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Carol Cone:
I’m Carol Cone and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact.
I’m joined once again by a dear friend, longtime contributor, and one of the most visionary leaders in our field, Balaji Ganapathy. Many of you will remember him from earlier episodes when he was leading social impact at Tata Consultancy Services. Over more than two decades at TCS, he helped build one of the most purpose-driven organizations in the world. Now he’s stepped into a bold new chapter, launching his own venture, Social Positive, focused on closing the gap between good intentions and real, scalable impact — in our nations, around the globe, and in our communities.
In this conversation, we’ll explore the lessons he’s learned from his time at TCS, why he believes purpose is still the ultimate growth engine for an organization, and the four critical gaps holding back social impact today. We’ll also dive into leadership, partnerships, and what it takes to drive meaningful change in a highly complex world. It’s an insightful, energizing conversation, full of ideas you can apply right away. So let’s get started. For how many years were you at Tata, Balaji?
Balaji Ganapathy:
Twenty-one years.
Carol Cone:
Twenty-one years. But welcome back to the show. He’s been a frequent guest, whether it’s a full podcast — our first one was May 2020, right when COVID hit — and then we’ve done others since. So welcome back to the show, Balaji.
Balaji Ganapathy:
It’s a pleasure to be back. Carol, you’re so generous and kind, and I truly value the friendship and the partnership that we have. You know, each time I come on the show I’m at a different chapter in my life. The first time, as you said, it was building a purpose-driven organization on the legacy of a hundred and fifty years of history of the Tatas. The second time was my own social impact journey of looking at what I learned and scaling and growing the impact globally. And now I’m building something new. So it’s great to be back. But one thing I was thinking, in preparing for today, is that the core has not changed, right? So who I am — I’ve always been somebody who builds organizations, teams, and leaders who serve society and the planet with humility and a pioneering spirit.
Carol Cone:
I love that you’ve said in the past that everything in my life has led me to where I am today. And so I want to start with your parents and growing up, because I always feel that we are so shaped by our early youth experiences. So tell us a little bit about your upbringing.
Balaji Ganapathy:
Thinking back to growing up in Trivandrum, which is a small town in the southern part of India — I was born into a joint family of about forty people. And we had modest means, but boundless generosity. Growing up, I don’t remember buying a new book or clothes because you had cousins who would hand them down, or neighbors who would give you comic books, or my parents’ office network where we would go during the summer break and knock on doors of their colleagues and get books from their kids. So those experiences early on definitely showed me that scarcity was there, but the scarcity taught me something that abundance never could have: that dignity is not diminished by sharing — it is in fact multiplied.
And along with that came this urge to travel and see the world, and I did that. I had the blessing of being able to do that in the general compartments of trains in India in the nineties. And as a teenager, traveling all across the country, crisscrossing the network of the old Indian railways, I was crushed shoulder to shoulder with migrant workers, farmers, everyday people, students, old people, young people, people from different cultures and languages. And I can tell you that’s the same experience I’ve had traveling around the world — in the US, in Australia and Canada, Mexico, and other places too. People who had nothing were willing to share everything.
So looking back thirty-plus years, I think those journeys really crystallized something that it took me decades to articulate: that you are born with equal potential but not equal opportunity, and access to opportunity — and how to help people empower themselves to get that access — became my North Star.
Carol Cone:
I love that. Access to opportunity became your North Star. So I want to talk about some of the twinkling of that star and your background, because you’ve got a background in engineering, you’ve got a background in HR, and then ultimately you became the lead in terms of social impact and purpose at TCS. So can you talk a little bit about how each one of those areas contributed to your North Star today?
Balaji Ganapathy:
Yeah. It is not by design — it was by accident, I would say, that I am where I am today. But intentional accidents. Intentional choices made over a period of time. The first one was when I was studying engineering at the College of Engineering Trivandrum in the nineties. I had this crazy dream that we could design a car that used hydrogen and oxygen and created clean drinking water as its emission.
Carol Cone:
Amazing.
Balaji Ganapathy:
We went and knocked on many boardrooms and tried to pitch that idea to plant floor managers, to leaders in sales. And it didn’t work. So what it taught me is that any innovation is only as good as it is adopted. Technology does not change the world. People adopting technology change the world. And I started moving from machines to human systems.
That is point number one. The second pivot came much later, about ten years into TCS or so, after my initial entrepreneurship days. I came to the US just as the great financial crisis was unfolding in early 2009. My first week on the job, I was driving through the streets of Detroit where things were boarded up and the downtown looked like a ghost town. It was a hard landing. It was an economy in free fall, it was a new role. TCS was doing great work, Tata was doing great work globally, but growing our business in the US was the goal, and pairing up with business leaders, domain leaders, and functional leaders to do that was my job. But I realized that what the country needed, what the community needed at that time — people did not need to see the solutions that you bring to the table. They wanted to know whether you’re trustworthy and bring value. And that crisis then became a catalyst.
So I started building strategic partnerships with internal leaders who believed in putting community at the center, and I learned that other companies had the same instinct. So it just became an extension of doing business together — but also doing work to uplift the community together. And over a period of ten years, I saw business grow from three to ten, twelve billion in the geography itself. And companies that serve society together do not just survive downturns — they emerge stronger. And that brought in that conviction, and it helped me move from the business-facing role to more of leading social impact, and to where I am today.
Carol Cone:
You have in the past declared that purpose is the new tech. Now in this Trump world — geopolitics, war in Iran, AI everywhere, data centers taking over all of our lands — is purpose the new tech still part of your philosophy? And if it is, what does it mean?
Balaji Ganapathy:
Absolutely. I’m doubling, tripling down on that. Because what is your reason for existence? That doesn’t change just because of what’s happening externally. You adapt to what is changing externally. I saw in my lifetime, working with TCS as a company that was leading technology and helping companies across the world across all kinds of sectors and domains adopt technology — I saw the power of originally enterprise systems, then in the early two-thousands and twenty-tens, you could see social, mobile, analytics, and cloud coming through. And then when tech became a buzzword, every company wanted to be a tech company — the Airbnb model, the Netflix model. But in doing what they were doing, what they were really doing is embracing technology to make it easier for them to live their purpose, however they define it. So technology, as I said, does not create longevity. Purpose creates longevity.
If you really look at what purpose can unlock, it’s not a trade-off. It is what I call the value quad: you have business growth, employee purpose, community impact, and shareholder returns. All four can rise at the same time. And we are a living example of that. I saw that for twenty-one years at TCS. We saw thirty times revenue growth.
Purpose is not a cost center. It’s a growth engine. So purpose is the new tech, whether that tech is enterprise systems in the early 2000s, social media analytics and cloud in the 2010s, or AI today. The technology that comes may change. But why you exist, and how you can serve your most important stakeholders — that doesn’t change. So that’s what is leading me to believe that every enterprise, if you want to last and bring your purpose to life, you have to create an organization that’s carbon negative and social positive. There is no way around it.
Carol Cone:
Right. So, you were very fortunate to grow up in the Tata group — perhaps the world’s foremost, oldest, purpose-at-the-center organization. Now you’ve got a new company, Social Positive. We’re going to talk about that. But you’re always out speaking — at conferences, talking with your colleagues. And I know, with great affection, they look at you and go, oh my God, you’ve done such amazing work. You talked about some of those outcomes. But they say: I don’t work in a company that has the history and the ethos and the soul of Tata. How do I move my C-suite along so that we move to be part of strategy, day in and day out — not the afterthought? What do you say?
Balaji Ganapathy:
It’s easy and hard.
Carol Cone:
Okay, it’s easy and hard.
Balaji Ganapathy:
So the easy part is that purpose cannot live in a department. Whether it is the foundation, CSR, social impact, sustainability, ESG — whatever you call it — it cannot live in a department. It has to live in the DNA and the operating model of the organization.
I think when you shift from thinking about how do I make the case for my program, my initiative, and get a sign-off — when you start seeing it differently, it was like seeing the matrix. I may have had limited resources when I started. But then I looked at the organization: oh, it’s a huge organization. Why am I thinking of my few-member team or a few million dollars as the resources? Every one of the 600,000 people is part of the CSR and impact team. All 48 business units are part of the team. 2,000 customers are part of the team. So when you think like that, you start to think in abundance. And then came the $650 million and the 30 million lives across 55 countries.
So what is the lesson? The lesson is you need to, of course, have great interventions, programs, and solutions that address where the need is high, resources are low, and only your organization can make a difference. That is necessary. But then you take your organization’s people on that journey.
Carol Cone:
Let me ask you about partnerships, because I know when you talk about Social Positive, you say you’ve had conversations with thousands of people and you’ve had over 200 different partnerships and such. Can you give two or three secrets to your success with partners?
Balaji Ganapathy:
We’re diving into really good territory here. I think every practitioner will recognize what I’m about to describe. You have conviction, you have data, you may have the board’s support, but the gap between strategy on paper and programs on the ground is where we spend most of our careers. So convincing leaders — that’s the easier part. The harder part is building the operational rhythm to make it happen. So what do you need to make it work, alongside partners?
One: shared measurement across teams. That’s a must. If you report certain things to your board and then you ask your partners to report other things — and they have other stakeholders they report to, or they’re part of a collective — it’s not going to work. You have to get together, look at the problem in a value chain, and really say: what are the measures we need to go after? And be humble enough to say we don’t need to measure the whole world — we need to measure these things, and establish that across the teams.
Second: building an operational cadence that connects strategy to frontline execution. Don’t stop at just giving grants, issuing RFPs, and being happy about identifying good organizations. Help them with the frontline execution — because mostly the lessons that you and your organization have on how to unlock last-mile issues is not something that a small community organization or a medium-sized nonprofit will have. So if you are there as a partner, not as a sponsor or a grantor, the equation changes.
The third, and I would say the most important, is building leaders at every level who feel ownership of the mission. I used to ask myself every day, when I look at myself in the mirror: am I working for the CSR team? Am I working for TCS? Am I working for the community? Am I working for society at large?
Carol Cone:
And you say society at large.
Balaji Ganapathy:
Society at large, absolutely. That comes first. Then the community we have identified to serve. Then the company I work for. Then the team. So you always have to defer to the larger mission that you are out there to serve. Because if your program teams and marketing teams wake up in the morning thinking their job is just to market or just to do the program, then you’re losing sight of what they call the bricklayer versus the cathedral builder. Both of them have bricks in hand and are putting them against the wall. But one says they’re just laying bricks — the other says they’re building cathedrals. And the difference is that ability to envision what that end goal, that mission, is going to lead to.
Carol Cone:
Great. So we’re going to skip by this incredible twenty-one-year career, all the different things you achieved — great awards, the Civic 50 and what TCS achieved. So now Social Positive — it’s over a year old now. Tell us about Social Positive. And then we’ll get deeper into some of the offerings, because they’re astounding.
Balaji Ganapathy:
I’m happy to share with the audience that I didn’t start out to start a company. I looked at: where is the need highest, resources are lowest, and my experience and background can make a difference? And I always enjoyed the best times when working with field staff, working with leaders in this space — not as sage on the stage, but in close quarters. Talking to leaders in this space all around the world — and the network is so generous to open their doors and continue to welcome me well beyond my time at TCS.
What I saw is that they all recognize the same four disconnects and frustrations. I saw it for twenty-six years. I saw it in fifty-five countries. And these patterns are not because somebody is doing something wrong — it is a structural problem.
So hear this. If we were to think of social impact as a country, this is a $2.3 trillion economy. That’s what I rediscovered when I did the research. $2.3 trillion flows into social capital — through domestic philanthropy, through ODA, through cross-border philanthropy, through impact investing and all of that. That’s comparable to Brazil or Canada, right? So you should be seeing the kind of outsized outcomes that exist for those countries. And I realized that is not the case. And that is when I started to name the four gaps that I believe are keeping us from good intentions to good actions to good impact.
The first is needs to funding. What I saw is that capital flows toward where funders live and operate — not always toward where the need is the highest. I think we subliminally recognize this. Yes, we have a responsibility to the community where our offices are, where our employees live — absolutely. But recognize that, for example, in the US, rural communities are home to about 19% of Americans but receive only 3 to 7% of philanthropy grants. It blew my mind to put the numbers together and recognize that 3% of the overall $2.3 trillion capital is only flowing to 10% of the people who need it most. So it’s a $160 billion gap for the poorest of the poor, who have the least means. I looked at India — same kind of issue. Maharashtra, which is one of the most prosperous states in the country, receives twenty-three times more CSR impact funding than Bihar, whereas Bihar is 5.5 times more poor. So to summarize: it’s not about blame. Proximity is where you start to give, and we can change that.
The second pattern is strategy to execution. We have great intentions — 83% of organizations say that impact is a priority, which is great. But only 25% are achieving measurable progress. So it is not about intention. Good intention is there, generosity is there. But translating strategy to operational programs on the ground is not easy. It took us a year and a half to build operational infrastructure even at TCS — a great organization that has everything aligned in terms of wanting to do the right thing. It takes time to build that. And often our systems are geared toward organizations that can build strategy, but with very little infrastructure on how to translate it to execution on the ground.
The third is implementation to impact. Most of us are measuring and reporting outputs. And it is a pet peeve — I know in the conferences we go to, we sit in the sidelines and say, what can we do to bring about a system or a framework that changes what we measure and report? Only 14% of organizations are measuring outcomes. Even fewer are looking at long-term causal impact. The leaders know this, they want to measure outcomes — I think we have good solutions, but the systems are not making it easy.
And the fourth is evidence to scale. This is what hit me hardest in the last five years or so, especially after COVID, when I started going and visiting with others who are doing great programs on the ground — whether in India, the US, Australia, Mexico, the Philippines, so many places. And I saw that solutions existed. For example, ultra poverty — there is a proven solution from twenty-two years ago. Why is it that we have not solved for poverty? Because the system that is built to show pilot success is not the system that is required to scale at population level. It takes seventeen years on average to move from proven pilot to population-level adoption — not because evidence is weak, but because the systems for scaling — the funding bridges, the policy partnerships, the leadership capacity — are not in place.
So these are the four patterns: needs to funding, strategy to execution, implementation to impact, and evidence to scale. So that is what led to the birth of Social Positive. This is the market gap. Everybody is working toward each of these four gaps individually, but there is a new connective tissue needed. In our lifetime, we want to see impactful change happen at scale. Who doesn’t want grassroots impact at population scale? I’m just verbalizing it and providing a space where I believe we can do it together.
Carol Cone:
And it’s astounding. So I love that you describe Social Positive as AI-native impact consulting. And you have used AI for some of your core services. So can you explain your vision? Talk about the three services and how they are, dare I say, dynamically using AI to advance our work?
Balaji Ganapathy:
Let me start by saying that AI-native can sound like jargon. So I want to make it very real — what is the practitioner’s aspect of it? How do you put it in practice? How do you build tools? My goal is that every practitioner in this space should have the collective intelligence, the analytical power, and the wisdom of those who came before us. That’s how we start our journeys. So The Collective is a way to bring practitioners together — not to share speeches at a conference, but to really share answers to hard questions that are difficult to solve. It is a community of practice, a community of practitioners. And instead of something living only in a moment — whether it be in a podcast or a conference — what if you could harness all of that and build the insights from it? If ten of us have similar insights on how to deal with our board or make the case to our executives, that should be shared intelligence that is open to all in our sector. If we have insights on how to help nonprofits identify and get grants, we should be able to share it with a larger group of nonprofits — thousands of them — so that they can level themselves up against well-resourced organizations. So The Collective is a way to share open intelligence across the network. I welcome anyone who’s listening and wants to join to be part of it.
Now, Impactscape and RECA are really products — an extension of what I saw is required for each of us as a leader to operate well. If you think of yourself as the CEO of a community, helping solve problems for that community, you are accountable to that community. So first and foremost, do you ask yourself: where does the need exist? Where is the capital flowing? When I ask myself the question — the $2.3 trillion and where it flows — that is the first version of Impactscape, and it’s available for everyone to see and experience. But then, sitting in the seat you’re sitting in — whether in a corporate, a foundation, a nonprofit, a family office — if you are working in a state, working in ten counties, working in three countries around the world, do you have a real view of what the marketplace looks like? Nothing exists today to give you that quickly. You have to wait three months and commission a project to do it. What Impactscape does is bring it together. What is government doing in terms of helping citizens through its social services? What gaps exist at a state, county, or federal level in the US, or central, state, and district level in India? What is the current level of capital flowing against that? If you want to work in elder care, mental health, education, gender — these are thematic areas where we have data available. You can sit together with your leadership team and have a meaningful planning exercise around where the need is highest, resources are lowest, and your capital can make a difference.
The third product — I spoke about The Collective, I spoke about Impactscape — is RECA. AI today is hallucinating and providing responses you can’t rely on. So if you have questions and you ask a generic LLM, can you believe it, can you trust it? But what if you could have access to curated materials — not the open internet, but curated benchmark research, practitioner knowledge and wisdom, benchmark data — available as an AI ally?
Carol Cone:
This is about the decades of experience you’ve had and your knowledge of what’s available out there — the trusted resources, the speed at which you can access them and feel confident about the information you’re getting back, to develop strategy and direction. It’s not just an AI tool. It is AI plus human interaction and analysis. So I think it’s extraordinary.
We will put links in our show notes to Social Positive and your various entities. I want to continue, because you’ve been spending a lot of time in Asia. And I think you are serving as a commissioner on the Commission on Asian Philanthropy. You’ve been bringing incredible foundations together and thought leaders in various venues to truly advance the practice of philanthropy and social impact in Asia. Give our listeners a little bit of a taste of what is happening in Asia and what your vision is for that commission.
Balaji Ganapathy:
It’s incredible challenges and incredible opportunity. A lot of us don’t realize, but 60% of the world population lives in Asia. So 60% of the challenges also exist there, or more. The beauty of Asia is that it is probably the only continent where needs are growing, but the resources to address those needs are also growing. So it is not all deprivation — there is some abundance coming alongside the challenges that exist.
One of the first learnings I had when I looked outside of India and started deep-diving through the Commission’s work into other jurisdictions — all the way from Japan to China to Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, the UAE — is that Asian philanthropy is pluralistic. Asia for Asia recognizes that Asia has its own deep traditions of giving: collective stewardship, family-led philanthropy that spans multiple generations, faith-based giving, community-led models embedded in the fabric. These are assets to build on. So looking ahead, what the Commission is looking to do is improve both the quantity and quality of philanthropy so that it can serve nation-building and global agendas — working alongside countries and regions, but also globally.
Carol Cone:
Great. We need to wind this down a bit. But I would like to ask a question I always ask for young people who want to get into this field. They want to be involved in social impact — forget the label, they really want to be involved in purpose. What are you suggesting to them today?
Balaji Ganapathy:
Don’t wait for the perfect job that combines career and purpose. It’s not like: do your part in your career and then you find your purpose. Start where you are. Volunteer. Build skills. Observe. And you will find that there are certain things that stick to you — because they break your heart. And you will realize over time that that is what you’re uniquely positioned to fix.
I love volunteering. I love going to community organizations and serving there. But I realized that I am better at building teams and organizations that can serve that. And that’s what helped me move in that direction. So purpose is not something you find. It is something you build, one decision at a time. You fan the flame.
Carol Cone:
I love it. So beautifully stated. Okay, I also want to take you into the end, where we ask really quick questions. You might have a one-word answer or a sentence.
Balaji Ganapathy:
Okay.
Carol Cone:
So the first question is: what’s one word that best describes your work?
Balaji Ganapathy:
Leapfrog together.
Carol Cone:
What keeps you hopeful on the days that this work feels heavy?
Balaji Ganapathy:
I think the young people, and those I meet in the field every single time. They have the answers, they have the aspiration. We are just enablers.
Carol Cone:
What’s one lesson you’ve learned from building purpose-driven systems at scale that you couldn’t have learned anywhere else?
Balaji Ganapathy:
Programs fade, leaders endure.
Carol Cone:
What’s one small action people can take today to advance purpose or create impact in their own communities?
Balaji Ganapathy:
If you put your hand up to do something, before you do it, ask the question: where is your current community investment going? And then ask the second question: is it matching where the need is the greatest?
Carol Cone:
And then the last thing: if you could leave listeners or viewers with one idea or feeling today, what would it be?
Balaji Ganapathy:
I think it’s a tough world out there, like I said, and you may feel hopeful some days and despondent on others. But you already have everything that you need to make a difference. I’m telling you, the world will survive and thrive. Yes, today may look hard. So the question is not whether you want to do something — it is where to begin. Start at the first step.
Carol Cone:
There you go. I love that. Well, Balaji, you never, never, never, ever disappoint. You always give more and give generously. It’s been a phenomenal conversation. I always leave the last word to my guest. So how would you like to wrap this up? It’s a lot to wrap up.
Balaji Ganapathy:
It is a lot to wrap up, but I just want to be grateful. Grateful for the friends and network and leaders who have been in this space and who have continued to welcome me with open arms. And Carol, I want to thank you. You and I have spent a lot of time together over this past year, and it has been a blessing for me. You are one of the first people I would say who saw purpose not as a trend but as a transformation. You pioneered this field before it had a name. So we owe it to you that you are continuing to help move this space. Social Positive would not exist without people like you — mentors and friends like you — on whose shoulders I believe we are carrying this work forward.
But the last thing I want to say is that success to me is when we build leaders who build other leaders. We build teams that build other teams. We build institutions that build other institutions. That is the leapfrog-together effect. That is generational change. So my lessons of growing up in a modest family in Trivandrum — to a small town where I live with my family today — sharing books then and sharing experiences now, it’s all the same. If I can sum up this whole time spent with you, Carol: grassroots impact, population scale. That’s been the vision. And now we have a home for it. Come, let’s do it together.
Carol Cone:
Thank you. There is just so much that I continue to learn from you. You’re such a joy. And you’ve contributed so much to the field, and I know that you have a lot more to do. So thank you, Balaji Ganapathy. You are the real heart of my soul.
Balaji Ganapathy:
We do it together. Couldn’t do it without you. Thank you.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I’d love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney at Carol Cone on Purpose, Pete Wright and Andy Nelson — our crack production team at TruStory FM. And you, listener — please rate and rank us, because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available, so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
