How much our growing-up years influences our later personality later is worth pondering. 

I was born when Lord Wavell was ruling India , and when Gandhiji and Jinnah were walking the streets of Mumbai. It was in Calcutta 1945, when I was born. I studied and lived in Bengal (Calcutta and Kharagpur) till I was 21. My Bengali friends would say that I was a Tamil masquerading as a Bengali and my Tamil friends thought I was a Bengali, masquerading as a Tamil. I reckon I was both. 

In addition to Tamil and Bengali, I learnt English, Hindi, Sanskrit and German—not because I was a polymath, but because my mother thought linguistics would be helpful. Indeed, later in life, linguistic diversity helped me in adapting, accommodating, understanding and empathy. The language agility helped me better connect with people. 

St Xavier’s School and College were dreams—sports, elocution, dramatics, and, of course, education. I went to temple, church, and mosque with equal fervor, celebrating the one Supreme God, known by so many names. BSc (Physics) Honors followed school and then B. Tech at IIT Kharagpur. Those are impressionable years for any child. Some of my lingering impressions that returned to me during adult years were:

• • Fitness is power: Former Davis Cupper, Dilip Bose, conducted tennis coaching at South Club. He would insist that “the body is the only car you will possess for life, so guard it like your only car.” I did, and I remember his advice to this day.
  • Friends are for life, more so than knowledge: I cannot remember all my class lessons, but I distinctly recall school and college friendships. Relationship-building with no ulterior motive is a great social and psychological asset.
  • Green is how you perceive it: Father de Bonhome explained optics by saying what you see is your own reality, not something real and outside of yourself. The green object absorbs all other colors, and sends back only the green wavelength, that is why you perceive it as green. It is not green!

• The soldier does not choose the timing or his battlefield:  My family migrated to Bombay when I was in the first year of college. I had the enigmatic and boring chore of closing some legal case and winding up the household assets of a large bungalow by auctioning them. I felt sorry for my situation, while friends seemed to enjoy themselves on Park Street. But that experience taught me, and I learnt to “take charge” and avoid self-pity. It was hugely valuable in later life.

• It is important to know where you came from: The occasional family visits down south, the interactions with grandparents who had spent all of their life in the village, and a deep immersion into the life in a village—these were great sources of inculcating humility. I think our family was not as well-off as others thought, but we had more than we needed! That was being middle-class, a hugely valuable identity.

Getting into IIT Kharagpur was a big deal—at least within our family, and in those days. I was the first in my peer group of siblings and cousins to get into an IIT, and the first to pursue a “double degree.” My parents were hung up about us sporting double degrees after their names. Thy were very proud as both of them had only a secondary school education and were determined that their next-gen should be well-qualified. That struck me as another middle-class virtue. 

Living in Kharagpur turned out to be a dream–it was dramatic, challenging in parts, lovely for the most part, and passed so quickly! The challenges of living, study, and socialization were overcome largely by meeting the challenges head-on. It taught me that any life challenge is like a loose ball in cricket. You should engage suitably with it, not avoid it. The election as Vice President of the Students’ Gymkhana in 1966 seemed like a life-crowning achievement at that point of time, rather silly in hindsight.

Armed with an electronics education, a primitive curriculum by the standards of these days, I joined the Hindustan Lever (HLL) computer department as a systems analyst/programmer. The salary was princely at Rs 750 pm, with prospects of becoming a “covenanted manager” in two years. I worked in an air-conditioned computer room at a time when even senior officers sat in an office cabin with a punkah above! 

My grandmother said she was not sure what I did, but she expressed her determination to get me married to a charming Tamil girl at the earliest (before girls from other places would ensnare me, she added!). The family succeeded and I got married when I was a tender 24 to a girl who was an even more tender 20!

HLL was a dream company in many ways. It not only taught me operations, it taught me ethics of business, it taught me about the larger role of business in society, it taught me about adjusting and adaptiveness while building personal resilience. Over the next thirty-one years, I moved from Computers to Sales to Marketing and on to General Management, with change of roles and physical relocation to the south, west, north and overseas. As HLL’s Vice Chairman, I had become quite comfortable with consumer goods—and thought I knew one hell of a lot. That was until I met Ratan Tata.

Tata was a different culture compared to HLL, though both had great similarities of being professional, ethical, and competent. I accepted the offer to join as a director of Tata Sons. It was a dream again, challenging occasionally, but overall, significant and enriching. I knew absolutely nothing about power generation, automobiles, industrial chemicals, air conditioning, watches, infrastructure and so on. I was sort of beginning my career all over again, innocent, and curious. As botanists would say, it was neoteny at work, a strategic rejuvenation of a grown-up plant.

After a further career of seventeen years at Tata, I happily retired in 2016 to begin my third career as an author and a business commentator. Having written seventeen books, and a million words of articles, delivered over one hundred keynote speeches all over the world, and an active social media activity, I feel I am emptying myself of the experiential wealth that has accrued to  me—not by my accomplishments but through the Providence of circumstances. 

The more I share of my experiential wealth, the wealthier I become! 

Click the link below for all the details of IIT 1967 Batch

IIT 67 batch

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With a fine protocol officer, Ahmed Husain, touring the city

Through many decades of business travel, I became a somewhat curious traveler, though the curiosity was a specific one—a curiosity, which was influenced by focus on business or on family, depending on the trip. Recently I spent four days in Dhaka (earlier Dacca), when my curiosity was general. There is a great difference between general curiosity and specific curiosity. Why, in the first place, a general curiosity about Dhaka, of all the places in the world?
Well, I was born in Calcutta during the tumultuous times when Lord Wavell was ruling–or trying to rule–undivided India, and the ‘prime minister’ of undivided Bengal was Sir Khwaja Nazimuddin, followed by Husein Shaheed Suhrawardy. The latter was from my school, except that he was fifty-five years senior to me!! I grew up in Kolkata.
Calcutta and Dacca were sorts of twin Bengali cities. Growing up in an environment of Tamil at home-Bengali outside multi-culture, I often wondered about ‘the other side’. When I was a young manager at Hindustan Lever, the Swadhin Bangla movement unraveled in 1971. Hence the long-standing curiosity and interest in Dhaka. In my imagination, I felt a juvenile connection with the city. That is acceptable for a greying and ageing retiree!
Only after I arrived, I realized that Sri Gopala was the dynastic founder of the Buddhist Pala dynasty, which ruled Bengal around 750 CE. The silly thought that a second Gopala was visiting strengthened my imaginary bonds. Quite silly, but being occasionally silly is part of curiosity, isn’t it?

          At Sobzi Bazaar, Dhaka

Luckily, I was able to speak in Bengali—at the five-star hotel, at Songsod Bhavan (Parliament), at the Sobzi Bazaar, with the poochkawala, with the jhal moori vendor, and the server in the Mishtana Bhandar. Having left Bengal over half a century ago, initially, I was a bit hesitant about the fluency of my Bengali, but was greatly encouraged by the following energizing encounter with Chef Shafiqul Ananda.
“Boloon, kee khaben?” he enquired with a smile. I rattled off my childhood favorites—loochi alurdom, begoon bhaja, and aloo poshto. “Oi gulu thak, maachey kee khaben?” Sharif persisted. When I declined with an announcement of my vegetarianism, he seemed dumb founded. He cocked his head at an angle and stared at me “Kee, apni maach khaben naa? Ekta kotha boloon. Apni to Bangali nei, ota to bhoja jaache apnar boli theke. Kintu, apni kay?” His face lighted up like a 1000-Watt bulb when he learnt my antecedents. With the typical Bengali exclamation, “Kee aschorjo!” he showed recognition of who I was. He did not leave me writhing in any embarrassment, he announced in a very motivating tone, “Kintu, apnar Bangla ta na, khoob mishto o sposhto, shunleyi bhoja jai je apni Kolkatar log.” That settled my hesitation in speaking the local language After that, I was in full flow. For example, it so happens that in Tamil, Dacca, the city, Taka, the currency, and Dhaka, the word for hidden, are all written the same way.
During my walk, I found shoeshine boy, Robi Das, with his handwritten name board and a cell phone number. “Why the cell phone number?” I enquired. He beamed at me and said “Aami baadi te delivery kori, ek motooner Amazon shoeshine.” Wow, that is some entrepreneurship!

     Poochka in front of Parliament

I had been warned that Dhaka Bengali is quite different and that I may have difficulty following their manner of speaking. Their accents were different, but not difficult enough to follow. They would say Bees when I would say Koori for twenty. They would refer to elder brother/sister as Bhai/Apu, not the Da/Di appendage that I was used to. The vegetable market was Sobzi, not Tarkari. Yes for sure, would be Aboshyo rather than Nischoy. Women wear the saree, unlike in Pakistan, where sarees became rare after being discouraged during some earlier period.
The conference where I was speaking—Bangla Brand Forum—was well attended. The theme was a grandiose jaw breaker—how to develop a humane, transformational, collaborative, sustainable, and extraordinary Bangladesh by 2040!!
I got a great insight into the economy, of some of which I was unaware. Bangladesh is stated to be the second largest exporter of garments in the world. Second largest? Could India have been double Bangladesh instead of being, as India is today, half of Bangladesh in world garments exports? Garment exports account for 12% of GDP, an approximately equal share as agriculture and inward remittances! My image of Bangladesh was of being ‘hothobhaga’ (unfortunate)—always flooded after hurricanes and with frequent fires in garment factories. The good news is that they have moved on.
Of the top ten, certified ‘green’ garment factories in the world, seven are from Bangladesh. The road network is so good that you can reach from anywhere to anywhere in six hours. Rural and urban are, of course, distinct, but connectivity is merging them, a bit like our own Kerala.

Reaffirming friendship with Ahmed Husain

Their software is tiny. However, the speaker gave his clarion call with stirring words. “Do you know that six Indian companies account for 80% of India’s software exports? That indicates how their strength can become their weakness,” he thundered. With such concentration in Indian software, he exhorted that Bangladesh needs a different approach to rapidly developing software exports. Their learned economics/management academic announced, ”Our per capita income in Bangladesh is at the same level as India, what does it take to significantly overtake India and become the first middle income country from South Asia?” Soul-stirring calls, a la Nike, to ‘Just Do It.’ The spirit, at least in the conference, was very electric.
Good luck to Bangladesh–sab ke saath, sabka vikas.

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1. Gopalakrishnan

Humility is uncommon among business leaders. With a prologue to his book titled “A speck in timelessness,” Dr Ashok S. Ganguly, former Chairman, Hindustan Unilever, Director of RBI, and Member, Rajya Sabha has escaped the common trap of self-glorification.  His book, AFTERNESS, is engaging and is easy-to-read.

The author has chosen a reflective title: appropriate, when the writer is in his late eighties and reflects on his distinguished, three-part career—as scientist, as industrial leader, and as public intellectual.  

The distinguishing feature is that Ashok Ganguly’s life is a grand illustration of the principle of ‘obliquity.’ Financial Times writer, John Kay, explained obliquity as “our life goals are best achieved indirectly”—for example, the happiest people do not pursue happiness, and the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented!

The  Bombay-educated, indifferent-student never imagined that he would get a PhD in biological sciences from America; while abroad, he accidentally ran into an astrologer-acquaintance, who predicted that young Ashok would not live beyond his late thirties—mercifully, at eighty seven, he is cheerful and busy doing whatever he enjoys; when he returned to India to look after his ageing parents, he had no plan to pursue a scientist/manufacturing role in an international company; he rose to the position of HUL chairman without actively coveting such advancement; he was sounded to be a cabinet minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government, but he brutally assessed himself as unsuited to politics; he was pleasantly surprised when Unilever offered him a promotion as global Director of Research; after his retirement, he became an independent director of Reserve Bank, compelling him to learn afresh from talented financial and economic wizards. Having shied away from politics for many years, he succumbed to the blandishment to serve as a Rajya Sabha member—which was professionally fulfilling, though frustrating. As late Arun Jaitley told him, he had strayed into ‘the citadel of Indian politics, which is best avoided by a professional’.

Did obliquity apply to his awards also? He was recognized multiple times–Businessman of the Year, Padma Bhushan, Padma Vibhushan, Commander of the British Empire–my editor’s word-count limit prevents me from listing all awards. Interesting, isn’t it, to achieve all this, without trying to do so? 

Oh, the marvels of obliquity!

He narrates how humanity is universal: a Christian chairman asked the Hindu Ashok Ganguly to meet Mother Teresa regarding a proposed HUL’s financial support. Mother placed a dying baby on Ashok’s lap. “I watched the life of the infant slowly ebbing away, and shortly the baby died on my lap…. I had never before encountered such an incident…I was in tears.”

As Nike might ask, how did he ‘just do it’? “I don’t know, but a big share of credit is to my late wife, Connie”. 

Life should not be lived by charting your own pre-designed steps because somebody else is doing it for you. Sentimentally he reflects, “I now live in the eerie stillness of our home, which Connie built and adorned, leaving behind my daughters, who are my only solace.”

Our lives are indeed a speck in timelessness. Sic transit gloria mundi.

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The idea of a board coach

To improve governance, can a coach help by holding a behavioral mirror to a board?  

By R Gopalakrishnan* 

Could responsible Indian companies experiment with having an experienced and wise leader sit in at board meetings as a fly-on-the-wall? He or she would function as a behavioral mirror, reflecting board dynamics rather than commenting on the content or substance of board transactions. 

Such a practice does exist, though it is rare. I have worked on a board where, by turn, one independent director would play this role. I have also experienced a board that recruited such a coach to attend three board meetings and offer suggestions for improvement. To have any chance of success, the board must wish to improve continuously, and the action must be voluntary, not mandated by regulations. My uncynical self says that it is worth airing this suggestion. 

My cynical self thinks it is a laughable idea. Chief executive officers and boards are prone to several behavioral aberrations because the board is an ongoing battle among niyat, niyam and neeti. 

One example. Readers may recall the story of Eike Batista of Brazil, reportedly a self-made and wealthy Brazilian. He counted among the richest in the world around 2012, making his fortune while building Brazil’s infrastructure. He was reported to be close to key powers in Brazil. With a change of regime in 2016, his fortunes collapsed.  Another example. Just as a tiger’s nature is to hunt for prey to survive, hedge funds expose contradictions in a company and short sell. It is their role. In 2019, Hindenburg exposed Nikola, the over-valued American battery manufacturer. In January 2023, Quintessential Capital exposed UK’s Darktrace. 

Managements and boards are under glaring public scrutiny.  Controversial companies view governance as a chore. This article is not for them. This article is for companies that truly value governance and seek to improve their board performance continuously. 

In team sports like cricket, there is a coach for the individual player, and another coach for the team. In individual sports like tennis, each player has a whole team of coaches. Promising executives have a coach. There is a thriving market for trained and certified executive coaches. To be successful, the player or executive not only needs technical skills, but also mental or psychological (= behavioral) skills, which a coach might provide.  I wonder why a board should not consider a board coach! 

Though still riddled with weaknesses, corporate governance has advanced significantly in the last 30 years. Governance interests all those associated with leadership. After all, human foibles and behavioural flaws are common, whether in boardrooms, public administration, sports, or political organisations. All of them are rooted in social and psychological soils. In several corporate failures, hindsight reveals that the root cause is traced to behavioral factors, the most common one being ignoring early warning signals. There are others like the overpowering influence of some directors, board members’ inability to disagree without becoming disagreeable, and so on. 

In the discourse on corporate governance, there is a valid emphasis on the visible and cognitive –legal, accounting, risk, cash management and so on. Apart from the visible, the invisible behavioral aspects merit more attention. We tend to ignore or overlook the invisible, because the visible factors demand immediate attention and action. The pandemic highlighted that an invisible virus can seriously threaten people, societies, and nations. In governance too, invisible threats are very important.

Directors are human beings and are prone to subjectivity and behavioural bias. Directors can learn, or be trained, on the technicalities. It is far more challenging for them to learn or be trained on behaviour. Behavior is self-taught. For example, most frequently, nomination committees recruit new board members for reputation and skills, with perhaps insufficient emphasis on healthy attitude and constructive board behaviour. 

It is human nature to seek power, prestige, and status. Hence, our behaviour is in line with aspects that can bring us respect, approval, admiration, and status. We intensely desire to fit in with people like us, and, once we are in such a group, we intensely desire to be prominent. This is why we tend to emulate behaviors of those whom we admire, or those whom we aspire to become like. Newly appointed directors on boards display this tendency in spades. We generate strong internal pressure to belong within the group. The benefit of being accepted is far greater than the benefit of being right, or cautious. These natural drivers and habits direct our functioning as board members. That is why behavior trumps the regulations and laws that define the role of independent directors, the board chairman, and the myriad dos and don’ts.

 Corporate India needs wise directors. Some wisdom may be found among independent non-executive chairmen and former directors, who are no longer on boards.  As observers, they can observe the group dynamics and coach on what is working well and what is not. A fly-on-the-wall, experienced advisor can counsel boards just as an executive coach offers behavioral counsel to ascendant executives. Needless to add, such a person will not be a permanent attendee, will have no statutory responsibilities, and must sign the required ethics and confidentiality agreements. 

Where niyat is missing, it would be useless. Where niyam and neeti dominate, it might help. Are there any boards that want to improve, year after year? Might this idea help?

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

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Gopalakrishnan and Ranjan Banerjee*

*(Gopal is an author and business commentator, who served Lever and Tata during his fifty-year career. Ranjan is Dean of Mumbai’s BITS School of Management (BITSoM) and former Dean of SPJIMR (SP Jain Institute of Management)

There are many recent stories of leaders of Indian origin making it to the top of global institutions. From Jayashree Ullal at Arista, Sonia Syngal at Old Navy , Leena Nair at Chanel, to the recent news of Ajay Banga being nominated by Joe Biden as President of the World Bank, there has been much to celebrate. Overseas Indians seem to be gaining recognition in several fields—management, academics, global institutions, and political governance. What could be the factors contributing to this now discernible trend?

In 2018, we had co-authored a book–The Made-in-India Manager, published by Hachette India. We had defined ‘Made in India’ as people who had spent their most formative years in India (typically up to college or under-graduate level). While our book spoke specifically of managers in global corporations, the qualities we describe apply equally well to leadership in academics and public service. It is not difficult to separately make a case for the made in India doctor. Given the increasing gender diversity in our leading educational institutions, it is not difficult to see that we will see more women leaders of Indian origin making it to a global stage in the years to come.

Much-celebrated leaders like Satya Nadella, Shantanu Narayen, Arvind Krishna, and Indira Nooyi, belong in this category. We could not this pin down to a single distinctive trait of Indian-origin managers. Rather, it was the coming together of factors that created ‘a secret sauce’.  Borrowing from biology and systems theory, we identified this as an emergent phenomenon, a quality which emerged from multiple factors coming together in an interesting way.

• Growing up in a crushingly competitive, highly aspirational environment: from birth certificate to death certificate, from school admission to IIT/IIM admission, living in India presents huge challenges. Only the persistent succeed. The statistics of how many compete for a seat at an IIT, IIM, SBI probationer are numbing. There are instances of bright students who could not secure a seat in an IIT, but got into Cornell or Princeton! This implies that difficult odds do not faze these leaders, as they are lesser than challenges already faced and overcome.
• Exposure to extraordinary setbacks that accelerate personal learning: : Commuting in chaotic circumstances, inadequate privacy and space to study at home, poor sports and library facilities and the crushing burden of exams. Every student faces early setbacks like inadequate marks, a lost college admission or limited job choice. This implies that ambiguity and setbacks are merely seen as challenges to be overcome. In a world which is frequently characterized as VUCA, this can be rather valuable.
• The ability to work hard along with intuitive adaptability and creativity: Even if grudgingly, employers admit to the exceptional hard work put in by Indians. Abraham Pinkusewitz, head of a diamond trading company in Antwerp is reported to have said, “Business is important for Jews, but we cannot pursue it with the single-mindedness of Indians.” Indian managers have been exposed to unstructured situations early in life, and these help them to learn special skills.
• The ability to think in English: In an international environment, many managers think in their language, but act in English. Many Indians can ‘think and act in English’.

These factors, constituting the emergence principle, were aptly summed up by the late CK Prahalad, who used to say, “Growing up in India is an extraordinary preparation for management.”

When our book was published five years ago, the review in the London Times was a bit scathing. The reviewer was a person of Indian origin, but not ‘Made in India.’ He felt that we had made much about a few stray cases. If Indian managers were that good, then why could they not manage their national business economy better? It was a fair question, but the answer is unravelling as the following facts suggest. 

The size of the Indian economy and the size of the Indian stock market are finding a place in the top five in the world. The fact is that Indians are no geniuses, just as former British and American managers were no geniuses. They work hard and persistently in a particular environment, which allows their actions to cumulatively compound. Improving a few percentage points of productivity each year, after many years, the cumulative effect looks dramatic. As the century of Indian independence approaches,  it is, perhaps,  a case of things coming full circle.  Remember, it would merely restore India in the league of countries to where it was in the 1800s!

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 Tono-Bungay enterprise

 By R Gopalakrishnan* 

From my IBM 360 software training days, I recall Brooks Law, attributed to Fred Brooks of IBM. It stated that just deploying more engineers at software development may not get the work done any faster. The remark became more colorful with time —Russian economist Grigory Yavlinsky’s statement, for example, that you cannot put nine pregnant women in a room and expect the babies in one month! Brooks Law is true for building and nurturing SHE (sustainable, honest, enlightened) enterprise as well. Enterprise is essential for human progress. Yet, society is deeply suspicious, especially of quick-fix enterprise. What may be the remedy?

An article in Strategy+Business magazine revived memories of HG Wells’ satirical novel, Tono-Bungay, written in 1908 when the robber barons were being denounced in Teddy Roosevelt’s America while Victorian England was booming.  It is a mordant satire on a greedy uncle-nephew duo that launched a fraudulent elixir branded Tono Bungay. In those days, they did not intellectualise whether it was a con or bad management! After dramatic early success, sense dawned that the product was a con, indeed harmful. 

The world always had, and will continue to have “entrepreneur lions, who devour everything greedily and quickly”. However, in due course, the ageing lion dies miserably, just like get-rich-quick entrepreneurs and leaders. There are two lessons from Tono-Bungay: First, that success in entrepreneurship produces unexpected side effects, and second, sans integrity, entrepreneurship is doomed. Today, as in the days of HG Wells, the dilemma is that society needs aggressive entrepreneurs, but not entrepreneurs who undertake spiraling risks, unfettered by ethics or nous. The authors of Lessons from the Titans draw well-known and general lessons about what causes the downfall of company managements (complacency, arrogance, complexity) and the decline of company leaders (not listening, obsessed with publicity, personal ego, lack of compassion). Among many factors, complexity and cronyism promote fraud.

The book describes the dramatic rise of GE up to the late 1990s, and its precipitous decline in the 2000s. It is riddled with saucy and memorable anecdotes: How the CEO in recent decades would fly in one company jet, while a second jet flew in tow, as a back-up; and how an assistant flew in advance to the hotel to set up the personal gymnasium equipment of the CEO. Currently, an ongoing Deutsche Bank probe into mis-selling of risky foreign exchange derivatives shows that some bank staff acted with bad intent and disingenuously. Customers were taken in by the sales pitch for an incomprehensible instrument. Trusting customers perhaps ignored the sage advice–if you don’t understand something, don’t engage. 

Complexity is the enemy of long-term success. Although GE’s financial doings in the early 2000s were incomprehensible, nobody dared to criticise the mighty GE. Whether in India or abroad, mighty firms respond to criticism with aggression. If what a company is doing is incomprehensible to reasonably skilled professionals, then it is a signal for caution, if not alarm. Reflect on FTX, Enron, Theranos, 1Mdb, and the Robert Maxwell empire, among overseas companies; think of IL&FS, ABG Shipyard, NSE colocation, and some contemporary Indian cases.

Cronyism is nurtured by the unholy union of political power and entrepreneurial greed, like the battle that Teddy Roosevelt fought over a century ago. We still encounter cronyism, as exemplified by the much-chronicled stories of Eike Batista in Brazil, Yevgeny Prigozhin in Russia, and several in India from the 1950s LIC-Haridas Mundhra matter right into modern times.

Leaders in all domains are prone to such frailties. Former President Obama had said that political leadership has too often become about being more aggressive (https://obamawhitehouse.archives. gov).  “Much of what is trotted out as leadership today is just old-style beating your chest and being louder and more self-centered,” he said. Chest beating is common among gorillas which seek to communicate their size to scare off competitors. 

Psychologically secure and great leaders fight lonely battles against opponents, for example, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Abraham Lincoln. Such leaders fight their battles by talking to their opponents, perhaps even embracing them, but not by boasting that they fight alone. 

How can leaders reduce the probability of aberrant behavior? Traditional Indian wisdom may offer a solution—good business is accomplished through four leadership actions: Develop self-awareness, protect the resources that enable business, serve others, and display compassion towards stakeholders. All the principles of ESG, climate action, SDG, and humanism are captured by vasudeiva kutumbakam.  Humanistic management is a people-oriented management that seeks profits for human ends. People are not seen as mere resources to serve a profit goal. Genuine humanism embraces: (i) wholeness, (ii) comprehensive knowledge, (iii) human dignity, (iv) development, (v) common good, (vi) transcendence, and (vii) stewardship-sustainability. 

At a Yuva Parivartan event at Mumbai in February, Nobel awardee Kailash Satyarthi, passionately exhorted the audience to elevate vasudaiva kutumbakam from an Indian slogan, to be the basis for a movement to “globalise compassion.” It is an intriguing concept which needs further development. Indian enterprises can be the beacons of a new form of enlightened capitalism, first within India, and thereafter, in the world. This is a worthwhile idea.

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

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1. Gopalakrishnan*

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

We celebrate the success of Indian CEOs who have made it big in international companies. Apart from business managers, kudos and encomiums are also due to academics, doctors, and scientists, who have deservedly begun to achieve international recognition. While the leaders have great merit, we cannot overlook the meritocracy in those countries that encourages great talent to flower.

So far as management is concerned, I have a deep interest partly because of my professional background, and partly because of my passionate belief that talent and management excellence are the most important ingredients to synthesize SHE enterprises—sustainable, honest, and enlightened enterprises. SHE companies are crucial for the advancement of our nation. Every nation has developed by building great enterprises. The track record of talent management among many companies, both established and start-up, suggests that India can do better. Just six generations ago, there was no concept of an Indian manager. This article explores a brief history of the factors that led to the establishment and growth of Indian management talent.

Circa 1800, India counted among the richest nations in the world in terms of GDP, which is why the Dutch, the English, the French, were all eager to trade with India. Recall what led to colonization. Textiles, spices, ivory, agricultural commodities, were all hugely valuable trading items. The industrial revolution in England led to employment generation in mining, manufacturing, railways, postal system, among many others. Apart from workers, the tribe of managers started to develop. In their own interests, the British colonialists introduced infrastructural activities in their most prized colony. In the initial decades, experienced British workers and technicians worked in India as supervisors or managers.  The activity reserved for the natives within India or other colonies in Africa, West Indies, Guyana, or Fiji, was unskilled labor. 

Historians credit Dadabhai Naoroji for mooting and advocating the idea that ‘natives’ had to be trained and deployed on the administrative challenges of a complex country like India. As a British parliamentarian, Naoroji lobbied for the ICS cadre to admit suitable Indians. His mission met with initial success when Indians were allowed to sit for the ICS exam, but the exam was conducted only in London.  He then pushed for the ICS entrance exam to be held in India, concurrent with the exam in London. Several years later, ICS exams started to be held concurrently. It was in this manner that Indians were groomed to be ICS officers in India.

Meanwhile railways and postal services started to be established in India. Progressively Indians started to enter the defense forces as juniors. Private entrepreneurs took to modern industry, particularly in the domains of textiles, jute, coal, steel, tea, just to name a few. All such activities required administrative and management talent. Indians joined as junior staff members, and a few grew to junior managerial roles. This was largely true right into the 1930s.

International companies also began to develop the Indian market for their products. BAT, the original promoter of what we know today as ITC, started to set up distribution of cigarettes throughout India. Unilever started to manufacture its globally famous Sunlight and Lifebuoy soaps and exported product to India from the 1880s. Thereafter, Unilever set up local manufacturing in the 1930s. To make, distribute, and sell, initially young British managers were deputed to appoint wholesalers in towns all over India, drawing from trading communities of India. A senior Unilever officer called Andrew Knox, then chairman of what was called the overseas committee, wrote a report in the early 1930s. This report now lies in the Unilever archives. In it, Knox recorded that unless Unilever should “Indianize” the management to develop the Indian market. Either he was clairvoyant or just a shrewd observer; that is exactly what the global company started to do soon after. The first Indian “covenanted manager” to be recruited was Prakash Tandon in 1937. 

Among international companies, Unilever identified and developed Indian managers since the mid-1930s. They did it so well that today after several decades, HUL-recruited Indians occupy top positions in the global corporation. Arguably, Unilever has been the most successful among all companies in talent development. During the last few decades, at any point of time, the Indian subsidiary had about 150-200 managers on secondment to other geographies in which Unilever operated.  The author has benefitted from such secondment when he was posted to head the Unilever subsidiary in the Arabian Peninsula several decades ago. 

Dadabhai Naoroji’s pursuit of recruiting Indians into the civil service resulted in  Satyendranath Tagore, brother of the illustrious poet, joining the ICS around 1864. For the army, it was a momentous occasion, when, in 1949, Gen KM Cariappa was appointed as the first Indian to head the Indian Army. JM Lall became the first Indian CEO of Imperial Chemical Industries in 1959. When Prakash Tandon became the first Indian Chairman of Hindustan Lever in 1961, it was a tribute to the vision of Andrew Knox, and was notable for business management. 

It was not only the international companies who started to take such deliberate steps. Indian entrepreneurs started to develop their own ambitions. Textile mills came up in Bombay and Ahmedabad. Jute mills were set up in undivided Bengal. Tea plantations and factories were established in Assam, Kerala, and Tamilnadu. Tata set up the steel plant and hydroelectric power stations. All of them either recruited foreigners for technical help or trained their own manpower. These Indian entrepreneurs were focused on developing Indian managerial talent.

As can be seen from this brief review, talent management has been a complex and long journey, demanding great persistence and patience. Talent management represents the “infinite game,” to borrow Simon Sinek’s term. 

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1. Gopalakrishnan*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SHE can coexist with Enterprise. 

By R Gopalakrishnan* 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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