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I’m excited to release the next episode of my podcast – with Toshan Tamhane, currently Chief Strategy Officer at UPL and ex-Senior Partner at Mckinsey and Co. In storytelling, clarity of communication is a key goal. And one firm which has exemplified that in business communication is Mckinsey. After all, this is the firm that gave birth to the Pyramid Principle (through Barbara Minto) – a tool that I teach regularly as a part of my courses. I was always keen to speak to a senior leader from Mckinsey about how they view the art and craft of storytelling – and was I lucky to have the opportunity to interview Toshan. Toshan has spent 18+ years at Mckinsey across 55+ countries advising leading companies and individuals. Currently, apart from his role as CSO at UPL Ltd, he is also an active angel investor and avid adventure enthusiast. Across these years, Toshan has had a ringside view of several high-stakes communication events with senior stakeholders – both as a presenter and now mainly as a reviewer. I thought it would be great to tap into his vast experience and get his insights on the best practices for storytelling at work. In the conversation, we go through a wide range of topics – Toshan’s reflections from his IIM-Ahmedabad years, the lessons from Mckinsey, his ideas for improving business review meetings, his use of relatable analogies and his insane curiosity for deep conversations. I should reveal here that Toshan happens to be a batchmate from my graduation college – the Podar College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai. He was always a prodigious talent since early days, and also known for his drive and clarity. It was great reconnecting with Toshan after almost 2 decades… and I learnt a lot from this conversation. I’m sure you will too. As always, I’m sharing some some lightly-edited extracts from the conversation – tagged under ‘the 3Ps’ – the Personal, Philosophical and the Practical (although with him, you’d find a lot of overlap between the three buckets!): 1. Personal: a. Reading a variety of books and reflecting Toshan: …one of the things is that I’m always reading a lot of books like stories, biographies; Even now, I have 7 books in front of me and I’m sure that when I read them, I’ll keep assimilating (information). Like, “This makes sense. Let me try and link something to it,” which happens subconsciously. When I actually want to make a point, I will figure it out and say, “This is how I should be talking about it to make people remember it.” Ravi: A tactical question on that: When you read something and it triggers a thought about something you’re working on, do you then stop reading and note it down somewhere? Or do you just store it mentally? Toshan: I just store it, or if I am reflecting on a point and something comes up…for example, I have this book right now called The Escape Manifesto. It has this phenomenal first paragraph, “All our life we jump through hoops. Often without asking why. It’s easy to feel stuck – a small cog in a big machine. It doesn’t have to be like this. Don’t waste your life living someone else’s.” it’s a very powerful thing. I will keep thinking about it; cog in a wheel…am I living someone else’s life? If it makes me pause, I will keep thinking about it for some more time. When I am running or doing something else it will be at the back of my mind, saying, “Am I living someone else’s life? Am I a cog?” I keep visualizing the cog, the wheels turning, then it will stick. Then, I will remember the book. I will remember the amazing things the book is telling me, and so on. It’s linking one thing to another, and it stays. 2. The Philosophical: a. Be intensely curious – insights are waiting to be discovered in the most unlikely of places Toshan is innately, intensely curious as a person and has the ability to ask questions which can open up new insights from the most unlikely of places – for instance a waiter, an Uber driver and a liftman! Ravi: I remember reading on your LinkedIn introduction that you try to have 52 conversations – one a week! How do you find the time to do this?! Toshan: I think the issue is not about the time. A meaningful conversation can happen with anyone. I’ll give you a couple of examples. I was at a French restaurant, and the guy served me a drink and he had a leaf on top. I asked him, “Why do you put this leaf on top? I’m going to take it out and keep it aside. I’m going to drink the drink. If it was lemon inside, I understand. If it was an apple inside a Sangria, I understand.” And then he went on to explain how the flavour and aesthetics work, and we went on to discuss the topic of molecular gastronomy. He said that food is not consumed only in one sense, which is taste. Your brain starts liking it (multidimensionally). Smell is one; sight; touch. He said French cuisine is not all about the taste. Taste is just one aspect of it. You need to make sure that the patron is involved in it. He went on to tell me how different items are done. I thought, wow. There is a presentation dimension; there is a story behind a dish, he was saying how this comes from here and that from there, so on. I once asked an Uber driver to tell me about his 5 most interesting rides. The guy told me about a drug bust. I couldn’t believe him. He told me about the area and how he took an undercover cop (as a client) – these are things you only see in movies! I thought, (he’s just an) Uber guy, (but he said), “there’s so many interesting things I

I know, I know – it’s been ages since the last episode of the podcast. But the way I’m looking at this initiative is that I’m building these knowledge assets for the long term. More than a regular cadence, I’m just looking to create a base of content that is valuable and timeless. Meanwhile, I’m excited to release the next episode of my podcast – with Paul Smith. ​Paul Smith is the bestselling author of books such as ‘Lead with a Story’, ‘Sell with a Story’ and ‘The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell’. Paul specialises in what I term as ‘human stories’ – which is narrating specific incidents from work and life that contain valuable lessons or insights. Through his books, Paul teaches us how to use such incident stories to lead better and to sell better. Now, you might think that the ability to narrate incident stories is a God-given one – you either have it or you don’t. But reading Paul’s books gives you the clarity and confidence that this is very much a learnable skill. Look, I get it. As a skill, storytelling may seem esoteric, mysterious and difficult to break down into component parts. But it is possible to do that… and of the many books I’ve read on the topic, Paul’s books are perhaps the best at achieving a neat, structured breakdown of this craft. In this short but insight-filled podcast episode: It has been a privilege for me to have such an accomplished author and storyteller on the podcast. I hope you find the conversation as insightful as I did. PS: I’d have loved to have a longer conversation, but Paul only had about 40 minutes available. Still, 40 minutes is better than none! As always, I’m sharing some some lightly-edited extracts from the conversation – tagged under ‘the 3Ps’ – the Personal, Philosophical and the Practical (all emphasis mine): 1. Personal: a. Keep looking for your Ikigai 🙂 Paul was at a senior position at P&G and had a great corporate life going. But he was still looking for what makes him tick. Ravi: May I ask what the trigger was, Paul, for you to realize that storytelling is a critical skill (and you want to specialise in it)? Paul: There were probably two things – one, at that point I started to have just enough access to the senior management of the company. I was mid-way up the hierarchy myself, so you ended up spending a little bit of time in a C-suite with some of those officers. I just started noticing their behaviour exemplified some good storytelling. But the other reason was just very practical, honestly, and perhaps even selfish. About that time, I started asking myself, “Here I am, 15 years into this company. Do I want to spend another 15 years here? Or do I want to do something different? What do I want to do here?” And I decided that what I really liked – the best part of my job was the few days a year that I got to teach a new hire Training class, or a new General Manager training class, or speak at the annual company meeting or something. That’s the part of my job I loved the most, and it was like 5% of my job! What could I do to make that all of my job? Turns out, there wasn’t any job at the whole company that was doing that full time. And I realized that the only people I know that get to do that are these guys that have written some best-selling book and they get to travel around the world talking about the book. I said, “Well, I guess that’s what I gotta do. What am I interested in enough to write a whole book about?” And I thought, storytelling; this thing that I realized I don’t know enough about. Then it became more purposeful; (I thought) “I want to learn this not just to learn this, I want to learn this because I want to write a book about it and completely change my career path” and it ended up working. It didn’t have to, but I got lucky enough. 2. The Philosophical: a. There’s no shortcut to perseverance Paul is fairly risk averse and did not just leave his job to “follow his passion”. Here’s how he wrote his first book (Lead with a Story): Paul: I wrote my entire first book while I still had a full-time job at P&G. The reason was because I didn’t know if it would work. I’d love to tell you some romantic story of how I woke up one morning and decided that I was going to do this, so I walked into my boss’ office and I quit my job, then I went out and started this. But, I’m reasonable and maybe just too risk-averse to do something like that. I dedicated probably 1 hour a day, and 5 hours on the weekend every week, for a couple of years while I was still working at P&G, to research and write that first book, out of the 5 books I’ve written. And then I still waited until 6 months after the first book came out before I left the company, because – like you said, it was an experiment. I was running my own market research to see if it would work; if enough people would read the book and call me to generate the speaking engagements and training courses that I (envisioned); to see a sustainable business model. After the first 6 months once the book came out, I used up all my vacation time doing these training courses and speaking engagements. I ended up asking for a reduced work schedule, because I ran out of vacation time which really upset my wife – that was no good! Once I spent all of those days, I realized that this is meeting my success criteria. By that time, the book was already