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Founder@ Interview
Interview with Dr. Raman K Attri
“As an entrepreneur, you should chase for clarity. Chase clarity for two things, “why” and “what for.” Why is your emotional drive for doing something you want to do? “What for” is your purposeful drive in terms of what you expect or hope to achieve...” – Dr. Raman K Attri
Today we feature Dr. Raman K Attri, the founder at XpertX Research. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
My name is Raman, and I’m residing in Singapore as of now. I was born and raised in a small remote town in India. I studied to be an engineer, but I switched careers to become a learning leader through systematic planning and experiences.
I am a global authority on speed in learning, a performance scientist, and training thought leader. I am also an international professional speaker and author of 20 books.
My work revolves around bringing speed in learning, performance, mastery, skill acquisition, employee development, and leadership. My expertise lies in finding methods and strategies to help others cut the time out from their journey.
I translate research into practical strategies for practitioners, professionals, and organizational leaders. Then I offer my proven wisdom via training and coaching programs. I also provide keynotes and written pieces.
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
I was a very inquisitive child. I wanted to learn, explore, research, and discover things around me. When I was in 9th-grade school, I decided I want to be a scientist. My starting point was to go for an engineering degree.
I graduated as an engineer at 21. After graduation, I took an unconventional path to join as a trainer in a small training institution. I stayed focused on my primary goal. I became a technology scientist at a premier national research organization in India less than a year later.
I served as a scientist for about 10 years. Midway through that tenure, I was offered to be part of the training department, which had been set up with the help of the Swiss government. I grabbed that opportunity instantly, as I loved learning very much from childhood.
The five years at the training organization opened up doors for my international training career. Alongside, I got a wide range of opportunities to serve on multiple freelancing and advisory roles for various domestic and international forums. I also embarked on an entrepreneurship journey offering niche consulting and training services, but it did not go well. However, I leveraged my experience and failures to pivot my career in multinational corporations.
I had my calling in the learning and development space. I led an international Hall of the fame training center for a Fortune 500 corporation. To build my next level of thought leadership, I went for intensive research for over 10 years and earned two doctorates in the learning domain. My focus was on finding out how to design organizational culture that could enable employee development to match the speed of business.
Apparently, I am the first researcher in the world to have conducted such high-value research on speed. Soon I saw myself in the front row as one of the few experts who had cracked the code of speed. Every organization needs to crack the code of speed to stay competitive. I saw the opportunity to fill the gap by converting my research into practical strategies for business leaders.
That’s why I founded the XpertX forum to reveal the secrets of speed in learning and performance, disseminating it to a larger population of businesses and executives.
Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
The XpertX forum is a wisdom-based solo initiative that translates proven research into practical, high-value strategies for practitioners and leaders. It is based in Singapore, but it caters to a global audience.
My goal here is to enable professionals and corporate executives to master the strategies to speed up their path to learning, performance, expertise, promotion, transition and leadership.
At the core, all the strategies have been designed for professionals and organizations to help them bring a speed-enabling culture and framework in their settings. I save them time and money – quite an enormous amount of time and millions of dollars – by teaching them the science and art of speeding up their respective journeys.
The solutions involve systematic training and coaching programs to handhold them and cut the time out of their journey. Fundamentally, I have three focus areas:
The core focus at XpertX is to offer proven strategies, practices, models to corporates and guide their leaders on how to shorten time to proficiency of employees by 50%. The solutions include implementing time to proficiency metrics, building speed-savvy culture, setting up a speed-enabling ecosystem, revamping training philosophy and reorienting leadership philosophy.
The breakthrough philosophy is delivered through targeted training and coaching programs, seminars, webinars and executive coaching.
The second core focus at XpertX is to offer experimented, time-tested approaches to professionals and employees to master new skills quickly and be the star performer in half the usual time.
The solutions include guiding them with the best practices and techniques to speed up their career, quicken their transition to management roles, enable them to learn complex skills at an accelerated rate and develop professional performance faster. It is done via a range of 1:1 coaching and group sessions.
The third core focus at XpertX is to offer state-of-the-art design methodologies to seasoned training and learning leaders to put up powerful training interventions that can help people learn highly complex skills for next-generation projects within a shorter time.
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
As I already mentioned, my career took a different path when I moved into the training department while serving as a scientist. Fundamentally, it connected me back to my roots – learning – which was the sole lifesaver for me in my childhood and my adulthood. It was a natural choice for me to go with a career in the learning domain.
That experience triggered my interest in the process of learning and the strategies to learn faster. In a short while, I gained over 100 international credentials in a range of disciplines.
I think when passion and profession match, your overall speed and influence gets amplified several folds. So, I followed my passion and decided to work on it more closely, taking it to the next level, which started with my two doctorates.
My doctoral research was the foundation of my success. During my research, I found that there was no systematic research on speed to proficiency. I was amazed to see so many inconsistencies in how learning has been designed or delivered at the workplace. There was no effort in building any synthesized method to reveal the science of speed.
That was an aha moment for me because I realized this is what I was meant to do. It instantly connected back to my childhood passion for learning faster.
This research made me stand among the front runners of society. Currently, I am the only practice-based researcher and professional speaker, speaking on the topics related to the speed of business.
So, my success lies in building the science around speed, creating frameworks, methods, techniques and best practices that can help people grow faster. Now I am in the process of simplifying that research and translating it down to practitioners to learn practical techniques and apply them in their corporate settings.
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
My biggest lessons originated from my life challenges rather than professional challenges. But when I overcame my challenges, it became my differentiator to be successful in the professional world.
My life lesson is that our limitations, failures, and struggles could be the best bet to shine as the best in whatever we want to do. I also learned that you could break any boundaries and stay ahead of the curve when you match your passion with your profession. You can bring speed into your life.
My story started with me being born under deplorable conditions and becoming disabled owing to the poliovirus. I always believed that my disability was my biggest limitation. But soon, I started seeing the leverages that spring up from disability, like distraction-free time. I get to use it to immerse myself in reading and learning that changed my life. I read anything and everything I could put my hand on.
The zest to be fast in something propelled my passion for learning new things. That mental shift encouraged me to conduct various experiments on different ways to learn effectively and quickly.
During this journey, I earned two doctorates in the learning domain and over 100 international educational credentials. Alongside, I wrote 20 multi-genre books that range from training, learning leadership to art and poetry.
As I continued on that path, I chose the career in learning, formulating proven, research-based methods to speed up learning, performance, expertise, skill acquisition, and workforce development.
That made me stand as a global authority on speed in professional learning and workforce performance. I can say that I transformed my inability to walk into role-model expertise with which I guide the leaders and professionals on strategies to walk faster, as an ironic contrast to my disability.
I learned that there are always windows of leverages and opportunities to pursue despite mental walls of limitations. You could find leverages in your failed business, your incomplete projects, your financial losses and your rejected ideas. It is just a matter of shifting the focus to an optimistic side.
I was more focused on creating content which has a longer shelf life as books. As a result, I have authored several books with efficacious content. From that angle, my thought process was very traditional.
However, I have been a bit late in catching up with modern marketing and promotional methods. I understood that leveraging content as lead magnets and processing the readers through well-designed funnels were the standard practice to bring more leads or reach a wider audience. A part of that strategy is using videos, webinars and podcasts, etc., to increase the reach. If I had known about this content-driven audience engagement earlier, I would probably have been more strategic in my approach to release the content.
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
I did not come from a business background, so there was no foundation for the entrepreneurship spirit. My best bet was to depend upon my personal experiences and the wisdom I had drawn from them. My first sprint as an entrepreneur was 20 years ago, which was quite a struggle, mainly because I was focused too much on choosing technologies, tools, systems, and business.
I missed paying attention to choosing the right people and building a good network.
I would probably advise my younger self to focus on people first rather than things. Sometimes, the race of life shifts our focus on acquiring things, materials, jobs, professional success, credentials, status, or titles. This race takes away the focus from the core of life, which is people and relationships.
If you want to have a successful entrepreneurship path, it cannot come in isolation. Even as a solopreneur, your best bet is people, relationships, and networks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37Ms_Unpv6Y
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
It is a wisdom-based endeavor which revolves around my niche expertise. I offer my distilled wisdom from years of experimentation on what works and what does not.
I mainly provide specialized corporate training programs, conferences, corporate keynotes, and long-term executive coaching programs.
Industry 4.0 and the prevailing conditions of the pandemic are driving the business transformation at the speed of light.
There is a bigger need for executives to learn how to bring speed-savvy culture into their settings. Business is moving at such a high pace that leaders need to develop their workforce at an equally high speed. So, my audience is top-notch executives who create top-down cultural and systematic changes in organizations.
I had to figure out ways to reach out to these top executives. I leverage speaking at larger executive-level conferences. When you have fresh breakthrough ideas, eventually, you will get connected with the right audience.
I deliver well-designed keynotes on new business challenges. While webinars and other virtual platforms have opened up many options, top order conferences are still the best platform to reach out to top executives. Besides that, my books are the primary drivers for reaching out to the people who really need this knowledge.
While technology, apps, tools, website and other virtual platforms are significant enablers in today’s business to reach out to the right people, I think the old-fashioned ways are still the best in delivering quality services and building a network of high value.
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
I was more focused on creating content which has a longer shelf life as books. As a result, I have authored several books with efficacious content. From that angle, my thought process was very traditional.
However, I have been a bit late in catching up with modern marketing and promotional methods. I understood that leveraging content as lead magnets and processing the readers through well-designed funnels were the standard practice to bring more leads or reach a wider audience.
A part of that strategy is using videos, webinars and podcasts, etc., to increase the reach.
If I had known about this content-driven audience engagement earlier, I would probably have been more strategic in my approach to release the content.
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
As it may seem obvious, I am certainly proud of my disability, which I believe might inspire many to move forward in their lives no matter what hardships they face in their personal and professional life. I am glad that I have invented methods, science and art behind the speed in personal, professional and business life.
It has helped me to conceptualize, define and solve pressing business challenges which are highly relevant in today’s time for every single executive. In the long run, I am sure whenever business leaders talk about the pressing challenges of time to proficiency or speed to proficiency, my name will come up in their discussions.
On the same lines, my message to business owners would be that we never know how our situation might turn around tomorrow or in ten years. Sometimes, it might be the beginning of something extraordinary.
In your entrepreneurship journey, you would come across failures and setbacks. You might feel at the edge of losing something. But that does not mean you lost the war. You can still attain some fantastic achievements with whatever leverages you have.
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
My future goal is to build XpertX as a platform where people can learn the art and science of speed in every walk of their life.
It may be learning, performance, skill mastery, career progression, leadership, or anything else. I would like to bring the world’s best experts, coaches, scientists, and visionaries to share how they cracked the code to learn better and faster.
In the long run, I would want to develop it as a learning portal like a Wikipedia of sorts where people can learn the techniques to learn better and faster. A place where they can get some tested ways to be star performers at their workplace.
A portal where they can receive better self-clarity about themselves. I have this firm belief or philosophy that our race is not external but internal to us. We have this constant zest to surpass ourselves and to raise our bars.
I would like to make it a movement that could inspire and enable people to go beyond learning faster or better, beyond being a star performer, attaining true excellence at an accelerated rate without reinventing the wheels.
To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
When you start the entrepreneurship journey or start any initiative in that direction, you might be driven by one or many things. It could be your willpower. It could be your strong attachment to an idea or your newly found motivation by listening to someone else’s story of success.
I want to warn you that motivation and willpower are short-lived. It is debatable as to how much motivation or inspiration can propel us forward. A strong attachment with your idea is good as it generates fuel and passion, but when it exceeds the limits, it may blind you.
Instead, as an entrepreneur, chase for clarity. Chase clarity for two things, “why” and “what for.” Why is your emotional drive for doing something you want to do? “What for” is your purposeful drive in terms of what you expect or hope to achieve.
You have to have both as an entrepreneur. Once you have a sense of clarity, you already have the fuel to do what you need to succeed.
You would not need any external motivation or inspiration, and you most definitely don’t need any superpowers. Clarity is the new superpower. So, search for clarity first, as it is the fundamental component to attain success.
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and XpertX Research”
To learn more about XpertX Research Visit https://www.speedtoproficiency.com
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