“Oh, you’re Ayesha’s husband!” I’ve grown accustomed to this introduction—not only in Singapore but sometimes beyond. At least it saves me the trouble of carrying a name card. There’s a saying that behind every successful man, there’s a strong woman. But when you’re married to Ayesha, it’s more like the reverse.
I don’t know many people who’d say that they’re stronger alone, but it’s not obvious how a partner’s success adds weight to your own. Here’s how I see it.
Two's a company
Interpersonal relations are a lot like international relations, the field in which I started my PhD shortly after Ayesha and I got engaged, with her supporting my transatlantic flights between New York and London to meet my advisers at the London School of Economics. I was studying diplomacy, in which two of the most important concepts are reciprocity—the ‘golden rule’, more or less—and mutuality, finding shared benefit. Both parties have to believe that they’re better off doing things together, and that the things they do they’ll do better with the participation of the other. The nerdy analogy is a free trade agreement with benefits.
While academic research is a solitary affair, one of the first projects Ayesha and I undertook together was launching a research institute that convened experts on how rapidly evolving technologies were affecting society, and writing a book about it called Hybrid Reality. The title was Ayesha’s, derived from a scribble she frequently pondered: Semantics x Interfaces. I had no idea what that meant. But I did know that geopolitics isn’t just about armies. Putting our heads together, a formula emerged that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own: “The balance of innovation drives the balance of power.”
I’d like to think it’s an aphorism worthy of the original futurist power couple: Alvin and Heidi Toffler. From the 1970s through the 2000s, the Tofflers authored a number of books together, and insiders know that Heidi’s pen frequently ran dry even on the books where her name didn’t appear on the cover. Even in their elderly years, they radiated inspiration during a memorably long double-date at their favourite restaurant in Los Angeles, where they still riffed off each other and completed each other’s sentences. We wouldn’t have half the futurist lexicon we do today if it weren’t for the Tofflers, who gave Hybrid Reality a glowing endorsement for the inside cover.
That’s just one example of the kind of table you’d feel awkward sitting at without an equal partner. Both the symmetry and the strength would be missing. At our dinner parties, conversations are greatly enhanced when genders mix it up, share their unique stories [and] even argue a bit. In tennis, men and women don’t play against each other in singles, but mixed doubles is fun for everyone, win or lose.
The better half
When it came time for Ayesha’s PhD, she was already juggling a career and kids, whom I often kept busy in London so she could power through statistics and information systems en route to her thesis on ‘smart cities’. One of her case studies was Berlin, the city I’ve lived in several times over the past 30 years. Now it’s the place our whole family considers a home away from home, and we all went to live there on a sabbatical.
Looking back, Ayesha’s always grateful for the intensity and rigour of the academic experience, and I wound up benefiting from how it propelled her next act: founding the AI solutions company, Addo. What started as a scrappy start-up of a half-dozen is now more than 100 data scientists strong, and now more than half of my own company, Climate Alpha’s team resides inside her corporate mothership. A decade ago, I’d be the last person you’d peg to have founded an AI company fusing property markets with machine learning. The story only makes sense if you factor in who I’m married to. I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—be on my biggest mission to date without her backing it, and some of my biggest decisions are informed by her listening in on what we’re doing and lending big nuggets of wisdom from choosing the right data science models to how to build team camaraderie.
Another key principle from social science: the division of labour. This isn’t just about laundry and vacuuming, but above all parenting. With our kids, Ayesha leads on math and coding, and I oversee humanities and travel. Bridging our strengths, we raise confident adolescents who (fortunately!) aren’t just like us, but are well-rounded in ways we weren’t and wouldn’t have been able to impart to them alone.
Companionship is fundamentally a relationship among equals. Done right, it’s also something of a recipe for mutual growth. The more comfortable you become with having a strong partner, the more you realise that success isn’t just a one-man—or one-woman—show. It’s a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Dr. Parag Khanna is founder and CEO of Climate Alpha, founder and managing partner of FutureMap as well as an international bestselling author of seven books.
