Clay Christensen: Hi, this is Clay Christensen and I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call, The Disruptive Voice. In this podcast, we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at HBS: Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them and I hope that you find these conversations inspiring and useful. If you have an idea about a topic or a speaker that you'd like to hear more about or if you'd like to comment on our work, please reach out to us here at the school.

Derek van Bever: Hi, I'm Derek van Bever and you're listening to The Disruptive Voice. We're here today in the studio with Hari Nair, a member of Clay World and a friend of Clay's for many years. Among Hari's many interests and accomplishments, he's an expert in innovation and particularly in business model innovation, which he and we believe is an underappreciated skill in organizations of all sizes. Now, I introduce Hari as a member of long standing in Clay World because he's been involved with Clay and with Innosight, the consultancy that Clay founded since the early 2000s. He was employee number three Innosight Asia and among the many projects and ventures he pursued, he was very deeply involved in the design and rollout of the ChotuKool, a market creating innovation in India that we've profiled in a case study that we teach in all of our channels. It's a capstone case in our MBA curriculum, it's included in our week-long executive education course here on campus and it's profiled in the HBS online version of our course.

Derek van Bever: Hari has been on campus for the past year as a member of the school's Advanced Leadership Initiative, and it's a great pleasure to share what he's learned about innovation and about targeting non-consumption in particular, with all of you. Hari, welcome to The Disruptive Voice.

Hari Nair: Thank you, Derek.

Derek van Bever: You've had a lot of experience in innovation both in big CPG companies and as a vice president for emerging markets and new products at Innosight. Can you give us a quick thumbnail of your CV so that our listeners can get a sense of, if you will, the schools of experience that you've attended?

Hari Nair: Sure. My journey really goes back to the beginning of being a chemical engineer. I started off my career at Procter and Gamble Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. Actually, I'm an R&D nerd. That's pretty much how I see myself as I've always been focused on innovation through a very, I would almost argue, a technical lens on chemistry, processing, packaging together. My career at Procter and Gamble was largely that. I worked on laundry detergents for a decade on big brands like Tide, Cheer and thankfully they're still around. They're still big brands, like Tide is still a really big brand. Then I moved into emerging markets.

Hari Nair: In 2002, I moved to Beijing to help P&G develop the laundry product penetration in a lot of the Asian markets. Along the way, we'll talk about more later, is when I came across Clay's work. The Innovators Dilemma was written in 97, but I read it in 99. Then Innovators Solution, I think, came out right when I was in China, actually. I was fascinated as a technologist to think of Clay's writing, and how it links to help my work.

Hari Nair: Then, of course, I left P&G and joined Clay in Innosight. I actually found out that he had a consulting firm and I applied and that was around the time we were setting up the operations in Asia. I was fortunate enough to join this amazing group of people.

Derek van Bever: You told me the other day, in fact, this was not exactly a high process long drawn out courtship, but you got an email back [crosstalk 00:04:12].

Hari Nair: Yeah, I know. People asked me because I'm not an HBS student, another student of Clay, so how did I land up at Innosight? True story, I found that there was an article about Clay, which I had read. I read his books, but I really didn't know much about Clay. I actually saw Lives In Time on Newsweek. It happened to be on my desk and I said, "Oh." It's somehow mentioned this from Innosight. This is Soccer 2006 internet. Right? Google may have been there, but it's not the Google today. You typed in Innosight and you got this really strange landing page, which was our website for a while. I applied at the contactusatinnosight.com. I just wrote, just an email, just random email saying, "Hey, I've read Clay's stuff. I'm looking for something different to do and I think I know how to apply the theory." Within 24 hours, I got an email back saying, "Hey, interesting. Why don't you talk to him? We're setting up an office in Asia."

Hari Nair: Fast forward, six years of my life when at Innosight applying the theory. We'll talk about the projects we worked on. We had the labs, Business Innosight Labs business, which was a prototyping firm that we had. Then we also had the ventures business. All of those were really, really fascinating. Then I moved back into a corporate role in Korea, South Korea with Kimberly Clark and then most recently, before I joined the fellowship, I was at Sime Darby, which is a really large conglomerate, where I ran strategy and innovation for, I'd call it more of an AG company, mostly based on AG commodities.

Hari Nair: All my career, I would say I've had this blend of technology, chasing technology, but then with this really solid framework of what I think is jobs to be done and non-consumption. Right? If I look at where they intersect and that's my career, pretty much in a nutshell.

Derek van Bever: I guess the Innosight Asia work took you to Singapore, where you all set up shop and then to India. You mentioned to me the other day, a conversation that you recall that you and Clay had, he was folding himself into a small Indian taxi in Mumbai and you and he talked about the challenges of doing market research using a jobs-to-be-done lens. You've got that great image of Clay trying to squeeze 6'9" into the backseat of a tiny little taxi, but could you talk to us about what you and he discussed that day and how sometimes I guess I take it, the market research tools that big CPG companies use can get in the way of breakthrough innovation and developing new markets?

Hari Nair: Absolutely. Yes, that image is something I'll never forget with Clay getting into that taxi. He did manage to fit himself into the really small taxi we were in. The conversation which I had with Clay, first of all, Clay looks at everything also from a technical lens too, which is really one of the reasons why I enjoyed working with him at Innosight because innovation often has a technology component to it. One of the challenges I think in my experience in CPG companies and CPG companies, I think are prolific in testing products. There's everything from idea screening, concept testing, volume forecasting, A/B testing, blind testing. You walk into a CPG company, it doesn't matter which function you're in, the way you derisk CPG product is through a lot of consumer testing.

Hari Nair: Often the challenge is, you are working on testing where you have to compare the tests you're running today against historical data. You have to look at past concept scores, past product line extensions and say, "Well, how did this new thing compare against that?" As I was discovering jobs to be done, on my own reading the book, one of the constraints I found was, if I wanted to do jobs-to-be-done-focused research, well, first of all, I have to go to the market research department. The market research department may, in fact, understand the framework, but they don't really have the methodology, nor do they say, "Well, that doesn't really compare to our historical data."

Hari Nair: That was a real barrier, I felt, in many ways, this desire to have data and historical data to verify and dearest projects, I think was a real impediment to adopting jobs-to-be-done framework. How we deal with it, you go to a place like China, which is, I was there for four years. We had markets like India. We had markets like even China, where very clearly non-consumption was a big opportunity. Right? In addition, the people like myself who understood that, we just had to look at ways where we can solve jobs, but through the existing methodology.

Hari Nair: I worked in laundry detergent, so one of the areas where we did that very well was in India, where we launched, which was a pretty breakthrough at the time, a single-use sachet, which wasn't a breakthrough. They already existed, but at a price point that was significantly lower than what was existing at the time. That was really a big breakthrough and that was really because we were able to design that sachet of detergent, a very small amount of detergent, because it's hand washing that delivered just the right chemistry to solve the jobs that that consumer had. It allowed us to optimize the product based on the jobs.

Hari Nair: Now, if I went in and actually set it that way, in the company at the time, people would look at me with five eyes and say, "What are you talking about? Actually, when I think about what actually did, that's exactly what we did, it was actually designing the appropriate product to solve the jobs that allowed us to hit the price point, that allowed us to literally get explosive business growth that came out of that.

Derek van Bever: With our students, when we talk about jobs and we talk about the impediments to adopting a jobs approach, this reality that in order to introduce this concept, you have to introduce it into a structure and organization that's been doing things differently from time immemorial. We always share Clay's trope with our students that data are only useful in terms of providing insight on what happened in the past that data won't tell you. You need a theory-like jobs to understand what's going to happen in the future. I guess we see why you're such a big fan of jobs-we've-done approach.

Hari Nair: Well, I mentioned India, but, again, I think I was very fortunate to have worked in the kind of businesses that did and I think if people ask, "You worked in laundry detergent? Actually, laundry is the best, best detergent business to work on if you want to apply any of this theory in my view, because it's chemistry-driven. Chemistry is one of those things you can figure out at the exact right point based on different conditions. The second thing is, people always wash clothes all over the world. When I give the example about India, India, China and Philippines, at that time, they were largely hand wash markets. I don't know what it is today, but back in those days, washing machines didn't penetrate as much, so people washed by hand.

Hari Nair: If you want to formulate a product in those particular markets, it's not the same product. It can't be the same product because each of those consumers are very different. In China, for example, the water conditions and actually the way the Chinese consumers wash their clothes is very different, so you have to design based on the jobs that are satisfying for the Chinese consumer. Philippines is like a social side of it. At that time, I remember doing observations and literally it would be a two-hour wash process, but they were conversing and they were having tea together, but they were doing the wash together. In India, you just dump a bunch of clothes into a bucket, put some chemistry in there and you wait for a while and then you just beat the heck out of the clothes and then that's how people wash their clothes.

Hari Nair: If you're just looking at it from a chemistry lens, you could fall into the habit of just saying, "Well, I just designed the same product for all three markets." If you understood the different social and emotional circumstances of the jobs that these three consumers had, you will design a very different product. That's where I saw the magic of jobs-to-be-done in P&G. Then I said, "Okay, well, I'd like to go apply this in other places."

Derek van Bever: Fascinating. All of your chemical engineering peers are leaning forward and saying, "I knew that. I knew there was a role for me in innovation." Hari, this is where your story gets so interesting, because you have had frontline experience. You've lived Clay's observation that if you slip on the lenses of our theories, if you slip on the lens, for example, of jobs-to-be-done, that you can spot non-consumption.

Derek van Bever: Clay always talks about how most people look at the world and they see consumption. He looks at the world and he sees non-consumption. How do you do that? Does that make sense to you in the first place? If so, how do you spot something that doesn't exist?

Hari Nair: Yeah, absolutely. I think part of the way it makes sense to me is because after having those experiences and living in emerging markets where... I can't stress this enough. From 2002 to 2012, so 10 years, I would say, I was living and working largely in big non-consumption markets, China, India. We were headquartered in Singapore, but really for Innosight, most of the work was in India and that's really where I spent all my time. When you see it from a non-consumption lens, a couple things happens. Right? First of all, the economy is improving, but defining good, defining perfect is very different when you're looking through a non-consumption lens.

Hari Nair: Somebody that is not consuming your product or consuming very little, their definition of quality is different. As an engineer, as a scientist, you look at that, and you say, "Well." That's the firsthand way you see, "Oh, the product I was designing, well, 80% of the features of that product, this consumer is not going to even see it ever, ever." That's what's actually going to be driving my cost of materials. That's what's driving my then price point and margins I have to build in. When you see it firsthand in everyday products, it hits you right in the face. Right? It's not that complicated, but it's very difficult to figure that out in a conference room. It's very difficult to put that in PowerPoints. It's very difficult to put that in the context of decision making.

Hari Nair: That's why I think a lot of companies steer away from it because they may not have that first hand, visceral feeling of how that feels. I think ChotuKool is a perfect example of that because it started off as a, "Let's go develop an innovation for Godrej." The real opportunity, of course, was the fact that a whole segment of the population in India, which is rural consumers, didn't really have the access to some cooling equipment in their home.

Derek van Bever: Take us back to the beginning of that story, which more recent students will remember having studied as a case. How did you come to do that work for Godrej and where did the idea for ChotuKool come from?

Hari Nair: It's interesting because everyone can argue, "Why India?" Right? One of the interesting things about the Innosight experience for me was, while I was so excited to work for Innosight and Clay because I was able apply these theories, I asked the question, "Why India?" Well, it turned out that, when Clay wrote those books, Innovators Dilemma, there are a lot of people in India that actually bought those books and read those books. There was actually quite some latent demand for this approach and we were invited by the CII, which is a Confederation of Indian Industries. This happened before I joined, for Clay to come and give a big talk about non-consumption and all this. Goddard's happened to be one of the companies that that said, "Hey, we really want to look at this a little bit more deeply."

Hari Nair: We all know the Godrej story, but what people don't know is that, we actually worked with Godrej across their different business units. It wasn't just the refrigeration division, we worked with their furniture division, they had a securities' division, so we came up with multiple business plans or ideas, I would say. We used to call them business plans at the time, which would really find opportunity spaces for each of these different divisions of Godrej.

Hari Nair: Without a doubt, this opportunity in refrigeration just stood out. I remember one conversation just before we were about to present to the management board of Godrej, where we were presenting all the ideas. The conversation was with Clay, actually, with a group of us presenting the different cases and Clay just looked at ChotuKool and said, "That's the one." We had other ideas we thought about. What about furniture division we wanted to talk about? We knew that IKEA existed. We didn't think the Indian market was going to assemble their own furniture, but we thought, "How about enabling carpenters locally to help put furniture together?" We had a really cool idea and we had cool idea on securities around digital securities because they were all emerging those days. We could see the future.

Hari Nair: ChotuKool, when we presented that, they said, "Well, refrigeration is a need." I think he understood the technology really well. We can talk about that, but the fact that this was a different type of refrigerator solving very specific jobs for the consumer, I think all that hit and then that's what we presented. It was actually Clay that saw amongst all these different ideas. That was the one that ultimately Mr. Godrej and the team decided, "We were going to make a bet on this." That's what we did.

Derek van Bever: There's so much context here that's interesting. In the first place, a number of our listeners might not understand really how significant the Godrej Company is in India and to Indians. You mentioned that one of the things that ChotuKool just triggered a childhood memory of yours.

Hari Nair: Yeah. Look. I was born in India and I lived in India till I was nine years old. I have limited memories of India, but I do have it as a child. One of just those memories that you could never forget was that, in our kitchen, there was a refrigerator and it was a red refrigerator and it was a Godrej refrigerator. Why did I remember that? It's because that's where the chocolates were. The chocolates were kept in the fridge is because if you bought a chocolate in India, even in the 70s, we didn't have air conditioning everywhere, it would melt. Right? Chocolates were stored in the fridges and every seven-year old kid was going to find out where the chocolates are. That was food memory. It was the brand. Godrej was a luxury item to have it.

Hari Nair: We had a very small fridge by today's standards, but it was a fridge and not many people had it and so that bought it. The other piece of it was, I think, the fact that this company is so connected to India's history, especially from the time it started making these steel cases, lockers, if you will, to the first ballot boxes in the first democratically held election in India. It's as iconic as Procter and Gamble or any other company in the world, in my view, but for India.

Derek van Bever: Our students who have experience in India struggled to explain to their classmates how significant this company is because there really isn't a good cognate in the US. One of the anecdotes we tell them the case is that, it would be competitor to Godrej asked Mahatma Gandhi for an endorsement and he wrote back and said, "I'm sorry, I can't do anything that would inconvenience my friend Godrej." When you've got that kind of endorsement, you're-

Hari Nair: Yeah, that's right. As we were working with them, me being a new member of the team, most of the team was actually just based out of the US or just we were setting up a small office in Singapore, I had the sense of, I really wanted this project to come through because the company means so much for the country. When ChotuKool actually came across, there was a nice intersection of my knowledge of the technology side because the core technology of ChotuKool was the Peltier technology, which is-

Derek van Bever: Talk about that.

Hari Nair: Yeah. It's interesting, because you go back and you look at history, and you see, Peltier technology is a very simple, I'd almost call it, a trick that we use to make semiconductors cool, or heat in different ways. It's basically a technology that's used in computing quite a bit actually today. It's also a technology where you could leverage it in cooling of small, what I call minibar fridges or even wine coolers. They use the same technology. Now, It was never It was never interesting for the engineers that work in refrigeration because it doesn't have the same efficiency as a compressor. A cool stuff, but doesn't make ice, for example. Right? It doesn't make things really cold.

Hari Nair: Again, going back to the observation of the Indian consumer and there are jobs to be done connecting back to the laundry story I had narrated to you, a lot of Indian food, Indian cooking, first of all, is heated cook. It's curries and thick. You can cook it and then just keep at room temperature and it's going to get finished that day. There's not a lot of leftovers. There are, but not that much. Most of the produce is bought daily. You don't go to Costco and load up and then just store it in the fridge. That's not happening. You go through what you buy generally through meals, but there are some specific jobs like what I said, keeping the chocolates cold, keeping a cool drink. It's a hot day and I want to come and have a cool drink.

Hari Nair: The idea of having a cooler of some sort is to solve many of these jobs. For that set of consumers, it made a lot of sense. Then the question was, "Well, does it exist?" Of course, it exists. One of the things I remember back in those days, because we had to write the plan, but then show how this would work from a technology standpoint. I will talk about catalogs, but I always like looking at catalogs. There was a Coleman camping catalog that I found online, it's called the Coleman cooler. It didn't quite look like the ChotuKool today, but it's a very small looking cooler that people use for camping. Guess what? It uses a similar type of technology.

Hari Nair: To Godrej's credit me they took the technology and they made it much more efficient. They really did optimize it around that, but that idea that we could use something completely different from a different industry, I think really helped and also the fact that it has so many other advantages for that set of consumers, that you don't have to worry about leaks, you don't have to worry about it. There's just so much simplicity in the design of that. That refrigerator really helped us get commercialized.

Derek van Bever: We develop all this in our classroom discussion, and we talk about non-consumption. The technology it's replacing, if you will, is the clay pot. The behavior that it's enabling is the purchase of just right amounts of ingredients. For people who don't have a refrigerator, or access to reliable electricity, the ChotuKool, is actually a godsend in terms of being able to actually pull that capability into your life. Fantastic, fantastic experience. You talked to me about how, as you've worked in innovation, you've developed some observations about how you can spot non-consumption. Maybe part of this was from your time in Korea. For our listeners, if they're trying to get good at spotting non-consumption, what kinds of things might they do to develop these muscles?

Hari Nair: Yeah. Part of it is that observational, which I had in India and emerging markets really well. Moving to Korea was a really interesting experience because you have two ends of the spectrum in Korea if you want to spot jobs or non-consumption. Right? Probably, the most advanced digital native population that we have in the world today is probably sitting in Korea. I say this because I was just thinking about this today is that, I moved there in 2012. 2012 August, is when I think I moved there.

Hari Nair: December 2012, was a pretty interesting moment in Korean history. That was when gangnam style hit a billion users. I know that sounds crazy right now, because today, I think a billion views, it happens probably within a couple of months, but that was a big deal. There was actually a concert that Psy gave, literally, when it hit a billion views on YouTube, because that was the first person to ever hit a billion views at that sort of time. It's a very digitally connected, very interesting place. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got an aging population. You've got a population where people are living close to, well into their 80s and 90s, but people often retiring in their 50s.

Hari Nair: The interesting thing in that situation, if you know how to spot these things, you start looking at, "What are the jobs to be done in these two ends of the spectrum?" I was there running an innovation center for Kimberly Clark, and in a way it was wonderful because that ecosystem in Korea allowed us to experiment, not just with mothers who are having babies for what type of diapers that they may want to have and so technology that you want to build within that, for that set of consumers on the the younger end, but to the set of consumers on the older end of the spectrum, where the only product that you took, you and I associate with that segment of the population and the consumable goods is largely incontinence products. Right? Maybe some mobility devices like walking sticks.

Hari Nair: In Korea, you would find these amazing, small niche products available for serving the older population. For example, one of the ones I really liked when I was there, was a job to be done when you're over 55 to someone who's Korean, is actually writing an autobiography of their life. Think of it like a yearbook, but of all their years and this is something that's passed on to families and so you may publish only 100 copies of the book. There was a whole cottage industry supporting this business around writing your autobiography. That's usually printed in small limited editions, and it's given away. Then I thought about that, "Well, that's a job to be done. That's just about every person would have at that age or just a lot of people would, so how could we look at that and potentially scaling that as a business?" Another one was-

Derek van Bever: Just by the way, for liberal arts majors out there who are unemployed, this is good news.

Hari Nair: Yeah. Learn Korean and go to Korea. That's a good idea. They're absolutely right. Then the other one that I found really interesting was pet therapy. They called it really pet therapy where, again, loneliness is a big factor when you get older, so this whole business around engaging with pets, not robotic pets, I mean, real pets and that was really interesting. What you start seeing is the nascent emergence of businesses. They're small, but they're really solving important jobs. I always use this little rubric that I think I was taught in a site, but I think I use it all the time, which is, importance of the job, frequency of the jobs, and then how good are the current alternatives?

Hari Nair: If all three intersect into one idea, there's something there. Your solution may not be perfect, but there's something there. You just got to keep digging away at that. That's how I go about things. I look at it. That experience in that segment really has influenced my fellowship project too, which we can talk about later, but that's something that I'm really interested in aging space because we're all going to get there. We're all going to live a lot longer than we anticipated.

Derek van Bever: One of the approaches that you would recommend to our listeners is to do this cross-cultural, cross-Society comparison to understand. I think, was it William Gibson who said, "The future is already here. It just presents unevenly." Maybe this is a good example of that. You mentioned that you had a bunch of old Montgomery Ward and Sears catalogs. What was that about?

Hari Nair: Well, just like that quote about, future's already here, past is also here, if you want to really look at it. Right? You just got to go to the right place to find the past. When we were in India and especially when we were doing that broad assessment of what market opportunities, which ultimately landed ChotuKool, but we were looking at other spaces, one of the sources of inspiration was, I went on Amazon. I think it was still Amazon at the time or eBay, I forget which one, I think, where I found these really old Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs. When I say old, these are from 1900 to 1920.

Hari Nair: I ordered a couple of them and I got them. I just pulled through the pages to see, What kind of products were we selling in America during that time?" Now, I'm glad that India was far more advanced in many levels in 2006 and 2008, relative to 1900s. In some cases, you can get some insights into what were then, you would sell and you'd look at those catalogs you'd often would have sold their wares like, I remember bullets were sold, there were some interesting things that were sold in the McKamy World catalog. Somewhere along the way, there was something like a cooler, but it wasn't really a cooler. It was like some water bath thing. I think it was used here as well. The same technology that we saw in India was actually used here in America. It was interesting, partly for source of inspiration to look at the past.

Hari Nair: The fact that you could get homes like, I think it was Sears who would actually literally ship the kit to the home where you can go and build everything from nails and everything was the package deal that you could get when you buy a Sears home and it would come in the rail car and they would just drop all the materials and you and your neighbors were in. That served as an inspiration for one of the furniture ideas that we had around using local carpenters to help build the furniture. I look at these things because we forget that that's there, but it's all there.

Hari Nair: I think once you understand a job-to-be-done framework, and make sure you understand it, it's actually quite easy to make these connections. It's not that difficult, but you got to swim in it. You can't just episodically come in and out. If you swim in it, it's actually pretty easy to see these things.

Derek van Bever: That's cool. You're looking at the leading edge In developed markets. You're looking back to, if you're, for example, doing innovation in parts of Africa these days, maybe you're trying to think about, how do markets develop? Our colleague Efosa, Ojomo and Clay have written The Prosperity Paradox, looking at how to market creating innovations bringing prosperity to society. right. I guess it's obligatory. You can't have a podcast these days without talking about the impact of AI and AR. What do you see on the horizon with those technologies?

Hari Nair: This is my new little thing, but it's great to have a gap here. This time here at Harvard reminds me a lot of the time I had, the six years at Innosight is my sandbox to play. Yeah. Not quite playing, there's work but, it was like just a place where you could just channel just a ton of what you feel like you've learned, but into different areas. One of the areas I'm really looking at right now is AR and I actually have this partner that I'm working with on this, whose name is David Ross, who's at the MIT Media Lab. David and I have been looking at, "What kind of jobs can we do with AR today?" AR is this augmented reality for the acronym.

Hari Nair: What's interesting right now is, you can see already, at the very high end you have Microsoft doing things like the HoloLens, which is just this $3,000 product at the very low end. Bose, just a few months ago, launched these eyeglasses, basically sunglasses, but that have sound coming through the bone conduction, but they vibrate around your nerves near your ears. There's no headsets. It's not going into your ear, but you can hear everything through these headsets through these glasses. I started to see that, okay. Then you have Alexa coming in where we're communicating through voice. Right?

Hari Nair: The question is, what sort of jobs? I had this really amazing experience when I moved back last year. I had to renovate our condo here and I had to go to Home Depot. Right?I went to Home Depot and I had to get this very specific type of light bulb that I wanted to buy because evidently my condo was built at a time when it was not screw on my light bulbs. I know how to do that, so this sounds terrible as a engineer having to go have to buy a light bulb, but I had to actually do that.

Derek van Bever: How many engineers is amicable?

Hari Nair: How many engineers? I know there's a joke there somewhere. Anyway, so I go to Home Depot with a picture of this light bulb that I needed to buy and I go to three different Home Depot's thinking that somebody in that Home Depot is going to guide me to the solution of finding this light bulb. I had no success. One of the things I realized was, because I've been out of the US for a long time, in 2002, or when I went to Home Depot, there were a lot of smart people working there that helped me find stuff. Right. Today, I think retail in general, it's challenging to find really good people that can help you.

Hari Nair: David and I were talking and saying, "What if I had just these glasses that could just tell me, here's the glasses and it was just guiding me all the way to the right place at Home Depot to pick it up." Right? There was Alexa there. There was some version of Alexa that could also create a really unique experience for me. I started thinking to myself that, "There's too many pain points, again, using that job-to-be-done frequency and alternatives." I think in retail environments, I think augmented reality is going to become a pretty important part of how we experience that consumer experience in the in the coming coming years. Certainly for training and development that's already there. My new thing is spotting jobs with technologies like when new technologies come in, what jobs can they solve today?

Hari Nair: Rita McGrath has just written a great book. I'm sure you've seen Seeing Around Corners and Rita talks about doing stepping stone experiments. Right? I think, today, if you're in the AR world, you should be doing stepping stone experiments with pain points today, that the technology today could solve. Right? I think if you can start doing that, you will start to create these new opportunities and new businesses and I'm really excited about that space.

Derek van Bever: That's cool. Just to bring our listeners up to the present on you, Hari. You've participated in this very prestigious program, the Advanced Leadership Initiative here. I think every participant in the program is expected to work on a project and it won't surprise any of our listeners I suppose now, that they've gotten to know that you're working on three at the same time. You talked about Aeternum, which I think you lead interest right now. What's that about?

Hari Nair: Yeah, thank you for asking about that. Aeternum is, we'll just launch off that conversation we had a few minutes ago around the aging population. Right? I really am convinced that 70 years from now, so basically kids that are born today, anywhere in the world, including Sub-Saharan Africa are going to will live well past 65. I mean, pretty close to 90 to 100. That's how that's what we we expect. The conundrum that's in my head is, if the workforce is going to "retire" or stop working in your 50s or 60s, what are you going to do for 30, 40 years? Right? When I looked at it through the lens of jobs-to-be-done, right, a couple of things come into mind.

Hari Nair: First of all, there are people who face what I call unexpected transitions over 50. They get laid off or the company gets acquired and they're just not planned. Right? There's something to do and then they need to find a transition to the next thing. They're not ready to stop working, but it's unexpected. A whole series of jobs and circumstances that come around that that you have to solve. Then there are people who actually proactively go into early retirement. Right? Who feel excited about that, but then don't get to the outcome that they want, which may be, they wanted to become a teacher or they wanted to do something in their community, but they're struggling because they they're not able to learn that.

Hari Nair: Aeternum is about actually building an education platform just to focus on those above 50. I've partnered with someone else from the Clay World as we know Michael Horn.

Derek van Bever: I know Michael.

Hari Nair: Michael actually really helped me a lot because he just wrote this book, Choosing College, which my daughter is reading through right now. I told Michael, "I really think that this is the space that is really underserved, non-consumption." Right? People who get to know me, they realize that my playbook is pretty transparent. I go after spaces where there's consumption. There's a specific job to be done in an iterative solution. Michael, of course, is involved with this mentor studio called Entangled Group. I've partnered with Entangled Group to help create this venture. I'm calling it Eternum right now, but who knows what the name will be? Maybe it'll stick, maybe it won't.

Hari Nair: It'll have three pillars. We want to solve both of those two spectrums: the unexpected transition and the planned transitions and they focus on figuring out what you want to do. That's one part, the training part. Then, of course, the peer support network. The interesting thing today though, Derek is that, I found that financial planning companies don't really do a really good job having this conversation. We do a lot of financial planning, but hey don't really talk about, "Well, what are you really going to do?" That's what I'm working on right now.

Derek van Bever: Fascinating. You also have a health and nutrition interested [Sarika 00:41:55].

Hari Nair: Yeah. Well, there's two things I'm working on there because this is really the chance school here of public health at Harvard. I've been really interested in health and nutrition largely because I think there's a lot of unknown elements of health and nutrition that's affecting people's health. One of them I'm working on is actually, again, connecting back to my India days. In the last 50 years, India's gone through rapid, rapid growth. Right? That means they have to generate more food to feed India, but also just the whole environmental aspect of all the different things of industrialization in India has been pretty massive. Right? There actually has been lot of studies done to figure out what's the effect on that with humans. Right?

Hari Nair: I'm helping one of the professors at the Chance School to say, "If you really want to understand what kind of chemicals are in an Indian's body, you actually have to analyze them." We're trying to figure out how to do an experiment where we can do testing of people's... There's some really bad chemicals that are considered to be cancer markers and other things that we want to be able to analyze. I'm doing this more for my own learning, so I'd like to learn what those chemicals are, so I could avoid them when I when I go back to India.

Hari Nair: The other project I'm working on is actually something that's even more interesting for me personally because I went through this similar phase of a major health transformation a couple years ago, where I really started focusing on what I eat. This is actually a concept that's built around putting kitchens in workplaces. They're already using, well they're already kitchens in workplaces. But no, this is a kitchen where we're going to have employees take time to go and cook their meals before they leave for work. We think that one of the reasons why people aren't eating healthy is because they don't have time and frankly fast food is really cheap. Right?

Hari Nair: Workplaces has have gyms. Right? We often talk about, hey, they want people who are Fitbits and be active, but usually the number two cost of every P&L is healthcare costs for most companies. What if we did a little experiment to give people paid time to go cook a meal and look at their health outcomes based on eating healthy. Of course, it will be healthy meals and we want to teach them cooking, we want to give them a chance to see that transformation happen. Then we want to see also how they influence others in their community. One of my good friends from Cincinnati, Ohio, Dan Meyers got an amazing place where he hires second-chance citizens and these are people who just came out of prison and he's employing them. Dan and I are literally cooking up a kitchen, where we can go and and take some of his employees and actually teach them cooking skills, and then see how we can affect their health outcomes. Yeah. there are totally three different areas, but they're all important to me.

Derek van Bever: Well, I appreciate your sharing them and for our listeners, we've just laid out a series of breadcrumbs for you. If any of those activities or challenges or causes really resonate with you, reach out to us, we'll connect you with Hari and you can join him in these crusades. Hari, I guess we've come to our time. We've talked about targeting non-consumption, we've talked about ways that our listeners can try to spot non-consumption in their worlds. We've given some history and context for the kinds of work that you've done and are doing. Do you have any closing advice for our listeners, and typically, the folks who listen in? Our alums of the course have understood the importance of Clay's theories and are looking for how to implement them and how to apply them to their worlds. Any closing advice from you?

Hari Nair: Well, I think a couple of thoughts. I was thinking about this and I thought, first of all, as I mentioned, I learned to apply Clay's thinking and his work in every aspect of my life. Right? If you think about it, whether it's the consulting work or my work in companies, or also in how you measure your life, if you read that book, which I'm sure the listeners will certainly get that, if you live that framework, my view is, you should just walk the talk. Right? I think if you've taken this class and you believe in it, the only way you're really going to have impact is just doing it. Right?

Hari Nair: As leaders in organizations, which some of your listeners definitely will be, I think really becoming much more focused on the job-to-be-done framework and non-consumption in your everyday work, I think will really help you train your mind to actually become that thinker and also a doe of these two methodologies. I think there's a lot of conversations I've had where we think about stuff, we actually think about these things. I always say, "You know what? That's just the thought. What's that? It's the first experiment, we got to go try." That's the approach I've taken.

Hari Nair: I'll close with this. I was having dinner the other night with a couple of other fellows and you're right, it's a great program when I'm around these amazing people. What struck me, the difference of the tutelage that we get from Clay in this course and this approach is that, we are immediately wired to think in a certain way and go do it, whereas, I still get into the conversations with people where they just want to still boil the ocean and come up with the answer looking back in history. Right? Then going back to your quote, the data is just the past. Right? If it doesn't tell you anything about the future. If you believe that, you should just get out and do it. Right? That's my advice that, if you follow that theory, if you follow the theory, you can have impact.

Derek van Bever: That resonates so deeply on Clay's ideas when you talk about targeting non-consumption or jobs-to-be-done. They're simple enough, easy to take on board and understand and get behind. Then, actually, to execute them in the world requires you to push against a lot of forces that just argue for status and sameness and so you really have to be committed as a leader, to charting a different direction, a different course for your organization and staying with it. I think, Clay's example and teaching really provides inspiration to all of us.

Hari Nair: Absolutely. I think that and I'm the best. One thing you should do, and I always say is, "If I can do this, if I can learn to do this, it's just about anybody can." With all due respect to Clay and to all we teach, this theory works if you practice it. That's it. It's just that there's nothing else about it.

Derek van Bever: That's great. For all of you out there listening, practice spotting non-consumption, seeing where there are unmet needs that are important and frequent, and where the existing solutions just are absolutely inadequate, and try to change the world as Clay would encourage us all to do. Hari, thank you for your time today. It's great that you've been a member of the family for so long. We're glad that you're here with us back in Boston, at least for the time being, and wish you and your family well and your daughter well as she chooses college. Thank you very much.

Hari Nair: Thank you, Derek.

Clay Christensen: Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. If you like our show and want to learn more, please visit our website or leave us a review on iTunes. Until next time, good luck, everybody.