Alumni News: December 2025 Edition

Ruchika is an award-winning inclusion strategist, keynote speaker, and author of the upcoming book Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success (out November 2025). Building on her work in Inclusion on Purpose and her widely read Harvard Business Review article Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome, Ruchika continues to challenge the way we think about success and belonging.

As she prepares for her new book launch, Ruchika reflects on the inspiration behind Uncompete, the UWCSEA values that shaped her outlook, and her hopes for the next generation of changemakers.

What inspired you to write Uncompete? Was there a moment or experience that made you reconsider how we perceive success and competition?

There were many moments that inspired Uncompete–personal and professional. Of course, growing up in Singapore had a huge part to play in how I perceived success. Competition is the norm when you grow up in one of the most competitive countries and economies in the world!

Going to global educational institutions and working in brand-name companies also conditioned me to believe that success comes from being better than your competition. But as I grew older, my life experiences began to feel incompatible with this idea of competition and winner-take-all approaches; in fact, I saw collaboration and collective wins as more compelling and sustainable measures of success.

One specific moment that solidified my “why” for this book came after I finished speaking at a thousand-person conference about advancing women at work. The first question I got after my presentation was, “But what about men? If women advance in the industry, won’t men lose out?” It hit me how deeply the zero-sum mindset is embedded, even in spaces meant to push for inclusion and equity. That moment stayed with me, and I realised that even within spaces designed to advance people, competition and competitive norms were showing up in ways that were limiting progress

How did your time at UWCSEA shape your views on collaboration and inclusivity — themes that feature strongly in Uncompete?

Being surrounded by people from all over the world, each bringing different perspectives, gave me a front-row seat to what’s possible when diversity isn’t just a value, but a lived experience.

That early exposure to real collaboration, inclusion and solidarity across cultures taught me that inclusion isn’t about creating a few seats to advance a few people, it’s about rebuilding the table entirely so everyone can contribute meaningfully. Those lessons are baked into every page of Uncompete.

Learning empathy was a big part of my UWCSEA experience, especially through the emphasis on Service in the IB and Project Week, which underpins all concepts in this book. Lastly, I’m grateful to UWCSEA for instilling a very strong focus on environmental justice in me. That’s also a key consideration for this book.