CEO SPECIAL..................... Audacity of Hope

Audacity of Hope  Five stories that have shaped the worldview of Manish Sabharwal, Chairman, TeamLease Services The story of Gandhi There is something for everybody in life of Mohandas K. Gandhi; his innovations of satyagraaha and hyphenated identities, his imagination in using the symbolism of salt, his experiments with personal self-control, his high command style that denied Bose the congress leadership, his ability of establish diverse friendships, his choice of Nehru over Patel, his choice of peanut butter rotis for lunch, and so much else. The recent book by Ramachandra Guha that covers Gandhi’s life till he left South Africa is a jewel. A sequel will cover the most important period of life because the moderates who formed the Congress in 1885 didn’t bring India half-way to independence; it was Gandhi’s return to India in 1915 that converted the talk shop into a mass movement. For me the most important lesson of his life is that you must become the change you seek. Team of Rivals We have done a better job with our second venture because every entrepreneur learns the hard way that the team you create is the company you create. We learnt that companies who do great things have different skill sets around the table but it is hard to avoid the cognitive bias of humans wanting to work with people who are like them (race, language, schools, discipline). The book that best summarizes the upside of diversity is Team of Rivals by Doris Goodwin and chronicles how Abraham Lincoln appointed three of his political rivals —William Seward, Salmon Chase and Edward Bates — into his cabinet and slowly converted their dislike and distrust of him into respect. This was because of “his extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, and to understand their motives and desires”. The four of them working together not only won the civil war for the United States but sowed the seeds of its subsequent glory and prosperity. For me the most important lesson was that you don’t need to like people to work with them and emotional intelligence matters trumps intelligence. The story of India’s independence struggle The story of how 200,000 white people came to rule over 220 million brown ones is interesting but understandable; the British had superior technology and the raj was a joint venture with many Indians (662 Maharajas, the Zamindars of West Bengal, the Talukdars of United Provinces, the Gurkhas, etc.). But the more fascinating story is about how independence was won from an empire on which the sun never set. This struggle can be captured by reading the biographies of Gandhi, Nehru (by Sarvapalli Gopal), Patel (by Rajmohan Gandhi), Gokhale (by B R Nanda), Maulana Azad (by himself), Bose (Elliot Vallenstein), Bhagat Singh (Jatinder Sanyal), Bal Gangadhar Tilak (A Bhagwat) and many more. The Indian freedom struggle was inclusive, had vibrant inner party democracy, developed micro-funding and in the end won over the people like civil servants and maharajas that had the most to lose. This broad coalition of the unwilling and unlikely was important; India and Pakistan born on the same night have had very different destinies because our leaders aimed high, worked together, and persisted. For me the biggest lesson is that breaking an entrenched status quo needs building a really big tent that attracts a strong team of rivals who unite for a big vision. And that overnight success takes many years. The Shawshank Redemption The hardest part of building a company is working silently over long periods of time and keep the faith in goals that are faraway. Sanskrit has a wonderful word called Mantragupti that means the strength in silence. The Shawshank Redemption is a movie that tells the story of a wrongfully convicted tax lawyer — played masterfully by Tim Robbins — who works quietly against all odds for twenty years to change his situation. His closest friend — again played masterfully by Morgan Freeman — does not know his plans even though all his moves become obvious when he finds out what happened. Don’t want to give away the plot so watch the movie if you haven’t. For me the most important lesson was that the less you talk about your long term goals while you are relentlessly working on them, the better. The story of Amazon.com One of entrepreneurship’s most difficult challenges is balancing the long and short term. We entrepreneurs write business plans in poetry but execute them in prose and almost everything takes more time and money than you think. For me the story of amazon.com and its founder Jeff Bezos is an inspiring example of being able to convince stakeholders to overlook short term metrics (profits) in pursuit of an ambitious and wonderful long term vision (low prices for consumers and reinventing retail). The company has almost never made a profit but today their market capitalization is $170 billion despite almost running out of money a few times. Jeff Bezos’s audacious vision, gumption in taking big bets and high expectations from his team have convinced the equity markets that he may change the world, and even if he does not, he will die trying. Of course there was luck – the company would not have survived if it hadn’t done a large debt fund raise just before the dot com meltdown. The best synthesis of this journey is a recent book called “The Everything store” by Brad Stone. For me the biggest lessons are that high expectations are important because we overestimate what we can do in the short run but underestimate what we can do the long run. And that gumption attracts luck.CD