Gandhi, as modern-day CEO!

Founding father of world’s largest democracy was tried for treason in the modern-day capital city of the very state he was born in, nearly two and a half-decade before his life long efforts bore fruits - yes, such is the veracity of time, what is a known truth today, may in the days to come, fade into a mere build-up to the greater reality. Before we go any further, I’m duty-bound to inform you that I’m a fan of Bapu ( can’t say the greatest but yes one of significance ), every line, every word that you’ll read here on will drip my admiration for the greatest Indian ever, the Mahatma, so if you happen to be someone who doesn’t like him as much, you may leave this article right here, enjoy the holiday that his birthday grantees to every Indian! Coming back to the historic trial, our beloved barrister did not particularly win cases, in fact if we judge him, on the ratio of victories in the courtroom, he might well come out as the most unaccomplished lawyers of all times, but this man was not meant to be just an advocate, he carried in this heart and soul letters that bore meaning which far exceeded usefulness of any rule book. In his argument, Bapu said and I quote.

“Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite to violence.”  

Justice Broomfield, who was in awe of the short, skinny & funnily dressed Indian man went on to sentence him but how he pronounced the judgment celebrated Gandhi, the man in no uncertain terms. Historians write that he frequently visited Bapu in the jail with the stated intention of forging friendship with the jewel of India. He even titled Mohandas as his spiritual friend in the book that he wrote after his retirement. Think of the audacity of the situation here, a British judge that finds a man guilty of treason against the British empire, goes out of the way, denouncing tradition to celebrate him in every way possible. Our Bapu was such a man!! He was less of a man and more of a living miracle, it is a pity that most Indians (87% according to a survey done by Sriram publication house) have not read even one full book on father of the nation. if you happen to be one such person, go grab ‘my experiment with truth’ today, you would not regret it. Before I get to the title of this article, let me underscore the degree to which circumstances now have changed. How the societal fabric that held values dear and regarded it above all else has found greater love in material manifestations; therefore, natural love for such powerful principles may not be as evident in the present times as it used to be then. We’re a society that values sensationalism over sense, chaos over clarity, histrionics over history; great moments do not get created over ‘viral’ semantics, history is created slowly, one moment at a time and it almost always is without frills. 

In keeping with crazy times, I want to imagine Bapu as a modern-day figure, someone with responsibilities of pleasing not just principles but also materials and targets. So, I imagine him as a CEO, and in doing so, I try to explore which among the values that he demonstrated superbly in the Indian freedom struggle would he practice in the 2019 avatar. Here is my pick. 

Truth: Gandhi can’t be imagined without truth, in an organizational setup, therefore, I presume that he would have created a culture of candor, one in which people spoke their minds freely and fearlessly. Political correctness, sugar coating & diplomatic recitals must have been things that he would have disliked the most and should situation demanded even acted against. He would have professed Satyagraha, (Sanskrit and Hindi: “holding onto truth”) and that would have meant pure ethical business conduct. Shortsighted, penny wise pound foolish practices like mindless misreporting, treacherous misrepresenting, wilful misguiding; putting things under the rug, creating a smokescreen, stealing information would not have existed under his watch uncontested. He was a compassionate man but not in situations that demanded action, the way he called off non-cooperation movement when it turned violent teaches us that he would have been extremely heartless and curt in curbing things which he did not find righteous. In his world, it was not about taking the most profitable however unethical but the right decision, always. He knew to march ahead and lead just as well as he knew to stop and retreat.

Democratic dissent: Mahatma neither lacked confidence nor will, he was, in fact, the very opposite of weak; so he would not have surrounded himself with spineless ‘yes men’. He in his role as a CEO would have encouraged diversity of views, he would have welcomed intellectual challenges, even the most difficult & daunting ones. Bapu believed in merit and originality; he was dead against lifting information from open sources without quoting creator. Historian Ramchandra Guha writes that he fired his temporary assistant (not naming him because he was a timid man and has earned nothing more than anonymity for the character that he showed) on a visit to England, when he found that the assistant  cleverly stole Franklin’s line from one of his journals and produced it to Bapu as his own, on the matter of civil liberty. Bapu was a well-read man, he found out in an instance and showed the man the door. He knew to dissent like nobody I have read about or know did. Bapu knew that to encourage people to come with their original ideas he would need to create a culture of acceptance and respect and I sense that he would have done exactly that, even a CEO.

Love and Compassion: Hate the crime and not the criminal, he exuded love and compassion even for his opponents in measures equal to what he bestowed upon his supporters and followers. He would have made sure that ills of favoritism, nepotism, red-tapism, did not exist in the org that he led. He believed in reformative actions which essentially is about understanding the depth of the problem, from that we can conclude that he would have disallowed superficiality and hollow problem-solving. He was an ardent egalitarian, therefore, he would not have rendered deferential treatment to people basis tenure, caste, affluence, color, regionality, etc. As a CEO, he would have respected his competition and not bad-mouthed them. He would have shown no malice for those who chose a path different from his, he would have done everything possible to create a framework that encouraged people to understand before they concluded matters. He would have built an organization with bricks of empathy and care. 

Sardar Patel, Deputy PM and Home Minister of Independent India, reached Bapu in the week that Godse took him away from us forever to pursue him to allow security personal guard him and to let for thorough frisking of all who got near him or the premise that housed him, as he started building his argument on the threat that the agencies had picked up. Bapu told Sardar, could you come to the point quickly Patel, I’m getting late for the evening prayers. 

So, I’m concluding it here in the shortest possible way that for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, CEO, India incorporation; ends would have never justified the means!

On that note, Happy Birthday Bapu and thank you for all that you did, spoke and wrote about. You continue to be my superhero!

‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’

‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’ I’m borrowing this line from a legendary business writer, if you’ve read him too, you’d know he means it. Will reveal the name of the gentleman towards the end of the article. Not all business houses and leaders think as high of ‘culture’ or invest enough resources in setting it right .. they often, on the contrary, are found wrestling with challenges that crop up as a result of not having strong cultural fabric tying loose ends of their organization together. For some reason they miss the fact that covering a wound doesn’t take the pain away; but this write up is not about them but the 'subject', so let’s get back to it.

Organisations have multiple identities, they exist for economic reasons, they also have a social purpose and sometimes even a moral signature; all at once. Travel far and wide, pick up any sector, county, sect or society in the Morden world, you’d find that wealth creation is at every core of its existence. Why else would you see democratic governmental setups talk about GDP growth.. etc? It is a good thing. Prosperity in practical terms is believed to be a close blood-related relative of happiness and therefore pursued wildly. There is no prosperity without wealth. This is not just a boring business administration line, you’ll find substantive evidence of it in mythology too, Hindu mythology in particular. The fact that we worship Goddess Laxmi and in her praise sing and chant mantras which when translated from Sanskrit into our language of daily use means “ to make happiness possible .. we need wealth so .. lord grand me it, in abundance” in summary 95% of the times, balance 5% is chorus, trying to match up with it, is proof enough.

For prosperity one needs perspective, though: this is true even for those who see happiness in things unrelated to wealth. For instance the great poet, Mirza Ghalib held that to lead a good life, all one needs is a good heart, someone to love and great prose to say so differently in different times of the day. If you read Diwan-e-Galib you’d find it. ( This is a rare book and is found only in the national Mirza Galib library at New Delhi, besides Nizamuddin Aulia Dargah). Do check it out.

Perspective is important and integral to organization building. Let’s agree that there is no right or wrong perspective .. as long as your straight view is legal and permissible you’ve every right to pursue it. It, however, needs constant reiteration in an organization to

a) keep people adequately informed and

b) making sure that people do not forget it. 

While an organization is way more , but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just assume that organization is a huge money-making machine : A huge press that prints currency, coming together of many moving parts some mechanical and others human ( accounting, sales, customer service, branding, information technology, procurement, and other, business acumens). From dusk to dawn it prints, converting paper into powerful currency. People who run it are happy seeing how humble paper with their labor turns into one with ink valued a lot more than when it arrived raw on the other end of their press and so are those who supervise it and fund its operations. Imagine, that the machines aren’t oiled routinely, its motors aren’t greased frequently, as a result.. some parts fail, causing a portion of the paper to get wasted, some ink going down uncountably. Let’s just say that workers are lazy, uncaring, selfish and insensitive, instead of letting the supervisors know about what caused the waste of paper and as a result lesser output, they choose to cobble a convincing tale, attach very little significance to it when presenting it to the top guys with the intention of having them pass it without they attaching much attention to it. And this happens over and over again as more parts fail thanks to aging, wear and tear over time. The insincere lot, keeps making their concocted story sound more believable by sprinkling experience to their false cover up reports.

Or they are nice people but in absence of reiteration do not find motivation to report the issue, some may be at a level of less than required intelligence, thus unaware. Silence irrespective of reason is not healthy.

Because not all organizations are small and confined to a small & manageable by physical inspection geography/ office; not every business leader has it in within his means to check and verify every bit of information that is being shared. As a result, having heard the story so many times, they begin to believe in it as much. The real problem keeps flourishing unchecked. Neutral voices that go a-galore against the malpractices are subdued or gagged easily for they are a minuscule minority, as a result, the misdoing continues till that curial breaking point is reached when it becomes terminal and death seems the only cure.

Things come to an end: of what is left people make their last sum of money and walk their separate ways to their next destination. 

In the process what could have been a prosperous endeavor ends in misery, distress, and disrespect. 

Let us imagine, the same set of circumstances in an environment that drives ‘truth’ for a culture, one that rewards dispassionate reporting of events negative as well as positive. A currency factory, that doesn’t reprimand unreasonably, one that encourages people to come forward to own problems and faults and of course has practices and people in place to quickly respond to the situation and correct it. The error would have gotten reported and perhaps the press would still be running as respectably as possible. 

When you’re a 200 to 500 people organization; setting these things right is not as big an issue. In all probabilities most sensible people would have been a part of the hiring process, there is near real-time interaction between management and the delivery apparatus. The problem comes when you have an operation running in scale when you have half a lac or more people operating out of a geography well spread out, in diverse areas of work. Then the challenge is real and it is not just of setting the culture right but also developing detection methods to know what is broken and where? Because the complexity is of an enormous order not acting is equivalent to inviting untimely death.

In this write-up, we will only deal with the detection of the broken and I shall follow this one up with another article on restoration, in the coming weeks. Do keep an eye on this blog for it.

What we need to understand is that broken things are not a problem. In the real world things break all the time, the problem is not having a pair of conscious eyes set to find out what’s broken and then also not having an honest intention of fixing it. Time is of the essence when it comes to fixing.

What we need to know here is that ‘doing’ part of any job is relatively easy .. in deciding what is to be done, how and when lies mastery. Everyone knows that to score decent marks one must study hard, yet not everyone scores well .. because the underlying behavior of all students isn’t healthy. One who sleeps in the class, doesn’t complete his homework and disobeys the teacher is less likely to do great in academics .. may turn out to be a great dancer but if the need is to have an academician .. you will have to look for the traits that make one. 

Therefore, organizational symptom study is vital.

Below are a few detrimental symptoms for you to observe in your organization, if they exist .. your organization is a positive candidate for restoration. 

1. When people agree ‘all’ the time with those in the position of power: Let’s accept this we’re not right all the time and when people simply agree with all that we say, we are headed for a disaster. You need people who without fear, favor or malicious intent disagree with you, give you a contrarian view. One size doesn’t fit all, don’t we know this?
2. When good news outbalances the bad ones on a continuous basis: Let’s say when you review a process or a business and it only tells you all that is right all the time with very little mention of what went wrong and why .. you have got a problem. Well, even Sachin has had to walk back to the pavilion on ducks, if the unit is not failing either it is not trying hard enough or just faking it.
3. Evident Follow ups: If you preside over a system that runs on follow up and delays .. it is a clear indication of the fact that either you do not have competent people or your competent set isn’t sincere. In both cases, if you do not get your people to change their attitude towards ‘on time’ delivery/ response; you will have to change them and if you do none of the two.. you’re setting virtual lighted matchstick to a stack of hay which is dripping with petrol. Someone is always monitoring, natural justice, you see!
4. Disregard for conformance: This one is rather easy when you see people not conforming to the norm for the heck of it.. you have a problem. The common way of finding it out, when people run late for a scheduled meeting, all the time. When they wilfully come unprepared, almost always. Or better yet, do not attend crucial meetings. You should know they do not care enough and you should care little for them.
5. Shortage of Ideas - When the group that you work with starts falling sort of Ideas.. you experience relatively long & unexplained lull, often .. you must know that your people aren’t thinking and because thinking is 50% of doing an excellent job. Chances are they aren’t even doing what they are really supposed to do, let alone anything nearly good.

Well, if you see any of these symptoms surfacing enough in your organization, you should declare an emergency. At this point, you should slow down expansion and fuel restoration. Because if you do not fix .. it will break .. and sooner than you think. 

BTW,  Mr. Torben Rick, is who said "Culture eats strategy for breakfast"

Have a great Sunday, catch you in the next one!