IAM1193- Founder Guides Leaders and Professionals to Speed up Performance

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00:27 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:55 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Dr. Raman K Attri of expert egg. Doctor Raman. It's great to have you on the show.

01:03 – Dr. Raman K Attri

Thank you so much gresh. It is my pleasure to be on your show. Appreciate it, man.

01:07 – Gresham Harkless

I definitely appreciate you for taking some time out and doing all the awesome things that you're doing. Before we jump into the interview, I wanted to read a little bit more about Doctor Raman so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Doctor Raman is a performance scientist in the world's leading authority on the science of speed and professional learning and performance. Chaired by his permanent disability since childhood, he transformed his inability to walk into his niche expertise to teach others how to walk faster in their professional world.

Equipped with over two decades of vast research and corporate experience, he guides leaders and professionals on proven strategies to speed up performance. He is a prolific author of 20 multigenre books has earned two doctorates in learning and awarded over 100 international educational credentials. Among his most recent projects, he founded the experts portal to inspire people to learn the art and science and speed in all walks of their lives. Doctor Raman, super appreciative of you taking some time out again. Are you ready for the I AM CEO community?

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02:01 – Dr. Raman K Attri

Yeah, certainly. It will be my pleasure.

02:03 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here, a little bit more on how you got started. When I touched on your CEO story.

02:11 – Dr. Raman K Attri

I think I'm going to take you back to my childhood. When I was a kid, I was a pretty inquisitive kind of child. I wanted to learn, explore, research, and discover many things around me. So I think when I was in 9th grade in the school, I decided that I wanted to be a scientist. So my starting point was to go for an engineering degree at that time, and I graduated at the age of 21. After graduation, I took a quite unconventional path. I joined as a trainer in a very small institute. I guess I wanted to stay focused on my primary goal. So I became a technology scientist in a premium research organization in India, I think less than a year later. I served as a scientist for about ten years. But midway through that tenure, I was offered this part of being a training organization for that big organization, and they had set up this training center with the help of the Swiss government.

I grabbed that opportunity, and the moment I grabbed that opportunity, I started loving this whole field of learning. That's where I decided that you know, learning and development is a space where I actually gonna now go into a little bit deeper. So that's where my career basically started. When I quit that organization that opened up my doors to the international world, I went on to many places. Finally, I was given an opportunity to lead a hall-of-fame training organization for a Fortune 500 corporation. Then I thought that you know, I'm going to need to build my thought leadership. That's how I went on research with two doctorates. That's where I started kind of finding this entire thing about learning. I found that people are not actually being taught how to learn better and faster, and that became my kind of mainstream profession. That's the kind of thing that I do now at expertise. So that's kind of a nutshell. My story gushes.

04:03 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I truly appreciate that. It kind of sounds like through your journey and through your story, the learning how to be efficient learning, it kind of seems to have been magnetic that's drawn you to it, to go deeper and deeper so that it sounds like you've been able to help yourself, but it sounds like because of the expertise, the knowledge, the excellent that you've been able to kind of accrue, you're also able to help out so many other people.

04:24 – Dr. Raman K Attri

That's correct.

04:25 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I know you touched a little bit upon Expert X, and I did it as well, too, when I read your bio. Could you take us through a little bit more on how you work with your clients, how it works, and how you're making that impact?

04:36 – Dr. Raman K Attri

Right. So fundamentally, it's a solo-driven initiative, and it's all surrounded around the wisdom-based business. So the whole idea is to really find out what worked in other organizations and do a deeper research and then kind of distill the practical inferences out of that one because, in the business setting, not everyone really knows how to use research. So my job is basically to translate that research, which is hard to understand and convert them into practical strategies for organizations, which they can use in their own setting. So that's the. At a higher level, that's what I do. But I do focus on three areas there. The number one area I work in is workforce proficiency, where I focus on strategies, systems, and processes, to allow organizations to shorten time to proficiency. Because speed is very important in today's world. We have seen in the pandemic that most organizations were having a lot of struggle catching up with all the changes that was happening because of pandemic.

Even, you know, apart from a pandemic, there is a technological revolution. So this part of my initiative caters to that speed. The second area, that I typically focus on is individuals, because most of the time, managers and a leader, have a journey to do in their organization in their profession, or in their business, but they take longer time these days. The time is valuable, so they want to shorten their journey. So I help them with certain strategies, certain methods that how they can go to exact same place, but in a shorter amount of time. So that's basically the second area where we work on. The third area I typically work with is training and learning design folks, helping them put together this entire workplace learning system so that their employees are more efficient. Particularly on, what I call complex problem-solving skills because that's very hard to teach. Not many organizations or businesses really know how to prepare their employees to handle complex problems, because the world is becoming complex, Gresha, as you know.

06:42 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I absolutely love that. Like you said, the world is becoming complex, but it's also becoming, it seems like, really, really fast. As you said, because of technology, because of disruption, there are so many things that are happening that it kind of requires that ability to be able to, not just as a leader, but also your team, be able to think kind of creatively, maybe innovatively, and learn how to do that. So that's why I love, kind of like the foundation of what you talked about is a lot of times we don't learn how to think and let alone learn how to think more efficiently and effectively and quickly. So I love that each of those tiers that you kind of talked about and the people that you serve but as that foundational element of the kind of learning how to learn, which is something that you kind of just pick up. But we sometimes forget that there can be those principles that you've been able to extract and translate, that we can learn, but also people within our organization can learn from as well.

07:27 – Dr. Raman K Attri

That's correct. I think the biggest challenge is that nobody teaches those things these days, and people are already in the race. They don't have time. So I think that's where I kind of try to fill in the gap.

07:38 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's much to be said about, you know, I always believe, and I think there are even some quotes out there that say, you know, true excellence and true, you know, learning about your craft and becoming a master at your craft is not being able to kind of understand it yourself, but being able to, as you said, distill it down. So not just for you to understand those complex things, but to be able to distill it down so that other people can learn it as well, too. So I appreciate you so much for leading the charge and doing all of that work so that we can kind of understand how we can kind of level up and be better in our organizations and in our lives as a whole.

08:09 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce. And this could be for yourself individually or the business or a combination of both, but what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

08:19 – Dr. Raman K Attri

Yeah, I guess the biggest need right now is speed. And interestingly, my research is on speed, and that's the number one thing most organizations need. So if you see that I have this code to achieve that speed, what most organizations need, and finding the code for the speed requires decades and decades of research. And I think that makes me different from the rest of the services because then I bring in the thing they really need, the rest of the thing as far as the efficiency is concerned, remaining solution. Most of the leaders can get it from industry 4.0 kind of solution technologies are there, artificial intelligence is there, but the world is changing of them. That's what sets me apart, that I can bring in the strategies that nobody has talked about before.

09:10 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

09:20 – Dr. Raman K Attri

I guess I'm going to share a lesson from my life, which I kind of lived through in my journey. I think the failures failures are very important. We all experience failures in life, business, and projects. Probably in our professional world, we are more worried about failures. In the business world, this is the number one thing we always want to mitigate somehow through risk management or otherwise. But my philosophy is that it is okay. You know, I want to share a message from my childhood that I kind of heard long back, I don't know who said it, and the statement says, to package the same idea differently and the result can be truly spectacular. And many times we get attached to an idea. As business owners and entrepreneurs, we are so passionate about certain ideas that we get attached to them.

We want to make it a success in exact same form in which we envisioned it. But many times we have to kind of rethink our ideas. Maybe we need to package that idea differently and there is the possibility that we can get the result differently. This particular result, this particular philosophy came from my own experience. I think I didn't mention that I've been physically disabled since childhood. So the first thing I lost in my life when I was six months old was the ability to walk. I couldn't walk. So as you see, I lost speed. I lost the ability to walk. So then of course I felt bad. That was a big failure in my life. But as I grew up, I repackaged that hunger. I say I'm going to use this lack of speed to excel in something where I can move fast. So incidentally, I repackaged it in a way that I became an expert on teaching people how to walk faster. So I guess that's the kind of essence of the lesson that is applicable in our business world and entrepreneur world, that let's repackage the idea if it is not working one way.

11:11 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I love that. So I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be more of a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

11:22 – Dr. Raman K Attri

Yeah, certainly through all my own experience, what I feel is that when anybody starts entrepreneur generally, or they start with an initiative in that direction more often, we are driven by many things. It could be our willpower, or it could be our strong attachment to an idea, as I said, or it could be our motivation, which we get by listening to somebody else success story. So in my opinion, motivation, and willpower, are very short-lived. From a science perspective, it is very debatable how much motivation or inspiration can propel us forward. So a strong attachment to an idea is certainly a good thing because it generates fuel and passion, but when it exceeds the limit, it may blind you. So my recommendation is that as an entrepreneur you should rather focus on gaining two-dimensional clarity.

The first dimension is why, which is your emotional drive to do things, something you want to do. The second dimension of that clarity is about what for what's the drive that moves you toward a purpose that you hope to achieve. So you need to master these dimensions as an entrepreneur. Once you have a sense of clarity on why and what for, you already have the fuel to do what you need to succeed. You would not need any external motivation or inspiration or you most definitely don't need any other superpowers. So I guess the clarity in today's world is the superpower. So my advice would be to search for clarity first, as in, you know, that's the foundational component to attain success.

12:57 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quotes unquote CEO's on the show. So Doctor Raman, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:08 – Dr. Raman K Attri

Oh, that's a good question, Gresham. I guess I think almost like you, I kind of heard you somewhere. I think that you know, being a CEO, it's like, you know, it's a movement, it's a drive toward which you want to go. So from that angle, I am a strong believer that CEO is not a title. I can say pretty much that I am the CEO of my own life. Right. So it's being in the driver's seat and being able to act as a leader. So when you spear had something no one else wanted to do, that's being CEO. It doesn't have to necessarily be a title, but it is when you take charge of that moment to move forward, you are the CEO of your life or your business or profession or even initiative. Right?

13:51 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Doctor Raman, truly appreciate that definition. I of course appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get a hold of you, find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

14:06 – Dr. Raman K Attri

Yeah, certainly. I think given the theme of this podcast, I certainly want to, you know, kind of share some wisdom in that regard. It's my experience personally that when we get into the business world, we become a little bit too logical. We do a lot of calculations, we use a lot of analytical tools, we use lots of other tools and techniques, and we look at the data and what happens is that that makes us very thing-oriented, very data-oriented, which is okay, the world is moving that way. But I think at the same time, we shouldn't forget our personal side.

We need to make sure that when we are in the business world, our personal and professional things are marrying together. More often now, the way that things are moving in the world, we need people who can come across personally, who can handle things two dimensional, the emotional side and the logical side together. So what I have seen in my experience is that increasingly our business leaders are going away from that personal and emotional side and becoming a little bit more logical. I think we need to bring it back and be the people, the leaders who can work in a personal space.

15:17 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, I absolutely love that. I think so many times we forget about, I always say, the human aspect of business. So I love that you mentioned that and how important that is. People who want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

15:28 – Dr. Raman K Attri

The best way is my website, Raman Katri.com, and that website. They can find a lot of blog articles, and research, they can download a lot of things, and apply them in their own setting. That's the best way to reach out to me.

15:41 – Gresham Harkless

Okay, perfect. We will definitely have the links and information in the show notes as well, too, so that everybody can follow up with you. I love everything you're doing with Expert X, and I love that final point. I want to hammer that home even more because I think so many times we forget about kind of like the human aspect of business and have to choose whether or not we have to look at the data or if we have to look at the human side. But how marrying both of those is really how we get those innovations.

We get to think creatively about different ideas, and different problems that we have. I think when we marry those two things, that's when the innovation starts to happen and we really start to make that thing in that universe that we all hope to do. So appreciate you so much and reminding us of that. Appreciate you even more for doing that. I hope you have a and I'm Marissa Da.

16:19 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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