To challenge the status quo find a coconspirator Ipsita Dasgupta
Translator: Joseph Geni
Reviewer: Camille Martínez
So I’ve been thinking about
how to explain this concept to you,
and I’ve decided I’m just going to start
with something we all understand.
To achieve great heights
or change the world,
no matter how smart we are,
we all need people.
And for conventional people,
the universe seems to conspire
to make them successful.
For the unconventional,
I think we need something
that I like to call “co-conspirators.”
Co-conspirators are different
not because they’re different themselves,
but because of the people who need them.
They tend to be people
who are willing to bend the rules –
actually even break them sometimes –
and challenge the status quo
to stand beside someone
who is going against societal norms.
I’m actually going to describe
an experience that I had
that first crystallized the idea
of co-conspirators in my mind.
In 2014,
I was a corporate executive
with an American multinational in India,
and we were actually faced
with an interesting problem:
we didn’t have enough
women in the workforce.
And just to give you some context,
27 percent of women work in India.
If you look at most of Asia,
that number is around 48 percent.
So we knew the numbers were deplorable,
and it was manifesting itself
in our own organization.
So we decided – actually,
I’ll just give you a quick example
of a young engineer, a 25-year-old woman,
who told us a great story
about her daily life,
to just exemplify it for us.
She said, “As I walk out
of the house in the morning,
I am running around
doing a bunch of chores,
and my mother-in-law –
I live with my in-laws –
is starting to get a little bit irritated,
because she’s going to be left
with all the housework to do.
And then, as I get
back home in the evening,
I’ve overshot the time I’m going
to be home by an hour or two at least,
and by then, two of my biggest champions,
my father-in-law and my husband,
are also starting to get
a little bit irritated.
And my mother-in-law is furious,
because she’s taken care of everything
that needs to be done.
And through the middle of the day,
I’m actually surrounded by men my age,
and there’s only one expectation
from them by society.
It’s to achieve in their careers
and provide for
their families financially.
How do you expect me
to bring this same level of enthusiasm,
excitement and passion to the workplace?”
And she was right.
And I thought the women’s
network volunteers
came up with a great idea.
They instituted a “bring your
mother-in-law to work” day.
So we heralded a group of mothers-in-law
and a few mothers into the office,
and we took them to our R and D labs.
We took them to the medical equipment
that their daughters-in-law
were creating and building.
And as we did, we described to them
what their daughters-in-law actually did:
they impacted maternal mortality rates
and infant mortality rates.
They brought them down.
They identified complex diseases
early enough to be able
to prevent and cure them.
And then we took them to lunch.
We gave them a lavish lunch
and thanked them for the role they played
for freeing up a young woman
to work shoulder to shoulder with us
to literally change the world.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the room.
Every one of these women
were grateful and proud.
They were proud of who
their daughters-in-law were,
but they were grateful to be included
as part of the conversation.
And I wondered at the time
whether what we’d done
was just a great touchy-feely moment
and was cute
but really wasn’t going to have
long-term impact.
And a couple of days later,
one of my mentees swung by my office,
and she was super excited.
She said, “I went home
from work yesterday,
and I was bracing myself,
because I was really late,
and I was bracing myself for a lecture,
and my mother-in-law
turned to my husband and said,
‘Can you please get up
and make her a cup of tea?
She’s exhausted.
She’s saving lives. You work at a bank.'”
(Laughter)
And there you had it.
You had the perfect co-conspirator,
someone that we don’t always
recognize or value,
but was changing the way somebody else
could challenge the status quo,
by standing beside her
and questioning the societal norms
and making a difference.
The next example I’m going to use will be
closer to almost everyone in this room.
When I graduated from business school
and started working in a company,
a group of us, my peers and I,
were asked to work on a strategy
for a business that hadn’t
been doing too well over the last decade
and was being neglected.
We put our hearts and souls into it,
and we did a lot of analysis
on our nights and weekends
and put together what we thought
was a good strategy.
And after presenting it
to a number of people
that we were getting buy-in with,
we were actually asked to present
to the global CEO
at his annual strategy meet
that happened over a week.
And we were both excited and apprehensive
as we flew into headquarters.
We were excited
because this was an opportunity
to show how much we had learned.
But we were also nervous because,
though a brilliant, dynamic man,
he had a fiery temper and wasn’t really
the easiest person to present to.
Five or six hours before our presentation,
a senior colleague pulled us aside
and sat down and gave us a front-seat view
of what had happened all week.
We knew about people
who had bombed their presentations.
We knew about people who had almost
been instantaneously promoted in the room.
We knew what was keeping
the CEO up at night
and what he thought
were tailwinds to the business.
And when we walked into
that presentation later in the day,
we actually got buy-in with both the CEO
and his senior staff.
And it wasn’t just because
of our analysis or our strategy.
It was because we were prepped
to be able to communicate in a way
that the team could absorb.
Now, this senior colleague of ours
didn’t pull us aside,
because he wanted to gossip.
He pulled us aside because he believed
we were unconventional in the boardroom.
That unconventionality was exactly
why he wanted us to think about
this new, fresh perspective
and provide a view
on where this business should go.
But he also knew it was
a distinct disadvantage for us,
because we didn’t know how
to present in that room,
and we hadn’t done it before,
and they weren’t used to receiving us.
And that again is an example, in my mind,
of somebody bending the rules.
Because he decided to co-conspire with us,
he not only changed
the career trajectories
of six young people in the organization
who suddenly got all this visibility,
but he actually changed
the trajectory of a business
that people were neglecting
and didn’t have any fresh ideas for.
The last example I want to share with you
is actually very far removed
from the corporate world
and somewhat personal.
This is the story of my mother.
In her early 20s, she lost her father.
He had passed away in his late 40s,
leaving behind six children,
four younger siblings
and one older sibling than her,
and a widowed mother who had never worked.
My mom and her older sister realized
that they actually needed
to start earning an income –
they were both in grad school –
to ensure the rest of the siblings
could get through their schooling
and start to work.
So she shifted her law school classes
to evening classes,
and she started to work
during the day as a schoolteacher
to bring home an income.
And every day, she would
actually get off a bus
at the end of her evening
law school classes
on the streets of Calcutta.
Now, mind you,
this is a woman who wasn’t used to
taking public transportation at all,
let alone at night.
And as she would get off the bus,
she would take about a seven-
to eight-minute walk to her home
from the bus stop
on a street that was largely deserted,
because it was a residential street
with some shops that closed
around 8pm or a little bit before that.
One day, a store owner was closing
his store a little bit later than usual,
because there was a customer
who had actually left a little bit later.
And he saw my mother get off the bus.
He waited for her.
He actually knew the family.
The store had been in the neighborhood
for more than 20 years,
so he knew her since she was a baby.
He watched her walk to the street
that her house was on,
turned off the lights,
shut the store and went home.
From the next day, he found
that he waited for her every single day
until he she made her way
to her own house.
Other store owners on that same street
suddenly noticed this one store
that was open longer,
and suddenly started to see
a bunch of end-of-day customers walk in
to buy odds and ends that,
from after their long day from work
and their commute home,
realized they hadn’t picked up
for the next morning.
Some people who came in the mornings
also started to come the night before.
A few of the storekeepers decided
that actually what was happening
was he was monopolizing
a bunch of customers,
and they started to keep
their store lights on
and keep their shop open till 9 o’clock.
From that time on,
my mother had a lit street
with plenty of activity on the street.
I believe that that store owner
was my mother’s co-conspirator.
Because of him,
a small change to what was conventional
on that street at the time
allowed for her and her family
to do something that was
completely unconventional.
A woman her age from
an upper-middle-class family
actually got married at that age
or studied in grad school
with the protection of their family.
Because of that store owner,
all of my mother’s siblings
went on to become engineers,
lawyers, accountants and teachers,
and my mother went on to become a lawyer.
The world needs co-conspirators.
As we get into a complex environment
where more and more complex problems exist
and we need to find more solutions,
we need unconventional people
in our boardrooms and at the table.
For that to happen,
we need co-conspirators.
In my own life,
whether it’s because of my gender,
my ethnicity or sometimes,
as I’ve been living in this part
of the world for over a decade, my accent,
I’m often perceived to be unconventional.
It’s my co-conspirators that have
shown me the path forward,
and actually, it’s my co-conspirators
that keep me seeking out
the unconventional paths to go down.
So what I’d like to ask
of all of you today
is that you look around
and find the people
that inspire you to co-conspire.
I promise you that your empathy
and your courage
will change someone’s life
and may even change the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)