Welcome to another episode of The Brand Called You. A vodcast and podcast show that brings you leadership lessons, knowledge, experience and wisdom from hundreds of successful individuals from around the world. I'm your host, Ashutosh Garg and today I'm delighted to welcome a very, very successful entrepreneur, a fellow YPO member from Bulgaria, Mr.
Christo Popov. Christo, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Thank you. Christo is the founder and CEO of Fast track, which is one of the fastest
growing consulting companies in the world. He was earlier with Shell and SABMiller. Interestingly, he has spent one year in India to study Vedanta, Buddhism and Zen. He's had numerous publications, to his credit, and as I just mentioned, he's a fellow member of the YPO. So Christo, let's start talking about Fast Track. Tell me about this venture. Fast Track is a comparatively young company, it's only seven years old. And the success and growth of Fast Track actually is if I have to be honest beyond my expectations. Now we
operate in over 25 Different countries well, but if I have to go back, it's a child that has a number of fathers. And I've been trying to conceptualize in my mind what led to the Fast Track methodology. And there are five or six contribution to this. The first is my life under communism, believe it or not, when I come from a communist country, completely different social and economic system, there was some interesting lessons about human behavior. Part of it, I spent some time in the army in Bulgaria, and in Russia, that was also a fascinating experience. Then I had the privilege to go to some of the best universities in the world. I mean, I had the privilege to interact with people like Michael Porter, Peter Sanghi. And then like, most of us do, we joined the big corporate world,
I was the head of scenario planning in Shell, I spent some time with McKinsey with SABMiller. I was fed up with the corporate world, I left the corporate world. And then we had a number of startups over 25 different companies. Some of them are spectacular failures. We have been through two bankruptcies. Some of them are decent success stories. And then like you said, I spent one year in India, where I was trying to understand Vedanta and Bhagavad Gita, and Zen and Buddhism. And all this put together is actually what gave birth
to Fast track. So when I was analyzing this, I came to some interesting conclusions. And maybe the first one is time, is by far the most important asset. It is true for us as individuals, and it is true for corporations. And at the same time,
I was fascinated how we tend to make everything much more complex than it actually is. You go to a traditional consulting company, they will deliver 200 slides, when you see the slides, I said, God, what the hell is going on. So actually, if you zoom out, the fundamentals are much, much, much simpler. And when we analyzed all this,
we realized that to create a strong business, you need to master two things. The first one is to create energy. And the second one is to build character. And these were the two fundamental blocks of building a business. So we thought, how can we put this together and create a
system to help companies to grow faster? So this is how this idea of Fast Track came about. Okay. And Christo which are the areas that you're consulting? We are industry agnostic. We are company size agnostic. And we are geography agnostic. We are ambition sensitive. We're not targeting companies. We're targeting CEOs and
targeting a very, very small group of CEOs who are absolutely committed to fulfill the maximum of their personal potential. Amazing. So this is what we do. And our analysis showed that there are three activities that guys like this should master. The first one is energy, the ability to create personal and mental energy. Because if you don't have energy, you have nothing. The second one is the ability to act, but actually acting has two separate elements. The first one is to have the intellect to decide what is the right action to take. And the second one is to do it in the best possible way. Okay. And the third element is actually learning.
And what I find fascinating, Ashutosh is when I say learning to people, most of the time, they think about professors and schools and podcasts. And actually, what we ignore is that there are two different types of learning. One is external learning, like we said, from lectures and all this, but there is another source of learning. And when we are born, we're all born with a coach, sitting on our shoulder. This coach never leaves us. It coaches with us for the rest of our lives until we die. And this coach is always right. Whatever this coach tells you, he is absolutely spot on. The only problem with this
coach, he only speaks to you when you act, this coach is real life. So there are two sources of learning. One is yes, go to universities, listen to podcasts, professors, but the other one is, stop, get on the balcony, and observe yourself like a buck. And ask a simple question, What did life teach me? And I can promise you there is very, very profound learning in this. I know, I mean, from your comments, I can almost hear the deep learning and understanding you have over the Bhagavad Gita, you know, which is amazing. But, you know,
you said this is a young business, and it is one of the fastest growing companies in the world. So what have been some of your challenges and your learnings as you've built Fast track? It's interesting, I mean, Fast Track is built around five principles. The first one is 80-20, 20% of everything, we do determinate a percent of the outcome, we call it the ultimate efficiency hack. And in my experience, companies are getting slow not because they are doing things slowly, is because they are not doing the right thing. So the first principle is 80-20. The second one is simplicity. Simplicity is the ability to take out everything that is not necessary to go down to the fundamentals. And I will challenge you, you must 80-20 simplicity, you can't help
but have a better business. The first principle is something that is maybe a little bit more intellectually challenging if we're thinking from the first principle. Okay. Going back to your question, the challenges they come from principle number four, and number five, is, number four is brutal honesty. Okay. Brutal honesty is the ability to speak your mind without the worry how the other person will respond, the ability to speak your mind without trying to be politically correct. And we work with companies in India and in Vietnam, and in Bangladesh and in Saudi Arabia.
And what I have discovered is lack of brutal honesty, the biggest drain of human capital. And you're asking me, what is the challenge? This is one of the biggest challenges. Yes, of course, we have our problem, building a team, building the product, but that's for every business. Yeah. What I find extremely interesting is when we work with companies,
how difficult it is to implement new concepts and change. And because we work with CEOs who 99% extremely smart people, they get the concept. Intellectually, they grasp it, or 20 goes down to implementation, they face the burden of legacy thinking, they face burden of local cultures. Actually changing this is by far the biggest challenge that we're facing. Incredible, incredible. So you know, when I was reading about you and reading about all the things that you have on the internet, I've picked up a few interesting lessons that you speak about. The first one is if you risk nothing, you risk more. You can see only the whole valley from
the edge of the cliff. Help me understand each of these and there are five of them. Help me understand these with some examples. It's a mind game. What is a risk? A risk is a decision with an uncertain outcome. Any decision is something about the future. Anything about the future is with an uncertain outcome. And why I think not taking risk is the biggest risk you can take. I mean, the world is such an absolutely fascinating place.
And if you always live within your comfort zone, you're cutting out 99.999999% of what the world can offer to you. Correct. And I think this is the most severe sentence we can put on ourselves to operate with our own feel of comfort. That's why we believe taking risk is basically making life richer. Well said. And you know, you just spoke about brutal honesty in a leader or an organization, but you also say, the biggest asset for a leader is self confidence, intellectual humility, and ability to listen, learn and change. Love to get your perspective on this.
For me, self confidence is the confidence to know that you can change, that self confidence. And for me, the most beautiful word in the world is the word, yet. I cannot do this, yet. I don't know this, yet. Wow. Okay. One of the biggest science of this humility is asking questions. Actually, questions are more powerful than answers. People make progress because of the questions they ask not because of the answers, they find.
Answers only follow questions. So what is self confidence? Self confidence is the ability to change, the ability to change comes from observing opinions that are different to yours. If I have a fighter view, an intellectual fight. And if I agree with your opinion, people will say, Ashutosh won. The discussion, we think is the other way around. The person who changes his mind leads the discussion about the person So we are constantly striving for this brutal honesty. And if you go to business schools, they teach people how to give feedback. Actually, we teach people how to receive feedback. And we think any feedback is a sign of respect.
I'm not saying to you, listen, this is bad. I'm saying I believe you can do better. And we try to strip the format from the content. It doesn't matter how you talk to me, I'm desperately trying to search for something in what you say that can make me a better person, a better father, a better leader, whatever. And this is extremely difficult. Let me give an example. Yeah. India, big company, run by two brothers, billion dollar company, one brother, they suggesting a marketing campaign. And for any person who can analyze it properly,
the marketing campaign is horrible. But he's the boss. Everybody stays quiet. The presentation is over. Everybody says yes. Yes, yes. Yes. Go ahead. And after the meeting, I go to the younger brother say, What do you think? We're gonna lose millions. Why didn't you tell him? I can't. He's my senior brother. Now, what is happening here? The guy has an idea. He has 10 amazingly smart people in the room. But they couldn't speak up. Why? Because it's culturally
not accepted. What is happening in this room? He's not tapping, intellectual potential these people. So we have challenged ourselves, can we create a system that actually breaks this barrier? Everybody can speak his mind to everybody else. And when I talk to you, I would like to give you the respect and the confidence that you can take whatever you need, and the rest you can. This
is the principle of brutal honesty. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. And you know, what you're saying culturally is so true, not just in India, but large parts of Asia. I often say people down the line don't have the courage, or the ability to say no, you know, I think that's an important factor. But thank you. So, you're asking for challenges. We fail 90% of the time, especially in your part of the world we implement it, but the few companies where we have succeeded.
Communication goes like that, quality of decisions goes like that, number of mistakes go down. One of the ways to prevent a leader from making mistakes is to give him up and it is absolutely critical. Interesting. So moving on. You also say that the ultimate measure of man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy. Are you talking of internal resilience or something else? We only grow when we experience difficult period. When you're in your comfort zone, you don't grow.
If you go to the gym and always do the same thing, you don't grow. If you always read the same book, you don't grow mentally. So when you experience challenges is the moment of truth. And that's why we say, if you have a fast success, it builds your ego. If you have a slow success, it builds your character. Wow. Okay. I believe putting people through difficulties is extremely rewarding for the ones who want to grow as people. So this is
the fundamental of this thought. Very amazing. And my last point, from your learning, before I move to some more questions, is you also say it's a Mind's game. Help me understand this. 100% minds game,
think about it. Every second, our brain is attacked by 1 million bits of information. 1 million, and you can only absorb 40,000 less than 1%. So everything else is a blind spot, it is your decision. Which parts of the environment to consider and what to make out of it? There is no reality. Everybody, and you know the famous thing everybody was accusing Steve Jobs of distorting reality. At the end of the day, he showed that his reality is right one. And all his critics reality is the wrong one. So it is absolutely mind's game. And I think the
ability to open your mind and to connect as many dots as possible, is fascinating. And one thing is reading books. I'm absolutely fascinated by people who don't read. If, you know, you have written books, to write a good book takes you two years, a lot of editing, a lot of research, a lot of talking to people, and you give me this piece of knowledge in my hand. And I can read your book for four hours. Just imagine for four hours, I'm tapping into the condensed knowledge that somebody has put for two years, and maybe for the rest of your life. Four hours, I can see the world from through the eyes of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, Steve Jobs. So accumulating all these different points of
views makes your perception bigger. So it puts more dots in your mind that you can connect. That's why we say it's a mind game. Very interesting. So let me go back to something you mentioned right in the beginning, about you coming from a communist environment, and you're having served in the army. How has the army and the environment you grew up in help you formulate such incredible thoughts about business? It's accumulation of experiences. I think it's not the army. But the army just I think it helps you to understand the second
order of consequences. That what you do in the moment is irrelevant, why you did it. And what happens in the long run is critical. And you can find benefits in every situation you are in. It can build physical, can do character, you can build knowledge, you can accumulate patience, an army is a beautiful place to build your character. And if you zoom out from
the day to day activities that are physically extremely demanding. You can really understand a lot about yourself. You know, when you're in love, you're the person who would like to be when you are in war, you see the person actually who you are. Okay. So that's why we think when you put yourself in such difficult situation, then you can have a better understanding of the self. Fascinating. Fascinating. So one more question. Just put it in context, one of the techniques I use here in our company, I deliberately try to take people out of their comfort zone. And I very carefully observe their reactions. And there are different ways you
can take, it could be intellectually, it could be even challenge their values. It could be physically and observing the reactions of people when they're out of their comfort zone tells you a lot about the person. And we've tried to implement this also in the companies we work. That's why our slogan is I'm not here to be nice to you. I'm here to make you better. So one more question relating fast track and then I'll have a couple of questions on your time in India. Christo for someone who's leading such an amazing organization, for someone who's hired over 10,000 people over the years for someone who, as you just said, likes to put people out of their comfort zone, what would you say is Christo's leadership style? I cannot comment on my leadership style. And if you asked the people who work with me, they'll say it's extremely, extremely damn extremely difficult person to work with. Okay.
But over the years, I have learned to believe that it's almost impossible to change people. And characters may be the most important thing. And you know, the vasanas, I'm putting a lot of efforts trying to understand the strengths of people and their natural inclinations, and just try to create the right environment for them to operate.
We managers have the wrong belief that it is our job to motivate people, it isn't. Our job is to find people who are already motivated & create the best environment for these people to flourish. So basically, our job is to pick up the right character, and create the environment. That's it. Very, very interesting. You know, pick up
motivated people rather than try and find ways to motivate people. Fantastic. So Christo, I have time for a couple of more questions. And I thought since I am in India, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about India. You spent one year in India to study the Vedanta, Buddhism, Zen. Couple of questions, What motivated you to come to India? It's a combination of couple of things. I was at a crossroads in my life, I was
a bit disillusioned with big corporations. I reached a stage where I became a very senior person at a very young age. And I found this extremely dangerous, because you start taking yourself too seriously. Correct. And I was also worried what's happening outside me, I couldn't figure it out. We are the most comfortable generation ever. In the history of the planet, and we are the most complaining generation ever. You talk to
these young guys, they have everything. And if their Instagram doesn't load for three seconds, they start complaining. And two weeks down down the road, they are mentally depressed. So I was trying to put all these things together and try to make sense of it. And I came across an Indian teacher called Swami Parthasarathy, who shared with me some of the fundamentals in Vedanta. And I loved it. I mean, he said Vedanta is unlike other religious there. It is teaching us
that intellect is the guiding factor. Don't trust what I say, use your intellect to assess what is and I loved it. And I just wanted to go deeper and deeper and deeper. And if something has survived for 5000 years, and has impacted the lives of billions of people, they should be merit in it. So all this prompted me to go and dive deep into this. And I really, really loved it. And I'm fascinated, you go to India, you see extremely poor people. But if you look into the eyes, somehow you see peace, you see Shanti and you go to some other countries, you see rich people and in the eyes there is hatred. I was just keen to understand
what is behind it. Oh, fascinating. You seem to pick up the pulse of a large Indian population, especially about the peace in people's minds, you know. But my last question to you now is, how are you using your learnings from Vedanta in Fast Track? Fast track is not a job for me. Fast Track is not a company, Fast Track is who we are. And basically, I'm trying to apply my personal values in what we do. My personal
definition of success, my personal definition of how to spend your days how to take decisions, how to spend your life, so Vedanta had a huge impact in what we do. And if you come here to the office, it has an impact on everybody around us. A lot of people don't like it. Some people like it, but it is what it is. And a lot of people believe success is what you have achieved, but this is a static definition of success. We prefer to have a more dynamic understanding of success.
And for me, it all boils down to do you enjoy what you do every second of the day? If you call the time 9-5 job, you're not a happy person. So we are trying to go to love Mondays as much as we love Friday, you have a more dynamic definition of success. And at the end of it is, I think we need to have crystal clarity of where you want to go. You cannot just
have this clarity if you don't know yourself. So at the end of the day, it's about authenticity. And it takes a lot of time to distill this to observe yourself and to find your true self. And then it takes a lot of courage not to give in to social pressure to change. Amazing, amazing. Christo on that note, thank you so much. It's been such a privilege speaking to you. Thank you for talking to me about Fast Track, about the amazing things that you're doing. Thank you for speaking to me about your learnings, what your philosophies. And thank you for speaking to me about your incredible experience that you said you had in India, and how it's relating back to you and all the people around you. Thank you again and good luck.
Thank you. Thank you. It was a privilege. Thank you. Thank you for listening to The Brand Called You, videocast and podcast. A platform that brings you knowledge, experience and wisdom of hundreds of successful individuals from around the world. Do visit our website, www.tbcy.in to watch and listen to the stories of
many more individuals. You can also follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Just search for The Brand Called You
2022-02-01 13:22