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hello can you hear me
yeah so after latias very deeply
personal experience and a call to be the
change that you want to see which is
what can these exportations to all of us
I'm going to sort of keep it impersonal
and talk about destroy to create and you
know I'm also very glad that you
mentioned that I have 25 years of
experience actually 31 but that's good
for me so so you destroyed six years
alright right so let me just go through
this
yeah so you know I'm gonna take a few
examples of destroy to create alright
from a variety of fields and then
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related to what is it that we do in our
lives okay and my area of focus is
essentially given that it's a management
and business school you know talk about
business entrepreneurship innovation and
things of that kind
alright and you know and I had and since
I also teach a lot you know you'll find
me asking questions in between so please
don't respond that's not what the TEDx
structure is so if you look at the
cosmos right do you know what this is
what's this a picture of it's a picture
of the Sun the Sun is estimated to be
about 4.6 billion years old
as a Sun like the star formation took a
while longer and the interesting thing
is the sum is actually a nuclear reactor
right and as a nuclear reactor what it
does is it does fusion so hydrogen fuses
to form helium right it's a very very
powerful exothermic reaction for those
of us who still remember class 10
chemistry all right and what happens is
hydrogen becomes helium mass reduces
that mass from Einstein's equation leads
to e is equal to MC squared leads to an
explosion of light and heat energy it is
that light and that heat that leads to
life on earth it is that light and that
energy that creates the conditions that
enables life to exist but while all of
this is going on within the Sun itself
it is getting destroyed the core
temperature is about 15 million degrees
Celsius inside the Sun right and as it
starts heating up itself so hydrogen
becomes helium helium finally becomes
carbon etcetera etcetera it collapses on
itself
and every billion years it is estimated
that the sun's temperature will increase
by 10 degrees Celsius which means that
in about 4 billion years it will rise to
about 40 degree will rise by 40 degrees
what that means is this earth will
disappear right the variety of factors
you know water vapor global warming
greenhouse effect etcetera etcetera
etcetera this will entirely disappear
but all this is happening even as life
is being created on earth right inside
the Sun you are seeing enormous
destruction take place okay so what it
tells you and I will link this up
subsequently to the idea that this is a
finite process right and as the Sun
becomes you know a red giant a red giant
becomes a white dwarf those of you
interested in you know space and
cosmology will know all of these terms
you'll find that ultimately becomes a
black hole and it becomes so powerful
that even light it does not escape so
that is what is going to happen to the
Sun now as it evolves and as it destroys
itself while creating life outside you
will have a situation that when this
earth planet Earth disappears all the
other planets that are nearer to the Sun
than Earth will also get enveloped and
destroyed conditions may emerge where
newer life forms in other planets that
are yet to be formed will take place and
that is the infinites
cycle of life itself okay and we see
this every day pretty much in the cosmos
as we know it
how many clicks do I need to do all
right now you look at nature you know
all of us and it's quite common to talk
about fossil fuel and global warming and
you know all the other buzzwords that we
are all familiar with climate change and
people panicking about climate change
and all of that you know leaving aside
the hyperbole around Earth's extinction
thanks to climate change the fact is
that 95 percent of our energy today
comes from fossil fuel ok so if we don't
have fossil fuel we might as well say
goodbye and get destroyed fossil fuel is
what keeps this world
yeah he's what keeps this world moving
okay and that's a mix of petroleum
natural gas right and coal
these are the three major components of
fossil fuel now how is fossil fuel
formed in the first place over hundreds
of millions of years
plants and animals died got buried and
the layers and layers of sedimentation
under intense pressure under intense
heat leading to the formation of tar and
from tar to a bunch of these things
right so animals have died plants have
died when over millions of years we have
found that fossil fuels have emerged
which essentially is now leading to the
creation of life as we know it they
would not have been any human progress
if these fuels didn't exist all right so
just keep thinking about it in nature
you take a human body you know which is
the largest organ in the human body it's
the human skin 16 percent of our body is
covered by the skin every minute 30 to
40 thousand cells fall off it is
estimated that in a year 3.6 kilograms
3.6 kilograms of our skin cells fall off
just imagine what happens to those skin
cells that fall off it becomes food for
the dust mite the microscopic mites that
live around us and are largely invisible
to the human eye
they feed on the human scale our human
skin cells they survive and because our
skin cells die newer skin emerges okay
and it's very very common it's very very
true of every aspect of the human body
and you will see that you know manifest
itself in very many ways and just like
the Sun there comes a time when this
entire process of
destruction creation etc within this
reactor called the body exactly like the
Sun is going to eat itself up and get
destroyed newer life-forms will emerge
okay and again so you'll see the same
metaphor the same template get expressed
over and over again
this is a fascinating thing right and we
really keep talking about you know
electric vehicles and all of that
electric vehicles are more than 100
years old by the way okay so you know
it's nothing new electric vehicles were
you know right from a Henry Ford's time
the electric vehicles have been talked
about just that the costs didn't sort of
justify the creation of electric
vehicles what used to happen was you had
these animal powered transportation
systems typically horses and in New York
City and London etc etcetera you had a
situation where horses were the primary
mode of transportation estimated
somewhere between 150 to 200 thousand
horses what are New York City's roads
creating an enormous pool of many are
right both solid and liquid which was
quite undesirable and given the
temperatures I mean the weather
conditions and all of that it was a
really horrendous situation and you had
about 10 to 15 thousand horses die every
year right on the tracks and that was
another mess you know out of disease and
old agent sheer working conditions and
so on and everybody sat down around the
table in New York London etc and said
hey what do we need to do to deal with
the problem of many or and to deal with
this problem of horses nobody saw the
automobile emerge ok in about 15 years
from the time all of this is from the
late 1880s so by the time the 20th
century began the automobile had made
its appearance and ten years thereafter
it exploded and horse-drawn carriages as
the primary means of transportation and
locomotion disappeared so then entire
industry got wiped out and a brand new
industry called the automobile industry
emerged it had a lot of very fascinating
side effects okay and it is little known
but very interesting to know in 1929
there was this great crash of the stock
exchange
in New York right I mean everybody talks
about it as a great crash and so on one
of the interesting reasons for that was
the advent of the automobile you know
why because as the automobile emerged
and horses were no longer required large
hundreds and thousands of acres of
agricultural land that was used to
create feedstock for the horses were no
longer required so which means that all
the farmers who were dependent on that
suddenly lost incomes they had borrowed
heavily from local mortgage banks snv's
right savings in bank those bought they
borrowed heavily to run these businesses
of theirs and you find therefore that
they went into bankruptcy
the folks who lent to them also you know
faced the problem essentially became a
chain reaction
net result that the stock market
collapse and that is one of the
predominant results for the stock market
to experience that massive dip that it
did and therefore what happened so you
destroyed an entire way of life you
destroyed a lot of wealth in the stock
market a lot of people lost their lives
voluntarily and involuntarily a brand
new industry emerged which is the
automobile industry leading to
unprecedented job creation highly
skilled technologies being deployed
etcetera etcetera right so that is what
the process of all of this change
actually entails and we see this you
know the cyclical formation of new
factors of productivity needing to new
kinds of jobs new kinds of skills it's
an ongoing and ever lasting kind of a
phenomenon now let's get to economics
and this will be kind of the core area
that I will focus on to economists have
had the greatest influence in the world
John Maynard Keynes you may have heard
of John Maynard Keynes
and Joseph Schumpeter Schumpeter is less
well known less celebrated because you
know he favors destruction as a primary
mode of economic wealth creation and
absolute classic ideas of
entrepreneurship of innovation of
destruction to create about competition
about the nature of economic forces and
factors of production all come from this
map an unbelievably great guy came out
of what's the very famous Austrian
School of Economics okay and you know a
lot of people emerge from there from the
Austrian school most famously perhaps in
a management school you may have heard
of Peter Drucker
you heard of Peter Drucker the
management guru right Peter Drucker's
guru was this guy in fact for a time
both of them were colleagues at Harvard
and so on and he is an Austrian
immigrant who came now just the idea
that he proposed was so foundational to
the idea of competition policy was
basically this that competition is
inherently destructive innovation is the
source of competition so you don't
compete based on a licensing Raj that
you impose you don't compete based upon
access to asymmetric information you
don't do any of that if you assume that
the market is free you have to compete
on the basis of innovation right an
innovation could be in technology it
could be in business models it could be
in the way you you arrange your supply
chain the way you go after customers it
can be anything in other words without
being innovative you have no reason to
exist that was the amazing insight that
Joseph Schumpeter put out and that's a
foundational thing that you will see
today in the world that we live in as
more and more digitalization and
technology permeates every part of our
lives
this idea is core to every single thing
that we see and do today
all right and this point and now you
look at the area of the impact the
impact it has had on business this is
the famous s-curves
of Technology okay some of you may be
familiar with this every single industry
goes through these s curves meaning at
the time somebody comes up with
something new it's kind of very early it
is Nessun you're making some money
nobody cares much about it then you have
a massive acceleration and you go
through the roof so to speak with
phenomenal hyper normal growth you're
making a lot of money because of that
competition comes in you plateau out and
then everybody kind of hangs around
doing nothing
because the market has matured until the
new person comes along and creates
another ESCO right so if you think about
it in every single industry every single
industry that you have thought about you
find new entrants disrupting the way an
existing status quo has been run and
managed right most commonly particularly
and this is the city in India and among
the few in the world that is home to a
lot of these disruptors just
fundamentally altering the way in which
you do things okay and whether it is in
agriculture whether it is in building
materials whether it is in food whether
it is in the way you shop and you by the
way in which you know you deliver every
single area is open for disruption and
the key to that is innovating and you
choose the element that determines what
your innovation vector will ride on okay
and that is absolutely for the other
words it trusts the human
entrepreneurial spirit in mind to come
up with solutions and it is very
important that that be encouraged which
is a an idea that is largely an anathema
in our country where we are taught
to follow we are told what to think and
there is a rigor and a rigidity to the
way things get done so on the other hand
if you free up all of this and you allow
people to rise come up with their own
solutions to their own problems within
their own bounded spaces you find that
there is a lot more organic way in which
problems get addressed and the
sustainability of all of that is quite
phenomenal ok so it's a width excuse me
is a very important idea to the nurture
particularly in our country now if you
look at it and let's say America right
which is kind of the epitome of
innovation and all of that this is
something that everyone deeply believes
it that I need to be innovative I need
to be entrepreneurial I need to go out
and challenge status quo I need to make
things happen I take responsibility for
making that happen ok and it's a very
deeply socio-cultural kind of an issue
it's also a function of the system and
the structures within which we operate
right but there's no reason not to
challenge any of the established or the
dominant narrative structures that we
all operated
cannibalization right you know Steve
Jobs who I think we all can agree was is
a very well-known disrupter and a
innovative entrepreneur right if you
don't cannibalize yourself somebody else
will what does it mean
it means that we need to be able to very
quickly not keep resting on our success
but be able to destroy what we have
created and come up with something new
and run with something new entirely look
at the evolution of the phones right I
mean the cameras right from the top left
look at the nature of the phones that
everyone and all of this is the classic
example of what you see in a Steve Jobs
type of environment okay I've been told
the time is up and you know this whole
cycle is an infinite loop incidentally
if you go to Cupertino right in which is
the Apple headquarters the road in front
of the main building is called infinite
loop okay and this is what life is all
about you destroy you create you
regenerate rejuvenate write all of that
and that is what this whole mantra is
always is for all of us to think about
so don't be afraid of destroying
anything make sure you go out there
create right because whatever you create
will be better than what has been in
existence right the so-called new
normals and so on all right thank you
all very much
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