i have this opportunity with my team to bring together people to give them a platform to connect with one of the most influential powerful cultural industries that touches people all over the place and as an industry we have a responsibility and an opportunity
to really change the world [Music] hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the world thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen learn and grow now today i get to host a very special episode i'm seated
in oxford london at the soho farmhouse if you haven't been here before it's a magical venue and especially what i'm here for is even more incredible i've been invited to speak at the voices conference for the business of fashion and beyond that i get to sit down with
the founder the ceo and the editor-in-chief of the business of fashion imran ahmed himself imran thank you so much first of all for organizing such a beautiful event and for being here today on the podcast thank you the organization of the event
comes down to my brilliant team i'm sure you've been meeting them in all of the little nooks and crannies around absolutely what we call our campus but we absolutely love putting this event together especially this year because it's been two years since we've done
voices and we we think of it as like the best way to bring our team together because we face so many challenges in making voices happen you know there's a lot of people to manage a lot of things to imagine this year of all years we have something at bof called the
voices test which is like resilience in the face of adversity and rapid changes and you know 24 hours before we were arriving here this year they changed all the covid restrictions so we had to adapt and be agile and like my team is just
awesome so it's all because of them yeah well what's even more special is everyone's really positive too so they're doing all this hard work but whenever they're with you or me or with a individual at the conference and the event they've all been just so wonderful
so congratulations to you and the team i want to start off because we are at voices and i have been absolutely blown away by every speaker on stage since day one uh the diversity of conversation the depth of storytelling you know when i was first invited and
you hear about the business of fashion you're thinking oh well everyone's going to be a fashion speaker and then you're like no we're talking about mushrooms we're talking about root studios which is incredibly looking at fashion from a completely different
angle we're talking about activism tell us about where the idea for voices came from and what you wanted it to be when it first started and how it's evolved yeah i think you know like most industries there were already a series of other industry
conferences um and you know at bof whenever we do something new we want to do it differently we want to add something to what's already there we wanted it to be disruptive because my observation was that you know most of the fashion events that
we have are just fashion people and therefore you have fashion people talking to fashion people about fashion which is a bit of an echo chamber right and those kinds of conversations are absolutely important and they happen at fashion week and they happen in all
sorts of you know you know industry events but fashion doesn't live in a bubble it doesn't exist outside you know the intersections of other things that are going on in the world and especially now amid you know a once-in-a-generation you know public health crisis
um you know economic dislocation um heightening global inequality a global reckoning around inclusion racial equity diversity you know we are connected to everything that's going on in the world so our idea was we need to bring other voices into the room
and so it is a conference about fashion in some ways because we touch on all those topics but we wanted to pierce that echo chamber we wanted to bring other people inside the industry and help them kind of open open the eyes of the industry and also
to help people understand the power of fashion so we have all these other people that come inside and and kind of share their time and their expertise with us and one of the things they always say to me when they leave is like this is such
a powerful industry it's such a cultural force in the world and fashion has the power to change things so we set up voices originally with that vision that idea that we wanted to disrupt the existing trade conferences and we don't call it a conference we call it a gathering
and we wanted to bring other people in and just create the kind of conversations that weren't happening enough and what happens is everyone the non-fashion people go away and they've learned so much about the industry and they've met all these people and the
fashion people come and they've also met the non-fashion people and it just creates this incredible energy well imran today you're uh you know you're you're a fashionable gentleman uh you're always in the world of fashion but i want to go back to what imran was like
growing up i want to hear about what your passions were what your interests were what you were like as a teenager you know what is it that you thought you were going to go out to do what were your aspirations as a teenager i think my aspirations as a teenager
were in a way largely defined by what other people expected of me i grew up in canada in calgary my parents moved from kenya to calgary in the middle of the cold winter in 1974 in december um they were both the first in their respective families to go to
university wow and my mom was already pregnant and i guess they made a decision that they just wanted me to have the best life and my parents you know even before i was born i think they were already thinking about the future they wanted for me
and as immigrants to a new country with you know 500 and great education they really believed in the power of education and they came to canada with a view to kind of setting up themselves for a new life and you know that was a massive risk and change
for them wow um and four months later i was born so they moved from kenya to calgary and i think the day i was born someone told me this kid will go to harvard one day and i was named imran after imran khan because my dad was a cricket player
and so i think growing up i always felt like these expectations you know and i didn't turn out to be athletically gifted in any way um but i was always driven towards a specific path you know many immigrant families when they first moved to the west you know it's been
doctor or lawyer or engineer um and i think when i was a teenager i felt like those were the only options so at school i was i was really really nerdy i used to get up at four or five in the morning to do my homework or to study or to prepare
for tests you know my mom sometimes used to wake up in the morning um to quiz me and to work with me she was she was a teacher um my father was an architect and you know they really just invested in my education and i guess i felt this like pressure or expectation that i had to go
down one of these paths in the evenings however i was a really creative kid and i started um my first foray into the performing arts was as a singer it's i was in a boys choir from the age of 89 yeah all boys choir and we literally sang like this
um and then i got into public speaking into drama into musical theater and so my days were really really nerdy and academic and my evenings were filled with extracurricular activities that were rich with creativity but when it came to making decisions about my education
[Music] i mean maybe i kind of knew that there wasn't really an opportunity for me and the performing arts you know as a very small brown person like that you know there weren't roles for me and there weren't opportunities for me you know getting
cast in things was very very hard you know i was always cast as like the impish mischievous puck or mad hatter you know in in like plays and stuff but like to have a real career in the performing arts was like just a risk that i couldn't afford to take
honestly so um i was really interested in business and entrepreneurship and so in a conversation with my father i remember we said well what i should study business so i studied i moved to montreal when i was 18 years old and i studied at mcgill university and i
studied for a bachelor of commerce and you know i loved i loved my time at mcgill in part because it was this global university there were people from all over the world and i'd spent my first 18 years only in calgary you know and we didn't travel that much
internationally we did lots of road trips in north america but um mcgill was my first time being really immersed in a truly international global environment and it found it so enriching um and montreal as a city was hugely inspiring to me it's a bilingual city
uh and i really wanted to learn french um i you know i've been learning french and since like elementary school because in canada you get trained in english and french but i didn't really speak french so being in montreal gave me this opportunity to immerse myself in one of
the worlds like truly bilingual cities where the you know the locals can switch from one language to another like this and i remember sitting in a mall one day in the food court and there were these two women sitting next to me and they were going back and forth uh in a
conversation and quoting they were speaking in english and quoting in french and you know i just i was like i want to be able to do that so when it came time to graduation i actually decided to stay in montreal i worked in management consulting in a
fully bilingual environment all my friends left it was um great to be still in montreal but it was obviously not the same when all my college friends had left and gone to like new york and paris and london and toronto and other places so after a
couple of years my dream was to work in europe and i asked uh my company for a transfer to europe said i want to live in paris or london this is that mckinsey right this was at deloitte okay fine uh i worked at a small strategy consulting group that they used
to own called braxton associates that's right and they said well you're 22 years old like we only transfer people if they have unique skills that you can't find in london and you know you're way too young so at that point i was thinking about
applying for business school and you know i managed to get an internship slash fellowship with a microcredit organization in bangladesh and i started making plans to move to bangladesh and actually the the day i was planning to quit the managing director of the office
bob leech was his name he came up to my office which was very unusual because i would usually go down to his office and he said imran um i found a way to move you to london and you know it turned out that there was someone in the london office who
wanted to move to north america and we were just going to swap it was the first time in my life i faced a real professional dilemma i had kind of convinced myself that going to work in bangladesh was going to be really enriching it was going to be great for my business school
application because it would show a different you know professional experience but i'd always wanted to live in london and by this point my family my parents had moved back to kenya and so i'd been traveling through london to visit them in nairobi and
you know i'd spend like three or four days in london you know as stop-offs on the way and there's something about the city that i just i remember first time i was like driving down palm all in london i was in the back of the cab and i was like oh my god
yeah you know it's like one of these things you only see on tv and i called one of my professors professor anne hale and i told her i i don't know what to do like i feel like it's you know i could go to bangladesh or i could go to london and she said imran
go where your heart is telling you to go you have the rest of your career to give back because i really wanted to go you know and do this you know service yeah in bangladesh so you have the rest of your life to do that if your instinct if your heart is
telling you to go to london just go to london and so i slept on it and i was like agonizing over this decision and i woke up one morning and professor hale was right she said you know i just my heart was saying go to london so that's that's how i ended up that's amazing and
you've you just told me before we went live you've been living in london for 20 years now yeah so i first moved here in 1999 yeah and i ended up staying here for a year uh with deloitte and it was amazing because i got to work in switzerland and
norway and holland and all over the place all these countries i'd never been to but i was also applying for business school and i managed to get into business school about six or seven months after i moved to london and i'd been traveling
so much that i actually didn't end up spending much time in london and at that point i quit my job and started planning to go to business school so um yeah that was that was was here and then after business school i moved back yeah what what do you think were the biggest
skills or gifts you took away from business school i think that there's a lot of conversation today about education higher education graduations uh postgraduate but as someone who actually went to business school what were the things that you felt you really took
away in terms of skills that you wouldn't have got anywhere else you know honestly it really wasn't about the skills i had studied business in undergrad and you know um hbs has a really different way of teaching they have a case study method you know i
studied from textbooks in undergrad and you know hbs was offering me a different way to study business and it was great you know don't get me wrong you know there were elements of it that were you know different and i learned stuff but honestly
business school is not for me it wasn't about the classroom it was about again the people you know and i i found it really hard there at first you know it's a really intense place you know if you do the myers-briggs test familiar with it yes very familiar and
you know i think like 70 of the you know incoming class the year i started were entjs the so-called natural-born leaders so you have a lot of like really similar driven people sitting in a classroom every day it creates you know it creates in some ways a very
interesting positive energy to drive you to be the best you can be but it's also in some ways it's very limiting and um you know i found at times it was really hard and you know while i was there um 9 11 happened and as a as a muslim you know it was
a really eye-opening experience because you know you know hbs is like a community you know it's a community of people and you know it happened in september obviously and i was in my second year and i remember thinking about all of the first years i had just arrived from
algeria or egypt or saudi arabia you know muslims from all over the world and they were in the u.s you know for the you know the first three or four weeks of their business school career and this like horrible tragedy has happened and so
a bunch of us gathered all the muslims on campus together um to just say you know like this is a really supportive community and by that point there had already been some instances of extreme islamophobia on campus you know people were saying really misjudged
ill-informed ignorant hateful things and you know you have to remember it was a really it's a really charged environment it was really emotional time and so of course like everyone was feeling you know but they were it was h harvard business school there were so many
connections of people in those classrooms professors teaching in those classrooms and that and the trade world trade center and so like of course it was very emotional situation but you know for those of us who were muslim it was also
really really difficult because there was some really really unfortunate things that were said and you know i realized and we said to the incoming class that our responsibility is to educate people you know and you know there's one moment uh i was in a classroom and
we were taking this class called the moral leader and every week we would have a conversation about a significant moral dilemma faced by a protagonist in a you know fictional book or a situation that happened in the world uh and that the professor
on this particular monday you know a week or so after the terrorist attacks decided to turn the focus into the current situation and what that unleashed in the classroom was you know really hateful things you know and one person in the classroom said you
know my friend who's in my section i'm worried he's going to blow up the school another person down the road from me was um said you know islam is a religion that teaches every um teaches people to kill jews and i i could like i could feel myself really shaking because
my instinct i got up and i just left you know and i remembered that conversation i had with that incoming class i was in the hallway and i left and i was like shaking so i went back into the classroom and everyone's hands were up and i realized i was the only muslim
person in that whole class so i raised my hand and i just you know i just spoke really from the heart i can't remember exactly what i said but you know i just felt like it was my responsibility to to talk and so i came to this whole story just to say that you know
even at a place like harvard business school where you have these like highly educated people really well traveled worldly you know ultimately the experiences about the community people you're with and after i spoke the whole class erupted into applause
you know and for the rest of the day you know people were just showing up at my house that i share with my classmates thought mates just to come and like it was very supportive in the end but you know this you know business school was just really
hard you know it's not you know it's not easy i i treasure the people that were there that were you know there to support me and to this day you know my friends from university and my friends from hbs they're my community that you know that hold me up
that push me um and so it's really not about the classroom it's about you know the community yeah and thank you so much for opening up about that and sharing that because as you were saying it i can only imagine how hard that is to reconcile
internally not just the classroom or not just the conversations or the moral leader discussion but to deal with it internally while you're in a place like that you know i've never i've never told that story before because i think one of the things that happens
in our career so like yeah i went off to after business school i joined mckinsey in london i went back and i think one of the things that i've realized over these last 18 months or so since we were all locked down is that i've just internalized a lot of this
i've never really understood how it has you know impacted me and one of the commitments i made to myself over these last months is that you know i just need to be more open about it because these these moments like when you look back in your life there's these certain
defining moments that you you're changed and that moment that i just talked to you about like that was the moment that really shifted me you know um but i've never talked about it what do you think changed about you behavior-wise or attitude wise or
approach-wise from that day what did you do internally now you as as you're saying you hold on to it it feels like something you didn't share but how did you process it or did you not process it at all until more recently i mean i think it wasn't a moment of processing
it's been years but really i think a lot of that processing has happened in the most recent period because you know i'm sitting at home and like everybody i was reflecting on my purpose you know my why am i here like what am i doing why am i working so hard and what am i
working towards and one of the things that's really happened in my role here at the business of fashion is i've found myself in a position of influence i found myself in a public position and i've realized that as a gay person as a muslim person
as a brown person as a canadian with east african roots and indian heritage there's actually a lot of people who see themselves or part of themselves in me and there's not that many of us in the fashion industry certainly not you know in a in a position that i'm so
privileged to have now so i've just been thinking a lot more about well what am i gonna do with this position and that's really a lot about what voices is for you know that's why we're here because i have this opportunity with my team
to bring together people to give them a platform to connect with one of the most influential powerful cultural industries that touches people all over the place and as an industry we have a responsibility and an opportunity to really change the world you know fashion imagery spreads
everywhere now with social media you know fashion used to be this like really secretive little world all everything was kind of contained and as an outsider you know with a management consulting background um to come into this industry and be able
to learn from everybody and you know you know all the interviews i've done all over the over the years like every person i've met has taught me something and now i have an ability to use all of that and connect that with my curiosity and
my interest in that you know being part of a global community you know the one that i had at mcgill the one i had at hbs and the one that we've built here at bof like all of these things are threads um through my life and so the processing has happened over a very
long period of time but i think in the last 12 months or so it's really become much more sharpened and that's the session that you know we're going to have this this afternoon with you is like everyone's going to be talking about how their purpose
has been either shifted or sharpened or focused because of this period that we've lived through yeah absolutely thank you again for sharing that it's it's truly beautiful being drawn into your personal experience and i love that you described it as a thread
because it just shows how interconnected you feel it all is often people feel their life is like a series of pivots and you've had a lot of pivots in your life but you don't see them as pivots you're seeing them as a thread i wonder
when you do make the transition from successful mckinsey consultant to starting the business of fashion being the authoritative voice in the industry tell us about what gave you the courage again i feel like you're just one of these people that's constantly had and i
have a lot of these questions from my community my audience i have questions like this from private clients i work with and people that i've coached in the past a lot of people struggle with transition so whether it was your transition uh to mcgill your transition
to london instead of bangladesh then london to hbs then hbs to mckinsey the mckinsey you know there's so many transitions here and then you take the biggest one which seems to be where you're feeling your purpose is being fulfilled tell us about what gave you the courage
to make that transition from a phenomenal career which most people would dream to have at a place like mckinsey but then to be able to make that i find that really fascinating it's interesting to use the word courage because it i didn't feel courageous i felt
i just i was really unhappy and without denigrating mckinsey because mckinsey is an incredible institution with you know deeply held values it's flawed like every organization but walking into those doors every day i felt like i was leaving a lot of myself
at home and you know it goes without saying i was leaving all my creative side at home you know my powerpoint slides they were very pretty that was my outlet yeah but there was some professional feedback that you know mckinsey loves feedback
i get feedback after every meeting you get feedback after every project you get feedback every six months and in some ways that's really helpful but some of the feedback i was getting was basically like they said i didn't have gravitas i've been thinking about this a lot
recently they said well you don't have gray hair so you need to like be less expressive i use my hands a lot i'm a very expressive person yeah animated experience yeah that's my theater side coming out yeah and then one day someone said to me
wouldn't you feel more comfortable if you were a tie and a blue shirt and there was one meeting i was in and everyone was it was all men who had gone to oxford or cambridge and they they were all wearing checked shirts and they they realized that the checks on their shirts
were the same were kind of the size of the checks on their shirt were commensurate with their tenure at mckinsey and they all got up in a row and they lined themselves up and i was sitting down at the table and i've been thinking about that moment
and if that's not a moment of uttering because i was wearing an orange shirt i was a brown gay muslim guy at mckinsey and these were all like straight white men and basically what i've learned over the last few months what i've realized it was very coded language
that was being given to me to tell me to not be myself and i know that now but back then all i was feeling was pain and so i wrote them a memo and i asked for a sabbatical and someone came up to me in the new delhi airport and he came up to me and i was i was on
my way to bangladesh actually to go visit a friend of mine who was on that same program that i i was thinking about doing many years back and he came up to me and he said i've been observing you i have some things to tell you about your life
and i thought it was one of those quacks right i was like i don't have any money i'm leaving my rupees are gone he said no i don't want your money just sit down with me for five minutes and he said to me i want to talk to you and a few minutes
later he said you're not listening to me so yes i am so he took a he took a piece of paper and he wrote something down crumpled it up and he put it into my hand he said hold this in your hand he said i want you to tell me your favorite color i was like i don't have a favorite color
i was in such a negative place i said i don't have a favorite color but mckenzie told me to wear blue shirts blue he said what's your favorite flower i'm not really a flower person or i wasn't back then and my cousin's wife had calla lilies in
her bouquet so i said lily and then he wrote down my name and he put uh one two three four five over the letters of my name and he said what's your favorite number and i picked number three because right in the middle and i like symmetry he said open your hand
i open my hand and the little paper that he'd given me five minutes earlier said blue lily three and he said now will you listen to me and i spent an hour talking to that man he said a lot of really crazy things but the one thing he said to me
was you need to practice meditation and you know in my culture i'm in his smiley muslim we practice something called bandagi and my grandfather used to wake up every day at four in the morning and he used to practice bandigi and whenever i tried to to practice meditation
i could never do that but it stuck with me and then through a conversation with one friend and then another friend everything pushed me towards something called vipassana meditation so i wrote this memo to mckinsey explaining that i needed a sabbatical i
was feeling deeply unhappy i wasn't sure i wanted a career in the firm and i wasn't going to be able to think about this properly if i was working as hard as i was working everything at mckinsey was done with memos so i had to make a business case
for why they wanted me to take this time off and they gave me the time off and i found myself in south africa doing vipassana meditation which is 10 days of silence and that's when everything changed because i learned how to meditate and i
wa i mean a whole other conversation that we can have one day is that experience because it's a but i flew from cape town to nairobi and i sat down with my parents and i said i have done everything you thought i should do and you've given me this amazing education and you've
given me everything you could possibly give me but i'm so unhappy i need to try something different and they were really worried about me because obviously i was this like overachieving kid and all of a sudden i was in you know south africa in the middle of a
forest meditating i mean they were worried that i was going to turn up in saffron robes or something and like and i know you were a monk so you i did that yeah um and they said okay we just want you to be happy yeah and that's when everything switched and
one of the realizations i had as part of that whole sabbatical i started talking to people in fashion and music and filming i wanted to work in a creative industry [Music] and you know when i was a young young young person i used to watch this television show
called fashion file which was hosted by this man named tim blanks it was on every saturday and i just there's something about that show that i always was so curious about yeah because tim used to be in milan in paris and london all
these places all these like interesting people and like there was a business but it was also creative and so i was like i just i feel like drawn to this industry and so a lot of time when young people say like how do you know what you're passionate about i always say like
what were you what were you drawn to when you were a child [Music] before anyone told you what your past should be before you understood the expectations of society or um other pressures yeah what was what were like it's inexplicable what we're drawn to as
children because it's purely intuition and so um i quit my job at mckinsey and that's what my journey into the fashion industry began emerald that's spectacular honestly that is uh so beautifully shared and there's so many parts of it that i want
to deep dive on i also want to be respectful of your time so it is exactly the time that we had promised to finish and i'm gonna ask you to promise me that we can do a part two um another time because i feel like we just framed who you are and how you got
there but i want people to hear about what it happens after that because we're at a really beautiful space so i just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking out the time for opening up for being so vulnerable with our community you know
both of us had i never have any idea when i'm about to do one of these what i'm about to learn and i can honestly say that you know everything you've shared with me today not only has moved me but i know it's going to move my community so i want to thank you
appreciate you but i know that you've got a busy schedule so i'm going to be respectful of your time thank you and we're going to find another time to complete the conversation let's do that um even after i'm back and we'll schedule it we'll make it happen
yeah it's it was really special thank you jay and thank you for no one's really asked me those questions before you know like when you're when you get in a position like this what sometimes happens is like the media creates this narrative around who you are
and what i've realized over the last couple of years is there's a real gap in the way the media has created the story of this overnight success and you know all the stuff and you know fashion and yeah just the names as well like mckinsey the
business oh yeah of course everyone yes you know everyone thinks oh it must have been an absolute dream not it has been a dream yeah but it's a you know dreams come dreams like the experience that i've had they come with a lot of challenge and struggle and you know
it's hard you know it's really hard so i'm really grateful that you um i didn't know what we're going to talk about either no i know i just sat down and i had no idea what we're going to discuss but i wasn't yeah thank you that was beautiful thank
you if you want even more videos just like this one make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here i'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book think like a monk from think like a monkbook.com check below in the description to make sure you order today