• Publisher: HBR Press, 2021
• Date of Review: 2nd Nov 2021
• Reviewer: R. GOPALAKRISHNAN

Humans yearn for a simpler world, yet we coexist with contrasts: the humble and the pompous, the good and the bad, the greedy and the generous. According to Chinese philosophy, those who master the balance of yin and yang, combining complementary opposing forces, conquer the world.

In the corporate realm, opinions about businesses range from viewing them as greedy bloodsuckers to praising them as forces for good. Throughout my career with Unilever and Tata, spanning fifty years, I’ve engaged in initiatives that created employment, reskilled staff, and delivered fair incomes, expanding economic activity significantly. Did I serve the nation? Undoubtedly, and perhaps more than many others, echoing Alfred Marshall’s 1910 sentiment that “if India had a score or two of men like Mr. Tata, India would soon be a great nation.”

Hubert Joly’s new book, The Heart of Business, categorizes as one praising the goodness in corporations. It discusses how corporate leaders can create companies that are humane and passionate, which, as a byproduct, achieve impressive growth and great profits. Unfortunately, stories of good deeds often garner less interest than those of misdeeds, as seen in Netflix’s lineup or the daily news.

In a world often focused on the negative, Joly’s book shines like a lone candle in the darkness. Drawing on his experiences and lessons from turning around Best Buy between 2012 and 2019, the content resonates with other influential works like Good to Great, Conscious Capitalism, and Firms of Endearment.

Joly asserts, “I firmly believe that it is business’s business to get involved in societal issues.” This belief is tested in the challenging realities of India, where a firm’s progressive advertisement can provoke backlash from conservative quarters, risking damage to its properties. This dichotomy challenges Joly’s conviction, especially in Indian contexts.

Many Indian firms need a turnaround. Unlike typical literature on the subject, Joly advocates a unique approach: “Always start with people, always end with people, and generate human energy.” This perspective informed his successful strategies at Best Buy.

Applying the Joly formula to Air India as Tata prepares to take over might focus on revitalizing the company by prioritizing its people, which aligns with the century-old Tata ethos. This human-centric approach might seem soft to left-brained, analytics-driven commentators, yet it could very well succeed.

Joly also recounts learning from Jean-Marie Descarpentries, CEO of Honeywell Bull, whose approach emphasized prioritizing people over business and finance. If such ideas are implemented in Air India’s turnaround, the current employees, though initially stunned, might become curious and eventually energized, significantly contributing to the turnaround efforts.

Lastly, Joly addresses the challenges when a company grapples with its majority shareholder, using his own experiences at Best Buy after the retirement of founder Dick Schulze. Schulze’s attempt to take the company private led to a decline in share prices and morale. Joly’s approach to resolving conflicts with Schulze involved establishing a firm boundary about taking advice but not directions, which ultimately led to a substantial return to shareholders by the time of his retirement in 2019.

Reviewing The Heart of a Business has been a delightful journey into understanding the softer, yet profoundly impactful, side of corporate management.

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Book CEO Excellence 

Authors Caroline Dewar, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra

Reviewer R. Gopalakrishnan, Author and Corporate Advisor

Date 20-5-22

Authored by three experienced McKinsey consultants, this book has rightfully boast of the solid conceptual framework, intellect, and rigor that the firm is fabled for. According to the authors, based on their research interviews with 67 CEOs, there are six mindsets for CEO excellence—Direction Setting, Organizational Alignment, Mobilizing Leaders, Board Engagement, Stakeholder Connection and Personal Effectiveness. 

Each mindset is exemplified by three supporting practices. Thus the reader will find eighteen practices that characterize the six mindsets of the excellent CEO. Six mindsets and eighteen practices–that is what the book is all about. They have also included CEO Excellence Assessment and Prioritization tools in the appendix. What more can authors provide? The book writing style is thorough and exhaustive—even exhausting in parts. 

However, as always, it will remain a mystery to a manager about how he or she can practically implement those mindsets and practices, and become an excellent CEO. Unless, I reckon, you hire the firm as a consultant!  This is a problem, not of this book, but generically of all books that describe how to perfect what are essentially performing arts—golf, music, and dance, for example. Imagine a book based on interviews with Rukmini Arundale, Balasaraswathi, Vyjayantimala, Mrinalini Sarabhai, Alarmel Valli and their ilk on how to be an excellent Bharata Natyam dancer. Even the best and most excellent research, commentaries, and workbooks may not create another dancer like those interviewed.

The theme of this book follows in the genre of several books like the Lessons of Excellence book by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman–both also, coincidentally, McKinsey consultants. Also, the terrific book, Good to Great, by academic, Jim Collins. This reviewer has himself coauthored six books on how good Indian companies have been built into institutions during the last fifty years. However, there are, for sure, two ‘uncommon mindsets’, titled Board Engagement Mindset, and Stakeholder Connection Mindset. 

A very important addition in the contemporary context of board effectiveness and governance. Surprisingly, it places the onus of building “a foundation of trust” on the CEO, not the Chairman. The CEO is advised to (i) choose radical transparency (ii) build a strong relationship with the board chair (iii) reach out to individual directors (iv) expose the board to the Chairman. As a former CEO and now serving as an independent director and Chairman, I am nonplussed. Surely there is some role for the board Chairman! 

However, the lessons from the interviews of the exemplars are laudable. Consider the quote from Jamie Dimon, who told his JP Morgan Chase board, “Just so you know, I am going to do the right thing for this company. I am going to tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth to the best of my ability every time…. if I am wrong, I am going to tell you that too.” In a milieu where former CEOs try to stay on as non-executive directors, or worse still, as non-executive chairman, the authors have stated, “In unfortunate situations where a former CEO has become the chair and wants to continue controlling the company, building individual relationships becomes make-or-break.” The book goes on to aver, “Getting on top of board dynamics is one of the real challenges for the CEO early on. There’s informal power and formal power, and in boards, it is the informal power that you really must understand.” Reflect on what happened or could happen in Larsen & Toubro, Tata Sons, Britannia Biscuits, ITC, and several promoter-led companies to appreciate the full import of this advice by the authors.

The Stakeholder Connections Mindset also is a welcome read, especially in the context of changing societal expectations from enterprise. In the section on social purpose practice, the authors refer to a McKinsey Quarterly article on how and where humans find meaning at work. Employees draw on at least five sources of purpose and motivation. The first is themselves—their development and rewards, and freedom to act. The second is fellow employees—feeling a sense of belonging, caring for one another. The third is the company—beating competition, industry leadership, and following best practices. The fourth is customers—impact on them, making their life easier by providing superior products. The last source of purpose and motivation is society—impact on markets and making the world a better place. 

When I was making a career switch from Unilever to Tata, I sought advice from my late sister. Since she knew nothing about the corporate sector, she responded that joining Tata must be good “because they are good and benign people.” Occasionally, many people wonder why Tata employees feel a great sense of belonging. I think it is the Tata impact on society.

Finally, as a closing remark, I should add my view that the market would be enriched by a book on how Indian companies, nurtured in the soil of Indian values and culture, become excellent and perform sustainably as institutions of great enterprise. I doubt that the listing and priorities of mindset and practices would be identical to American or European companies.

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Book The Crux: how leaders become strategists

Author Richard Rumelt

Reviewer R. Gopalakrishnan, Author and Corporate Advisor

Date 16-7-22

Richard Rumelt is a senior academic and an emeritus chair at the UCLA Andersen School of Management. He is considered by McKinsey to be the “strategist’s strategist”, suggesting that he is a strategy guru. This book is a sequel to his earlier book, “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy”, published in 2011. Judging purely from his writing style and content, he comes through as a thinker, sans the flair and flamboyance that some academics display in spades. For a subject like strategy, this is a positive trait. His articulation and approach resemble, in my view, the style of a Clayton Christensen. 

In his 2011 book, Rumelt had declared what a good strategy is. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to the obstacles to progress. The core, therefore, is to discover the critical obstacles and to design a coherent set of actions to overcome those obstacles. 

He had also articulated what good strategy is not. Good strategy is not an overarching vision, nor the high ambition of a leader. It is not about the motivation of people. 

Think about the strategy sessions that you may have participated in. Most likely, many were rich with words like vision, mission, goals. They perhaps were so artfully packaged in jargon and so intellectually seductive that unless you are willing to admit that you had not understood, the words could pass off as great strategic thinking.   

Think of British Airways several years ago adopting a strategy to be “the most respected company in their field through global leadership, growth, and high shareholder return.” Outside of business, think about national level “strategies” like doubling farmers’ income, rooting out black money, vocal for local, and you will see how alliterations, catch phrases, bombast and fluff play out. Bombast is temporarily seducing, but is not of any permanence, because it represents legitimate and great ambition, but it is not strategy.

Identifying the key obstacles to achieving ambitions is essential before a management can think of actions to overcome them. In his second book, Rumelt  has devoted his writing exclusively to this process. Borrowing the term, Crux, from mountaineering, Rumelt argues that it represents the most critical challenge to the desired progress. For any organization, the list of obstacles and challenges is labyrinthine, thus masking what the author calls the “gnarly challenge.” 

Gnarly challenges share certain characteristics. They retard a clear definition of what the real obstacle is, and hence, they invariably attract a bundle of ambitions as possible solution. Further, the connection between the proposed actions and the outcome are unclear. This valid statement exemplifies why gnarly problems have to be distilled down to a crux in a disciplined methodology. 

Gnarly challenges require focused coordination of multiple activities across many functions, simultaneous with the day-to-day operations working effectively in their silos. The methodology is not intellectual, it is tedious. It involves (i) widespread consultation, (ii) distillation to the most important amidst many important obstacles, (iii) articulating the obstacles unambiguously, and (iv) designing actions that will untangle the crux. 

From my own observations, I imagine the crux that must have been identified by Hindustan Lever in its journey over eight decades. I was not the strategist in the cases mentioned here, but was an active player in teams of strategic execution. In the 1930s, the crux was to develop an Indian cadre of management. Untangling this crux took twenty-five years before Prakash Tandon was appointed as Chairman, the first national in any overseas Unilever company. In the 1950s, raw material supply was identified as the crux. This led to the setting up of a Research Centre, the first for Unilever in any overseas country, under the leadership of Cambridge-educated Dr S Varadarajan. In the 1970s, Unilever shareholding under FERA and misguided labor unions were both seen as crux. Between T Thomas and Ashok Ganguly, the battle with policy was waged relentlessly for over a decade until Unilever was permitted 51% and the labor difficulties were untangled by dispersed manufacturing. 

Susim Datta faced the challenges of liberalization. He addressed the crux of growth and quality challenges and adopted appropriate methodologies to significantly enhance quality of products and processes. Similarly, as India liberalized, Ratan Tata identified the crux for the Tata Group after the six-decade chairmanship of an iconic JRD Tata as transforming to global competitiveness. The first step was awakening the leadership to squarely face the real challenge of corporate excellence. He did this by advocating the adoption of the Tata Business Excellence Model and the Tata Code of Conduct. On an annual basis of measurement, the exercise held a mirror to every Tata company about how it stacked up against peers. The warts in the reflection delivered the message for action. Rumelt is persuasive against the corruption of real strategy. Fluffy words, inspiration, motivation, catch phrases, all have a role, but should not be confused with strategy, he argues. 

Recently one of my client companies requested advice on how the company can execute a strategy of growing revenue by 3 X within five years. I explained to the client that growth is the consequence of strategy, it is at best an ambition, but it is not a strategy. Strategy is like breathing. Good breathing and good strategy both require leaders to learn techniques, and engage with disciplined practice. Ask Baba Ramdev or read James Nestor’s recent book on breathing. If you breathe well or adopt a crux-overcoming strategy, you improve the chances of a successful outcome, which may approach your ambitions—no assurances. 

I like James Nestor’s description of good breathing as “a new science of a lost art.” Richard Rumelt’s non-fuss, deep book perhaps merits the same descriptor for strategy as a new science of a lost art.

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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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“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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When I got the book Doodles on Leadership from Outlook Business, I was half expecting to see doodles and scribbles that the author may have penned during the multiple board meetings he has attended during his long career. But lo and behold! The book does not contain any doodles by Mr R Gopalakrishnan. Instead, you are provided a whole lot of ideas and new thoughts on management and broader policy making.

Mr Gopalakrishnan is not just a best-selling author. His resume is power-packed with two long stints with the most respected groups in the country. While his previous books were more focused on the management lessons he has learnt working in two terrific organizations and working with visionary leaders, this one [Doodles on Leadership] is a little different. Don’t let the title fool you. Like I have said already, there are no frivolous doodles in the book for you to critique. This is not an adult colouring book either.

The first few chapters feature a terrain that Mr Gopalakrishnan has covered well in his other books. The first chapter is a rather interesting discussion [imagined, of course] among the leaders who guided the Tata Group for its first 100 odd years of existence. The conversation is enlightening and throws up several issues relating to recruitment, ethics, visionary thinking and so on. The second chapter delves into Mr Gopalakrishnan’s role as the custodian of the innovation spirit in the Tata Group — possibly the only group to have developed a group-wide focus on innovation. I was looking for some metric of the sort of Product Vitality Index [developed by 3M to measure what percentage of sales comes from products that are less than five years old], and I did discover the ‘Innometer’ that Tatas use to measure the innovativeness of individual companies.

The third chapter deals with the concept of ‘Trusteeship’; you will get to meet some interesting personalities including Swami Vivekananda in this chapter. The concept of Conscious Capitalism is now being touted in the West as a cure-all, Mr Gopalakrishnan points out that this is a concept that has been alive and well in India for long.

In the second half of the book, the author starts addressing some larger socio-economic issues. In the chapter titled provocatively as ‘The #ETu Movement’, he addresses the challenges of giving up control and anointing a successor. Most Indian companies are family controlled and Mr Gopalakrishnan has some worthy advice for a person taking over as a CEO of an Indian [family owned] company. The first advice says ‘don’t criticize the predecessor’; the second is about ‘setting the right expectations with the promoters’. I will let you discover the other three in the book.

The book then moves on to what I would call larger topics. The chapter on ‘Little India’ shows Mr Gopalakrishnan’s passion for the neglected India that lives in the villages — how can corporates and government unleash the power that is residing in ‘Little India’? I was surprised to read that West Bengal has some of the best land revenue collection records in the country [interestingly, they also have some of the best CCTV based traffic policing]. Mr Gopalakrishnan suggests that policies should drive towards collecting more land revenue, but letting ‘Little India’ decide and spend it at the local level.

Having worked in large corporates that sell their products through the length and breadth of the country, with factories located in remote regions, Mr Gopalakrishan brings a deep understanding of the challenges being faced by the unserved India. His exposure to agriculture products enables him to do a deep dive into the crisis being faced in agriculture in chapter seven. This chapter consists of 10 recommendations for policy makers. All of them make eminent sense but I really loved the idea of connecting the 20 million progressive farmers through a digitally led transformative road; along the lines of China’s ‘Taobao’.

The last three chapters deal with reforming the Indian justice system, building a stronger entrepreneurial orientation and the roles of the nation, society and business enterprise.

The book is a very easy read at less than 200 pages; and I suspect we will be reading a lot more from Mr Gopalakrishnan on some of the topics he has touched upon here. That said, the book raises many important issues and should be recommended reading for policy makers and business leaders — young and old. Given the pace of the book, you will be left with no time to do your own doodles on the margin.

Review by Ambi Parameswaran, an independent brand strategist and the founder of brand-building.com; his last book ‘SPONGE – Leadership Lessons’ examined how we can become better leaders through the SPONGE Process of Learning. 

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