Dr. Ravi Gundlapalli argues that intentional, agenda-driven conversations transfer wisdom and spur creativity, especially as large retirements and incoming millennials reshape workforces. MentorCloud Spark matches people within organizations to have these conversations, aiming to facilitate 100 million of them.
If you look at how wisdom gets transferred between people, it can happen in one of two ways. It can happen in a classroom setting, or it can happen during conversations between two people. If you look at conversations in particular.
I always look at them as two types of conversations. Incidental conversations versus intentional conversations. By incidental, I mean individuals in a meeting, in the cafeteria, or in the hallway or near the water cooler. It's great to say hello to each other and it builds camaraderie among your people. Let's look at the intentional conversations where the individuals are coming to the table or to the conference room with a specific agenda, with a specific desire to share and learn. Intentional conversations is where something positive can happen. And most of these conversations happen in companies in the context of a project or a customer issue or a specific business problem. And I have seen these conversations happen throughout my career. If I look back and reflect on the conversations that I found to be most insightful and exciting, they happen to be with people that I don't work with on a regular basis or with people that I have met quite serendipitously. Because when such conversations happen, there is an element of discovery, there is an element of unknown, and there is an element of creativity, because two individuals are speaking not in the context of a specific project, but they are kind of discovering as they go along. Why are intentional conversations important now? We are living in a very interesting time. We are going through a demographic shift where millions of highly experienced workers are going to retire over the next several years. We also have millions of millennials entering the workforce. And across industries there is a renewed focus on increasing diversity. So it's extremely important to ensure that there are good conversations happening between people that have the experience and a strong understanding of your company's culture and the people who are just getting started in your organization. Intentional conversations have another advantage. They help you tap into the experience that already exists in your organization. Mentor Cloud Spark helps organizations to facilitate intentional conversations among their employees. And we are seeing in companies that the employees are finding the conversations that have been structured with a clear agenda and a clear intention. They're finding them extremely insightful and extremely valuable. They're finding that new opportunities are opening up for them and new insights are being shared in such conversations. Because of our intelligent matching engine, we are now able to connect people that otherwise would not have the opportunity to have a good conversation. Leading organizations around the world are using Mentor Cloud Spark to address a variety of business challenges. Most important is employee engagement. They're also using Menta Cloud Spark to accelerate competencies of its employees to spur innovation as well as to identify new talent. Because conversations allow executives to truly understand who the employees are and what they really care about and what their key skills and interests are, across our client base, we are finding more and more executives are coming forward and to make themselves available because they want to be known across the organization and they also want to be accessible to the rest of the workforce. At Mentor Cloud, our vision is to facilitate 100 million insightful and intentional conversations by 20.
