Higher Ground: A conversation about great leaders, inspired companies and inner purpose

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The Weekly Take
Higher Ground: A conversation about great leaders, inspired companies and inner purpose 

4.25.2023

Spencer Levy
We ask a lot of questions about real estate and business on our air, and our guests routinely provide answers filled with hard data, thoughtful opinions rooted in their experience, timely analysis of developing trends. Now we’ll widen our lens with an author and academic who takes an almost spiritual approach to his exploration of leadership and human potential in the business world. On this episode: thinking outside the box in a conversation with takeaways for everything from management to dealmaking, negotiating, productivity, and even design — a new perspective on people, places, and purpose.

Hitendra Wadhwa
There is incredible power to having people be face to face, be there to have those coffee cooler kind of conversations. To be able to sense and see and experience the energy more in a certain physical space than otherwise. Inspiring for a certain collective cause. And so that's my guess: that we will use this moment to rethink what the nature of these physical spaces should be. 

Spencer Levy
That's Hitendra Wadhwa, a professor at Columbia Business School who teaches an award winning class on personal leadership and success and is the founder of the Mentora Institute, where he coaches leadership, working with C-suite executives from the Fortune 100, and more. Hitendra’s journey from humble roots in his native India informs the perspective he shares in his recently published book, Inner Mastery, Outer Impact: How Your Five Core Energies Hold the Key to Success. Coming up, seeking wisdom from history and the human condition while adding new dimensions to our ongoing study of how and where we work. The ideas of Hitendra Wadhwa. I'm Spencer Levy and that's right now on The Weekly Take. 

Spencer Levy
Welcome to The Weekly Take. And this week I am delighted to be with Hitendra Wadhwa. Hitendra, thanks for joining the show. 

Hitendra Wadhwa
Pleasure, Spencer, to be here with you and your listeners. 

Spencer
Well I would like to have you and I'm delighted that I just finished your terrific book, Inner Mastery, Outer Impact, which — we could talk about any one page on that book for the whole show. But for the purposes of just getting started, just tell our listeners who you are and what you do. 

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah, I'm grateful you read the book because I can't even get my daughter to do that. But yeah, look, I grew up in India. I am blessed to have lived the last 30 odd years here in the United States. And one of my life's quests has been, how do I bring these two worlds together? And India, to me, represents a little bit the inner quest, the quest for deeper truths and happiness and fulfillment and connection from an attunement with nature and truth seeking kind of spirit in the universe and all of that. That's been India's heritage for thousands and thousands of years. And then the United States, to me, represents the outer frontier of the same pursuit, looking at life in the world from a more material lens of outer accomplishment and pursuit of just perfection and beauty on the outside. So this book in some ways is an attempt by me to bring these two worlds together — the pursuit of inner beauty and outer beauty, inner success and outer success, inner happiness and outer happiness. 

Spencer Levy
Well, that's a great summary. In fact, the first quote I wrote from your book is “how can we find our true selves?” But some people are afraid to reveal their true self. Do you agree with that? 

Hitendra Wadhwa
Now, to answer that question carefully and precisely, we'd have to pause for a minute and just ask ourselves, what is my true self? In popular consciousness, including today, there's a lot of interest in people wanting to be showing up more as the authentic and true self, and sometimes that is conflated with the idea of just expressing whatever feelings I have and whatever thoughts are have and foisting in a sense, my values on the community that I'm a part of because that's my true self and it kind of makes sense at some level. But then in my study of some of the inspiring figures from history, those who've left a positive and beautiful footprint in the sands of humanity, and they actually came from, as best we can tell, a very authentic place, a place where they were very, very true to themselves. Like an Abraham Lincoln or Mother Teresa or one of your favorites, Nelson Mandela and others, right. What I noticed is that there were actually these very powerful moments in their life journies where they were pausing and not actually expressing what they were feeling, not actually expressing a thought they were having, not actually pushing forward on a certain value that was important to them because of a higher purpose. And so Lincoln would write these hot letters, but he wouldn't actually send them out at times to his generals because he knew that he was in the heat of battle at times being roused up in a certain way, perhaps feeling sudden uncharitable thoughts and dismissive thoughts about the very people that he was depending on, leaning on, teaming up with. And he just wasn't ready to trust his own, his own thoughts or his own emotions. And another time Mandela had a certain moment where he could have pushed forward an anti-racism kind of cause, anti-apartheid cause. But in that moment, he felt he didn't have the potential to actually impact the situation in a very positive way in a law firm that he was part of before he actually got to be part of the official anti-apartheid movement and the African National Congress and all of that. So in that moment, he paused, not because he didn't have that value. He was seeking to not be true to himself, but he realized that he had a higher cause in that moment. And the higher cause was be patient, be strategic, be thoughtful, look for the right moment to strike the right chord. And so to that end, my invitation or appeal to your listeners would be that absolutely, life is inviting, as in every moment and every moment to be true to ourselves. But to recognize that to be true to ourselves, we have to engage in the calculus of knowing what is this moment calling for me to do. 

Spencer Levy
Well, there's so many directions we can go with that. But this is a great segway into the five pillars of your book, the first one being purpose. Then it's wisdom, growth, love and self-realization. 

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah, Yeah. Thank you. I call them the core energies. It means the energies that come from the very core of your being. Purpose, as you mentioned, is the first one. And purpose is about recognizing that what we do on the outside may attract us to certain goals, may attach us to certain outcomes. But fundamentally, we can't really control many of those things on the outside. What we can do though, is really be clear about why we are doing those, why we're pursuing those from the standpoint of the values and the purpose that we are seeking to manifest from the inside. And so if you start to strive in your career and in your life to approach every project, every task, every responsibility and role and, you know, engagement with your workplace and with society at large, from that place of being informed and inspired by a deeper why, then you get to be very anchored from within in the service of that value or purpose and very agile and flexible from the outside as conditions keep changing around you. So that's the purpose energy. The second is wisdom. And wisdom is recognizing that you may have great intentions, but along the way you may miscalculate, you may miscalibrate, you might not see truth in its fuller light. You might make some errors unconsciously, because you just have some confined, limiting, blinding beliefs that are holding you back from seeing possibilities to actually build a bridge with a certain part of the organization, or to creatively open up a new door, or you miss a certain critical data point and you then look back six months or a year later and say, What was I thinking when I was doing that? Why didn't I listen to this person? Or why did I get so consumed with pessimism about this or what have you? And so wisdom is about striving to see the truth in all situations by using your emotions or thoughts in the ultimate service of your purpose. 

Spencer Levy
Let me jump in here for a moment. One of the things when I was reading your book and I read every famous leader, just about every famous leader I've heard of in the 20th century, and I said, well, what about the common, the person who was not a great leader — the janitor, the Navy SEAL, the prison inmate, and then each and every one of those people was in your book giving some level of wisdom. So I think it's important for our readers to understand that while we know the great wisdom and purpose and all these things that are coming from Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, it can come from anybody. Is that a fair statement? 

Hitendra Wadhwa
That is not where I started my path in this work. I thought that we should be particularly paying homage to certain luminous leaders over the course of history. As you rightly pointed out, the kind of people that I have in the book and over the last 15 years as I've been teaching, this as a class at Columbia Business School and our time to executive audiences as well, to my Mentora Institute, what has for me been tremendously both uplifting and humbling at the same time is to see incredible stories of these kinds of unsung, everyday heroes. And over time I’ve become a story collector. I just go around with them -- talking to a cab driver or just a friend, what have you. I'm looking for these moments of extraordinary possibilities and pursuits by ordinary people. And absolutely, it is something that has transformed and changed me because I realized that Warren Buffet is actually right and what he sometimes calls his 10% rule, which is that he believes that anytime he interacts with anybody, 10% of that individual is really heroic, is really beautiful, it is magical. And so part of his like, problem solving is like, how do I discover and activate that part of this person that 10% in them? And so absolutely. To your point, I get super energized by looking around for these kinds of extraordinary capacities. And it has become, in some ways, my life purpose to seek to create a system, a pathway, a structure through which any or all of us can discover this aspect of who we are by curating stories from our lives, we have actually activated that energy as well as being planful about the way we approach challenges and engagements with the world today so that we are not just seeking to, if you want to call it, maximize our moments of leadership — you know, I want to grow up in the career and I want to get this manager role and then this leader role, and then I want to be the CEO and all of that — not just maximize the moments of leadership, but maximize the leadership in a moments. Because when we live life that way, where we maximize the leadership in a moments, then, yeah, ordinary people who just every day find that extraordinary achievements and outcomes are within arm's reach. 

Spencer Levy
What's interesting about the Warren Buffett quote is it reminds me of the Stephen Jobs quote that was in here; that he saw the inner good in everyone, that everybody has it in them. He wasn't trying to make money. He wasn't trying to make computers. He was trying to make the world more beautiful. It's that fair way to put Steven Jobs?

Hitendra Wadhwa
I love it. There are two things you've said. One is he was trying to make the world more beautiful rather than make money. I do think there's enough evidence, enough evidence, even for the cynics among us, to see Steve Jobs for what he was trying to do in that way. There's a story I have in the book about Larry Ellison; him having a conversation when Apple stock was way down. He'd been fired from Apple. He was at NeXT computers and all of that. And Larry Ellison is proposing to him that, look, I mean, the stock is so low, I can just buy the company and take it private. And then why don't we make you the CEO? You rightfully have your asset back and then you take it to another level and both of us make a lot of money. And Ellison shares the story, says that Jobs paused in that walk and he turned towards me and he put his hands on my shoulders and he looked at me in the eye and he said, Larry, you don't need more money. You already have a lot of money. And he says, I need to make sure that people see that I did it for the right reasons. So here's what's going to happen. Apple actually will realize that they don't have a very good operating system and then they will want to acquire NeXT because we have like a really great operating system. And at that point when they acquire NeXT, I'll get a board seat from Apple. And once I get a board seat, you just wait and watch. I’ll end up becoming the CEO again. And this was two years before any of these actions happened. Somehow he was able to foretell the future, but also resist the instant gratification opportunity to like shove it up, right, like with regard to, like the Apple board and the Apple owners and all of that by taking the company private with Larry Ellison's help because he was truly not doing it for the money. In fact, what most people don't realize is of the eight or nine billion dollars of his family fortune that he had when he passed away, that he left with his successors, right, and his wife, most of the money was made on Pixar, and had not be made on Apple. You're right about that. But then the other thing you also said is how he just saw so much innate potential in humanity than what perhaps we might see. And to me, some people say that he didn't demonstrate a lot of empathy. He didn't have, you know, as much of like a soft touch to his style and manager. And I think that's fair, although I do, as you might recall, have some stories in the book about Steve Jobs 2.0 and how much his heart really developed. And he cultivated one of these qualities of empathy and compassion. In the second chapter of his life. 

Spencer Levy
Let's now talk about some of these other attributes of getting to self-actualization: growth, love, and then self-realization. This one stirred me. There was the story of the Navy SEAL that was involved with the Osama bin Laden affair, and he said he gave his Congressional Medal of Honor away that he received to a friend because, quote, Every year I give some possession that is precious to me to someone else, because I know they'll value it. That's an act of selflessness that's remarkable. For most people, winning a Congressional Medal of Honor, like winning a Nobel Prize, like winning the Heisman Trophy, like winning all these things would be perhaps their prized possession. But to him, the prized possession was the relationship, was the selflessness. What do you think? 

Hitendra Wadhwa
I love that you picked that story up. What I take away from that is two things. One is that — look, it's easy for you and me to give if the giving we are doing is not going to have a strong material loss perceived by us.

Spencer Levy
Mm hmm. 

Hitendra Wadhwa
Right, if I had a certain amount of wealth, then I give a little bit away in a way that doesn't actually change my lifestyle every day. And then all of that, right? Then that's kind of the easy part of the giving. The harder of part of the giving is to actually give something away that actually makes you miss it, makes you miss what you given away. And that's what this individual is doing. And that would be very consistent with Mother Teresa. She said, I want to help you learn how to give, give till it hurts, give till it hurts. Because she felt that in that hurt would be redemption, would be growth, would be the opening of the heart, would be an education that you and I would be going through. That actually the real joys are inner joys. That when we connect with our core and engage in that selfless weird to serve those in our community who might be need, we get such a reward from within that it more than makes up for what we lose materially on the outside.

Spencer Levy
The key theme of this book is don't act based on how you are perceived. Act on how you feel, basically on how you perceive yourself. 

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah, the really important writer, I would add to what you just said, which is beautiful, is loving your true self rather than your false friends. You and I and all of us, we struggle at times with certain addictions, attachments, insecurities, hurts, desires and hungers and all of that. And if we just seek to, in the moment, indulge in those, that's not necessarily loving yourself, that's loving those false friends that at some point or the other will take us down a path that will negatively affect our health, negatively affect our relationships, make us not feel really fulfilled in a region of etc., etc.. And so the first responsibility to love yourself is to discover yourself, discover your true self. And that's the key part. You know what I am inviting us to take on in the journey of this book is to recognize that there is this part. Once we cut through the clutter of our inner core, which is pure, it’s beautiful, it’s untainted, it’s always in a state of grace. And once we discover that and we sanctify it, we honor it, we engage with it, we connect with it, we seek to let it shine through in everything we do, we get both inner and outer success. 

Spencer Levy
Well, you talk about so many stories within this book. I can go on and on. But let's shift now to the Mentora Institute and the work that you're doing, specifically in the real estate context. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah, thank you for asking. So Mentora Institute is about developing inspired leaders, developing inspired cultures, developing inspired organizations. And to us, an inspired collective; the individual, the team, the organization, is one where people have a deep commitment to a noble and uplifting purpose. A keen connection with each other and those they serve. A calmness and receptivity to truth in whichever form it comes. A curiosity and openness to growth at all times and a certain centeredness from within that gets them to be very joyful in showing up in service of the purpose. Now, how do you create an environment like that? Part of it is inner discipline that you and I and all of us can engage in from taking some time away from the free and battlefield of work and life to connect with the purest core within us. Whether it's through prayer or meditation or walks in nature or journaling or spending time in the company or an uplifting person that just kind of brings that part out of us. So that's one part. But then the other is the outer cues. And the outer cues can be social in nature in terms of the kind of conversations and the company we keep. But it can also be the physical environment that you surround yourself with. And you're all of us. We just go through a process of self-reflection, I think we will find that there are certain pathways, there are certain rooms when you sit in, there are certain paintings or just experiences in nature, etc., where when we're in those environments we just feel a certain something, a greater, perhaps connection with our inner voice, a greater sense of peace ability, perhaps an upliftment into a more joyous state, what have you. And in general, I would say that the workplaces of the past have been designed with a focus on saying, Look, guys, this is not time for play. This is time for work. Be serious. Put your head down and now get things done because that's what you're being paid for. And then in more recent times, I think we open ourselves up to the fact that, hey, listen, people are not automatons. It's not just a robotic kind of relationship we have between management and labor, right. And there is something about the inner life of the organization, of a team, of an individual that is worth honoring and activating to get it to be in a really harmonized place with regard to the outer work that we have to do. And that inner life means that people can be more in the space of creativity and or joy and or kinship and connection. They are just more likely to show up and engage in meetings and make decisions and have conversations in a way that will lead to more of the kinds of breakthroughs you want, right. And so part of our work at Mentora Institute is to do research and ultimately come up with products and offerings that will also open up an organization not just to requiring and asking people, thou shalt this and thou shalt not that, and here's how to lead, what have you. But pay attention to the physical environment and the cues and particularly use the advantage today of flat screen kind of displays both on people's computers but also in physical spaces to constantly nudge and prompt people to inspire a certain mood, a certain optimism, a certain desire to want to connect and collaborate. Because ultimately, yes, we have heroes on the outside, but the most important hero is the hero that is lying within, waiting to be stirred and awoken to go on your own hero's journey. 

Spencer Levy
Sticking with the physical space for just a moment. The office has clearly gone through a massive evolution, right; to something that's more collaborative, more open. And that revolution had started well before the pandemic. But then we had the pandemic. 

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yes. 

Spencer Levy
And maybe people are better off in a hybrid environment where they have more freedom to be with their kids, more freedom to have less commute times. But we're in the physical environment business. What do we do to change? 

Hitendra Wadhwa
I have a lot of empathy for what your industry is going through leading to such a tectonic shift in the relationship between work, workers, and workplace. I do believe that for the kind of qualities that I celebrate and profile in my book, that will take us into meaningful pathways in life, that social connection, professional, in-person connection is critical because the best teams, the best communities, the best organizations, you know, always have that power of the shared space in which they come together to do their life's most beautiful work. And so to that end, it is my personal hope and intrigue and prayer that what will happen over time is that we will come to a more and rather than an awe approach, maybe that means hybrid, not purely in office all the time and not purely work from home. But what is the ideal optimized form of that hybrid is, I think, still being still being worked out. There are certainly, I think, some benefits for those who have very long commutes and/or who have not had, let's say, a very favorable and positive and engaged work space for them to feel like they're getting the better work done from home or maybe people who may consider themselves the introverts. But we do know that, and I'm curious about what you think on this, Spencer, but that there is incredible power to having people be face to face, be there to have those coffee cooler kind of conversations, to just be able to sense and see and experience the energy more in a certain physical space than otherwise, inspired for a sudden collective cause. And so that's my guess that a) we will use this moments to rethink what the nature of these physical spaces should be, how they should be really crucibles in which people do some more of the shared, connected work, you know, rather than just go into their own little silos and their cubicles, but at the same time, recognize and honor the fact that probably unlikely for all the organizations of the world starting tomorrow to be on a 9 to 5, five days a week in office schedule. 

Spencer Levy
Do you see a strong future for the city or do you see us becoming more diffuse? Because a lot of people are saying people are going to move to secondary markets because of hybrid. 

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah, yeah. One of the powers I see in a city is the ability to have us like, travel the world in an instant. As a point of confluence across diverse races and lifestyles and demographics and what have you, to be able to be rapidly exposed and richly exposed to all of those forces and influences around you is unconsciously a highly educational and mind opening experience. And it's one reason why humanity has, over the last 100, 200 years, advanced so much. Much as we got our hiccups and challenges to work on, advanced so much in our capacity to absorb influences from across the diversity of cultures and what have you is because humankind has over time become more capable of travel and therefore everyday exposure to people who look very differently from you and who live a different lifestyle from you. I can't imagine what it would be like if we got so segregated into all different special communes and non-city, suburban, and remote-like sort of ways of living that we lose that richness and New York is a melting pot and what have you. So it will be my hope and prayer that we always have these points of confluence and congregation, let alone, I mean, some of the things which are obvious to us, right? Like the beauty of the arts and sports and other such aspects of what a vibrant city life can give you that we wouldn't have if we were just in maybe very smaller collectives. That said, I think there's a lot of power for us to also escape from those collectives from time to time - to discover our true spirit. I've shared in the book how there is a lot of science today that is showing that if you choose not something that is imposed on you, but if you choose moments of solitude that can be really powerful and helpful for you to discover your true self. Because when you are in company with others, you just tend to naturally be drawn to being of service to them, adjusting and accommodating to the needs and interests. And research also shows that unconsciously you get very influenced by their values, by their emotions, by their ways of thinking or what have you. So having periods of choiceful solitude: walks in nature or escapes into retreats along with re-infusions, into the milieu and richness of vibrant, urban life. That, at least for me personally, has been a really enriching kind of choice and balance to have in life. And I would hope that's available to all of us for years end. 

Spencer Levy
One more question. Your personal journey, Hitendra. What a remarkable journey to where you are today as the founder and head of the Mentora Institute, college professor Ph.D., but you came from very humble beginnings in India. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Hitendra Wadhwa
My father was an officer in the Indian police service. In India it’s a national service. And I learned a lot from him about grace under fire, about being able to be very firm, about your values and convictions, and be comfortable at times that holding your ground and fighting certain ills in the system and just being extremely resilient and adaptive to what the moment demands from you. My mother was, to me, an icon of love, and I was enriched, therefore, with these dual role models in my own family growing up, much as we had very humble means. We couldn't afford a television. Growing up, we had a car that was like 30 years old. We couldn't afford to be on an airplane until I finally got my scholarship in the US and got onto a plane on the basis of that money to come here with just a few dollars in my pocket. But it was a rich, rich, rich life for me from the inner kind of journey – Hitendra as a toddler, as an infant, as a child, and as an emerging adult. I came to the United States when I just turned an adult. I was 21, got my Ph.D. in business, but really with a focus on analytics. My passion was mathematics. In getting all the way to the Ph.D, I realized that academia wasn't really going to do it for me. I wanted to have more impact in the world and engagement with the world. And so that's when I joined McKinsey to do strategy consulting from there then I went to Silicon Valley to do a startup. But what I realized over time is that while I left mathematics, it didn't actually leave me. And I found that it has always been the lens through which I approach pretty much anything I do. Those kind of things I learned from mathematics have been very core to the way I approach consulting or doing startups, or ultimately then in my mid-thirties. When I finally came to Columbia and started to teach. I took a keen interest in essentially the science of human potential and what is it that the latest psychology and psychotherapy and neuroscience are informing us about it, and how can we use that to create a fresh new set of possibilities to re-architect and reimagine how to approach leadership and how to approach life. And so a mathematical approach to doing that. But also, I have to be honest, a mystical approach to doing that. As in, very early in my life, partly blessed with what I was seeing, the pursuit of my parents be - I got redrawn to some of these larger questions about what lies beyond that border between life and death and where did I truly come from and what's my relationship with the universe. And I feel like that star is talking to me and I'm very grateful for the access I got to truth seekers and philosophers and spiritualists of the past, which over time became like a desire for me to seek to bring that kind of mystic like hunger that any or all of us have into practical outer expression in the way we live our lives and the way we lead. And that's been really the model of leadership that I've been able to do over time. Just torn and defined. 

Spencer Levy
So, Hitendra, we're just about to wrap up here. Any final thoughts with respect to your book, Impact on the commercial real estate industry? 

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah, well, I just have one overall message to offer our listeners today. Thank you for making time to actually listen to this conversation. I find you very inspiring, Spencer, and your curiosity and your capacity to connect just so many beautiful dots together. And my final message then is just around how the thing that I have discovered in my work is just how much beauty, how much grace, how much strength, how much capacity for living and leading in a super meaningful way resides within each of us. And a time like this, when there's so much change and ferment that's happening in society, each of us has been called upon in some ways to be lending a hand in the process of change making - the reformation of institutions and practices in society and education and whatever it is that you feel personally concerned about or drawn to. And when history looks back on it years from now as to what it is that this moment signified, you know, let us do our part to show up in the right way to help advance humanity in the direction that you believe deeply from the very core of your being is important, you know, for humanity to be shaped and molded around. And you can do that because within you rests tremendous insight and capacity for innovation. If you tap into your core ideas and thoughts for how to do that is what of course my book is about. But it's been for me both rewarding, humbling, energizing to recognize how much potential there is in each of us. 

Spencer Levy
Well said. And on behalf of The Weekly Take, I want to thank Hitendra Wadhwa, professor at Columbia University, founder of the Mentora Institute and the author of the book, Inner Mastery, Outer Impact. Hitendra, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Hitendra Wadhwa
My pleasure. And all the best to you and your listeners. Thank you, Spencer. 

Spencer Levy
For more about Hitendra Wadhwa and his unique perspective, check out his book. And there's also more info and related content on our website, CBRE.com/TheWeeklyTake. Next week, we’ll continue to seek enlightened wisdom not about the human condition, but about hamburgers. Yes, for the start of National Hamburger Month, we visited the headquarters of none other than White Castle to speak with the company's CEO about building a family business and an enduring brand. While we put the finishing touches on that episode, we'll hope you'll share this show. And also, don't forget to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you listen. Thanks for joining us. I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart. Be safe. Be well.