122: Spotlighting the 'S' in ESG: A conversation with Sakshi Bansal, Unesco Kindness Leader, Diana Award Recipient

Shownotes:Some of my listeners are also guests on my podcast The Elephant in the Room. We connected last year and had several conversations before recording the podcast.If you are interested in the ‘S’ in ESG listen to the latest episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast where my guest Sakshi Bansal speaks at length on the topic. Sakshi Bansal the recipient of the Diana Award, a civilian honour for humanitarian work, the world’s first UNESCO Kindness leader, Founder of Project LEAP, and a strategy consultant with Arup UK. In this free flowing conversation we spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾👉🏾 Psychology and sustainability - what is the connection👉🏾 The importance of social equity & risk resilience assessment, triple bottom line and the social license to operate👉🏾 Challenges organisations face in reporting the ‘S’ and recent trends👉🏾 Global sustainability narrative being dominated by the global north, and lack of diversity in the industry 👉🏾 Push back in some geographies on ESG as a distraction👉🏾 What millennials and Gen Z think about Purpose driven organisationsWe also spoke about the necessity of continuous learning to keep up with constantly evolving regulations, frameworks and standards; role models and her deep rooted belief in an interdisciplinary approach to addressing the sustainability challenge……..Disclaimer: All views expressed in the podcast are Sakshi Bansal’s personal views and do not represent or reflect the views of Arup Ltd.Head to the podcast to hear more, link in comments 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾Episode Transcript:Sudha: Good morning, Sakshi. Wonderful to have you as a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast today.Sakshi: Hi, thank you so much. It's so nice to be here.Sudha: To start with, give us a quick introduction and tell us a bit about yourself, maybe your childhood, education.Sakshi: Gosh a bit about myself. So, I am a psychologist by education, both a bachelor's and master's degree, but I'm also a management and strategy consultant now. And if I look back on my career, because it's so well integrated into who am I it's what I call a roller-coaster career or a squiggly career. It started in a tech startup. I was studying in Delhi I wanted to be a professional salsa dancer, And I came across these guys and they were doing something really cool at university, building an AI platform for billing and telling software and digital menus of the hospitality industry.And I said, ah, I'll join you. And started working in a startup as one of those co-founders specifically focused on bringing in clients. So we were a bunch of 16, 17, 18 year olds with a team of 20 people bringing in clients and selling our hardware and software products all over Delhi on a tech platform that I knew nothing about. So that was my first real education, I think, into the world of entrepreneurship is learning how to not run a business, how to be a leader, how to talk to investors. And I think very early on, I got an insight into that world. And I think that sparked the sort of entrepreneurial interest in myself, and then I later went on to start a charity. So later means two years later, when we sold the startup to Amazon, went on to start a charity which is called Project Leap, and we were providing free education to