Newgen Software has plenty of talented people. For its global CHRO Kashish Kapoor, that does not necessarily settle the talent question.
When Kapoor joined the company, she found what she describes as a huge pool of talent. The harder question was whether the capabilities Newgen had today were aligned with where the business wanted to go tomorrow. As the company moves from being an enterprise software business towards becoming an AI-led product company, that distinction has become increasingly important.
In the latest episode of The CHRO Playbook, powered by enParadigm, Kapoor joins Dr Prajjal Saha, founder & editor, HRKatha, and John Cherian, founder & CEO, enParadigm, for a conversation about what future-readiness actually demands from organisations and their people.
For Kapoor, hiring for a new capability may appear to be the obvious response when a business changes quickly. The harder and more sustainable challenge is helping people already inside the organisation remain relevant.
She recalls technically accomplished professionals who had spent years succeeding in their roles, only to find that a changing business required them to become more consultative and commercially aware. Their initial reaction was understandable: they had already been doing their jobs successfully for years. Capability building, therefore, could not simply be about teaching them something new. People first had to understand why they needed to change and what that change meant for them.
That experience has also changed what Kapoor looks for in talent. Earlier in her career, she might have said attitude. Today, she chooses adaptability.
She breaks adaptability into three elements: curiosity, confidence and context. Curiosity is the willingness to keep learning. Confidence includes being comfortable enough to admit, “I don’t know this yet.” Context is understanding why learning something new matters at that particular moment.
There is another side to the capability problem, and Kapoor turns the lens towards HR itself.
She recalls a time when organisations built elaborate competency frameworks, workshops and leadership programmes. Participants returned energised, yet a few days later little had necessarily changed. What was missing, she argues, was commercial thinking. HR could not solve business problems while remaining distant from the economics and operating reality of the business.
Cherian takes that argument further. Organisations first need to decide which capabilities are strategic enough to build internally and which are better acquired from outside. Once development begins, training itself cannot be treated as the outcome.
“Every learning journey is also a change management journey,” he says. The stronger approach is to start with the desired business outcome and work backwards towards the knowledge and behaviour changes needed to achieve it.
The conversation also explores another tension familiar to global organisations: how much capability building should be standardised across markets. Kapoor’s distinction is useful. The intent and desired outcome can remain common, while execution responds to local context. What works in India need not be replicated identically in the US simply in the name of consistency.
Perhaps that captures the larger argument of the conversation. Future-readiness is not about predicting every capability an organisation will need. It is about creating people and systems capable of continuing to change when those needs inevitably do.
Watch Kashish Kapoor and John Cherian in conversation with Dr Prajjal Saha in the latest episode of The CHRO Playbook, powered by enParadigm.
