Social Impact Authors: How & Why Authors Gaurav Bhatnagar and Mark Minukas Are Helping To Change Our World
An Interview With Edward Sylvan
Success itself is not enough. I have had the wonderful pleasure of having lived two careers. The first half was solely dedicated to success and the second half dedicated to doing what gave me joy. In the first half of my life, I was joylessly successful and in the second half I was successfully joyful. I would pick the second half of my life any day.
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact” I had the pleasure of interviewing Gaurav Bhatnagar and Mark Minukas, coauthors of Unfear: Transform Your Organization to Create Breakthrough Performance and Employee Well-Being (https://unfearbook.com).
Gaurav Bhatnagar is the founder of Co-Creation Partners and has dedicated more than two decades to helping companies thrive and achieve breakthrough performance. Since founding Co-Creation Partners in 2010, he has designed and led programs and workshops for private, public, and social-sector clients across multiple industries, including financial services, basic materials, manufacturing, healthcare, and technology. Prior to founding Co-Creation Partners, he was a consultant with McKinsey and Company, most recently as a leader in their Organization Practice in North America. Before McKinsey, he worked in marketing for Pepsi Cola International and Procter & Gamble in Europe, the Middle East, and India.
Mark Minukas is the managing partner of Co-Creation Partners. An engineer by training, he began his career as a Navy officer and member of the US Naval Construction Battalion (Seabees) and the Navy Dive Community. In 2005, he brought his experience and insights into the performance of engineered systems to McKinsey and Company, where he worked as a consultant and member of the Operations Practice. There, he mastered the technical aspect of organizational transformation and process improvement, as well as the cultural side of transformation. Since leaving McKinsey to join Co-Creation Partners, Mark has worked across multiple industries, including financial services, high tech, biotech manufacturing, IT services, and governmental offices, to deliver both top-and bottom-line improvements and build high-performing operations.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
Gaurav : I think the best way to describe my childhood would be to say that it was complicated. I was born and brought up in New Delhi. On the one hand I was part of a very loving, close-knit family that encouraged me to aim for the stars and never give up. On the other hand, at the age of two I was diagnosed with a squint that required me to have surgery and wear glasses for the rest of my life. On top of that, I was left-handed at a time when being left-handed was see n to be wrong. This meant that I was often the butt of jokes, four-eyed, wrong handed “shaitan” (demon) etc., etc.. This combination of having amazingly loving parents on the one hand and been seen as the odd duck on the other, made me fiercely independent and borderline dysfunctional competitive.
Mark: I grew up in a suburban town outside of Hartford, CT. I think I had a very normal and positive childhood by most standards. My parents were very caring and supportive to my brother and I. A few conditions shaped my early life, though. One is that I wasn’t a physically large kid growing up. I was athletic, but just skinny. My brother who was a year and half younger than me was about the same size or bigger. People thought he was older. That really bothered me! Another thing is that I had glasses to correct a vision problem from a young age. It contributed to this sense that I wasn’t good enough. The net result of this is that I burned with a competitive drive. I was quick to anger if I wasn’t doing well in sports or school. This helped me for a while to compete and win in golf — which ultimately helped me win a scholarship for college. It also helped me achieve academically. But in the long run it undermined my sense of well-being and my effectiveness is the professional world.
When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
Mark: Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. For some reason that book instilled or captured this deep yearning within me to travel the world and take risks. To venture out and not always take the safe route in life.
Gaurav : I was not much of a reader when I was young, but I remember a Japanese story that touched me quite profoundly. It was the story of an old man who had spent his whole life taking care of his son and his old age was now living with his son with nowhere to go. One day the father by accident broke the china in which he was having his food and his now grown son screamed at him for being clumsy and from that day on made a wooden bowl in which he was to be given all his food. A few days later the son saw his own child hollowing out some wood. On asking, the little child responded that he was preparing a wooden bowl for when he -his father- would get old. This story has always stayed with me and has taught me the importance of treating others with dignity irrespective of who they are or what they do. I am not always successful at this but the story is my anchor for trying.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or take away did you learn from that?
Mark: I don’t know how funny this is, but when I was working at McKinsey and Company as a consultant, I got blindsided once by a bad performance review. It felt completely unfair because the story in my mind was that my clients and my teams felt I was doing great work, but a couple of people higher in the hierarchy at McKinsey didn’t like me. While there was some truth to all of that, I learned that I can’t get stuck in a story of who’s right or who’s wrong. It took me months to let go of the feeling of righteousness that I had and step into a mindset of being more effective. I had to face the fact that I was not doing a great job at building certain relationships and pulling people in to help me. That lesson continues to teach me even years later.
I have a funnier story in the book!
Gaurav: I would have to talk about the time I took a dive into a fountain in a business suit😊 It was 1996, I was the newly recruited Market Research guy at the Pepsi Business Unit in Middle East and North Africa. We had a big strategy meeting coming up where I was supposed to make a big high stakes presentation. High stakes because I was new, there was a restructuring coming up and nobody’s job was secure, least of all mine as the new guy who had just come in. We had adjourned from the meeting and and as we were walking through the lobby to lunch, I was preoccupied with something, tripped, and saw I was going to end up in the large fountain. For some reason that I still can’t figure out in hindsight decided to make it look like the fall was a dive. My limbs therefore intact but my dignity most definitely wasn’t. And my big presentation was due that evening. I needed to shift my mindset from how stupid I was and how stupid I looked to “okay I am a klutz but what I have to say is of value and people will take it seriously”. It was not easy, but somehow I managed it and the presentation did go brilliantly and although my position was downsized, the head of the BU and the head of the Marketing, appreciated my work enough that they worked the network until they landed me into a similar position in a different BU. And that was my first experience that mindset matters, and with the right mindset you can overcome some pretty formidable obstacles.
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book Unfear?
Mark: Mismanaged fear is the source of so much organizational dysfunction and erosion of personal health and well-being. This ultimately cascades out into communities and societies. When leaders in organizations make decisions from a place of fear, they’re prone to prioritize short-term gains at the expense of long-term costs. This can impact jobs, local economies, the environment…on and on. When people are stressed out at work this ripples out into their personal lives as well. We don’t compartmentalize fear. So addressing how people relate to fear in organizations can ultimately transform society. That’s my mission.
Gaurav : Businesses impact human lives in profound and persistent ways because they mediate virtually everything, we interact with on any given day. However, for all that interaction, the net impact of business on our human well-being is mixed at best. While there certainly are some benefits as consumers and as employees, there are also significant drawbacks — human well-being, at least in developed countries, seems to be levelling off or even declining. Despite the proliferation of information, we seem less informed. Despite rich employment opportunities, we feel one small step away from financial ruin. And we are slowly destroying the world we live in.
Fear sits at the heart of many of these negative impacts and Unfear provides a path to businesses to transform to participate in countering these disheartening trends. We need to shift out of fear at a global scale and that begins with organizations operating in amore mindful, unfear way!!
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
Gaurav: While there are many powerful stories in the book the one that I would like to share is a story from Chapter 1 about John who was the plant manager of John who was the plant manager of Chemical Plant in the South and had been told to “right size” the site by letting go a third of his workforce. His response to this was to place a thermometer on all his presentations that measured how many people had been let go to encourage his managers to stay focused on the task. When we first met John, we thought that it was the most depressing, fear-driving action we had ever seen. The story then goes on to explore John’s own journey of Unfear and how he led the site through an Unfear journey that led to the plant finding its mojo again and allowing it to be a major source of employment within the region. Read the book to find out more.
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
Mark: For me, I had two series of events — one professional and the other personal. Professionally, as a leader and consultant, I was dismayed at how difficult it was to create sustained change in organizations. As a consultant focused on operational excellence, I would come back to clients after 6 or 12 months to find out that all of the brilliant plans and energy we left them with had gone nowhere. Transformation programs would die out and fade. Something was missing and as a systems thinker I was determined to figure this out! Ultimately this led me to discover how critical fear was in causing transformation efforts to fade. And the answer isn’t to eliminate fear…since that’s neither pragmatic nor effective. The core answer is to help people see fear as a cue for learning and growth.
Personally, I struggled with fear much of my life. Fear of not belonging. Fear of failure. Fear of missing out. This led me to have a very competitive orientation to life. Everything boiled down to winning or losing. This was how I managed my fear, even though I was quite blind to this dynamic. As I faced my fears and the dysfunction of my competitive orientation, I started to see things differently. My fears were ok. I just needed to learn how to get out of a perpetual win/lose mindset and into more of a win/win one. This has been a key to me improving my own performance and well-being over recent years.
Gaurav : My aha moment happened 20 years ago in South Africa when I was young hard-charging, close to burnout McKinsey consultant who thought that life was all about running faster than anyone else and never looking back to see the damage I was leaving in my wake. It happened when I attended a mindset workshop that was part of our office improvement effort, and I was exposed to this amazing lady called Gita Bellin. Amongst the many powerful experiences, the transformational moment for me happened when she asked us to meditate (which I thought was complete hogwash) and as I sunk deeper and deeper into the experience it connected me to a part of myself that I could not logically explain. It allowed me to expand my perception of life and possibility in a way that I could never look back. Today 20 years later I am still learning and discovering and Unfearing.
Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
Mark: One of the deeply satisfying parts of my job is seeing how directly people’s lives are impacted by the work my team does. We have all kinds of stories. One example is a woman who was leading part of a transformation effort in a financial services company. When we first started working with her she was very stuck in an aggressive and stress-inducing (for herself and others) leadership style. She had this strong story that she had to lead that way to be effective, but she was also exhausted by it. And this pattern was also impacting her happiness at home — in particular, her relationship to her daughter. Through our work, she realized that she was participating in creating these patterns in her life and it wasn’t inevitable. She could change the stories and interpretations she had about her boss, her colleagues, employees, and even her daughter. When she started to see things differently, other people started to relate to her differently in turn. She had better and more productive conversations. She built deeper trust. She and people around her are now more productive, less stressed, and happier. She’s now gone from a situation of almost quitting her job to being promoted and having a much bigger impact on her company. And things are better at home too. She did this all herself, we just held up the mirror so she could see how her prior way of thinking and acting weren’t serving her.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
Mark: I’ll address this to politicians because they’re such central and public figures in how fear is created and propagated in society. (1) Reflect on your own fears and understand how you may be falling into zero-sum fear-based patterns of behavior. Our book Unfear lays out 8 fear archetypes that people may find themselves in. Two that politicians are prone to, in my view, are the Controllers and Competitors. While there may be good values behind these archetypes, taken to an extreme, they are terribly dysfunctional. Politicians need to get out of their own fear-based patterns first to expect others to do so. (2) Dare to be different and change the tone of political rhetoric. Yes, fear does work in getting people to express outrage and take simple steps like go out and vote for a candidate…but fear is a terrible emotion to generate creative thinking and collaborative action over the long term. (3) Tell more inspirational stories rather than fear-based ones. Most political storytelling today is all about what we should fear or avoid or how bad others (“they”) are. The problem with fear-based narratives is people become numb to them. To make these stories have impact, the intensity of the story has to keep ramping up to cut through the numbness and noise. Instead, tell hopeful stories. Think of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. Tell people what you believe in and what your positive vision is for the country.
If politicians could start doing some of the above, we could change the whole tone of the conversation in America (and other countries, too). We need this to solve the tough, multi-generational problems we’re all facing. That’s my dream.
Gaurav: I have one simple thought to offer — Being right is not the same as being effective. We, with great positive intention, are so busy proving to others that we are right that we forget that very often in doing so we make other people wrong. When we make other people wrong, we do the opposite of what we intend. We create division instead of movement. The true work of leadership is to be effective, to move us forward collectively even when there is disagreement.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
Mark: Leadership is an attitude. It’s not a role. It’s an attitude of taking responsibility for making positive change happen in your sphere of influence. So anyone can be a leader. My 6 and 9 year old daughters teach me that every day!
Gaurav: What Mark has said is fundamental to understanding leadership AND I would add that there is nothing easy about leadership. My definition of leadership is the “ability to drink the poison without getting poisoned”. What does this mean? In any major pursuit there are both intended outcomes and unintended/negative outcomes. The job of leadership is to allow the organization to continue creating the intended positive outcomes by stepping in and taking on the unintended outcomes in a way that harms neither the team nor the leader.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
Mark: I’ll share two and let Gaurav take the other three.
One, is from some advice I got from my high school math teacher and golf coach before I ventured off to the Naval Academy at the age of 17. He had gone to the Academy as well and served in the Navy. His advice…which I haven’t always followed in life…was to treat bootcamp like the game that it is. In other words, don’t take yourself too seriously. Try your best, but whatever happens don’t get so identified with the outcomes, because inevitably you’re going to make mistakes, get the wrong kind of attention, get yelled at, etc. I found that so useful for bootcamp. It helped me to just go with the flow and not get down on myself when times were tough. But then I promptly forgot that advice for most of the next decade. I’m relearning it now! It’s so helpful to remind myself to just treat life like the game it is. Take it seriously, but don’t take myself too seriously.
Second, would be emotional openness. Growing up, I saw how my dad, an introverted engineer and a manly guy who I wanted to be like, rarely shared emotion. Anger was ok now and then, but most other emotions were frowned upon. Positive emotions like joy and sadness especially. The implicit message I received growing up was that it wasn’t ok for a man to share his emotions. People wouldn’t trust you and like you if you did. Over the years, I’ve learned how crucially important it is to share emotions. Sharing emotions without being overcome by them allows other people to understand what’s going on for you. It builds trust. It helps people sense that you’re acting in a way that aligns to your thoughts and beliefs and that you’re not withholding things. If I daresay, it’s an act of manly integrity.
Gaurav: I like Mark have 2 as well:
One: Success itself is not enough. I have had the wonderful pleasure of having lived two careers. The first half was solely dedicated to success and the second half dedicated to doing what gave me joy. In the first half of my life, I was joylessly successful and in the second half I was successfully joyful. I would pick the second half of my life any day.
Two: Do not get so busy doing that you lose sight of the why!! I spent 10 years from the age of 22 just doing what everyone was doing without ever questioning why I was doing it. At 32 when I did ask why or more accurately when life forced me to ask why, I realized that a lot of what I was mechanically doing was adding to the chaos rather than allowing me to live a life of contribution and meaning. Well those 10 years were important I wish I could have them back.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Mark: One I constantly come back to and draw insight from is the serenity prayer. “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” So often my ego gets wrapped up in all kinds of things — what people think of me or could think of me, what someone else said, what’s happening in the world that’s frustrating, etc. It’s empowering to know I can’t change everything, but I can change some things. In particular, I can change how I respond to any life event or circumstance.
Gaurav: Mine is a quote from GK Chesterton — Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. We all have the amazing ability of flight and of making incredible contribution but we hold ourselves down by taking ourselves too seriously and burdening ourselves with doubt and pretense that does not serve us. Whenever I feel I am not flying, I think back to my 7-year-old self when I had no care and I find my ability for flight and to do things that I otherwise thought were not possible.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Mark: I’d love to chat with either Joe Rogan or Sam Harris. They’re interesting people, can be a bit controversial, and have cool podcasts. What we talk about in Unfear is quite relevant to what they address on their shows.
Gaurav: I would love to have lunch with Donald J Trump because I suspect he would completely reject the Unfear philosophy. I would love to understand how his mind works. I would want to know his philosophy of life and why he believes his way of being and doing improves the world.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Mark: They can find either of us on LinkedIn. They can go to our company’s website (cocreationpartners.com) and sign up for our monthly newsletter and/or find our email addresses and just reach out. And people can go to our book website, as well (unfearbook.com).
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Social Impact Authors: How & Why Authors Gaurav Bhatnagar and Mark Minukas Are Helping To Change… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.