KPMG: Removing racial barriers to success: enabling career opportunities for refugees

I think the most critical stage for me when I reflect on it is the first sort of proper job I had was working in a law firm. working with HM Customs and Excise, as they were called then. And I found the job interesting for a while. And then I got a job with Ernst& Young. It was radically different in terms of doing broadly the same thing, but at a much faster pace, much more demanding, and apparent huge opportunities ahead. Yeah. I think that was probably the critical turning point for me because it just opened up a huge new opportunity, which was probably the start of my professional career in the UK.

And if you think of today, we think of these huge firms, KPMG employing over 200,000 people. You know, you're doing some serious work with some incredible firms around the world. Your own energy, very positive, very upbeat. I'm just wondering what drives you, what gets you out of bed in the morning?

I think it's changed over the years. Initially, it was really about getting a good job, getting interested in the work. What I do, I find it really interesting. The big job for me is the intellectual stimulation I get being able to solve problems. But as I've become more experienced, I find that something else gets me excited, and that is trying to help others be successful. And the more you can create opportunities for others, the more you can create— Opportunity. The more you can show people different ways of doing things, the more fulfilled I feel. So yes, it's a number of things.

And it's that last bit that I really wanted to explore a bit with you today about getting the best from everybody. Something you have been very personally involved in, particularly through Business in the Community, is the Race at Work Charter and making sure that everybody feels welcome, is welcomed, and can thrive. Why were you drawn to that? And Give us a sense of that journey.

I think in society, you will always have differences, whether it is gender, race, religion, culture. And the real challenge for the business community, and whether it's a large business or small business, is to harness the best you can get from everyone. And if we can truly unleash potential of our employees, and perhaps even people who aren't our employees yet, then you really have the potential to be great. I think that there's a skills shortage. And I think that to really maximise potential for business, we should actually maximise the opportunities for everyone in the business.

So I want to come through to some of the positives and the practical steps we can take. I'm going to start on a slightly more challenging note, which is around this Race at Work Charter, a survey was commissioned, over 24,000 people in the survey, and over 95% of ethnic minorities reported that they had witnessed or experienced racial harassment. And there it's saying often what they're describing as accidental or unwitting, or bullying from managers. That is a cause for concern. Just take us into that a bit. What sort of thing are we talking about there, particularly on the unwitting side?

I think that, first of all, when I saw that statistic, I was pretty surprised, really, really shocked by that. But when you engage with it a bit more and you speak to people across different sectors, across different professions, you start to get an understanding of how that could arise. And sometimes it's blatant, which is wholly unacceptable. In fact, very shocking that that still happens in this day and age. And that would be by use of terms which are derogatory, inappropriate, et cetera. But you also have the unwitting aspects where you indirectly harass people by using terms which subtly suggest that they can't do stuff.

Well, one thing that Business in the Community and the Race at Work Charter has done, which I think is incredibly helpful, is just to identify some very specific things which an organisation of any size in any sector can be doing. One that drew my eye, Richard, was take action that supports ethnic minority career progression? I wonder if we could just talk about that, how it looks in practice.

Yeah, I think that's a very good one and one I'm really passionate about. I think that the easiest way of making a difference is getting, first of all, sponsorship from the leadership in the business. If there's no sponsorship from leadership, in general, you can have some nice policies that say something on the intranet in some document, but in practice, you don't really move the dial in any significant way. So sponsorship from the board, from leadership is important, but actually not just sponsorship in terms of saying the right thing, but actually being active with it and doing something about it. And when I say doing something about it, I think it is quite good. And this is one of the things that came out of the Race@Work charter is having targets. Where you have targets, one of the things that does is it suddenly means the board is accountable for doing something specific. And it becomes even more compelling where those targets are published. If it's published, I definitely do.

And you don't just mean internally, you mean externally as well. Externally.

Absolutely.

So here we have again another recommendation, assurance, capture ethnicity data and publicise process. And of course, for some firms, this is a risky business because in the early stages they may be a little ashamed of what they have to share.

And I actually get the point about being ashamed of your current data. But I think most success is achieved by recognising that we're not where we should be. And therefore, we're on a journey. And I think that journey simply means that if your ratio is very bad and you set a strategy to improve over the next 2, 3 years, what you should be measuring is how much progression are you making.

Right. And on that first point you've made about appointing an executive sponsor for race, simple question, how important that that executive sponsor is from a Black or ethnic minority?

I don't think the person has to be from a Black or ethnic minority background. And the reason for that is that in a larger organization, you will have a variety of different people. And of course, the Black and ethnic minorities will be a small proportion of that. What I think is more important is having the person with the power and the ability to drive change.

Right.

And in general, that may not be a BAME individual, broadly speaking. So I think it's much more important to have somebody who is passionate and has the ability to drive change.

Right. And if we just think in practical terms about this process of sponsoring and championing individuals, this taking action to support this career progression, what are some real examples that you've either used or seen that really bring that about?

So there are a number of things that can be done. I think if you look at it, we look at it with 3 lenses. You look at the recruitment piece, you look at the retention/progression, and you look at leadership. So let me deal with leadership as an example. So using a leadership lens, the challenge really is that we have a very, very, very low showing of BAME individuals at senior levels in most businesses. What can you do to try and improve that over a period of time? Some of the approaches and strategies we've adopted is identifying what is it that you need a leader to do? What sort of skills are we looking for? We're not saying you just promote people for the sake of promoting them. You develop a strategy to say, okay, these are the skills we look for. And you look through and say, who are the people potentially in line over the next 3 years to get to that level? on the assumption they were given the right sort of experience. And it may be 3, it may be 5 years, it may be more. It may mean you need to go outside your business to look for the right sort of talent. But critically, when you get them into your business, you need to start giving them exposure to things and experiences that will put them in a position to be effective in those leadership roles. So in a business like mine, for instance, the sort of experience you want is experience working with large clients, experience working with complex clients, experience dealing with challenging issues, experience working with senior stakeholders in the business. All of those sort of experiences will help drive the career development of an individual. And it will differ from business to business, clearly.

And so it sounds a bit like talent spotting, being proactive about giving people breaks, I guess, in a sense, where they might not be as forthcoming in the first instance themselves. I mean—

That's absolutely right. It is about And that's why the other part of this is having sponsors. So very often you have BAME people working in an organization. They don't really have a sense of, is it realistic to expect to progress? Nobody really talks to them about how to progress. But if you've got a sponsor, one of the roles of a sponsor could be around spotting opportunities for you, helping you to think through a strategy for your own career development, and spotting how that could fit in. with your organisation.

Excellent. Super helpful. And I've got so many more questions for you on that. Someone I know will also be interested in this. Mursal, welcome to The Lens. It's great to get you on the podcast. I want to hear about your brilliant business, Chatterbox. I also want to go back to your roots as well. Where did life begin for you?

Life began in Kabul, Afghanistan. My family were an emerging middle-class family there. This is around the time that the Russians had sort of in some ways improved and other ways damaged the country. But my parents were educated under this regime, and they succeeded. They worked incredibly hard and became a civil engineer and a maths professor. So, you know, working by candlelight, putting the hours and the sweat in, they got to where they wanted to be in their 30s and had myself and my older sister. And unfortunately, as happens with, you know, All displaced people, something completely out of their control forced them to leave everything behind. My mum had a choice of staying and trying to maintain her international career as a successful civil engineer or to give her 2 daughters a chance at a future, and she chose us, which I'm very grateful for, obviously. Unfortunately for her, this meant that when we came to the UK, she had basically abandoned her professional identity. She didn't know at the time, but it quickly became apparent that people didn't believe her experience. her qualifications. Even if she had the certificates and managed to, to get her diploma from the university before Kabul University shut down, she wouldn't have— it wouldn't have counted for anything here in the UK.

And what age were you at this point?

I was 4 when I arrived here, yeah.

And so just to put a frame on that, at that point you were a family of refugees?

So at the time that we arrived in the UK, we were a family of refugees in Camden Town, one of many probably, in the early '90s. So I grew up very conscious of how lack of opportunity can severely damage and dampen the energy of an entire community. You know, being in the industry that I'm in now, helping the refugee community, once, you know, a civil engineer comes to a place like London and looks around at her community and sees that the surgeons are now working as cleaners and the former academics are unemployed, it does force you to lower your aspirations and to, you know, accept what you think you've been given, the hand that life has dealt you. Mursal,

And yet you have created something which gives people the ability to thrive. Tell us about Chatterbox. I think everyone should know about what you're doing. How did it start? What is it?

Chatterbox wants to be the first opportunity back into skilled work for highly skilled refugee labour. There's currently a chronic shortage of opportunities for even the most highly skilled and highly educated people who become displaced here in the UK and in fact, all over the world. And so what we want to do is to create really accessible work pathways for them to create value within our company, and then hopefully to move on to even better work if they want to.

And in that sense, it sounds a bit like you're representing them, helping them onto a multitude of opportunities. But what are they actually doing when they start engaging with Chatterbox? What's the service there, or what are they offering?

Well, 1,000 successful unicorn companies could be built off the back of refugee labour. Like, let's get that straight. The one that we've created is one that deeply inspires me, as someone who's worked in education for a long time, we are using the skills and talents in the refugee community, specifically their language skills at the moment, to educate professionals. So on our platform right now, we teach languages like Spanish, Mandarin, French, Arabic to professionals in places like WeWork and hopefully one day KPMG. And what they're doing is educating these professionals in the languages of the future. And in doing so, also able to transfer their prior professional backgrounds into the learning. So on our platform, we have, for example, engineers teaching other engineers Arabic, and we have medical doctors teaching aid workers French.

So you're matching them up to teach the language that, of course, is native to them to a professional. And the professional at the moment is in the UK?

The professional at the moment is all over the world. So we have students, you know, in Australia, the States, across Europe, and in the UK.

And how is the exchange taking place? Face-to-face? Online?

So we've built a platform that facilitates these connections. The scheduling takes place there, the video and the chat takes place there, and soon we'll have the world's first matching algorithm partnering language learners with the ideal language tutor.

Brilliant. I was going to say, what have you learnt about what makes for a good pairing to bring out the best in both of them? Any lessons you've learnt?

Well, definitely professional backgrounds. I mean, from a business perspective, what Chatterbox does is The value we create is through talent arbitrage. We found a really undervalued source of labor, and we're correctly valuing it and selling it in the marketplace for language learning. And so, because these people are so highly underemployed, we're able to produce an invaluable service for professionals looking to learn languages that taps in— that feeds them not just language skills, but also industry insights, market knowledge through someone who has direct experience in their industries. So it was this revelation that people were coming to the platform and self-selecting people from their professional backgrounds or from their interest areas, that we thought this is something that we could formalise in an algorithm that in the future, hopefully with data, could be self-improving.

Got it. So tell us a story, an example of someone that you're proud to have engaged with so far. Sometimes, you know, it brings it to life a little bit. Give us an example.

Oh gosh, so many. I mean, a really recent one is Wajid. from Wales. Shout out, Wajid. I'm joking. So she came to the UK from Syria. She was a schoolteacher. And we stepped into her career path really early on, at the time when she first became a refugee, which is very different for some of the other people we're working with. You know, we have people like Zahra, who was a lawyer in Iran and has been unemployed in the UK for 10 years. So we really stepped in early. And this was a chance for us to show what difference there could be with Chatterbox. existing in the journeys of the lives of refugees. And so, Wajud had only been here for a few months, still had her certificates, her teaching certificates. Her husband's a huge supporter of her getting back into work. She's the educated, successful one. And so, she wrote to us saying she wants to teach, sent us her teaching certificates, which were not necessary because we take the radical approach of believing people when they say that they can do stuff and letting them demonstrate what they can do. So, she started working on our platform 2 years ago when I first set it up. And since then, she's taught hundreds of students and thousands of pounds on the platform. But most, you know, really proud moment came last month when she asked for a reference from Chatterbox to a teacher training program from the UK government because she was taking the step to get back into teaching because she'd been so inspired by being connected to students and being believed really about her potential and her worth as a professional. And so writing that reference was definitely you know, a circle complete for me.

Brilliant. And you mentioned about refugees playing a role in just huge value creation. And I suppose a part of that is on the basis that all individuals have talent. I wanted to ask more specifically, have you noticed, or do you believe there's something specific about this community which gives them certain different ways of seeing things, certain advantages, if you like? What do you notice?

I mean, I tend to shy away from brushing brushing communities with characteristics because they're just so diverse. I think people tend to say that refugees or migrants are more entrepreneurial, that they're hardworking and all that kind of stuff. And I just think actually there are plenty of lazy and non-entrepreneurial refugees and migrants as well, just like everyone else. We are people just like everyone else.

So it's unhelpful?

I mean, if you can show me statistics, they might bear these things out. For sure, refugees have a higher propensity to take on entrepreneurship compared to other careers. But I think what the data doesn't show is the fact that other career opportunities are blocked from them. So, when you can't do anything else, what do you do? Start something for yourself. But, I mean, there's data from the US which shows that refugees are highly overrepresented in entrepreneurship, that they create millions of jobs across America every year. So, clearly, entrepreneurship is something that the community has accessible to them and is thriving in.

Absolutely. Something else I know is close to your heart, I wanted to quiz you about. We've heard about IQ and EQ, emotional intelligence. CQ, until I'd read some of your recent thinking, was not something I was up to speed on. CQ, tell us a bit more.

So I recently wrote a piece that's been published on Forbes about the importance of cultural intelligence in the workplace today. I think listening to Richard and hearing some of his points about how workplaces have struggled to include people who they perceive as outsiders, you know, either racially or because of their gender. And I think this can be just traced back to a lack of intelligence to adapting to people from a different background to yourself. So cultural intelligence can be defined as an ability to really integrate and to build connections and work well with people who come from cultures different to yours. A different culture can be a different racial culture, it could be a different different societal culture. You know, someone from a middle-class background might struggle to connect with someone from the nobility or whatever. So cultures can be very different in different ways. But one really interesting finding in studies of CQ have been that people who tend to be outsiders actually tend to have the highest cultural intelligence. So refugees, migrants, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who are forced into workplaces or cultures that are different they tend to do better because they're so used to having to observe, make an effort to adapt. And it's these things that really shape whether someone is culturally intelligent or not.

And as you describe it, it strikes me that we have a responsibility to be more culturally intelligent. So, how would you— how can it be improved?

Well, first and foremost, I don't think it's just a responsibility. I think today, if your organisation is not culturally intelligent, you're not going to attract the best talent because workplaces are so diverse and globalized today that if you're turning off the best talent because they're from a slightly different culture to the one you're used to, you're just going to be at a disadvantage. So that's at best. At worst, you're going to end up with a scandal. I mean, just look at some of the airlines. Just look at some of these big companies like Dolce Gabbana in China or Burger King in New Zealand. And a lot of the really silly mistakes that they've made in communications result from a lack of diversity or cultural intelligence.

Right. And the gaffe we see is actually the tip of the iceberg, right?

Exactly. It comes from a chronic lack of cultural curiosity. and cultural intelligence. So, this is— I don't think this is a responsibility or something, a do-good activity. It's like, if you're not doing it, well, more fool you. And the way that you can develop it— so, I'm totally against these one-off workshops or these one-off, you know, awareness days about race or about gender or other things, because I think that what they tend to do is to other. Mmhmm. People from different cultures or different groupings in societies. What I'm for is things that continuously and repetitiously bring to the fore or bring people together who might be different. And so obviously coming from being a language learning company, I think language learning is a great way to do that. You're constantly coming into contact with a different culture. If you're learning from a tutor, you're coming into contact with another person from a different culture, not just learning about it. You're developing curiosity about it. You're putting these skills into practice in every lesson. So I think language learning is a great way to develop CQ.

It also strikes me it could be such a bonding experience. And again, a segue to so many other activities. Richard, what do you make of our conversation here? Any questions striking you as well for Mursal?

I think it's fascinating. It's very challenging, I imagine, to try and create opportunities for these refugees. I think it's a fantastic thing you're doing. Being— well, I'm not a refugee, but I've come from a different culture, and therefore I can and empathize, and I understand the experiences. I just wondered, one of the challenges I think that refugees must face, and I think you've alluded to it, is that if you've got qualifications, if you've got professional experience abroad, it's quite difficult to— for it to be recognized in the UK and to get a job, even if it is in a sort of a quasi-role rather than a formal role. Have you guys got experience of trying to help people get into new professions or into things their previous profession when they were in their home countries?

So I could talk a bit more about what we call skill surfacing that happens on the platform, on our platform, on the backend. First, to point out that this situation where people's qualifications become a bit useless isn't reserved to refugees. I think automation is going to make this impact communities we never expected, like doctors are going to lose their jobs to, you know, great apps and And we're predicting that accountants, you know, in the next few decades— maybe a touchy subject, sorry about that.

Rich is giving a nervous smile at this point.

I mean, I'm just going by the research, but, you know, automation is going to have this impact. And what we're finding is it's more about the soft skills and the hard— I guess, the skills to learn, the skills to communicate that are going to be more transferable between different jobs as our working lives become more fluid. across different careers in our lifetimes. And so, at Chatterbox, we've picked up on this need that is actually very concentrated in the refugee community because they directly see, you know, the loss of their qualifications and recognition, you know, instantly. Whereas for other industries, I guess it'll take time to see the impacts of automation. And so, what we're doing is teaching— You know, there's that There's that slogan from government teaching programs that's, if you can, teach. The idea is that on the Chatterbox platform, if you can do something, you can teach it. So it starts with language learning because that's a really easily validatable skill. And so they start teaching their languages on the platform, and we're matching them with people who come from their professional backgrounds. And through the review and feedback system, we can ask other professionals to validate these— the teachers' prior professional backgrounds. And over time, if the data is showing that this teacher is, you know, an expert in education in West Africa, we can put that on our platform and make them an expert in that area for other people to consult with, or to do expert translations with, or to do a series of other kinds of expert work with. And so, on the back end of the Chatterbox platform, with every lesson taught, we're building a digital CV of the microskills or the microknowledge that our tutors possess. And this can easily transfer from the refugee community to helping people impacted by AI and automation and so on.

And what's your vision for Chatterbox over the next 5 to 10 years?

Um, right, well, let me get my pitch voice on. So, um, well, it— we're focusing in the next 18 months, we want to be the best language learning product on the market for professionals. Um, we're doing a very innovative thing in pairing people based on their prior professional backgrounds, something that you could only do because our tutors are from the refugee community. So it's not like like anybody can, can copy, uh, that, that aspect of our teaching. And we want to develop courses, like I said, in Spanish, Mandarin, French, Arabic, and many other courses. We, we see our growth being amongst businesses and with professionals. So we've— we're in the early stages of securing pilots with some really, really exciting global companies to acquire our services as a corporate benefit for their employees. And so we see ourselves in 18 months, like, making people like Rosetta Stone a bit scared about what we're accomplishing, hopefully. But beyond that, we want to expand into other areas of teaching. So we want to tap into the other domains of expertise of our tutors to deliver consultancy and services that tap into their other skills.

A question for you, Richard, as Mursal was speaking about cultural intelligence, you know, a clear line anti the one-off workshop. What's your take on this?

I think that workshops have their place. I think that it is important to have allies to whatever segment or minority sector you're dealing with, because you very often can't effect change on your own. And therefore, I agree with Mursal that just doing stuff on your own doesn't really take you very far. I think it's important to reach out. And to reach out, I think the cultural awareness is really important. And I agree that in general, immigrants tend to have a higher level of cultural awareness, curiosity, because they have to.

They have to, exactly. I mean, so in the article I wrote, at the end, there's like 3-step suggestions for testing and then improving your CQ. And there's a quiz that people can do to test their own CQ. And what's really interesting is one of the questions on there is how often are you in a minority. And so few people can say that they ever are. You know, I think the UK is like, you know, majority monoethnic. And so how often are part of the majority ethnic or grouping in, in KPMG forced to be a minority and to have to adapt or, or die, basically? And what I'm saying is what we need to do is to create more opportunities for people to feel like a minority, because that's when You know, you adapt or you fail.

Your point has broader relevance also. Because from a business perspective, Brexit or no Brexit, the reality is that for us to be successful and really maximise opportunities, we need to reach out to people not just in the UK, but globally. So to do that, you need to be reasonably understanding, aware of different cultures, to be very effective in international trade, international business. So yes, the cultural awareness is critical.

So interesting you say that, because measured 10 years ago, you know, the UK has £48 billion in missed trading opportunities because of a lack of language and cultural skills in the workforce. That was 10 years ago, pre-Brexit discussions. So today, that's going to be huge.

Right. Very interesting food for thought. Richard, a few just very quickfire questions on this. You talked about the importance of measuring Data, publicizing progress, setting goals. Somebody listening says, I get it, we are doing this, we are measuring it. We simply haven't got a diverse enough group of people applying to our organization in the first place, often probably heard by you as an excuse. Practical tips to change that, to move the needle?

I think the approach is that if what you're doing currently isn't yielding you the results, then you need a completely different pair of eyes to look at it. And to adopt a different approach. Certainly, we have had experience of doing this where we weren't meeting certain targets. We looked at it differently. We got different— we adopted different ways of recruiting. We also recruited in different pools of talent. I think the pools of talent are really, really important.

Again, I'm sensing proactivity there. Yeah,

absolutely. It is all about proactivity. It is all about not doing the same thing you've done for the last 20 years where you haven't had much success. So it is about proactivity. It is about fishing in different talent pools than you have previously. If you've gone to certain universities, perhaps you want to extend it beyond those universities that you've looked at before. If you've gone to certain types of businesses, perhaps again, you want to extend beyond there. just go into different pools of talent. And we've seen a lot of success with that approach. So I think a bit of proactivity, a bit of imagination, a bit of out-of-the-box thinking will get you there.

And part of your work, Mursal, makes me wonder if large firms will need to help their own teams reinvent themselves in the same way that you are helping so many. I do wonder whether that will extend, because in a sense, Richard, you too have reinvented yourself on at least one occasion. Is there a Is there a link there to your point about skills? Richard, are you scared for your job? I mean, is the third reinvention coming? I mean, it's a serious question, right?

I'm not scared for my job at all because what I do is pretty specialist, pretty niche. It requires a lot of judgment. I think that the received wisdom is that automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence will sweep away a lot of jobs. But the reality is we shouldn't be afraid of that because it will create new types of jobs. We saw that with industrialization. We're seeing that even in my area where we're bringing AI into some of the technology in the tax world. The reality with it is that what it will mean is that certain jobs will be lost, but new jobs will be created, new challenges will open up. And therefore businesses just need to be in a position, and employees need to be in a position to reskill, upskill themselves.

Indeed, the only change will be the pace of change. So it's more that I think, you know, new industries will be created at a much faster pace. So it's developing skills that help you navigate these changes, and the ability to navigate across different cultures into different workplaces and different workplace cultures is going to become much more important as well, to tie back to the theme.

Mursal, just very briefly, you have chosen an entrepreneurial path. Was there ever a parallel universe in which you found yourself within a very large firm? You know, you could have done anything.

You know, in 10 years' time, once Chatterbox has floated on the stock exchange—

The London Stock Exchange.

London Stock Exchange, of course. I'm very interested in doing the opposite of what I've done so far. So everything that we do at Chatterbox, from our team culture to our style of management to the decision-making processes, are just came out of my own head. And some of them are great, some of them are not so great. But it would be wonderful to be part of a big organisation at some point in my life and actually learn, you know, what the collective wisdom of many people across generations have created and to learn best practices like that. But I'm talking like 10, 20 years into the future.

Okay, we're going to hear what these things come around quickly. I have some very quickfire questions because we have learned a lot about your organisations. But also, I'd love to ask you very personally, someone you'd love to have a coffee with, someone that inspires you, you'd love to meet them face to face. So Richard, who would you meet?

Living person?

Yeah.

I would find it really interesting to meet somebody who probably will surprise you. Angela Merkel.

Yes.

Wow. Why?

I'd be really interested to meet her because of what she's achieved. First woman chancellor, comes from— grew up in Eastern Germany. become the Chancellor of Germany, given all of the politics and the differences between East and West Germany. Right. Brought a million migrants into Germany. That must have taken a huge amount of courage.

Yes. And in the face of real opposition. A lot of opposition. Right. Well, she'll soon have a bit more time on her hands. Possibly. I would be very interested to see her next chapter as well. Mursal, who will you sit down with?

I'd be really interested to speak with Reid Hoffman. So a fellow entrepreneur. I think he wrote a really interesting piece on HBR, or co-authored a piece recently, touching on some of the subjects we just talked about, about the relationship between humans and technology, but specifically in learning. And our thesis at Chatterbox around learning is that learning's become too automated, that we rely too much on videos and text to convey information and to teach, whereas the human component can't be erased. Because if you erase that, you erase the engagement. Yeah. You erase the personalization. And so he wrote a really interesting piece about that, and I'd love to talk about what we're So

this is serial entrepreneur, founder of LinkedIn, multibillionaire investor, Greylock Partners, Reid Hoffman. Right. Well, we'll see if we can make it happen. Putting it out there to you, Reid, if you're listening. Masters of Scale, great podcast, by the way. If you'd like to return the favour. Quick plug. Thank you. Okay. Any book you will recommend? What's on your bookshelf? What deserves a wider audience? Doesn't have to be a business book. Richard?

Yeah, not a business book. It's a book about Mandela. I find Mandela fascinating. Somebody who's gone through the fight, through the years in prison in Robben Island, through the difficulties of coming through, and yet still having such an open heart, such a genuine person, so forgiving. I find that amazing.

And so, is that— is it just in general books, or is there a particular book that— Long Walk to Freedom. Long Walk to Freedom. Great. They're his own. Yeah, absolutely. And Mursal, what's on your bookshelf?

Um, so it's the last book I managed to complete. Unfortunately, the number of books I've read since starting Chatterbox are, you know, a tiny fraction of the number I used to read. And the one that I, I was really excited to read that came out recently was Arundhati Roy's book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. This is a 10-year follow-up from her first book, The God of Small Things, which I wrote one of my first book reports on. Um, so it was— I think she writes incredibly well, using, you know, fantasy and fiction to convey really meaningful political points.

Well, we will share links to both of those books, of course. And I'm just going to take you back very briefly for our final couple of minutes together. Richard, you've— you're in Nigeria, you've newly qualified as a barrister. A word of advice to your former self, knowing now what you know?

Yeah, I think a word of advice would Confidence, confidence, confidence. I think that you could do so much more if you have confidence in yourself, confidence in your ability. And I recognize that it's hard to build confidence. And part of building confidence is about getting feedback. Put yourself in situations where you can get independent assessment of yourself, of your of your ability, and will strengthen your confidence.

Right. So somebody listening to this, regardless of their own confidence, will know somebody who is lacking in confidence. What's a kind, helpful, practical thing that somebody, any of us, can do to boost or increase the confidence of others?

I think it is not just praising people, but being clear about why. you're praising people. So giving a comment to say, I think this bit you've done is really good, either because there's clarity of communication or there's good insight. So praise plus detailed insights.

Excellent. On my mind a lot at the moment as a dad, actually. That's specific. No, seriously, the specific identification of the— right, confidence, confidence, confidence. Mursal, you can pick a time in your life that we'll go back to. Yeah. But what would you

Oh gosh, like, I would have echoed something about trusting your gut and confidence, but more practically, I would have gone back to my first-year university self and said, don't drop maths. Because I started off university studying maths and economics, and I think I was really— you know, this is the 2009-10 start of the financial crisis, and it was a really interesting time to read economics. And so I dropped the maths in second and third year, but, you know, it would have come in really handy. And I think if I could have been one more woman in STEM for my degree, that would have been a great point to make in many of the events I go to today.

There you go. So don't drop maths. There you go. Well, look, it all added up in the end. And we will follow the Chatterbox journey with very keen interest. And I hope it won't be the last time you two cross paths as well.

It'd be lovely to catch up again.

Yeah. So it's been a pleasure having you as my guests on The Lens today. So what I wanted to say is firstly, Mursal Hedayat, Richard de Forenza, thank you very Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ollie.

Great having a chat with you.

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