Weinberg College
of Arts & Sciences

Waldron Career Conversation with Kian Gohar '98: Founder and CEO of Geo-Lab and Best-Selling Author

This episode of the Weinberg in the World Podcast features a conversation with Kian Gohar ‘98, who is currently the Founder and CEO of Geo-Lab and a best-selling author of “Competing in the New World of Work” after Graduating from Northwestern with Majors in History and Political Science.

Kian shares stories about a Great Teacher, Working During College, Choir, Learning Skills, His First Job After Graduating, Participating in Fellowships, Deciding Between Different Post-Grad Options, Working at a Development Firm, His Book, Working During the Pandemic, Focusing on Key Tasks, and more!

00:45: Studies and Student Experience at Northwestern
3:30: Skills Learned from Extracurriculars
5:55: First Job After Graduation
8:05: Experience With Fellowships
11:30: Working at Geo-Lab
14:15: The Hybrid World of Work
17:45: How to Thrive in a World of Uncertainty
21:35: Teaching, Training, and Writing
27:00: Future Challenges and Goals
28:30: Networking

Cassie Petoskey:
Welcome to the Weinberg in the World podcast, where we bring you stories of interdisciplinary thinking in today's complex world. This episode is brought to you by the Waldron Student Alumni Connections Program, a resource in Weinberg College where we help current students explore career options through making connections with alumni.
Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Kian Gohar. Kian graduated from Weinberg College in 1998 with majors in history and political science. He's now the founder and CEO of Geolab, an innovation research and leadership development firm in addition to a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Competing in the New World of Work. Thanks so much for being here with us today, Kian.

Kian Gohar:
It's an honor to be here.

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah. We're so excited to hear a little bit more about the work you're doing today in your recent book but we want to start with your Northwestern student experience. And here, what were some of the impactful classes, internships, extracurriculars, that helped you figure out what you might want to do after graduation?

Kian Gohar:
Well, I had a tremendous education at Northwestern from, I studied history and political science. I did a senior honors dissertation in political science and academically, I learned so much but I got to marry that with so many internship opportunities in downtown Chicago. The most impactful memory I have from my academic experience at Northwestern was I took this series of classes with a history professor called Colonial America History, and it was around 17th century, 18th century America and I really had to be honest with you, very little interest in that space when the teacher was Professor Tim Green, and he changed my life on how I should be thinking about the future and he taught me how to write critically. And it was the most impactful academic experience I had at Northwestern. And he became a mentor to me after those classes and we are still in touch almost 25 years later.
And so, deeply grateful for that experience to really get to know some of the world's leading faculty in that field and be mentored by them. At the same time, I had this opportunity, like I mentioned, to have internships in downtown Chicago which was really amazing because I was really interested in the intersection of politics and history and international relations. So I worked briefly at a think thing called the National Strategy Forum, and at the same time I was working full time as a student. I was working at the Cheesecake Factory in Old Orchard and it really gave me a perspective of living and working in the real world outside the Northwestern bubble which was amazing. And so, I worked full time throughout those four years to help make ends meet. And my time on campus was limited in terms of extracurriculars but the thing that was most meaningful to me was I was in choir for the first couple years of college and I decided I wanted to start a guy's acapella group at Northwestern. And at the time, there wasn't any.
And so me along with a friend of mine, we started a group called Asterisk and it was an eight men acapella group. And I'm really proud to say that 25 years later, Asterisk is still institution of Northwestern. It's going still very strong and I never expected a small little extracurricular activity that I started to really become an institution of Northwestern, and that gives me really tremendous joy.

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah, absolutely. That's amazing. You must have started something really great for it to still be going so well and just to dive into that experience, some of those experiences, cheesecake factory, starting the acapella group, what were some of the skills you picked up from those extracurriculars that you may not have known at the time but have been so valuable to you in your career?

Kian Gohar:
So I mentioned writing and critical thinking was really valuable from an academic perspective but from an extracurricular perspective, starting that acapella group was my first entrepreneurial experience. And ever since then, I've been starting businesses and starting new projects and initiatives and it just takes having a vision and rolling up your sleeves and putting one foot in front of the other and really trying to start something new. So I've been doing that ever since I started that acapella group in college. The other thing that was really impactful for me which was really unexpected in my career was being a server at the Cheesecake Factory. Obviously you have to have good interpersonal relationships and skills but you're also selling a lot and you're helping tell a potential client what product they want to have and you have to sell it. And honestly, I was a shy college kid. I was very studious academic, and so I wasn't necessarily the most successful server initially because I didn't know how to sell and connect with my clients.
That was a really valuable experience for me and to really learn how to sell, how to communicate, how to come out of my shell and all those are so practical when you are in the world of business because the world of business isn't just about sales for salespeople, you have to sell yourself all the time. Whether you're selling yourself into a new job, whether you're selling yourself into a partnership or whether you're selling yourself into a new client. And so, that skillset of learning how to communicate with clients in the real world outside of academia, I learned that as a waiter at the Cheesecake Factory and I'm really grateful for that. It was hard because I was working 40, 50 hours a week to make ends meet but that's what it required and I'm really grateful for it and I'll never forget it.

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate that perspective and how hard it is at the time but hearing that it's so valuable in so many different ways now today, I think will give students a different perspective on different activities they are a part of or jobs that they have that may not seem like the typical "resume builder", if you will, but are still so valuable in the skills you need to succeed. And speaking of success, I want to jump into your career path after graduation and hear a little bit more about what you did right after school. What was your first job post-graduation? You had these jobs and entrepreneurial spirit while you were in school, what was your first job post-graduation and was it a good fit? How did you plan your career from there?

Kian Gohar:
Well, I must submit that I was not the most career savvy person coming out of college because I graduated without a job and I had a history degree and political science degree, and I couldn't figure out exactly what to do with it at the time. And so for the first few months after college, I continued working at the Cheesecake Factory while I was looking for jobs and this is going to date me, but at the time, was looking for jobs in newspaper advertisements. And so, you would get the advertisements in the physical newspaper, you'd go down it and then you'd send resumes and that's how things were done in 1998 before the internet really popularized job search. And so, I worked at the Cheesecake Factory for quite a few months actually until I was able to find something. And my first job after I did get something was with a boutique consulting firm down in Chicago, MZA, Margret Zona Associates.
And it was a boutique political risk consulting firm where we were advising large clients on political risk in emerging markets. So I really got to marry my experience of political science as an academic degree along with my ability to write that I've learned through so many history classes and analyze what was happening in emerging markets and help clients be better prepared for those situation. And it was really the first experience I had in the business world because I never had any interest in the business world. And so, it gave me a great perspective on how the world of politics impacts the world of markets and the world of business. And so, that led me to think, "Wow, I really want to better understand how the business world works." So I went on and got a degree in international relations and master's degree from the London School of Economics and then later on an MBA from Harvard.
But that first job after Northwestern really opened my eyes to the world of business, and that was really impactful. And then it gave me an opportunity to think about how it can go abroad and work internationally and really have a very rich career of experiences.

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah, so interesting. I know in previous conversations you had mentioned to me you also took part in a fellowship based on the recommendation from some mentors or folks at Northwestern. Can you tell us a little bit more about that experience and how that fit in?

Kian Gohar:
So I mentioned to you that my history advisor, Tim Green changed my life and he really encouraged me to study abroad in England. I won an international scholarship to study at the London School of Economics and that was just so incredibly eyeopening. And through his continued mentorship and also with the Office of Fellowship at Northwestern, I applied for the Henry Lu Fellowship and I won the competition to be one of 18 Americans to go spend a year living in Asia. And the idea is to have a professional experience early in your career so that when you come back to America and at some point mid-career or later career, you are working in America with Asia on your mind. And so, I had; this is four years after I'd finished Northwestern; gone a master's degree, and I was living in the UK at this time and working in my next job which was in venture capital. And I won the Lu fellowship to move to Asia.
And so I went to Shanghai for a year and I worked for the first ever Chinese venture capital firm, New Margin Ventures, and I was the only person in the office who was not Chinese speaking and very few people spoke English. And so it was a deep dive cultural experience of learning Mandarin Chinese in a professional context and really being at a time in history where China was growing so rapidly and so many opportunities. And it was a mind opening experience for me to feel like an outsider in a country that I had never been in. And that was a great skillset for helping me to feel resilience and to overcome obstacles and overcome challenges. And so, the Lu fellowship in China really was extraordinary, and I would not have done that had I not been encouraged to do that by my history professor and the Office of Fellowships which was so incredibly supportive in that experience. And I'm still deeply grateful for it and I'm very involved in the foundation now.

Cassie Petoskey:
That's awesome. That's amazing. And you said that was four years after you had graduated?

Kian Gohar:
It was four years after I graduated, yeah. I had stayed in touch with the Office of Fellowships because I had won already international competition to go to the UK and they had just continued to be in touch. And when I thought about next opportunities, when I won the Lu Foundation Fellowship, I also had applied to business school and I had gotten accepted to Harvard for my MBA. I decided to turn down Harvard to go to China on a Lu fellowship. And everybody thought I was crazy saying that who turns out going to Harvard MBA? And actually I thought about it and I said, "Harvard will always be there but what an incredible once in a lifetime experience to deal to China and experience that culture." I applied the following year to Harvard and got in again. I didn't lose anything. It was just an incredible experience.

Cassie Petoskey:
That's amazing. And to have that perspective of evaluating which opportunity is going to be most valuable to me right now and what's the most unique and really great to hear that it worked out the way it did in your path. And I know there's many steps between there and now but I'd love to hear a little bit more about the work you are doing now, and if you can share a little bit about the evolution of how you got here, that'd be great. But the work you're doing at Geolab sounds really interesting and would love to share more with students?

Kian Gohar:
So I started Geolab as a leadership development and innovation strategy firm about 10 years ago. And what we do is we help companies and their leadership teams better understand the future. Whether that means advances in technology or whether that means advances in how we work. And so, we curate workshops, we curate content, we help leadership teams really better understand how to become more affected using different strategies. Whether it again, technology innovation or even innovations in how we work. Our work really is designed to inspire and move people to action at the leadership levels of major companies. I started this firm because I was just really passionate in this space of human capital and how we can help really make better leaders and how they can better tap into the trends that were coming out of the world. And so before starting Geolab, I was an executive director at the XPRIZE Foundation which is a technology nonprofit in Los Angeles which does incredible work to try to solve some of the world's biggest challenges using technology moonshots.
I was on the faculty of Singularity University in Silicon Valley for many years, and actually what I didn't mention was that when I was in Shanghai on my Lu fellowship year, I was working at China's first venture capital firm but I also had a joint appointment, the China Europe International Business School where at the age of 25, I was the youngest adjunct faculty member and I started a course on social entrepreneurship and I started teaching and I realized teaching was so incredibly hard. It was the hardest work I'd ever done and I discovered that I had a passion for helping people learn. And so, over the course of many years since that experience in China, I realized that my passion is really helping open people's aperture to what's possible. And so that led to starting my firm 10 years ago and all the work we've done since then in terms of helping organizations across the world better understand how to become better leaders. And our focus right now really is on this concept of hybrid leadership and hybrid management.
Obviously we are in a post pandemic context where some offices are remote, some companies are virtual, some companies are in person, and sometimes there's a hybrid of the two. And there is a very unique perspective on how do you lead in a hybrid methodology and your workforce. And so, our work right now helps companies better understand what it means to have hybrid leadership and hybrid management practices.

Cassie Petoskey:
Super interesting. And this is just such a great segue into your book, Competing in the New World of Work. And I'd love to dive into some of these topics. Thinking of it from a student lens, our students who are entering this hybrid world of work, can you share a little bit more about your book and how the topics might support current students?

Kian Gohar:
Yeah. So I think the real lessons of the book or the subtitle of the book is how radical adaptability separates the best from the rest. And during the last two years of the pandemic, we researched and interviewed over 2000 executive teams across the world to better understand what allowed them to thrive in a world of uncertainty. And we pattern match it into four leadership skills and I think anybody can learn those four leadership skills. And I think students, they get better at these, the more advanced opportunities they'll have earlier in their career. And these four leadership skills are collaboration and inclusion. So how do you maximize collaboration when you're not always working in the same place? Second one is agility, how do you run experiments quickly to better understand whether a project is working or not? The third one is resilience, how do you not only have individual resilience but how do you make sure that your team is resilient so that you guys are crossing the finish line together? And the fourth one is foresight, how do you think about looking into the future and tapping into those trends?
And so I think from a student perspective, if you can learn to master these four skillset, it will make you radically adaptable. And regardless of what the future brings, regardless of what economy does or what job changes bring, knocking on your door, you'll be able to thrive and be resilient regardless of what the future hold. And that lesson for me started at Northwestern, it continued in China and it has really flourished in my career and it's something that I really encourage all students to think about which is these key skillsets. I was an arts history and political science major. And so, here I am advising some of the world's largest companies on business, how did I get there? Well, the skill sets that I learned that were so critical to liberal arts major like critical thinking and writing and communication and empathy and creativity, these were the things that were so important for me to succeed in Northwestern and are even more important now as a business leader.
And so early in your career, you want to learn functional skillsets which allows you to be a contributor. And then as you move on in your career, you stop being an individual contributor and you start becoming a leader or team project manager. And the skillsets that really distinguish people in mid-career and above are actually the skillset that you learn in Northwestern in liberal arts which is communication and creativity and empathy, emotional intelligence and writing. And so, while your first job out of college may not have directly the same translatable actions that you had hoped while you did at Northwestern, I promise you if you just put that in the back of your mind and reserve that spot, you'll come back to it in mid-career because that is something so critical.

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah. I really appreciate that perspective of when you've seen some of those things you've learned come into play throughout your career and how some of those skills have come in later and that's really interesting. And it seems like this is, Competing in the New World of Work, some of these topics that you are passionate about, radical adaptability, you've been studying and sharing information about for many years but then we had this global pandemic that had completely put a wrench in everything. The timing of the book was around the pandemic and it is new hybrid space but you've been studying these things for years. How did that evolve over the last couple of years during this global pandemic?

Kian Gohar:
Well, the pandemic was incredibly hard for everybody. Whether you were a college student that had to suddenly go home and do your Northwestern year abroad in your parents' basement or whether it was you were a frontline worker or whether you were mid-career, it was incredibly difficult for everybody in different ways. And it had different impacts on mental health and how we survive coming out of the pandemic. And while the biological threat may have reduced in recent months, I still think that the other shoe is yet to drop on the effects of how the pandemic really changed society. And it's going to be few more years before we can have the hindsight to understand how did it really impact and change our world? And so if we think back to history when we had the Spanish flu of 1918, it took us a couple of years to really understand what the changes that brought from a socioeconomic perspective and I think the same will apply in the pandemic.
And so, when I think about how do you really thrive in a world of uncertainty, you obviously have to have the individual resilience and people come to that with different resources. But also it's really critical to understand who your team is, who your community is and make sure that your team and your community, however you define it, is resilient so that you guys are able to accomplish great things regardless of the challenges that come to it. And so, this level of resilience, this level of being able to constantly adapt is really critical in your life and the sooner you master, I think those skills, the more likely you'll be able to lead life that is more successful and happy. In my life, honestly, I've had many experiences since I was a college student where I've had difficulties in my life, I've had career setbacks, I've been knocked down on the floor and all the thing you can do is get up and try again. One thing I really want to impress upon your listeners is that careers are not linear.
You don't just take one job and then go to the next job and go to the next job and think you plan it out for 20 years, that's just not how it works. And so, you want to take steps that allow you to really thrive and have the skillset that will allow you to make lateral jumps in the event that the opportunities present themselves to you. And so, this idea of being resilient is really critical and I'm grateful in hindsight, that things were hard for me as a student at Northwestern, had to work all the time while I was in school because that allowed me to really tackle many other challenges that you have in your adult life and your professional career.

Cassie Petoskey:
Absolutely. I love that, that careers are not linear because I feel oftentimes there's a lot of pressure around that first job because that's what sets you on the path and really there is no one path. There's a lot of options and it's all about gaining skills and I really appreciate that from a successful alumnus like yourself sharing with current students. Like you mentioned, the pandemic has been very hard on a lot of people and we definitely have a lot of students who are dealing with mental health challenges that were either brought up or exacerbated by the pandemic. So definitely something that's on the top of many people's minds. And Kean, you are in your work, you're doing a lot of teaching and training and then you just wrote a book which takes very different skills.
And so, I'm curious if you can share just a little bit about what you enjoy about those types of things and what were challenging because it seems like one of them is more about an extroverted sharing resources with people in person or virtually. And then the other one is writing a book takes a lot of quiet and introspective time. So what were some of the challenges and opportunities you found from both of those?

Kian Gohar:
That's a great perspective of defining the differences and I am very extroverted in terms of my training and the work that I do at my firm, but writing is hard and it requires solace, and I don't want to call it introversion but it requires peace and quiet. And I think why I haven't written the book before this is because it is quite hard to focus yourself and focus your mind to be able to really identify what it is that you want to say. The opportunity that presented itself in the pandemic was that you couldn't really go anywhere. And so unless you were on Zoom and you were having various business conversations which I was, it allowed me to really do a lot of research that I wouldn't have been able to do because I couldn't travel for work and so I had to do a lot of my research online through Zoom and through interviews.
And then during the pandemic winter when I had to actually deliver my manuscript to my publisher which was Harvard Business Review Press, you had a very strict deadline of when that manuscript was due. And so, the way I dealt with it was I went into a small town called Palm Springs, California for the winter where I didn't know anybody, and it was still under very strict lockdown conditions and all I did was write and think for three months. And so unbeknownst to me, this is what writers often do when they go to writer's retreats or where they go away for a couple of months to find solace and really work and write deeply. And that was actually very useful for me, it also coincided with a time in the world where that was very easy to do. The research and the writing phase, I thought, was just an incredible gift that I wouldn't have had otherwise because I would've constantly been on the road and so, I took advantage of that opportunity.
The second part that I didn't know about which is very critical to publishing a book is really the marketing of the book which came about six to nine months later. And that requires a different skillset than writing. And that requires a lot of thinking to who is a potential audience for the book and how do you then help them be aware of the book and then share the insights so that they would be interested in learning more about it. And so, that's a marketing tactic that, to be honest, I learned in the course of the publication of this first book and very grateful for that but it was not something that was obvious to me when I was writing because I thought the writing part was hard but actually the marketing part was harder.

Cassie Petoskey:
Interesting, I would've thought the opposite as well, just thinking about your teaching and training and background in that but that it is a good perspective that the timing of the pandemic gave you some of that space which I think it did slow things down for a lot of people in a way that was unfamiliar territory.

Kian Gohar:
I would strongly recommend your listeners to think about how they can recreate that space in their lives. Obviously not in a way that it happened over the last two years, but how do you turn off the notifications and turn off the influences to really focus on what you want to get done? If I might share a story that I find really inspirational, there is a quarterback called Stetson Bennett and he was a walk on to a football team way back a couple years ago. And when he was able to finally walk on and become the starting quarterback for the university, he had a decision to make and he said, "I'm actually going to get rid of my iPhone because there's so many notifications that allow me to get distracted and what I really want to do is I just really want to focus." And he got rid of his iPhone and he bought a small flip phone that had no capabilities except for just calling.
And so, for six months he wanted to reduce the distractions that he had so that he could focus. And what happened was that earlier this year, he took the University of Georgia Bulldogs to the College Football National Championships and he won. I think it's just a really powerful way of thinking about how can you reduce the distractions in your life so that you can focus on the projects that really matter. And we were able to do that in the pandemic to some extent because it was forced upon us by the circumstances and I was able to write a book. And I don't think I will be able to recreate that but I would love to figure out how I can continue having those smaller moments of where I can focus and shut out the things that really don't move my projects and vision forward. And I would really encourage your listeners to think about how they can recreate those moments of grace so that they can pause and really just focus on the things that matter in their own lives and the projects that they're trying to achieve.

Cassie Petoskey:
Absolutely. Reducing those distractions can be such a challenge in this day and age of popup notifications and you really have to make a point to seek that out, rather it just is never going to happen. I used to think traveling abroad when you couldn't have a phone plan or being on a plane where your phone was on airplane mode, you're in that zone where no one can contact you and no distractions and even that is not the case anymore with students studying abroad. There is still the same popup notifications and whatnot. So I think that's really great advice and insights for our students to take that space, absolutely. And out of curiosity, Kian, what's next for you? Are you thinking... Would you write another book? You've done some really interesting things in your career, what's your next challenge or is it marketing the book?

Kian Gohar:
Well, I'm grateful that the book already is a success. It's a top of the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, and so, I no longer need to market the book proactively, so I'm grateful for that. I am trying to figure out that next challenge for myself. I think we are trying to find the right balance and professional life and personal life and since the book has come out, I've been on the road quite a bit and that's a bit exhausting. And so, my challenge is to find that balance in my personal professional life so that I'm not traveling as much and I can deliver a lot of my trainings and content more virtually, that's really important to me. So that way I can reach more people so that they can have more opportunities to really have impact in their careers without me always having to be present.
So I think that's a big opportunity and goal for me. Will I write another book? I think I will. I'm not quite sure if it'll be a business book, to be honest with you. I love businesses. I'm a business man. I have a company that I run, but my passions 25, 30 years later post Northwestern, still is in history. And those are the things that I really love. Whether connecting stories through history around leadership and courage and inspiration, I think those will be the elements of one future book. I don't quite know what that will be or which flavor it will take but I think it'll be in that realm.

Cassie Petoskey:
Fascinating, that's great. We'll have to keep an eye out. And Kian, I know you've shared so many great stories throughout our conversation about how mentors from Northwestern and I'm sure beyond have played into your success throughout your career. I'm wondering if you have any stories of how networking has played out throughout your career path?

Kian Gohar:
Networking is all about building relationships and people think networking is a dirty word, it really isn't. It's just inviting people to get to know you better and vice versa and being in each other's personal professional lives and sharing stories and helping when possible. I'm grateful that I'm still in touch with the alumni from my Acapella Group at Northwestern, Asterisk. We just had a 25-year anniversary concert on campus back in May and a lot of us came back for that. And they're all successful professionals in their own right, and whether they're investors or business leaders or owners of companies and we help each other thinking about some of those challenges. One thing that I didn't imagine would be the case when I was in Northwestern was a friend who was a friend of a friend actually, at Northwestern, I didn't know him. When I went to Harvard, we actually ended up becoming roommates for two years during business school because we had known of each other but didn't know each other directly.
And he has since become a very dear friend and probably my closest friend from Northwestern, even though we didn't know each other at the time, we developed those bond of friendship afterwards in a different location. And so to this day, we are still very good friends, Verde, John, Michelle, Yu, we are still very in touch. And so your relationships and your networking will not finish at Northwestern, it will continue to the extent that you want them to continue. I finished Northwestern at a time when email was prevalent on campus but not in the real world. And the internet was around, but again, not that available. We would mail each other letters. I know this sounds super antiquated and I still have those letters from my friends from my freshman year at Northwestern. And so, my point here is that your relationships do not finish at commencement, they continue to the extent that you can put the energy and effort to get to know people and be of service when you can.

Cassie Petoskey:
Absolutely. I really appreciate that perspective of how you've been able to build relationships with Northwestern classmates beyond and after your time on campus. That is so fun to hear and such a great perspective for our current students who are finding their networks right now on campus or maybe they'll find more networks after as well. So Kian, this has been so great spending this time with you. We really appreciate hearing more about your career path, some of these fun stories and insights are so helpful. So thank you so much for being here with us.

Kian Gohar:
Thanks so much for having me. It's just been such an honor to share space with you and the Northwestern communities.

Cassie Petoskey:
Thanks for listening. If you want to hear more of these conversations, links to the full videos and podcasts are below. For more information about Weinberg College and this podcast, visit weinberg.northwestern.edu and search for Waldron. As always, we would love to hear your feedback. Please email us with your thoughts on the program. Have a great day, and go cats.