The lotus is a flower that not only survives but thrives and prospers in muddy, murky, unclear water. Companies are like that, they need to strive and adapt to hard times. You need to build the right culture so that your company can go through those times. This is exactly what the founder of Leading Lotus, Umadevi Gopaldass does for her clients. She helps them build a strong ecosystem or work culture so that they can achieve success. Join your host, Stephen Jaye as he talks to Umadevi Gopaldass about her many work experiences with different cultures. Learn how to emerge from this muddy, murky place and thrive.
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Building A Strong And Thriving Work Culture With Leading Lotus Founder Umadevi Gopaldass
For the vast majority of people, work is a major part of our lives. One key aspect that impacts our work experience is the culture of the organization that we work for. Work culture is one area where I believe that we’re in serious need of making work, work better for more people. With that being said, I want to bring up my guest, Umadevi Gopaldass, who started her own business called Leading Lotus. That is leading the charge in bringing us a better, more useful work culture. Thank you for joining us, Uma.
Hi, Stephen. Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure.
Tell me a little bit about Leading Lotus and what your goal is for our work culture.
I started Leading Lotus a few years ago. I incorporated on February 14th on Valentine’s Day. I had nothing else to do that day, so I was a rebel. I had quit the corporate world. I had 26 years of working and living all over the world. I was in oil and gas, working offshore on oil rigs, platforms, and remote towns. I was with Accenture Management Consulting for several years and then had high-powered jobs and careers, followed by the gold mining industry. Part of it was, I was struggling to find a purpose for my own life, which was pulling at me. Even though I had great careers, the remuneration was great. Work-life balance was an issue, but then financial stability was not an issue.
That was the struggle. I didn’t have to change anything except I had to. It was like a conundrum. It wasn’t like just yesterday. I woke up and decided, “I want to do this.” It was starting to happen six years before I even quit my last high flying job. When it was time to let go of a paid job, the decision was very natural. I quit end of 2016 after finishing all my projects. I didn’t leave. I had a three-year project that I completed and I left. I disengaged from everything for three months and founded Leading Lotus. The company had an underlying theory that we all need to come out of the book, the muddy, murky consciousness of mess that we go through every day in our minds, where a lotus grows.
Lotus is actually like a weed. It only grows in muddy, murky, unclear waters. It always comes out of the water pristine because it’s got a self-cleaning technology built into it. We call it the Lotus effect. It’s a scientifically proven design that’s used in control towers. Not many people know the biology of a Lotus. It’s a revered plant and had been around for 150 million years. I said every day we do need to come out of that muddy, murky messiness. We need to think clearly, see the light, and make the right decisions. That’s a tough call, every day, day in and day out.
I designed my company based on that. The tagline was, “Decide with clarity.” It’s supposed to help people, individuals, professionals, businesses, corporations, and nonprofits get out of the struggling mode and get into the striving mode, and then end up in the thriving mode. Because if you look at the Lotus, they thrive in a murky environment, but it’s an ecosystem where it’s always going to shine bright when the sunlight’s out. That was the premise of Leading Lotus.
“I hire people telling them that they can only work for me or in this role for two years. I need to see them progress. I like people who literally get bored of their role very quickly.”
What is this muddy, murky place? Can you describe what does it feel, look, and sound like?
In the worst situation, it feels like you’re drowning for an individual. Your lungs, stress levels, hormones, brains, veins, everything is like a ticking bomb. That’s called the burnout stage. You can’t think clearly anymore because you’re overworked. Your company or your work is compromised. You don’t have security and stability. That darkness, for an individual, is almost like a constant panic state, where you’re short and angry with people easily with your kids, wife, spouses, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, and parents. You always don’t have enough time. Time is a very elusive concept. There’s not even enough time to think about why you don’t have enough time. That’s how I would characterize it.
For a business, it’s the trajectory that is going downhill and you do not know how to pull it up, where graphs showing your growth rate going up and suddenly flipping and falling. There’s no amount of work that you can do to try and pull it up. The startups like Uber, Lyft, all have gone through that. They’ve enjoyed huge period of growth, then suddenly it’s like, “What do we do now?” No one is immune to that. Businesses and organizations themselves have a very different way to operate these days, which is a lot larger and deeper in the breadth of scope and the ability to influence societies a lot deeper. That’s where the problem lies, making the right decisions.
What typically gets people into this murky, muddy place? Is it mostly overwork? Is it insecurity? Is it a combination of a lot of things?
If you’re talking about individuals, it’s very personal to them. In a broad aspect, people are not thinking long-term enough. Coming from Asia, I’m from Singapore, where it’s always about the 50- to 100-year vision because it’s a tiny island, so we cannot afford to think about tomorrow or the next day. We have to think about our population in 100 years. This island is sinking. How else can we reclaim the land from the ocean? Let’s quickly dredge more sea kind of stuff. That society has built me up for a long-term, larger vision to have in life and businesses. I never went after the short-term remuneration, piece, or the payback. It’s a tough position to be in when you are not looking for short-term gains in the hope that the long-term will pay off.
The key problem for individuals will be like, for example, “Now I have a job. I’m doing great,” and then you’re tugging along. In 3 to 6 months, you’re starting to get disillusioned. You hit the one year and you’re like, “I need to find a different job.” Instead of doing that, what someone needs to do is look into themselves and see, where do I want to be in five years? For me, several years ago, I decided I need to be in a boardroom to be a board of directors, but I knew I wasn’t ready. That was where I aim to go. Everything I did between then was to strategize to want that avenue because I need to get educated, build my career path that way, get more experience in the governance and sustainability portion, the fiduciary roles and stuff like that. You need to design your life in how you see yourself in the future.
I didn’t use to live like that. In my teens and my twenties, I was more destructive with my life. I could have been a multimillionaire now, but I threw money away and didn’t believe in money. I’ll be dead tomorrow, let’s party. I was getting paid a lot, too. I was working offshore on oil rigs and I was working for a very big oil and gas company, Schlumberger, and it was paying me a lot. I was also living in remote towns, earning the hardship allowances, yet I came back home with $15,000 debt, even though I got paid more than that a month.
Decide with clarity.
That sounds like rapper stuff right there.
That was. I was disillusioned and like, “Life sucks. Everything sucks. Let’s throw money at everything and give money away to people.” I was philanthropic as well. I saw too much poverty and destruction, and at a young age, you can’t manage that when you see too much bad stuff happening. I would say that, first of all, I regret what I did when I was in my twenties. I could have been a millionaire. If I had saved everything up, bought three properties, I could have just retired. Learning that lesson has, in my thirties, set me up for success. I had to learn that in my twenties. In my 30s, I started getting serious about investing in good insurances, endowments, stock market, real estate, and stuff like that. In my 40s, I went into real estate.
Especially for women, because as an Asian girl when I was young, we were not taught about the financial aspect of growing money. Being Asian, we were taught about saving money, so that was the saving grace for my family. They would never say, “You’re going to be a rich girl. You’re just going to be married off. Don’t worry about it.” That didn’t happen. I broke that mold, too. I had a very keen sense of understanding that as an individual, regardless of your background, race, and gender, you have to be self-sufficient and be able to project that for the long term to succeed. You need to think long-term vision.
What feels to me and you would know this better than I would, having lived in many different places, it seems to me like American culture is notoriously short-term in its thinking. What do we need to do to reorient ourselves to more long-term visions?
I’ve done a couple of goal settings for Millennials and Zillennials. It’s not a matter of not wanting to think long-term. It’s not having grown up that way. When you go to school, it’s like, “You got to pass this test, you got to go to this, you go to that, and you got to score so much for these sports and those sports.” It’s a very busy life. The hard questions you don’t ask quickly or at a very young age. That’s also a generational difference, too. You would have had that from Barbara Randell in your last episode or the future episodes to come. The culture for the recent times is to show your worth through your achievements now.
Instagram culture.
Instant gratification, Instagram, Insta and all of that. It’s a like culture and a thumbs up culture.
I’m guilty of it, too. I’m not here just pointing the blame, but I understand the culture of like you get the reward right now as opposed to the culture of I’m setting myself up for something in the future and I’m doing this work right now. I might not see any real benefit to myself for 6 months, 1, 3 years is a completely different way of thinking about it.
I’ve lived in Africa and the Middle East. I’ve worked a lot in the Middle East for oil and gas, Europe, and the US for a long time. Moving around the culture is very different because the problems are very different. The nature of the problems is very different. If you’re looking at developing nations, conflict-free zones are a luxury in certain places. If I’m in that situation, do I want thumbs up or do I want someone not to shoot me in the head? That’s the analogy I use. It’s like, “I get a thumbs up, but I accidentally get killed.” Fail. That’s the difference. The cultures are different because of the underlying aspects of the need.
I used to come in and out. I was in Texas before Chicago, but several years ago, I moved completely to the US for the job I was doing prior to setting up my company. I only had 60 people on my Facebook and I was very proud of it. I was trying desperately to cut down more and telling people, “No, I do not want to add you.” It’s only for my family who lives on the other side of the world. Singapore is literally on the other side of the world. How can I explain to you that Facebook is nothing more than something to keep in touch for my family so they can see photos? For me, I used it as an app to write and post pictures for my mom and my cousins, and everybody can see that I’m alive in a foreign country. I can’t pick up the phone fourteen hours later and say, “I’m alive.” It’s difficult. That was what I was using it.
It started to grow and annoy me that I wasn’t able to shut people off, people that didn’t matter to me. They would get upset that I wouldn’t engage in communication on Facebook. It’s like, “Let’s make this easy.” I get rid of Facebook. Now I do have Instagram again. I keep it very simple. Again, the 60, 70, 80 people, I need to keep them. I try not to put too much people from work or anything. It’s never work-related.
For me, I’m in an age group that’s Generation X too, 1974. We were used to picking up a phone. We were used to the pager culture. That instant gratification wasn’t something I needed to pursue at all. I do have to say that sometimes it backfires in my career because I’m not putting myself out there enough for people to know who I am that involves clients. That’s a paradigm shift. It’s a choice that you make and you got to live with it. I have struck a balance with it. I do a lot on LinkedIn and I save social media for family.
One of the things a lot of people struggle with is having some separation between their work life and their personal life, especially Twitter, but even with Facebook and Instagram, a post you make on those things can affect your work because they’re looking at it. I remember when recruiters first started looking at people’s social media presence and beyond just LinkedIn where you’re supposed to look at or GitHub if you’re in the tech world. Looking at everything and suddenly it’s like if you’re that twenty-something where most of your pictures on Facebook or Instagram are you falling down drunk at a bar. I remember when people would say, “I need to deactivate my account while I do a job search and then put it back on later.” One thing I’m wondering is that you talked about the six-year period between when you realized what you want to do and when you started Leading Lotus. Six years before that, at the very beginning, was it the same vision of having Leading Lotus or was the vision something different? Did it take on many iterations?
I always say that my career is driven by an outside source, but activated by me, which means I started on a journey, on a path in my career, and I decided, “I need to do this. I need to do that.” It’s brought me into places to enable that with me kicking and crying. You didn’t ask it in the right way. I’m both blessed and shocked where I am now. I started my career when I was sixteen years old. In Singapore, you start early doing an internship. I was the richest kid in school despite coming from a poor community because oil and gas pay a lot for a part-time job while you’re studying full-time.
Design your life in how you see yourself in the future.
I enrolled in a university and they paid me for part of the degree and said, “You’re going to Major in Operations Management with a secondary for Supply Management and a bit of Finance.” I said, “Sure. Why not? I’ll do it.” I didn’t say, “No. I want to do Archeology or whatever.” I said, “Fine.” That’s what I meant. I had all this outside influence, but I knew when I was that young that I was going to be a business person. I knew I want to be a businesswoman in elementary, for you guys, but we call it primary school, at a very young age. My best friend was asking me, “What do you think you’re going to be when you grow up?” I said, “A businesswoman.” She was like, “What? What’s that? Someone who has a business?”
If you knew from primary school, from age 7, 8, or whatever that is that you want to be a businesswoman, how were you able to, because a lot of Americans might struggle with this idea, still go to college and pursue a degree in something completely different, Operations Management?
How do you pursue your dream? For me, education was an education. Singapore’s system was Step A, B, C, D, E, F and then off you go. You had to study and go through a university. They knocked you out of the park in the education thing. It’s an Asian staff. You have to go through all the way. Otherwise, you’re a failure in society. They give all the grants and stuff, so there’s no excuse for you saying, “I’m too poor. I can’t afford that.” No way, Jose. Everyone needs to go and study, get to college. We will provide for you. I hated studying and school. I went through it because it was expected of me.
The beauty of it was I was interning for a very big and popular company that I didn’t know I was interning for. One of my best friend’s auntie was working for Schlumberger in Singapore. Singapore is a huge oil and gas refinery island. It’s the great exporter of Asia Pacific. The aunt was looking for some kid to come in and file on the weekends. I was only 15, turning 16. It was holiday for us back then, like a school holiday. I said, “Fine, $50 an hour. Why not?” That’s a huge amount of money. I volunteered and then I got stuck. They kept calling me. That’s how I ended up interning from sixteen years old, all the way until I graduated university at twenty years old. They already offered me a job while I was there. My first stint was an Operations Manager in Indonesia. I’m managing a $500 million profit and loss port operations in offshore Indonesia. As soon as I graduated, I was shipped off to Indonesia. There were a lot of external influences where I did not say, “No.” I just said, “Let’s see where this is heading.” My instincts of going with the flow have been spot on.
You went with the flow for a while, and then at some point, you decided, “I need to go out of the flow and start this business.” What inspired the business? Was the concept behind Leading Lotus inspired by the work experience that you had over these years? Was it something you had in your mind all along?
It was like a combination. When did it start? I was about 29. I was thinking, “I would like to try this consulting thing,” because Schlumberger had a huge consulting arm, too. I wasn’t in the consulting. They just looked fancy. They didn’t look like the oil riggers. We all wore overalls and hard hats. They all looked fancy and shoes. I was like, “That looks like a great job. They don’t have to go to the rig.” I said to myself, “That might be a fun place to work,” and then I left Schlumberger resting because I finished a seven-year project for their global transformation. I wasn’t burnt out. I needed a place to rest.
When I was resting, it was in Bali. I was surfing, drinking beer, and stuff like that for three months. One of my coworkers, who was in Schlumberger, had left and gone into Accenture Management Consulting, a big name consulting company in Asia-Pacific, in Malaysia. For some odd reason, I don’t know what possessed him. He took my CV, my resume, spruced it up and sent it to the Singapore Accenture office. He told them that they need to hire me to set up the Supply Chain Consulting vision. Here I am, having great fun in Bali, thinking I should find another job. I get a call from Accenture, and they go, “We got your name and got referred to. They want to interview you for a position.”
Your career is driven by an outside source but is activated by you.
Six months later, I’m joining a management consulting, one of the big fours next to McKinsey and Bean, and all of that. I’m joining them in a senior position. I’m just thinking, “I should be a consultant.”
Remember the first thought was I want to be a business owner? I’m thinking, “I want to be in consulting.” I was 25 plus and three years in consulting. I was having a fantastic time, but something was off in the consulting world. For me, coming from the industry, I wasn’t getting my hands dirty enough. I was consulting, leaving, and saying goodbye. I’m not used to that environment.
I felt like I wasn’t producing enough value with the way I’m working, not in terms of the projects I was doing, those huge amounts of value we’re giving, but we don’t get to see the fruition of it because we leave the consultants. I didn’t even give myself some time or anything. I said, “At some point, I need to leave this and go work for a company,” and then I was thinking, “You know what? I need to set up my own consulting company.” While I was saying that, there was a project in Elko, Nevada. They shipped me off to Elko, Nevada for Newmont Mining, a gold mining company, to do a three-month cost efficiency project. I landed in Elko, Nevada kicking and crying. I was like, “What the heck? I’m in Singapore and you flew me to a small town.”
There’s nothing around you. It’s desert everywhere.
It’s a rugged beauty. There will be canyons. When you’re landing, you don’t see it. Once I landed, the first time I landed, I looked around, and I said, “I found a home.” I liked living in remote places and small towns because I’m used to oil and gas. Going back home to Singapore was tough for me because it was a beautiful, big, glitzy city, and I didn’t feel comfortable there. I’m odd. After doing the three months project, all I said to myself was, “It won’t be bad if I ended up working here, maybe some sort of a senior role.”
I finished that project and went back home. The managing partner for that project in Accenture leaves and joins Newmont Mining a year later as the VP of Supply Chain calls me up, and she says, “You know how you loved Elko, Nevada and I don’t know why? We have a job for you, a senior role as North American Regional Supply Chain Director. Would you want to go?” I’m like, “Yeah.” It was one year later. I’m like, “Sure.” They’ve processed my visa and I leave Singapore in a huff and a puff.
Within one month, I left and moved to the US to Elko, Nevada, for the first time. I lived there in the year 2010. September was when I first moved there. I said, “This is going to be a fun ride. Who knows? I might end up in Colorado.” That’s what I said when I Ianded. All I do is put stuff out there and things happen. I did that role. Within two years, Newmont is saying, “We need you in a global position because we need you to take care of Ghana, Peru, Australia, and not only focus on the Nevada region for the gold mines. We’re moving you to Greenwood Village, Colorado for a global role. Are you going to take it?” I said, “No.” I was kicking and crying because I loved Elko. I didn’t want to move.
I made a deal with them. I again knew that when I kick and cry, it means that it’s the right place I’m going towards. It’s just not going to be pleasant for me because it’s not what my brain is used to. My brain can’t see the full potential of an opportunity, so the first instinct is fear. I agreed. I flew back and forth living in two places, Elko and DTC, Denver Tech Center, for two years, and then finally, I committed to move to Colorado in 2013. I worked for Newmont. I was like, “You know that business thing about consulting thing that I was thinking about, I think it’s time.” That’s when I started Leading Lotus.
What’s interesting is full circle back to the beginning of the conversation, you talked about that transition is natural in a way. Whereas in these other experiences, you talk a lot about things. Kicking and screaming have come up quite a bit, but it seemed like when you decided it was time to leave and time to start Leading Lotus, it felt natural. It almost felt like you said, “This one larger project has come to the completion, a multi-year project, and now it’s time to do Leading Lotus.”
That’s the funniest part. When I was working for other companies, it was like, “When is the right time?” When I completed the project, I think I gave my notice six months early.
Not two weeks’ notice, six months’ notice?
I didn’t have to, but I knew I had to train up someone else to take over what was already built. I brought in a colleague from Ghana. I trained him on this global role, so that he could take it wherever he needs to take it. I positioned it that way and it worked out well. My bosses were in sync with what I was thinking in my career. They knew that I’ll outgrew quite a lot of stuff. I think that was the problem. At every end of every program and project, it outgrew the role and me. I needed a bit more of the risky stuff.
Here’s an interesting question. There is always this balance between stagnation and outgrowing things. If you’re running an organization, were you more concerned about someone who’s going to outgrow the role you hire them for or more concerned about someone that’s going to stagnate and not be very effective? Which end of the spectrum is a bigger worry from a management standpoint?
Find the right job for your personality.
For me, particularly from a management point of view, I hire people telling them that they can only work for me or in this role for two years. I need to see them progress in 2 to 3 years. Oil and gas were like that. They would never let you get too cushy and comfortable in a role because that means you’re stagnating. In worse circumstances, if you become complacent, bad things can happen offshore in an oil rig or whatever. We were always moving around like crazy because of that. I took that personally to how I nurtured people who worked for me and hiring where I liked people who get bored of their role very quickly, but you don’t need that hire for all of the rules. I only take those people for the most strategic roles. There’s no real hardcore outcome. You need to be very creative all of the time.
If it’s something of an administrative task, you can’t have someone who loves risky businesses because then they’d get bored out of their mind. If you put someone who likes structure, standards, procedures, and policies, you wouldn’t put them in a risky position. You would put them in more of an audit-like, able to analyze and have more surety of their roles. I normally look at the characteristics and the personality of the job and then try to find the right fit.
That seems like it’s a theme, finding the right job for your personality and finding a personality match. Can I ask you, in starting Leading Lotus and bringing these services to organizations and individuals, what is the overall goal? What is the overall mission that you’re looking to advance?
When I started Leading Lotus, it was a consulting company, human capital excellence, so talent optimization. How do you make sure people don’t burn out and run out, and your attrition is not awful? How do you keep them engaged and all that? Mostly it was operational excellence, so typical consulting company and it wasn’t me. Why am I stuck? I might as well join Accenture again. I morphed it into something. The word Leading Lotus, the Lotus itself is a pure form of biology.
My company was more about trying to build a natural ecosystem called a culture, a sustainable environment, a governance management that helps the organization grow organically without force-feeding and plugging in all sorts of programs. You can see that diversity, equity, inclusion these days are force-fed into a company like we need more people of color and stuff like that. How do you do that more organically and naturally, and not with a consulting project, for example?
Now what Leading Lotus stands for is, I integrate social consciousness into organizations. It’s how you operate and make these decisions, there needs to be a deep consciousness about who you are affecting outside of your own role, which includes the customers, the employees, the community where you operate, the shareholders, and the investors who trust in you, the society and the planet. That’s how it’s rolled into more sustainability, environment, and policy building. I’m more in the board room roles trying to get more governance worked in. In years, I would say it’s shifted into a more self-conscious awareness for corporations to grow money but still be very conscious about what you’re doing to others.
What’s interesting about the story is that it is the mission you have for yourself from a very young age, “I’m going to be a businesswoman. I’m going to be in the boardroom.” It also found its way to be flexible and move with the flows of life and events. I feel like a lot of other people can have a story similar to that. Whereas you still have an underlying goal and purpose, but sometimes the details, the specifics, and even stuff that’s like not as much of a detail, such as what location you’re living in, can be subject to being altered. What I’m also wondering is, when an organization goes through the Leading Lotus Program, what does that organization look like? How does that organization look different from your typical American work culture?
When companies come to me, there’s a level of disengagement and sometimes it’s more than disengagement. It’s a bit of toxicity involved, hidden agendas, or politics that create more hardship and revenue loss. You can call it bleeding money. You don’t count it because you’re still earning revenue, but you could have more revenue. You could have made your customers more satisfied. Your customers are now worried because they can sense some problems within your internal structure. When I step in, I’ll bring in a journey to them. It’s not a change management. It’s a transformation. It’s like how human beings, who are stuck in a rut, need to transform their life internally, spiritually, externally, all aspects of their life, health and mind-wise. You take an organization and build all of those parameters where they need to transform into a healthy manner. You build a roadmap out.
Some things can be done in a year. Some things can be done in 3 to 5 years. It depends on what else is on the agenda. How much money they have to dedicate to this? It does take money to make more money. That’s always something that companies knew very well because you need to always make your organization more healthy and making it healthy in the short run costs money, but in the long run benefits so much more. There was a research that says the earnings were at least 5, 4times more than a company that didn’t even project to spend money on growth. Here’s the problem with that. Even though I go in and give this roadmap and say, “Tomorrow, you become a more engaged culture.” We measure all these aspects. Your attrition goes down, your revenue goes up, your cost comes down. Those are the things that are valuable to shareholders.
What you want to do is I still proof the business case, but there’s a moral case that is so much more valuable. It transcends the money, so it shows up as a growth, the value of the company growing. I’m done with something like that. I’ve only been operational for years. Many companies want the roadmap and they try to do it themselves. They’ve been successful, maybe not in the ways that I want them to do. They might take piecemeal versions of it. It’s not into fruition 100%, but it gets to a point where it’s more honesty-based changes.
What I love about this also is that it’s not an either-or thing. A lot of people think of a healthy bottom line, satisfying your shareholders, having a strong moral code, and having a very good culture that’s good for society and good for the environment as mutually exclusive, whereas it actually could easily be both.
It’s not one or the other. That’s the problem even in diversity, equity, and inclusion. You create a function that’s supposed to prove a business case and the model case has intrinsic values that deliver so much more to the company. You can’t capture it in a dollar sign directly, but you can be creative about it. You can say this year, this was our bottom line and this is how we were operating. Our salespeople may be missed so much of the sales target, and maybe three years down the road, let’s re-measure ourselves. We’d put in all the strategies to communicate to people the true culture and nature of the company. They want honesty. The one thing I do tell a company and company leaders is, if you’re going to be the screaming, toxic culture company, just say you’re the screaming toxic culture, and then the people who like that screaming toxic culture will come to you. That’s fine. I worked for a lot of that kind of company and invited when I had the energy to be involved in a high-powered culture where that was necessary or that was built into the culture or whatever.
What hurts a company is when they have all these moral codes and conducts. We value people. We value being heard. Is this a safe environment? There are layers within the hierarchy that does the complete opposite. People go into the interviews all starstruck because of what they see on the websites. When they start working and after a year or two, they’re like, “What? Something is off. I’m not happy. I’m burning out and so attrition happens. You don’t know what happens.”
What I tell companies is, “You either show the right nature of your company, which means if you want to have a striving company, you’re striving for good and striving for value. We may screw things up but stand by us and we will try and fix it.” That’s one culture. The other one is, “We are very good, very powerful, and love everyone. We want to do very good for everybody.” What happens on the ground is completely different.
Part of it, I feel like, is about honesty and part of it is about people knowing what to expect when they get into something. Another interesting part of it is, I wonder if this is also part of the whole short-term versus long-term thinking thing. I hear a lot and read a lot of articles, people talking about how there’s a disconnect between what is valuable and what makes money. Whereas maybe the nature of this disconnect is not so much, “Money never goes after anything good like people spending money, whatever markets never get those the right results.” It’s that we’re thinking short term that we’re not thinking about how some of these more intrinsic things, they’re not going to show up on your quarterly earnings report. Ten years later, they will because you’ve created a better culture and society.
The world itself and the world of business is changing. We have the seven-year startups that are forever startups. We have the story stock companies, which are great on paper because they’re trading very well on the stock markets for some odd reason, but they don’t have revenue. That could affect much for the future, so you’re like, “How is this market capital this big? Where is it going to come from? Are the 7 billion people right now going to afford all these things? The world has changed. The business world is changing, which means people have to become more aware of what it means. If a company’s vision is to start up and then be sold off, then it is by nature a short-term thing. You just improve profit now and then sell myself off. If the nature of the business is full of integrity, social responsibility, building sustainable communities where they operate, then that company has a long-term vision. As an investor, for me, my values lie in that long-term vision. For me, I would like to make some quick buck and put it in companies that are flying high in the short run,” but I would not feel good with myself. That’s the problem right now.
People chase the capital, the capital is chasing the market, and the market is coming full circle and chasing the people with the capital. When capital is being chased and that’s chasing the market, it’s a destructive force. If we can say, “Stop. I want to put my capital and the things that I believe in,” but if we keep looking for the next shiny object, unicorn and trying to chase that, then the capital is going to be destructive in my mind.
It seems like a lot of it is about honesty, transparency, understanding our values, and rethinking our priorities. Before we wrap up, I want to give my audience a chance to get a hold of you if they’re interested in learning more about your services. How would we find you on the internet? Do you offer services both for corporations and for individuals?
Yes, I do mentor for individuals. I do mentor through platforms. You can reach me on my LinkedIn. You can look me up as Umadevi Gopaldass or you can reach me at Uma@LeadingLotus.com.
Uma, thank you very much again for joining me and sharing your story about experiencing cultures all over the world and hopefully helping all of us get to a better place with some of our workforce transformations. I also would like to thank everyone for reading and joining us on the show. Please stay tuned for more episodes about more people taking on initiatives that hopefully bring us to a better place in the future.
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About Umadevi Gopaldass
Umadevi worked in many different industries before starting Leading Lotus. She worked in oil and gas, management consulting and gold mining, while living in many different places from her native Singapore to rural Elko, Nevada. She started Leading Lotus four years ago fulfilling a lifelong desire.