Companies and businesses can be built into great institutions, which are more than engineered processes and ingredients; they are live organisms with emergent conditions. It is these emergent conditions that bring an institution alive. However, sometimes, few entrepreneurial leaders are charged with motivation and drive that is dramatically different. These business folk break the mould of prevalent thinking, setting an organization onto a new trajectory. They appear to operate with the rainforest rules, which are quite different from the model of cultivated agriculture in which you attempt to control and guide environmental factors to maximize efficiency and replicability. In the rainforest, you accept the environment and within that, you seek effectiveness and novelty.

The narrative of Biocon, India’s first and only modern bio-technology institution that has produced significant research and commercial value, and its founder, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, resemble the application of these rainforest rules.