It is five o’clock in the morning on a September day by the seaside, away from Pondicherry. I am perched atop a 40-foot-high rappelling wall in the middle of nowhere, overlooking the Bay of Bengal. I am waiting to catch a glimpse of the sunrise. The sun will not come out for good fifty-five minutes more, but like a villager who must not miss his train, I like to be nice and early. Next to me in the breezy darkness, my Canon digital SLR camera is sitting quietly. Beyond the camera is a box full of lenses. This morning, the one that is particularly happy to be here is my newly acquired Sigma 500 mm lens. We are here to capture the first rays bursting through scattered clouds, announcing the arrival of another brand new day. I like my camera, the aluminum box, the tripod. I love the 500mm lens the most, though. There is something solidly attractive about it. I like his power looks. Yes, it is a he. He clicks into the groove of my SLR every time I slide him in, as if to say, “OK, let’s go”. Each time I set the vision, his whirr gives me a high. I call him Lens. Lens makes me feel professional.

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.

Read more…

22 Comments | Post a comment

So, this week I am taking you to Trichy, the 2300-year-old, historic South Indian city that has been witness to dynasties like the Cholas, the Pallvas and the Hoysalas - not to forget invaders like the Moguls and the British and the French. Situated by the banks of the Cauvery, Trichy bears testimony to the rich learning and cultural heritage of the region. This is where we have the impressive campus of the National Institute of Technology (NIT) where we are headed today.

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!

Read more…

32 Comments | Post a comment

From a team building perspective, start-ups go through different phases in their early years. In the beginning, it is mostly all about the core team. Then comes a stage when the core team must expand its sphere of influence to a larger group of people who come to join in the journey. Next, the start-up survives and moves on to become an established entity - it is in this phase that we have to look at teaming as an abiding way of the organization. No longer is it about just a few people or for that matter a group. This is what I wrote about in the last blog and we carry the discussion onto this week as I show case the learning from Arjun Erry and Mohinish.

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”.

Read more…

11 Comments | Post a comment

After MindTree got off to a great start, Sudeshna Shome Ghosh from Penguin sent me a mail asking if I would write a book for aspiring entrepreneurs using my experience of co-founding MindTree. That is how my first book The High Performance Entrepreneur came about! I am glad I wrote it because it seems to have filled a large gap. Having written the book, I am obviously very keen to learn from others on the subject and constantly look forward to interactions with experts on the subject of entrepreneurship.
A couple of weeks ago, I met three outstanding people at a TiE event in Bangalore - Mohit Bhatnagar of Sequoia Capital, Arjun Erry of Hunt Partners and Mohinish Sinha of iDiscovery.

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.

Read more…

7 Comments | Post a comment

This one here - is especially for Rincy, Naveen and Gurudutta. You have been anxiously waiting for the Part II of our saga of the Prophet of the Bonsai People - Muhammad Yunus. So, here we go….

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

16 Comments | Post a comment

Yesterday I had the privilege of listening to the Nobel Laureate, Muhammad Yunus speak for the second time in my life. The first time, I had heard him speak under a makeshift shamiana in the courtyard of a village school on the outskirts of Bangalore.
He was speaking to a motley crowd of poor women, school teachers, a few micro-credit missionaries and some folks like me. He wasn’t a Nobel Laureate at that time.

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

4 Comments | Post a comment

Thank you to all my dear young friends for visiting my Blog. For all of you, I have something special here. It happened like this - last week, I was back at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore where the Class of 2006 had heard me deliver the “Go Kiss the World” speech, four years ago. I was overwhelmed with the welcome by the students last Friday, this time I had gone to read out excerpts of the book “Go Kiss the World” because it has its origin in their institution. The book reading was followed by a great question and answer session. Subsequently, over the weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to see the book reading and interaction available as a MP3 file - you can listen to it at your leisure by clicking on the link below:

http://coffeewithsundar.com/SubrotoBagchi.mp3

Before I sign off, thank you to Sritanu Chatterjee for your comment posted last Thursday. Why, you ask, did we admit our parents in government hospitals in the last leg of their journey? Weren’t we children well-to-do enough to afford better hospitals? Let me explain.

Read more…

20 Comments | Post a comment

Dear Aditya, Abhishek, Basanta, Chandra, Chandu, Nikhil, Sreeja, Joshua, Joy and Veena and all of you who have visited my blog recently.

Thank you to those of you who have left your thoughts on my Blog. I am sorry that I took a while to acknowledge - what with a daytime job and some travel as well. I am glad all of you liked the essence of “Go Kiss the World”. As early believers, I have the duty to keep you informed about happenings around the book.

First of all, the book sold out 10,000 copies in the first three weeks of its coming out; I am told it is a record for a business book in India. Penguin of course is reprinting it and that gives me a chance to rectify a few mistakes in the first print run. The other heartening news is that a Hindi version is on its way - I just signed the contract and that would take the messages in the book to a much larger audience. I am really looking forward to it. By the way, the Korean rights have also been sold. I am told there is a tremendous interest in India from Korean readers! Imagine a business book designed for young Indian professionals being of interest in far away Korea! But that also tells you that the world indeed is flat and that means so many new opportunities and so many new challenges.

The other day, I was listening to Gopal Srinivasan of TVS Group at a seminar in Chennai by Pegasus, the outbound learning organization. Gopal is a powerful speaker and he was outlining a few key directions for organization builders in the next decade. One of the things he pointed out was the phenomenal rise of the middle-class in the world as a powerful economic force. He said by 2020, 2 billion people in the world will be part of a great new consumptive force. They will join the middle-class. Its impact on society, culture, education, business and politics would be beyond what we can imagine. In the book Go Kiss the World, I have addressed myself to the young Indian professional because I believe that for the first time in the history of India, it is the professional of India who is defining the image of India, what it means to be an Indian. The rise of a global middle-class intersects this phenomenon. Gopal’s thoughts reinforce my belief that Go Kiss the World has indeed been well timed.

Meanwhile, keep spreading the word, keep writing in. Without you, what is the meaning of my existence?

Go, Kiss the World.

6 Comments | Post a comment

o I think I am an entrepreneur and a professional. In my first book, I have given away my formula for entrepreneurship. In this book, I share my formula for building life as a professional.

o GKTW is a book for young Indian professionals, because they would shape the future of the country. More particularly, I wrote this book for the young Indian professional from small town India because that is where I come from. It draws upon my life’s experience of growing up in places without electricity and tap water to come to where I am. The central message is that ordinary people can do extra-ordinary things.

o The book draws on my life. But it is not about my life. I use my life as a narrative, it is not the message. The narrative carries what I call “Life-Lessons”, these I have gleamed from situations and people from whom I had something or the other to learn in life. The book lists more than three dozen such people – it pieces together lessons learnt both from people in positions of great power and very ordinary people.
Read more…

11 Comments | Post a comment

o It is all in the Mind, if you think you can, you can
o Your power to receive is more important than someone’s power to give
o To get, first you must give
o Connect with people – finally, leadership is all about people
o Life is a constant negotiation – never feel surprised with the need for it
o The overachiever is always on a slippery slope – one must always carry the ski-poles of humility as you negotiate your success
o One must build respect the marginal person in life – the small folks are more important than the big ones
o Passion is what passion does – life is not about the armchair revolutionary
o In your profession and in life, resilience is more important than brilliance
o The key to your happiness is not money
o One must learn to look beyond oneself, my pain is as large as my inability to see the pain on the face of the guy next to me
o We must learn to forgive ourselves and forgive others as we grow up
o Self-doubt is a good thing – all over-achievers will go through it sometime or the other

13 Comments | Post a comment