A day with Rishad

It is always refreshing to spend time with Risad Tobaccowala. Last week I spent a day with Rishad in Delhi and learnt a couple of new things. He talked about ‘ignorance arbitrage’ and how that is likely to vanish from this world as information becomes easily (and timely) accessible. His point of view on ‘working media’ and ‘non-working media’ was quite refreshing and it caught attention of all the clients that he met in Delhi.

We got around talking about Talent and he said: “there is always a new wave behind us” – that made me think about the way we manage people in our industry. In most cases we put people with skills-of-the-past in-charge of managing people who are actually bringing in skills-of-the-future. Talented people don’t want to be managed and actually know how to manage themselves. So rather than thinking about managing talent we need to think about enabling talent and setting them free so that they can win. I think there is never a better than today to rethink how advertising industry manages talent.