Leadership, AI & Purpose-Driven Business — Yogesh Srivastava on Ek Soch

Thirty-Five Years of Proving Himself

Yogesh Srivastava's corporate journey spanned three and a half decades, multiple roles, multiple teams, and multiple cities. He is precise about how he frames that period — not as survival, but as consistent demonstration.

Every new role required proving himself again. Every new team required building trust from scratch. Every new city required understanding a context that was different from the one before. The consistency of that requirement, rather than exhausting him, became the engine of his development — because the professional who has had to earn credibility repeatedly across genuinely different environments develops a kind of adaptability that cannot be taught in a single context.

When that cycle was complete, he made a deliberate choice. The accumulated experience of thirty-five years had produced something that could either be held privately or shared. He chose to share it — through two ventures that carry the same underlying purpose despite being superficially unrelated.

The Talent-Alignment Problem Nobody Was Solving

The observation that led to YS Epiphanity was one Yogesh had been making for decades without initially knowing what to do with it.

Across organisations, across industries, across levels of seniority, he kept encountering the same pattern: people doing work that bore no relationship to what they were actually good at or genuinely interested in. Engineers in clerical roles. Photographers in sales positions. People whose natural strengths were being systematically underused by organisations that had placed them based on availability or convenience rather than fit.

The cost of this misalignment is not abstract. It shows up in productivity figures, in engagement levels, in the turnover rates that organisations spend significant resources managing, and in the quiet professional unhappiness that never becomes a formal complaint but shapes every interaction a person has at work.

Epiphanity was built to address this specifically — to help organisations map individual talent to organisational goals in a way that improves both productivity and the human experience of the work. The name carries the intention: an epiphany about what someone is actually for, and what the organisation actually needs.

"Engineers in clerical roles. Photographers in sales positions. The cost of misalignment is not abstract — it shows up in everything."

The 80/20 Rule Most Leaders Invert

Yogesh's core leadership principle is stated simply and runs counter to how most organisations actually operate.

Leaders should spend eighty percent of their time on their people and twenty percent chasing numbers. Most organisations operate the inversion — leaders spend the majority of their attention on metrics, targets, and reporting, and the minority on the human beings whose daily experience determines whether those metrics move in the right direction.

His argument is not sentimental. It is causal. The numbers are an output. The people are the input. A leader who manages the output without understanding the input is working at the wrong end of the chain — and will consistently find themselves surprised by results they could have anticipated if they had been paying attention to the right things.

He credits this orientation — the deliberate prioritisation of people over numbers — for consistently delivering top results across every role he held across three and a half decades. The irony is precise: the leaders most focused on numbers typically produce worse numbers than the leaders most focused on people.

"The numbers are an output. The people are the input. A leader who manages the output without understanding the input is working at the wrong end of the chain."

Mental Health Is a Leadership Responsibility

Yogesh addresses the question of employee mental health directly and with the specificity that the subject requires.

He references the Pune corporate suicide incident — a case that generated significant public discussion about workplace pressure and leadership culture — and his position is unambiguous: the leader is responsible. Not solely, not in a way that removes individual agency, but substantively and accountably responsible for the psychological environment that their team inhabits daily.

His practical prescription is straightforward. Leaders should know their team members personally — not in a performative way, but genuinely. Their passions, their hobbies, their family situations, the pressures they are carrying outside the office. A leader who knows this can read distress signals that are invisible to someone who only knows their direct report as a job title and a set of deliverables.

The leader who treats people as resources to be optimised for output will consistently miss the signals. The leader who treats them as people will consistently catch them early enough to matter.

"The leader who treats people as resources to be optimised for output will consistently miss the signals. The leader who treats them as people will consistently catch them early enough to matter."

What He Sees in Modi's Leadership

Yogesh uses Narendra Modi as a leadership case study — not a political endorsement, but an observation about a specific set of qualities that he considers exemplary in execution.

The qualities he identifies are particular: omnipresence across contexts, from tribal communities to global summits, without appearing to perform the shift between them. Emotional intelligence that reads the room accurately and responds to what the room actually needs. Effective delegation combined with close oversight — the ability to trust others with execution while maintaining genuine awareness of what is happening. Consistent accessibility to the full range of people who want to reach him.

These are not qualities that belong to a political ideology. They are leadership competencies that work in any context where a person is responsible for directing a large and diverse group of people toward a shared outcome.

VUCA, BANI, and the World Leaders Are Actually Operating In

Yogesh introduces two frameworks for understanding the current operating environment — VUCA, which stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous, and BANI, a more recent framework that extends the vocabulary for describing systemic disruption.

His point is not academic. These frameworks matter practically because leaders who do not have language for the environment they are operating in cannot diagnose it accurately, cannot communicate about it clearly, and cannot make the adaptive decisions it requires.

The response he advocates is not resilience as passive endurance — not the ability to absorb difficulty without breaking. It is resilience as active adaptation — the ability to read a disrupted environment accurately and change approach accordingly. The leaders who thrive in VUCA conditions are not the ones who are toughest. They are the ones who are most honestly responsive to what is actually happening.

"The leaders who thrive in VUCA conditions are not the ones who are toughest. They are the ones who are most honestly responsive to what is actually happening."

Why AI Is Not Optional

Yogesh's position on AI is stated without softening: it is mandatory for employees at every level, in every function, at every stage of career.

He grounds this in his own history with technology adoption. In the early internet era, he visited Yahoo Mail cafes to learn email when it was not yet standard. The professionals who adopted early gained an advantage that compounded over time. The professionals who waited until adoption was forced upon them were perpetually behind the curve.

The pattern is repeating. AI is at the Yahoo Mail stage — present, accessible, not yet universally adopted, and about to become the baseline expectation rather than the differentiator. The professionals investing in understanding it now are building the advantage that will separate them from those who wait.

His practical recommendation is specific: invest ten percent of income in skill development, consistently, as a non-negotiable allocation rather than a discretionary expense. The compound return on that investment across a career dwarfs almost any other use of the same money.

"AI is at the Yahoo Mail stage — present, accessible, not yet universally adopted, and about to become the baseline expectation rather than the differentiator."

The Book Written in Fifty Days of Stranding

Yogesh's book Resilience of the Unbreakable Spirit is not a theoretical treatment of its subject. It is a direct account of being stranded in London for fifty days during COVID — cut off from home, from routine, from the professional infrastructure that most people's sense of stability depends on.

The experience of writing through that period — of converting fifty days of involuntary isolation into a book that subsequently won an award — is itself an illustration of the book's argument. Resilience is not the absence of difficulty. It is the decision, made under genuine difficulty, to produce something from it rather than simply endure it.

He recommends it alongside two other books whose influence on his thinking he acknowledges directly: Atomic Habits by James Clear, for its precision about the mechanics of behaviour change, and Ikigai, the Japanese framework for identifying the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for — the framework he returns to in his closing message.

Learning Beyond the Office

One detail Yogesh shares that is easy to overlook is the discipline of attending industry events at his own expense — not on company budget, not as a required professional development activity, but as a personal investment in staying genuinely current.

The Singapore Fintech Festival and the ET Global Leaders Forum are examples he cites. His reasoning is specific: vendor presentations and news articles provide a filtered, secondhand version of what is actually happening in an industry. Attending events where practitioners are speaking to practitioners provides primary access to real developments, real challenges, and real opportunities that the filtered version consistently misses.

The willingness to spend personal money on professional learning — above and beyond what an employer provides — is, in his view, one of the clearest signals of a professional who is building a career rather than filling a role.

"The willingness to spend personal money on professional learning is one of the clearest signals of a professional who is building a career rather than filling a role."

My Couture: Travel That Gives Back

The second venture Yogesh co-founded begins with an observation about mass tourism that most frequent travellers have made without acting on it.

Mass tourism extracts from local communities and environments. It concentrates economic benefit in large operators and international platforms while the communities that host the tourists — whose culture, landscape, and local knowledge are the actual product being sold — receive a fraction of the value they generate. The environmental cost of the transportation, accommodation, and activity infrastructure required by mass tourism is rarely accounted for honestly.

My Couture is built as a direct response to this. It offers bespoke, immersive travel experiences guided by local experts — people whose knowledge of a place is genuine rather than scripted. Carbon neutrality is built into the operational model through tree plantation partnerships with Tree Nation, with every trip's CO2 emissions offset end to end. A share of profits returns to the local communities whose assets make the experience possible.

The experiences themselves are deliberately distinct from what mass tourism offers: Antarctica expeditions accompanied by subject-matter experts, F1 in Morocco, India's Hornbill Festival in Nagaland, Brahmaputra river cruises, nights in the Thar Desert, stays in British tea bungalows in the Northeast. The places exist in standard travel itineraries only rarely, if at all.

"Antarctica expeditions. F1 in Morocco. Hornbill Festival in Nagaland. Brahmaputra river cruises. The places exist in standard travel itineraries only rarely, if at all."

Sustainability Through Self-Interest

Yogesh's argument for sustainable travel — and for sustainability as a general orientation — makes no appeal to altruism. He makes it through self-interest, deliberately.

The question he asks is not: do you care about the planet? It is: do you care about your children's health, your children's future, the world your children will actually inhabit? The environmental consequences of unsustainable behaviour are not abstract future problems. They are the air quality, the water availability, and the climate conditions that children alive today will spend their adult lives managing.

My Couture's net-zero website and end-to-end carbon offset model are not marketing positions. They are operational commitments built into every trip the company offers — because Yogesh's position is that if the business cannot operate sustainably, it should not operate.

The Final Frame: Ikigai and the 90 Percent

Yogesh closes with two ideas that have shaped his approach to every decision he has described in the conversation.

The first is Ikigai — the Japanese concept of identifying the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Both of his ventures sit, in his telling, at that intersection — not by accident but by deliberate design. He urges every person in the audience to find their own version of that intersection and commit to it fully rather than approximating it indefinitely.

The second is a formulation he attributes to the broader resilience literature but that his own experience has tested: life is ten percent what happens to you, and ninety percent how you respond to it. The stranding in London, the career transitions, the decision to leave corporate life and build from scratch — all of it processed through that framework. The circumstances were ten percent of the story. The response was ninety.

"Life is ten percent what happens to you, and ninety percent how you respond to it."