Dr. Ravi Gundlapalli explains why mentoring and sharing wisdom across generations matters for both people and organizations. He focuses on how experiential knowledge gets passed down and shapes human development.
Chapters
It is, it is how, you know, in my view, humans have thrived. In fact, if, because this mentoring is a transfer of wisdom from one human to another. You know, when I studied civilizations, when I studied our human evolution, you know, civilizations have survived and existed is because one generation transfers their body of knowledge to the next generation, and the next generation essentially builds on it. If every person kept whatever their experience was to themselves, we wouldn't be here, Right? Even if you go back to the early days of human evolution, when somebody went hunting, they shared that, hey, here is where you can find more prey and here is where you should not go. So this sharing of your experience is such a core human trait. If you like a movie, you tell 20 people. If you went to a nice park, you tell other people. So sharing something that you have experienced is such a core human trait. Now, if you extract that and really implement in sharing of knowledge and wisdom, that is how families thrive, communities thrive, civilizations thrive. And I have seen when that human to human transfer of wisdom is broken, lot of civilizations have ended up in what I call, you know, in museums. Many civilizations ended up in museums. But when you look at the civilization where I come from that I have experience with the Indian civilization, there is that what is called Guru Sishya Parampara, as I say, the teacher, disciple. That relationship is so strong, it's inherent in this in. So even though libraries have been destroyed or, you know, they have been archived, the human wisdom still remains fresh. So I said that is if you, if you look into that, it can be incredibly valuable for an organization because you're talking about human wisdom that is experiential, that is really hard to document on a piece of paper, right? I've never written a book on how to do a PhD, but it's in my head. Your SVP of sales could know exactly how to run a sales campaign and how to create higher closing ratios or how to innovate. If you are a chief innovation officer, all that experiential wisdom needs to be shared. And that's why mentoring as a mechanism for human wisdom is so fundamental to an organization, because you don't want your people to reinvent the wheel.
If the answer exists in a company, it should be instantly available to somebody.
