2020 - the year of Experience Makers

This is the annual bumper issue of my newsletter. I hope to make it a useful collector’s item of ideas and content. So let’s go! GO! GO!!!

1. Meet the Experience Makers

This year conferences went virtual. I love going to conferences to meet friends and make friends. The Adobe Max conference is one of the conferences I absolutely crave to attend. It is a conference about creativity and ideas. I want to share a treasure trove of ideas. If you register by adding your email, you can access the recordings of the Adobe Influencers who spoke there. These are all 15 minute presentations packed with ideas. Discover why you need to be an Experience Maker

Watch the Experience Makers

2. BNPW: Book, newsletters, podcast & website

For me it has been the year when I created content and experimented with many new formats

BOOK:
I wrote a new book Dreamers and Unicorns and its spin offs. It is all about the many ways in which leadership, talent and culture have become the new growth drivers. I started writing the book in the early days of the lockdown. It was launched on 16 Nov 2020. This was a COVID baby for sure!

2. TWO NEWSLETTERS:

I started this newsletter on substack which appears on Mondays at 9:00am IST. This newsletter is in its 31st issue. If you have not subscribed to this yet, just add your email by clicking the red button below.

https://abhijitbhaduri.substack.com/subscribe?

I started a second weekly newsletter on 1st Dec 2020 with LinkedIn. It got off to a great start by one and half lakh subscribers. I write about one practical idea every week that you can use. Read it here

3. PODCAST:

I started the second season of my podcast. It is the second season of Dreamers and Unicorns, a podcast that I started last year. Listen to episodes of Dreamers and Unicorns 2.0

4. My website abhijitbhaduri.com got a new look. BUT during the migration I lost all the old emails of people who used to get my posts in the mail. You have to go back and add your emails once again.

3. Live chats with Unicorns

This year, I tried to learn about how to do live chats with people who are doing something interesting in their career. I had to get over my awkwardness with video. They say, the pandemic accelerated changes that would have otherwise taken a few years. In my case, the change that got accelerated was getting comfortable with video. My book launch had to be done virtually. I was quite apprehensive about it. The launch was on my birthday. Guest no 1 was Aditya Ghosh, who is credited to have taken Indigo airlines from Dreamer to being a Unicorn and becoming a Market Shaper.

The second live chat was with Santosh Desai - India’s brand guru. We spoke about what IS a brand and what are ways in which brands are built. This is a masterclass in brand strategy. Don’t miss it.

The third live chat was with Bala Srinivasa. He spoke about the next big opportunity for entrepreneurs. It would be to build products and services for “Middle India”.

And the last week was a great chat with a professor of globalisation and a professor who has been a hostage negotiator. The topic? How to work with people we don’t like.

The next live chat is on 1st Jan 2021 with stand up comedian Papa CJ. Join me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at 7PM IST

4. The Vaccination Visa in 2021

Vaccination records will go digital. Every employer and every country will have to find ways of signaling to others that they are safe to socialize with. Being able to convince others is the new business opportunity and the new leadership skill.

2021 will be the year of convincing others. Read more

Read previous posts on my Economic Times and Times of India blog

5. Book review: ‘Yes Man - the untold story of Rana Kapoor’

If you have seen the serial Bad Boy Billionaires on Netflix, you may have seen Pavan Lall talking about Nirav Modi and how he engineered the scam and escape. Pavan wrote a book called Flawed: The Rise and Fall of India’s Diamond Mogul Nirav Modi.

His new book is about Rana Kapoor, the man who floated Yes Bank. According to the ED, Rana Kapoor, his family members, and others, got benefits worth Rs 4,300 crore through companies controlled by his family as kickbacks for sanctioning huge loans through Yes Bank. He is also accused of receiving bribes for going easy on loans given to a few big corporate groups that had turned into non-performing assets.

Pavan Lall unravels the story of how greed and unfettered ambition of a megalomaniac ruined the institution and the average consumer paid the price.

Read more