Diversity Beyond Tokenism

Swati Jena is one of those people who leave you with, ‘Aha, I never looked at it that way’. Her uncanny perception and ability to pay deep attention to things help her see often-missed dots and connect them in unlikely ways. Swati is an expert generalist with 17 years of work spanning across 10+ industries and domains such as learning and development, education, talent management, consulting, product management and entrepreneurship. From going to petrol depots for manpower planning to visiting Rashtrapati Bhavan for arrangements to invite the president of India, Swati’s diverse life experiences have shaped her multi-disciplinary outlook. She is the quintessential ‘all-rounder’, a trait that carried well into her MBA education at XLRI, Jamshedpur.Swati began publishing her ideas on LinkedIn, on a variety of topics including diversity, which led to her being named as one of, ‘LinkedIn Top Voices’ of India in 2017. Swati believes that asking the right question comes before the quest for answers. This love for questions was at the core of her TEDx talk ‘Life is Like a Google Screen’. Swati’s first book, The Entrepreneur’s Soulbook―Is It Your Cup of Tea?’, is again about questions that aspiring entrepreneurs should ask themselves before starting their journey. The book reached Amazon number 1 bestseller rank through word of mouth. Swati currently runs her venture WriteFor, a one-stop-shop learning hub for domain-specific writing. T. N. Hari wears different hats―author, angel investor, advisor to VCs and CHRO Bigbasket, among others. He spent the first 14 years at Tata Steel. Of this, the first 11 years were spent in engineering on the shop floor. The next three years were in HR helping restructure the company to cope with post-liberalization challenges.The next 18-odd years were with a string (five of them) of highgrowth start-ups. The first four saw successful exits (Daksh was acquired by IBM, Virtusa went public on NASDAQ, Amba Research was acquired by Moody’s and TaxiForSure was acquired by Ola). In each of these start-ups, Hari has been a part of the management team and played a key role in shaping their growth and exit.In the last five years, Hari has been an advisor and sounding board to numerous young entrepreneurs and start-ups. He is a mentor at accelerators like Techstars, Silicon Road and India Accelerator. He is an advisor to Arkam Ventures (an earlystage VC fund) and Fundamentum Partnership (a growth-stage VC fund).He is a prolific author and has authored six books so far.