The points mentioned are relevant at all the time for all people of all generations from all walks of life. There is a Thai saying that experience is a comb which Nature gives to man after he is bald. As I grow bald, I would like to share my comb with you.

1. Seek out grassroots level experience
I studied Physics and Engineering at University. A few months before graduation, I appeared for a Hindustan Lever interview for Computer Traineeship. When asked whether I would consider Marketing instead of Computers, I responded negatively: an engineer to visit grocery shops to sell Dalda or Lifebuoy? Gosh, no way. After I joined the Company and a couple of comfortable weeks in the swanky Head Office, I was given a train ticket to go to Nasik. Would I please meet Mr. Kelkar to whom I would be attached for the next two months? He would teach me to work as a salesman in his territory, which included staying in Kopargaon and Pimpalgaon among other small towns. I was most upset. In a town called Ozhar, I was moving around from shop to shop with a bullock cart full of products and a salesman’s folder in my hand. Imagine my embarrassment when an IIT friend appeared in front of me in Ozhar, believe it or not! And exclaimed, “Gopal, I thought you joined as a Management Trainee in Computers”. I could have died a thousand deaths. After this leveling experience, I was less embarrassed to work as a Dispatch Clerk in the Company Depot and an Invoice Clerk in the Accounts Department. Several years later, I realized the value of such grassroots level experience. It is fantastic. I would advise young people to seek out nail-dirtying, collar-soiling, shoe-wearing tasks. That is how you learn about organizations, about the true nature of work, and the dignity of the many, many tasks that go into building great enterprises.

2. Deserve before you desire
At one stage, I was appointed as the Brand Manager for Lifebuoy and Pears soap, the company’s most popular-priced and most premium soaps. And what was a Brand Manager? “A mini-businessman, responsible for the production, sales and profits of the brand, accountable for its long-term growth, etc., etc. I had read those statements, I believed them and here I was, at 27,”in charge of everything”. But very soon, I found I could not move a pin without checking with my seniors. One evening, after turning the Facit machine handle through various calculations, I sat in front of the Marketing Director. I expressed my frustration and gently asked whether I could not be given total charge. He smiled benignly and said, “The perception and reality are both right. You will get total charge when you know more about the brand than anyone else in this company about its formulation, the raw materials, the production costs, the consumer’s perception, the distribution and so on. How long do you think that it will take?” “Maybe, ten years”, I replied, “and I don’t expect to be the Lifebuoy and Pears Brand Manager for so long”! And then suddenly, the lesson was clear. I desired total control, long before I deserved it.
This happens to us all the time – in terms of responsibilities, in terms of postings and promotions, it happens all the time that there is a gap between our perception of what we deserve and the reality of what we get. It helps to deserve before we desire.

3. Play to win but win with fairness
Life is competitive and of course, you play to win. But think about the balance. Will you do anything, to win? Perhaps not. Think deeply about how and where you draw the line. Each person draws it differently, and in doing so, it helps to think about values. Winning without values provides dubious fulfillment. The leaders who have contributed the most are the ones with a set of universal values! Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King for example. Napoleon inspired a ragged, mutinous and halfstarved army to fight and seize power. This brought him name and fame for twenty years. But all the while, he was driven forward by a selfish and evil ambition, and not in pursuit of a great ideal. He finally fell because of his selfish ambition. I am fond of referring to the Pierre de Coubertin Fair Play Trophy. It was instituted in 1964 by the founder of the modern Olympic Games and here are two examples of winners. A Hungarian tennis player who pleaded with the umpire to give his opponent some more time
to recover from a cramp. A British kayak team who were trailing the Danish kayak team. They then stopped to help the Danish team whose boat was stuck. The Danes went on to beat the British by one second in a three hour event! What wonderful examples of sportsmanship! Play to Win, but with Fairness.

4. Learn to Enjoy whatever you do
I never understand when people say “Only do what you like”. Sometime things just don’t work that way. Learn to like/enjoy whatever you do.
Sir Thomas Lipton is credited with the statement, “There is no greater fun than hard work”. You usually excel in fields, which you truly enjoy. Ask any person what it is that interferes with his enjoyment of existence. He will say, “The struggle for life”. What he probably means is the struggle for success. Unless a person has learnt what to do with success after getting it, the very achievement of it must lead him to unhappiness. Aristotle wrote, “Humans seek happiness as an end in itself, not as a means to something else”. But if you think about it, we should not work for happiness. We should work as happy people. In organizational life, people get busy doing something to be happy. The more you try to be happy, the unhappy you can get. Your work and career is all about you’re reaching your full potential. Working at one’s full potential, whether it is the office boy or the Chairman, leads to enjoyment and fulfilment.
A last point about enjoyment.
Keep a sense of humor about yourself. Too many people are in danger of taking themselves far too seriously. As General Joe Stilwell is reported to have said, “Keep smiling. The higher the monkey climbs, the more you can see of his backside”.

5. Be Passionate about your health
Of course, as you get older, you would have a slight paunch, graying of hair or loss of it and so on. But it is in the first 5 – 7 years after the working career begins that the greatest neglect of youthful health occurs. Sportsmen stop playing sports, non-drinkers drink alcohol, light smokers smoke more, active people sit on chairs, and starving inmates of hostels eat rich food in good hotels and so on. These are the years to watch. Do not, I repeat do not, convince yourself that you are too busy, or that you do not have access to facilities, or worst of all, that you do this to relieve the stresses of a professional career. A professional career is indeed very stressful. There is only one person who can help you to cope with the tension, avoid the doctor’s scalpel, and to feel good each morning – and that is yourself. God has given us as good a health as He has given us health, like a credit balance in the bank. Grow it, maintain it, but do not allow its value destruction. The penalty is very high in later years.

6. Direction is more important than distance
Every golfer tries to drive the ball to a very long distance. In the process, all sorts of mistakes occur because the game involves the masterly co-ordination of several movements simultaneously. The golf coach always advises that direction is more important than distance. So it is with life. Despite one’s best attempts, there will be ups and downs. It is relationships and friendships that enable a person to navigate the choppy waters that the ship of life will encounter. When I was young, there was a memorable film by Frank Capra, starring James Stewart and Dona Reed, and named IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. It is about a man who is about to commit suicide because he thinks he is a failure. An angel is sent to rescue him. The bottom line of the film is that “No Man is a Failure Who Has Friends”.

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Experience is a comb which Nature gives to man after he is bald!  But all bald men are not old men.  Nani Palkhivala once circulated a quotation about how youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind.  Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years.  People grow old by deserting their ideals.  Years wrinkle the skin, but giving up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.  There is much research all over the world about leaders who are learning for a lifetime.  Such people are focused on the future, not on the past.  They are addicted to life, as energized by it as they ever were.  They seem to be forever young.

Actress Zohra Sehgal is 92.  She says the secrets of her success are “a one hour physical workout and those explicit scenes in novels.”  Actor Dev Anand is 80 and confesses that he does not smoke or drink and believes that the way to be perennially young is to look ahead with excitement, and being alive all the time.  Ustad Bismillah Khan is 87 and feels that “music is an ocean and I have barely reached the shore after so many decades.  My search is incomplete and that’s what keeps me going.”  Kathak dancer Sitara Devi is 79 and asserts “I do riyaaz every single day.  I am still learning to dance, now Bharata Natyam style.”

I wish to share some lessons that I have learnt about staying young and zestful.  I do so not merely from the perspective of my experiences so far, but also knowing that several inexperiences await me in the future.  Sharing may help, it may even be interesting

1. Manage Yourself

You are defined in others’ perception by your body, your mind and your time.  All three require managing.  It is a huge disadvantage not to be able to do so.

It pays to have a practical attitude about the role of your body.  It is not the most essential thing about you, but it is the vehicle which carries what is essential.  If you were given a car and told that it would be the only one for the rest of your life, you would take care of it in a certain way.  Your body is the only one you’ll ever have and you have to work hard to make it run longer and better.

The mind is a bit like a garden.  If it isn’t fed and cultivated, weeds will take it over.  Just like your body would not be in good shape if it was fed only ice-cream, potato chips and hamburgers, you cannot feed your mind only with television, soap operas and Bollywood movies.  Indulge your mind in the adventures it has been trained to undertake, do not waste it – read, think, write, do what turns you on in mental calisthenics.

The day has twenty four hours for you, and so also for those you work with.  Be respectful of your own time, and even more so, of other people’s time.  Diary and time management is a serious weakness of many top people and the higher the executive, the more deleterious are the effects of poor time management.

So, lesson number one is to manage yourself since nobody else can manage your body, your mind or your time.

2. Manage Your Conscience

Life is this great theatre where we are all small actors.  Ours is a role, cast by a scriptwriter.  Our role in the play will for sure get over.  That is when we peel off the grease paint, shed our costumes, and go “home to our maker.”  All the glory, if any, achieved during the drama of life will probably seem much less relevant at that time compared to the magical moment in the play.  At that time, we will listen to the voice of silence and our own conscience.  Will that be a pleasant voice?

We can make it so.  By remembering throughout life what Gandhiji once said to beware of : politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, education without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity and worship without sacrifice.

It is essential to live a life with conscience.  That is my second lesson.

3. Manage Your Happiness

When I was offered a terrific professional opportunity as Chairman of Unilever Arabia in 1990, my wife and I faced a dilemma : how would  we cope with the restrictive lifestyle in Jeddah?  My mother’s advice was insightful and has stayed with me ever since, “If you both have decided to be happy, nobody can stop you.  If you have decided to be unhappy, then nobody can help you.”  We spend our lives as though happiness is a destination and as though we are on a journey towards that destination.  In reality, happiness is a companion on the journey.  We can work for happiness or with happiness.  The choice is ours.

Sir Thomas Lipton said, “There is no greater fun than hard work.” You excel in fields that you truly enjoy, you feel happy when you feel stretched to your full potential.  Success is only a by product, not the aim of the act of working.

4. Life is hard ….. and not always fair

Scott Peck wrote, “Life is a series of problems.  Do you want to moan about them or solve them?”  We all meet people who crib about one thing or the other as though it was their birthright not to have those problems.  I say, thank God for problems, if there were none, we would not be required, there would be no job for us to do!

As a matter of fact, life is also fun.  We can feel the fun only if we see it as fun.  I recall a fine movie called Zorba the Greek.  It is a story about the relationship between two men, Zorba and the Boss.  Boss has looks, intelligence, health, money and education.  He is also a good person who is all locked up inside : he doesn’t seem to enjoy life.  He reads and he thinks, but he doesn’t have fun.  Then Zorba tells him, “You’ve got everything, Boss, except one thing – madness.  A man needs a little madness or he never does cut the rope and be free.”  At the end, Zorba teaches Boss to dance, to laugh, and to let go.

My wife has been my Zorba!

5. Direction is more important than distance

Every golfer tries to drive the ball to a very long distance.  In the process, all sorts of mistakes occur because the game involves the masterly co-ordination of several movements simultaneously.  The golf coach always advises that direction is more important than distance.  So it is with life.

Despite one’s best attempts, there will be ups and downs.  It is relationships and friendships that enable a person to navigate the choppy waters that the ship of life will encounter.  When I was young, there was a memorable film by Frank Capra, starring James Stewart and Dona Reed, and named It’s a Wonderful Life.  It is about a man who is about to commit suicide because he thinks he is a failure.  An angel is sent to rescue him.  The bottom line of the film is that ‘No Man is a Failure Who Has Friends’.

6. Successful people think and radiate success

Attitude is the most important choice we can make.  Research from Harvard and several top universities, all bear this out.  These studies reveal that up to 85% of our success in life is due to attitude, while only 15% is due to ability!  Whether 85:15 is correct or not, one thing is for sure i.e. attitude is far more important than intelligence, education, special talent or luck.  Tim Hansel writes in his book You Gotta Keep Dancin’ that pain is inevitable, but misery is optional.

The world will not devote itself to making us happy.  We have to form an attitude which enables us to adapt to the world, to think with an open mind and constructively.  I learnt that success means doing the best we can with what we have.  Success is in the doing, not the getting.  Success is in the trying, not the triumph!

7. Seek out grassroots level experience

Ardous Huxley wrote, “Experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him.”  So it is essential to seek out experiences at the grassroots level, particularly early in one’s career.   

After studying Physics and Engineering, at an HLL interview for Computer Traineeship, I was asked whether I would consider Marketing instead of Computers.  I responded negatively.  After a couple of comfortable weeks in the swanky Head Office, I was given a train ticket to Nasik.  Would I please meet Mr. Kelkar to whom I would be attached for the next two months?  He would teach me to work as a salesman in his territory, which included staying in Kopargaon, Pimpalgaon and other small towns.

I was most upset.  In a town called Ozhar, I was moving around from shop to shop with a bullock cart full of soaps and a salesman’s folder in my hand.  Imagine my embarrassment when an IIT friend appeared in front of me.   I could have died a thousand deaths.  After this leveling experience, I was less embarrassed to work as a Despatch Clerk in the Company Depot and an Invoice Clerk in the Accounts Department.  Several years later, I realised the value of such grassroots level experience.  It is fantastic.  I would advise young people to seek out nail-dirtying, collar-soiling, shoe-wearing tasks.  That is how you learn about organizations, about the true nature of work, and the dignity of the many tasks that go into building great enterprises.

The lesson is seek out grassroots level experiences early in your career.

8. Learn to listen

We are all trained to speak – at school, at college debates, in tutorial colleges.  Nobody teaches us to listen.  Come to think about it, how does one train a person to listen?  And then, there are two kinds of listening : to the words spoken and to the song behind the words.  Most of us have not even learnt the former, let alone the latter.

Doug Ivester lasted only 28 months as CEO of Coke after having developed a successful career for several decades in the same company.  Why?  His critics thought he did not listen, that he was not sensitive to some important issues like minorities, the adulteration case in Belgium and so on.  Eckard Pfeiffer of Compaq was fired by his board.  Why?  For surrounding himself with yes-men and ignoring those who would speak truths to him.

As a trainee at Hindustan Lever, we would be invited by Chairman Prakash Tandon for lunch occasionally.  It was a terrifying occasion.  One of my trainee colleagues was bright, exuberant and garrulous.  The Chairman once gently admonished him, “Young man, as you progress in your career, will you promise me that you will listen more than you talk?”

The lesson is to avoid the congenital disability of not listening.  Let us all learn to listen.

9. Deserve before you desire

The Chettiars of Tamil Nadu practiced a successful management development system for centuries.  At 10, the youngster joined the business as podiyan (= trainee), at 21, he became aduttavan (= assistant), at 31, he became pangali (= partner) and at 41, he became mudalali (= proprietor).  They had a system of rigour before reward.

At one stage of my career, I was appointed as the Brand Manager for Lifebuoy and Pears soap, the company’s most popular-priced and most premium soaps.  And what was a Brand Manager?  A mini-businessman, responsible for the production, sales and profits of the brand, accountable for its long-term growth, etc., etc.  I had read those statements, I believed them and here I was, at 27,  “in charge of everything”.  But very soon, I found I could not move a pin without checking with my seniors.  I expressed my frustration to the Marketing Director and gently asked whether I could not be given total charge.  He smiled benignly and said,   “The perception and reality are both right.  You will get total charge when you know more about the brand   than anyone else in this company – about its formulation, the raw materials, the production costs, the consumer’s perception, the distribution and so on.  How long do you think that it will take?”

“Maybe, ten years”, I replied, “and I don’t expect to be the Lifebuoy and Pears Brand Manager for so long”!  And then suddenly, the lesson was clear.  I was desiring total control, long before I deserved it.  This happens to us all the time – in terms of responsibilities, in terms of postings and promotions, it happens all the time that there is a gap between our perception of what we deserve and the reality of what we get.

It helps to deserve before we desire.

Conclusion

When you are older, you can and should be different from my generation.   Ours is a great and wonderful country, and realising her true potential in the global arena depends ever so much on the quality and persistence of our young people.  Good luck in your journey, my young friends, and God be with you and our beloved Nation.

 Word count : 2234

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Convocation speeches definitely require to inspire young graduating students; if possible, they should also instruct the young people in some way (s); if at all possible further, convocation speeches should induct some memorable stories.  I propose to narrate several real stories to induct, instruct and inspire this special batch of ITM graduates, 2017.

I should state my four messages upfront

• Become and remain positively angry
• Expect curious coincidences
• Recognize unearned luck
• Remember that success is a thief.

Become and remain positively angry

When India showcased the world’s second fastest supercomputer (at that time) PARAM 8000, at the Zurich Supercomputing Show in 1991, the Washington Post greeted the event with the headline, “Angry India Does It Again.”  Why again?

In 1965: green revolution……national response under duress of PL 480 cessation ………led by Shastri, Subramaniam, Swaminathan and Shivaraman

In 1971: white revolution …….operation flood led by Verghese Kurien.

In 1991: PARAM development after denial of Cray super computer technology after Pokhran.

In short, constructive anger is good.

In the British Museum, there hangs a painting by Benjamin West to mark the occasionIn August 1765 when the descendant of Emperor Aurangzeb signed and handed over a scroll to an Englishman called Robert Clive. Through this scroll, the Mughal Emperor handed over to East India Company the right to collect taxes in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.  These territories had been won by the British from NawabSirajudaulah, the Mughal satrap of those areas.

The painting shows Shah Alam, the descendant, sitting at a height with a genuflecting waist as he hands over the scroll to an imperious – looking and upright, standing Robert Clive.  The genuflection at the waist certainly suggests a position of weakness in the postures.

That painting was about a ruler genuflecting to a businessman, for that would be the correct description of Robert Clive.

Since 1947, the roles have been reversed.  Indian businessmen have regularly genuflected at the waist to the new czars of India – ministers, MPs and bureaucrats.  Why should they do so?

I have found my professional business career to be a perfectly honourable and satisfying one.  Through working for Unilever and Tata, I believe I have made small contributions to many national issues: creating jobs, improving the welfare of several families, paying taxes honestly, delivering good quality products to customers.  I am convinced that, in society, business is a force for good.

So my advice is based on my experience: do an honest piece of professional work, be proud of your contribution to society, don’t ever be arrogant – but don’t ever be subservient either.  Be positively angry and do the best of what you can to earn an honest profit and to serve society diligently.

Above all, remember that business is a force for good.  You can do good by doing good.

Expect curious coincidences

King Constantine I was ruling Greece in 1917.  He and his elder son had megalomaniacal visions of once more creating a great Hellenic/Greek Empire after two thousand years.  The European powers like Britain and France did not like King Constantine’s ideas.  They conspired to a plot to exile the King and his elder son.  In his place, they placed the second son, Prince Alexander, who showed every promise of being a puppet King.  King Alexander became King and controversially, he married a commoner.  On 2^nd October, 1920, the King and his consort took a walk on the lawns of the imperial TATOI estate.  A monkey in the garden attacked the King’s German shepherd dog.  As the King tried to separate his dog and the monkey, a second monkey jumped down from a tree and bit the King.  The King’s wounds were cleaned, but not cauterised.  After some days, King Alexander died.

The exiled King Constantine I returned to Greece.  He started a war with Turkey and a quarter of a million people died in the war.If the monkey had not bitten King Alexander, may be there would have been no Greece-Turkey war!

On 22^nd August 1931, an 18 year old Englishman by name of John Scott – Ellis, took his new FIAT car for a spin around Munich.  As he drove up LeidwigStrasse and turned right into BriennerStrasse, a pedestrian crossed the road.  He was knocked down on one knee. Scott-Ellis felt re-assured that he had not injured the pedestrian as the man picked himself up and walked away. Three years later, now 21, Scott-Ellis sat at the Residentz Theatre.  In the adjacent box, the same man sat, the one whom Scott-Ellis had knocked down. Within a few years, Scott-Ellis realized that the man he had knocked down was called Adolf Hitler! If the accident had killed the pedestrian, the history of the world might have been different.

Allow me to narrate how I joined HUL in 1967–by sheer coincidence.

Recognise unearned luck

We are trained to think that success in business must be derived from a single, shaping vision or mission statement that is relentlessly executed.  It is incorrect to imagine design when there was only adaptation and improvisation.  It is wrong to attribute every success to some deliberate plan.

The same hold true of an individual’s life.  We are too easily misled by biographies of great people who, after the fact claim to have meticulously planned their ascent.  The origins of success are much too subtle and complex.  Life does not follow a course and we change in many ways as we grow.

Good outcomes are dressed up as strategic strokes of genius; catastrophes are attributed to bad luck.  Admitting the existence of luck demands the acknowledgement that some things are beyond our control.  However the control-freak side of human nature never allows acceptance of such an uncomfortable state of affairs without a fight. Here are three examples.

• In 2012, the Olympics were ongoing in London. All eyes were set on SainaNehwal who was playing great badminton.  On 4^th August 2012, India’s star, Saina, competed with China’s Wang Xin for the bronze medal.  Left-handed Wang Xin was seeded no. 2 in the world and had all the psychological advantage to win.  Indeed Wang Xin worn the first game at 21-18.  In the last point of the first game, however, Wang Xin twisted her knee.  She received on-court treatment for the injury.At the beginning of the second game, Wang Xin winced and it became obvious that she was in great pain.  Soon Wang Xin had to concede the match and Saina became the first-ever Indian woman to win an Olympic medal in badminton.  With no discredit to Saina, I wonder whether or not it was a case of “unearned luck” for Saina.
• I was posted to Jeddah in end 1990 as Chairman, Unilever Arabia. Due to Saddam Hussein’s designs on Kuwait, war clouds were gathering over the Arab peninsula.  Indeed on 12^th Jan 1991, when I reported at London for my formal induction as Chairman, my boss, Chris Jemmett, welcomed me with the words, “Welcome, the war has begun.”  Everybody around me thought that I was unlucky to be posted at a time when the whole region was about to become war-ravaged.Within six weeks, US Marines and Saudi troops entered Kuwait City and engaged in what came to be known as the Battle of Medina Ridge.  Soon, Iraq and the parties accepted the UN Resolution and the war was over.  Massive government spending followed the cessation of the war.  The economy became buoyant.  This unexpected development certainly helped me to quickly establish Unilever’s Arabian business.  This too was a dramatic transformation of unearned bad luck into unearned good luck, thus making Unilever, myself and all my colleagues as the beneficiaries.
• Your biggest decision in career and life is who you marry. Your second biggest decision in life and career is who you stayed married to!

Remember that success is a thief

A thief has three characteristics: first, he must not be seen as a thief; second, when he robs you, you don’t know you are being robbed; third, after you realise you have been robbed, you feel very foolish.

We spend our whole life chasing success on the assumption that success will bring happiness.  When you do get success, that success robs you of your happiness.

Charles Michael Schwab was born in 1862.  At age 35, he became President of US Steel, later Carnegie Steel.  He was big, rich and famous.  He built a 75-roomed private house, RIVERSIDE, for USD 7 million.  In the 1929 crash, he lost everything.  In 1939, Charles Michael Schwab dies with a debt of USD 300,000.

Howard Hopson was born in 1882.  By the early 1920, he put together a big clutch of electric and gas companies in NY, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  He then indulged in a number of dubious deals.  By 1940, he faced trial and finally died alone – in a Brooklyn sanatorium.

Work and career account for an asymmetric proportion of our life.  They account for about 40% of our physical life but account for 100% + of our emotional life.  Our work accomplishments, the position we reach and the success we achieve – all define who we are, how others perceive us and all the trappings that come with work.

Family and human relationships, on the other hand, account for a huge proportion of our sense of well-being and happiness.  Nobody who has friends fails to enjoy life.  Conversely, a person with few friends invariably suffers through his or her life.

As managers, our sense of fulfilment is shaped by our search for meaning through our work experiences and human relationships.  Studying at an institution can improve your IQ.  Your work experiences will help to improve your EQ.  But the crises in life will test your LQ (leadership quotient).

As you develop your career, you will realise that you are prone to some weaknesses.  Your “cocktail of weaknesses” is unique to yourself – short temper, arrogance, garrulousness, insensitivity etc.   Being aware of your “cocktail of weaknesses” is as important as playing to your strengths.  Smart people like us can be utterly stupid under certain circumstances.

In Mexico, the Aztecs ruled successfully during the 16^th century.  They were much advanced in arts and sciences, but they were blind to a deeply religious belief that one day, their founding father would re-appear in a strange form.  When the rapacious Spanish conqueror, Hernan Cortes, appeared at their border in 1519, the Aztecs thought he was their returning founding God –Cortes was received with gifts and warmth right from the border of the country to the Aztec emperor, Montezuma.  On 13th, the August, 1519, the Aztecs surrendered and the Spanish ruled them for over 300 years.

As a democratic, capitalist nation, India is only 25 years old though, as a civilization, India is 5000 years old.  Between 2000 and today, the last 13-14 years, India’s real per capita income grew at 6% p.a.  Compare this 6% with 3.5% p.a. in the 1980-2000 period, 1.3% p.a. in the 1950-1980 period and under 1% between 1850 and 1950!

In short, India has had the fastest and best growth during this new millennium compared to the fifty milleniums that have preceded it – and in this millennium, we have had NDA as well as UPA, so it is not political.  We have youth, you people as India’s great asset.

Reminds me of what Shashi Kapoor told Amitabh Bachhan in film DEEWAR : mere paasmaahai!

Good luck and God speed.

Words: 1920

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I am delighted to have been invited to be a part of this very important milestone in your careers and lives. My hearty congratulations to the graduating class, the parents and well-wishers and, above all, the teachers and staff of IIM Ranchi.

Keeping the relevance of the journey that you all are about to begin, I would like to speak about how high potential managers adapt and relearn skills through what I call the 4 A’s. My ideas are based on a book that I sat down to write four years ago.*

Through your career stages, adapt skills rather than emulate behavior

Sometimes people assume that if you can learn to behave like successful leaders, you can be successful. My experience is that career builders should avoid adopting behavioural models of success but rather adapt basic human qualities for success. I will speak about the 4 A’s and how they play out in different phases of your career–which stand for Accomplishment, Affability, Advocacy and Authenticity.

• Accomplishment refers to the attribute of reliably delivering results. It has to be learned like all skills and practised periodically.
• Affability is the attribute of developing agreeable relationships and getting things done in an appropriate manner.
• Advocacy is the skill of envisioning new ideas and persuading others to debate those new ideas.
• Authenticity is the perception others develop about you, especially subordinates, and about who they think you are.

These four attributes vary in relative importance at each of the four stages of your career journey.

The first stage is referred to as Managing Tasks, when you have to plan activities to deliver results with the help of people who typically report to you: for example, to achieve sales targets with a team of salesmen, month after month. During this stage, it is crucial to accomplish and to deliver results. The other 3 As take a lower share of importance.

The second stage is when you move From Tasks to Relationships. You obviously still need to deliver results, but now you rely on people who do not report to you. You need to get work done, not through hierarchical power, but through lateral relationships. For example, you are the regional manager, but only the sales managers directly report to you; the finance, personnel and legal colleagues report to head office with only a dotted line to you. During this stage, the importance of affability increases compared to the earlier stage.

The third stage is termed From Relationship to Thought. Your CEO is happy that you are a doer, but he needs to assess the quality of your thinking horsepower. So you are assigned a strategic role such as Marketing Manager, Product Development Manager or Strategy Manager. Your ability to acquire and synthesize new knowledge becomes very important.  At this senior level, you have to imagine the future and create market spaces that are not readily visible to many others.

On the fourth and final stage of the leadership journey, you need to be far more aware of yourself and your society by addressing deep issues about people and community; for example, why does your company exist? What is its unique societal contribution? Does it have ethical or moral standards to live up to, apart from the statutory standards? At this stage, your authenticity and how people perceive your nature becomes very crucial. Can I trust him? If he asks me to jump, should I jump? These are the sort of questions your subordinates wrestle with.

Before becoming a successful leader, it is essential to be a great subordinate.

All successful subordinates are judged by their bosses through observing how well they combine the four qualities of accomplishment, affability, advocacy and authenticity. These are not static attributes or qualities. They are relative.

You must be ‘sufficiently’ accomplished in getting things done, you must be affable enough and persuasive enough to be an excellent performer and you must be ‘authentic’ enough to be accepted as a peer and as a leader in the roles you perform on the way up.

Accomplishment

Accomplishment means being able to execute with efficiency and to deliver results. It is the most important of the skills that any subordinate has to learn. Simple though it sounds, it is a great weakness among many managers. If execution skills were to be found as abundantly as they are expected, then there would not be so much research and management literature on the subject. There are some reasons why the Accomplishment attribute is not as richly found among managers as one might assume.

The expectation of being an accomplishing executive stays throughout your working career. There is never a stage when you are not expected to deliver results. As you rise in the organization, you depend more and more on others to deliver. So, like the oxygen required for staying alive, the skill of Accomplishment is a life-long demand on the manager.

It is not enough to execute, deliver results and demonstrate accomplishment. The results have to be achieved in an acceptable manner. So the method through which you accomplish results becomes the lens through which your actual results are viewed.

Practitioners like Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan have pointed out that execution is actually a formal discipline.Execution has three core processes: the people process, the strategy process and the operations process. This discipline is not actually taught in schools of business. And, to be fair, perhaps it is right to argue that such things are difficult to teach. You learn them through constant practice and self-correction with occasional mentoring from coaches—a bit like how you learn sports or music.

Anyone who has worked in organizations recognises that there is a gap between what the organization knows and what it does. Former Unilever chairman Michael Perry used to say that “it would be wonderful if only Unilever knew what Unilever knows.”  Knowledge that is actually implemented is much more likely to be to be acquired from learning by doing than from learning by reading, listening, or even thinking.

 Affability

The word, affable, is derived from the French word affabilis. Thedictionary defines an affable person as one who is “easy to speak to, pleasant, friendly, and courteous especially to inferiors.”

The word, manager, is derived from Latin (manus) and Italian (maneggio). The dictionary defines the word, manager, to mean “to wield, to conduct, to control, to train by exercise, as a horse).

If you take these meanings too literally, the concept of an affable manager is an oxymoron. It might appear that no efficient and effective manager can qualify as an affable manager. By the nature of work, a manager has to overcome obstacles, which means to convince, cajole, coerce and, if needed, even crucify people into doing things and to coordinate all those actions into a targeted end-result.

That is why affability is a skill to be learnt, practised and perfected.

• How can you disagree without being disagreeable?
• How can you separate your rival’s views from your feelings for your rival?
• How can you listen carefully with an open mind and yet be focused and single-minded?

People like to communicate and that means not just the opportunity to speak, but the right to be heard—in a genuine way. The cause of much strife in the world arises from the inability of people to listen to each other. Even in psychological counselling, practitioners have pointed out the therapeutic effects of just listening to people who want to get things off their chest.

This therefore constitutes a distinctive quality of the affable manager: he or she has to learn to be a good listener. If you look through the training courses run for managers, you will rarely find one on Listening Skills.

Listening is very difficult, especially for managers with authority and a ready audience within their departments or companies. My previous chairman at Hindustan Unilever, the late Prakash Tandon, would exhort trainees to ‘listen four times as much as you speak because the surface area of the two ears is four times as much as the lip.’ This sounded very appropriate, and I remember the advice to this day. But I have spent a lifetime trying to understand how to do so. I finally found the answer in the research findings of a counsellor and teacher of hearing-challenged people.

 Advocacy

Advocacy is a word derived from Latin advocatusand its meaning is “the function of pleading the cause of another, the act of urging something.” The dictionary meaning suggests that it is about persuading without power. Management, on the other hand, is quite a lot associated with direction, hierarchy and power. So where is the connection with advocacy?

In the early stages of one’s career, you are the recipient of instructions and the effects of power. You accept them by adapting. You realise that the boss expects you to exercise your leadership on the people who report to you and make sure that things get done. In the middle management phase, you find the need to influence people without their directly reporting to you. In the senior and leadership roles, you may exercise no control over the people you need to influence. This is the manner in which your skills of advocacy develop.

Every CEO got his first taste of advocacy when he became the head of a faraway factory. He had to influence juniors, peers and seniors at the head office. He also had to influence external people who could impact his factory: officers in the police, the local administration and the policy makers in government.  When he became CEO, he had to meet ministers and political level people. It was vital for the future of the company that he succeeded in persuading them that the policies implemented were killing his company, and with it, the employment of his workers. He had to appeal to their rationality and emotions to get them to do whatever rescue acts were involved. These are the elements of advocacy.

Authenticity

The final attribute is authenticity. This is probably the most difficult attribute to learn and practise. It is easier to recognize its absence in an unauthentic person than it is to define what exactly authenticity is. In this respect, authenticity is very much like beauty and character. In most societies, people are likely to consider politicians as unauthentic, more so than say teachers, doctors and managers.

What is authenticity? It is being who you are. Your colleagues and peers see you as you are, not the way you would like to be seen. It is their perception of who you are and what you stand for that produces their followership. Followership is used here, not in a hierarchical sense, but in an egalitarian sense. It is the voluntary desire or inclination among followers to follow a person, emotionally and physically. Unauthentic people can get others to follow by asymmetry of power, by threat or by coercion. These are not likely to be long lasting.

Genuine followership comes as a result of the person appearing authentic. At a junior career level, there are not many who are following you. So the lack of authenticity may not produce palpable effects. You may not suffer much from its absence in terms of work leadership.

There can be a view that the attribute of authenticity is a consequence of your behaviour and your beliefs. It is not a skill or art that can be learnt. But it is surely helpful to understand the principles that help to build enduring authenticity. Authentic people:

• Are cast from the crucible of their sufferings
• Are moulded through formal and informal mentors
• Are those who try to live out a selfless character
• Have a sense that they are called to lead
• Handle privilege with great care
• Are tenaciously focused on their goals
• Invest in the lives of those who follow them

We live in an age when there is a tendency to dismiss character, selflessness and servant-hood as weak and limiting. On the contrary, the attribute of authenticity has become the supreme requirement of modern times. Authenticity arises from your sharing your humanity with those that have chosen to follow you.

I have spoken enough. I can only end by wishing all of you God speed and best of luck in your careers and life journeys.

*WHAT THE CEO REALLY WANTS FROM YOU, Harper Collins India, 2012

The post Companions of your career—the 4 A’s (TSM Madurai) appeared first on The MindWorks.

I am delighted to have been invited to be a part of this very important milestone in your careers and lives. My hearty congratulations to the graduating class, the parents and well-wishers and, above all, the teachers and staff of IIM Ranchi.

Keeping the relevance of the journey that you all are about to begin, I would like to speak about how high potential managers adapt and relearn skills through what I call the 4 A’s. My ideas are based on a book that I sat down to write four years ago.*

Through your career stages, adapt skills rather than emulate behavior

Sometimes people assume that if you can learn to behave like successful leaders, youcan be successful. My experience is that career builders should avoid adopting behavioural models of success but rather adapt basic human qualities for success. I will speak about the 4 A’s and how they play out in different phases of your career–which stand for Accomplishment, Affability, Advocacy and Authenticity.

• Accomplishment refers to the attribute of reliably delivering results. It has to be learned like all skills and practised periodically.
• Affability is the attribute of developing agreeable relationships and getting things done in an appropriate manner.
• Advocacy is the skill of envisioning new ideas and persuading others to debate those new ideas.
• Authenticity is the perception others develop about you, especially subordinates, and about who they think you are.

These four attributes vary in relative importance at each of the four stages of your career journey.

The first stage is referred to as Managing Tasks, when you have to plan activities to deliver results with the help of people who typically report to you: for example, to achieve sales targets with a team of salesmen, month after month. During this stage, it is crucial to accomplish and to deliver results. The other 3 As take a lower share of importance.

The second stage is when you move From Tasks to Relationships. You obviously still need to deliver results, but now you rely on people who do not report to you. You need to get work done, not through hierarchical power, but through lateral relationships. For example, you are the regional manager, but only the sales managers directly report to you; the finance, personnel and legal colleagues report to head office with only a dotted line to you. During this stage, the importance of affability increases compared to the earlier stage.

The third stage is termed From Relationship to Thought. Your CEO is happy that you are a doer, but he needs to assess the quality of your thinking horsepower. So you are assigned a strategic role such as Marketing Manager, Product Development Manager or Strategy Manager. Your ability to acquire and synthesize new knowledge becomes very important.  At this senior level, you have to imagine the future and create market spaces that are not readily visible to many others.

On the fourth and final stage of the leadership journey, you need to be far more aware of yourself and your society by addressing deep issues about people and community; for example, why does your company exist? What is its unique societal contribution? Does it have ethical or moral standards to live up to, apart from the statutory standards? At this stage, your authenticity and how people perceive your nature becomes very crucial. Can I trust him? If he asks me to jump, should I jump? These are the sort of questions your subordinates wrestle with.

Before becoming a successful leader, it is essential to be a great subordinate.

All successful subordinates are judged by their bosses through observing how well they combine the four qualities of accomplishment, affability, advocacy and authenticity. These are not static attributes or qualities. They are relative.

You must be ‘sufficiently’ accomplished in getting things done, you must be affable enough and persuasive enough to be an excellent performer and you must be ‘authentic’ enough to be accepted as a peer and as a leader in the roles you perform on the way up.

Accomplishment

Accomplishment means being able to execute with efficiency and to deliver results. It is the most important of the skills that any subordinate has to learn. Simple though it sounds, it is a great weakness among many managers. If execution skills were to be found as abundantly as they are expected, then there would not be so much research and management literature on the subject. There are some reasons why the Accomplishment attribute is not as richly found among managers as one might assume.

The expectation of being an accomplishing executive stays throughout your working career. There is never a stage when you are not expected to deliver results. As you rise in the organization, you depend more and more on others to deliver. So, like the oxygen required for staying alive, the skill of Accomplishment is a life-long demand on the manager.

It is not enough to execute, deliver results and demonstrate accomplishment. The results have to be achieved in an acceptable manner. So the method through which you accomplish results becomes the lens through which your actual results are viewed.

Practitioners like Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan have pointed out that execution is actually a formal discipline.Execution has three core processes: the people process, the strategy process and the operations process. This discipline is not actually taught in schools of business. And, to be fair, perhaps it is right to argue that such things are difficult to teach. You learn them through constant practice and self-correction with occasional mentoring from coaches—a bit like how you learn sports or music.

Anyone who has worked in organizations recognises that there is a gap between what the organization knows and what it does. Former Unilever chairman Michael Perry used to say that “it would be wonderful if only Unilever knew what Unilever knows.”  Knowledge that is actually implemented is much more likely to be to be acquired from learning by doing than from learning by reading, listening, or even thinking.

 Affability

The word, affable, is derived from the French word affabilis. Thedictionary defines an affable person as one who is “easy to speak to, pleasant, friendly, and courteous especially to inferiors.”

The word, manager, is derived from Latin (manus) and Italian (maneggio). The dictionary defines the word, manager, to mean “to wield, to conduct, to control, to train by exercise, as a horse).

If you take these meanings too literally, the concept of an affable manager is an oxymoron. It might appear that no efficient and effective manager can qualify as an affable manager. By the nature of work, a manager has to overcome obstacles, which means to convince, cajole, coerce and, if needed, even crucify people into doing things and to coordinate all those actions into a targeted end-result.

That is why affability is a skill to be learnt, practised and perfected.

• How can you disagree without being disagreeable?
• How can you separate your rival’s views from your feelings for your rival?
• How can you listen carefully with an open mind and yet be focused and single-minded?

People like to communicate and that means not just the opportunity to speak, but the right to be heard—in a genuine way. The cause of much strife in the world arises from the inability of people to listen to each other. Even in psychological counselling, practitioners have pointed out the therapeutic effects of just listening to people who want to get things off their chest.

This therefore constitutes a distinctive quality of the affable manager: he or she has to learn to be a good listener. If you look through the training courses run for managers, you will rarely find one on Listening Skills.

Listening is very difficult, especially for managers with authority and a ready audience within their departments or companies. My previous chairman at Hindustan Unilever, the late Prakash Tandon, would exhort trainees to ‘listen four times as much as you speak because the surface area of the two ears is four times as much as the lip.’ This sounded very appropriate, and I remember the advice to this day. But I have spent a lifetime trying to understand how to do so. I finally found the answer in the research findings of a counsellor and teacher of hearing-challenged people.

Advocacy

Advocacy is a word derived from Latin advocatusand its meaning is “the function of pleading the cause of another, the act of urging something.” The dictionary meaning suggests that it is about persuading without power. Management, on the other hand, is quite a lot associated with direction, hierarchy and power. So where is the connection with advocacy?

In the early stages of one’s career, you are the recipient of instructions and the effects of power. You accept them by adapting. You realise that the boss expects you to exercise your leadership on the people who report to you and make sure that things get done. In the middle management phase, you find the need to influence people without their directly reporting to you. In the senior and leadership roles, you may exercise no control over the people you need to influence. This is the manner in which your skills of advocacy develop.

Every CEO got his first taste of advocacy when he became the head of a faraway factory. He had to influence juniors, peers and seniors at the head office. He also had to influence external people who could impact his factory: officers in the police, the local administration and the policy makers in government. When he became CEO, he had to meet ministers and political level people. It was vital for the future of the company that he succeeded in persuading them that the policies implemented were killing his company, and with it, the employment of his workers. He had to appeal to their rationality and emotions to get them to do whatever rescue acts were involved. These are the elements of advocacy.

Authenticity

The final attribute is authenticity. This is probably the most difficult attribute to learn and practise. It is easier to recognize its absence in an unauthentic person than it is to define what exactly authenticity is. In this respect, authenticity is very much like beauty and character. In most societies, people are likely to consider politicians as unauthentic, more so than say teachers, doctors and managers.

What is authenticity? It is being who you are. Your colleagues and peers see you as you are, not the way you would like to be seen. It is their perception of who you are and what you stand for that produces their followership. Followership is used here, not in a hierarchical sense, but in an egalitarian sense. It is the voluntary desire or inclination among followers to follow a person, emotionally and physically. Unauthentic people can get others to follow by asymmetry of power, by threat or by coercion. These are not likely to be long lasting.

Genuine followership comes as a result of the person appearing authentic. At a junior career level, there are not many who are following you. So the lack of authenticity may not produce palpable effects. You may not suffer much from its absence in terms of work leadership.

There can be a view that the attribute of authenticity is a consequence of your behaviour and your beliefs. It is not a skill or art that can be learnt. But it is surely helpful to understand the principles that help to build enduring authenticity.Authentic people:

• Are cast from the crucible of their sufferings
• Are moulded through formal and informal mentors
• Are those who try to live out a selfless character
• Have a sense that they are called to lead
• Handle privilege with great care
• Are tenaciously focused on their goals
• Invest in the lives of those who follow them

We live in an age when there is a tendency to dismiss character, selflessness and servant-hood as weak and limiting. On the contrary, the attribute of authenticity has become the supreme requirement of modern times. Authenticity arises from your sharing your humanity with those that have chosen to follow you.

I have spoken enough. I can only end by wishing all of you God speed and best of luck in your careers and life journeys.

*WHAT THE CEO REALLY WANTS FROM YOU, Harper Collins India, 2012

The post Companions of your career—the 4 A’s (IIM Ranchi) appeared first on The MindWorks.

I feel deeply honored to be invited to deliver the convocation address at this great institute, which bears promise as a national institution of significance.

Our country is going through uncertain times as happens with every society periodically. If you watch TV or read the newspapers, you could get depressed. The problem does not lie with the times we live in or with the media.  The solution lies in your perspective. You have the choice to think differently. If I have a single message for you, it is this: your generation is poised to escort the country into its most prosperous phase. Live your life with positive energy.

It is human nature to want to know the future, but nobody knows it. The view of the so-called experts is no more reliable than if chimpanzees were to throw darts at a dartboard. History is littered with failed prophecies.

• In 1877, Western Union Company stated “The telephone has too many shortcomings to be considered as a means of communication and is inherently of no value to our company.”
• In 1899, Charles Duell of the US Patent Office stated, “everything that can be invented has been invented.”
• On 8^th January, 1913, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose wrote a letter to his elder brother “Is our dear country on the high road to progress? India is wading through sin and corruption but as the eye of prudence, prophecy or foresightedness can behold, all is darkness.”
• In 1943, IBM founder Thomas Watson said “I think that there is a world market for computers of maybe five computers.”
• In his 1968 book, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich declared that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.”
• International Monetary Fund economist Prakash Loungani commented about economists that “the record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished.

So do not get trapped by the so called experts. Consider your inheritance and live life responsibly and king-size. As you inherit, please remember that you too need to be good ancestors. Enrich the society you will live in as you develop your career and leave an even better India for your children.

For the students who are graduating, this is a wonderful day. Your teachers have nurtured you professionally, as indeed your parents and elders have nurtured you personally over several years. These are acts to be grateful for. I recall a memorable metaphor from Nature.

Many species of animals undertake some form of protecting to help their young adjust to their new environment. But there are exceptions. Science writers say that unlike mammals and humans, reptiles have no emotion. They mate, drop their eggs and simply walk away. It is known to be true of many species of snakes, turtles and so on. However the crocodile is an interesting case.

When the eggs are ready for hatching, the mother crocodile digs them out of the nest and gently cracks the eggshell to let the young ones out. The young ones are very vulnerable to predators. The mother gathers the babies into the pouched floor of her mouth—not to eat them, as is erroneously assumed but to protect the young ones. She then heads for the river close-by.   Upon entering the water, she opens her jaws to release the young into the water.

Your teachers have behaved like the mother crocodile: they have held you all in the protective environment of their pouches for a few years and are about to release you into the swirling and threatening waters of the real world today.

Congratulations to you and always remember that you owe them a debt of gratitude.

This wonderful institute has provided you one I in the form of ‘instruction’. What you need in your professional life is another I for ‘intuition’ and a third I for ‘inspiration’.

I wish to share five lessons to support this point of view.

Develop intuition by learning what cannot be taught

 It is good to always remember that your professional goal is not to be just knowledgeable, but to be wise.

Knowledge comes from learning what can be taught. Intuition is learning what cannot be taught. Wisdom is a combination of the two.

Anything that can be taught (like science, economics and management) can be learnt by studying at suitable institutions. When institutes teach techniques and concepts, they appeal to the analytical part of the student’s brain. The graduating student feels that she knows a lot about management: but this is only partly true. Real life practice is much more than the acquisition of such knowledge or a degree. You all have to learn many other things–which cannot be taught. Management principles are tenets, at best philosophies, but certainly not discoveries in any scientific sense.

A great manager realizes that the energy to manage actually comes from the dark side. It comes from everything that makes him suffer: difficult trade unions, unreasonable competitors, change-resistant middle managers, poor top teams and so on. As he struggles against these negative powers, he is forced to live more deeply, more fully.

A great manager is a person who has realized that he is mortal i.e. he can make mistakes, that he will not be in that job or position in a few years. This is what makes him develop a compassion for others.

 A manager can develop to his full potential by learning to be intuitive, inclusive and humane—the kind of skills that are not taught. Intuition is not a substitute for analytics and formal learning; it is a winning overlay, it complements knowledge.

 Follow your compass, not your clock

 We live in the blackberry and internet age. Time is the most precious commodity and just about everyone is short of it. I call this act of living a time-challenged existence as the clock.

When we use our time, we do those things that we like to do and avoid the others.  Some people have the time to read books but not to socialize. Others have the time to attend parties, but not to write letters to friends or have exercise to keep fit. All of them are busy.

In organizations, an atmosphere gets built up without anybody’s design or desire. This atmosphere pressures managers to give time to the organization—time becomes the surrogate measure for the employee’s commitment. In reality, commitment is measured not by the time one gives to the company but by the energy and mind-space one gives.

Time is out of our control and anyway, we suffer from limitations on how much we give to the organization. Rather than try to control the time we give to the organization, we would achieve greater success if we tried to control the energy we give to the organization. You can control your energy by thinking about your ‘purpose.’

Each of us has a ‘purpose’, a compass. Each one’s purpose is uniquely personalized, unarticulated and internalized. Purpose is crucial in society for three reasons: it is a primary source of achievement; it is the core energy that fuels the human dynamic; purpose is what successful leaders try to keep activated.

There is, however, one dimension of purpose which is universal to all human beings—people want something out of their work so that their lives mean something, they want their lives to have a reason. Fulfillment and happiness come out of working to your potential, irrespective of whether you are a doorman or a chairman.

That is why purpose is a function of character because you notice it by its absence. To be effective, purpose must have be based on a moral idea by which I mean that it concerns itself with valuing some types of human activities over others.

It is this compass or purpose that makes a lawyer give up his successful practice and fight for the independence of his country as Gandhiji or Nehruji did. It is this compass or purpose that makes a government officer or soldier go beyond the call of his duty or a company to uplift the society around it through CSR. It is purpose that makes a GE a lean machine of efficiency or Google as an innovative outfit.

As you work in management, you will be under pressure to follow your clock. Stop and reflect occasionally to ask whether you are following your compass as well. That alone can provide meaning to your life.

Immerse yourself in your profession

 The manifestation of ‘giving energy’ is to immerse yourself in your chosen profession. Immersion means experiencing emotions and involvement so deeply that the lessons enter your brain’s remote memory. When needed, these lessons pop up on your mental screen without your trying. Achieving total immersion is a key step in the management of your energy and the development of intuition. Traveling, talking to customers, staying rooted mentally and emotionally, are all ways of doing so.

You may enjoy listening to this true story about a famous film star of the 1940s and 1950s—LeelaChitnis.

Leela was the antithesis of a film-star. She was the skinny and gawky daughter of a professor; she wore thick glasses. She fell in love with Dr GajanandChitnis, who was 14 years older, and a Marathi editor and playwright by occupation. They had a couple of children, but the family income needed augmenting. So Leela started to accompany her husband to rehearsals, and helped with the costumes and sets in order to earn a bit of money. She observed all the going-on evening after evening in a complete emotional involvement. One evening the lead female star failed to turn up. Leela was thrust on the stage only because she had attended endless rehearsals.

Now from the recesses of her brain, she dredged up the dialogues. She became a star overnight. In 1940, when LUX soap sought Indian girls as models for the first time, Leela was chosen. Thereafter there was no looking back.

Such is the value of immersion—and chance!

Work incessantly on managing your de-railers

 I will narrate the situation of a very pure and old monkey species called the vervet—perhaps Hanuman was a vervet. These vervets act exceptionally cleverly under some circumstances: for example, vervets can give three different signals to communicate three different types of predators. Yet in another circumstance, they act very stupidly: if they see a carcass, they will not suspect that a predator may be around and they will approach the carcass with all the mischief and curiosity of a monkey.

Managers are like vervet monkeys.

Business books and magazines are full of stories about highly intelligent and extremely successful CEOs, who suddenly seem to act in a silly way. In management, we are taught about talent management, performance appraisals and accelerating top performers. If such systems work quite well, why do we see CEOs being fired? After all, they have been appraised and watched for several years and must be having excellent reports to their credit if they have reached the position of CEO. And one fine day, he is worthy of being fired?

In my experience, there are three reasons that account for this strange occurrence. First is that a manager’s intelligence is contextual, which means that signals that she picks up in one situation may not be picked up in another situation. Second is that power reduces a person’s ability to reflect. Third is that she overestimates the value of her own solutions due to insularity or arrogance.

As you develop your career, you will realize that you are prone to some weaknesses that are uniquely personal to you e.g. short temper, arrogance, garrulousness, insensitivity and so on. These are called de-railers. It is very difficult to completely remove such weaknesses, but you can push yourself to a heightened awareness of your de-railers. In this way, you can reduce their damage potential.

It is not so well known that the Ramayana character, Ravana, was a well read and learned person. In fact, Ravana had undertaken such severe austerities that the gods appeared before him and granted him a special boon. He desired immortality from being killed by anybody. But who could kill him? He asked that his death should not come from a god, demon or animal. He did not include a human being in his wish-list as he just could not imagine that a frail human could ever kill him. Ultimately he was slain by a human.

In Mexico, the Aztecs ruled successfully during the 16^th century. They were much advanced in arts and sciences, but they were blind to a deeply religious belief that one day, their founding god would re-appear in a strange form. When the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes appeared in 1519 at their border, the Aztecs thought that he was the returning founding god. In spite of a number of contrary signals, Cortes was received with gifts and warmth right up to the emperor, Montezuma. On 13^th August, 1519, the Aztecs surrendered and the Spanish ruled them for over 300 years.

How could such an intelligent Ravana or such a successful emperor as Montezuma do such stupid things to cause their own downfall?

They forgot to manage their de-railers.

Success is a thief

 Success is a thief. That is why success is not something to be pursued. This thief brings only unhappiness to those who pursue it. The best chance of capturing this elusive thing called success is to look within us. It may be hiding, but its right there! However, almost all of the 6.5 billion people on earth try looking for success outside of them.

The problem is that they think of success in others’ context. That is why they relentlessly pursue the acquisition of things that others can readily see—wealth, status, and recognition. Such success is a thief.

A thief has three characteristics: first, a thief is not recognized by you as being a thief; second, he robs you of what you have without your realizing it at that time; third, a thief leaves you feeling very foolish after you have been robbed.

So it is with success. You assume that visible symbols of success makes you happy, but such success increases the chances that you will be robbed of your happiness, and further, after losing your happiness, you feel foolish that you have lost your success.

Consider the reality around us. A consulting and accounting firm called KPMG conducted a Fraud Survey in 2008 among the largest private and public companies. An incredible 80% opined that fraud is a problem. To those who doubt the concerns about ubiquitous fraud, further evidence comes from the Satyam episode which has hogged newsprint and airwaves for the last several weeks.

Charles Michael Schwab was born in 1862. At age 35, he became President of US Steel, later Carnegie Steel. He was big, rich and famous. He built an ambitious 75-roomed private house, Riverside, for $7 million. He lost all his wealth in the 1929 crash and died in 1939 with a debt of $300,000.

Howard Hopson was born in 1882. By the early 1920s, he put together AGECO, an association of electric and gas companies in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. He then indulged in what turned out to be shenanigans. He faced trial in 1940 and died in Brooklyn sanatorium.

All of these ‘successful’ people lost the perspective of context.

The plain fact is that success has to be seen within a context, and that context is your own self, not outside of yourself. Strip away the context, and you see it completely differently.

To most of mankind, success means having wealth and status which others can be impressed with. But the trick of showing something is not to retain it. The blue object looks blue because the object sends back the blue wavelength of light and retains none of it. Similarly the successful person returns success and retains none of it.

Just as the Himalayan musk deer tires itself by running around seeking the source of the fragrance, little realizing that the smell originates from its own navel, man too should search his own self.

I am not sure who wrote this line but it is wonderful:

“It is not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived”.

Conclusion

 I have shared just five lessons that I have learned, I could go on for long. But these lessons are not taught, they are learnt by you. I wish you luck in learning what you cannot be taught.  Enjoy the journey and my best wishes are with you. God Bless.

The post Convocation IIMU appeared first on The MindWorks.

At this Convocation, I wish to focus upon only two messages: first, it is good to be angry, a sort of positive anger. Second, it is not good to ever lose hope.

Being angry

In August 1765, the descendent of Emperor Aurangzeb signed and handed over a scroll to an Englishman called Robert Clive. There is a painting by Benjamin West in the British Museum to mark this occasion. The scroll handed over to the East India Company gave away from the Mughal emperor the right to collect all the taxes in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. These territories had been won by the British from Sirj-ud-daulah after Robert Clive had bribed Army Chief Mir Jaffar to allow the English to win the war (nowadays we call this match-fixing). The painting shows Emperor Shah Alam sitting at a height with a genuflecting waist as he hands over the scroll to an imperious-looking and upright, standing Robert Clive. The genuflection at the waist certainly appears to suggest a position of weakness in the postures.

In that case, the ruler genuflected to a businessman for, after all, Robert Clive was a mere officer of the East India Company. In a role reversal, since independence Indian businessmen have regularly genuflected to the new rulers—ministers, MPs and bureaucrats. My first advice to you is that during your management career, never genuflect to anyone in power. You don’t need to be arrogant, but you should never have to be subservient either. Always do an honest piece of professional management work, be proud of your contribution to society and be slightly angry about wanting to do more. The results that can be achieved by being slightly angry are illustrated by three key events by India as a nation.

1965: the green revolution…national response under duress of the PL 480 cessation…the 4 S’s being Lal BahadurSastri, C. Subramanaiam, Dr MS Swaminathan and Food Secretary, S. Shivaraman.

1971: the white revolution….national response in the face of acute milk shortage despite having the world’s largest bovine population….operation flood led from the front by Dr vKurien

1991: the supercomputer revolution….C-DAC response to the US denial of Cray supercomputer technology after India tested a nuclear device at Pokhran….led by Dr Vijay Bhatkar….the launch of the woeld’s second fastest supercomputer, PARAM, at the Zurich Supercomputing Show in 1991…Washington Post greeted the event with the headline ANGRY INDIA DOES IT AGAIN.

In short, constructive anger is good. I wish you a career of constructive anger if India is to progress.

Hope and despair

We Indians seem to periodically have a sense of gloom and doom with respect to India’s situation.  “Has India has blown it?” many people ask.  I find myself struggling, both for words as well as the time to express my thoughts.  So I felt I would use this opportunity to view the subject rationally rather than emotionally.

The expression ‘blow it’ literally means ‘to spoil your chances’ or ‘to lose an opportunity.’ So the questions I address are:

• Has India lost an opportunity and, if so, over what time frame?
• Did other nations also blow it?
• What are the simple indicators?

I wish to explore these aspects in this speech.

TIME FRAME

The time frame over which you judge the question is important.  Time is relative and is what is perceived by the viewer.

For example, even though you move your folded newspaper at great speed to swat a fly, the fly escapes with alacrity and speed. Why? Because the fly’s eye has a different CFF compared to the human eye: CFF stands for critical fusion frequency and is the frequency at which a flicker stands still. Humans have a 60 cycles per second CFF while flies have a five times higher CFF at 250 cycles per second. This means that to the fly, your speed comes through as five times slower than how you perceive it. A fly-eye view of an F1 Racing Driver is that of a comfortable week end driver, cruising through a country road. That is why your rapidly moving folded newspaper is perceived by the fly to be as slow as a wooden spoon moving through honey or treacle.

When you are reviewing the progress of a vast nation or society like India, there has to be some perspective of time, viz, use an appropriate CFF factor. It cannot just be last week’s SENSEX or the next month’s Man Ki Baat talk.

To emphasize the importance of the time perspective, imagine that you are examining the proposition “Sachin Tendulkar has blown it.” If you disagree with the proposition, you will find plenty in the full cricketing career of the iconic player to prove your point. But if you were to review only his last 20 test matches and compare his performance with his peers in their last 20 test matches, here is what you would find:

• That Sachin’s score of 1070 runs in 33 innings ranks last among Brian Lara, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Ricky Ponting, whose run scores are in the range of 1128-1953.
• That Sachin’s per innings average is 33 runs against his peers of 34-53 runs.
• That in his last 20 test matches, Sachin’s highest score was 94 whereas his peers scored between 176-226 runs.
• That in their last 20 test matches, his peers scored between 2-8 centuries, but Sachin scored zero centuries.

So did Sachin blow it? If you review only his last and recent performance, the answer is YES. But that is not true, you all know it! It is important to have a perspective of time.

COMPARISONS

Therefore I viewed India’s progress or lack of it over the 13 years of the new millennium. This has the added advantage that it covers an NDA as well as UPA period. I also benchmarked with non-China BRICS economies like Brazil and Indonesia to make the comparisons as relevant as possible.  Please note that I am reviewing the country, not the UPA or NDA.

I compared IMF data on the acceleration of annual GDP growth between the last 13 years of O.M. (old millennium, 1986-1999) with 13 years of the New Millenium (1999-2012). Europe decelerated by 102 basis points; Indonesia accelerated by just 10 basis points; Brazil added 95 basis points but India added 120 basis points, second only to China.

Urbanization is a good driver of economic growth. Since 1991, Indian urbanization grew by 250 basis points per year, matched by Indonesia, but both countries were far ahead of Brazil which was half the rate at 120 points. India is urbanizing like a bullet train.

In the New Millenium, India’s real annual growth rate of disposable income advanced at a whopping 650 basis points, compared to Indonesia at 400, and Brazil at 360.In the N.M, India’s ranking in agricultural production improved enormously.

In the new millennium, India has emerged as the Number 1 global producer of milk and fruits, the Number 2 global producer of vegetables, cotton, wheat and sugarcane. India has surpassed Thailand as the number 1 rice exporter in the world.

India’s production of passenger cars grew in the N.M. by 1500 basis points per year, compared to Asia Pacific of 1200 and Brazil’s of 700.

The growth track record over the post-independence period is as follows:

INDIA PER CAPITA INCOME CHANGES

So we have experienced the best 13 years in our 5,000 year history, and what do we do? We perpetually debate whether India has blown it! Rather odd!

Would you treat the serious business of economic and social progress of 1.2 billion people by the yardsticks of cricket, where a batsman is judged by his last few innings?

For sure, in the last few years the same indices that I have quoted declined compared to the immediate past period. There has undoubtedly been some effect of the global downturn.  To use the tennis metaphor, you cannot compare grass court tennis with clay court tennis. As the world economy has become more VUCA in the last five years–volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous–India retained its position at Number 2 among fastest growing nations. It is worthwhile to note that when the tide rose in the first 8 years of the N.M., India accelerated and improved its position.

My audience might think that I have conveniently avoided talking about China. For many centuries, the Chinese economy has been bigger than India in total money terms. In per capita terms, China and India had the same per capita income in 1970. Today, admittedly, China has three times the India level on this measure. However, bear in mind that if Indians had, in the 1970s, let Sanjay Gandhi implement his measures to limit Indian family size (as China had done), the per capita income of China would not be three times India’s but only one and a half times!

Although China liberalized 13 years before India, India’s per capita GDP lags China by only 8 years, and in per capita private consumption, India lags China by only by 5 years. India’s per capita consumption of steel, cement, soda ash, soaps and many others—all lag China and the developed economies by a factor of 10-50%.

The headroom for growth should send anybody in a tizzy; it is unbelievable.

You have to view all this data as an opportunity rather than as a problem. In that case you will get “blown away” with India rather than debate whether India has “blown it”!

CORRUPTION

I should add a brief word about corruption, which is undoubtedly a distressing feature of India. Without accepting it as a necessary evil, I would respectfully point out that corruption is like a virus. It affects every society, it travels and its effects are disastrous. Every society has to keep vaccinations as a preventive and medicines as a curative. India is no exception.

But let us not forget that though India is 5,000 year old civilization, it is an adolescent, 22 year old in its incarnation as a capitalist democracy. When other countries were at a similar phase in their development–US, UK, Korea, Taiwan—history tells us that they faced similar crises. The British Parliament would not have despaired about its bleak future in 1893, nor would Teddy Roosevelt have done so for America in 1906.

Switzerland is generally regarded as a clean, corruption-free economy. Considering that it has recycled into dignity Nazi money, dirty money from African politicians, black money from Indian businessmen, it qualifies as the world’s biggest hawala operator. Is it right to place it on top of Transparency International ratings? It is worth pondering the subject.

So does all this mean that India has seized every opportunity and missed no opportunities? No, of course not.Life is all about missing many opportunities, but grabbing some others. The issue is whether you are grabbing your opportunities well enough compared to others in a competitive sense.

And India has done exactly that.

At the equivalent stage of India’s current economic development, Britain took 170 years from 1700 to 1871 to double per capita income; America took 50 years from 1832 to 1882 to do so.  India, at the recent growth rates, since 1996, doubled per capita income in 14 years.

The Economist ran a lead piece in 2013 entitled “Has Brazil blown it?”The magazine mourned the fact that Brazil, which peaked growth at 7.5% pa in 2009, had collapsed to below 1%. That seems more like blowing it than India!

As a citizen, I would have liked India to grab more opportunities. But I can, with sobriety, think of many opportunities I have failed to grab during my career and life. But I would staunchly refute any suggestion that with respect to my life, ‘I have blown it.’

The nation just needs citizens – young people, entrepreneurs, and business – to have the confidence that India will recover soon.  This requires an acceptance from the political leadership that a new action agenda is required.  This possibility is a real one.

The greatest obstacle to a recovery is having a population that does not expect it!  I hope young people do not despair.  If that happens, then I am sure that India would surely have blown it!

Word count: 2089

The post Convocation Speech IIMK appeared first on The MindWorks.

Ignoring for a moment the by-election results of last week, we Indians seem to have a sense of gloom and doom with respect to India’s economic situation.  “Has India has blown it?” many young people ask.  The subject has so little merit that I find myself struggling, both for words as well as the time to express my thoughts.  So I felt I would use this opportunity to view the subject rationally rather than emotionally.

The expression ‘blow it’ literally means ‘to spoil your chances’ or ‘to lose an opportunity.’ So the questions I address are:

• Has India lost an opportunity and, if so, over what time frame?
• Did other nations also blow it?
• What are the simple indicators?

I wish to explore these aspects in this speech.

TIME FRAME

The time frame over which you judge the question is important.  Time is relative and is what is perceived by the viewer.

For example, even though you move your folded newspaper at great speed to swat a fly, the fly escapes with alacrity and speed. Why? Because the fly’s eye has a different CFF compared to the human eye: CFF stands for critical fusion frequency and is the frequency at which a flicker stands still. Humans have a 60 cycles per second CFF while flies have a five times higher CFF at 250 cycles per second. This means that to the fly, your speed comes through as five times slower than how you perceive it. A fly-eye view of an F1 Racing Driver is that of a comfortable week end driver, cruising through a country road. That is why your rapidly moving folded newspaper is perceived by the fly to be as slow as a wooden spoon moving through honey or treacle.

When you are reviewing the progress of a vast nation or society like India, there has to be some perspective of time, viz, use an appropriate CFF factor. It cannot just be last week’s SENSEX or the next month’s CHOGM meeting.

To emphasize the importance of the time perspective, imagine that you are examining the proposition “Sachin Tendulkar has blown it.” If you disagree with the proposition, you will find plenty in the full cricketing career of the iconic player to prove your point. But if you were to review only his last 20 test matches and compare his performance with his peers in their last 20 test matches, here is what you would find:

• That Sachin’s score of 1070 runs in 33 innings ranks last among Brian Lara, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Ricky Ponting, whose run scores are in the range of 1128-1953.
• That Sachin’s per innings average is 33 runs against his peers of 34-53 runs.
• That in his last 20 test matches, Sachin’s highest score was 94 whereas his peers scored between 176-226 runs.
• That in their last 20 test matches, his peers scored between 2-8 centuries, but Sachin scored zero centuries.

So did Sachin blow it? If you review only his last and recent performance, the answer is YES. But that is not true, you all know it! It is important to have a perspective of time.

COMPARISONS

Therefore I viewed India’s progress or lack of it over the 13 years of the new millennium. This has the added advantage that it covers an NDA as well as UPA period. I also benchmarked with non-China BRICS economies like Brazil and Indonesia to make the comparisons as relevant as possible.  Please note that I am reviewing the country, not the UPA government, in my analysis.

I compared IMF data on the acceleration of annual GDP growth between the last 13 years of O.M. (old millennium, 1986-1999) with 13 years of the N.M. (new millennium,1999-2012). Europe decelerated by 102 basis points; Indonesia accelerated by just 10 basis points; Brazil added 95 basis points but India added 120 basis points, second only to China.

Urbanization is a good driver of economic growth. Since 1991, Indian urbanization grew by 250 basis points per year, matched by Indonesia, but both countries were far ahead of Brazil which was half the rate at 120 points. That is like a bullet train.

In the N.M, India’s real annual growth rate of disposable income advanced at a whopping 650 basis points, compared to Indonesia at 400, and Brazil at 360.In the N.M, India’s ranking in agricultural production improved enormously.

In the new millennium, India has emerged as the Number 1 global producer of milk and fruits, the Number 2 global producer of vegetables, cotton, wheat and sugarcane. India has surpassed Thailand as the number 1 rice exporter in the world.

India’s production of passenger cars grew in the N.M. by 1500 basis points per year, compared to Asia Pacific of 1200 and Brazil’s of 700.

The growth track record over the post independence period is as follows:

INDIA PER CAPITA INCOME CHANGES

So we have experienced the best 13 years in our 5,000 year history, and what do we do? We perpetually debate whether India has blown it! Rather odd!

Would you treat the serious business of economic and social progress of 1.2 billion people by the yardsticks of cricket, where a batsman is judged by his last few innings?

For sure, in the last few years the same indices that I have quoted declined compared to the immediate past period. There has undoubtedly been some effect of the global downturn.  To use the tennis metaphor, you cannot compare grass court tennis with clay court tennis. As the world economy has become more VUCA in the last five years–volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous–India retained its position at Number 2 among fastest growing nations. It is worthwhile to note that when the tide rose in the first 8 years of the N.M., India accelerated and improved its position.

My audience might think that I have conveniently avoided talking about China. For many centuries, the Chinese economy has been bigger than India in total money terms. In per capita terms, China and India had the same per capita income in 1970. Today, admittedly, China has three times the India level on this measure. However, bear in mind that if Indians had, in the 1970s, let Sanjay Gandhi implement his measures to limit Indian family size (as China had done), the per capita income of China would not be three times India’s but only one and a half times!

Although China liberalized 13 years before India, India’s per capita GDP lags China by only 8 years, and in per capita private consumption, India lags China by only by 5 years. India’s per capita consumption of steel, cement, soda ash, soaps and many others—all lag China and the developed economies by a factor of 10-50%.

The headroom for growth should send anybody in a tizzy; it is unbelievable.

You have to view all this data as an opportunity rather than as a problem. In that case you will get “blown away” with India rather than debate whether India has “blown it”!

CORRUPTION

I should add a brief word about corruption, which is undoubtedly a distressing feature of India. Without accepting it as a necessary evil, I would respectfully point out that corruption is like a virus. It affects every society, it travels and its effects are disastrous. Every society has to keep vaccinations as a preventive and medicines as a curative. India is no exception.

But let us not forget that though India is 5,000 year old civilization, it is an adolescent, 22 year old in its incarnation as a capitalist democracy. When other countries were at a similar phase in their development–US, UK, Korea, Taiwan—history tells us that they faced similar crises. The British Parliament would not have despaired about its bleak future in 1893, nor would Teddy Roosevelt have done so for America in 1906.

Switzerland is generally regarded as a clean, corruption-free economy. Considering that it has recycled into dignity Nazi money, dirty money from African politicians, black money from Indian businessmen, it qualifies as the world’s biggest hawala operator. Is it right to place it on top of Transparency International ratings? It is worth pondering the subject.

CONCLUSION

So does all this mean that India has seized every opportunity and missed no opportunities? No, of course not.Life is all about missing many opportunities, but grabbing some others. The issue is whether you are grabbing your opportunities well enough compared to others in a competitive sense.

And India has done exactly that.

At the equivalent stage of India’s current economic development, Britain took 170 years from 1700 to 1871 to double per capita income; America took 50 years from 1832 to 1882 to do so.  India, at the recent growth rates, since 1996, doubled per capita income in 14 years.

The Economist ran a lead piece a few weeks ago, entitled “Has Brazil blown it?”The magazine mourned the fact that Brazil, which peaked growth at 7.5% pa in 2009, had collapsed to below 1%. That seems more like blowing it than India!

As a citizen, I would have liked India to grab more opportunities. But I can, with sobriety, think of many opportunities I have failed to grab during my career and life. But I would staunchly refute any suggestion that with respect to my life, ‘I have blown it.’

The nation just needs citizens – young people, entrepreneurs, and business – to have the confidence that India will recover soon.  This requires an acceptance from the political leadership that a new action agenda is required.  This possibility is a real one.

The greatest obstacle to a recovery is having a population that does not expect it!  I hope young people do not despair.  If that happens, then I am sure that India would surely have blown it!

Word count: 1689

The post Convocation Navarachna appeared first on The MindWorks.

The mission of this wonderful B-School is “to promote business success by empowering managers and young professionals with updated knowledge and decision-making skills.” It is laudable that the school aims to achieve this goal by working closely with industry partnerships. I offer my hearty congratulations to the graduating students, the parents, the faculty and the industry partners.

In the available half hour, I have just two messages that may be useful for the life and career of upcoming managers:

• First, that sport teaches us many lessons of life.
• Second, that obligation is more important than entitlement in your career.

LIFE LESSONS FROM SPORTS

Like with any performing art, sport can be enjoyed without necessarily taking a technical or analytical approach to the enjoyment. Sport is a condensed version of life because it allows the questioning of whether a fact and an opinion are related. It permits you to debate the causal connection of an outcome.

The first lesson is about working to your internal ambitions rather than to external measures of accomplishment.

Who is to judge accomplishment and how? Is Michael Phelps the greatest sportsman because he has won the largest number of medals by far in Olympic history?  If you want differing opinions on the subject each with an array of brilliant facts, read the International Herald Tribune of 3^rd August, 2012.

Is Tendulkar greater than Bradman? If Rajdeep Sardesai were to conduct a panel discussion to choose ‘the best’ from among  Sachin Tendulkar, Don Bradman, Ricky Ponting, Garfield Sobers, Brian Lara, Viv Richards, no stop there, because you will merely create the world’s longest, most vigorous and most inconclusive TV debate.

As you strive in your career for accomplishment, recognition and advancement, remember that there is no better yardstick than what you have set in your own mind. It is important for folks like you and me to take pride from our accomplishments rather than to expend mental energy to be one up on our peer.

The second lesson is about working to your full potential rather than to a hypothetical limit of managerial genius.

In sport, what are the limits of human endurance? Who knows?

In 1936, Brutus Hamilton, the coach of the Stanford University team and a most revered athletic coach, took it upon himself to record what he thought was the ultimate performances in track and field events. At that time the world record for the mile belonged to American Glenn Cunningham whose record was 4 min and 6.8 seconds. Hamilton stated in his report, The Ultimate of Human Effort, that the quickest mile ever possible was 4 min, 1.06 seconds. However on 6^th May 1954, Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute barrier at the Iffley Road track in Oxford.

Roger Federer won the longest tennis match in Olympics history day before yesterday when he overcame young Argentinean player Juan Martin del Petro in 4 hours and 26 minutes. He won the third and last set 19-17.

But in 2010, John Isner took 11 hours and 5 minutes and all of five sets to beat Nicolas Mahut in five sets. The set score in the last set was 70-68!

Andrew Berry who teaches evolutionary biology at Harvard states the obvious fact that “no one will run a mile at the same speed as 100 meters because the laws of oxygen will not allow it. Human improvement must ultimately bow to the laws of biomechanics.”

Yet at the heart of human endeavour is what poet Robert Browning wrote, “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s heaven for?”

It all depends on your perception of your grasp. It is your grasp that you need to judge and strive to just exceed.

The third lesson is about you setting the balance lies between work and life.

Mark Inglis  is a much decorated professional mountaineer from New Zealand. He is a double amputee. On 15^th May 2006, after forty days of climbing, Mark Inglis was at the peak of Everest, the first double amputee to accomplish this. While ascending Everest, he and his party encountered David Sharp, a distressed British climber, but instead of helping Sharp, they continued their climb. Sharp died subsequently. Mark Inglis was criticised for the ethics of his decision. Was he right? Who knows?

In the ongoing London Olympics, Chinese diver Wu Minxia won her third Olympic Gold Medal. She is one of her sport’s shiniest stars, but part of that is due to the price paid by her personal life. Her father Wu Yuming said, “We accepted a long time ago that she does not belong entirely to us.” So she was not told of her mother’s breast cancer condition until she had won the medal, or even of her dear grandparents’ death over a year ago. Is this right or ethical? Does it diminish her accomplishment?

I do not know the answer.

But you should strive to set the balance in your own life so that you can be a happy person. Never leave the keys to your happiness lock in anyone else’s hand.

  The fourth lesson is that luck matters.

Luck is best exemplified in sport and the debates abound about the role of luck.  In April this year, writer and former English test cricketer Ed Smith made a presentation at the London School of Economics on “Luck: what it means and why it matters.” He has also written a book on the subject.

The modern history of luck perhaps began in 1859. Samuel Smiles wrote his best-selling book, Self Help, in that year. Since then there have been many exponents of the subject of self-improvement like Dale Carnegie, Robin Sharma, Tom Robbins, Stephen Covey, just to name a few. All of them have inspiringly and rightly advocated the development of a mindset that says, “My destiny is in my hands, and if I really want something badly, I can work hard to get it.”

Always remember that they are absolutely right. You can forget their message but only at your peril.

Now here is the catch. Concurrently also remember the opposite because that is also true: that you need a stroke of luck to get what you want. Sure, you have to do your very best but there is no assurance of success, whatever your definition of success may be.

The absence of the luck factor can deny you the rewards that you seek through your hard work and persistence. If that happens, just move on with your life. You would be wise to remember that the two opposite co-exist.

But what exactly is luck? Napoleon said that he wanted competent generals, but, more importantly, he wanted lucky generals. The word has the connotation of a built-in joy: it is derived from the German word, Gelucke, which connotes both luck and happiness. Admitting the existence of luck demands the acknowledgment that some things are beyond our control.

But it is important to recognise that there are two kinds of luck.

There is a luck which you prepared for and can claim to have earned. You can see a cause and effect relation between the effort and the result. I call this Good Luck. This is the kind of luck that Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie advocated.

In Indian philosophy, we invoke Good Luck by advocating the attitude of the karma yogi: do your best but do not expect the fruits of your effort.

There is another luck which I call Unearned Luck, a sheer random coincidence, that which is beyond your control. Winning the lottery is luck; our genes are luck; your parents are a matter of luck.

When Saina Nehwal reached the semi-finals at the London Olympics, it was her Good Luck. But when she won the losing semi-finalists’ match against Wang Xin, who folded up with an injured knee, it was her unearned luck.

One of my most emotional experiences at college was a conversation with an academically brilliant class mate when I was gloating about my election victory as the Vice President of the student body. He said to me, “What is the difference between you and me? You are lucky that you have a stable home. My father is a drunk and I have an emotionally disturbed home.” Yes, it was my unearned luck, and it was equally his unearned bad luck.

The discoverer of DNA was James Watson, who was in a three horse race with chemist Linus Pauling and biochemist Erwin Chargaff to be the first to make the discovery. Pauling and Chargaff were on the same boat after attending an international conference.  But they did not like each other and never talked throughout the boat journey. Had they exchanged a few notes, Pauling would have discovered DNA. James Watson considered this as his Unearned Luck.

On 22^nd August 1931, a young English lad, John Scott-Ellis, drove up a Berlin street in his new Fiat and knocked down a short man. As he apologised profusely, the short man said he was lucky, picked himself up and walked away. Some years later, John Scott-Ellis realized that he had knocked down Adolf Hitler. Had he killed him, the course of human history could have been different.

You should stretch as far as you can for the Good Luck, but acknowledge Unearned Luck when you get it as much as you should never despair about not getting Unearned Luck.

OBLIGATION MORE IMPORTANT THAN ENTITLEMENT

This subject has occupied my mind a great deal in recent months as I completed the manuscript of my forthcoming book, What the CEO Really Wants from You.

The management world is replete with articles and books on how to succeed, how to get to the corner office fast and how to be a great leader. But the literature is thinner on how to be a great subordinate, how to deserve before desiring, and about how to regard an understanding of what your boss needs as an integral part of your job. And if you have not been a great subordinate, you are not quite headed to towards the C-Suite or the corner office!

I have made so many errors of judgment throughout my career that it is an enduring surprise that I survived all of those. I must thank my subordinates, peers and bosses over the last forty five years for indulging me and by letting me learn lessons from my mistakes.

To end up as a boss, you first need to be a great subordinate.

You are young when you set out to build a career. You clearly remember your early days of company work as a professional manager—huge hope, burning ambition, energising anticipation and deep anxiety, all rolled into one. Then begin the lessons of experience—new roles, new bosses and unexpected challenges.

Early on, you begin to understand what output you are required to deliver: simple things like work timing, do’s and don’ts at work, how work gets done, what targets you are required to achieve, by when and how you should measure your performance. In due course you start to develop ideas about what you can expect from the organisation and your bosses. What are your entitlements, what training courses you can attend and what sort of career paths might you aspire for.

Your career develops with asymmetry

I conduct an exercise with the participants of training sessions on the subject of expectations. What does the boss owe you? What do you owe the boss? After compiling answers over several hundred candidates’ responses, I find that people list nine expectations from their boss but only four from themselves to their boss!

The nine things that managers feel that their boss owes them are: feedback, empowerment, coaching, transparency, recognition, opportunity, clear tasks, access and respect for personal time.

The four things that people feel they owe their boss are: 100 percent effort, loyalty, honesty and get-it-done results.

When your consciousness and focus in any relationship is driven by what the other person owes you rather than what you owe that person, then that is asymmetry; this means that more often than not, you are giving less than what you take out of the relationship.  Such unbalanced expectations merit some thought because the asymmetry is the cause of strife and disappointment.

It is extremely important for any good subordinate to think about the boss’s needs as much as he or she would like the boss to think of his or her need. You live your life based on certain assumptions. You test these assumptions with each experience and with each passing day. One such assumption is that the company and your bosses owe you a good career. Another assumption is that all that you owe the bosses is good work and loyalty.

You need to learn the skills encompassed by what I have referred to as the 4As: Accomplishment, Affability, Advocacy and Authenticity. They are central to your ability to be an outstanding subordinate.

Accomplishment refers to the attribute of reliably delivering results.  It has to be learned like all skills and practised periodically. It is the most important of the skills that any subordinate has to learn. Simple though it sounds, it is a great weakness among many managers. If execution skills were to be found as abundantly as they are expected, then there would not be so much research and management literature on the subject. There are some reasons why the Accomplishment attribute is not as richly found among managers as one might assume.

Affability is the attribute of developing agreeable relationships and getting things done in an appropriate manner. If you take these meanings too literally, the concept of an affable manager is an oxymoron. It might appear that no efficient and effective manager can qualify as an affable manager. By the nature of work, a manager has to overcome obstacles, which means to convince, cajole, coerce and, if needed, even crucify people into doing things and to coordinate all those actions into a targeted end-result.

That is why affability is a skill to be learnt, practised and perfected.

• How can you disagree without being disagreeable?
• How can you separate your rival’s views from your feelings for your rival?
• How can you listen carefully with an open mind and yet be focused and single-minded?

And yet all these, and more, constitute what is regarded as an affable manager.

Advocacy is the skill of envisioning new ideas and persuading others to debate those new ideas. In the early stages of one’s career, you are the recipient of instructions and the effects of power. You accept them by adapting. You realise that the boss expects you to exercise your leadership on the people who report to you and make sure that things get done. In the middle management phase, you find the need to influence people without their directly reporting to you. In the senior and leadership roles, you may exercise no control over the people you need to influence. This is the manner in which your skills of advocacy develop.

Authenticity is the perception others develop about you, especially subordinates, and about who they think you are. What is authenticity? It is being who you are. Your colleagues and peers see you as you are, not the way you would like to be seen. It is their perception of who you are and what you stand for that produces their followership. Followership is used here, not in a hierarchical sense, but in an egalitarian sense. It is the voluntary desire or inclination among followers to follow a person, emotionally and physically. Unauthentic people can get others to follow by asymmetry of power, by threat or by coercion. These are not likely to be long lasting.

These four attributes vary in relative importance at each stage of your career journey. There are four stages or discrete steps on your career journey.

Thank you very much for listening to my thoughts on this wonderful day for you. I dream about the exciting journey that awaits your generation.

Your generation will escort India into the middle income category, it may be the generation which can witness the abolition of abject poverty in India, and it will be the generation that will watch India retrieve her place among the comity of nations as distinctively as India used to occupy 250 years ago. What a lucky generation!

Enjoy the journey and overcome its challenges. That is what this institution has tried to inculcate in you.

Word Count…..2760

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I feel deeply honored to be invited to deliver the convocation address at this great institute.

Our country is going through uncertain times as happens with every society periodically. If you watch TV or read the newspapers, you could get depressed. The problem does not lie with the times we live in or with the media.  The solution lies in your perspective. You have the choice to think differently. If I have a single message for you, it is this: your generation is poised to escort the country into its most prosperous phase. Live your life with positive energy.

It is human nature to want to know the future, but nobody knows it. The view of the so-called experts is no more reliable than if chimpanzees were to throw darts at a dartboard. History is littered with failed prophecies.

• In 1877, Western Union Company stated “The telephone has too many shortcomings to be considered as a means of communication and is inherently of no value to our company.”
• In 1899, Charles Duell of the US Patent Office stated, “everything that can be invented has been invented.”
• On 8^th January, 1913, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose wrote a letter to his elder brother “Is our dear country on the high road to progress? India is wading through sin and corruption but as the eye of prudence, prophecy or foresightedness can behold, all is darkness.”
• In 1943, IBM founder Thomas Watson said “I think that there is a world market for computers of may be five computers.”
• In his 1968 book, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich declared that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.”
• International Monetary Fund economist Prakash Loungani commented about economists that “the record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished.

So do not get trapped by the so called experts. Consider your inheritance and live life responsibly and king-size. As you inherit, please remember that you too need to be good ancestors. Enrich the society you will live in as you develop your career and leave an even better India for your children.

For the students who are graduating, this is a wonderful day. For the last four years, your teachers have nurtured you professionally, as indeed your parents and elders have nurtured you personally over several years. These are acts to be grateful for. I recall a memorable metaphor from Nature.

Many species of animals undertake some form of protecting to help their young adjust to their new environment. But there are exceptions. Science writers say that unlike mammals and humans, reptiles have no emotion. They mate, drop their eggs and simply walk away. It is known to be true of many species of snakes, turtles and so on. However the crocodile is an interesting case.

When the eggs are ready for hatching, the mother crocodile digs them out of the nest and gently cracks the eggshell to let the young ones out. The young ones are very vulnerable to predators. The mother gathers the babies into the pouched floor of her mouth—not to eat them, as is erroneously assumed but to protect the young ones. She then heads for the river close-by.   Upon entering the water, she opens her jaws to release the young into the water.

Your teachers have behaved like the mother crocodile: they have held you all in the protective environment of their pouches for a few years and are about to release you into the swirling and threatening waters of the real world today.

Congratulations to you and always remember that you owe them a debt of gratitude.

This wonderful institute has provided you one I in the form of ‘instruction’. What you need in your professional life is another I for ‘intuition’ and a third I for ‘inspiration’.

I wish to share five lessons to support this point of view.

1. Develop intuition by learning what cannot be taught

 It is good to always remember that your professional goal is not to be just knowledgeable, but to be wise.

Knowledge comes from learning what can be taught. Intuition is learning what cannot be taught. Wisdom is a combination of the two.

Anything that can be taught (like science, economics and management) can be learnt by studying at suitable institutions. When institutes teach techniques and concepts, they appeal to the analytical part of the student’s brain. The graduating student feels that she knows a lot about management: but this is only partly true. Real life practice is much more than the acquisition of such knowledge or a degree. You all have to learn many other things–which cannot be taught. Management principles are tenets, at best philosophies, but certainly not discoveries in any scientific sense.

A great manager realizes that the energy to manage actually comes from the dark side. It comes from everything that makes him suffer: difficult trade unions, unreasonable competitors, change-resistant middle managers, poor top teams and so on. As he struggles against these negative powers, he is forced to live more deeply, more fully.

A great manager is a person who has realized that he is mortal i.e. he can make mistakes, that he will not be in that job or position in a few years. This is what makes him develop a compassion for others.

 A manager can develop to his full potential by learning to be intuitive, inclusive and humane—the kind of skills that are not taught. Intuition is not a substitute for analytics and formal learning; it is a winning overlay, it complements knowledge.

1. Follow your compass, not your clock

 We live in the blackberry and internet age. Time is the most precious commodity and just about everyone is short of it. I call this act of living a time-challenged existence as the clock.

When we use our time, we do those things that we like to do and avoid the others.  Some people have the time to read books but not to socialize. Others have the time to attend parties, but not to write letters to friends or have exercise to keep fit. All of them are busy.

In organizations, an atmosphere gets built up without anybody’s design or desire. This atmosphere pressures managers to give time to the organization—time becomes the surrogate measure for the employee’s commitment. In reality, commitment is measured not by the time one gives to the company but by the energy and mind-space one gives.

Time is out of our control and anyway, we suffer from limitations on how much we give to the organization. Rather than try to control the time we give to the organization, we would achieve greater success if we tried to control the energy we give to the organization. You can control your energy by thinking about your ‘purpose.’

Each of us has a ‘purpose’, a compass. Each one’s purpose is uniquely personalized, unarticulated and internalized. Purpose is crucial in society for three reasons: it is a primary source of achievement; it is the core energy that fuels the human dynamic; purpose is what successful leaders try to keep activated.

There is, however, one dimension of purpose which is universal to all human beings—people want something out of their work so that their lives mean something, they want their lives to have a reason. Fulfillment and happiness come out of working to your potential, irrespective of whether you are a doorman or a chairman.

That is why purpose is a function of character because you notice it by its absence. To be effective, purpose must have be based on a moral idea by which I mean that it concerns itself with valuing some types of human activities over others.

It is this compass or purpose that makes a lawyer give up his successful practice and fight for the independence of his country as Gandhiji or Nehruji did. It is this compass or purpose that makes a government officer or soldier go beyond the call of his duty or a company to uplift the society around it through CSR. It is purpose that makes a GE a lean machine of efficiency or Google as an innovative outfit.

As you work in management, you will be under pressure to follow your clock. Stop and reflect occasionally to ask whether you are following your compass as well. That alone can provide meaning to your life.

1. Immerse yourself in your profession

 The manifestation of ‘giving energy’ is to immerse yourself in your chosen profession. Immersion means experiencing emotions and involvement so deeply that the lessons enter your brain’s remote memory. When needed, these lessons pop up on your mental screen without your trying. Achieving total immersion is a key step in the management of your energy and the development of intuition. Traveling, talking to customers, staying rooted mentally and emotionally, are all ways of doing so.

You may enjoy listening to this true story about a famous film star of the 1940s and 1950s—Leela Chitnis.

Leela was the antithesis of a film-star. She was the skinny and gawky daughter of a professor; she wore thick glasses. She fell in love with Dr Gajanand Chitnis, who was 14 years older, and a Marathi editor and playwright by occupation. They had a couple of children, but the family income needed augmenting. So Leela started to accompany her husband to rehearsals, and helped with the costumes and sets in order to earn a bit of money. She observed all the going-on evening after evening in a complete emotional involvement. One evening the lead female star failed to turn up. Leela was thrust on the stage only because she had attended endless rehearsals.

Now from the recesses of her brain, she dredged up the dialogues. She became a star overnight. In 1940, when LUX soap sought Indian girls as models for the first time, Leela was chosen. Thereafter there was no looking back.

Such is the value of immersion—and chance!

1. Work incessantly on managing your de-railers

 I will narrate the situation of a very pure and old monkey species called the vervet—perhaps Hanuman was a vervet. These vervets act exceptionally cleverly under some circumstances: for example, vervets can give three different signals to communicate three different types of predators. Yet in another circumstance, they act very stupidly: if they see a carcass, they will not suspect that a predator may be around and they will approach the carcass with all the mischief and curiosity of a monkey.

Managers are like vervet monkeys.

Business books and magazines are full of stories about highly intelligent and extremely successful CEOs, who suddenly seem to act in a silly way. In management, we are taught about talent management, performance appraisals and accelerating top performers. If such systems work quite well, why do we see CEOs being fired? After all, they have been appraised and watched for several years and must be having excellent reports to their credit if they have reached the position of CEO. And one fine day, he is worthy of being fired?

In my experience, there are three reasons that account for this strange occurrence. First is that a manager’s intelligence is contextual, which means that signals that she picks up in one situation may not be picked up in another situation. Second is that power reduces a person’s ability to reflect. Third is that she overestimates the value of her own solutions due to insularity or arrogance.

As you develop your career, you will realize that you are prone to some weaknesses that are uniquely personal to you e.g. short temper, arrogance, garrulousness, insensitivity and so on. These are called de-railers. It is very difficult to completely remove such weaknesses, but you can push yourself to a heightened awareness of your de-railers. In this way, you can reduce their damage potential.

It is not so well known that the Ramayana character, Ravana, was a well read and learned person. In fact, Ravana had undertaken such severe austerities that the gods appeared before him and granted him a special boon. He desired immortality from being killed by anybody. But who could kill him? He asked that his death should not come from a god, demon or animal. He did not include a human being in his wish-list as he just could not imagine that a frail human could ever kill him. Ultimately he was slain by a human.

In Mexico, the Aztecs ruled successfully during the 16^th century. They were much advanced in arts and sciences, but they were blind to a deeply religious belief that one day, their founding god would re-appear in a strange form. When the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes appeared in 1519 at their border, the Aztecs thought that he was the returning founding god. In spite of a number of contrary signals, Cortes was received with gifts and warmth right up to the emperor, Montezuma. On 13^th August, 1519, the Aztecs surrendered and the Spanish ruled them for over 300 years.

How could such an intelligent Ravana or such a successful emperor as Montezuma do such stupid things to cause their own downfall?

They forgot to manage their de-railers.

1. Success is a thief

 Success is a thief. That is why success is not something to be pursued. This thief brings only unhappiness to those who pursue it. The best chance of capturing this elusive thing called success is to look within us. It may be hiding, but its right there! However, almost all of the 6.5 billion people on earth try looking for success outside of them.

The problem is that they think of success in others’ context. That is why they relentlessly pursue the acquisition of things that others can readily see—wealth, status, and recognition. Such success is a thief.

A thief has three characteristics: first, a thief is not recognized by you as being a thief; second, he robs you of what you have without your realizing it at that time; third, a thief leaves you feeling very foolish after you have been robbed.

So it is with success. You assume that visible symbols of success makes you happy, but such success increases the chances that you will be robbed of your happiness, and further, after losing your happiness, you feel foolish that you have lost your success.

Consider the reality around us. A consulting and accounting firm called KPMG conducted a Fraud Survey in 2008 among the largest private and public companies. An incredible 80% opined that fraud is a problem. To those who doubt the concerns about ubiquitous fraud, further evidence comes from the Satyam episode which has hogged newsprint and airwaves for the last several weeks.

Charles Michael Schwab was born in 1862. At age 35, he became President of US Steel, later Carnegie Steel. He was big, rich and famous. He built an ambitious 75-roomed private house, Riverside, for $7 million. He lost all his wealth in the 1929 crash and died in 1939 with a debt of $300,000.

Howard Hopson was born in 1882. By the early 1920s, he put together AGECO, an association of electric and gas companies in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. He then indulged in what turned out to be shenanigans. He faced trial in 1940 and died in Brooklyn sanatorium.

All of these ‘successful’ people lost the perspective of context.

The plain fact is that success has to be seen within a context, and that context is your own self, not outside of yourself. Strip away the context, and you see it completely differently.

To most of mankind, success means having wealth and status which others can be impressed with. But the trick of showing something is not to retain it. The blue object looks blue because the object sends back the blue wavelength of light and retains none of it. Similarly the successful person returns success and retains none of it.

Just as the Himalayan musk deer tires itself by running around seeking the source of the fragrance, little realizing that the smell originates from its own navel, man too should search his own self.

I am not sure who wrote this line but it is wonderful:

“It is not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived”.

Conclusion

 I have shared just five lessons that I have learned, I could go on for long. But these lessons are not taught, they are learnt by you. I wish you luck in learning what you cannot be taught.  Enjoy the journey and my best wishes are with you. God Bless.

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