Rishad Tobaccowala on the Future of Leadership and Meaningful Careers

Erik  04:50

We want to welcome all of our listeners to another episode of MRP, Minority Report podcast with Erik and Kerel. Each episode, we talk with real operators and leaders in media, tech and business, and today, we're thrilled to welcome Mr. Rishad Tobaccowala, who is the founder of rethinking work platform and also the co founder of the Athena project. Mr. Rishad, how are you welcome?

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Rishad Tobaccowala  05:19

Excellent. Thank you. And it's Rishad. No mister.

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Erik  05:21

All right, fine. We'll take, we'll take it off. We'll take, you know, it's funny you say that because I think the last time I ran into you was at one of luma's great, great events. And I talk to you and talk a little bit more, but I felt like I didn't want to disturb you number one and number two, I felt like I had such a personal connection with you already, without you really knowing me through all of the great additions that arrive to my inbox each week. And so getting together with you here and talking with you, I said, Okay, I'm going Rishad or Mr. Rishad.

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Rishad Tobaccowala  06:10

So no, no, it's basically Rishad. And if you basically talk to my three bosses, which are my wife and my two daughters, they'll basically make it even worse than that. So promotion for me, I

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Kerel Cooper  06:25

love it. We are we already have something in common, because those are my three bosses too, my wife and my two daughters,

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Erik  06:32

yep, and I have twin daughters. So it's like they take turns being bosses. Yeah, exactly, many times simultaneously. So Well, I'm excited to have you. We have a lot to sort of, I think, you know, cover to get to know all the great work that you do. For those that don't know, can you tell us really about the vision and what you know, rethinking work platform does every day?

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Rishad Tobaccowala  06:57

Sure. So the best way to think about this, I'm going to make it a little bit broader, because it'll fit a few things that both what you read, rethinking work platform and the Athena project. So for many, many, many years, I worked at a company called the publicist group. That was where I spent 37 years when I had a job, I didn't join Publicis. I joined a company called the Leo Burnett company in Chicago in 1982 and I did a lot of different things. And in 2002 we were purchased by the Publicis group, is a French holding company. And I was fortunate that from 19 I remained and I spent a lot of time at the corporate and leadership levels of the publicist group, so I ended up being the chief strategist and growth officer globally of 106,000 person company in 2019 I left, and the good news was I left on my own terms, or rather I wanted to leave, before they asked me to leave, and I started a my new thing, which is to help people see, think and feel differently about how to grow themselves. What I would say is how to see, feel and and think differently about growth themselves, their teams and their business. And the way I do it today is I do it through three different platforms, one of them, which we'll revisit right now is the Rethinking work platform, which is about what the future of work looks like. One you read, which is what I've been somewhat known for, which is how to deal with the future and change so that is what I call the future does not fit into the containers of the past initiatives. That's the thought letter you read. It's a podcast called what next. It's a book called restoring the soul of business. So that's all in one area. But I also began to realize work was changing dramatically. Which shall we revisit? And then I also thought that we had, to a certain extent, both an opportunity and a crisis in leadership. And I'm not talking about political leadership, but just leadership broadly in business, individuals, etc. So that's what the Athena project is. So if you think about a triangle, the triangle is change in future work and where it's going, and leadership. Now, if you think about it, they're all connected, right? But like any business,

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Rishad Tobaccowala  09:53

everybody particularly wants to enter this triangle, either through the world of work, through the world of change, or through the world of leadership, though they're connected, so that'll set you sort of the broad thesis of what I'm trying to do. So let me start, and I'll specifically answer rethinking work, but in that framework. So rethinking work is built around my new book, which came out this February, called rethinking work, and I wrote it, and it got published this February, but I wrote it for a very simple reason. And the reason was I began to recognize, and this was during the covid years, that three things make people happy. You know, what covid did is made people think a lot about life and work and what made them happy, and where they stayed and who they work to what was important. And three things really make a human being happy, satisfied, contented. And I understand there are different things, but let's say in that cluster, one is relationships. If you have good quality, relationships of some sort, those could be in work, it could be family, it could be friends, it could be spiritual, but relationships, that's number one. Number two is some form of mental or physical health, and number three is meaningful, purposeful, rewarding work. And if you have those three, you kind of are okay. Because actually, if you have those three, you tend to be all right. You tend to make enough money because you've got relationships, you got physical health, you got meaningful purpose, rewarding work, and you tend to be okay. Research showed that they're all interconnected, but that if you don't have meaningful purpose for rewarding work, you tend to live less. There was an association that when you got older and you stopped having work, people died faster. And the other one is when you had meaningful purpose for rewarding work, you were less likely to go home and kick the cat or dog. So I began to realize that meaningful purpose of rewarding work was very important. And I wrote the book because I had a thesis, and I was seeing enough data that work would change more between 2019 and 2029 than in the previous 50 years, because of a lot of different things. No one was thinking about it, and they were thinking about obviously stupid things like getting people back to the office, which has got nothing to do with the future of work. So I decided to write rethinking work. But once I wrote that, I started talking to a lot of different people about rethinking work, and they were interviewing me, and I was talking to people. But then I said, Why am I talking? Why people asking me, why don't I go outside and talk to people who are inventing the future? So I started doing that, and I invented a show called the Rethinking work show. And so now the book, thoughts about the future of work. The rethinking work show, resources are all the Rethinking work platform and outside of the book, which costs $15 on Amazon, every other resource is completely free. Yeah, right, because my whole stuff is and the reason the book is not free is because I did not self publish it. It was published by Harper Collins, who gave me a royalty. They have teams, and they would not be amused if it was for free, but it's 15 bucks, but for which, every time you buy one, I get $2 so it's not like exactly a money making racket on my card, but everything else is free. And so the whole idea is, I'm trying to get people to think about here's what work looks like, but not just from my perspective. Who cares there? I actually talked to people from a 25 year old to Howard Business School professor

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Rishad Tobaccowala  13:53

to parents, because I think work is so central, again, meaningful purpose of rewarding work. If you noticed, one of the things I did not say was another word, a three letter word, job. So I believe work and job are completely different, and I think we are at peak jobs, and we can have meaningful, purposeful, rewarding work and wealth creation, even though we are at peak jobs.

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Erik  14:22

Yeah, it makes total sense. And I think living firsthand what you're talking about, and actually being able to verify and back up what you were saying. You know, my partner and I, we founded our company in 2019 just as the pandemic was about to kick off and and we realized so many of those things that you mentioned, if I remember correctly, between 2019 and 2029, will just completely change absolutely and realize that.

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Erik  14:56

One that stands out for me tremendously, Rishad, is one of your additions, I believe, around the transformation of work in remote and freelance work. Yes, and how, in by roughly 2028, over 51% or more than half of your workforce will be made up of folks who don't sit with you every single day,

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Rishad Tobaccowala  15:19

exactly, exactly. And what happens is, I go into boardrooms. I wish, I wish I'd been invited into the JP Morgan Chase boardroom before they spent $3 billion to build a stupid building in Manhattan. Okay? Because by the way, if you look at the building in Manhattan, it's stupid all the way down to its foundation. And I'm one of the few people who say that right? Because people are scared of saying that. If you look at the actual place where people sit, it basically looks like a place where you put cows or chickens at pictures of the place. Make it palatable. They have 19 restaurants and bars in the building. Now, please recognize this is not in Bentonville, Arkansas. It's in downtown Manhattan, where, if you walk in any direction for two blocks, you have 50 great bars and restaurants. Okay, so in effect, what they're basically saying is we have to have bars and restaurants for people to come back, we have to threaten to fire them for them to come back. What is that? What

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Kerel Cooper  16:28

is that? Isn't, isn't that? Isn't that the sign, though, that

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Rishad Tobaccowala  16:32

it is the sign of somebody and management who is completely out of a zone of control when the world is moving into a zone of influence, people in their 50s and 60s who have no clue about what's about to hit them. And by the way, I'm 66 older than all of them, right? But at least I have a clue about what's about to hit me, right, running around incestuously, sitting in their private jets, talking to each other and not understanding the hell the world is about. Okay? And I go into boardrooms and I tell them that, and then they actually stop. They actually stop what they do. Because I don't go there with like passion. Who the hell cares about that? I go with facts and data which they care about, and I will give you five simple facts and data which will blow people's minds, because these are real. I have an advanced major in math. These are real. The number that you just mentioned, Erik, starting sometime in 2027 a majority of the people in the United States will be freelance or fractional, et cetera. Number one. Number 220, 2% of Gen Z believe in capitalism, versus 66% of baby boomers, less than 10% of baby boomers want to work for themselves. 76% of Gen Z want to work for themselves. 66% of Gen Z who have a full time job have a side hustle or side gig with which they make money. Worried about returning to the office. They don't want to return to the boss. They're not rejecting the space. They're rejecting the person

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Erik  18:06

I love. That the debossification,

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Rishad Tobaccowala  18:07

the deep age of debossification, is on, and no one has told the bosses that. Okay, if that makes sense, the fastest growing, most lucrative companies are AI. First talent everywhere. The same companies who are talking about agility and personalization have a one size fits model for everybody, which means they don't believe in agility or personalization for their own employees, who are the single most important thing that they have. So in effect, it's a failure of leadership and not a failure of space. Fascinating.

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Erik  18:43

You know, I want to come back to that because I think it's, I think it's really important for businesses to, you know, focus on those areas that you talk about. Right, reimagining strategy, money and financials and what it means, right, a retraining or re imagination of the workforce itself. And then I think reimagining, you know, almost all of those things and how they work together, and then how they don't, is as fascinating. We're going to come back to that. Like I kind of want to go back a little bit, because what you're sharing, and I think it's important our listeners and viewers know that, as you said, it's free for the most part, right?

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Rishad Tobaccowala  19:27

Like so that people find really unusual is if you don't want either you don't have it, or you don't want to, or books are not the way you consume information, which I'm open to, okay if you go to rethinking work.io which often resolves to rethinking dash work.io but if you just type in rethinking work.io you will get the best thinking in my book. You will get me having conversations. But most importantly, you would have a bunch of resources.

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Rishad Tobaccowala  20:08

Teen leaders who are inventing the future of work. The most recent is a 25 year old from London who basically has gone viral by saying most corporate jobs are bullshit. But just before that, I had two leaders of big corporations, Unilever and Clorox, talking about how culture is a competitive advantage and what culture actually means, and culture has got nothing to do with space. I've had the mother of two Gen Z kids who wrote a book for them called the 10 permissions. Is how to get into the new world, right? I have Harvard Business School professors with data, facts and math that basically said, forcing people back into the office is the most strategically stupid thing you can do. I have the world's greatest person about how AI will change the world of organizational design, which is printed come out with a book, having a conversation. All those things are absolutely free. And this also is very disruptive, which is my basic belief is AI means knowledge will be free. Why the hell should I charge for it fascinating?

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Erik  21:10

I think I want to even go back a few steps further Rishad, even before the Leo Burnett days. I want to actually go back to to young Rishad, because I have to think somewhere in your life early on, there were some influences you know, that kind of helped to shape who you are now. And so my question to you is, tell, tell us a little bit about you. Where did you grow up and where were you raised?

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Rishad Tobaccowala  21:37

So I was raised in a city which I still call what it was called when I was growing up, which is Bombay India. For those who want to look for it, you have to type in M, U, M, B, A, I, Mumbai, India. But Bombay is where I grew up, and I insist on calling it that. And it was in India, and my influences were threefold. One was the country seeing around it. Second specifically were my parents, and third was the oddly Jesuit teaching. I got all my school and college were run by Jesuits, so I had, it was kind of interesting, because my father was a Muslim, my mother was a Hindu. They worked for a Zoroastrian company called the Tara group, and they sent me to Jesuit school. So the only and I had, obviously friends that were Buddhist and Jains. So it was only the only thing that be great, religion of the world I did not get exposed to till later, was Judaism. Okay, obviously, there was very limited number in India. But everything else, you know, Hinduism was born in India. Buddhism was born in India. You could kiss Jainism was born in India. India has more Muslims than any other country in the world, excepting Indonesia, more than Saudi Arabia, more than Egypt, more than what you consider to be Islamic countries, more than Iran, right? And it's got this large Hindu population. But they sent me to Jesuit school, and so the result of those three things was my parents taught me about the importance of education and reading, and so they would take me in my books. And obviously there was one India basically taught me that anything you say the exact opposite is true, which is extremely true today. India is not a poor country, but it's not yet. It's still developing. It hasn't developed. But Bombay, the city I grew up in has the third largest number of billionaires, after New York and Shanghai, which is kind of extraordinary. And India is the largest user, not the largest gas generator, but it's the largest user of every Google and Microsoft and meta product in the world more than America, wow.

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Rishad Tobaccowala  24:14

Back home I go back home, so I go back to India once or twice a year. Now home for me is more of a physical place than people anymore, because my sister and brother in law live here. My mother in law is still there, so we go to see her, but my parents out there, and a lot of my brother and sister, many of my friends out there, some of them are there. But I go back more to a place than people. There are people, and I go more back to a place than people. I also run a foundation in India which helps 10,000 people. So I go partly for that. But India, my parents and my education, my formal education, was the camp in school in St Xavier's College, were the, I think, the most influential things in how I became what I was, the mad man. I became Rishad.

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Kerel Cooper  25:05

I'm curious that you mentioned the different religions of your mother, your father.

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Kerel Cooper  25:19

I'm curious to know how just being exposed to a level of diversity growing up shaped kind of who you are and your thinking.

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Rishad Tobaccowala  25:28

I think it was very, very important, because what happened was my mother did not convert from from Hinduism to Islam. My father was more religious than it? Sorry, more spiritual than he was religious. We went to Jesuit school where they couldn't, couldn't teach us what they basically were not allowed to, because this was India, they were not allowed to have a class in Christianity. So they broke up the class into two classes. If you were a Catholic, you went to Christianity class. And if you were non Catholic, you went to moral science. So the thing was called Moral science because the Indian government basically said, You cannot teach Catholic. You cannot, you got, you can run the universities and run the schools, but you can't convert people, right? So you can teach everything that you have a Jesuit, but if you want to have a Catholic teaching it, there has to be a choice. It didn't make, didn't say that you couldn't go, but you had to choose that. But for everybody, you were put into moral science. Okay, that was the thing, and they taught you moral science, which they believed was very important. But what it basically did is my mother, I would go with her family to temples, with my father to mosques. I would go with my friends to church, right? And you began to realize that two things, which are very important, all of them believed in something bigger than themselves, and that was important. And some people didn't necessarily believe in religion, but something, something besides yourself, which is one thing. But second is when you actually went to all these people, you began to realize they were actually talking about the same thing, more or less, okay. And so you basically began to take every one of them seriously and not seriously, Okay, seriously. But anytime they said that the other people were stupid, you said, like, what the shed, I just went there. They're exactly the same, okay? And so that allowed me to basically say that diversity is extremely important. You know, to this day, I basically ask people given in today's environment, I basically say, I'm a believer in diversity, equity and inclusion, and I want you to say loudly that you are not I'm not saying Dei, anti voc. I'm saying those are the words I want you to use that you're not for diversity, equity and inclusion, and explain to me why don't talk about Voc and dei and anti voc and all that shit. Talk about that. Okay, yeah. And so what happened is, because I said, without diversity, human beings would not be alive because of cross pollination. Is the only way humans became alive, right? Without equity, in effect, in some particular way, you would basically means that you would never get a chance, and you were born because somebody got a chance, right? And inclusion basically, simply means that today, it may be other people's perspectives that I'll listen to, but whether, if you see the demographics of the United States, today's majority will be tomorrow's minority. So you kind of want inclusion for yourself. Yeah, right. And once I talk that way, everybody shuts up. And that I learned from India, wow, from my you know, stuff, my own step is stop this goddamn nonsense. You don't have a clue what you're talking about.

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Kerel Cooper  28:56

Yeah, wow. Well, I love that. If you don't mind, I'm gonna use that. I'm going to ask people to tell me why you're not for diversity,

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Rishad Tobaccowala  29:03

diversity, equity, inclusion, don't talk about Voc and anti voc and everything else. You know, one of the key things that I do is I was run this Athena project, and people basically say, you've got the most extraordinary people here. And then one of them said, like, how come they So, God, I'm diverse. I

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Rishad Tobaccowala  29:27

i Okay, and if I program for excellence, this is what it looks like, right? But what I basically do is I'm sensitive to the fact that I'm programming for excellence, and suddenly doesn't look like America. So I'm saying, Am I programming for accident? So I'm not looking hard enough. Okay, but at the same stage, I had a panel on private equity. There were three white men old because they were the best people I could find. No problem. I had three people basically talking about AI. They all were people of color. So what? Right? So my old stuff is, I'm not like, it's not a quota system, but what basically happens is, if you go in a room and the room doesn't look like America, you got to ask yourself, why not? Right, right? I'm not saying it has to look like America, but it looks so out of like out of America. You just want to ask, why not? Yeah, okay, that's what I ask. I'm not saying anything else, is it? Because I'm not looking hard enough, or because, if, for this particular thing,

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Rishad Tobaccowala  30:32

skitball players, and you don't see Indians, and you ask, why not? There's a very simple answer. We got, I'm short, okay, and then it's done. Okay? We understand why they have their Indians. Okay, but those are the questions to ask. You know, somebody says, why? So there's a reason why not. But if the reason is, Oh, we didn't think to look for Indians, but Indians don't. Indians are genetically disadvantaged in playing basketball and fine. That's not a racist comment. That's true. Gotcha.

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Kerel Cooper  31:07

Yeah, no, it's I love your perspective on that. And again, why not? Why are you against diversity, equity, inclusion? Another question for you. You mentioned I the education was a big part of that. Just as the workplace is changing, I think the way people learn and the education system needs to change. I don't know it's changing fast enough, and so I'm curious to get your thoughts too, on just the education system, the traditional system, and how that needs to evolve, if you think it does so well

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Rishad Tobaccowala  31:50

too, as we so. If you look at the United States, I joined by the United States four, four categories account for 52% of us, GDP, and all of them, I believe, are ripe for major disruption. The largest one, which accounts for 18 to 20% is healthcare. And the other two are finance and automobile and transformation. And the fourth one is education. Okay, of all these four, I believe education is the most important, because it's the one that actually drives almost everything else. And somewhere along, we've completely lost the plot on education, and we've done three things on education in the United States. Makes sense to me, one and this I've read and learned from people like Scott Galloway, is we have decided to make it about scarcity and luxury good. There is absolutely no reason the world's greatest universities, the United States, can't triple and quadruple the number of people who study there. They purposely limit supply to make it rare and scarce. There's no reason for that. That's number one. Number two, they spend most of their time and most of the money. For most of these universities, for every one teacher, there are 234, administrators, right? Most of these universities spend 60, 70% of their budgets. And I'm not anti sports, but many of these spend 60, 70% of their budget on football stadiums, basketball stadiums and extracurricular I'm not against that. It's part of the college and everything experience, but if 10% and 90% go to professors, contracts and circus. Tell me how that's an education. That's not an education that's basically getting someone to sit around in Las Vegas.

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Kerel Cooper  33:54

Yeah? It's a it's a revenue generator,

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Rishad Tobaccowala  33:57

yeah, so, so. But the good news is, because of the internet, because of AI, I believe everybody has access to education, and I've been talking a lot about how to upgrade your mental operating system, and I basically keep telling people that you can have the world's bad education for $1,000 a year, as long as you are self driven and you have some friends to help you. Okay? And the reason for the $1,000 by the way, a year, is, I suggest to people that they buy two subscriptions at $20 ahead of either one of the following three, Claude or Gemini or open AI, I suggest two of the three, if you can afford all three, that's all three. So that's 20 that's half your money is gone. That's $500 right? And the others are certain, certain services, including, for instance, two or three streaming services, one for music, because I think music is a form of learning. You know, you can go to criterion and Netflix, or criterion and Netflix and Disney, or whatever it is, because they exposes you to a whole world, YouTube, without the commercials, things like that, right? So now you have the world at your feet for about 1000 bucks a year. You've got more than the Library of Alexandria had. Now what you need to do is get people to teach you, either online or this is where you need friends, mentors, guides, who will help you, like, figure this out. That's what my writing is. All about it. I often tell people, here's how you learn, here's what you can do, here's what you can do, here's how you can narrow yourself. So self education, I still do believe that schools and colleges are extremely important, because a lot of things that you also learn. I

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Rishad Tobaccowala  35:43

being connected to different people who not only have different points of view, who disagree with you, but who you cannot swipe mute or turn off. Okay, the only problem with this whole online thing is you can swipe mute or turn off, and because of the algorithms, you sometimes get yourself not exposed to other points of view. So, you know, and this is not my thought. This is like last week's writing from Scott Galloway. He says the two biggest money money making rackets in the United States is rage and obesity, right? Which is, there's a whole bunch of people who get you fat, which make you sick, and a whole bunch of algorithms that make you angry. Okay, and so, in effect, everybody looks like Cartman from South Park, a fat, angry person. Love it. Rishad, I want to

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Erik  36:56

expose some folks who don't subscribe, don't listen, don't read. And again, I go back to just this tremendous gift that it's all free. I'm thinking about some of the things that sort of have touched me, that I've read, you know, and sort of even taken back internally to my partner or to the leaders in my organization, and even the rest of the teams, you know, can you talk a little bit about soft? Is the new hard? Yes.

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Rishad Tobaccowala  37:26

So one of the things that I got really worked up about at some particular stage was where certain gentlemen who I would basically say are extremely successful, extremely powerful, and have amazing, what I would call our Amazing pedestals to stand on. And some of them are known by the name of Elon Musk. Others are known as the name of Mark Zuckerberg, right, who started using the word, it's time to be macho. We need masculine. We need hardcore. Those are the names words I was using, okay? And my whole basic belief, and everybody was saying that, and I said, that's absolutely wrong. It's actually much harder to be soft than to be hard, okay? And so one fine day, I decided to write, soft is the new hard and and I basically said one of the things is people who actually are very, very successful, who are extremely happy, have certain things. And those things tend to be, they have a state of grace and flow and connection. And I believe over time, soft, like water erodes rocks. Okay, two rocks hitting on each other, the rocks just chip. Water flows over rock gently and over time, and people who have grace and people who have flow and who have connection, and I define it further. People who have grace tend to have a combination of generosity with humility, and they treat people with respect. People who have flow tend to and that's from you know the term flow is they tend to build things. They tend to create things, and they tend to learn. And people who are connected tend to basically have either a connection to a spiritual thing, a connection to a purpose, and they have human connections. That is what success is. And it that none of that is hard core and macho and competitive and smashing people on the face and winner take all my old stuff is like, if these people were so god, I'm happy. After all their billions, why do they look so miserable? Why do they bend the knee when they don't have to? I'm not bending the knee to the guy in DC. Why do they with billions of dollars? Because they have no internal compass. They just have these brilliant, stupid things called hardcore, right? And my basic belief is, look, America is fantastic, but there are two great civilizations, lots of great civilizations, right? Many, many, America is great. I love America. I live here, but let's not discount there are other civilizations like I just talked to, and they're like, there's Egyptian, African, and I talk to that I know very well Indian, because I grew up there, but Chinese. So I've been to China, 23 cities in China, until two, three years ago, I would go, I would spend the equivalent of a month in China, one week at a time for four weeks. And I spent a lot of time. And you know, the Chinese people sort of reminded us that they you ask them very carefully what they believe in, and one of the things that they believe in is education, and they believe that they have to get along with each other, as the Japanese do and the Indians do, because there are too many of them. So they can't start fighting, right? They can't go out into Montana. There is no equivalent of Montana. Yes, there is in parts of western China, but there's no equivalent of Montana in India, right? There's no equivalent. So it's kind of very interesting. China has a lot of problems. I'm not saying they're great. You don't hear of like people being shot to death in China because they don't got them guns. No one's allowed to have a gun. You don't have an Indian not allowed to have a gun. So the whole idea, basically, is this macho stuff is the world's largest population, with the world's largest obesity world's least educated people, 40% lonely. That's what macho gets you, my friends, why don't we think about grace and respect and flow and connection and think about the soft stuff? Because it's much harder to do, because you have to listen to people, you have to reflect, you have to learn, versus smash your face, which is what this is.

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Erik  42:28

Yeah, thank you for that. You know, I've been asking you to kind of look back on different editions and look back, you know, on on certain subject lines. And I mean, you're almost up to 300 editions already? Yes, 272

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Rishad Tobaccowala  42:43

so you know, one of the things that I often have done is I'm gonna you know when you have your when the when this broadcast, or when you put it online. And the link basically is, if I were to ask anybody to look at one thing that might actually, in a very small way, impact their lives, I've made it into one link. So when a lot of people ask me on LinkedIn for advice these days, I can't talk to everybody in real time and live. So I do it like through you all. So I said, but I always respond so outside of it, like being one of those InMail things that I can do this for you, but anybody who calls it as a student, I say, Listen, I myself may not have time, but I'm going to distill everything that you are asking with an answer on one page. Okay? And I said, I'll keep it continuously upgraded, updated for you, so you have my latest thinking. And it's a it's a page on my website. It's a hidden page, which is the 100 best pieces of writing I've ever done in my life. Okay, so I've actually of those 272 pieces. I've selected 100 best pieces and organized them by subject. So if you want to learn how to sell, if you want to learn how to upgrade your metal operating system, if you want to learn about this, all of them are there, and people say this is better than any book and it's free. And I said, that's the point. It's free. And because it's free, it works, because I'm not trying to sell you anything, okay? And the oddest thing is, I start by creating good stuff, versus starting by how do I charge people?

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Erik  44:22

Yeah, that's great. You know, I was just gonna ask you, what are some of the favorite or best additions, but you've already

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Rishad Tobaccowala  44:30

subject for me, one of the things I began to realize is what may be best for me is not best for somebody, because they have a question. So my stuff is, you pick what is agitating you, or what you like information about, or what you want to learn about. Here are 12 subjects. Very quickly, you can see what the 12 subjects are, and then you can see the titles of the pieces, and you can click on the one that you think is useful for you, and that will be the best. If you ask me, I might give you something different, but I'm not you, so I'm just saying these are the my best thinking on these subjects you choose. And people say, How come? No, they said, like, isn't that smart? So I said, Yeah, what I'm doing is I'm personalizing, but I'm making you personalize. I'm not personalizing for

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Erik  45:19

you. Tremendous. Yeah.

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Kerel Cooper  45:22

Rishad, we always hear that very successful people have a daily routine that they just stick to, and it works for them over and over again. Do you have a daily routine? And what is that?

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Rishad Tobaccowala  45:35

This way, I had a daily routine, which now is often I get to it during the day, but it's not in exactly the hardcore routine that it used to be, and there are two reasons for it. One reason is I no longer have a day job, okay, so I work, but I don't have a day job, which basically means, and also I travel in which means this hardcore routine is a little bit hard when I tell you what it used to be, but I'm doing the same thing, but not doing it at the same time in the same order. Okay, so here's what it is. I believe I would get up at 4:30am Chicago time, or if I was in New York, I would get up 5:30am New York Time, which is 4:30am Chicago time. I would sleep at 930 or 1030 so I would sleep for seven hours. So this is not like no sleep. It's seven hours of sleep when I get up at 430 This is what my first three and a half hours look like. And I still do this some all of it, but it, I don't do all three in sequence anymore, because sometimes I do other things. But the usual seek the sequence is I get up at 430 and in 430 and 445 besides brushing my teeth and stuff like that, I make two doppios, so two double expressos, which I have it 445, then from five to six, I learned, I call it my learning hour. And I did that this morning. And it was basically I read two short stories from the American best short stories, 2025, it can be anything. So I didn't go online. I read usually it's, I call it my reading hour. It I don't go online. It's books of different sorts. Almost all of them tend to be fiction, some nonfiction, like essays, etc. So at any given time, in any given time, I'm reading 18 or 21 books, because if I have an hour, I read 25 minutes of three books today, right? And you can see behind me and I have books all over the place. I read books after that one hour when I had a job. At that time, I would open my email, read my email, get deeply disturbed by the people who are writing emails to me, which is basically crazy bosses, crazy clients, crazy whatever.

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Rishad Tobaccowala  48:14

Decided I hated them all use that energy and I would go either run or swim for the next 45 minutes, okay, then I calmed down. And when I was running and swimming, I basically decided to get all my you know, like, why is my boss saying this? Why is the city client saying this? Why is this prima donna talent saying this? I got all of that out of my system. Became very sane, came back, and when my kids were here, it was with my kids or with my wife. I would have breakfast with them. Then I would start answering emails. I start work. What I had done between five and eight o'clock in the morning was I had fed my mental, physical and emotional operating systems when I opened that email, I started answering. I lost control of my day. I was now under this publicist, clients, etc, my talents control or and I have no control. But regardless of what they did, it was a great day. I spent time with my family, I learned something, and I kept myself alive, right? And part of that was I reduced any stress or whatever it was. Then exactly at 530, or six, regardless of where I was, I would go to a bar and have two beers. So I would call it coffee takeoffs and alcoholic landings, right? Exactly two. So not one, not five,

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Kerel Cooper  49:52

yeah, two, two,

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Rishad Tobaccowala  49:53

right? So at it was basically, and I would, I would four or five times it would not be by myself. Sometimes would be by myself. I would have a colleague or go out with somebody, chat, and then it was done, and that was my routine. I still do the coffee takeoffs. I still do the reading hour, I still do the exercise. I still do the alcohol in the evening. What I sometimes the work day is not the same anymore, right? And therefore it allows me to do certain things. Sometimes I read later. I spend time with my wife later, rather than the morning. I sometimes get up later, those kinds of stuff, but those are the key reading. But I always ask, in the course of a day, did I do something that helped my emotional, mental and physical operating systems.

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Kerel Cooper  50:43

Gotcha. Gotcha. What's, what's something you wish you were better at?

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Rishad Tobaccowala  50:48

There are lots of things that I you know. I mean, there are hundreds of things that I could be better at, but the ones that I think, you know, I often wish I was better at, is I appreciate music, but I don't have any talent in playing any and I tried when I was young, my parents sent me to violin, and the teacher said the guy's got no skills. Later on, my daughter learning piano, I tried to go teacher, and she said, give it up. Okay, so I think I envy people who knew how to play a musical instrument, gotcha. I think it's a form of language, and I don't right, gotcha. And I think also, therefore my mind isn't as good as people who learn how to play music. So that's sort of one aspect. The other one is, you know, I think about all the things that I don't know, like, like, I keep reminding people, you have to be somewhat humble because you know so little when you think about everything, like, yeah, I try to get as many perspectives as possible. But that's not all perspectives, right? So in effect, it's that, and then the other one, and this, I don't I, oddly, I don't see it as a disadvantage, but sometimes I see it as a disadvantage, and it's so one of the reasons I so much done,

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Rishad Tobaccowala  52:23

I see in the United States is I do not spend any exercise. I swim, I run. So that's my version of quote, unquote sports. I play no sports and I watch no sport right outside of when it is time to watch sports. So what I will do is I will read a little bit about what's going on, like now, about, you know, the World Series, etc, and then I will go and watch the Super Bowl. I will watch, you know, the NFC, AFC playoffs. I'll go watch if it's Game six or seven in a basketball game. But outside of that, I don't watch any sports. I don't read that much about sports, and I don't play any sports. That to me is I don't have either the skills or the passion or interest that plus music are the two things that I regret music much more. I actually see the absence of sports as the ability to have freed up all time for me to do all the other things. Okay, that makes sense. It does, because a lot of my friends spend an innate amount of time on sports, which I believe, by the way, I love sport, I understand it, but it's so it's the music one I I think I missed the language in sports. It's a double edged sword. I'm no good at it. I haven't I don't spend time in it, and therefore, at some particular stage, I, if somebody talks to me about it, I know enough to not appear completely stupid. But I can't, like, outside of, like, naming two or three players of the Chicago Bears, I wouldn't know it. I wouldn't know any of the players, even Chicago Cubs. I know pope is involved in White Sox. That's how I know that, right? I've been to all the games, because I was in advertising. I've been to all the big

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Kerel Cooper  54:12

games, right, right?

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Rishad Tobaccowala  54:13

But it's not when people say, Would you like to come to a game? I said, Why don't you take someone who's really passionate about it? I'm going to sit there and say, I want the hot dog.

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Kerel Cooper  54:25

Well, I live in New Jersey, but I'm a big Chicago Bears fan, so if you know anyone wants to go to the Bears game, I'm raising my hand. All right, I got a two, two part question for you. Okay, what is a question that you would like us to ask our next guest, right? And our last guest wants us to ask you, what's something that you went through earlier in your career that if you had a chance to do over, looking back on it, you would do differently.

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Rishad Tobaccowala  54:57

So I want to answer that question. I would basically say that I would have basically taken more risks faster than I did. And I tended to basically because I came out of India, and in India, we did not have as many choices if you didn't make the right mistake. So what basically happened is I began to realize that the the more risks I took, and that

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Rishad Tobaccowala  55:31

started making my career. And I would have done it a little bit earlier, but it turned out that I didn't wait too, too long. It was only 1213, years into my career, not 30 years into my career. And that's one the question that I would ask the next guest is, who is the person that you helped? Who or who are the people you've helped? So when someone goes to them and said, who made a difference in your life, they'll debut. I love that cool

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Erik  56:05

Rishad, thank you for that link. We will be sure to share that link with everybody. But I also want to ask you real quick about your podcast. Where can everybody listen to your podcast?

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Rishad Tobaccowala  56:16

Yes, so there are three different things that people can read or listen and watch, all of which are absolutely free. So what I've given you the best of my writing, there's a sub stack subscribe to for free. That's my writing. I have a podcast which is called what next, and the best way for them to find it on any platform is to type in what next. And publicist group, which is my old company, because they produce it. It's what next, Rishad tobacco, but they produce it, so it's called what next. And then you type in Publicis group, and it has about 145 episodes of me talking to different people, which is fun. And then if you go, you can also type in the Rethinking work show, which is my latest show. But if you go to rethinking work.io and click on show, you'll see it. There's a YouTube show. It's also available on Spotify and podcast, which is actually produced by my daughter. So the Rethinking work show at rethinking work.io what next? Publicist group, wherever you listen to podcasts, and then I've given you the link. So rishad.substack.com but I've given you the link for all the best of the writing. What's important to remember is all of those are not only free

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Rishad Tobaccowala  57:33

marketing, they're free, free, free, which is why people there's nothing there's no affiliate marketing, no advertising, no subscription. Cost, nothing, right? 100% free. So it's basically my basic belief that generosity is the best strategy, and those are my gifts,

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Erik  57:56

excellent, Athena project.

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Rishad Tobaccowala  57:59

So theta project is something that a gentleman called drew Yani and I have co founded, and it's the third part, which is about leadership. So if my writing sub stack is about the future, and we talked about rethinking work, so I believe that we have a leadership challenge. And I talk to a lot of leaders, and this is not necessarily age gated, but it's kind of, it's basically people with 20 years of experience or more. So it tends to be people 45 to 65 though I'm myself older, I sound like we limited to that, but there's a group of people that are trying to figure out what's next for them, and everybody who talks to them tries to charge them a lot of money and sell them shit. So I try to create the version that I'm doing on other things, but for leadership, but human first, versus title first, to how to increase their impact, influence and intelligence, both for themselves, to build their futures as well as build their company's futures with programming that was wide spectrum, very much of my diversity programming sort of thing. I call it mongrel mix in bohemian, built around trust and integrity, and try to create it's a combination of convening content and community, but to create something with Hermes quality and Costco pricing, so by invitation only. But this particular thing, and my partners are people like Boston Consulting Group, University of Chicago, SAP member entire year, $888 a year, for everything, okay? And the only reason that isn't free is because there are some costs to running it, real costs to do these things and Drew and I don't want to keep investing our own money. So we run it so we don't lose too much money. That's the way to think about it. But our competitor, we don't have competitors, but people who do the same thing charge between five and 10 to $20,000 a year, and we charge 888, which is also a lucky number, 888, right? It's kind of interesting. So that's the Athena project. And you can, you know, if you go to Athena project on IO, you see a little bit about it, there'll be the hope all the content of Athena project would be available to everybody for free, right? The events and other stuff are going to be by membership only, and those are what you pay for, okay? Because those are actual physical costs that we have to have of space and food, intellectual learnings of that will be also available for free, excellent.

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Erik  1:00:38

Well, thank you, Rishad for providing a number of ways that folks can learn, stay in touch and and continue sort of there.

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Rishad Tobaccowala  1:00:45

And I would tell everybody who's listening, regardless of what everybody says, The world is actually getting better. So be optimistic.

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Erik  1:00:53

Love that. Love it. That's fantastic. And also, I think we should mention, pick up a copy of rethinking work

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Rishad Tobaccowala  1:01:00

absolutely, because it's, by the way, it's a great book. You can think about it and rethink your work.io. It'll make my publisher happy. And we're selling a lot. We already sold 20,000 books, which is great, but the more you buy, the better it is. And therefore I'll get to publish my third book.

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Erik  1:01:17

Keeps working, no surprises on the success of that. And thank you Rishad for hanging out with us and spending some time and everyone thanks for listening to another episode of MRP, Minority Report podcast.

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