New year, new podcast season! Trainconsulting CEO and Consultant Lothar Wenzl and Journalist, Author and avowed Feminist Mari Lang start the 2nd season of “Die Schöne und das Biest. Warum schöne Organisationen die Welt verändern” with none other than Nipun Mehta.
Nipun is the founder of ServiceSpace an incubator of projects that support a gift culture, the so called “Giftivism”. But how exactly does a company profit from this and why is it so important to think about different types of capital and not only in the financial way? In this episode the visionary also shares his thoughts on how AI affects companies and how he would describe a beautiful organisation in his words: “What exactly is beauty when two hearts come together?”
I would hire a human being because of the context. Because you are not just your content. If we have just reduced people to content, that game is going to be over because the price of knowledge is going to be zero.
Nipun Mehta
At the age of 13 Nipun Mehta emigrated from India to the USA with the dream of becoming a tennis pro or a Himalayan Yogi.
Instead he decided to study computer science and philosophy at the elite University of Berkeley and became a software engineer. But soon after he quit his job to become a “fulltime volunteer”.
In 1999 Nipun founded the NGO ServiceSpace, a global movemement centered around volunteering with over 1.5 million members.
Dalai Lama honored him as an “Unsung Hero of Compassion” and U.S. President Barack Obama appointed him to a council for addressing poverty and inequality in the United States.
Currently he is travelling the world as a speaker and leader of the “Awakin Circles”.
We don’t just want to talk about improving, we actually want to improve. Send us your feedback to dieschoeneunddasbiest@trainconsulting.eu.
If you don’t want to listen, you have to read! Here you can enjoy the podcast in written form:
“ Die Schöne und das Biest. Warum schöne Organisationen die Welt verändern.”
A Podcast fromMari Lang and Trainconsulting CEO Lothar Wenzl.
Nipun Mehta: By any metric, you cannot say that we have beautiful organizations, we really don’t. We have organizations that beg for innovation.
Lothar Wenzl: Beautiful is about people making mistakes, learning from them and then getting to another level.
Nipun Mehta: If anyone who understands modern technology gives you a five-year plan, you are not going to be a successful CEO. You can say that with a guarantee because you have no idea. If you look, it took TV 75 years to get to 100 million users, Netflix ten years, and ChatGPT two months. As soon as you move your center of gravity towards more givers, you have so many upstream benefits.
Lothar Wenzl: It’s the human social systems that we are talking about. It’s humans who are at the center of the communication and the action organization, but we have forgotten that.
Nipun Mehta: If I’m the head of a company and I’m just trying to extract from everyone for personal profit, it is going to be a very logical next step to say, “Why would I hire Lothar when I can get an AI that’s got ten times his IQ and doesn’t get tired? It constantly works and it produces content.”
Marie Lang: Why would you hire Lothar?
Nipun Meha: I would hire a human being because of the context.
Lothar Wenzl: What can you say after Buddha? Nothing can come.
Mari Lang: Now Lothar Wenzl.
Lothar Wenzl: Yes. Thank you.
Mari Lang: In this episode, we are talking to Nipun Mehta, a US citizen, born in India, who has studied computer science and philosophy. He is the founder of Service Space, an incubator of projects that operate at the intersection of volunteerism, technology, and gift economy, which has now grown into a global ecosystem of over one point million members and has delivered millions of dollars in service for free.
Marie Lang: He’s been honored as the Unsung Hero of Compassion by the Dalai Lama and was appointed by former US President Barack Obama to a council for addressing poverty and inequality in the United States. Before we talk about leadership in modern organizations and how artificial intelligence might shape our everyday work in the future, we will describe Nipun Mehta, like all our guests on the podcast, by his sounds.
Nipun Mehta: Could it be a tennis ball?
Mari Lang: How do you know that?
Nipun Mehta: Tennis was a big part of my life growing up. It taught me so many lessons, actually, about life, effort, surrender and flow. It taught me a lot about winning and losing as well. You play to win, usually, and then at some point you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t like losing but every time I win, I’m giving that bad feeling to other people.”
That was a profound moment for me when I first had that thought and I was like, “Can I arrange my life around more infinite games rather than these finite games where your winning comes at the cost of other people losing?”
Mari Lang: I will now play another sound, which is the loudest we’ve ever played.
Nipun Mehta: Sound of silence.
Mari Lang: Yes. What’s that got to do with you?
Nipun Mehta: Oh, I think it’s everything for me. So much of music comes from silence. Without the silence in between the notes, you wouldn’t have music and so how do you learn to embrace that? I think we have a society that’s biased towards the notes, so to speak, the action, but how do you glue that action together into coherence through silence? Silence is a pretty big part of my life.
Mari Lang: If you’re open to it, then silence can always sound different.
Nipun Mehta: The silence is pretty loud. It’s a pretty amazing party.
Mari Lang: We’ll have a party today, but maybe not totally in silence. Hello and welcome to this podcast episode, the first one in English because we have an international guest with us. Hi, Nipun.
Nipun Mehta: Hello.
Mari Lang: It’s so nice to have you here.
Nipun Mehta: Happy to be here.
Mari Lang: Maybe we’ll start with the definition. You’re always talking about gift tourism and a gift economy. What do you mean by that?
Nipun Mehta: I think a gift economy is a shift from transaction to relationship. Transaction has a very narrow sense of reciprocity and it’s usually direct reciprocity. If I give to you, what are you giving back to me?
Nipun Mehta: If we expand it to indirect reciprocity that my mom does something for me, I do something for my brother, my brother does something for my dad, what goes around comes around. It keeps on circulating.
I think the shift that we can bring from direct reciprocity to indirect reciprocity is facilitated by different cultures of gifts. How do we bring that into circulation? That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about. We’ve done a lot of different experiments, including Karma Kitchen here in Vienna.
Mari Lang: Is Karma Kitchen a restaurant chain where people don’t pay for their food, but they are paid for by the one who’s come before and they will pay for the next one?
Nipun Mehta: Yes. You go into a restaurant, you have a meal like you would at any other time, but your check reads zero. It’s zero because someone before you has paid for you, someone you don’t know. You’re forced to expand your sense of care for people before you, and then you get to pay forward whatever you want for people after you.
You’re expanding your sense of reciprocity from, “Here’s my money, and this is owed to me.” to thinking in a much broader way, “What happens when we do that individually and what happens when we do that collectively?”
Mari Lang: Is that working in a sense of traditional economy, and when you think about capital?
Nipun Mehta: Yes. In Vienna, they just had it at a restaurant called the Full Pension for three months right here this summer. A lot of people say, “Oh, can it work? Can you actually trust people to pay forward? Will they do that?” This goes against the dominant paradigm narrative, which is that people are fundamentally selfish and aim to maximize self-interest.
We said, “Yes, if they do, then this is going to fail.” It’s okay, we tried, but what we discovered is quite the opposite that people respond to generosity with greater generosity. It’s not going to work for every single thing, but it’s going to work where you can create strong context.
Nipun Mehta: Context matters, but we are so driven by content alone. If you’re just doing content and if you just do a buffet line and say, “Everyone, pay for whatever you want.” it wouldn’t work. If you walk in and underneath your table is a quote and on your table there’s a notepad where you can write a note for people after you and you can flip it back and read what someone before you on that table has done, it starts to expand your consciousness. You take something that is transactional, which is a very narrow form of reciprocity, and you use that excuse to build a much bigger reciprocity.
Mari Lang: You work with a lot of companies. We were talking about restaurants now, are there any fields of business where you can see this model working without questioning it?
Nipun Mehta: My first answer is no, because not directly. What I see in our work with organizations and with people as such, is that there is a big longing for that, for resonance, contact, for being together and for just being able to give. In my life, I always had the feeling that I have more joy in giving than in receiving a present, for example, because it brings so much back to me.
I get so much for giving anyway and this is for sure also one of the concepts behind it. As you said, context matters. If the context is a capitalist, very competition-driven context, that’s very different.
Nipun Mehta: The belief systems are in contrast to those of capitalism of the classic form, neoliberal, or whatever capitalism is against them. I think people are wired for it because this is our foundation and because we come from nature and go to nature.
We have a big longing for that, and that’s what we see in organizations as well. That’s why we also strive so much for, “What does your company give to the world?” and not, “Take from the world.” because the exploitation of resources is widespread. We know that.
Nipun Mehta: You can narrow that down into finer and finer delta. You can look at your employees and not say, “How am I extracting the maximum amount from them for my purposes, and even start to expand your sense of wealth from just financial capital to other forms of capital. All too often, even with generosity, we are all wired to care.
There’s tons of evidence around that, but all too often we make generosity into a luxury sport. We say, “First, you need to have to give.” I think what that undermines is that there are so many different forms of wealth and, usually, when we relate to each other, we sometimes evoke our self-centeredness even in giving.
Nipun Mehta: We say, “I have and you don’t have.” which is a secret way of feeling more power. That’s the sympathy model. That’s how we do aid in the world. That’s how we say, “Oh, you should give.” “Who should I give to?” “Oh, that poor person.” What we don’t realize is that that person has a certain poverty and they need a certain wealth.
I have a certain wealth, but I also have a certain poverty. If you’re able to engage with people in that way, then it’s no longer a transaction from my wealth to your poverty. It’s actually a relationship between all my expressions of wealth and all my expressions of poverty, coming together with all your expressions of wealth and expressions of poverty.
Nipun Mehta: When you bring that together, the coherence you get and the productivity that it actually leads to, is remarkable. It’s a very different frame to look at it, and Adam Grant at Wharton has done a lot of work around givers, takers and matchers. As soon as you move your center of gravity towards more givers, you actually have so many upstream benefits.
Mari Lang: Also, when we talk about capital, most of the time we talk about financial capital. That’s what companies are always ranked with, like how much money they make and earn. Nipun, you say there is more capital than just a financial one?
Nipun Mehta: Yes, definitely.
Mari Lang: On which capital should companies maybe focus on, to be a beautiful organization, as Lothar is saying?
Nipun Mehta: For instance, there’s time capital, people want to volunteer. Your employee retention is much better. Your attrition is much lower if you support your employees in volunteering in places where they are called to volunteer. There’s a lot of research around that. You say, “Okay, that’s time capital. How do I amplify that? How do I circulate that? How do I allow that to build on itself?” You can even look at things like attention capital. We were talking about…
Mari Lang: May I just quickly interrupt here with the time capital, because now I hear a critical voice saying, “Within a company, I have so much work anyway and now I should do volunteer work as well.” I have my family and I have so much to do. That sounds to me almost like…
Nipun Mehta: More stress.
Mari Lang: Yes. How would you react to someone criticizing that saying, “How should we do that? We don’t have any time anyway.”
Nipun Mehta: I think all too often that’s usually an untested hypothesis. There’s some very interesting research. Again, Adam Grant references this. He says that we tend to think, “Oh my God, I have so many things, and so to return to my center, I need to stop those things and go to a spa or take a vacation.”
There is interesting evidence that shows that changing the nature of your work and doing things that actually make you come alive, ends up being regenerative for you. Less is not always more, because they did this research with teachers who are burnt out.
When you’re burnt out, you say, “Okay, one more program.” for you to avoid burnout. That just feels overwhelming. With this control group, they actually gave them more things to do, that were more aligned with their values and what made them come alive. They added things that reduced the stress over there. I don’t think it’s quite a simple linear equation the way we tend to simplistically talk about some of this.
Lothar Wenzl: I would agree because we also know from research that stress does not come from doing more work at the same time. It comes from doing work that you either don’t like or work that doesn’t make any sense to you, or whatever. That’s what increases stress.
The other thing I would like to comment on, is that I even think that we need to find different language on notions like capital. We cannot use these words anymore because they are taken by the capitalistic system. We need to find other expressions to change our world and therefore then change our actions.
I think whatever that means because time is never an excuse, it’s always a priority. “What do I want to spend my next two hours on?” is always a decision we can make. I know it’s very hard. In this way of living most of us, including myself, find it hard to make these decisions well.
Nipun Mehta: Similarly, you can apply the same sort of skepticism to attention capital, attention wealth or attention period, if you don’t want to use those words. I remember one of my friends runs a very leveraged private equity firm on Wall Street. One of his staff comes in and says, “We should do a minute of silence before our meetings.” He’s like, “No, why would we waste our time? We bill every three minutes.” Even a minute feels like it’s just stress, but as soon as they did that, they were like, “Oh, that actually regenerated the other two minutes that we were billing or the rest of the day.
“Not only did it regenerate that, but it changed the dynamic between me and others because I was interrupting other people less, and that had all these upstream benefits of collaboration and productivity and all of that. I think we have to use this counterintuitive logic to just test the hypothesis like, is it really going to take more or is it going to add more? Your baseline is pretty low in traditional organizations’ dissatisfaction.
The quitting mindset is so high, and so you’re like, “Okay, clearly your ideas and your current status quo are not working out for you.” By any metric, you cannot say, “We have beautiful organizations.” We really don’t. We actually have organizations that beg for innovation, and we haven’t innovated organizations for a long time. It’s like, “If we are going to innovate, what will be that radical new way to go about it?” Frederic Lillo has done some very interesting work around organizing.
He says, “We initially organized as wolf packs.” which was very reactive. We then went from that to organizing in command and control settings, which are armies and churches, that kind of thing. You then had modern-day corporations that were more machine-like. Your boss says, “Either you do this job or if you don’t do it, I’ll fire you and find somebody else to do it.” To comment on that, it’s not even to go back to something we already had, it’s that we have never seen different forms of it.
We have never seen what we are now talking about, new work or beautiful organization. However you call it, we have never experienced that yet. It’s not easy because we have no mind concepts and no consciousness for that because we have never seen it. Lillo says, “You go from corporations to purpose-driven organizations and a living systems approach.”
When you say living systems approach, it’s like what we were talking about earlier, that if all your wealth and poverty comes together with all my wealth and poverty, that’s a high bandwidth connection. Who do you have to be to hold high bandwidth connections? It’s much easier to say, “I just want you as a radio host and I just want you as a note taker and I just want you as this. I don’t want to hold all of you, for it in all ways.” If you can actually be that person, you will get so much more possibility in your institutions in any effort that you make.
Lothar Wenzl: We are currently more talking about this because social system is also a term we use in systemic thinking. We try to go beyond that because it’s the human social system we are talking about.
It’s humans that are in the center, that do the communication and then the action organization, but we have forgotten that because of Taylorism, and for good reasons at that time tried to pull the persons and the individuals out of the process because they are error-prone. That’s why we need to go at least back to a concept where humans are in the center because they run the organization, especially with AI around the corner.
Mari Lang: I just wanted to say, isn’t the whole development going in the other direction, that we don’t see the human in the center but we see the new technologies in the center? That’s also a topic you deal with a lot. You think a lot about how artificial intelligence will affect us as humans and also our society and companies.
Nipun Mehta: Absolutely, yes. If my algorithm is extractive, if I’m the head of a company and I’m just trying to extract from everyone for personal profit, it will be a very logical next step to say, “Why would I hire Lothar when I can get an AI that’s got ten times his IQ? When it doesn’t get tired, it constantly works and it produces content.”
Mari Lang: Why would you hire?
Nipun Mehta: I would hire a human being. I would hire Lothar because of the context. Because you are not just your content. If we have just reduced people to content, that game is going to be over because the price of knowledge is going to be zero. Are we much more than that or what is something unique that human beings can offer? What is the way in which we come together as two beings? What happens in that field of emergence where it’s not just one plus one is two, it’s much more than two.
If we can hold that possibility, then it’s like, “Yes, I want humans at the center of the organization.” If you’ve just been running at this thing that my purpose of coming together here is to get a radio show, why even have me in the studio? What difference does that make to the person listening? How does who I am affect how I relate to you in real life and how does that affect the person listening to the content on the radio?
There is a through line, but if we don’t see the through line… If I’m the boss of this radio station and I’m saying, “The net output is that you have a show and I monetize the attention of people, and that’s my bottom line.” In that case, you would not want to waste your time doing this whole thing.
You would say, “We could do a Zoom call.” At some point, you don’t even need a Zoom call, you just talk to my bot and it’ll give you answers. There are many podcasts with AI. I was very moved by, I don’t know if that’s the right word, Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, interviewed Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs passed away.
Lothar Wenzl: I heard it, yes.
Nipun Mehta: You were like, “Wow.” Eric Schmidt of Google says, “I was moved to tears because I knew Steve for 35 years and this is exactly how he would respond.” Is it just content?
When you talk about beautiful organizations underneath it, you’re asking the question, “What exactly is beauty when two hearts come together?” If you can’t ask that question, if you’re just rooted in productivity, then I think that’s a whole different trajectory. We actually need leaders to step into this possibility. We think of it as social permaculture, leading with the context of a field and not just the fruits.
Mari Lang: First of all, I’m glad he says that he would hire human beings because you’re very much into AI, I know.
Lothar Wenzl: Bringing it on to the concept of a beautiful organization, for me, is very clear because only human beings can be in resonance with each other. Resonance meaning is not just question and answer, it’s a dialogue with an open end.
We don’t know where it will lead to, what emotions are underneath and what emotions drive us to be creative, for example, together, because it’s not one plus one having a dialogue. It’s one plus one a dialogue, in creating an own communication system that leads to something else, something much higher. This one plus one would then be 11, as my friend Stelios says.
Mari Lang: As we have a lot of critics out there, I have to fulfill this role.
Nipun Mehta: Yes. Thank you.
Mari Lang: You can’t just be like, “Yes, beautiful.”
Nipun Mehta: It’s a good life.
Mari Lang: Exactly. One thing that humans also do is make mistakes and machines more or less, you can somehow try to erase the mistakes and make them more efficient and so on. How would you deal with this? I was thinking about what Lothar said, “We don’t know the outcome of this interview and we don’t know where it’s going to lead.
This, for a company, can also be a threat. We don’t know where it’s going, we want it to be successful, we want to monetize and we want to get out in the market. If we don’t know where we’re going, how do we deal with that, with mistakes?
Nipun Mehta: Uncertainty, you’re saying. I think this is why AI is so powerful and it’s a great opportunity because anyone who understands modern technology, if they give you a five-year plan, they are not going to be a successful CEO. You can say that with a guarantee because you have no idea. If you look, it took TV 75 years to get to a hundred million users. Netflix takes ten years, ChatGPT takes two months, and Facebook Threads takes five days.
These are revolutionary things that end up disrupting everything and if you had a five-year plan last year and you said, “I’m sticking to it and I’m using all my might to get to that end.” that is an example of a bad CEO. That company is going down. We live in such an era of rapid change that CEOs have to be agile and leaders have to be adaptive. What does it mean to lead an ecosystem in times when you actually cannot see the future? We cannot see, it’s not just a theoretical or a spiritual idea, we’re really at a technological real level.
Nipun Mehta: You have no idea what innovation is just going to spring up on you and change everything. AI is creating these radical innovations almost by the week and so I think it changes the kind of leader that you need in times like this. To me, it’s a great opportunity to innovate organizations and leadership.
Lothar Wenzl: I would respond to your critique, which is fine and very, very helpful. To beauty or beautiful organizations, as you said, people make mistakes and exactly that is the reason what beautiful is about. Beautiful is about people making mistakes, learning from them, and then getting to another level.
A beautiful organization is an organization that says, “We are not the sum total of our products and our output. We are actually the sum total of our relationships and what is happening in the space between us.”
Nipun Mehta
Lothar Wenzl: As you said, CEOs or whoever runs something like a company or an organization, make plans falls short of life because life is happening while you’re making plans, as John Lennon already said, by the way. You will fall short because, as you say, we have no idea what is around the corner even next week. You need to make mistakes and this is what beauty is about because beauty has the darkness, the light and everything in it. That’s beautiful, otherwise it would not be beautiful.
Mari Lang: You would train in consulting. You have six criteria for beautiful organizations. We’ve been talking about that in the past season of the podcast. How would you, Nipun, describe a beautiful organization? What criteria must a beautiful organization have and can you relate to this term?
Nipun Mehta: I like the term. There was a Tibetan monk who asked a very interesting question one time. He said, “What is aesthetic thought?” Even before you get to organizations, you need people in the organizations. If you nuance it further, all people are having many thoughts.
Nipun Mehta: What is the architecture of an aesthetic thought? I think there’s a through line that you can draw from an aesthetic thought, which, to me, is a thought of compassion and connection to relationships that are in the field of this regenerative beauty, to then systems that amplify this possibility.
Now, to me, if you were to say, “What is one core characteristic of a beautiful organization?” I would say, it’s an organization that is rooted in emergence. Even in this notion of failure, you can only have failure if you have a predetermined idea of what the destination is.
A beautiful organization is an organization that says, “We are not the sum total of our products and our output. We are actually the sum total of our relationships and what is happening in the space between us.” Because if you take care of the relationships, then naturally there’s going to be all kinds of emergent output and emergent impact in the world. How do we learn or what innovations does it take? How do we marry the narrow margin propensity of technologies with the broad margin propensities of the heart?
Mari Lang: You say relationships are one of the key values you would see in a company. Now I say, again, critically what I experienced with a lot of modern companies when they talk about new work and stuff like that and a lot of IT companies, they pretend to be like a family.
Mari Lang: They do a lot for relationships and they go on retreats and they do family things where all the families are invited and stuff like that. On the other hand, the next day, they get numbers from I don’t know where and they just fire a bunch of people.
That, for me, is like a contradiction because if I am in a relationship, I cannot handle people as numbers. How can we deal with this? On the one hand, talking about relationships, but then on the other hand, seeing there is actually no relationship. It’s just fake. Do you understand what I’m saying?
Nipun Mehta: Absolutely. I wouldn’t say it’s fake, but I would say that there are two ways to look at some of this stuff, all the interventions that accompany does. One is a strategic intervention and the other is a principled intervention.
A strategic intervention is, “I’m stressing out all my employees and could you come in and please lead a mindfulness meditation class for them?” Why? As a pacifier for the status quo. I can continue to be greedy and extractive and all the stress is now pacified through all of this work. That’s what you’re saying, that so many people will have these retreats. “Let’s be relational, we’ll give you time to volunteer and let’s bring your family in.
“We have this purpose.” and they lead with that purpose but underneath it, there’s a distinction between a strategic intervention, which is done for the sake of extraction versus principled value-based. The principled practice of generosity, for instance. What does it mean to be a leader who when somebody knocks on your door, you’re going to make time?
There are leaders like that, very famous people even, who have zero time and they will say, “Anyone who knocks on my door, I’m willing to give them a five-minute meeting.” That’s the practice that you do and can you have a culture of that practice? I think that there is a very big distinction between strategic interventions and principled interventions.
One nuance I would add to this is that I think leadership is hard work. It’s not like, “Hey, I care for all employees and I want to keep them all happy.” because you sometimes get into these zero-sum games where, if you keep one person happy, the other person’s not happy. It’s very complex. I think the thing about leadership is that you’re not choosing between right and wrong, that would be easy.
You have to choose between right and right. If you’re choosing between right and right and you are evaluating these two positions, on what basis? What is your core algorithm, and underneath the algorithm, what are the values that you’re optimized for?
Usually, if you go and ask leaders, what are the core values you stand for? They just haven’t done that work. When you are tested with all these different competing priorities, your center of gravity ends up being very wobbly. This is where before we can even innovate or maybe as we innovate organizations into a greater beauty, I think we will need a population and leadership that is rooted in a deeper clarity around what they value, why they value it and how they communicate that.
Mari Lang: I can see this totally when it comes to startup companies and companies that are just built. When you start from scratch, you can find your system within this system. What is it with traditional companies? Because all companies function in the system we’re in right now and that’s a capitalistic neoliberal system.
If things have been the way they’ve been for many, many years, how do you get leaders and entrepreneurs to this new way of thinking and to understand that it’s not just all about financial capital? It’s more about relationships and everything we’ve just been talking about. How do you get them to this new mindset?
Lothar Wenzl: I would like to start because, first of all, I would like to make a disclaimer for all leaders and managers listening to that. Leadership and management is hard work. It’s a very, very complex, difficult job, so everyone who does that gets all my credit.
I’m curious about what you will be saying in a minute, Nipun. The other thing is that nowadays, it gets a little bit easier for us coming from the outside, who are there to break patterns and change because they ask us for it. It’s easier because the pain outside is so big, labor shortage, climate crisis, democratic crisis or whatever you would call it.
The crisis around them has become so evident that it’s easier nowadays, as you see that nearly 80 percent of the workforce force is not engaged. It’s easier nowadays to get to that point because the sense of urgency is much higher. That’s the first thing I would like to say and I’m curious about how you do that and I can relate to that later.
Nipun Mehta: Let’s say you have an ecosystem of givers, takers and matchers in an ecosystem. Givers give, takers are going to take and matchers are going to be somewhere in between that, “If you’re a nice guy in the company, I’ll be nice to you. If you’re a taker, I’m going to put a boundary.”
You’re a conscious leader. You come into this equation and you say, “I want to move the center of gravity towards more givers.” because there’s no utopia anywhere. You don’t go in and say, “Wow, I have all givers here.” Even as a startup, you’re going to have the same issue. Even as a giant Fortune 500 company, you’re going to have the same issue. You go in and you say, “How do I move the center of gravity?” That’s a fair reasonable leadership question.
Mari Lang: Can I just quickly ask something about the leaders, the givers, and the matchers, is that a natural thing, a personality type, or is that how we are socialized? Why would you find all the different types? Can’t we make people just be givers? Naively asked.
Nipun Mehta: Yes, it would be great. Maybe we can start with you and me. I’m not a giver all the time, but we want to be and we aspire to be. I actually talked with Adam and he says there are three kinds of people givers, takers and matchers. I refined that a little bit and I would say there are three kinds of mindsets that, even if I’m a taker at my company and I’m like,
“Yes, I want to make sure I get the most amount of money or the most amount of credit, whatever.” I go home and if I have my. Kids are my loved ones, I’m not thinking like I’m going to be a taker. I’m a giver at home and so, in so many ways we have… Even one person is never a taker at work, they just have different mindsets that come up.
To the earlier point, how do we change the center of gravity? It turns out that research on this is quite compelling and quite simple. If you just have one consistent contributor that comes into an ecosystem where you have a whole spectrum of givers, takers and matchers, it changes the center of gravity because it says to matchers, “This is a place where I bring my giver self. This is a place where others are generous. This is a place where we’re not playing a zero-sum game.”
If I was a leader of say any group and I had a spectrum, the design question I would hold is how do I see consistent contributors in this ecology? The follow-up question I would have to that is, how do I not just seed? How do I amplify it? That’s just a different design question than you would have. Typically, you would say, “How do I get the maximum amount of output so that I can reach there?” That’s maybe a short-margin or narrow-margin goal, but I think in the broad-margin or the longer-margin this is going to be much more sustainable, emergent and regenerative.
Mari Lang: Sometimes we just ask the wrong questions, maybe.
Nipun Mehta: I would say, all the time. It’s one of the key concepts, you ask the right questions.
Mari Lang: We could go on forever and ever I think now, but we really have to come to an end and I hope I have one good last question. As we were talking about questions, it’s the one I always ask every guest and it’s the question about value. I ask every guest we have here, what their core value in life and work would be and they should leave this with us.
Nipun Mehta: The Buddha at one point, was in an assembly and somebody said, “There are all these virtues, which virtues should we focus on? There are all these core values, which one should I prioritize? He gave a very interesting response. He said, “Compassion is like the footprint of an elephant. It’s so big that it contains all these other virtues inside of it. When an elephant walks, it’s like a giant footprint and inside that footprint, so much life resides.” For me, I’ll also copy-paste from the Buddha and I will say compassion.
Mari Lang: Nice one.
Lothar Wenzl: What can you say after Buddha? Nothing can go.
Mari Lang: And now Lothar Wenzl (laughter).
Lothar Wenzl: Yes. Thank you. I would say, again, I’d go back to trust in the process of life. That helps me the most.
Nipun Mehta: Yes, I like trust. I’ll copy-paste Lothar next time.
Mari Lang: Thank you very much, Nipun, for all those insights. It was really interesting.
Nipun Mehta: Very inspiring talking to you both and having me on your podcast.
Lothar Wenzl: Likewise. I’m so glad it wasn’t our AI talking to each other.
Nipun Mehta: Are you sure?
Lothar Wenzl: Yes.
Mari Lang: I just wanted to say, leave a listener and you can now find out, was it an AI, was it Nipun Mehta, and was it Marie Lang and Lothar Wenzel? We don’t know.
Mari Lang: That’s all for this episode. Please let us know what you think of the show. You can drop us a line and we’ll find our contacts in the show notes. We’ll be back soon. See you.
