Ashish Kothari’s TEDx Talk Challenges the World to Make Flourishing a Competitive Edge
Make flourishing your competitive edge
Ashish Kothari at TEDx
In the 10-minute talk, Kothari shares his own journey and how he discovered the untapped lever that drives true transformation: achieving peak performance through flourishing, rather than at the cost of it.
“There is something fundamentally broken about the way we work,” Kothari says in the talk. “Only 20% of people are thriving, 60% report daily stress, 22% are burned out, and just one in five find meaning in their jobs. This is not just about personal wellbeing, it’s about how we can all rethink success and redesign work so that people can actually flourish.”
Drawing from over two decades of research in psychology, neuroscience, and organizational transformation, Kothari offers a practical, business-driven roadmap for embedding flourishing into core organizational strategy.
His approach focuses on four key actions:
1. Treat flourishing as a strategy, not a perk: Redesign work to eliminate toxic workloads and align incentives.
2. Measure what matters: Go beyond engagement to measure meaning, satisfaction, happiness, and resilience.
3. Listen often and act fast: Move from annual surveys to monthly pulse checks with rapid interventions.
4. Let teams lead the way: Give teams autonomy to choose solutions that fit their unique needs.
Ashish continues to state that “We lose 12 billion working days to anxiety and depression. That’s 12 billion days that someone’s light didn’t shine through… that they didn’t feel whole enough or safe enough to show up.”
According to research by the McKinsey Health Institute in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, poor work wellbeing costs $12 trillion in global economic value. Companies that prioritize flourishing see higher profitability, greater productivity, more creativity, and stronger stock performance, without sacrificing their employees’ wellbeing.
More than inspiration, this talk is a call to action: to redesign the way we work by turning human flourishing into a strategic advantage – unlocking higher profitability, productivity and growth while reducing burnout, attrition, absenteeism and presenteeism.
Watch the TEDx talk here.
About Ashish Kothari
Ashish Kothari is the founder of Happiness Squad and the author of "Hardwired for Happiness." He specializes in helping organizations achieve performance breakthroughs through enhanced wellbeing and human-centric leadership. Ashish has over 17 years of experience as a Partner at McKinsey & Company, where he developed and co-led the firm's Adaptability and Resilience offering, supporting thousands of leaders in building organizational effectiveness and scalable capabilities. Ashish is a Newfield-certified ontological coach trained to help leaders overcome obstacles through the use of language, mood, and somatics to shift how they observe the world. He also has a Masters in Business administration (MBA) with a specialization in Organizational behavior from Chicago Booth and a Bachelors and Masters degree in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India.
About Happiness Squad
Happiness Squad is a tech-enabled transformation company helping organizations unlock peak performance by addressing the root causes of human capital loss. Based on the science of flourishing, we address the underlying causes of attrition, absenteeism, and presenteeism through integrated interventions at every level of the organization: REWIRE for individuals, PEARL and Management Mastery for teams, and our Organization Human Potential Index (OHPI) with continuous listening for organizational transformation. For more information, visit www.happinesssquad.com.
Sonya Hausafus
Happiness Squad
sonya@happinesssquad.com
$12 trillion dollars are lost every year due to poor work wellbeing
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