Seventy-Nine and Sunny in London
Six years ago at Duke, I took a course on organizational behaviour. Hemant Kakkar, a phenomenal researcher and an even better professor, was teaching the course. The pilot session was engaging, but it was really the second session when I knew this was going to be my thing. It was at that perfect intersection of psychology, human behavior, and great leadership, everything I cared about, and I was having a swell time.
So sometime toward the end of the course, I asked professor if he’d be open to a coffee chat, and he, so kindly, said yes. What exactly was I looking for out of that coffee chat? A revelation? A roadmap? I don’t know. Probably nothing (at least nothing I could have explained properly at the time), but there was just this gut feeling I could not shake.
We met at the Fox Center, which, if you’ve been to Duke, you’ll know is where many of these little life-altering conversations quietly happen. We spoke about the program, and a lot of fairly mundane things before I finally asked him “At what point in your life did you know you wanted to do what you’re doing right now?” At the time, I was also struggling a little with my own path. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do, or how exactly the Duke degree would help me get there.
“Well, I wasn’t sure if I always wanted to be a professor,” he said, “but I can tell you the point when I decided I wanted to pursue organizational behavior.”
“There’s this book called The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. I was reading it and it dawned on me, this is what I want to do. You should read it.”
And then, per usual, life happened, and I never got around to reading it.
A few months passed. Then a few more. Life nudged me toward the world of media and politics, again, something I really cared about, and I moved to DC for work. I met some great people, had a brilliant time, and before I realized, three more years had passed. It was the latter half of 2024. We were approaching the presidential elections, and I had more or less decided that I would move back to my hometown in India to be with family while I figured out what the next chapter of my life was supposed to look like. It was meant to be my last week in the United States, and I was saying my goodbyes.
As part of those goodbyes, I met Hannah for dinner. Hannah and I had joined the firm around the same time, and she was my best friend at work. I asked her how life had been lately and, to my dismay (since I had just quit) she said, “Quite good actually. I was at an event with this author, Malcolm Gladwell, and he spoke about a book that, by the way, I think you would really like.” “Yeah?” I said. “What book?”
“The Tipping Point.”
One of those moments when life has the subtlety of a marching band. Later that evening, I ordered the book. It arrived just before my 24-hour flight back to Kolkata, and I read it on the plane. And like Hemant, I too had my tipping point. I knew this was something I would love to pursue, if I ever got the chance, but the timing, naturally, was terrible. I was about to begin a new job in the family business, work that was miles away from organizational behavior (at least from the theoretical side of it), but once the thought entered my mind, it didn’t really leave.
Come 2025, something shifted. Feeling unfulfilled in the work I was doing, I decided to try something new, and I was twisting and turning, looking for direction. The thought of OB had not left me. If anything, it had only grown louder, and I started looking for ways that could take me toward it, and London Business School just happened to have the perfect program at the perfect time for me.
It was a one-year MBA that let me pick and choose what I wanted to specialize in, which, for someone trying to follow a curiosity rather than a script, was ideal. And then came one of those details that makes you stop for a second. Guess who I found among the alumni of London Business School? Hemant Kakkar.
My old professor had done his PhD there many years ago. With a little help from my friends, I applied and got in. Somewhere in that process, I also reconnected with Hemant, and that was a refreshing feeling in ways I hadn’t quite expected. There was this faint sense that a circle had closed somewhere in the background.
Come to think of it, had I not reached out to Hemant six years earlier for that coffee at the Fox Center, none of this would have happened, and I wouldn’t be here in London. Not sure what would have happened, but I’m not a fan of counterfactuals anyway.
And so I have learned never to underestimate the power of conversations, or the power of people.
In that vein, I’ve spent the last year conducting a series of coffee chats on campus with people, students, professors, the lunch lady, anyone and everyone I find intriguing. And unlike most other business school coffee chats, mine are not designed to get me a referral. They are designed to get to know people deeply: their motivations, their challenges, what inspires them, what moves them, what drives them.
One of the questions I often ask during these chats is: what has been the most rewarding part of your life so far? And if you were to turn the tables and ask me that same question, I’d say, “This.” This being, of course, the very act of discovery itself.
// In my March 2024 blog called Crossroads, I referred to Hugh Everett’s theory of parallel universes, and I wondered if there was a parallel universe out there where I ended up in London, at LBS, and if in that universe, I was a happy man. Note, when I wrote that blog, I had zero plans of pursuing an MBA, let alone one at LBS and at this time. However, now I can safely confirm that yes, that Rishabh is indeed a happy man. Even though I had no possible way of knowing that, when I first got here. The tipping point came in silence.
July of 2025, I landed in London. It was seventy-nine and sunny.
Blog - Rishabh Poddar | Edits - Namankita Rana
