Listen, I've decided I'm not going to pursue that anymore. I'm not going to take a job in private equity. I'm going to go into the music business.' So he started his own business while he was in college, and he did this for a couple of years. Then he got a really interesting idea for a tech company in the music space, and now he's the CEO and founder of a company that's doing reasonably well. He works all the time, and he would have worked all the time if he had gone into finance as well. But now he's having a really good time, he's enjoying himself. If he's successful, he's successful at something that he cares about, and he makes an impact in a world that he really values and enjoys. I think that's the kind of thing that is important, and frankly, that's the advice that I followed in my own career. I've made decisions where I focused on things that were interesting and important to me, not just because of money. The other piece of advice is to focus on your deficiencies. Earlier in your career, you have to take an honest look at yourself and really try to understand your strengths and weaknesses. You've got to embrace those areas for improvement and act upon them. In my own particular case, when I started off, I was a horrible public speaker. I used to get petrified speaking in public; it was really problematic. I could never speak in front of a group of people. So I intentionally learned how to speak in public, and today I have no trouble speaking in public. That turns out, and I had no idea it would be an important skill, but it turns out that in my job, a number of occasions a week, I end up speaking to groups of people. If I had that fear of public speaking, it would be impossible for me to do my job. That's something that I specifically worked on. But paradoxically, as your career advances, you're in a position to hire other people who can offset areas where you need to improve. At that point, as your career starts to advance, you should start to focus on the areas of your strength and hire people to offset the areas where you're not as strong. That changes as you advance in your career. The other thing is you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. For your career to develop, you have to put yourself into uncomfortable positions, where you have to learn something new, where you have to learn to adapt. In my own case, to give you an example, when I left being a technology executive and took a job in private equity, I went from running an organization with thousands of people reporting to me, with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue around the world, a packed calendar, to a situation where I had zero people reporting to me, a brand new industry where I had to make my own agenda and my own calendar. I had a great time doing that. It was an extremely challenging environment because essentially it was a shift in my career, but today I am a better CEO because I went into something that I thought would be interesting but put me into a position where I was quite uncomfortable. So you have to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. The next lesson is you should always keep learning, especially when you're in difficult situations. What you learn at your B.Tech or M.Tech level, or whatever degree you end up with, the details of what you learn will no longer be relevant in a few years. It's important; it'll help you get your first job, it'll help you start your career. But everything that you learn will be outdated with new technologies, new techniques, new understanding. What's far more important is to learn how to learn, to learn how to question, how to reason. Because there is never a right way to do something in business. When you make a decision, there's no validation as to whether that's the right answer or the wrong answer. You have a choice of doing one thing or another; you do one thing, that's the universe in which you live. There's no control against which you can validate whether that's the right thing or not. So you have to learn to be able to make decisions in the context of incomplete information. You have to learn how to make decisions, and that's the most important thing. Those are skills that you can get from an institution like IIT, and those are the skills that set you up for a lifetime of success. The other thing is that no matter how challenging the situation you might be in, even if you don't like what you're doing, treat it as a learning experience and take away from it the positives that will help you in other experiences. In my own case, I found myself in a pretty unpleasant situation at one point in my career. Rather than just simply walk away, and I had plenty of opportunity to walk away, I worked through it. For me, that was a tremendous learning experience because I came out of it with a better understanding of how to deal with those kinds of situations, and that has made me a better executive today than I was before. So those are important aspects. I think another very important thing, which many people may not necessarily recognize, is the concept of emotional intelligence. Some people call it EQ. EQ is as important, or perhaps even more important, than IQ. Obviously, what you know is important, and you have to have the facts and know what you're doing. But how you treat people on your journey is even more important. I'm a CEO of a global company; I work with people of different nationalities, different cultures, different backgrounds, different beliefs. My success as an executive depends on my being able to understand what's important to other people, to be able to motivate them, to recognize how to work with them. As you go out and work in the industry, you'll be working with people that you recognize for many years, and you'll work with people who come from completely different backgrounds. It's really how you empathize with people, how you communicate with them, listen more than you speak. That's important. Learning how to bring people along, understanding the diversity and the value that other people bring, that's really profoundly important, and that will bring you even more success than knowing a particular set of facts. I'll give you an example about bringing people along from my own career. At one point, I took a job and moved to a different part of the organization. My office was in a large open space at the end of it, and there were a number of people sitting in that open space. I would just walk by them to get to my desk. About a year later, my assistant told me that a lot of people here don't like you. I said, 'Why is that? That seems somewhat harsh; I haven't spoken to anyone.' She said, 'That's exactly why they don't like you. They weren't part of my department, but they didn't like me because I just didn't say hello, I didn't smile, I went straight to my office and sat down and got on with my work.' It actually took me an interesting lesson, which was that it doesn't take you a moment to stop and say hello to someone, to greet them, to make that connection. That human connection is really important because later on, when you need something and you want an individual to do something, how you interact with them is going to be very important, and they'll remember that. That's a trivial example, but that's one perspective as you think about emotional intelligence and your ability to work in a large multi-national corporation or to work with clients from around the world. Your ability to connect with them is going to be important. That is an important skill, and frankly, it's a skill that many people don't have. As engineers, it's not a skill that naturally comes to you; it's not a skill that you think about if you're in sales. It's something that you have to develop to be successful, but for a lot of engineers, it doesn't come naturally. Finally, I think the point I want to leave you with before I open up for questions is that you really have to recognize the world and the opportunities as they are presented to you. I talked a little bit about how COVID is changing the world and how people will think differently. Just think about what we've gone through with the shutdown. I know IIT Bombay is shut down for classes, and they're going to be virtual classes next semester. Think about how impactful that's been. In a time of change like this, when we go through major trauma, because society is going through trauma right now, that ushers in change and accelerates change. So what might have taken 10 years to happen in society is going to happen in a year. It's important now, when you are all graduating, you're going to be graduating in a world which has been impacted by COVID. People are going to be working from home, supply chains are going to be disrupted due to trade wars. All of these things represent opportunities. These are markets that are going to be disrupted, and there are opportunities. With the global disruption in supply chains, that's going to be an opportunity. Can you address it? What could you do? What are the skills that you could bring to help address a problem that's going to happen? This is not a problem that may have been as important last year, but next year it's going to be really important. Technology and tools are constantly advancing. Can you take advantage of them? I'll give you one example of a company that I talk about quite often, a company called Relativity Space. Relativity is a customer of ANSYS. This is a company founded by two young guys, probably both not yet 30. One was out of USC, the other worked for SpaceX. They got together and decided to build a company, and their vision was to launch a payload into space at a much lower cost than anyone else. That was their objective. What they decided to do was use additive manufacturing to print a rocket. That has some advantages about creating a much less expensive rocket, so you can have a much less expensive way of launching payload into space, even though it would be a single-use rocket as opposed to SpaceX, which obviously has more expensive but reusable rockets. That's the direction they were trying to go. Of course, when they started, they realized that there wasn't an additive manufacturing facility, there wasn't a 3D printer big enough to print the first rocket they wanted. So as a starting point, they went ahead and built the world's largest 3D printer, and then they used that to build a rocket. It took them 18 months from starting the company to getting a rocket on a test bed at NASA to validate that the engine could actually work. That is a tremendous 18 months, to go from nothing to building a next-generation engine. That is a tremendous feat of accomplishment, and that's because the technology and the tools are constantly advancing. It is easier today to build a company, it is easier today to come up with ideas and to take advantage of them, it is easier today to have an impact than ever before. That's again an opportunity for all of you. The environment, people's attitudes about the environment are changing. Obviously, with the pandemic, you're seeing a reduction in production, you're seeing bluer skies, you're seeing cleaner water. What could you do? How can you make a difference in that world? The final point I want to make is that companies, ANSYS is no exception, all of us are working from home, we're all working very effectively from home. But the process by which we're running our businesses has changed. Whereas previously we relied on people going into each other's offices, there was paper, etc., companies are now embracing a digital transformation. Whether it's running your office on a day-to-day basis, building your products, or thinking about servicing your customers, companies are completely changing into digital-based companies, and that digital transformation is accelerating. Those are opportunities. What can you do to accelerate that, to enable that? The reason I go through these potential disruptions in the market is not because I'm advocating that any of you go out and start a company in those spaces to address those challenges, but to point out that there are lots of opportunities. Whether you want to go start your own company, join a company that's addressing this, or think about studying more to build up your skills so that you can start to make a difference, there is an enormous amount of opportunity ahead of all of you because of what's taking place in the industry. Let me stop at this point. What I've tried to do is give you some perspective of some of the habits that I've learned over the years in my career. My path is not going to be the same as your path; no two people are going to follow the same path. But some of the basic principles, I think, are applicable more broadly. For all of you, even though things look difficult right now and you're graduating at a time of significant disruption, recognize that with disruption comes opportunity. With that opportunity and with the skills and capabilities that you have, comes the ability to truly make a difference in the world. With that, I'll pause and potentially open it up to questions.

Well, I think as I said before, there is no control. You don't have a choice; you're going to take a choice, and that choice is going to be the universe in which you live. You can't go back and revisit the choices. So you have to ultimately have conviction around a choice. The choice you should not, in my opinion, pick any one metric along which to optimize. It isn't just about money. A lot of people go down that path and say, 'Listen, I want to go and make a lot of money in this job even though it's going to be a horrible job, I don't like it, but at least I get paid a lot of money.' That, in my mind, while it may be optimizing for the short term, in the long term it's going to be a failure because you're not going to enjoy what you do. Look ahead, look multiple steps ahead, and say, 'Where do I want to end up in five years from now? Where do I want to end up two or three jobs from now?' Then think about whether this job is going to give you the skills to be able to get to that job that you're looking for. Let me take a simple example. Let's assume you want to become a manager. You're an engineer right now, and you're in an organization. You want to become a manager, and you want to become a general manager running a business. Well, if you just keep growing up in engineering, you have one set of experiences. But as a general manager, you're managing people in sales, engineering, and finance. So how do you think about broadening your sets of experiences? Maybe you want to advocate for yourself for a job where you step out of engineering for a while and spend some time working with customers. Maybe that's a good direction for you to go. Or maybe you really want to change industry, so you think about the path that you go. I think you have to think longer term, multiple steps ahead, and don't try to optimize for the next job.

I don't. I'm not sitting there solving partial differential equations. I don't do that anymore; it's been a while since I've done that. And I'm not writing software; it's been a while since I did that. There was a time in my career when I could stay up for two days in a row just write code, and I did. But that's not what I do right now. My job right now is to run a business. But it's a technology business, and my customers are some of the most technical in the world. We have about 4,500 people around the world, about a thousand PhDs in the organization. So it's a very technical organization. Yes, I participate in technical discussions, I provide guidance to my company, but I'm surrounded by people who know much more than I do about any particular subject. You pick the subject, there's someone in the company who knows significantly more. So my goal now as a CEO is not to be mired in the technical details of any one thing, but to understand the technology well enough to be able to drive the strategy of the company. My job is driving strategy, making decisions about how and who to hire at the executive level, working with my board of directors, and working with my shareholders. It's a broad view of stakeholder management, but setting strategy is an important aspect of that job. I have to understand the technology well enough and be well-versed in it to be able to drive that job. That's what makes it more difficult, especially for a company like ANSYS. If you don't have a technical background, it's more difficult to be a leader in this company because you don't understand the products, the technologies, or why it's complex to solve CFD, for example. That is something that I understand because of the training that I have.

The path that I followed was that I was an undergraduate in mechanical engineering, and I did not particularly feel like mechanical was for me. I didn't really know what I was getting into until well, at the time IIT was five years, so after two years you had an opportunity to change, but I really didn't know anything about mechanical engineering at the time. I took my first computer science class in my third year, first semester, and I loved it. I said, 'This is what I want to do.' But by the time it was too late to change disciplines; there was no computer science discipline at the time, it was just mechanical and electrical. Electrical had more computer science classes, so what I did instead was I took as many computer science classes as I could, and they were a handful. But my B.Tech project, I worked with someone outside of IIT on computer-controlled milling machines. That was my introduction. I wrote a lot of software, and I applied to the US for graduate work and switched to computer science. It was a difficult transition because many of my classmates in computer science had undergraduate degrees in computer science, so they had a full curriculum behind them. I had to just work a little bit harder to begin with. When I joined computer science for my graduate work, I became a computer scientist because I enjoyed it. It was fun for me. I really had more fun writing software than solving partial differential equations. So I knew I wanted to be in software, and that's what I did. I didn't specifically think about being in academia when I graduated with my PhD. I looked at academia; I had offers to be a professor. But I realized that one thing you have to be to be a professor is you have to enjoy teaching, and I really don't particularly enjoy teaching. I'm a pretty rotten teacher. In the one semester that I taught, I was a really bad teacher. So it was clear to me that being a teacher was not a good outcome for anyone, certainly not for me. So I ended up saying I wanted to be in research, and that's where I started. At the time, if you asked me what my goal was going to be, my response would have been, 'I'm going to be in research for the rest of my career.' I was very comfortable writing papers, going to conferences, presenting results, doing long-term technical exploration. That would have been my career. That is obviously not what I'm doing right now, but as I said, your goals shift and your objectives shift over time as you learn more about yourself and the industry.

Well, it's actually not that difficult, and it's exactly the same thing as anything. How do you get better at playing chess? How do you get better at running a race? You practice. What makes you better is doing it. I would strongly recommend that if you are uncomfortable speaking in public, speak in public. That's what you should do. Speak in public when the stakes are not so high. The first time you speak shouldn't be in a big event in front of a thousand people. The first time you speak in public can be in a smaller group. I don't know if IIT has a group like this, but certainly some universities have organizations where the students get together and take turns presenting on a particular subject to each other and provide criticism and improvement. You can certainly get formally trained in how to speak in front of an audience, and there is training available. But the most important thing besides practice is preparation. What you have to do when you stand up on stage is recognize that there's an audience in front of you, and they're listening to you because they want to learn from you. You have to prepare to make sure that you know what you want to say. Once you're well prepared, you have an advantage over the audience. You know what you want to say, you know what the message is, you know your material better than they do. So be confident and speak from confidence. It works out. The first time will be really difficult, you'll feel horrible. The second time will be better, and the third time will be better than that. The nice thing about having a camera on your phone is you can record it and watch yourself. Believe me, the first time you watch yourself speaking, you'll sound much worse than you thought you actually sounded. But it'll get better. So that's what I would recommend: practice, get together with other people, criticize each other. That's a really important skill. Learning how to present and how to get your ideas across in a short period of time is a very important skill in the workplace. When you're in your first job and you're talking to your manager and presenting some activity, the manager doesn't want to listen to 45 minutes of preamble. You want to really understand how to get the message across to the audience. So I think that's a very important skill that is worth developing. If you don't have a club on campus to do that, that's something that one of you should consider starting.

It is a difficult change to move from a research world into more of a commercial world. Some people don't make the change, some people can make the change very successfully. There are many examples of extremely successful people who started off in research and have built businesses and careers, either as serial entrepreneurs even while they're professors starting companies on the side, or building large companies that have been maintained. So it's not an unusual path. They require different things. When you're in academia or research, your focus is on writing papers, impacting the community through publications, maybe through patents, doing very advanced work. When you're running a company or an organization, or thinking about business, you have to take a slightly different perspective and not focus uniquely on the technology but focus on what the outcome looks like. The one place where people trip up is as a technologist or researcher, you focus on the technology and try to come up with a better way of doing something, a better toolkit, a better set of capabilities, a better offering. As running a business, you have to start from the other way around. You have to start with what the market is looking for. This is a failing of a lot of people who make that transition: they focus on the technology and not what the customer is looking for. To be successful in building a product or to run a product business, and I've been a product guy for my whole life, you have to understand what customers want, what customers will pay for. Not necessarily what they tell you they want, because what they tell you they want might change over time, but you have to understand what they really want and most importantly what they will pay money for, and how much it's going to cost you to produce what they're going to pay money for, and whether there is money to be made in that transaction. Once you understand that, and once you understand the business model and the needs, that'll help you build a business. People coming from a technology perspective focus on the technology and don't think that way. So you have to be able to change your mindset. Once you do that, and it's not that hard to do, you will have an advantage over people who are not technologists because you understand the technology. Someone who doesn't have a technical background is thinking in abstraction. If you understand the technology and you understand what customers are looking for, that's when you really have the opportunity to make a huge difference in the marketplace.

No. I don't have an MBA, and I certainly have a management role. It isn't necessary. Certainly, MBAs give you skills, but it's important to recognize that one of the key elements of an MBA is not necessarily just the skills, but it's also the networking. If you go to a really prestigious institution, you will meet other people there who are also going to be successful in their careers, and that gives you a network to rely on as you move forward in your own career. It also gives you a shortcut to understand finance, marketing, and leadership. A good MBA will teach you a lot of things that you will pick up over the years. As I reflect on my own career, if I had had an MBA, I would have had a shortcut to learning many of the things that I've learned over the years, but it would have just been taught to me in a very focused way, which would have been easier for me to consume than the way that I did. Anything that I've learned about business has been self-taught. My only educational credentials are technical: degrees in mechanical engineering and computer science. I don't have a degree in business. But I don't practice those; I'm not a practicing computer scientist or engineer. I work in a company where the skills required of me are business skills, and over time I've picked up financial skills and marketing skills. But an MBA gives you an opportunity to learn those in a very concentrated way. The question is how do you apply those skills, and is the institution to which you're going going to give you more than just access to books, which you could read on your own? Are they going to give you access to a network of people? That's why I would think long and hard about an MBA. Any MBA is not a good thing; a good MBA, in my opinion, is a good thing. But you don't need a good MBA to be successful in your career, just like you don't need a PhD to be successful. Your career is based on many different things; education is one aspect of that.

Well, it depends on what you mean by a leader. If by leader you mean that you're in a position where you have responsibility over other people, you're managing a team of people, for example, or leading a team of people, then I think it's really important to understand how to lead people. Leadership and motivating people and getting an organization to come along with you is not obvious. You have to really think about leadership styles and what your style is, what the style of the individual is. It's not something that is intuitively obvious overnight; it's something that you have to really think about. Frankly, doing some reading gives you a perspective on leadership styles. There are plenty of business books out there, and I would recommend that if you're interested, you spend a little bit of time and look out for whatever is most convenient. In business, there are a number of principles that people repeat in book after book after book. So you don't have to read a particular book, but you just have to understand the principles. Some of them are pretty universal and helpful to understand. But it's very important to read a book about leadership and to understand what the tools are that you need to develop. Part of that is being introspective to understand your own strengths and weaknesses, and part of that is understanding the individual that you're dealing with. I'll give you a very specific example of one way of thinking about an interaction. Let's assume you're a manager and you're trying to work with one of your team members. You have to think about what you're asking them against their capabilities. There's something called a skill-will matrix. Are they willing or unwilling to do the job that you think needs to be done? Are they able or unable? Depending on where that individual fits in that two-by-two matrix, you have to change your style of interaction with them. If they're able to do the job but unwilling, you have to sell them on the importance of it. If they are willing to do the job but unable, you have to show them how to do it. If they're willing and able, you have to delegate. If they're unwilling and unable, then perhaps you have a real problem and you need to think about potentially getting someone else in or making a change. That's a very simple example of how to think about it. These are all shorthands that I've developed over the years as I get into situations, and it's just second nature in terms of thinking about how to work with someone and with a group of people. Some of this comes from experience, some from learning, some from watching. I have the benefit of having been a manager or leader in large organizations for many, many years. As a result, these are natural to me. But learning how to motivate people, especially in a multinational corporation, or learning how to work with customers or team members who might be remote or in different parts of the world, all of those things require skills. That's why I made the comment about emotional intelligence and EQ. Learning how to work with people, what motivates them, what's important for them, and factoring that into your conversations is important. It's not only what you know; it's how you work with people that allows one to be a more successful leader. Some of the people from whom I've learned have been charismatic leaders who have helped me in my career. Certainly watching them, but also watching how they interact on stage, how they talk to people, how they think about scenarios. That's the other aspect. When you're in a situation, find somebody that you think could be a mentor, an informal mentor. Reach out to someone and say, 'Hey, listen, would you mind spending a little bit of time with me outside of the normal management structure? I'd like to get your advice. I like the way that you're thinking about running your business. I'd like to learn from that.' Those are useful things because most people are very happy to be in a mentoring relationship with someone else in the organization. So start to use the informal tools that are available to you, not just the formal tools, to try to develop these skills.

That's great, sir.

It's developed. In my mind, leadership skills can be developed. I don't necessarily think of myself as being a leader today. I am very different than I was 10 years ago, and I'm different than I was 10 years prior to that. I'm the same person, maybe a little bit older, maybe a little bit slower, but I'm the same person. What's changed is the experiences that I've had, the ability to improve myself, and the willingness to try to become a better person and to learn to become a better leader. As long as your mind is open, you're learning all the time, you're challenging yourself, you're taking on responsibilities, you're trying to put yourself in positions where you're uncomfortable. All of the things that I talked about earlier, as you start to go through all of those, you'll experience different things, and those will all make you a better leader. They will give you better instincts. As far as leadership is concerned, I think it's a misnomer to believe that there are some people who are born to be leaders and some people who will not want to be leaders. That's simply not the case. It just doesn't work that way. People step up and show leadership in some cases where you'll see leadership from unexpected places in the organization. Remember, leadership is not about titles. Just because I have a particular title, if I'm a VP of something or a director of something, it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm a leader. The leader in an organization might be someone who is able to step up and exhibit the properties that are necessary at that particular time. I'll give you a very simple example. If I were running an airline, if I were the head of an airline, and I'm in an airplane, the leader of the airplane is not the head of the airline, but it's the employee who is the pilot. The pilot is responsible for that flight, and if the pilot says do this, everyone's going to do exactly what the pilot says because in that particular situation, the notion of leadership is contextual. Who is the right person to exhibit the leadership? Who is the right person to lead the organization at that particular time? You're in a plane, the plane's flying, it requires attention. It's the pilot that's the most qualified; that's the person in the right place, and everyone listens to that individual. When you think about leadership styles, the old leadership style that a lot of people may be familiar with is a more command and control structure. The teacher walks in and says do this, and you do it because the teacher is the authority figure. The manager tells you do this, and you do it because the manager is the authority figure. The captain tells you in the army, and you do it because the captain is the authority figure. That is no longer the case. Leadership is not anymore about command and control. There are so many different styles of leadership, and you can read books about this. But the most important style is really leadership that comes from who you are. It's not about who you know or your position, but it's about who you are and the attributes that you've developed, what you bring to the job that establishes you as a leader. In times of crisis, when you're working with a company and there's a product crisis, they're not going to turn to the manager; they're going to turn to the person who is the product expert to go fix it. I remember in my career, many years ago when I was in IBM Research, I was working with one of the development divisions to help them bring a product to market. Deadline time, things were behind schedule. We were all late at night in the office in San Jose, California. The manager was there, the manager was non-technical, he had nothing to contribute. All he would do was go out and get food for everyone. I thought it was really important. He could have gone home because he wasn't the technical guy, but what he wanted to do was be with his team. He said, 'Let me go get food for everyone because you guys are working, and I'm going to do the right thing.' People take on different roles at different times. It doesn't make you any less as a leader if you are trying to support other people in your organization and pushing them forward because they happen to be the people who are necessary at that particular point. So it's a complex model, and you have to have a mental structure to think about all this stuff.

I do work out, I do exercise, and I do keep time for myself. At the end of the day, you're not going to be successful at work if you're sick. So you have to look after yourself. I used to run marathons when I was in my 20s. When I was at IIT, we had a mountaineering club. I know it was shut down subsequent to my departure; when I was there, we didn't really have any catastrophic accidents, but I know that there were some subsequent to that. So I used to do mountaineering and rock climbing at IIT. Subsequently, when I left, I used to run. Now I ride a bike and work out. I think it's very important to be active. If you let go of your health, it's just really problematic for you and for your family. So I think that's important. I think it's important to read. Any good leader or any individual has to have a broad set of inputs. You have to go out and collect information, read what you agree with and what you don't agree with. So I read a lot, and I'm up to date on a number of different things. I read books. To the point about meditation, I don't sit down and have 30 minutes of meditation every day, but I do try to enjoy time by myself, so it's a form of meditation but not in any structured or formal way. One of the important skills that I'll add is the notion of being able to compartmentalize. What do I mean by compartmentalization? No matter how challenging the day, and sometimes I have very challenging days when there's a lot of things going on, I get pulled into different conversations. Sometimes I'm talking with board members, sometimes investors, sometimes employees, sometimes customers. Some are good conversations, some are not so good. Some are about the future, some about the past. There's a lot of context switching going on. Every time you come into a meeting, the person in the meeting has no idea what you've been through or what your day's been like. Your day could have been great or rotten. They have no idea. When you come home to your family, your kids have no idea what your day has been like. You have to be able to compartmentalize, which means you have to be able to take everything that happened to that point, put it behind you, and restart for the next event. The next event has got to be the most important thing for you to deal with, and then you can move on. For me, I actually create a metaphor for myself. I've practiced this over the years. I imagine a box. Before I go into or start a new thing, I imagine taking whatever I'm thinking about, if I'm thinking about a problem or something that happened that I'm very upset about, I imagine taking that and putting it in a box, closing the lid, and putting it to one side. I explicitly have in my mind closing the box and putting it to one side. Then I restart and go back to the next meeting. So even if I'm going from a meeting which is contentious into another meeting which is quite the opposite, or from a meeting which is not contentious into one that is contentious, I'm ready for the meeting that's appropriate because I've effectively reset. Over the years, I've trained myself to compartmentalize. By the way, that also means I sleep really well at night. When I go to bed, I'm able to do exactly the same thing. Whatever I'm thinking about, I know some people will say they stay up at night thinking and tossing and turning. I sleep like a baby. Well, babies don't sleep so well sometimes. I sleep like a very well-fed baby for a short period of time. I sleep the whole night because I'm able to, before I go to sleep, just focus on compartmentalizing and calming myself down, and I kind of go to sleep. So I think all of these things are important. What I do may not be relevant for what you do; you may do things in a different way. But being able to context switch, separating work and family, is very important. Certainly when you have children, especially when your kids are younger, they have no idea what you do or the pressures you're dealing with. The most important thing that they want you to be is present when you're with them. Not just physically present, but emotionally and mentally present. If you're physically present and emotionally distant, or you're thinking about what's happening at work, it creates tension in the minds of the children that isn't helpful for them and hasn't been helpful for you. At the end of the day, what are you working for? What is your career for? It's family. Those are the things that are really important. So how do you think about being able to move from one context to another? Compartmentalization is a very good skill to have.

Success... I try to address this in my comments. I don't think that there's any one-size-fits-all for success. It isn't a matter of... I can't expect what I have done to be success for you. I appreciate that you think that I've been successful, and I'm flattered. But I don't feel any different from the guy that I was when I graduated from IIT in 1982. To me, I'm still the same person. I really am the same person. I don't feel any different. I don't feel like I'm a success now and I wasn't a success then. That's not how I feel. What I am most proud of is my family, my kids. I've been married for 31 years, just last week. I've got two boys. My boys are great kids. My wife and I have a great relationship. I'm close to my sibling. That to me is the most important thing. It's not whether I had my current job or not, whether I had more money or less money, whether I had a bigger job or a smaller job. That would be less important than this other aspect of family. So I think all of us have to pick ultimately what your own metrics of success are. Is it money? Is it status? Is it power? Is it family? Is it accomplishments? Is it changing the world? Was Einstein a success? By a thousand metrics, Einstein was a success. But you could also, if you read books, see that he had a relatively unhappy family life. You see this trade-off between family and work and accomplishments. If you're changing the world and bringing the whole world along with you, it's very difficult to bring along a couple of kids with you. If you're trying to focus on your kids, sometimes it might be more difficult to focus on bringing the whole world with you. So what is important for you? What do you want to accomplish? As I was saying before this session started, I'm in touch with my batchmates from IIT. We're in a WhatsApp group, and we get together every weekend ever since this pandemic started. We've been getting together every weekend or every other weekend on a video conference call. There may be 30, 50, 70, maybe 100 people on the call. We had a relatively small class of about 200-something people graduating, so up to 50 of the class is still on the call. Different people talk about their experiences and what they're passionate about. Some people talk about the environment, some about farming, some about photography. Every one of them, to me, is a success. The stories that they tell are stories where they've made profound differences, where they've changed people around them, made an impact on people's lives. That's success. So it isn't ultimately about making money. It's about the impact, the changes that you've made, how you're affecting society, and how you've realized that and lived your life. So I think success has no universal definition.

Well, I think it's important obviously there are classes, and I would recommend you attend classes. That's always a good start. Go about doing what you need to do. But look, I learned a tremendous amount when I was at IIT. With all respect to my professors, I learned probably as much, if not more, from my classmates than I did from my professors. I learned from other people in the class, from people in the hostel. I was in Hostel 5, Room 226, a room which I visited recently which looks like it hasn't been painted since I left. I made a number of friends over the years, and I learned from them not just about academics, but about becoming a better person. IIT was five years when I was there. I started in 1977; I was 15 years old when I started, and I graduated when I was 20. So for me, when I went to IIT, I was a kid. My view of the world was shaped not just in classes, but by the people around me. The way I think, I don't think the same way that I did then, but the methodology of thinking, the structure of learning, all of that was set in those years. So I think it's very important for all of you to maintain those connections. This community of colleagues and friends, as I said, I get together with my graduating class on WhatsApp, and we do this years after graduating in 1982. We're still in touch with each other. Maintaining that relationship and keeping that connection is going to be important. So think about not just work, but the social fabric of what makes you a class, what makes you colleagues, what makes you classmates or institute mates. Focus on that piece of it. The other piece, and you mentioned it, I think it's important to recognize that in this time, especially when you're away from the university, I see this in the US with many of my friends and colleagues who are professors. They are concerned about mental health in students. Mental health and people feeling depressed because they're by themselves and don't have the ability to interact in the same way that they could before. For many years, discussions of mental health have for some reason had a stigma associated with them, and that's certainly not the case. I would encourage anyone who's feeling down, feeling depressed, to reach out and get help because it's an important aspect. Being social is an important aspect of who we are. When you're remote from campus, make sure that you monitor yourselves, make sure that you're emotionally in a good place, and make sure that you're physically in a good place. Go out, work out. You may not have access to the institute's facilities, the gymkhana, the weights room, or the swimming pool in the same way, but at least find a mechanism for you to be able to work out. Keep a regimen going. Focus not only on your academics but also on your social, mental health, and physical health. That makes you a better person as you come out of it. All of those are important aspects throughout your life, but certainly as you're separated from your colleagues and friends and the experience that's so important to you, which is the undergraduate or graduate experience at IIT.

Sure, one more question.

As I said, authority is not something that you assert because of position. The most fragile form of authority is 'You have to do what I tell you because you work for me. I'm your manager, and I'm going to tell you to do this, and you must do it.' That is the most fragile form of authority. It will allow you to get something done in an immediate moment, like right now I want to get something done, go do this, and you go do it. But every time you do that, imagine that you're undermining your long-term ability to support an individual and to maintain your authority. The way you balance it is you try to be a leader who is able to understand how to connect the different people in the organization, how to bring their points of view together, and how to drive cohesion across the organization. Don't try to tell people what to do, but try to lead people by focusing on other styles of leadership than just simply being authoritarian. I don't know if that answers the question, but if you do that, you're able to make that connection. People like to work for people they like. Just because someone works for you doesn't mean that you can't be friends. But you also have to recognize that in that position as a leader, you have to make decisions. You have to give people performance reviews, you have to make decisions about individuals. So if you're at work, you're not at work to be friends; you're at work to get a job done. The fact that you're friends is great, but you have to think about your leadership styles in the right way. It's a complicated mix of how to manage all this. There's no simple answer, but you have to think about the styles and what's important for you to get the job done.

Thank you, everyone. I appreciate your attention. Thanks so much.