Find Your People, Find Your Purpose: Youngsuk ‘YS’ Chi, Chairman of Elsevier

“One of the pieces of advice I like to give young people is to collect knowledge, interests and a network of people you want to know. You don't know yet how you are going to use it all, but later it will become obvious which pieces fit with which,” says Youngsuk ‘YS’ Chi, Chairman of Elsevier. If you want a great example of how this approach works, you can look at Chi’s own remarkable career which took him from banking, to helping enable Amazon’s early growth, to being president of Random House to his current role at Elsevier and its parent company RELX, where he is Director of Corporate Affairs and Asia Strategy. Chi reveals to host Shiv Gaglani that what connects those disparate experiences are two people he “collected” at the start of his own career with whom he stayed connected in a mutually beneficial partnership. Seeing relationships as core to success explains why Chi makes time to be a mentor to dozens of people in a wide range of professions. Although wanting to help them on their career journeys is the prime motivator, Chi is quick to point out his mentees are a network he can tap for expertise as part of his commitment to continuous learning. The wisdom drop continues as they discuss how to help employees connect purpose to their work and how a post-COVID analysis needs to include “a humanistic re-questioning of what we do and why we do it.”