Basically, I ran the Jim Collins exercise, and in the cross section of passion, skills and economic drive, I found a question that became my mission in life. From that moment on, in the middle of 2005, the career path was trumped intellectually and emotionally --- regardless of the fact that it was leading me to a point way beyond my wildest imagination when I had first started at SAP. Compared to embracing my mission, it was just not a fair competition or a fair fight.
I keep saying that it is as if the question had found me, more than me finding the question. And my sense is that everybody has got their question out there. But very few are lucky enough to have their question find them. From that point on you are on a mission, you are on a calling.

What is the Question?
It all started with Klaus Schwabb's question to the Young Global Leaders --- "what are you doing to make the world a better place by 2020?”. At the YGL, you get drawn out from your micro world and given a macro perspective of what is happening in the world, of the very tight yet not obvious links between energy, governance, poverty, health, climate and so on. They are so deeply interlinked, yet on a daily basis we get drawn into the micro-aspects of one of them, whether in a business, an NGO or anywhere else. So for instance we go out there trying to deal with poverty in Africa, forgetting that here somebody else is generating fuel out of corn, therefore jeopardizing all the work that we do. We deal with governance and discuss the pros and cons of democracy coming first, without realizing that the annual $4 trillion wealth transfer through oil makes a mockery of that discussion.
So first we got a macro perspective and then we could understand that whatever we do at the micro level may actually not have a significant impact on the macro. From that point on, we could find our question.

... contd.