Gaurav Gupta is Director of Kotter International, Change Management & Strategy Execution and co-author of Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard to Imagine Results in Uncertain & Volatile Times. He translates strategy into implementation and develops learning-focused teams. Gaurav has worked with clients in industries as diverse as food and beverage, oil and energy, healthcare, chemicals, and finance. Gaurav draws on his extensive global (having worked in over 10 countries) and diverse functional experience in collaborating with business leaders to develop and implement effective transformation efforts. Gaurav lead the operations for the European office of Stroud International, a management and operations consulting firm. He combines his passion for international development and education in serving as an executive board member for a non-profit, Medic to Medic, that sponsors medical students in Uganda and Malawi. Gaurav holds a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Middlebury College and a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University.

GAURAV GUPTA

How do you get people to have a sense of urgency to actually take action and do something different? What we're finding is the learnings from business very much do apply to other spheres and also more generally do challenges like climate change. We’re facing the question of how do you get more people to actually be willing to take real meaningful action.

The idea of a burning platform does not really work. For a long time, people talked about burning platforms as a way to motivate change, and it was about how do you engineer a crisis? How do you create a situation where people see a real sense of if we don’t do something now we're going to be in real trouble.

That works to motivate people to take the first step but if you're trying to get people to want to take multiple steps and you're trying to get people to want to stay on a journey for a long time to drive meaningful change you've got to bare that burning platform with something that’s why is this good? What are the benefits of doing this?

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Jordan Holman with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Jordan Holman. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).