Business As Meaning Making Machines With Naren Balasubramaniam
Naren Balasubramaniam has been a healthcare executive for many years, occupying a variety of leadership roles across geographies and functions. His personal experience with spirituality and with leadership has provided him with a fascinating perspective about how our spirituality can be nourished and applied in organizational life. In this episode, Naren speaks with Andrew about his powerful and insightful points of view, how organizations might begin to design leadership roles with caring at their core, and how his new public benefit corporation is working to address childhood mental health issues, leveraging his purpose, while standing up a viable business entity. Tune in for more!
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Business As Meaning Making Machines With Naren Balasubramaniam
I'm pleased to share with you my interview with my client and friend, Naren Balasubramaniam. Naren has been a healthcare executive for many years. He’s originally from India. He's lived and worked on multiple continents and then lives in Tennessee in the United States. He shares his experience and views on spirituality and leadership. Some of what he's working on is a way to bring those two areas of his life together.
His definition of spirituality is about all life, not just centered on the human experience, which is what he called the connective tissue about the role of leadership to make people feel like they belong in an organization, highlight a broader calling, and help others find their purpose and potential and enable them to achieve it. He asked the question, “Do I care enough as a leader to do that? Do I know who's on my team, not just their job but all of them as people?”
He says, “We'll often miss this because businesses are generally focused on short-term earnings, EBITDA, and reaching key outcomes but are we designing roles that include caring and dimensions of caring? How do we do that as leaders? How can we make it realistic for a leader to have a truly broad span of caring,” as he called it? He talked about the opportunity for businesses to be meaning-making machines, which is a very powerful way of framing the role of business and also connects so well with what we talked about here on this show.
He laments that people have become distanced from one another, which contributes to a variety of maladies, including mental illness in children. That led him to found an organization called Metamorphix, which is a public benefit corporation he started. The mission of that organization is to create equitable access and intervention around childhood mental health.
They work with school districts using data analytics to drive insights, inform equitable access, identify and address needs, and help children live richer lives. The challenge is to make a business like this commercially viable while delivering societal good, which he is committed to doing and expanding his contribution into the world. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did. I look forward to any feedback you might have. Here’s Naren Balasubramaniam.
I am happy and excited to have with us Naren Balasubramaniam, Executive in Residence at Bon Secours Mercy Health in Tennessee and Founder of Metamorphix. He’s a fascinating man who I had the pleasure of meeting when he first came to Wharton to participate in the general management program. He could speak to that if he chooses but I was fortunate enough to be able to work with him there. Welcome to the show, Naren.
Thank you so much, Andrew. First of all, let me thank you for deeming me eligible to even share my perspective and be on your show. It's a privilege to know you. We have a bit of a history for 2023. You and I have worked on things together. You have helped inform a lot of choices and approaches that I've made in life. It's a pleasure to be a part of this.
Thank you so much. You are so deemed whatever that means. If there's a certificate, I'd be happy to sign it, whatever that means. Thank you for your openness as a leader and what you've taught me. In addition to what you're teaching me about, some of what you're working on, maybe we can get to in this show. When I first told you about this show, it seemed like you were a bit energized and excited.
You had a point of view about some of what we were talking about in terms of the connection between the spiritual dimensions, the core spiritual dimensions of us as human beings, leadership at this point, and how it can be so useful to bring those parts of ourselves into work. In your experience, I could ask you a number of questions. You know me. I don't script these things ahead of time.
What have you seen over your career in terms of this intersection of spiritual dimensions of leadership and you as a person? Your background is a little bit different being an Executive in Residence in Memphis. You may not be the typical Memphis guy or even the typical Bon Secours Mercy Health guy but I'd love to hear about your experience with this and what you'd want to bring to this conversation.
Spirituality As The Connective Tissue
You made a reference to spirituality as a human being. That drew my attention. We ascribe spirituality to be associated with human beings and I tend to challenge that. It's about life and existence. I don't center spirituality on just the human experience. I see it more as existential. It's about life, whether it is the beings around us, trees, squirrels, and flowers around us, as well as we as human beings. That connective tissue is my basis for relating to what spirituality is. I’m glad to be a part of it. On that notion, I'm going to say this. It's me, me, and me alone. Why there’s you and me?
Is it why are we here at this time?
No. Why there’s this sense of separation that you are you and I am I? It's me, me, and me alone. Why there’s you and me? This is a poem from one of my spiritual guides. I listened to him years ago and this keeps resonating. It is that sense of separation from my cultural bearings, which is what we call maya illusion that we are different from each other. That's the centrality of how I associate it with spirituality in human beings or leadership but the notion of what spirituality is.
It's you. It's me. It's nature. I'm looking at the horses behind you and I think about the horses that we work with here in Santa Fe. For purposes of these conversations, what does that mean in terms of leadership? How can we channel, funnel, or focus that broader dimension of spirituality into leadership? Does it have value? I don't mean that rhetorically. What is the value? How does it help us accomplish our individual goals, collective goals, and business goals? How does it support others as we're in leadership roles? How can you take this grand impossible-to-possibly contained notion of spirituality that you're describing and come into an office?
It's a journey. One is to intellectually say what I said but experientially living that are two different things. There is a sea of difference between those two. My spiritual journey or path is how I start experiencing that versus intellectually relating to that. What does that mean when I talk about the separation? It is around boundaries. When we talk about the priority in humanity across the world, it’s inclusion. How do you make people feel that they belong in the workplace and organization, whether it's Bon Secours Mercy Health or any aspect of an organization or institution? It is that inclusion.
How well do we boundary manage? How well do we express ourselves to separate people versus make them feel belong? That's the boundary management that is central to how you relate to spirituality. If we are able to inch towards that sense of, “I'm able to experience people around me as me and their needs,” this can be controversial, the way you interpret it and the lens that you're coming at. We use many of the cliché references in training, development, and workshops. The golden rule is, “Do unto others as you expect others to do unto you.”
How do you look at the lens of respect from your perspective through the lenses of your cultural upbringing versus that of others? These are things that we use to convey the aspect of respect but the broader calling is about two aspects. For me, leadership fundamentally comes down to, first of all, as a human being, am I evolving myself to the fullest extent of my potential? My full potential is to be able to experience existence as part of me. That's where the spirituality comes in. That might mean different things to different people.
Leadership fundamentally comes down evolving yourself to the fullest extent of your potential as a human being.
If that's your journey, then as a leader within organizational terms, you're leading people. Fundamentally at a very basic level, are you able to help others find their purpose and potential? How do you enable them to reach their potential? That's part of an inclusive act. When we talk about retention and engagement, if only we are able to connect to that one thing about, “Do I care enough as a leader,” think about all that needs to happen for me to care for a human being and enable them to reach their human potential and understand their purpose and being, which means you need to know.
You need to know who's on your team, not just by the job descriptions that are written. Are they doing the duties but they bring in their self? What is that self? What is the social context? What's the cultural context? What is the familial context? How do you know? We are living in a time in our society where there is a lot of political correctness to what you ask and don't ask people. Where is the line where it is a sincere curiosity to know more about a human being than being politically incorrect?
I hear you talking about leadership as helping to lead people on their journey or being part of the leadership team. I don't know that you are the leader on anyone's journey. Any more than a particular leader that you've worked with, under, or for is your singular. You lead them and be a part of their journey. To do that, you need to know them. That's the inclusion piece.
That's the fundamental aspect, which largely we are mostly missing. When we look at the value created by an organization, most of the time in the capitalistic society that we live in, it's on dollars and cents. It's about EBITDA, operating margin, spans of control, and ratios of how many people can a leader manage. There is a distinction between being a manager who is task-oriented, assigns duties and makes key outcomes are met. This is one thing.
Where is the capacity? Do we design leadership roles where you budget for knowing the human being, caring for them, and helping them evolve? With the people leadership component, how much of that is baked into roles? It's an organizational design challenge. It is a leadership role definitional challenge and then it is a capacity. Opportunity is how much we intentionally create these designs, which makes it realistic for a leader to have a span and spectrum of people that they can truly care about and help evolve.
I hear you talking about the role of leadership and business, whereas you're talking about role definition, operational goals, and how we measure success. All of those things are very IT things. They're very impersonal things. Whereas leadership I'd suggest is much more personal but all of these places you're speaking about, and you can share from your experience as operations leads, strategy leads, and HR leads, you've designed roles, built organizations, and written job descriptions and systems of job descriptions.
This stuff, in my view, is simply the playground. There's nothing spiritual about a job description, operating margin target, or something like that. There's something spiritual about traffic, climate change, or potholes but how do we operate within these spaces? How do we invite people to navigate challenges? How do we work together as we encounter whatever it is we're dealing with or try to reach whatever business goal? How much can you bake anything “spiritual” into a job description? Would you want to?
I'll challenge that you can because it's not just an IT and a playground. The question is, “What is spirituality?” In a different way, it’s the sheer acknowledgment that you're part of a larger whole. It is not me-me-me centric. It's not about what I want or what my needs are. How do I contribute to the whole right? It is about mission alignment, vision alignment, and the ability for you to connect everybody's tasks, roles, and playground things. What is the line of sight for enabling the mission?
I've been fortunate to work in faith-based institutions and secular organizations. My definition of secular is very different. For me, secular is all-inclusive faith and non-faith. Believers and non-believers of any kind are secular. A notion that is secular means it's no fate. I don't subscribe to that. Faith-based organizations probably provide a far more concrete way of identifying with a larger whole, which is informed by the type of faith, whether it's a Catholic organization or a Hindu mission. It drives different emotions and identification with what is the larger whole. It can be both.
It's the question of how you stitch it together. On a day in day out basis, how are you able to identify? For every individual employee, associate, or team member, it's a meaning-making process. Another aspect of my experiences is organizations are meaning-making machines. How effectively are we able to help meaning-make with every activity for every employee? Connecting to the larger whole, that's part of driving spirituality. You can never drive spirituality. That's the wrong choice of words but it's about enabling or getting the sense of a larger whole.
To pick up on that, it's about maybe not driving but facilitating, helping to promote, or opening a door or something for “spirituality.” In this case, to put a little bit of framework on this, spirituality here is about meaning, growth, development, and personal evolution. Are those fair words to use?
Also, human potential.
It reminds me a little bit. Would you be willing to share a little bit about what your purpose is? I remember when you did some work on that in some of our conversations, it related to human potential, did it not?
It is about enabling human potential for myself and others, which is where Metamorphix comes into play. That's a very sheer focus on enabling children to live life to their fullest potential. Given the state of teen and adolescent mental health in the country, the focus of Metamorphix is to tackle mind, body, and spirit, mind as a starting point for mental health. How do you create equitable access for early detection and intervention of mental health needs among K through 12 kids? That seems to be very aligned with my life's purpose and passion.
Metamorphics
Could you say a little bit about how Metamorphix works and what its offering is or service?
It's in its early stages. It's a public benefit corporation. Let me connect a couple of things. You and I got associated through my Wharton journey. For me, that was boundary management and expanding my boundaries and sense of identity in what places I play, what skills I develop, and how I exercise. What came out of that was the Wharton conversation. Great professors ultimately came down to value being a return on investment or IRR.
I cannot reconcile with that. I got to see a human value or a societal value coming out of that. There were a lot of deliberations. The public benefit corporation is by design and its charter is committed to creating societal good. My passion is creating societal good in a commercially viable manner through products and services. PBC is what I've created. We went through a very systematic discovery process.
One thing is to say, “I have a solution and people are going to buy it.” There's one way to do it like, “You identify a problem area that you're very passionate about and then go out and talk to people.” That's what I did. I went out and spoke to a couple of dozen people and stakeholders in the ecosystem around mental health and healthcare.
Schools are where we have the aggregation of all the kids. It provides some systems and processes for early detection. We spent a lot of time with school districts, superintendents, multitier systems of support, intervention services, deans, and all of that. We are working on a solution in partnership with a couple of school districts who have been early adopters and have embraced the idea of using data analytics to drive insights that help inform how to implement measures that enhance equitable access to understanding mental health needs and what type of interventions need to be put in place so we can help children through their evolution and help them live a more wholesome life.
There's technology that's in service to that mission.
It is an AI. No conversation goes without talking about ChatGPT or AI machine learning. I'm not talking from that sense but it is about driving actionable insights. AI is part of it. Machine learning models are going to be part of it. That's a huge technology play in it.
For you, what is the connection between Metamorphix and the broader spiritual landscape? It's a very subjective question.
It is just about me. I was raised in India, grew up there, and got married there. I had my first job. Think about my career journey and personal journey. It's about how I've gotten comfortable with not being comfortable. My growth has always been about pushing my boundaries and testing what else I can do. How else can I expand my horizon? Where else can I contribute? How can I integrate things and make them accretive?
It's not that these are separate chunks of life experiences but how do you accrete those experiences being part of different cultures, countries, functions, and organizations? Stitch it together that as I grow to where I am, the way I'm able to add value is a multiplier effect of all of those. For me, it's a huge challenge. When we talk about the state of mental health for teens and adolescents, we do have a healthcare industry that’s very well established in its size. It's the science of treating mental illness.
There are serious workforce shortages and reimbursement issues there. Their models are very different. Schools are deeply entrenched with the way things have worked there. They have systems and processes. They are set in certain ways. The biggest complexity here is making meaningful connections and nexus between the healthcare industry and the school district to focus on the human being in the middle, the future of the human generation of children, and how to help them address mental health needs.
This is not for the faintest of hearts. For me, personal growth and maximizing my potential is my ability to convene like-minded people and stakeholders, create a solution, and make it commercially viable, yet deliver on the societal good. If there is a traditional box and there is a job, and I predictably know what I do day in and day out, that's not for me. For me, it is about getting into uncharted territory, whether I have the expertise or not. If I'm able to convince people with the right expertise, I have what it takes to connect the dots and do something that I've not done before. For me, that is expanding my potential and how I contribute to society at large. It's personal and not personal.
It's personal but broad. It's other-oriented and service. Service is personally rewarding and motivating but it's not about you, if I may say. You're not doing something uncharted for the sake of the uncharted. You're doing something uncharted because there's a need that you see needs to be addressed for the greater good.
When it connects to the spirituality conversation, it is how humanity becomes distanced from each other. I don't want to get into causality and all of that because I'm no expert in it but at least published literature and facts within the United States show that 50% of lifetime mental illness sets in by the time a child turns 14. For us, it takes 11 more years before we can detect and intervene. In that time, lives are lost.
The second leading cause of death among teens, adolescents, and even up to age 32 is suicide. It's a disconnect to a place where a human being chooses that it's no longer worthy to live. They choose to take the only life they've got in their lives. What worse situation can we be in the context of spirituality, where it's me, me, and me alone? Why there’s you and me, the separateness?
There is no identification with a family, an ecosystem, or another human being that can help these kids so those kids, in whatever set of circumstances, choose to do what they're doing is taking their lives, being the second leading cause. It's a dichotomy but it is so pertinent to this conversation. Maybe there is a lack of spirituality or connectedness in our human experience that is leading to what is happening around us. What Metamorphix is going to focus on and what I want to focus on is very germane.
Business Meaning: There is a lack of spirituality in our human experience today that is leading to what is happening around us.
I hear that Metamorphix is about making those connections between the healthcare system and schools to facilitate daily gathering and participation in treatment plans, as I understand. It's about bridging that. That sense of isolation you speak of with teens and others, what's interesting is you could describe that as something spiritually related. This is an example of something where some people would look at this and say, “No, it's not right. It's something we want to fix and we can do better.” Other people say, “Therefore, that would make it spiritual. It's about the highest good.”
To me, it’s whatever drives you to do something positive and good in your life. I don't care what you label it. If there's a God, I don't think He cares what we label it. The question is what are we doing? I appreciate that. There’s a question I'd like to ask you though because it's not necessarily yes or no. There's more to it. You talked about your career leading you up. You're learning something every step along the journey. Could you have moved into the uncharted area of Metamorphix years ago in your career? If you couldn't, I'm curious to know what was missing or what you needed to learn or experience so that you can say, “I see this need. I can launch my ship out towards Metamorphix.”
Life experiences and the roles that you've been in give you a perspective and help make you who you are. There's one doctor back in Michigan. I have run multiple ventures and started different companies in the past. We were talking about a point in time when I was going to launch a company and she said, “Naren, starting a company is a team effort. You need people in and all of that but do not go into launching a venture depending on others helping you out. You have to fully feel complete in yourself for you to do what you want to do.”
You need to fully feel complete in yourself for you to do what you want to do.
That's the place I am in with regard to Metamorphix. I need a lot of help. It's not about, “I need,” but solving a problem like this needs so many stakeholders coming together, benefactors, and whatever coming together to do it. As the sponsor of the venture, I needed to feel complete. Some things might not work, some may work, or some may not go the way I planned. It may not happen at the pace at which I originally planned. I may not get all the resources when I need to get the resources. So be it. I feel complete enough to put this forward and launch it. I have evolved. We call it personal development or spirituality advancement. It is the time when I feel where I need to be to do what I'm doing.
When I hear you say complete, what I'm hearing below is, “I can move ahead even without knowing for sure that ABCD will happen. I feel confident that I can manage through if those challenges happen. I feel competent as well to lead through these challenges as they might happen. I don't need to have everything lined up and see all of the stepping stones out onto the horizon.”
Being there is not like, “I've beat myself up to be self-confident.” I will say, “I've surrendered to existence.” We call it God, guru, or spiritual teacher. I've laid it down. I trust that enough about the existential reality that it will happen if it has to. I'm an instrument in it to help advance it. That's again a dichotomy. I feel complete enough in me to place and surrender myself to the larger power to take it where it needs to go.
First of all, I would label that a spiritual perspective. I'd also call out that surrender means giving up in the sense of giving up, not lying down and being passive. Surrender doesn't mean I'm out. Surrender means I'm in to an even higher level. I don't want to oversimplify this but in terms of one's growth and evolution, perhaps it's not quite as likely that we have the ability, awareness, and maturity to surrender in that way at the beginning of our careers. If you do, I want to work with that person but that would be pretty unusual.
It has nothing to do with career. The career gives you experiences in a much more structured manner where you put yourself out. Career is a part of but the aspect of spirituality existed before the industrial age when nomads, peasants, and agriculturists practiced spirituality. They didn't need a career to serve as a baseline to see how you're advancing. It's a construct of the lifetime that we are living.
I had a feeling this conversation would wander to some interesting places. I so appreciate your perspective. I love it when you disagree with me and redirect me in a beautiful way. It wasn't disagreement. It's more redirection and refinements. I appreciate that. I don't know at this point, Naren, whether we'll have 200 or 200,000 readers but how could people learn more about Metamorphix and potentially you if they wanted to reach out to you?
Thank you for asking that. We've put together a basic external-facing website. It's www.Metamorphix.app. That's a public domain website. Purposefully, I left it to intrigue so the content does light but it allows people to engage, subscribe, and participate. That's a way to reach out. I'm on LinkedIn. They will pick me up there and I'll be happy to connect.
I hope they do. I hope we continue to connect. I would love to continue this conversation, put a pin in, and then see where Metamorphix is in the future. It's been a pleasure to be riding with you as you've launched this and see how this goes. I appreciate, acknowledge, and honor the work that you're doing to connect these different parts of your life to serve people. That's what I see.
Thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. This was special and pretty generative. We met in the moment and played into the conversation. There were no prepared notes. I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this show. Thank you.
Important Links
Naren Balasubramaniam - LinkedIn