The Courage to Lead: Saying Yes to Hard Things | Rajeev Kapur

 

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Gratitude, Empathy, and AI: A New Era of Leadership

Rajeev Kapur, shares how saying “yes” to hard challenges propelled his career! He discusses his “GREAT” leadership framework and its relevance in a world shaped by technological disruption and cultural change. Rajeev also dives into the transformative power of AI, offering insights from his book and highlighting the opportunities and risks of this rapidly evolving technology.

What does it take to chase greatness in a world of rapid change? Rajeev Kapur, CEO of 1105 Media and bestselling author, shares his journey of saying “yes” to hard things—from navigating international markets in the early days of Gateway and Dell to leading businesses during a global pandemic. His stories reveal the resilience and courage required to build opportunities where none seem to exist.

Rajeev opens up about how bold decisions and a mindset of growth led him to write his first book, Chase Greatness: Enlightened Leadership for the Next Generation of Disruption, during the challenges of COVID-19. He outlines his “GREAT” framework—Gratitude, Resilience, Empathy, Accountability, and Transparency—essential traits for leaders facing demographic shifts, technological disruptions, and cultural divides.

This episode also explores Rajeev’s second book, AI Made Simple: A Beginner’s Guide to Generative Intelligence, written for those intimidated by technology. He explains how generative AI can empower individuals and why understanding its potential and risks is crucial in today’s world. From harnessing AI for business to embracing deep fakes as a societal challenge, Rajeev makes the case for thoughtful leadership in an era of disruption.

Whether you’re a CEO, entrepreneur, or aspiring thought leader, Rajeev’s insights will inspire you to step up, stay curious, and embrace the hard path to success.

Three Key Takeaways

Saying Yes to Hard Challenges: Taking on difficult tasks and stepping out of your comfort zone can fast-track career growth and open unexpected opportunities.

The “GREAT” Leadership Framework: Gratitude, Resilience, Empathy, Accountability, and Transparency are essential traits for navigating disruption and leading effectively in today’s fast-changing world.

AI is for Everyone: Understanding and embracing AI’s potential—even for non-technical individuals—can drive innovation and create new opportunities, but leaders must also be mindful of its risks, like deep fakes and ethical concerns.

Rajeev has a GREAT framework and you can too! Thought Leadership consists of four components that must work together. You can learn more about them here.

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Transcript

Bill Sherman How do you position yourself to tackle the challenges that no one else seems to want to take on? Thought leadership often means being ready to explore paths that few others see or choose to tread. For Rajeev Kapur, CEO of 1105 media and bestselling author of I Made Simple A Beginner’s Guide to Generative Intelligence. Saying yes to the hardest tasks has been a defining feature of his career and a catalyst for his thought leadership. From building global networks to exploring the transformative power of generative AI. Rajeev shares how embracing challenges can propel your ideas, career and influence forward. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Rajeev.

Rajeev Kapur Thank you, Bill. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Bill Sherman So you and I were talking earlier. And you have had a journey where you were the first one to raise your hand when there was a hard thing to be done. Could you start with that story? Because I think that informs some of the work you’ve been doing and thought leadership.

Rajeev Kapur Yeah. No, thank you. That first of all, I’m glad to be here and I hope the audience gets tremendous amount of value. You know, for me, this idea I have a look if you want to excel and get ahead in an organization, you know, it’s easy to do the easy things, right? It’s easy to be comfortable. It’s easy to say, hey, I’ve got this great sales account, whatever. But you know what? If you really want to get noticed, if you really want to move ahead in organization, raise your hand for the hardest thing or the most difficult thing or the may potentially even the most important thing that that company needs to have done. Because if you can make it work there, you’ll just skyrocket your career. So I’ll give you a quarter.

Bill Sherman Let’s jump in the time warp and go back to Gateway and start there.

Rajeev Kapur Yeah, so, so the Gateway journey itself was crazy because honestly, I was born and raised in Southern California. I went to school in Southern California and the jobs in South Dakota. First of all, raising my hand. Yeah, I’ll go do that. Job, by the way, was 100% commissioned sales. Everybody thought I was crazy. They thought I was nuts. But quite frankly, if I hadn’t done that, I don’t know if I’d be sitting here today. So that’s a that’s a that’s the first example where you have for anybody listening in your younger, you got kids, you got encouraged, you got to go to the job, the jobs are going to come to you and you never know where that’s going to go. So for me, those two years in South Dakota, I lived in the Iowa side of the Sioux City border that worked in the North Sioux City, South Dakota side. And I remember going to lunch. One afternoon, about 5 or 6 months into the job, and I came back and this was before email, right back when we had monochrome monitors and 40-megabyte hard drive.

Bill Sherman Computers, but not the Internet.

Rajeev Kapur That’s correct. And it was all you know, there wasn’t even Micro DOS yet. Right. And so. So, you know. Gateway was starting to grow Dell. AST. I mean, there are hundreds of different Compac whatever. All these companies are growing. Computers can be computers are becoming, you know, standard for everybody. And so I walk into after lunch, I walk into the building and, you know, this was back when we had Cubbies, if you remember, we used to have is and our mail would go to these Cubbies. It was a little slot that our name on it. And, you know, you’d walk in and you.

Bill Sherman Could leave each other notes basically my slide.

Rajeev Kapur Right? Yeah, right. That was our carrier.

Bill Sherman Pre Microsoft teams or slots or anything like that.

Rajeev Kapur Right. And so you pre-email so I walked up and I pulled out my stuff and there was an or I remember that I was orange and was an orange flier. And also Ted Waitt, the CEO of founder of Gateway. And they said, hey, if anybody has any international experience, please come to my office. I would over 3:00 in the afternoon or whatever. And so I said, okay, I do my internship in Paris. I did an internship in Australia. I’m like, okay, I’ve got some international experience. Let me see what you want. So I walk over and I walked into his office. I was the only one there logging on to show up. He goes, okay, well, looks like you got the job. I go, which I did. I just get a job.

Bill Sherman Did I just sign up for it? Yeah, because.

Rajeev Kapur You’re a new international sales manager. I need to go to the Middle East. Do you want to go? I go. What? So I said literally, that was a conversation. And I said, Sure, let’s go. I go, Well, what’s happening? And he goes, Well, we had just won an Air Force contract. It was kind of after the first Gulf War, and we had to do some things in the Middle East to replenish some of this Air Force contract from Kuwait all over the Middle East. And, you know, we didn’t have a distribution arm, didn’t have any partners out in the Middle East. And so I said okay. And so he said, all right, well, go figure it out. Get on a plane and go to the Middle East and build a distribution network for us. And within there was no Internet, so I couldn’t Google where to go. And in my mind, I’m like, you know what? Hey, I get a free trip to the Middle East. I’ve always wanted to see the pyramids. So I said, I’m going to Egypt first. So I flew to Cairo and I stayed at a Hyatt. And I remember the first day I went walked around, I got there and I went walked and checked out the pyramids and the things. And that was so cool. And I came back that evening and I saw the concierge there and I said, Hey, do you guys have PC magazine here, a computer shop or one of these magazines? Because yeah, there’s PC Magazine Arabic. It’s at this newsstand. I’ll go get you a copy, whatever. Or send somebody give me a copy comes back. And so. I flipped to the back. And, you know, back then, if you all the good deals were in the back of the magazine.

Bill Sherman Absolutely not. The glossy stuff in front. Yeah.

Rajeev Kapur Right. And so I flipped to the back and I saw the first ad I saw was this ad for this company called Blue Moon Computer. And they had the logo of every single one of our competitors. So for hours, obviously asked the customers, go, Hey, can you do me a favor tomorrow morning? Can you call these guys with me and tell them I’m visiting from the U.S.? I’m a I’m from Gateway. We’d like to see if they’d be interested in carrying our product. And the guy said, okay. Went down at breakfast. Whatever. Got the guy. He met me at 9:00. He called the. He called them. And within two hours, they sent the car to pick me up, drove me to their office. Hammered out a deal that day, and they became my distributor in Egypt. And then they called friends they knew in Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait and Qatar and in the UAE as well. So I spent the next 4 to 5 months just traveling all over the Middle East from Egypt to I went to Dhahran, Riyadh, which city? Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Pakistan. I mean, so I went all over to set up this network, and it was all because, you know, you got to be resilient to figure this stuff out. And so that was and that was, quite frankly, Gateway’s first step into doing big international business and that now the two great things. And so that really helped accelerate my career. And I ended up doing more things with them. And then from there, I got recruited to come and join, you know, why didn’t we get recruited? As much as I just couldn’t handle living in the cold weather anymore of South Dakota. And so I remember. I remember it got so cold when one day my ears would blister wearing earmuffs and my into black was frozen. And, you know, it was just crazy, right? Yeah.

Bill Sherman And if you have to put the heater on your engine block in that just to be able to style.

Rajeev Kapur Ah that’s Southern California boy. Right. And you know they teach other you screw the top or gas directly into the cover you know set that a few times so it was like I did this southern California but I just can’t handle this cold anymore. And so I sent the resume directly to Dell and. And within a month the director, Michael Dolan. Within a few days, you know, I was on a plane to Austin and. And they asked me if I wanted they offered me a job and I said yes and packed up and moved on to Austin, Texas, and started there.

Bill Sherman And with Indiana, you got another ask for a hard thing there, right?

Rajeev Kapur Yeah, I got a couple of hard things. So within a couple of months being there, I remember being in my desk and sitting on my desk in my cube. I turn around and Michael is standing right behind me and he goes, Are you the gateway guy? I go, Yeah, I’m a gateway guy because I wanna talk to you. So that afternoon he started talking to me and he goes, Okay, I want you to come work for me. I want you to be one of my executive assistants. I want you to work with Bain Capital. They’re doing a they’re helping us do a whole strategy and a reset because we’re really hurting against Gateway and these other kind of providers. Our other competition, we were trying to figure out what we could do. So why would you do that? I said, Yes, I did that. And then, you know, that kind of helped skyrocket my career within Dell having, you know, so I worked hard. You know, my goal was always try to be the hardest worker in the room. But what happened for me at Dell was after I kind of built up everything I did there back in about 90, 97 or so, I got promoted to be the director of the West Coast window for Dell’s SMB group and built that business up to a little over $1 billion. What and when? And moved out to Southern Cal, moved back from Austin to Southern California married at our first we found out we were pregnant. I remember the day it was like June 10th, 2000 and Bill, that afternoon, Michael Collins said, Rajeev, will you go to China? And I said, talk to my wife. Do you want to move to China? We said, Sure. So we literally got a visa and packed up and moved to China. And, you know, again, that’s an example where, you know, international in China was going to be the biggest market for Dell over time. And they were looking for people to go and not many people were raising their hand to go. In fact, no one was raising their hand to go. And when he called me and said, and, you know, I don’t think I was choice number one just because I because I was in Southern California and the business was doing well. And they see, you know, I remember I’m talking to kind of my boss, John. And John said, you know, once you get Rajeev, I know he’s always expressed interest in going overseas because, yeah, I was going to go get a job and so called me up and you go, Yeah. So I packed up, went to China, the district, the language, our culture changed. This was before the world moved to China, right? And so did that for a couple, did that for a couple of years. And that was real. That was a real it was a real exciting time. Was a tough time. And I think really developed. You know, you haven’t led a team until you’ve let a team in, in a country that’s developing that doesn’t speak English and you don’t speak their language. So that was really tough. So that so that from there that for a long time and then eventually went to Singapore and all of South Asia for done and the rest is kind of history from that.

Bill Sherman So let me pull you forward into the world of thought leadership. We’ve established a foundation of here you saying yes to hard things. Number one, did you intend at any point in the Gateway Dell part of your career, even back earlier, that you were going to write books?

Rajeev Kapur No, not really. I don’t think the idea of that the book concept really didn’t come to me until maybe until my. So talk about other hard things. I went got my MBA when I was 42. When I was when I was CEO of Sonic. And I was flying all over the world and I was doing a part time MBA, U.S. flying 300,000 miles a year doing my MBA. When I graduated from Yale, I was 44 years old and I felt like and I got it. I got an award from USC and they gave out. And every year they give out an award called The Order of the orIty and the Order of the Hour. It goes to the number one business school students across it. Marshall at USC. I got it. They gave it to me. And when that when that. And that was exciting because I got that that was a goal. That’s a gold medal. I have an upstairs that I was really proud moment. And, you know, I remember walking up that stage thinking it was off. I think I got something here to talk about, something to say about my experiences. And that’s kind of a broad, right? That was around the time when the idea of writing my first book came into play. And then when Covid hit is when I needed something to do for my own mental health. And that’s when I started writing my first book, Chase Greatness.

Bill Sherman So let’s talk about chasing greatness and how that book came to be. So you have the seed idea in your mind. How do you produce the manuscript? And what choices did you make?

Rajeev Kapur And yeah.

Bill Sherman How did that journey go?

Rajeev Kapur Yeah, you know, Google is or Google was my friend, right? I didn’t know what to do. Google YouTube. I didn’t know what to do. Right. I mean, I had notes everywhere. I had notes on my phone. I had notes on Post-it notes. I had notes on whiteboards. I had notes scribbled in 14 different 14. You know, I was one of those guys. I just keep wondering like that for dinner for journalists, it’s like a, you know, whatever. I just grab a piece of paper, right? So, you know, getting all that together, you know, I kind of I kind of knew what the core of the book was going to be and, you know, during Covid. You know, I was doing my research for him, for my book. I discovered three things were going to be happening over the next five years. And quite frankly, we’re in year four of that five year journey kind of speaks on next year. And I think we’re seeing that now. And my three the three takeaways I got were number one is that Gen Z, millennials and women for the first time by 2025, 26 will have will be the majority of the workforce, period. You just can’t stop time that’s going to happen. It just is what it is, right? Number one. Number two is there’s going to be disruptive technologies. And by the way, this is before chatbot. So this was I was more I was more pontificating on machine learning A.I. as opposed to terror as opposed to GPP and type of A.I.. Right. Which is taking the world by storm right now. So, you know, and I had some I had some air experience because I got certified anyway from MIT to have a dual certification. And I from MIT, I said, So that was the second thing. And the third thing was that we were going to be we’re such a backend. This is back in 2020 or so. George Floyd, All these things are happening, right? You know, the Trump presidency, Covid, all these different kinds of things. You know, we became such a divisive culture, such a divisive society. And you’ve never seen these three massive things happen all at once in the history. Right? So, you know, we’re seeing a huge demographic shift, huge technological shift, and then huge polarization, huge polarization of obviously what can happen to much. And so what does it mean to be a leader in that type of environment? Like, how do you lead the environment? And so I remember it was Covid. Everybody’s working from home. I still went to the office. My office was empty. Right there. My building was empty. I was like, Well, all right, they’ll be here. So I might as well.

Bill Sherman Have gone to space. I may as well use it.

Rajeev Kapur I will use it. Right? So it was empty and I’d go there. I would take office every day. And so I remember on my whiteboard I said, Yeah, I remember sitting there and I remember exactly if you were up on a desk and I remember staring at the whiteboard, I asked myself, What does it mean to be great? Like, what does that mean? So what did the whiteboard know? What the what? I wrote the word great on the whiteboard and that was at that for a few days. And then I said to myself. I raised it and I wrote it vertically and I wrote gratitude, resilience, empathy, accountability and trust. So then I raise trust and I put transparency. And the first letter of all those five words spells great into me. And my thought leadership journey has been to be a leader. Now, today, with such a changing world, you need to be able to really understand those five key levers and use those five key levers as a leader to your advantage. You don’t use all five at once. But sometimes gratitude might be important. Sometimes a real resilient message needs to be important. I understand having empathy. You know, the thing about empathy was really important to me was I grew up in the 90s and I grew up in a time in, you know, this where they say, Hey, if you’re going to talk to your boss about a problem, you better come up with three solutions.

Bill Sherman Right?

Rajeev Kapur Right. And that to me never sat well with me. And I didn’t know why until Covid happened, because when Covid happened, nobody had a solution. Right. So and I kept thinking to myself.

Bill Sherman And there were problems that we had never seen before in our lifetimes. Right. Certainly other groups of people had in history. But we were looking and the question of, okay, how do I find toilet paper off the shelves or empty? Some very practical stuff. It’s like, do you have three solutions? No, I’m trying to figure this out as we go.

Rajeev Kapur Right. And so there was no book for me to read. There was no board member for me to call. There was a mentor for me to call.

Bill Sherman Right. Someone and say, back when I was in your right.

Rajeev Kapur There was no Harvard case study from you Bonnett plague days or what happened. Right. So, you know, so what am I going to do is I got to figure it out myself. And so what I realized at that time was that when you’re the CEO, when you’re the leader of a team, it’s okay if your employees don’t have solutions because sometimes they just need to talk. Sometimes they just need to hear themself thinking things out about. Sometimes they just need a sounding board. Sometimes they just want someone to talk on the phone or go for a walk. Maybe you might not have a solution, but you might have an idea. You might have a thought that might trigger something else down the road for them or somebody on the team, right? So this idea of you can have a real open door policy, then you have to be really empathetic, Right? And then accountability might be a lever. I’m not saying that, you know, being grateful and having empathy doesn’t mean you’re not accountable. You know, absolutely. You have to pull people accountable, but you have to measure the right things. You know, you have to make sure. And to me, people tend to measure the lag results as opposed to the lead receding. Yep, Yep. So think about sales. Like I in my business, I don’t try to measure revenue on a regular basis. I try to measure what’s all the activity that leads to the revenue, right? What’s how many phone calls were made, how many sales proposals went out, how many Google AdWords did we buy for this event or what are all those activities were great.

Bill Sherman And then if you look at those and you say our close rate isn’t what it should be, but the everything in front is looking good, then it’s a different question rather than are you talking to people.

Rajeev Kapur Right? So if the close rates low, how can you keep a close rate? Was the Moses great then what’s a yield war? Is something going on with. All right, what are the can.

Bill Sherman We have it? You need a different pricing strategy. There’s a number of different ways you can have conversations when you start looking at data and patterns that are leading rather than going all last quarter sucked.

Rajeev Kapur Yeah. So I text. So again, accountability, focusing on the right lead measurements became really important. And then, you know, one thing I learned during transparency is that one of the elementary code was that if you’re going to get people to do great things. And go. And you want them to trust you. Transparency comes before trust. Got to be really transparent with them on your feelings, the goals, the needs for what the opportunity is going to be. Then, you know, then they’re going to trust you. If you don’t do the transparency piece first, then no one’s going to trust you. So that you put that together and that’s where you go. And I wrote the book and there we go. Okay.

Bill Sherman If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast. Please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/ltl and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as Thought Leadership Leverage dot com forward slash podcasts.

Bill Sherman So you wrote the book, traditional publisher-hybrid-self-published. How do you get it out? You know?

Rajeev Kapur You know, I’m a member of YPO and so a friend of mine from YPO said, Hey, I know these guys over at Advantage Publishing. And so all of them and they kind of help me out a lot. You know, I mean, my book was in shambles, rightfully. I mean, an editor and a cover designer. And, you know, so they help me put it all together and they got me help me get a partner to help me kind of fill in some blanks on that person, help me out where they interviewed me in certain spots where there were kind of spots where that didn’t make sense. So the guys that advantage came in, they really helped me out. I was I was about 70% of the way there. And they came in and helped me across the rest of the 30%. And then we published through them. It became a bestseller and it’s available on Amazon called Chase Greatness.

Bill Sherman Talk about book number two, right? Because a number of people have the itch to do book number one. And like you said, you didn’t know quite what you were doing the first time around. It’s a new piece. I mean, we’ve all picked up books, but the experience of going through and creating one is very different. So how did you approach book number two, not only from a topic selection process and an audience perspective process, but then also, you know. Getting it into the world.

Rajeev Kapur Yeah. So book number two in book number three are the same. Just ones Jefferson and ones the second. And so on November 30th of 2022, I remember sitting in my bed and it was 630 in the morning and my phone beeped and it was a news alert from Apple News. It talks about something called Chatty Betty. And I’m like. What is this? So open it up. So reading it and my literally sat up in my bed and I’m like, what the heck is this? And if floored me, I knew what I mean. Having had my certifications of air being been in the air space for about a dozen, but close to ten plus years. You know, I was kind of smarter than the average bear when it came. Came I. I was not by any means any I program or anything, but from a business perspective, I got it. And. Afford me the copy by surprise, just like it cost most people outside of Silicon Valley by surprise. And I remember texting.

Bill Sherman We thought it was much more like a cold fusion thing where it was always 10 to 20 years away rather than here it is and it’s now just go online and start having conversations, right?

Rajeev Kapur You know, I mean, obviously the I mean, this article, I’m a little skeptical and I’m like, all right, well, then. But so I went and I remember opening an account right away and just started playing around with it in the little prompt box and didn’t know what that guy was doing. And I remember the first thing I said was, I remember I says, Can you teach me how to make pizza? And with the 10s. It showed me how to make a pizza. And they asked me, what kind of pizza do you want? I’m like, my God, this is crazy. And I remember texting my team writers and guys go create an account, get jump on. This could change the world and my business. So 11 of I media is a B2B marketing and media technology company. So we cover cloud, we cover data analytics. We do all that stuff in the technology sector, our cybersecurity. So we do all that already, but we didn’t do much. We had some things in the air on machine learning and things like that, but never binotto the generator. And they thought I was crazy. My team that I was up with that reminded me back of a time back in like 95, 96 when the Internet first came out. I remember being in a memory back of Michael Dell’s office. I think I told you the story. I was at Michael Dell’s office and he walked in with his box in the box, had Mosaic on it, and it was essentially the Netscape browser. And it’s on floppy drives, right? He throws it on the desk and there’s about ten of us in his office. He goes, okay, go figure out. So computers on this thing and like, you’re crazy, you’re dumb, you’re an idiot, you’re more aware. Are you talking about who’s going to buy a copy? What was the Internet? Who’s going to get this done? Right? And so that was a reaction I was getting. But this is stupid. What? Who’s going to do it? So anyways. You know, I just I remember calling my son and at the universe in Miami, he said, Dad, I’m checking it out right now. I remember talking to my other son. He was at USC and he’s going, Yeah, I’m testing it right now to do some math on it right now, testing it. So, you know, kids are already starting to embrace it within a couple of hours of it being released. And I remember having called my team that morning and I said, guys, this could change the world. Everyone’s got to learn this. And so hung up with them. They eventually got religion around. It took them about a month. They got religion around it. And remember, there’s a November 30th, so around Christmas, New York time. And I said to myself, you know what? Everybody in the planets can have to learn. I got to learn this stuff. I it’s going to affect everybody. And so people are going to get trained on it. And so why not, Right. A little quick, not quick, purposeless words, write a book on it. And so it was really easy. I kind of had an idea of what I wanted to write. And so I started writing a I made Simple and a Beginner’s Guide to Generative Intelligence and. And I couldn’t call A.I. for Dummies for obvious reasons. So. I wrote it. It took me about six months to write it and self-published it. And I watched it and it watched it in support. TeMber of last year. And up until May of this year, I think it was the number one bestselling A.I. book on Amazon. And then so then, you know, and the funny thing is, is that when I launched it, it was already obsolete. And so I said, should I do a second edition? So then I started working on a second a second edition back in February of this year, and then launched the second edition in June. The second edition is doing well. The problem is people are still buying the first two because Amazon doesn’t let you discontinue the first edition razor or buy the first edition and the second edition. So. So it’s done well. So I’m debating whether or not to do a third edition. I don’t think I’ll do a third edition just because it’s a lot of work. But instead I might open up my little YouTube channel or do something talking about the latest greatest.

Bill Sherman Well, there’s several options, right? You can go and do shorter updates. You can use different modalities. You could also get someone to be someone to help you do the updates on it. Right. And just hand that off. Right. So you’re wearing the hat of CEO for 1105 media. And at the same time, you’re wearing this author hat, right? So probably for a fast changing, you know, as opposed to your framework on greatness that you built. Chasing AI is sort of a red Queens race gap.

Rajeev Kapur You know, And so from there. I’ve been thinking about, you know, building out some A.I. courses for beginners. And but the demographic for A.I. made simple. It’s not your CIO, your CTO. You know, you know, you’re techie geeks. We’re going to get this stuff right away. People are already experiencing they I know this is written for my 80 year old mom to understand is this is written for that for that person who is hey, you know what? I don’t know anything about technology or I’m a technology novice. I’m a little worried about this stuff now because this is simply don’t understand how to use this stuff. And you can and anybody can embrace it and read it and understand it. In fact, I got a call the other day from this lady. She hunted me down at my office. She left me a voicemail message. She is 81 years old. She lives in Austin, Texas. And she started a book club. And her book club chose my book and they invited me to come and speak to them. And I got on a Zoom call with them and just like this and there was 12 people in the room and they’d all read my book and they were all in their late 70s, early 80s, and they all wanted to embrace A.I. and they’re all using it for great things. They’re all having fun with it.

Bill Sherman That’s got to be a great experience sort of in this an intrinsic reward to know that you’re making impact in scalable ways. My question is, you’ve got this dual hat. You’re running 1105. You’ve got these books out there. How did the two connect causes the practice of thought leadership and authoring books to support the business. And does it or do you see those two different things?

Rajeev Kapur Well, look, the first book is great news. That was from my own mental health, right, during Covid. I used to write the whole scenario of when you get on a plane, they say the flight attendant says, put on your own mask first before you can help somebody else. No pun intended, because of during Covid time. But that was just for my own thing, right? That was just something I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it right. And that incorporates what book or sold a thousand books. I really didn’t care. I just wanted to do it. So I did it. And so the air books absolutely are synergistic because we cover air, we cover we cover cloud infrastructure, we cover cyber, we cover data and analytics. And you can’t be successful on air without understanding your data. And so if you live alone or if I was set up, there’s five companies with an 1105 media, those five companies all reporting to me. I had different divisional presidents who reported it to me to run those businesses. And so, you know, this does if anything, this does it helps enhance what we do and helps build our brand and helps bring us credibility across our different offerings.

Bill Sherman So would you describe that first book experience as similar to the gateway story that you shared and the dull stories that you shared in terms of doing hard things? Was it a mountain to climb? Similar to some of the others, or was it a lesser mountain?

Rajeev Kapur You know, I think I would probably compare it more towards making the decision. When you’re 42 years old and you’re already the CEO of a company to go get your MBA.

Bill Sherman Okay. Y so where’s the connection?

Rajeev Kapur Because look. A lot of people told me, look, you’re 40 years old. You’ve already been the CEO of a you’ve already been the presence of a company and CEO company. What do you get? What do you learn from an MBA?

Bill Sherman You know how to read a pencil. You’ve had to make tough decisions and conversations. What are you going to get out of it?

Rajeev Kapur Right. So you can get out a book? You know, it was like more about proving to myself I could do it right. It was more about being example, being a being a leader for those around me to see that I did it being an example for my sons, raising my sons to see that you can do whatever he said to me to write. So I would put it on that look. And when I got my MBA and this not a woe is me story, but, you know, I was running a company that was headquartered in Switzerland. I lived in L.A. and Southern California, and most of our customers were in Asia. So I would spent so well and I’m doing an MBA doing all that. So I was flying 3000 miles a year. I was in L.A. and I was also taking classes in Shanghai because that’s where the remote campus was for USC at the time in Asia. And I would spend one week here in Southern California, one week in Europe, one week back home, one week in Asia. And I would bounce back and forth between the U.S. campus in L.A. and the USC campus in China and studying on planes and all these different kinds of things. And so, yeah, that that’s hard, you know, and it’s a big it’s a big mental fortitude thing that you’ve got to go through to prove that you could do it and, you know, talk about resilience. And I’ll tell you, when you got to have a paper turned in, but you’re jet lagged from three different time zones, I’ll tell you, that’s tough. You know, when you’re working on Wi-Fi, that that that that’s body at best. Sometimes it’s tough. And so you know but you know, you do it. And time went by pretty fast and made some amazing connection with some great people. And, you know, it’s about proving things to yourself. You know, I mean, I don’t think I have to prove anything to anybody. I just want to prove things to myself.

Bill Sherman But if I also listen, you in your answer said being a role model to your sons. Right. And sort of the team around you, that you can do hard things, you can keep multiple balls in the air. And we all have challenges. We have different things that make it hard for us in one way or another. And that’s not to diminish that. But like you said, whether you’re studying for an MBA and you’ve got that paper evenings and weekends where you’re working on a manuscript while traveling. Those are all things that you have to sort of sort out and say, is this journey worth it? And why am I doing it? Am I proving it to myself? Is this needed for the business? What’s my goal? Because if you don’t have clarity around that, it’s easy to walk away from a project. You’re.

Rajeev Kapur Yeah. I mean, look, I don’t. I mean, I never was going to give up on my NBA, Right. But I tell you, there are times when we get tired. Right now there are time outs, time.

Bill Sherman But certainly when you’re doing transoceanic flights east and west, transatlantic and transpacific on a regular basis.

Rajeev Kapur So, you know, and then, you know, it Covid was a tough time. And, you know, my business, you know, half my business was face to face events. And so that business went away and it’s just now starting to recover. Right. So we went from being an extremely, extremely, extremely profitable business. So maybe being a month away from bankruptcy because Covid hit us so hard, you know, we didn’t take any government money. None. And maybe we were dumb, but not to. But we didn’t take any government money. And then we figured it out. Took us six months to figure things out. And we survived and did well and made our decisions. And now, hopefully, Harvard will come one day and write a case study about how we survived Covid. Like I got the blueprint.

Bill Sherman So should we need a Harvard case study on how to survive a pandemic? I really hope we don’t. Right. As we begin to wrap up, I want to ask a couple of questions. And the first one is. Where do you see yourself going next on your failed leadership journey?

Rajeev Kapur Look, I. I’m still pretty young, you know, I’m in my mid 50. You know, I feel like I got a lot more in me, So we’ll see. We’ll see where it goes. But, you know, I thought I still think we got some stuff off the air at 1105. I’m thinking about, you know, how to get on a TEDx stage. I think that would be exciting to talk about the journey as well. I think I think that would be a good message to get out there to people, you know, And then from there, you know, I think, well, let’s see where this air stuff goes. I think there’s, you know, in the next few years, I think this could be an opportunity to be a real thought leader in this space and to really help embrace people. Because I think what’s happening there is I think there’s so much fear about losing jobs and so much fear about what’s the future going to look like about the Terminator. Robots are going to come for us and all these kinds of things. I think there needs to be a voice out there talking about the good things. Also at the same time talking, making people aware of the challenges and the bad things that that that that that are potentially, you know, out there now from people perspective.

Bill Sherman So because there is a long continuum between utopia on one side. Robot helps shape on another side and we’re probably somewhere in the middle. Some of it is choices that we make as individuals and as society. But recognizing the good and making informed decisions is going to take a lot of choices and a lot of conversation because as you said, this is a new world and it’s going to be transformative in many, many ways.

Rajeev Kapur Yeah. To me, I think it unchecked. I. A solution. Could become really dangerous, especially when you think about things like deep fakes. And to me, the Deepfake challenge is something that should keep everybody up at night.

Bill Sherman Well, it can be individually damaging. It can be societally damaging. There’s a number it could be internationally in international relations. If you pick a world leader created deepfake of something that’s going to spark, you know, conflict. Those are things that we have to not only be thinking about and not in a small ecosystem there, national security and technology, but then also prepare a broader society for and we could have an entire different conversation around how do you take something which is technically complex and encourage people to learn how to question what they see with their own eyes?

Rajeev Kapur Yep. Not only not only unsee their eyes, but also what they hear through years. Right.

Bill Sherman Right. Absolutely.

Rajeev Kapur It’ll be, you know. So. So that’s. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity going to be there. So we’ll see where it goes. But I’m excited for the future. You know, we’re you know, humanity is resilient. Humanity. I think if you think about it, during the mobile revolution and nobody if you would have told me that I was going to fly into Seattle and take an Uber and book my hotel on an app at a Marriott, you know, I thought you were being crazy ten years ago. Right. Yeah. So we haven’t even seen I mean, whatever those companies are going to be like outside of the Big Apple’s and the Microsoft’s of the world, we don’t even know what these new companies are going to look like. We don’t even know what the new opportunities are going to be. I think there’s going to be so much exciting opportunity, whether it’s longevity, space or education or where, you know, Smart City is connected Planet, whatever it might be. I think there’s so much opportunity in the space. We are we haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg of the opportunity that’s going to be there. So it’s going to be exciting to see what the next ten, 20 years looks like.

Bill Sherman Well, and it’s fascinating. As you mentioned, you know, you go back to the 1940s and 50s, we were all promised flying cars. And instead we have millions of innovations that most people had no expectation, whether it was the 50s of the Jetsons age and that sort of thing. And so that ability to see around the corner and say, what will it be like ten, 20, 30 years from now? And how do we chart a course to where we want to be? Rajiv, I want to thank you for joining us today on Leveraging Thought Leadership. And I wish you well on your journey in practicing.

Rajeev Kapur You should thank my friend. Appreciate it. Enjoyed my time.

Bill Sherman Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game and thought leadership as well as just starting out second. Subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.