At e27, we have kickstarted a new articles series called work-life balance to learn more about tech enablers and executives and their lives beyond working hours.
Amit Ghosh is the Chief Information & Services Officer for R3. He leads the global operations organisation responsible for information security, IT infrastructure and operations, customer success, professional services, and technical support. In addition, he also leads its business and growth in Asia Pacific.
Before R3, he held various senior business development & operations roles at Visa, PayPal, and Hewlett-Packard.
Based in Singapore, he holds an MBA from Chicago Booth and a BTech from IIT-BHU.
He is a regular contributor of articles for e27 (you can read his thought leadership articles here).
In this candid interview, Ghosh talks about his personal and professional life.
How would you explain what you do to a five-year-old?
As a father of an almost five-year-old, this is an interesting question. My answer would be the following: we build things like you build toys with your legos.
I build something similar to a railway track that can then carry a train with goods from one point to another (this is R3 Corda’s flow frameworks and smart contracts that move data and information).
Sometimes we put different legos in a safe box, give them a good hard shake, and a new toy emerges (analogous to Conclave’s computation in a trusted enclave). Like how you build toys that your friends love, we build things that our friends will love.
What has been the biggest highlight/challenge of your career so far?
The biggest highlight of my career is being part of the blockchain industry – to be building and leading teams at R3.
Blockchain technology has the promise and evidence to be as foundational and indispensable as the internet. It is proving to play a significant role in shaping our company and, in doing so, shaping the industry. This is a genuine opportunity of a lifetime. Our business relies heavily on interpersonal relationships with our colleagues, partners, and clients.
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In the last two and a half years, the pandemic has challenged and disrupted our ways of building relationships, working collaboratively, and forging meaningful partnerships with customers.
In addition, hiring, onboarding, and retaining talent virtually was one of the stiffest leadership challenges I have dealt with in the recent past.
R3 was able to weather the storm because our senior-most leaders spent significant time making thoughtful choices for our employees.
How do you envision the next five years of your career?
I envision spending the next few years driving transformational change in technology infrastructure that underpins the financial markets globally and, equally, in the Asia Pacific. We are already in the process of doing so with financial services customers like DTCC, SDX, BIC (India), and other corporate customers like Ericsson and Vodafone.
However, we are just getting started, and there is a long runway ahead. I intend to work closely with my team to deliver large-scale customer projects and make customers successful. And we cannot do that without the help of R3-ers.
Therefore, I envision my next five years entirely devoting my time and energy to finding new talent whilst continuing to develop and support our current talent as best as possible.
What are some of your favourite work tools?
Slack is an everyday essential for me. The collaborative aspect of Slack acts as the R3 team’s bedrock, and it is our go-to tool for internal communication. This goes without mentioning its user-friendly interface and many functions that can be integrated with the app.
So, I consider Slack my favourite tool, considering it integral to my daily work routine.
Besides Slack, Atlassian’s Confluence is another excellent tool that I use on a day-to-day basis. Made by a software company from Australia, Confluence effectively renders R3’s key insights into internal Wiki pages, which is especially helpful in facilitating clarity of thought.
Being able to pen down our ideas and make sense of our thought processes will lead us in the right direction and eliminate the possibility of information misalignment. This translates to more efficient and effective work for the team.
Good organisation and accountability are traits I highly value, especially as a leader when there are multiple things that I often have to juggle. An app that helps to keep me in check is Notion, a note-taking app that’s essentially a second-brain tool. It’s an all-in-one workspace that systematically consolidates all of my tasks, projects, and notes and serves as my primary storage place.
Its minimalistic visuals provide a seamless user interface with regard to connecting and expanding ideas or even sharing them with my teammates. But most importantly, it provides the quickest access to information whenever and wherever I need it. It’s akin to my brain but expanded.
What’s something about you or your job that would surprise us?
Every single one of us can transform if we have adequate self-awareness and a deep desire to change. My belief in this has strengthened over the last few years as I became self-aware and received coaching to work on areas that were a priority for me.
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Subsequently, when I became a coach, I raised awareness in the person I was coaching, which led to significant changes in their life. When I share my belief openly, most people are surprised by my conviction in this and how important it is to me.
Do you prefer WFH or WFO, or hybrid?
I prefer the hybrid model. I find it amusing, however, that it took a pandemic for us to take hybrid working models seriously and implement them globally. Before the pandemic, we would not even have considered hybrid working to be a possibility.
But I’ve now realised the benefits of working from home and the office.
At home, I can zero in on my work and be hyper-focused instead of being prone to disruptions and distractions that may interrupt my workflow in the office.
Working from the office, however, provides its own set of unique benefits, an important one being human interactions with the team. It’s a prerequisite for leaders to know how to build rapport with their team members, which can be challenging to do via a screen or any virtual platform.
Human connection is best built when you share the same environment as your team – physically interacting with them at work and beyond work settings. Human connections are formed based on experiences, whether getting coffee together in the pantry, bouncing ideas off each other in meeting rooms, or having small talks in the hallways — these are all part of this experience of being at work.
But all in all, it still needs to be a healthy balance between working from home and the office. Only with the hybrid model do you get the best of both worlds.
What would you tell your younger self?
I would tell myself to take more risks and travel a lot more! The courage to try new things and allow me the freedom to do first and think later is something I would love to tell young Amit.
The wisdom, life lessons, and values you gain from taking risks and travelling shape you into the person you are. As the saying goes – we are the sum of our experiences. Without risks, I wouldn’t be where I am or who I am today.
Ideally, I would have liked to challenge the mindset of my younger self, where I used to play safe out of cautiousness and take the leap of faith and believe that everything would naturally fall into place.
Additionally, travelling or living abroad will allow an individual to understand new perspectives better and take in new cultures – this builds character and shapes one’s outlook.
Can you describe yourself in three words?
Coach. Ambitious. Calm.
What are you most likely to be doing if not working?
It’s one of four things – I’m babysitting my four-year-old, being in nature, practising my coaching skills, or writing.
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Inspired by R3’s CTO, Richard Gendal Brown, a high quality prolific online writer, I’ve recently been practising and honing my writing skills for no objective other than to sharpen my clarity of thought.
I even started my webpage, where I share my perspectives on topics in the cross-section of talent development and leadership and occasionally share a personal story. This is a recent hobby that I am exploring to reinvigorate my creative side. The challenge to improve my writing energises me very much and knowing that I have a long way to go gives me a lot of joy.
What are you currently reading/listening to/ watching?
My current reads:
- Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
- A Simpler Life: A Guide to Greater Serenity, Ease and Clarity by Alain de Botton
- Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When The Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Al Switzler, Ron McMillan, and Joseph Kenny
I am interested in human psychology and its role in personal and professional development, fulfilment, and leading a holistic life. I strongly believe in the value of continuous growth as a person, and I constantly want to educate myself on the things that can inspire people, make them happier, and view the world more positively than otherwise.
Being able to internalise contentment, self-satisfaction fully, and inner peace is my ultimate end goal – I would like to learn how to rid myself of material wants and desires and grow through introspection.
I also read to understand better the people around me, which goes a long way for my personal development as a leader, mentor, and coach. It is imperative to find ways to improve myself so that I can better support the growth of the R3 team and be of help to them.
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