“Embrace the Future” is about time-tested, timeless lessons in leadership. And hence, a compelling read for today’s and tomorrow’s leaders.

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Book WARRIORS, REBELS, & SAINTS: the art of leadership from Machiavelli to Malcolm X

Author Moshik Temkin

Reviewer R. Gopalakrishnan, Author and Corporate Commentator

Date 15-1-24

A poetic book on prosaic leadership

Ngram shows that the word ‘leadership’ was sparsely used from 1800 till 1900. Thereafter, the usage escalated to now reach a dizzying peak.  Likewise with books on leadership. There are so many leadership books that it must be difficult to write something distinctive. Leadership is quite contextual. It is difficult to write with any universal applicability. When I opened the book under review, I thought to myself, “There are so many leadership books, yet the subject is so nebulous.” 

Upon reading the book, I found it to be a refreshing read, and I strongly recommend it. Moshim Temkin is a visiting professor at China’s Tsinghua University. His writing on the prosaic subject of leadership is almost poetic. Early on, he poses the question: do leaders make history or does history make leaders? Larger-than-life leaders of today think that they are making history, and create monuments for posterity. The graveyard is full of people who thought they were indispensable and were deeply impactful. The dead may be surprised how their leadership is regarded in history. If at all possible, communicate with the late Jack Welch or Jawaharlal Nehru. 

In this book, the author traces the lessons of leadership history in three frequently occurring situations—first, if society faces a crisis and people choose a warrior as their leader; second, if the change agent has little power and a rebel leader is required; third, if the change agent is under a tyrannical regime when a saint leader is appropriate.  

Warrior

When Republican Herbert Hoover (think of our own Dr Manmohan Singh) was sworn in as President of USA in 1928, things in America were close to ‘normal’, defining normal as absence of a crisis. Hoover was an educated, serious, and well-regarded leader who had every chance of success if things remained normal. But things did not stay normal. The stock market crashed in 1929 and the depression followed in the 1930s, plunging America into a crisis.  Hoover was not an assertive President and could not give people the confidence that his government had caught the bull by the horns. People yearned for a leader who could protect their interests and give them hope. 

Enter Democrat FD Roosevelt, who was a product of adversity (in his case, polio). He had an image of some dodginess, opportunism and evasiveness. By elections in 1932, people were ready for a change and FDR won handsomely. He toiled like a bundle of energy and set out to devise his now-famous New Deal with huge public expenditures on roads, highways, and infrastructure. He spoke to the people on the hustings and through the new-fangled medium of radio. He often criticized previous leaders for letting down the people and assured the people about his constant fight on their behalf to restore their self-esteem and livelihood. 

In the world at that time, several countries were in turmoil. The visible pattern was that parliamentary democracies were somewhat lost (Britain, France, America) while dictatorships (Nazi Germany and Communist Soviet Union) were coping better. In this vortex, what could be the value of liberal democracy to a common person? 

Warrior FDR gave common people what they really wanted—self-respect, hope, and symbols of progress. When these important things were available to people, liberalism and democracy seemed too intellectual to be important. In the face of some clashes, the Supreme Court was brought to heel. Critics thought that Roosevelt was becoming authoritarian, but his supporters thought that FDR was, in fact, saving democracy. FDR won a record of four elections. In due course, a two-term Presidency limit was introduced. FDR counts in history among the iconic of all US Presidents.

Rebel

How can one lead in the absence of power? The book describes the suffragette movement of the 19th and 20th century. The idea could progress only when it became a ‘mass movement.’ In a mass movement, of course, there are several stakeholders, each with a different perspective. Such divisiveness and diversity are exploited by the dominant power. In the suffragette movement, while different groups pursued their idiosyncratic agenda, they solidly united on the core issue, viz, to fight the prevalent strongly negative attitude to women. Rebels must unite on their most core aim. Without doubt, I-N-D-I-A has some lessons to learn from the chapter on how to bring change with little power.

Saint

How can one lead against tyranny? The book points out that tyrannical regimes appear to improve the lives of the oppressed in the short term. Recall the two years of India’s emergency. Leadership against tyranny requires the saint. Charles de Gaulle emerged as the saint when he led the resistance movement against the puppet Vichy government in France when the tyrannical Nazis invaded France. Mahatma Gandhi played the saint in India’s independence movement against a tyrannical colonial power. The book describes the tyrannical regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Trujillo ran a despotic government but could do so for three decades only due to the support of the USA! Trujillo was assassinated in 1961.

The book also touches upon (i) the effect of too much power, as when America was equipped with the atom bomb, (ii) what happens when super-talented leaders fail at their task as it happened with American leadership during Vietnam. Currently the specter of this possibility is visible with regard to climate change.  We think of some leaders as ‘transformational.’ The author points out that it is important to remember that such an image is less concerned with what that leader did. Rather it is about what we think that that leader did! All in all, a book highly recommended.

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by  Dr. Narend. S, Chairperson Accounting & Finance, TSM.

An extremely useful book that delves into the complexities of corporate governance. Corporate governance is becoming an increasingly important aspect of corporate strategies and good governance encourages well-managed and accountable decision-making at various levels of business. The narrative is taut and replete with adequate examples on practical issues and conundrums that influence decision making in the corporate world. The book dwells on the board dynamics, the biases, the mantras to be followed by CEOs and directors, how power manifests itself in the boardroom and the key ingredients of leadership among others. This book cleverly intertwines both academic findings and practical corporate incidences which would definitely be insightful for the board members.  This book would also be immensely useful for everyone involved in board dynamics and corporate governance in their effective decision-making processes, practices, and policies. A must-read book for practitioners and academicians interested in corporate governance and board dynamics.

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LEADERSHIP PRODROMAL SIGNALS. 

The world is facing increasing dangers from megalomaniacal leadership, arguably, more so than climate change. Individuals can respond in a limited way, but collective effort may help more. I have some thoughts on one manifestation of such leadership, that is crony capitalism. I realize that the reader may or may not agree, but just sharing thoughts. 

From an enterprise perspective, the potential admixture of business and politics—crony capitalism—can be troublesome. Such entrepreneurs enjoy amazing gains during the regime of a particular political dispensation. The Economist (2nd May 2023) reports that (i) crony wealth is increasing steadily since 1998 everywhere and (ii) autocratic regimes tend to have three times more crony wealth as a percentage of GDP than democratic regimes. As autocracy spreads, so does cronyism.

Think of Hungary where Lorinc Meszaros, a former schoolmate of Victor Orban and who owned a modest pipe-fitting business, has become the richest man in Hungary with a fortune estimated by Forbes at USD 1.4 billion.  Recall the case of the uber-rich Eike Batista, the charismatic oil and mining baron of Brazil, who was arrested in 2019. Think of six-year-old VinFast, a Vietnamese electric car maker, whose valuation at USD 85 billion has exceeded each of Detroit’s big three car makers. Pham Nhat Vuong, reportedly very close to those in power, owns 99 percent of VinFast, leaving very little float of his company shares. He is Vietnam’s nationalistic hero whose businesses range from noodles and real estate to cars. 

Patanjali Foods (Baba Ramdev) and Adani Wilmar (Adani Group) are huge importers of palm oil among Indian importers, India itself being the world’s biggest importer of the commodity. Both companies, among India’s top packaged food producers, have a limited float of equity stocks, and have fabled market valuations. 

When Swami Vivekananda travelled in America in 1890s, he felt that the world had never faced as much turmoil as it was then facing. Clearly the world has been in turmoil for long. His solution was to bathe the world in a ‘flood of spirituality’, which I would rephrase for contemporary times, as a ‘flood of humanism and compassion.’ 

Whether in company boards, sports bodies, gymkhanas, or nations, the consequences of dangerous leadership can be devastating. By identifying key indicators, such as a lust for power, manipulation tactics, and disregard for dissenting opinions, the chances of avoiding the calamities caused by toxic leadership can be minimized. There are archetypal attributes of dangerous leaders that have been observed for centuries. Historical leaders like Coriolanus or Julius Caesar, company leaders like Sewell Avery (Montgomery Ward) or Harold Geneen (ITT Corporation), and mythological characters like Hiranyakasipu and Ravana. 

The same attributes may not manifest in every leader, nor does the presence of some attributes automatically imply danger. However, when multiple signals converge, vigilance becomes necessary. There are certain overlapping archetypes.

Narcissistic Personality: A grandiose sense of self-importance, an insatiable need for admiration, and a lack of empathy are common traits of narcissistic leaders. They view themselves as invulnerable, making them resistant to criticism and blind to their own flaws, often leading to decisions that prioritize personal gain over the well-being of their constituents.

Manipulative Communication: Leaders who skilfully manipulate their followers may exhibit rhetoric that stokes fear, division, and prejudice. By capitalizing on insecurities and exploiting societal fault lines, these leaders can easily gain support and create an “us versus them” narrative, compromising the social fabric and fostering an environment of distrust.

Power Consolidation: Leaders who relentlessly seek to centralize power, weaken institutions, and limit checks and balances can pose a significant threat. Such attempts are often accompanied by diminishing freedom of expression, restricting liberties, and targeting dissidents. History has shown that power concentrated in the hands of a select few can lead to widespread abuse and oppression.

Through my professional career, I have observed and studied this subject. Most likely, I have even been a victim of the trait. In 2017, I wrote a book, CRASH: entry and exit of CEOs. Recently, I published another book, INSIDE THE BOARDROOM: how behaviour trumps rationality. Using the materials that I have read and written about, I assembled an early warning indicator that can give an alert. The members in a sports gymkhana, corporate entity or even a nation can test whether their institution is in the grip of a potentially dangerous leader by looking for ‘prodromal’ signals. 

Prodromal Test:

Here is a simple test that scores one point for every ‘yes’. A score of 12 or more out of 18 indicates a red light, a score of 6-11 is a yellow light, and below 6 can be attributed to the fact that no leader is perfect. Try this test on any prominent leader whom you are familiar with.

1. Deploys seemingly acceptable and outwardly democratic methods to achieve goals; avoids revolutionary methods. 
2. Uses established institutions to create a scare psychosis among people.
3. Promptly ejects those who do not readily cooperate. 
4. Prefers to speak to non-questioning audiences and avoids questioning. 
5. Preaches unity generally, but divides internally as needed.
6. Quick to form ‘we’ team and ‘them’ team among the people.
7. Expresses divisive ideas and initiates ‘hoodlum’ action principally through others mandated to do this. 
8. Quick to make impressive future promises which may or may not be delivered.
9. Promises a future in the long-term without measurable delivery of short-term performance.
10. Grabs opportunities for ceremony, pomp, and grandstanding.
11. Identifies ‘hate’ segments of the population.
12. Harks back recreation of ‘golden age periods’ in history .
13. Attributes every weakness of the times to past leaders.
14. Loves public speaking and becomes a persuasive, rabble-raising demagogue.
15. Gesticulates aggressively (body and face) while speaking in public.
16. Morphs from ordinary dressing to stylish dressing; becomes very conscious of personal appearance and image.
17. Gathers sycophants around self and forms a tight inner circle.
18. Loses feelings/empathy for others with increasing conviction that what he knows is the best.

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R Gopalakrishnan*

*(The writer is an author and business commentator. His fifty-year professional career was spent in HUL and Tata).

There is great value in moving across functions, geography, work relationships, and domains—what I term as talent portability and adaptation. A questioner may rightly ask why this is so; where does the value accrue from? The answer lies in the idea of a ‘crucible.’

A crucible is the vessel in alchemy where the nature and character of the contents changes and becomes quite different from the original ingredients. The change may be for the better or for the worse. In chemistry, it is a situation of fairly severe trial in which different elements interact, leading to the creation of something new. 

When an individual undergoes a life experience, he or she is modified by that experience; like, for example, when Gandhiji was thrown out of a first-class compartment in South Africa despite possessing a valid ticket; like, for example, when a school-pass Srinivasa Ramanujan left for Cambridge, England to do high research in mathematics with Professor G.H. Hardy.

A crucible experience may arise due to an incident (what happens) or due to the context (how, where, and when) or both. For example, Indians who went to USA were impacted by what happened to them as well as the new context—many favorably, but some disastrously. If you can imagine an x-axis titled ‘incident impact’ and a y-axis titled ‘context impact’, you can construct a matrix: low impact/context to high impact/context with combinations in-between.  

When Nandan Nilekani moved from being CEO of Infosys to a government job as Head of UIDAI (Unique Identity Development Authority of India), aka Aadhar, it was a high impact/context transition. When a young Deepak Parekh quit his multinational bank job in 1977 to join a start-up called HDFC, it was a crucible experience for him. When I moved from Vice Chairman of HUL to Director of Tata Sons, it was a high impact/context situation. On the other hand, when I was moved from being regional sales manager in west to north, it was a low impact/context situation. All had developmental implications (crucible effects), but some were more impactful than others. 

It is such a logic that drives the idea of talent portability and adaptation, which means that every few years, a high potential executive should experience work change along one or more of the four vectors of talent portability—function, geography, relationships, domain. In great talent companies, crucible effects are designed, but they may also occur in an unplanned manner. The following anecdote illustrates the point about unplanned crucible events.

A Hungarian lieutenant took part in a leadership development program. On his first leadership assignment, he led his small team on the required maneuvers for two days in the Swiss Alps. On the evening of the third day, the team camped to rest for the final assault the next day. Since the weather was clear, several soldiers in the team volunteered to do an advance recce of the assault area so that the probability of success on the next day would increase. The leader agreed. The soldiers left, but without their equipment or instruments.

An unexpected blizzard arose that night. None of the men returned throughout the long night. The lieutenant was rightly distraught at letting his men go on an unplanned recce sans instruments and equipment. Miraculously next morning, when the blizzard abated, the men straggled back to the amazement of the leader. What happened, he enquired? “We had given up,” said a young soldier, “when suddenly Pietr here pulled out a map. The map helped us to find our way back.” Upon seeing the map, the lieutenant was astonished that it was a map of the Italian Pyrenees whereas their action had occurred in the Swiss Alps. It is the equivalent of a team finding their way back from Kedarnath with a map of the Nilgiris! 

The story is used in leadership training to illustrate that managers find their way out of troublesome and unexpected situations through ‘sense-making’, not precise maps. Such sense-making has tremendous impact, being a crucible, on the way a leader develops. 

Crucible training has existed in one form or another for many years. Vanavasa for Sri Rama was a crucible training as it was also for the Pandavas. It was adopted formally by the US Marine Corps in the mid-1990s. The Commandant introduced an incredible fifty-four hours of Marine training—live fire exercises, long marches, and sleep deprivation at the end of base training. He called it “The Crucible.”

Without calling their training programs by that name, great talent companies design their own crucible programs, improving and tweaking it continuously. McKinsey makes associates work on completely unfamiliar domains; Hindustan Unilever sends its future leaders on rural development stints. Indian defense and administrative officers change their station and role for upcoming officers every few years.

Portability and adaptation are also the techniques resorted to voluntarily by people of other professions. Dr John Goodenough, who died recently, at age 101, won the Nobel Prize at age 97!  His scientific work on Lithium batteries has made possible our enjoyment of modern-day marvels in the form of cell phones and hand-held instruments.

In short, crucibles and adaptation are the antithesis of stagnation. They hold the key to human neoteny, which means rejuvenation and youthfulness. Leaders who cling on to positions of responsibility—CEOs of companies, Heads of State, Leaders of Political Parties—fail their stakeholders by throttling the potential rewards of neoteny.

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Preserving SHE values in institutions. 

By R Gopalakrishnan* 

I am happy to write this new column “Business & Purpose.” Last week this paper reviewed “Progressive Capitalism” by US Congressman Ro Khanna. The book made a case for decentralized capitalism. Asia Society India will shortly host a seminar on Balancing Profit and Purpose. Everywhere, the world seems to be searching for a different capitalism—Decentralized Capitalism, Conscious Capitalism, Enlightened Capitalism, Conscious Enterprise and so on. By overlaying my professional experiences on to these great ideas, I was led to the acronym SHE–Sustained, Humane, and Enlightened enterprise.

Long-living institutions—companies, scientific, charity, educational—must overcome two obstacles regarding values: first, developing sound SHE values; second, the preserving those SHE values across generations. 

Although set in the context of India’s freedom struggle, Gandhiji practiced the philosophy of truth, ahimsa, and satyagraha. Symbols like loin cloth, charkha, and Dandi march iconized his practices. His narratives and rituals were continual reminders to people, for example, group prayers, fasting, and jail terms.  These days, we observe several pyrotechnics to perpetuate ideology and to create reality-distortion fields around leaders: celebrating India’s alternative icons, narratives of history, and practicing rituals while inaugurating secular institutions. Such exercises are slick as is the pitch of a used car salesman, even if implausible to several.

A national economy is accelerated by the nurturing of SHE institutions because such institutions are national assets. SHE companies pay taxes, create jobs, innovate technologies, treat people decently, and inspire the community, all the while being sustainable, humane, and enlightened.  

Setting up a company with strong SHE values is difficult. Remaining a SHE company after the founder’s time is even more difficult.

Early leaders may implant deep-rooted and socially relevant values into the DNA of the organization, for example, Johnson & Johnson, Marks & Spencer, Cadbury, or Indian groups like Mahindra, Tata, Godrej, Bajaj, Birla. 

Metaphorically, developing and perpetuating SHE values is like a long river, from its origin till it rushes to meet the sea. From a trickle at origin, the river flows freely, develops currents, and becomes bigger due to land gradients and hydrology. Rivers bring bounty for people whom they serve. The trickle at origin is always “simple and elegant”. This is also true of the core of ideas and religions. 

As the river follows nature’s contours, it may appear complex and intimidating. The wide river develops its own character, much like ideas develop their own complexity due to icons and narratives. Complexity gets added through narratives, icons, and rituals.

In its final stretch, a vigorous delta rushes to meet the ocean and to lose its own identity. That is the essence of all leadership. The delta represents the multiplicity of rituals to honour the same philosophy with different narratives and icons of the simple idea.  

This metaphor of the river provides a four-stage mental model: Philosophy—Icons–Narratives—Rituals, validated by the birth and spread of world’s greatest ideas in religion, science, and philosophy. 

Enterprise must have a philosophy, which grapples with three inter-related questions: (i) what constitutes a philosophy for an enterprise, (ii) how that philosophy will be practiced and transmitted, and (iii) how it will be preserved for long.  There is no formula for the successful preservation of founding values. 

Finding out why many failed to preserve values is easier.  Consider two food companies, both of which got a fillip due to two different wars. 

First, the Camelot chocolate company, Cadbury. John Cadbury, the son of an abstinent Quaker added cocoa to his trading list of tea and coffee in the 1800s. John Cadbury was as determined as his father to improve the world around him.  In keeping with this philosophy, the family opened a chocolate township called Bournville, a bit like Port Sunlight of Unilever and Jamshedpur of Tata. Cadbury benefitted a great deal out of the First World War when its products were regarded as nutritious and convenient for the fighting troops. 

By 1965, the leadership passed to thirty-four-year-old family descendant, Adrian Cadbury (famous for Cadbury Committee on Corporate Governance). Cadbury engaged McKinsey Consultants to improve his company; Americanization of British industrial thinking had begun. There followed a management restructuring, then a sale of the confectionary business to American drinks company, Schweppes, which was dominantly profit oriented. Early founder John Cadbury’s communitarian and humane philosophy was lost in the change in ownership.  

Second, an iconic British brand, Bovril, which is a nutritious beef extract product. Responding to a call for nutrition for a fighting British army in the Franco-Prussian War, an innovative Scottish chemist called John Lawson Johnston, formulated a beef extract branded as Bovril, later joined by a vegetarian Marmite. To consumers, the brand blended meat, myth, and magic.  By 1960, the descendants could no longer competently run the listed company. The founder’s philosophy of “healthy, warm nutrition for workers” gave way to other philosophies as the business changed hands, first under investor James Goldsmith, and under Unilever which bought in 2001. A tangential and light-hearted observation is that a descendant of the creator of beef-extract married a Hindu girl!

Rivers end their journey for many reasons, so also it is with business philosophies. Change of ownership is a frequent cause of losing founding values. Preserving SHE values across generations of leadership is difficult for other reasons as well, for example, changing societal values, and appointing ‘wrong’ successors.

*The writer is an author and a business commentator. His articles and videos can be accessed at his website www.themindworks.me and his email ID is rgopal@themindworks.me

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By Gopalakrishnan*

In my experience of management talent development (distinct from specialist talent like with doctors or scientists), portability is a very important feature. What does portability of talent mean? Portability refers to the ability of a successful manager to be moved around the organization and for that person to depart from his or her zone of comfort to work with different products in different areas with different teams of people. 

To build great talent in an organization, as Tata Steel, Titan, Infosys, Mahindra have demonstrated, there must be an organized process to: first, build talent density; second, develop talent portability; third, clarify talent responsibility; fourth and last, hold talent accountable. 

To build talent density, management’s focus must be on quality and quantity of talent recruited. Talent recruitment must be dense but planned well. The sequential step is to develop such recruited talent through portability. This is the subject in this article. 

The vectors or dimensions of portability are functional, geographic, domain, and team. Portability should be practiced with judgment, intuition, review, and common sense, otherwise an organization will inadvertently disable its recruits through a high-speed centrifuge. Timing, frequency and distance of porting are important determinants. Variety is an important test bed for talent, just like a top tennis player should get experience of playing on grass, clay, and synthetic courts. A top cricketer should learn to perform different types of pitches. So, it is with managers.

Functional portability does not mean testing a biochemist in finance and accounts. It means offering a stint in, for example, sales to an accountant, or offering a stint in supply chain to an HR resource. It is a matter of judgment about how unconventional or long the jump should be while developing a candidate. I recall that in the 1970s, Ashok Ganguly, a researcher in biochemistry, was given a chance in manufacturing. He must have excelled as he rapidly moved on to become chairman of Hindustan Lever. In my early career, when I joined as a computer systems analyst and programmer, I was tried as a sales manager for a few years. It so happened that I liked the change, and that gave me the opportunity to switch my career path.

Geographic portability refers to changing the place of work. If you are a good sales manager in Karnataka, will you make a good sales manager in Punjab? After all, the language of doing business differs, the retail and distributor universe is different, attitudes to credit and trade differ. Some managers perform the same role in the same place for fifteen years and may even boast that they “have fifteen years of experience”. They have possibly had the same annual experience repeated fifteen times. 

Suresh Narayanan was the General Sales Manager in Nestle India. He was then moved to work in foreign subsidiaries of Nestle. When the Maggi noodles crisis hit Nestle India, Suresh was moved back as Chairman of Nestle India. From all accounts, he did a great job of getting Nestle India back on track.

Domain portability is the third vector. It is not essential to switch companies to get domain experience. Multiple domain experiences may be available within a company, but dramatically different domain experiences may be available across companies. I discovered this when I moved from fast moving consumer goods (Unilever) to industrial manufactures (Tata). A single corporation may have multiple domains as Unilever has Home Care, Personal Wash, Foods, and Refreshments. It is a great development experience to work in more than one domain. The business model and ways are different among Home Care and Foods, just to take one example. During my own career in Unilever, I moved back and forth from Home Care to Foods more than once. I believe domain moves accelerated my learning propensities. 

Before being appointed as President of World Bank, Ajay Banga worked in Nestle India, Pepsi Co, and Mastercard. Debu Bhattacharya, a Chemical engineer by training and experience, successfully headed HINDALCO, a metallurgical behemoth, for the Aditya Birla Group.

Team portability: Every manager is strengthened by his team and he or she strengthens the team. There is an organic relationship between an individual and how that person gets along with a team, principally because of the dynamics of human interaction. A top-class general manager should be flexible enough to work at the top of his or her capability with all sorts of teams. 

I have seen leaders who have worked in the same location with the same product line and with the same people for several years. Such leaders are almost specialists because their ability to gel with an alternative team in an alternative location has not been tested. The best among such leaders may well adapt, but many may not. That is why companies move emerging managers to work with different teams. When I moved from the comfort of working in Hindustan Lever to the discomfort of a different and international team while heading Unilever Arabia brought, I learnt a lot. If one reviews the career of top business leaders, one invariably notices evidence of that person having worked the way up while working with many teams, for example, Indra Nooyi at Pepsi Co, N. Chandrasekharan at Tata, Sanjiv Mehta at Unilever, to name a few.

Talent density and talent portability are two sides of the same coin, just as planting and harvesting are two sides of the same coin in agriculture.

*(The writer is an author and business commentator. His fifty-year professional career was spent in HUL and Tata).

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SHE can coexist with Enterprise. 

By R Gopalakrishnan* 

Virtue—Sustainable, Honest, and Enlightened—can coexist with Enterprise. They appear only appear like polar opposites. Virtue and Enterprise can and should be reconciled. Here is an example of virtue being sustained over generations.

While Unilever retained the basic philosophy of William Lever, albeit modified and modernized, that was not the case with other storied names that are often written about in business history. “Even when virtuous practices have been implemented, they have had relatively short half-lives in most corporations…most executives believe that their shareholders opposed such practices,” concluded James O’Toole in his book The Enlightened Capitalists, though his observations pertained to Anglo-American companies. 

I have been interested in the Unilever as an example–partly because I have long experience of working in that firm, and partly because it demonstrates that founder’s values and principles can survive many generations, though updated in its expression. 

During my Unilever years, I had visited Port Sunlight, Britain’s equivalent of our Jamshedpur. Through my hurried business visits, I did not quite appreciate that Port Sunlight counts among the earliest as a model town in Victorian England. William Lever advocated and practised radical ideas for his time such as employee welfare, societal advancement, and gender equality at a time when women in Britain were busy with the suffragette movement to secure voting rights for women! Lever’s philosophy, as recorded by John Griffiths of Manchester Metropolitan University in his doctoral thesis was “the interests of employers and employees were identical.”

“The truest and highest form of enlightened self-interest requires that we pay the fullest regard to the interest and welfare of those around us, whose well-being we must bind up with our own and with whom we must share our prosperity,” wrote Lever in 1888. By the early 1900s, Lever had substantive operations all over in Europe and America. 

Progressively, William Lever’s success enabled him to act with increasing boldness, even zaniness. He devised and implemented ideas through undertaking riskier and riskier investments. In early 1900s, young King Albert of Belgium invited Lever to invest in the Belgian colony of Congo. Entering a 50:50 partnership with the government, William Lever embarked on the Congo operations. The company provided decent wages, clean housing, schools, and healthcare to a population which was accustomed to being exploited as slaves. Lever was quite successful in his efforts.

Convinced by Port Sunlight and Congo experiences that his business could be a force for social good, he purchased two impoverished islands in the Outer Hebrides in 1918, off the west coast of Scotland. These islands were quite remote, almost in the Arctic zone. He was passionate about setting up a model township around a fish business there. Unfortunately, the venture stumbled. 

One reason was a steep fall in world commodity prices and deflation, which must have been difficult to anticipate. The finances of the company became greatly stretched.  William Lever wrote with frankness and despondency, “We are not entirely masters at the present moment and I am not captain of my own ship.” Lever’s finances were so stretched that he had to concede control of ‘his’ company to a more profit-oriented accountant, D’Arcy Cooper, a member of the Cooper branch of Coopers and Lybrands, auditors of Unilever  accounts. That is how Unilever became professionally managed.  A few years later, Lever was merged with the Dutch Margarine Unie to form Unilever.

According to James O’Toole, “over the years, the company somewhat drifted from away from Lever’s founding values, though not entirely”. In my experience, William Lever’s successors over the next one hundred years, adapted to the changed circumstances, not by departing from the founder’s philosophy, but by adapting the narratives and rituals that follow any philosophy.

From the 1980s, as emerging global storms became a hurricane—financialization of company balance sheets, advent of inexpensive money, demand for formalized corporate governance, short-term profit orientation, debates on profit versus social purpose, do-good ideas like planet and purpose—new ideas based on Unilever’s core philosophy grew, almost as a nod to the ghost of William Hesketh Lever. 

Under the leadership of recent leaders, the company imposed on itself the arduous and painful goal of reducing its use of water and energy, of adopting fair trade sourcing of its raw materials and agricultural raw materials, and to position half of its management as women. In the resultant collision between new trends and the financial market demand for quarter-quarter profits, there has been, and will continue to be some undercurrents, but the company’s core approach remains undeterred.  

“Anglo-Dutch Unilever has maintained a strong corporate culture that stresses the nurturing of community spirit among its employees. Equally it has earned a reputation for ethical behaviour,” writes James O’Toole.  Historian and HBS Professor Geoffrey Jones writes, “the concept of integrity is wider than honesty. Making money was never seen as an exclusive goal within Unilever either for individuals or for the company.” 

Would the script read differently in the case of venerable Indian companies like Mahindra, Lalbhai, Tata, Godrej, Bajaj, Birla? Do they have the reputation of implementing virtuous philosophies which they have managed to institutionalize for generations? There may be something to this enquiry.

*The writer is an author and a business commentator. His articles and videos can be accessed at his website www.themindworks.me and his email ID is rgopal@themindworks.me

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1. Gopalakrishnan*

*(The writer is an author and business commentator. His fifty-year professional career was spent in HUL and Tata).

When talent-building is discussed within organizations, a question often posed by the leaders is ‘Where does one start with such a long journey? How can we get critical mass?’ The anxiety is that his or her company is disadvantaged, being not so well-established like a Unilever or Tata Steel. Their company does not have the luxury of taking talent processes for granted. It is a reasonable leadership concern.

Two vital life and career skills are unwittingly learnt at the School of Hard Knocks—parenting a family and talent building in an organization. Just as one could secure a diploma in parenting, it does not assure parenting competence, corporate leaders (not just the HR folks) learn the art of talent development by deep personal engagement, both emotionally and temporally. 

The RIDE exercise–Recruitment, Induction, Development, Expansion—of human talent is both an ‘infinite’ game as well as a complex task, not dissimilar to parenting. For a quick start to talent-building, leaders and HR together can consider what I term the Miyawaki technique described in this article, but with a health warning: Miyawaki may offer a quick start, but an evolutionary and biological process must follow if the organization is to develop long-term great leaders.

During his research in the 1960s, Japanese botanist Professor Akira Miyawaki, pioneered a technique of growing mini forests. Natural forests take several centuries to get established. They require large land areas to develop. Inadequate land availability and urgent climate pressures have both demanded some sort of quick start. Miyawaki established a methodology to grow mini forests in small areas faster–in decades as compared to centuries for regular forests. In an era of rapid urbanization and concrete jungles, the Miyawaki technique delivers ecologically pleasing green cover in our endless, rolling urban spaces. 

Mini forests, which are heavy in wood, do not possess all the ecological advantages of natural forests. Mini forests are alright to get started but obviously cannot replicate the benefits of natural forests. In the five walking spaces in front of my residence in Mumbai, I have seen shades of Miyawaki mini forests, though not quite the real thing. 

The lessons of Miyawaki mini forests can be considered for jumpstarting a Miyawaki mini forest for talent! India Inc may benefit from such an approach. What might the Miyawaki technique look like when applied to talent?

According to Miyawaki, there are four categories of native plantings in any ecosystem–main tree species (tallest), sub-species (medium), shrubs (short), and ground-covering herbs—think of them as equivalent to top managers, technical and knowledge employees, skilled supervisors, and less-skilled workmen in an organization. About fifty to hundred local plant species belonging to all these four categories are selected for planting, but in a dense manner—twenty to thirty times denser than what ‘normal planting’ would involve.  

Here is an essential and important idea—the plants should be local, diverse, and must get planted densely. 

This stage corresponds to what we call ‘recruitment’ in talent management. As successful talent development companies know, recruiting with density is the important first step for talent development. How much density? There is no rule. Allow for a 25- 50% attrition over five years: design recruit density today, taking this into account. When I joined HUL as a trainee in 1967, the company recruited 10-15 trainees each year. Nowadays, they recruit at least six to seven times that number!

Next in talent management is induction. New recruits into any company should be hired for a positive attitude more than for ready skills. Skills can be taught, while attitude is difficult to teach. Fresh recruits are not aligned to the company value system, ways of working, culture, and relationships. Leadership must actively invest in these activities.  

In Miyawaki mini forests, over the early years, after the soil has been mulched and prepared for porosity and permeability, the site is ‘monitored, watered, and weeded’ to give the nascent forest a chance to establish itself. The densely spaced young plantings compete for light, water, and nutrients. Such a struggle itself promotes rapid growth compared to traditional afforestation techniques. There exists a ‘weeding out’ in the mini forest, equivalent to attrition. Since attrition is inevitable, the denseness of talent recruitment assumes primacy. Trees in Miyawaki are known to grow about ten times faster than normal! 

Maybe quality talent too can be identified for survival and robustness early on. Recruits should be actively inducted into company values and goals by their line bosses. Training courses, employee counselling by mentors, varied assignments, progress diaries—all of these and more are well-used techniques within good companies. In such a process, the less competent or uncommitted talent gets highlighted. Correction, and where necessary, weeding can occur.

Miyawaki mini forests have the long-term limitation that they cannot replicate the beneficial role of natural forests. They provide a quick and temporary green relief in concrete-jungled urban spaces. There is lots of wood, but the many other benefits of a natural forest do not accrue. Likewise, developing a mini forest of talent provides a quick start and builds a positive talent atmosphere in a company. Thereafter, an organic and nurturing process, more like a biological process, is required within the company to develop long-term leadership talent. 

The longer-term nurturing of talent is a large and separate subject.

Is the Miyawaki technique of creating a mini forest of talent a ‘proven concept?’ Yes and No. Hindustan Unilever, Tata Steel, Infosys, Mahindra, and Maruti, all have practiced the art without terming their talent approach as Miyawaki. If one studies their actions and approaches in talent building, one can trace the processes of a Miyawaki mini forest of talent.

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