An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
A positive attitude is critical. Negativity is not only contagious, but detrimental to productivity, morale and retention. It’s important to create a space that is open to learning, innovation, taking risks and having fun.
As a part of our series about “How Diversity Can Increase a Company’s Bottom Line”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tulika Mehrotra.
Tulika Mehrotra is a Chicago-based branding and communications expert. With a bachelor’s degree in Finance and a masters in design, Tulika has over 15 years of experience in various sectors and organizations including start-ups working on brand building, digital marketing, and communication. Tulika began with Peterson Technology Partners in 2018 as a consultant, leading brand marketing, communication, and digital strategy efforts across the organization. She manages international teams and all new products and brand launches. In 2021 she was promoted as the first Chief Digital Officer in the company’s 24-year history.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive into the main part of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you share a bit of your “backstory” with us?
Thank you for having me. I started my education with a bachelor’s degree in finance and then went in a completely different direction with a master’s degree in fashion design in Milan, Italy.
This led to a job corporate retail in Manhattan’s fashion district as a buyer for a major retail brand. I caught the entrepreneurial bug during my time in New York and I returned home to Chicago to tap into the emerging online streaming business in home entertainment and content distribution.
Launching and bootstrapping the business was both educational and humbling. While I did everything I could to make it a success, I ultimately decided to shutter the business and move on to join a VC-backed start-up in California. This was a great opportunity because the company was using animation technology to disrupt and elevate content creation. So, I was able to use both my design background and my entrepreneurial experience to drive the company forward.
In my spare time, while living in Los Angeles, I was writing fiction. On a writing research trip to India, I met literary agents and editors in New Delhi and pitched my manuscript. Within a few months, I had an agent and a publishing deal with Penguin India. My first novel debuted the next year and the sequel was released a year after. During this time, I was also writing for magazines like Vogue, Men’s Health, Harper’s Bazaar and India Today covering topics from business and culture to opinion pieces and celebrity interviews as well as radio and television interviews in English and Hindi.
The success of my novels allowed me to reevaluate my career as not only an author but as a business communicator with proven storytelling skills. I started a consulting firm to work with companies that needed help developing their brand voice and digital outreach. Ultimately, one of my client projects, Peterson Tech Partners, became so involved and expansive that I made the decision to dedicate the bulk of my time to that work.
Over the last 4 years, I have been building the creative and marketing team for the company from the ground up. I have had the opportunity to utilize all of my experiences and skills in directing the creation of branded content, developing internal and external communication, supporting diversity hiring initiatives, expanding outreach through conferences and events and leading an international team in various different time zones.
This year I was invited to be their first female executive in 24 years and the first Chief Digital Officer. It’s been an exciting journey and there’s a lot of great work to do as we begin the next phase of the company’s expansion into new businesses and stretch our reach globally.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us the lesson or take away, you took out of that story?
In Los Angeles, I was part of a business development team for a VC-backed startup, and my colleagues were very brilliant engineers, visionary leaders and business advisors. I was often the only woman in the room and I learned to speak up, loudly, to be heard.
The experience was foundational to who I am as a leader today, and I absorbed many lessons that stayed with me and nudged me toward bolder moves in my career. My confidence grew as I learned to stand my ground with the many seasoned business men that surrounded me.
Often, I felt like I had to present a hard shell, but when my dog died the shell cracked. And, the confident persona I presented fell away, revealing how sad I was about this certain loss. To my surprise, our tough-as-nails VC comforted me and rallied our leadership team to get me on a flight within an hour– allowing me to make it home in time to say goodbye to my beloved dog.
This revealed another life lesson — never assume a tough exterior means a lack of empathy. Humanity matters, and kindness is universal. It is always the right move.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you tell us a story about how that was relevant in your own life?
We cannot live in the past; it is gone. Nor can we live in the future; it is forever beyond our grasp. We can live only in the present. If we are unaware of our present actions, we are condemned to repeating the mistakes of the past and can never succeed in attaining our dreams for the future. -SN Goenka
I love this quote because it made me realize how often I veer away from being present. I can get caught up in former slights and future expectations, and this can cause me to repeat habits that don’t serve me.
The week before my first book debuted, I took a ten-day silent meditation course on a scenic hillside outside of Mumbai. Goenka’s philosophy was shared during my time at this retreat, and for ten days I was entirely cut off from the world. Being in retreat insulated me from being involved with the chaos that can come from book launches, so I was not involved in the planning.
Suddenly, it was launch time, and I was knee deep in non-stop promotional activity, which is the opposite of silence. I followed my publisher’s plan without question, and there was no space to think or take things personally. I participated in whatever presented itself from tv interviews, magazine stories, radio spots and signing events. It was a thrilling, extraordinary experience that revealed a world I only imagined.
And then it was over. As suddenly as it started.
Goenka’s quote, and my recent experience with silent meditation, gave me the grace to accept the silence after the tour ended. I returned to normal life, back to my computer to stare at the blank document that was my next manuscript, with no PR team to inflate my ego.
What I learned from that quote, and the time on that quiet hillside, was that everything is ultimately only in the present moment. In leadership, equanimity is an extraordinary tool to ride the ebbs and flows that is business, and I extend this to the culture of my teams… when things are flying high, and especially when they’re not.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?
Vaishali Mathur is a publisher at Penguin Random House India. I met her 11 years ago when she was a commissioning editor who was launching a new line of books for the young professional market. Vaishali is someone whose warmth reaches you before anything else. And, now she’s a powerhouse publisher with many business responsibilities, and yet, she’s personable, kind, generous, and incredibly smart.
Meeting Vaishali was the turning point in my life. In having the privilege to join her roster of authors, I had the opportunity to witness her navigate an artistic industry that is both rigid and traditional. And her taking a chance on me was a lesson in what it meant to take strategic risks and then having to defend those decisions.
I am so grateful for the chance Vaishali took on me over a decade ago and am happy to call her my friend to this day.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
As the first female executive in the company’s history, I can attest to the company’s culture and commitment. Not only to our people, but also to our consultants and clients in keeping their best interests at heart.
When the pandemic started in 2020, most of our clients paused all their projects, stopped hiring and began layoffs. We made a conscious decision to go in the other direction. Due to smart financial planning, we were in a fiscal position to be able to keep all of our consultants on the payroll and, most importantly, made certain not to disrupt access to their medical benefits during a frightening global pandemic.
Amidst global angst, we wanted to offer our team members stability and peace of mind to see everyone through the difficulty. Going against the tide of reactive corporate trends was not a flippant decision, and certainly impacted on our bottom line, but we have been through enough ebbs and flows in our business to know that everything is cyclical. Doing the right thing on a human-level mattered more than the market.
This is an example of Peterson’s company culture. It comes down to our people first. We know that when we take care of our team, the company is stronger.
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
We are thrilled to be expanding our business to PTP Global and PTP Consulting. With new executives joining our team, we are positioned to help our clients win the war for talent by supplying them with sources in nearshore options. The labor market is exhibiting surprising dualities that suggest a talent shortage, an abundance of jobs, inflation and a potential recession on the horizon. All of this is leading employers to look for innovative recruiting solutions to continue their critical technology projects. That’s where Peterson comes in to offer partnership and guidance on sourcing the right candidates for every project.
With regards to our consulting practice, we are very excited to be offering end-to-end solutions for cutting edge projects in AI/ML, cloud computing, dev op, salesforce, AWS and others. It’s a tremendous privilege to work with a team with as much experience as our leadership to be able to bring our clients the best practices in their fields. I am excited about this next chapter for Peterson.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
I believe we are all a work in progress and we are all doing the best that we can with the resources that we have. As a parent, I am very concerned with maternal welfare and was alarmed at inequality in accessing basics for young families at the start of the pandemic. In response, I started a diaper drive to help families pay for necessities.
I would also add that professional success is not a prerequisite for anyone to uplift their environment or community. Over the last four years, I have focused my energy on bringing moms together to help create a connected network where their daily experiences can be shared, normalized, supported and relied upon. I have found tremendous value in meeting other women who had advice for me, who were able to call on me in a difficult moment, or simply, to share a laugh when things were absurd.
Ok. Thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main part of our interview. This may be obvious to you, but it is not intuitive to many people. Can you articulate to our readers five ways that increased diversity can help a company’s bottom line.
Improves problem solving and decision making. One of my former colleagues, an African American woman, was in a leadership rotation at the same time, I was a buyer on the procurement side of a luxury brand. Our work overlapped with supply chain issues and pricing for every season’s product line. My role functioned as the center spoke of a wheel with creative, logistic, financial, sales and business touch points. It was still early in my career, and I did not have the experience to fully understand how to navigate this very diverse business environment, or how to negotiate difficult conversations to get everyone’s buy-in without stepping on someone’s toes.
After becoming fast friends, I observed how she handled integrating into teams with leaders who may have underestimated her or didn’t give credit to her ideas. She taught me how to listen. To be quiet and assess the situation while others danced in circles. She taught me how to be still in stormy workplace dynamics.
In one such situation, we had a product that was being transported by ship from Asia to California with an unsustainable margin on the product. We were at an impasse on how to fix the supply chain problem with the product price that the customer expected. As leadership considered taking a loss on this item for the benefit of the larger brand, my colleague and I were able to dig deeper into the problem. With our varied viewpoints on the business, we found a flaw in the shipping plan that created an expensive and unnecessary redundancy. When we pinpointed the problem, we were able to escalate to leadership who had the authority to reroute the product that would meet deadlines, orders, and exceed the desired margin.
Problem solving and decision making never have linear formulas. What I learned from my friend was to always investigate things deeply, to listen more often than to talk and to enjoy the times when people underestimate you.
Increases productivity. Productivity has been a hot topic of discussion since the pandemic began with the proliferation of remote work. It has given rise to rampant productivity trackers, which border on invasive surveillance, while bosses manage productivity paranoia. Companies have been experiencing collapses in employee engagement and massive turnover. And, while there is no perfect answer for every organization, there is one antidote to the situation. It’s simple but requires honesty and transparency by all parties.
In my experience as a leader, I found that having a diverse team of subject matter experts made it easy for me to trust their judgment, recommendations and work. I do not micromanage, quarterback or negotiate for the best output.
Recently, in launching a new brand to the market in a matter of four weeks, I assigned each member of my team a massive responsibility that would impact the work of each member of the team and the success of the launch if it fell through. I have found that my implicit trust in my individual team members creates a sense of ownership and pride in the work that I cannot manufacture superficially by tracking hours or forcing work conditions on them. The end result of the launch was a perfectly functioning website that connected users to the product that could be used immediately. And it was done in four weeks.
Expands customer base and revenue streams. When I made the decision to focus entirely on my consulting practice, I had to step up my game to better understand why certain brands struggled with their messaging and outreach. I made a choice to focus my energy on small and mid-size companies who were agile enough to pivot quickly on their branding with my aggressive recommendations.
One of the first clients I took on relied entirely on word-of-mouth marketing for nearly a decade. He brought me on initially to better gauge his marketing appetite in the digital space. After my audit, I created a detailed plan and offered an execution strategy that would require a shift in mindset that would bring in new customers and expand the client base but require a full multimedia reset.
The CEO liked it, in theory, but didn’t want to commit to the plan. He went in another direction, bringing on someone in-house to try a more traditional approach.
A year later, I was invited back to the company to reassess how best to fix the stalled situation. I was impressed by the leadership’s commitment to revisit the initiative and accept the project. My perspective as a writer, branding and creative consultant, woman and person of color gave me access to a deeper well of knowledge and experiences to integrate into the plan. In building partnerships with niche groups, expanding the digital footprint beyond the basics, creating emotionally relevant messaging and content for the brand, I was able to work with leadership to expand the customer base and revenue streams that went significantly beyond word of mouth.
Improves employee retention and acquisition. For companies who commit to DEI initiatives beyond the surface level, studies are showing that they are attracting better talent who are willing to stay longer. In this time of choice and high turnover, workers are not looking to bounce around, but they also will not put up with a stressful environment when better options exist.
When companies already have diverse teams, they attract diverse talent. It’s about creating a safe place for people to see themselves and be able to contribute without fear of exclusion.
At Peterson, we are able to attract the best talent because we adhere to this commitment to diversity. We never waver on talent quality and merit, and have found that when we open the doors, top candidates apply in droves. Women. Minorities. Candidates of every age group.
During this time of unpredictability in the job market, our work was noticed by Crain’s Chicago Business who recently honored us as one of the top 100 best companies to work for in Chicago in 2022.
We believe in honoring human relationships and recognizing that talent comes in every profile. The barriers to entry are low with universal access to education and certifications. And, I am proud to say that Peterson is a shining example of taking diversity seriously and being able to build trust with our employees and consultants that leads to retention and loyalty.
Sparks innovation. One of the most fascinating projects that I have worked on was a tool that would disrupt visual storytelling in a way that could mimic painters and hand drawn illustrations to create long form video content. Every Friday, our team gathered for lunch in our common room and put on an animated film for everyone to watch together. It was a form of story time for grown-ups where the team could study what industry leaders were putting out. It was also a time of connection, quiet contemplation and creative recharge. We had a diverse team of PhDs, graphic designers, production managers, coders, the business team and the executives. The time we spent together often resulted in lively conversation and discussion on strategies that we could try.
This ‘story time’ allowed everyone to come together without hierarchy or pressure and with it came creative output for company growth. One of the best ideas to come out of these sessions was the decision to move forward with an app that users could utilize on their smartphones. Giving this very advanced tool to everyone in the palm of their hand became a major initiative for the company as a whole.
What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees to thrive?
The most important thing in work today is purpose. For employees to thrive, they have to be excited about the work they are participating in, and a paycheck alone is not enough incentive for employees to invest their time with a company.
A positive attitude is critical. Negativity is not only contagious, but detrimental to productivity, morale and retention. It’s important to create a space that is open to learning, innovation, taking risks and having fun.
Encourage stretch projects where employees can pursue exciting ideas or initiatives while maintaining their performance in the current role. This not only offers an opportunity for your employees to learn new skills, but also feel more in control of their goals.
When I have a high performer on my team, I make it a regular practice to appreciate their work personally. I am open, honest and generous with my feedback when a team member delivers above and beyond expectations. Withholding praise is a terrible practice. It’s important for employees to be recognized for their good work and for it to be done regularly.
Finally, I would say the most important thing in creating an environment for your employees to thrive comes down to one simple thing; trust. I do not believe in micromanaging or hovering over my team. I do not quarterback. I have high expectations, and I offer full autonomy for my team to get their work done on their terms. I have learned that trusting my team is a far more productive strategy than trying to manage every detail myself. It is also much more rewarding to work with a team that consistently delivers because you give them the space to do their work without interference.
What advice would you give to other business leaders about how to manage a large team?
There are basic frameworks that I believe are universally transferable. I have managed teams in different time zones internationally, and of varying sizes, and found that success comes from the ability to pivot and be flexible. With larger teams, it’s critical to hire and nurture the best managers. The teams themselves need to have a self-starting, self-reliant mindset and culture in order to deliver without the bottleneck of your attention. I trust my team to have the subject matter expertise to make the best decisions. I remind them regularly that I will not have all the answers, but I promise I will have all the questions. Additionally, goals have to be clearly established with timelines, deadlines and vision right at the onset. Allowing autonomy on a team only works with strong managers and precise parameters on the end game.
Every day, I am constantly switching gears between a dozen high priority initiatives and projects that are ongoing at the same time. Clear communication is vital in my ability to manage larger teams and external partners. I would also recommend that no matter how large the team becomes, that a leader should always remain accessible and available to everyone. It benefits no one if a team member is not able to approach their managers with a fantastic new idea or raise the flag on an obstacle because they’re just not comfortable. It’s not about the person leading the charge, it’s about the open and inclusive culture that is perpetuated by that leader to help drive success.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this 🙂
It would be a joy to sit down with Bozoma Saint John. Her marketing achievements speak for themselves, but I also love the way she continually reinvents her career and personal brand.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I am quite active on Linked in and often share articles and commentary on trending news.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tulika/
Thank you for these excellent insights. We wish you continued success in your great work.
Thank you for sharing my insights.
Tulika Mehrotra On How Diversity Can Increase a Company’s Bottom Line was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
