The idea revolved around a basic concept - when a CEO experiences personal growth, the individual buoys the company up. Such growth on a sustained basis, is not an accident. It is therefore that behind high-performance companies, stand high-performance CEOs.

Take for example Andy Grove of Intel.

The forty years or so he spent at Intel can be equally divided into 10-year periods of being a start-up entrepreneur-cum-chip designer, the chief operating officer, then the chief executive officer and finally, as the chairman of the board. David Yoffie, Professor at Harvard University and long standing member of the Intel Board, told me once that it was as if they were four different people; such was the transformative, personal growth experienced by Grove.

We see similar cases in India when we look at the career trajectories of CEOs like Ratan Tata or a Narayana Murthy. Why is it that some CEOs keep growing and some hit the glass ceiling? What can an entrepreneur-CEO do to keep growing? These were the conversation pieces at the TiE Panel had. The Panel members were Hema Ravichandar - the much talked about HR and Strategy consultant who saw Infosys grow up, Dr. Pallab Bandyopadhyay of Perot systems and Rishi Das, founder-CEO of Career Net. Towards the end, the Panel took questions and as happens in case of any engaging Panel, we ran out of time for that one all important question that came at the end: What are the signs that should tell an Entrepreneur-CEO that it is time to get help? May be, move away to the next role within or to sometimes, move out? It came from an entrepreneur-CEO in the audience; so it wasn’t your typical idle question at the end of a session.

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Leadership requires what Peter Drucker termed “planned abandonment” - only that leader who can let go can experience planned abandonment so that the individual may expand his or her capacity and in the process, take the organization along. Inability to do so stifles the organization. The sad news is that there is no one to tell the entrepreneur-CEO, because of the very position the individual holds, that he indeed is the cause of his own, and the organization’s stagnation.

I have been pondering over the question on tell-tale signs for the last few days and I finally decided to take a crack at the question myself. I want to share a few situations with those who are interested in the subject - these situations, if evident in multiple numbers in the life of an entrepreneur-CEO, should send the signals that it is time to get someone smarter for the job and move up or move on. So, if you are beginning to question your own competence to run the tasks you currently do, check out the following. If many of these look familiar, it is time to get help.

1. Your books of accounts are not current for successive quarters. Closing the books has been a big ordeal. You do not believe in the numbers yourself. You are having trouble understanding what your chartered accountant is talking about. Your cheques have bounced a few times.

2. You are leaving office everyday around dinner time for the last six months.

3. For the third time, you have missed the delivery deadline.

4. When a recent significant prospect visited you, you were at a loss to understand what she was talking about. Her language was Greek and Latin to your ears even as you kept nodding intelligently through the conversation.

5. Your people are not confiding in you anymore. No one seems to disagree with you on anything you say. You sense false harmony when you are around.

6. You have lost 2 of your top 5 accounts last quarter.

7. You no longer understand your own manufacturing process or that of your best competitors.

8. Recently, you were at an international tradeshow - you felt lost.

9. You have crossed sales of Rs. 100 crores. But you really have no clue of the differences between sales and
marketing functions.

10. You have been feeling irritable at home. You cannot focus. You do not finish a book and can not sit through a movie. During the last vacation, you went to bed every night thinking about work.

11. You believe you have a second-rate team. You cannot imagine in what significant way they can grow up and become valuable to themselves and to others. You sometimes do not know what to do with them.

12. You have lost 3 key people in sales and cannot understand why.

13. You had a great ride for three years. You have no idea what the next three years would be like.

14. You do not seem to know the top three weak spots of your business, which when taken, could get you
out of business.

15. You have failed to raise the second round of funding.

16. You know the market is in Europe. You just have not been able to get there. You somehow do not like selling and feel awkward opening doors for sales calls.

17. You did a fantastic job with one customer or in one vertical or in one geo. For 18 months, you have tried but you simply cannot break into others.

18. You feel that you are physically slowing down.

19. You go to the Club during daytime.

20. You know that the business has potential but you feel as if you are a single-engine, two-seater aircraft of World War II vintage.

21. You read comics at work and have caught yourself surfing the Net for trivia. Personal friends drop in while you at work and you enjoy it.

22. Your wife is feeling bitter about how much time you are giving to the family.

23. You missed your flight thrice in the last three months. You feel lethargic to go to work.

24. You do not remember the names of the top people of all your 10 customers.

25. You were cheated thrice in the last one year.

26. You are ten years older than most of your buyers.

27. It has been three years since you started the business. You are obsessive about designing the marketing collaterals by yourself.

28. You hate to travel.

29. You have defaulted in filing statutory returns and pay the taxes even though there was money in the bank.

30. For the third year in a row, you are not profitable.

31. Three of your clients have complained about poor quality and you really do not know how the issue could be fixed - you have yelled at your people but that is not helping.

32. Your competitor is growing faster than you; the industry is growing faster than you as well.

33. Your competitor’s sourcing baffles you.

34. You just did not have time to exercise in the last six months, have not taken a vacation for a year. You
do not have an active hobby and have not helped with the children’s homework as far back as you can
remember.

35. You have not invested in R&D in the last three years after finding success with the initial product and your competition is doubling their R&D investment.

36. You do not get any Press, your competitor does. You do not know why.

37. You have not learnt any new word in the last one year. You have not gone to a new tradeshow in the same period. You have not added any new book to your reading list. You have not landed in a new airport in the same period.

38. You have the same set of professional friends and you discuss the same thing over beer.

39. You have not met a customer in the last three months. You do not feel like.

40. You know three positions need filling up in your company. You believe you need to meet the candidates yourself. You simply did not have the time.

The problem with being an entrepreneur and a CEO is that you are a Type-A personality, it is your own show and no one will come to shape your career for you. You have to read the signs, watch yourself and make way for more competent people. If you do not vacate your existing ground, how would you take a new one?

“Overall, the job of a CEO”, says my long-time friend and Professor at the Penn State University, Ragu Garud, “is to lead. It is not to fight fires. Leading requires the ability to create frameworks that others may use and that needs energy, power and connections”. Further away you are from that state, lesser you are doing your real job. It isprobably time to consider “planned abandonment”

With that, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers. I will connect with you all in 2009!

Vice Chancellor, Principal, Faculty, Members of the Senate and the Syndicate, my dear Students, Ladies and Gentlemen.
My being with you this evening is historic for me. The Ravenshaw ethos is part of our family heritage. My father studied here. My uncle studied here. Three of my elder brothers studied here. The eldest topped his class throughout and was elected vice resident of the student’s union. The third brother chose activism over academics as his calling and was the president of the college union in his time.

I was the last born and lived with my parents and an immediate elder brother in far away places like Koraput and Keonjhar. As we grew up in those places, we were told stories about the great Ravenshaw College, and we aspired to one day take our place in its imposing red structure. We learnt about the great academicians who taught here, the minds who mentored young people who eventually became destiny’s children. We were also told about something mysteriously transformational in the insipid food of the Ravenshaw hostels that sent people straight to a place called Dholpur House in New Delhi.

To us, Ravenshaw was sacred ground.

Unfortunately for me, by the time I was ready to come to its hallowed precincts, my father had retired. The last two of the brood were picked up by the elder brothers - by then one was a bureaucrat in Bhubaneswar and the other had started a fledgling legal practice in Cuttack. My immediate elder brother got allocated to study at Ravenshaw under the tutelage of the lawyer brother; I was sent to live with my eldest brother in Bhubaneswar and asked to go to the BJB College there. I have to admit that I felt deprived.

So, whenever I got a chance, while studying at BJB College, I came here - I stood by the Sun Dial or peeped into the Kanika Library. Sometimes I came to debate here. On two occasions, I won the Inter-College Debate competition held at Ravenshaw College - they used to be held in the Physics Lecture Theater and on one occasion, Dr. Mayadhar Mansingh was one of the judges. To be judged by someone like him gave me a sense of high I carry even four decades after! The prizes for the debates - one in English and one in Oriya - were instituted by Dr. Mahendra Kumar Rout, then Principal, in his father’s memory.

Each time, after I won the debate, Dr. Rout made it a point to tell me how he wished I were a student at this Institution! I carry that endorsement as a badge of citizenship. The thought that I was so welcome here then, makes me feel legitimate as your Chief Guest this evening. Today, when you choose me over the thousands of more well-known Ravenshawvians who have made an impact, you have taken away the last sense of banishment that I carried in my inability to make Ravenshaw my alma mater.

Ravenshaw College was born in the year 1876 because of the untiring efforts of an Englishman named Thomas Edward Ravenshaw. He called it the Cuttack College. He was a British civil servant in India. His vision for building an institution of learning has several lessons for all of us.

One, that vision was larger than life. As all visions must be. It was in fact, what we may call a “hairy, audacious goal” particularly at a time when Orissa was coming out of the great famine of 1866.
Secondly, that vision did not have anything to do with Mr. Ravenshaw’s self-interest - he was doing it for the posterity of a people that were not his own.

Thirdly, and very importantly, the vision was opposed at the time of its birth. Great vision is always invariably put to test early on and that is when many of us become frustrated. We want the world to come to our door steps because we have a dream. Only those dreams have a right to be born that can withstand opposition and cynicism.

But I am not here to talk to you about the power of vision, nor do I want to pay tributes to the great man who did not even want his name to be bequeathed to the institution he wanted to build. Instead, today, I want to talk to you about the burden of dreams.

Ravenshaw - from now on I mean the 132 year-old-institution - has not just been a place for mass-manufacture of employable graduates. On its sacred space, not just lives, but movements have been launched. We would all do well to refresh our memories on some of those without which we would not be worthy of the people who have once walked this very land before we did.

An educational institution is not just about prescribed curriculum, about question papers and answer sheets: it is a place to learn about life and living by dialogue and diversity, it is the place for creating the capacity to learn, to question, to innovate, to push and be pushed back, to romance life and make life a worthy place for those who will come after us.

The report card for Ravenshaw on that score is a glowing tribute to every single brick that became a sentinel of our freedom; this remarkable red edifice chose to do more than be a witness to time-it chose to be an active participant. Tonight, I would like to take you down the memory lane to give you a glimpse of that report card.

1903. Modern Oriya consciousness began in the formation of the Utkal Sammilani by Orissa’s first graduate, first post-graduate, and first practicing lawyer, Madhusudan Das. When that Utkal Sammilani had its first session here on the Idga Ground in Cuttack, history tells us, it was attended by 335 delegates from the outlying areas; zamindars, representatives of the Gadjats, the Commissioner himself, two Christian missionaries, local intellectuals like Radhanath Roy, Madhusudan Rao, Bishwanath Kar and the Principal and students of Ravenshaw College assembled to engage in the deliberations.

1920. Students of Ravenshaw, like Harekrushna Mahatab, N.K. Chaudhury and their fellow alumni, opposed the idea of the same Madhusudan Das accepting ministership of the British created government and distributed leaflets in protest; they disturbed a progovernment felicitation meeting. Their activities were reported to Mr. Lambart, Principal of Ravenshaw College, and their parents were asked to withdraw the two from college just a week before their BA examinations. In the years that succeeded, parallel to the uprising of Oriya consciousness, was the beginning of the national freedom movement. When India made her shift from self-rule to demand for full freedom, the chants for freedom first reverberated within the four walls of this great Institution before they spread far and wide.

1930. When the Orissa Pradesh Congress Committee gave a call observing January 26th as “Independence day”, history tells us that the hostellers of Ravenshaw College took the lead in organizing the celebrations and many students gave up a meal to contribute to the funds of Utkalmani Gopabandhu Das towards the national freedom movement. Then came the Salt Satyagraha and the post graduate students of Ravenshaw College actually dropped their examination in support of the struggle when a batch of protesters marched from Khurda to the sea to defy the Salt Act of the British Empire.

1937. Even as Orissa acquired statehood under the British Empire, there was no legislative assembly for people’s representatives to represent their will and legislate on their behalf. It is no small coincidence that the grounds of Ravenshaw College were chosen for the very first meeting of the Legislative Assembly of Orissa on July 28th, 1937.

1942. At the forefront of the Quit India movement were the students of Ravenshaw College. On 15 August that year, 200 of them protested. They actually set the office room on fire. Among the arsonists were Banamali Patnaik, Ashok Das, Biren Mitra, Suraj Mal Saha and Bibhudendra Mishra. The last two were detained under the Defence of India Act and sent away to the Berhampur Jail. The movement spread to all other educational institutions in the state. Born of famine, child of a foreigner’s vision, Ravenshaw College was the vortex of political, intellectual and literary movements in Orissa for the first seven decades of its existence. That is probably why it has produced countless heads of state, poets, politicians, judges and bureaucrats who spread their impact far and wide.

1947. And then came seven decades of relative silence, except for the student unrest of the 1960s that spread to the far corners of the State. As the nation got largely busy with itself, Ravenshaw College no longer buzzed with the higher call, its portals gradually settled down to a collective ambition that ran from the Cuttack railway station and terminated in New Delhi where the Union Public Service Commission had its home.

The corridors of Ravenshaw no longer reverberated with the footfalls of the revolutionary, the thinker-doer, the game changer - they only echoed gently a legitimate middle-class aspiration to become a permanent employee of the government. To the job seeker, Ravenshaw became a means to an end - a good education that guaranteed a good job.

If we make a roll call of the chief secretaries to the government that independent Orissa ever had, we will find that an overwhelming majority of them come from this single institution. That principle applies equally to the coveted Indian Police Service, the Allied Services and their less coveted state counterparts.
In the six decades after independence, Orissa progressed in some sense and regressed in others, but Ravenshaw, despite its innate capability, gently withdrew from its task of producing thought leadership. The same person who ran towards the safe harbor of a government job could have aimed for the Nobel Prize, the Booker and the Magsaysay Award. But the burden of dreams had been lowered for the time.
The time has come to change that.

Today’s Orissa, like today’s India, is in deeper strife than she was a hundred years ago. We need to address this.

I believe that the idea of the Indian State, of elected government, of a judicial system and of the protection of law and order, is ceasing to be relevant to an increasing number of people. A record number of Indian territories are ungovernable by public admission. It is no longer Jammu and Kashmir and the far flung border areas in the North East; the fact is that deep inside states like Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and many others, an increasing number of districts find themselves unable to guarantee anyone the right to life, property and equality of justice.

Here is our own state where policemen are mowed down in districts like Koraput. In Nayagarh, barely two hours from the state capital, hundreds raid the armory of the state as if it were a college picnic and vanish as easily as they came. In Kandhamal, someone is burnt alive, someone is raped and twenty thousand people become homeless, as if we live in the backyards of Somalia or Rwanda. All over India, government is retreating to the metros. The rich and the worrying are building “gated communities”-they do not realize that shrunken freedom is no freedom. Their gates are gates of fear and not freedom.

At the core of the problem is the issue of widespread corruption. The reason our police, our bureaucrats, our judges and our politicians are afraid is that we have become a collectively corrupt society. When you become corrupt, you lose the moral authority to govern. All forms of authority are finally about the moral right. Only the moral right gives us the power to stare down an opponent, as has been proven time and again in human history, from the days of Moses to those of the Mahatma.

When the Oriya language and identity was in question, Ravenshaw College had a view point; when the Salt Act was passed, the students and the teachers at the Ravenshaw College had a position; when the British oppression became intolerable, right here in the fields of Ravenshaw, the Union Jack was trampled. Ravenshaw’s students wrote love poems and secessionist literature with the same ease.

So, how is it that our middle-class, poverty of the mind is not on its priority?

How is it that when Kandhamal burns, Ravenshaw’s conscience does not agitate?

While the scourge of corruption has touched the marrow of the civil society, why are we are not dialoguing here for a more sustainable future?

The burden of dreams must return once again so that the hallowed grounds of this great institution can show the path to a people at crossroads with themselves.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are three kinds of freedom. Each one is more difficult to win than the other; each is more intense, fuller of churning, more demanding of loyalty than the one before.

In the first six decades of Ravenshaw College, India and, within that, the people of Orissa struggled for political freedom. Contrary to popular myth, we are not midnight’s children; in reality it was a night of decades, and our freedom took many generations of working, many lives had to embrace the cause without fear of the consequence.

That was our first freedom. Between 1947 and today, we have been battling for our second freedom: economic freedom for our people. In these intervening six decades, we have not had a famine of the 1866 variety. Although floods and droughts have been the bane of Orissa, they have not quite been like the great famines that once wiped off generations in a single go. Our people have starved to death during this period, but it was nothing compared to the specter of the past. With effort we have come this far and the battle for economic freedom is largely won.

But now, we have to embark a more crucial journey for a more difficult freedom to win - it is the freedom of the intellect. Unlike political freedom, and in some sense, economic freedom, this one is not about unshackling from an external opponent. Rather, it is about unshackling the mind from within. More than ever before, we live in times of widespread corruption, visionless politics, non-inclusive development and a near-total disregard for the environment. These are oppressors in our own minds and the potent destruction they may cause is larger than anything a foreign hand ever could.

To strive for freedom of the intellect, you have to develop a sense of destiny. You must know that you have a purpose larger than your own self.

You must develop the true desire to learn, beyond the mundane need to equip yourself with a qualification.

You need to develop the capacity to deeply question the state of things. You have to put your stake on the ground.

You have to build substance and the power to serve others in many valuable ways.

You must believe in your own self, follow your heart and not seek approval from a society that expects you to change it.

You must speak your mind and be accountable for your words and actions.

You must not be content with the measure of the times, for you are here to build a scale for the future. You must create your own path and not be path-dependent.

For this, the burden of dreams must return again.

Not everyone can carry a burden of dreams.

A burden is, after all, a burden, and when it is a burden of dreams, it is a life-altering experience.
The burden of dreams is not in what the eyes see; the burden of dreams is what you and I must affectionately carry in our bodies and on our chests so that we can live a worthy life.

Only blessed ones born on a sacred space can bear that burden of dreams.

Ravenshaw is the sacred space. The question is: are you willing to be the blessed one?
Thank you once again for inviting me this evening. As you take on the burden of dreams, I pray that Ravenshaw gives Orissa her first Nobel Laureate, her first winner of the Booker Prize and her first to claim the Magsaysay Award.

Go Kiss The World.

There are many messages in this story. One, tough times are about shared pain. Two, when the pain is shared, the bond that ensues is the greatest return on investment - we retain that middle management even nine years after! Finally, there is the inevitability of non-performance and there is an economic consequence of carrying it. Non-performers must be let go. The issue is timing. It is a known fact that in every single company, across industries, there are at least 5% people who do not pull their weight or cannot. Sometimes, this is because of attitudinal issues, sometimes the problem is lack of competence and yet sometimes, companies have hired wrongly. There is no way a customer or an investor can pay for them. In good times, they are invisible, in bad times - they appear like mangrove bushes in low tide.The best thing about being in the bottom 5% is that you really know that fact.

The greatest favor you can do to yourself is not sit there to get the bad news: accept the reality that this job, this company, this career is not for you. Get out and do something else - it may mean a salary cut, a social ignominy for a while, but I can tell you that it may be the greatest move in your life to brace reality and rebuild your career. When 9/11 happened, I personally know a head of Human Resource who actually re-started life as a “handy man” - he was good with tools - over time, he added a realtor and a placement business. He started off slowly but with patience and self-confidence, even after the tide returned, he did not go back to be a mangrove bush. So, rather than lament, ask very hard-hitting, fundamental questions: who are you? What are you really good at? What is your passion? What is that one thing you could really excel in? It is not going to be easy, you rather have your old job - but know what? If it was not this downturn, the sheer fact that your bosses at work think that you are not a performer is a disgrace that would kill your self-respect. So, why seek kindness?

Now to the trigger-happy organizations that use a hire-and-fire mindset that and pull the plug than build shared pain: know that this winter is not going to be your last. People will remember what you did to them and if you did things without sensitivity, care and concern - remember that getting rid of people always leaves behind residual toxicity and it damages the hand and the heart and the head of the organization. Make sure, you have exhausted all means before you take up the easiest option. Communicate transparently, involve everybody, explore other cost cuts, ask people to do alternate things, consult your customers and suppliers, and retrain people. Finally, if you have to let go of some people, for Heaven’s sake, don’t ask the HR folks to show them the door. Line managers must know that this one is their job. Only when line managers get involved, fairness returns.

The SME Summit had an air of uncertainty - the timing is such that it is natural for people to question if at all it is a good time to be a start-up or are these times particularly bad for being an SME?

At the Shangri La Hotel in Delhi, the venue for the summit, MindTree co-founder Krishna Kumar and I were sharing a room the night before. The morning conversation was pretty much pre-ordained by the news of collapse, gloom and doom in the capital markets as we waited for breakfast before heading down to the summit venue. We were discussing the issue of bad times and good times and what they do to business. Then a young waiter came in, bringing with him our idli and tea. As he set down the food, we shifted our attention to him. He was about twenty four, very pleasant and clearly knew and liked his work. KK and I started a small conversation with him. Where was he from? What had he studied? Who was his family?

You will be surprised how everything changes with these three unhurried questions.

He said that he was from the hills of Himachal Pradesh - when he spoke those words, I could see the mountain streams and apple blossoms in his eyes.

Then, blushingly, he told us that next month he was getting married!

KK and I were delighted - we congratulated him.

The young waiter thanked us, collected the tray and, with a glow at the thought of the young-bride-in-the-waiting, walked out on an invisible carpet of clouds.

He had heard about the bailout packages in the US, the shroud of rumor about the ICICI Bank, the layoffs in the airline companies and the impending slow down.

But he is getting married next month.

What can be a bigger act of confidence in the future than raising a family? Bringing a coy bride all the way from the land of the gurgling streams and apple blossoms into the harried capital city where our man would return to work - serving idli to people who become friends between a loaded tray and an empty one-people whom he may never meet again.

KK and I watched his receding steps to realize a simple truth: slowdown or not, people will marry; they will visit friends with the new bride wearing a pair of jeans but with her hands covered in those white and pink bangles that notify the whole Universe about her change of status; they will celebrate; they will mourn; one day they will get up in the morning and wake the kids up who must now go to school; they will go to work; start a new business; they will cook a meal and eat; they will fight with their loved ones, kiss and make up and then sleep. So, we told ourselves, the world does not really come to an end after all.

☼

The times, whether bad or good, do not target anyone just because he is a start-up or a SME. People marry while the stock market collapses, people also start companies, get new customers, and make good and bad business decisions. Some plan to build the first floor and some close shop. So, there is no point in despair.

☼

At the NASSCOM summit that morning, I told people about the hatch-rate among wild salmons called Coho.

Coho salmons are one of the most prized fish - both as game and food.

They spawn in fresh water and return to the ocean where they grow up to become adults. When the time comes for them to reproduce, they return to their place of birth and lay eggs. Out of 2500 eggs an adult may lay, only 375 survive. Of these only 30 become “smolts”; these are big enough to migrate to the ocean. Of these, only 5 become adults that grow up in the ocean and of these, only two one day return to spawn.

All creative acts must follow a similar process - that is Nature’s way. It is a sobering thought. As against the 1250:1 chance of success among spawning salmons, in our lives, we expect every single creative effort, every enterprise to become a success. It simply isn’t going to be that way. That has nothing to do with good times and bad times. There is no point blaming the economic environment because the economic environment only mimics Mother Nature.

Like the two fish that will return to spawn, we simply must keep working hard, duck the nets and the bears waiting upstream, swim further away and pray a little bit longer. Along the way, we attend a birthday, a christening - sometimes a funeral and, if we get the chance, certainly the apple blossom wedding that is due next month.

I can hear the sea waves but can not see them. The silhouette of a fishing boat is now beginning to appear and I can see the clouds in waiting-just as curtains and backdrops wait for a rock star to make an appearance. We have time yet. So here I am, thinking about what it will take to be a great professional in the days to come.

These days, even a small town guy who owns a so-called “photo studio” has a digital SLR. I, waiting for the sun, wonder: what is the difference between him and professional such as Dewitt Jones or Raghu Rai? Since everyone can take great pictures these days, photo-shop them, and freely upload them on the Internet, what separates them from these two?

The sunrise is still another good ten minutes away. Lens yawns listlessly.

His mind does not wander like mine.

Ignoring him, I ask myself, is this question any less relevant for doctors, architects, software engineers, lawyers and dress designers? What is required to be called a professional in the future?

Lens looks at me, rolls his eyes and makes a face, very similar to an affectionately irreverent teenager.

Just then, on cue from the clouds, my body tenses-the Moment has arrived. I lift the camera, pick Lens up, and fix him in. He is sharp and engaged, ready for war. The sliver of red appearing from below has made me one with Lens and my camera. Silently, so as not to disturb the arrival, we begin clicking. A whirr, the sound of a click and the shutter closes. Soft like my breath. Then a small wait. Shoot. Wait. Shoot.

Soon it is a ballet. The initial stiffness of a preying leopard is gone. We are talking again. But this time, Lens is doing most of the talking. I think he is showing off a bit, but he clearly knows what the professional of the future is all about.

“Have you heard of Howard Gardener?” he asks, casually.

I reply, “Oh yes: the Harvard prof who has written twenty books and received twenty one honorary doctorates; the same man who questioned the role of IQ in determining intelligence. In fact, it was he who had propagated the idea of multiple intelligences.”

“Same man,” says Lens. He begins to refer to what Gardner had said about professionals of the future: that to be a great professional you have to master the five minds of the future.

“What about that?” I ask a little impatiently, more keen that we focus on the job at hand, concerned that it seems to be suddenly slipping away.

“Why, it was you who asked for the reason your country cousin of a studio photographer could not become Tom Hewitt!”

I can sense that Lens is miffed.

Whirr, click, shoot. Silence. Whirr, click, blink, shoot, silence. More silence. More shots.

Now the sun is fully up, the whole world awash - as if it wasn’t ever dark here! Our job is over. Both of us are calm but still contemplating what has just happened. Then Lens begins explaining the five minds for the future as we start walking back. “Whatever may be your profession, to succeed in the world ahead, you need to master the five minds of the future…”

The first is the mind of the discipline. You may be a trained photographer or a qualified surgeon. It does not matter. Your professional qualification is not what will make you a professional. You need to devote yourself to your profession of choice for at least 10 years before you can understand its nuances. Empirical studies indicate that, across disciplines, that amount of time is a minimum requirement. You have to give yourself to the profession as against looking at it just as a means to a livelihood, a career or a job. You need to build affection for your profession and a long view of time.

The second is the mind of synthesis. The future requires the capacity to build abstractions. In other words, you need the mind of synthesis. It is about developing an understanding of ideas, concepts and problems in an inter-disciplinary manner while building depth in one’s own discipline. A photographer shooting wildlife will not be a professional unless he is able to understand why plant pathogens impact the eating habits of carnivores. If he is shooting in New York City, he needs to appreciate urban spaces, and a great shot on the outskirts of New Delhi requires an understanding of where Delhi comes from historically.

Now I am beginning to understand why Tom Hewitt shoots for National Geographic. Lens knows he has me hooked.

“The third mind,” Lens explains, “is the creative mind. Look, you are no photo pro. You are just a software guy building business solutions for your international clients. Ever thought about why, these days, your clients do not want the ‘tried and tested’ solutions to their problems anymore?”

I do not like Lens asking me such questions, because only he knows the answer. I just keep quiet whenever he pulls this Super Guru stunt. I know he will spill soon.

“Clients do not like the tried and the tested solutions any more because those solutions are simply not innovative enough. Precisely because they are tried and tested, they have become the past. Competitive advantage is about from creativity, and creativity is about taking risks. The creative mind is about building the capacity to answer what is new and what is different about the solution you are suggesting every time.”

I feign casual interest but I am listening intently.

“The fourth mind is the respectful mind,” Lens says.

Made in Japan, Lens becomes the Buddha at will.

“In the future, all problems will require interdisciplinary solutions. Whether it is about negotiating a nuclear treaty or removing a cancerous cell from the pancreas, if anything qualifies to be called a problem, then chances are high, the solution would have to be inter-disciplinary. That means experts from different fields will have to listen to each other, learn from each other, collaborate while they compete, disagree without being disagreeable and then put multiple minds together, build consensus and emerge with the strength of the respectful mind. Why do you think one CEO fails and another succeeds in taking a militant trade union along? Who do you think one educationist prevails over others while settling the contents of a high school textbook on national history? Why one physicist is is able to get agreement on making a certain standard universally acceptable in a transnational negotiation involving competing interests? Those who succeed have the respectful mind.”

The rappelling wall is well behind us now. We are walking back. Actually, I am the one walking back and Lens is hanging around my neck. He thinks it is his rightful place.

“Finally, great professionals of tomorrow will need to understand and master what Howard Gardner calls the ethical mind. This ethical mind is about the capacity to certify the completion of one’s own work. That rules out most people who need someone else to supervise them. Whatever may be your profession, to be called a professional, you must master all the five minds of the future and only then can you be globally accepted.”

“But why should we worry about being globally relevant?” I hear myself mutter.

Lens retorts, “Because the benchmark is no longer local. The benchmark is Tom Hewitt.”

Ahead of me, I see the road wind itself into a softly undulating sand dune. Behind the dune is the shimmering blue water of the Bay and beyond all that: Singapore, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, London, Paris and Mumbai.

NIT, earlier known as the Regional Engineering College or REC, is where MindTree Co-founder Srinivasan Janakiraman comes from. This is where the son of a village postmaster, a young Janakiraman, took his graduate degree in technology before heading off to the Indian Institute of Technology for a master’s degree. Sometime back, Janakiraman (or Jani as we call him) was felicitated as outstanding alumni.

Today, we are visiting NIT with a purpose. We want to actually spend time with a group of NIT alumni who have established a primary school. It serves the needs of villagers nearby on whose land NIT was set up. The members of the alumni association have raised money to upgrade the makeshift school to an impressive building which is being constructed at an estimated cost of Rs. 70 lakhs. Jani and I are here to see how MindTree Foundation can get engaged with the school as our way of saying “thank you” to NIT for giving us the likes of Jani.

By the time we reach NIT, it is past nine in the night. After a quick meal, I lie down on my Spartan bed at the Guest House. I love the bare essentials in such places - University Guest Houses are clean, friendly and functional - sometimes very historic too. For all I know, a Nobel Laureate has slept on the same bed as I. That thought itself makes me feel wonderful and relaxed and before I know, I am asleep.

☼

I wake up early in the morning. The Youngman who brings me tea explains that the Director would be coming over to meet us for breakfast at eight. Now that is a surprise, we came to visit a primary school and of course I am talking to a bunch of students and faculty of the MBA course in the afternoon, but that does not warrant a meeting with the Director. But what choice do I have now? He, Dr. M. Chidambaram, wants to have breakfast with me and Jani!

☼

The NIT Trichy is one of the Nation’s 20 NITs, ranked among the best places of learning, is home to 5000 students and faculty on an impressively laid out and well-maintained 800-acre campus. I believe that managing such an operation itself calls for great capability. Jani fills me up with some details - despite its great past, the institution did fall into some feuding and decay until the current Director took charge. Under his leadership, NIT has seen the restoration of its past glory and gone further ahead.

I am getting curious, what mettle is Dr. Chidambaram made of, I want to know. As a student of leadership, I am always looking for answers on where such people get their capacity from - why is it that many people fail while one individual comes in and creates alignment and energy in offices, corporations and educational institutions. Sometimes that power comes from later-life experiences. But the foundational capacity to lead is often built through one’s early-life experiences.

At eight sharp, Dr. M. Chidambaram appears. For a man who has taught at several IITs before taking over as Director here in 2005 and for someone who has guided 9 PhD scholars, 4 MS thesis and 30 MTech projects, he looks very young, the salt and pepper hair not withstanding. Remarkably understated, the Professor has a child-like simplicity that makes him approachable and also gives him the capability to simplify complex issues. “Tell me your story”, I ask him over breakfast.

Dr. M. Chidambaram was born to a small grocer in Salem in Tamilnadu. He grew up watching his mother sell kerosene and rice and other such things from the storefront at the back of which was the living quarter. “I never knew what a full meal looks like until I became an engineering student and lived in a hostel. Because my mother had to quickly rush inside the house and cook something between two customers when the business was a little slow. So, invariably, it was just rice and one other dish”, he recounts.

Some distance away, was another small store managed by his father. Before he was born, his parents had four girls in succession and someone suggested that his mother do a penance - to tie her hands behind her back and eat off the ground to appease the Gods, only could that demonstrate her determination.

So strong was that determination that she was blessed with not one but four more children - all of them sons. Dr. Chidambaram’s education in life started as a little boy while helping parents at managing the two stores - running between the two stores and gradually learning to mind the storefront. “I remember selling small quantities of kerosene for twenty five paisa”.

As a juvenile businessman, he says, he watched the brisk transactions on the street; he got to know who is who - from the customers to the cart pushers who formed part of the eco-system. He liked the energy. From there, he grew up to one day to become not only the first engineer in the family but to become the first ever to graduate from any college.

I look at the man in complete disbelief. Doctorate from the Indian Institute of Science, authority on areas as vast as Controller Tuning to Relay Feedback Tuning to Multivariable Controller Design and Periodic Operation of Reactors.

Now I begin to understand where the quiet confidence comes from with which he builds speed without sacrificing harmony, how he prods alignment among students, teachers and staff who together constitute this sacred space called NIT, Trichy. We finish our breakfast and shake hands, it is time for me to visit the school where hundreds of small boys and girls are waiting for us and in them, I am praying a few more Dr. M. Chidambarams!

Write back dear readers and tell me what you felt. I will see you again next week. Until then, Go Kiss the World.

Subroto Bagchi

Arjun Erry brought out some very interesting aspects of second-stage teaming. According to him, it is critical that we recognize “core” competence of the core-team. Find the gaps and fill them by hiring outstanding people. We have all heard about the idea of core competence and of course we know about core teams. But do core teams truly know their core competence? Do they feel emotionally secure to admit what they are not so good at? And what about timing? What happens when a core team takes longer than necessary to recognize its own gaps, initiates action, brings in supplementary talent and then assimilates the newcomer to eventually get the wheel of the chariot added? Well, if not sensed at the right time that you have a missing wheel, before you have even strated, the race is declared over!

Arjun Erry was looking at issues related to acquiring key talent that completes the team. In doing so, he underlined the importance of always going the extra mile to hire the “A” players. It is tough selling, but often the most critical first step in giving booster power to the rocket. Why “A” players? “Because”, “A”s hire “A”s, then the “B”s come. What do the “B”s do? They go and hire the “C”s. Before you know you have diluted the genetic pool of the organization and that can well mean the difference between a high performance company and just another start-up.

Arjun recommends that entrepreneurs take professional help in the hiring process. Not all founding team have the capability to talent scout. Some times you are so busy that you do not have the capacity to broad base your search. There are outstanding people who are often looking for the excitements of a start-up but belong to another industry! It is a good idea to choose a like-minded search organization and enlist their support just as you would go and sell your vision to an advertising agency or a PR firm to get their mindshare for the long run.

But handing over your specifications for a key hire to the agency is not enough. Arjun says, you must keep your involvement in the hiring process high. It is a top-management imperative. It is not something that can be outsourced and forgotten about or handled by HR. At each stage of talent induction and assimilation, the start-up team must deeply interact with the set of people who come on board - they must treat them as if they are semi-founders. When you build that mindset as against treating them as “employees”, you get ownership and not just bodies that are “work-for-hire”.

Three people do not build a corporation; they build a 10-people team. That team in turn goes on to build another team of ten. So, spend significant time on the strategic vision with all the senior hires. Pay attention to the on-boarding process - it begins well before the person actually comes on board. Do not wait until the joining date. From the time you have made up your mind on the right person, keep engaged and involved with exchange of ideas, information and advice until he or she actually comes on board. This is obviously within the boundaries of business sense - you do not want to take risks in matters of intellectual property either way - make sure you are not compromising yours nor are you contaminating someone else’s. After all, the person is still not part of your organization and until someone has been “badged in”, there are limits to how far you can go.

Finally, the start-up gets into stage 3 of its orbit. It is no longer a rag-tag army - or a bunch of toddlers. Now the organization has people, customers, multiple branches, systems and processes. Probably the organization is three years old!

It is time now to shed some and gain some. Taking on from Arjun, Mohinish recommends that the original team now must shift from an overwhelmingly inward focus, to an external one.

This is the time to pay attention to building a strong middle-management; it is time to focus on the robustness of operations.

Original teams rely strongly on innovation, finding solutions on the fly, trying out things never tried before and using the inventive capacity all the time.

Now, innovation alone would not do, you must build domain capability as well. Imagine you are a company that started in the wireless area. Now you have to say what you do in wireless for automotive sector, wireless in medical sector or wireless for entertainment application development! The kind of teaming required in the early stage and what you need now to build bodies of expertise are going to be very different.

Going forward, this is also the time that you have to be choosy about the kind of culture you want to take with you.  All that worked before, is not going to work going forward.

In the beginning, every one pitches in. That is what built energy, camaraderie and the romantic concept of the garage! Things now must get systematic; people cannot just be doing heroic stuff all the time. People must build respect for groups and not just individuals. Quite often, as the transition happens, the original group feels disenchanted - people miss their childhood, so to speak, and cling on. Childhood days may be beautiful but imagine remaining growth-stunted!

Teams must collectively move on; in the process they must shed some old behavior and adopt new best practices.

While presenting the case to migrate from “everyone pitches in here” to  the “things get done here” state, Mohinish talked about what he calls the “Suri Effect”.

In one of Mohinish’s earlier start-up, there was the unmistakable joy-de-vibre that even had the neighbor excited. This Mr. Suri loved the smell of the start-up and would frequently pitch in - there was no way you could unload a cart or move furniture without Mr. Suri being involved. It led them to call it the “Suri Effect”.

But a time must come when the teenage stuff must be left behind.

“Build a culture that builds scale”, is Mohinish’s advice. Apart from cultures that build scale, Mohinish spoke about Vision.

Give and state the Vision - again and again. Many organizations tire out or think articulating the Vision is a “state once, live forever” idea. It is not.

It is a long journey and people want to hear about the Vision, they want to know why we are in it together? They need to hear it every now and then. Newcomers and the old alike. But why Vision?

Because two kinds of organizational decisions must always flow out of the Vision - people decisions and strategy decisions. Vision must drive each time you have to ”make a call” in matters of people and strategy.

While focusing on building the team for the next phase of your company’s life, look for hunger, common emotional glue and commitment.

Finally, every organization needs to see different “leadership facets” over the years. In the third stage that Mohinish talked about, three facets of leadership behavior become critical. This is the stage in which the leader herself becomes the example of what it means to work for this organization. Two, her emotional resilience is what goes on to build trust in the organization and three, it is the leader who helps to instill and clarify what subsequently becomes “our way of doing things” - starting from how people run meetings to how every organization may have a unique way to resolve conflicts.

So much for today, learning from Mohit, Arjun and Mohinish! Next week, let us shift gears from discussing start-ups to what goes into building great character. For that, I will take all of you to the National Institute of Technology at Trichy to meet a very unusual person.

Until then, Go Kiss the World!
Subroto Bagchi

Mohit initiated the evening with thoughts on start-up composition from the vantage point of a venture capitalist. His focus was on the early state of an enterprise. Arjun picked up from him and spoke on the idea of expanding beyond a core and Mohinish then picked up the relay baton completing the conversation by looking at teaming issues beyond the start-up stage. Let me start with you what I learnt from Mohit.

Mohit was pithy and powerful. He had a seven-fold view on the issue.

1. Balanced teams are better than a lone ‘Rock Star’

Almost every company that ever made it to the “A” list was a start-up of multiple founders. This fact is borne out by 30 years of data. It is hard being a lone Rock Star and take on the ups and downs of a start-up, all the way to it becoming a high performance enterprise. It is a little like rock climbing. “Find complimentary folks, do not go there alone if you can”, says Mohit. He should know.

2. Do not mix up the dining table with the boardroom

This one is about building professionalism right at the seeding stage. Venture Capitalists value a company that “professionalizes the company from early on”. The friends and family inclination in the entrepreneur can actually come in the way of building a company that would scale quickly.

3. Good people get good people

The first ten people will determine the next 100. If the first ten are mediocre, chances are that the next 100 would be mediocre. Don’t make mediocre people decisions, be selective on competency and soft skills.

4. Action speaks louder than words

While approaching a Venture Capitalist, forget the impressive slideshow and snazzy business plan. You are under the microscope on your walk, not the talk. People are looking at subtle signs. So, here is ‘Mr. Passionate Start-Up Man in the Silicon Valley’ with a mortgage on an up-the-hill garage house who says, “If you fund me, I will move back to India and immediately start operations”. Read, “I will jump but please get me the golden parachute first”. This one is a complete give away and is not going to work. You must demonstrate intent through action to get the interest of the potential investor. The investor rather see you move first than seek the funding.

5. Make way for undisputed leadership

Start-ups are about making decisions, right decisions and making them quickly. In many early-state companies, friends become joint-CEOs, founders have what Mohit calls “herd conversations”, and there is inherent awkwardness to bite the bullet on leadership. “Have the hard conversation upfront, pick the leader. Do not take the easy path of not choosing the leader.”

6. Hire better, smarter people

Have the audacity to hire your boss’s boss. Surround yourself with people 10 xs better than yourself. Be the magnet. That is how you build a fantastic team. Entrepreneurs very easily fall into the trap of competing with their own teams, trying to show they are better and feel nervous in the presence of more competent employees. The Entrepreneur’s job is not to show one-upmanship but be able to put together and keep people many times better than himself. That is how you build a memorable team that eventually builds a memorable company.

7. Going global too early is dangerous

Four friends start a company and what do they do? They position one person in San Francisco, another two in London and one in Bangalore. It looks impressively global, but in all probability, it isn’t going to work. Mohit says, “Vision morphs and changes rapidly. It becomes very difficult if founders are spread out geographically. For the first couple of years, try stay together.”

Stay tuned for Arjun and Mohinish for the next post.

In the meantime, Go Kiss the World!

Subroto Bagchi

Professor Yunus, who made micro-credit a new chapter in money banking and public finance, after lending money to the poor without collaterals and paperwork, had yet one more frontier to conquer.

This time, lending money to beggars.
So he called his people and said, go lend money to beggars. And why not? At what level does someone give up and accept the life of a beggar? When all social systems fail. So, they were not the problem - the system was.
Professor Yunus told his people that each person working at the Grameen Bank must lend to one beggar. Only one, per person. That it had to be one and no more, was a strict requirement.

He would not accept lending to the beggars as a charitable, volume game. His idea wasn’t your anonymous, no-skin-in-the-game, loan mela of the nationalized banks. His people had to know the beggar, respect him as a person, and believe that the man (or woman) can redeem himself. And then lend.

Only a handful came forward and lent to a few beggars. Others watched, as they always must. Then the floodgates opened. They too came forward. All the 27000 people who work for Grameen Bank.

The beggars were given small loans. No freebies, loans. They were asked to repay the loan at their convenience and without interest. No pressure. There was an interesting angle to this arrangement though - each time the person pays back, he or she becomes eligible to borrow an even larger amount of money.

So, what did the beggars do? Every beggar, like a salesman, has a route. He follows it based on his own judgment of effort versus yield. Nothing has changed from that model. Except that, now the beggars go to their points of call, armed with knick knacks, toys, story books, small food items - they offer their clientele the option to give them alms but suggest they buy something from him instead of giving alms.

A miracle started to take place in the lives of many beggars. It was not about their economic self-sufficiency. It was about the redemption of human respect that they had lost. All their lives, they were given their alms or turned away from outside the doorstep of a householder. Now the householders ask them in so they can inspect the merchandise, the children can touch the toys or the housewife can scrutinize the merchandise closer. Now the children tell them what they must bring the next time they return. The beggars started to turn a new leaf - they never thought they could come in. 10,000 beggars do not beg anymore. Many more have now opted to become, “part-time beggars”.

Meanwhile, what is happening at the Bank?

The 27000 folks at the bank, who witnessed one miracle or the other, came to professor Yunus and protested the unfairness of his diktat of one-beggar per banker. It was not okay to restrict them to only one beggar. How could the professor underestimate their capabilities? After all, they had proven the model was working, it could work. Each one-lend one was such an archaic model!

Finally, the Professor relented. Now, each person at the Grameen Bank can lend to up to four beggars! And that is the story of a 100,000 beggars who are clients at the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh.

Next week, I must tell you about something very different - it is about budding entrepreneurship and what I learnt from three very different and young people at a TiE event I was invited to moderate at Bangalore.

Until then, Go Kiss the World!

Best wishes,

Subroto

Last night, he was speaking to specially invited people at a five-star hotel in town.
Senior Government officials, newspaper editors, industry captains, educationists, writers and people who really belong to the upper crust thronged the venue.

On both the occasions, he was agnostic to his surrounding; he spoke the same language and had the same message: The poor are bonsai people. When you look at a bonsai tree, there is nothing wrong with the inherent capacity of the seed - be that of a giant redwood or a banyan tree. It is not the seed in the flowerpot, but the flowerpot that makes the plant what it is.

The ‘flowerpot’ in the conversation of course is the society we have built. With its restrictive paradigms the society has pushed poor people and bounded them to become the economic bonsais.

What kind of paradigms does our evolved society create?

Banks are financial institutions for the rich. They need collaterals to lend money, lawyers to do the due diligence and need legal documentation before doing anything at all. What happens after all that? Comes a sub-prime crisis, the same smart banks write off trillions of dollars. They cannot even cash-in their collaterals.

Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, on the other hand, lends to the poor, takes no collaterals and has no lawyers and most of their borrowers being illiterate women - the bank has no use of documentation. But you know what? More than 98% of their borrowers return the money - on time. That lesson from Professor Yunus I had learnt, under the makeshift shamiana at the village school.

Last night, I learnt two new lessons.

Danone, the Euro 12.78 billion, French food giant set up a joint venture with Grameen to make and sell yogurt to the poor of Bangladesh. They have researched the micro-nutrients that the malnourished children in Bangladesh need and created a formulation that is just right. Twice a week, a child can have the yogurt and in a year’s time become healthy.

This is no MNC doing its vile, blood sucking at the bottom of the pyramid via a gullible NGO. Danone and Grameen have done this as a “social business” - a new kind of capitalism in which the impact is more important than profit. Profits get ploughed back to create more goodness and no party takes out a dividend.

With the formulation in sight, Danone showed Professor Yunus the container design for the to-be-launched yogurt. Professor Yunus had a good look at it. Guess what did he ask them next? He asked them, what the container was made of. When they told him that it was plastic - similar to what they use everywhere else in the world, he requested that they design something new and something that was environment-friendly. So, Danone went back to the drawing board. They soon returned with an answer. They had found their Chinese counterpart capable of producing a container out of corn starch that was bio-degradable when discarded.

“Discarded”? Now what was that?

Professor Yunus was back on their back. How could they make a poor child pay for a container that had to be discarded? The poor do not discard things! Why couldn’t the child eat the container? After all, we eat ice-cream cones - don’t we? So, why not a food container that is also food? Why plastic?

So, Danone is now back at work and soon, knowing that great organization, we will hear of the breakthrough.

By the time the soft-spoken, ‘banker to the poor’ had finished delivering his talk it was well past nine in the night. No one had stirred. Then it was the turn of the charismatic
Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty - host for the evening - to propose a vote of thanks. Instead, he had a child-like request to make.

“Tell us about the beggar story, Professor Yunus”, he pleaded.

Like a possessed mendicant, the messiah of micro-finance went back to the microphone on the podium and told his story about the 100,000 beggars. Let me tell you about that one, next week.

In the meantime, Go Kiss the World

Best wishes,

Subroto

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