It suddenly dawned on me what a huge responsibility I had on my shoulders. People had invested money and trusted me to deliver. I realized that we had to work day and night keep our heads over our shoulders, stretch every rupee, and scrub the floor if necessary. We would not waste a single paisa of our investors’ money. Just as during my early days of farming, the money we had raised was just sufficient to take the project off the ground. We would have to ensure that not a rupee was unproductively spent and that revenues were generated quickly and ploughed back into the business to reinforce the workflow of the venture. I had to protect the investors’ faith in the venture and in the process fulfil my own dream. This was sufficient to inspire me.
I remembered the words of the legendary founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, the global home furnitures chain. One of the world’s richest, he had said, ‘Whenever I write a company cheque, I only ask one question. “Can my customers afford it?” If my customers cannot afford it, I don’t write that cheque.’ This should be the guiding principle for all entrepreneurs dealing with public money. They must want to deliver value to the customer and bring value to investors. This is a huge responsibility. I was the trustee and all these people were friends. They had put their money on the basis of blind, implicit faith in me and the dream I had structured for them.
We were in the month of August. I chose 5 September 1997 as the launch date. It was like zeroing in on a daughter’s wedding. Unless a date is fixed it won’t happen. Once a date is set, you will die to ensure that your daughter gets married. There had been many clearances required and many bureaucratic hurdles to cross. The biggest hurdle had been getting the land, the licence, the people, and the money. We had all that. Still, scores of minor clearances and licences had to be secured. By not fixing the launch date, matters would drag on. The company would bleed to death.
Several steps needed to be taken before the Japanese company released the helicopter for our use. The helicopter would have to be written off their books; clearances from their DGCA sought and secured; it had to be de-registered and placed in the inventory of another offshore company. These measures would help the company avoid double taxation on earnings. All this cost the company a lot of money. The leasing company was therefore very particular that their machines began earning the moment they left their corporate jurisdiction.
Once the helicopter was transferred to our name, whether or not I took delivery, I would have to start paying interest and lease rental. Procrastination would have been suicidal. What I did, may have appeared too ambitious and foolhardy. This was the beginning of a pattern of behaviour I would begin to manifest each time I launched a new venture. I would fix a date and force myself and everyone else into a schedule we would have to meet. There was no going back. Beyond that date, I would say, I am a pauper. This I felt in my bones, my heart, my blood, and my cells. The one and only way to make anything work was to fix a date; make a commitment. I had decided on 5 September and I would make it happen.
The choice of date was not entirely random. There were reasons.
During lean periods, before things began to happen, especially when things did not seem as if they would work out soon, I had received a call from management professor Thirunarayana of IIM, Bengaluru. He is the son of a major literary figure of Karnataka, Pu Thi Narasimhachar (fondly remembered by the people of Karnataka as Pu Thi Na). He had called to tell me about a management programme initiated by Henry Mintzberg. He said Henry Mintzberg was one of the greatest among management thinkers, and ranked him among twenty thinkers who had changed the course of management thinking.
The professor said Mintzberg had initiated a management programme. Participants would receive a master’s degree in management at the end of the course. I did not need a master’s but the programme was itself unique. It was designed to happen over eighteen months and at five different locations across the world. These locations were well-known management schools. It was a very eclectic programme designed to initiate new ways of looking at management practices. It had experienced people from the industry and academia discussing and debating alternative approaches and perspectives. There would be structured classroom curricula with the difference that there would be intensive cross-industry interaction. Real-life situations would be built into the curriculum based on Mintzberg’s philosophy. Mintzberg had published a celebrated article in the Harvard Business Review, ‘The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact’, (HBR July–August 1975), which had a very high citation index and was one of the most frequently reprinted articles in HBR and had brought him a considerable reputation. Prof. Thiru asked me to read the article before making up my mind about the study programme.
When Henry Mintzberg had just graduated from management school, he wanted to complete his internship in a novel way. He identified some leading CEOs and asked if he could follow them, without disturbing them or asking questions. He would only observe the way in which they handled situations. He shadowed five or six very well known CEOs and made notes on their lives. After pursuing his subjects, Mintzberg drew the following conclusion: The difference between what they teach you at management school and what happens in reality at the workplace when you begin to manage is startlingly different.
Mintzberg’s key observation was that the CEO goes with a structured mind to the workplace. He has a predetermined plan worked out and ready to be applied to the problem at hand. At the workplace, however, the unforeseen occurs and the CEO is caught completely off guard!
Since Mintzberg wrote his path-breaking first essay over thirty years ago, he has written extensively on management and strategy and gained reknown across the world. Tom Peters, of In Search of Excellence fame, considers Mintzberg to be the most influential iconoclastic management thinker of today. Mintzberg’s management programme is for senior-level managers occupying positions of vice-president and general manager.
They bring experience from their workplace and share it with peers to evolve management perspectives. Instructors from five well-known schools and professors with industry experience conduct the programme. Henry Mintzberg wanted at least two enrolments in the class who were first-generation entrepreneurs.
When we met, Mintzberg said, ‘You are an entrepreneur who has come from a village, has been on a farm, dabbled in various businesses, and fought an election. You’ll bring a different perspective to the whole thing. Why don’t you consider enrolling?’ He said the programme would involve moving from one B-school to another, five in all. The schools were Lancaster Management School, UK; McGill University, Montreal, Canada; IIM, Bengaluru; Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo; and INSEAD in Fontainbleau, France. He said the course was designed so that managers of corporate companies would be able to continue their work and yet pursue a master’s management programme and also choose projects applicable to their companies.
I was fascinated. As I was getting into the business of helicopters, making me somewhat corporate, I thought it might be a good idea to get under the skin of managers. I did not want a degree but I needed to put the chaos in my mind into some form of order. I needed to understand the world of management. There were questions to which I needed answers. For example: how do managers think and behave in various situations? I looked at the list of participants. Five were from Motorola, five from Lufthansa, five from the Royal Bank of Scotland, five from the Red Cross, and five from Panasonic. The remaining three or four were entrepreneurs. The participants were senior-level people with excellent academic backgrounds. They were rising stars in the companies that had sponsored them. I signed up for the programme, and it also interested my brother-in-law, head of the legendary V.B. Bakery in Bengaluru, who also enrolled. There was another entrant from India, an entrepreneur like me. I found the nature of the programme and the prospect of associating with Mintzberg exciting. The licensing process and finding the funding for the helicopter venture was taking very long so I thought it might be a good idea for me to educate myself in the meantime. I accepted Mintzberg’s programme offer for th
e sheer ‘adventure of ideas’ it offered.
The first leg of the programme, held in May, was in Lancaster. Lancaster was chosen for its rich tradition in the humanities. Management education in the UK, unlike in India and the US, does not focus entirely on the engineering and technology streams. Both Oxford University and Oxford town have a long tradition of exploring human society and human endeavours. Cambridge has a rich tradition in the pure sciences and philosophy. Any form of education in the UK has the tempering influence of the arts and humanities. This is guided by the fact that human beings are agents and creators. What concerns them provides an understanding of the conditions that make human creativity possible. These institutions serve as intellectual breeding grounds. Indeed, most management graduates had a largely arts and humanities background. This was an agreeable thing for me as my own philosophy concurs with the spirit of academia in the UK, that management is about dealing with people.
Each leg of the programme lasted two to three weeks. The Lancaster module was called Reflective, its focus a reflection on the larger issues of management, people, history, and the evolution of business. The McGill module was entitled Analytical and explored finance and accounting. The third leg, at IIM Bengaluru, was devoted to Understanding China and India: Economy and Culture. The fourth limb of the course was hosted at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. This module sought to dip into the large repositories of knowledge residing in the large Japanese corporations. The last component was at INSEAD in France, considered the Mecca of Management in Europe, and dealt with Change.
The Lancaster module featured inspiring lectures by business historians, philosophers, and great management thinkers. There was an eclectic reflection on various aspects of management using philosophical heuristics. The speakers referred to A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, quite an unusual idiom of discourse. They moved from one end to the other of the spectrum of the British management tradition.
At McGill, I met the acclaimed author and academic Kunal Basu. I also met Jonathan Gosling, who has done a lot of different things from business to teaching. In the late 1960s, the young Jonathan became a hippie sanyasi and roamed the Himalayas in search of an elusive nirvana. By a strange design of destiny, he met the same woman, Susanna, a German, in three different places, over a period of a year; meetings that seemed to defy the laws of ordinary probability. Jonathan read these meetings as the trajectories of fate, proposed to her, and the two married. Jonathan’s lectures on management often contained mystical elements which left many in the audience bewildered, especially those who had no idea of Indian culture and philosophy.
I met many other people, each with significant accomplishments in his/ her sphere of activity. However, the person who had the greatest impact on my thinking was Henry Mintzberg himself. His lectures, two or three in each module, reflected a rare genius. He was a man of deep insight into business, and employed vivid imagery to render concepts palpable.
I took Mintzberg to my farm. He loved cycling and trekking, and we often escaped to my coffee plantations, cycling or roaming the hills. To me this was an extension of the programme. I was able to observe from close quarters how his keen enquiring mind worked. During ambles among the hills, Henry often came up with utterances that were nuggets of insight. He was a livewire of observation and always carried a notepad and a pen with which he jotted down whatever he found interesting or unusual.
Henry came across as both a keen student of the world around him and a very sensitive human being. On the farm, we slept in the same room on different charpais, separated by about five or six feet. On one occasion I had fallen asleep and was awoken by a faint rustle around three in the morning. A pale moon had cast its light into the room and I saw a ghost-like figure, silhouetted against the wall of the charpai where Henry had been sleeping. I peered into the darkness and was surprised to find that the figure was crouching with a blanket over it, not in a supine position. A sliver of light came through a slit in the blanket. It was all a bit eerie. I was curious and called out, ‘Henry, is that you?’ Then Henry removed the blanket from over his head and a torch-light shone from inside the blanket: he had been jotting down notes and had covered himself so as not to let the torchlight disturb me. I was touched by his concern and amazed at the way he was capturing his thoughts which must have woken him up in the middle of the night!
The programme required observing at first hand the conduct of business. We visited legendary companies like Lufthansa, British Telecom, British Aerospace, and Fujitsu. We were formed into several learning and discussion groups. We saw the differences between how a Japanese company operated and how a Dutch company operated. We got to interact with CEOs of many large companies who spoke on a variety of subjects.
At Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo we were fortunate to spend time with Professor Nonaka, considered the sage of knowledge management. Ikujiro Nonaka had co-authored the well-respected book, The Knowledge-Creating Company with Hirotaka Takeuchi. We visited the famous Japanese garden at Shinshin-an in Kyoto where Konosuke Matsushita, the legendary founder of Panasonic, had built a guest-house. Overcoming difficult beginnings, Matsushita is credited with contributing very significantly to the Japanese economic miracle after the Second World War. The hardships he faced early in his life made him conscious of the value of hardships in life. ‘Hardships,’ he said repeatedly, ‘can be very useful, for building character, forging motivation, and forcing honest self-assessment.’ From his realization of this Matsushita incorporated hardship as a part of the learning process in his Matsushita Institute of Government and Management, a school he founded near Tokyo. In that school, ‘students would not sit in luxurious dormitories and be spoon-fed assignments and ideas. They would live in modest surroundings, work hard, and be asked to devise much of their own curriculum.’ It is indeed true that ‘nature, when it adds difficulty, also adds brains’. Matsushita often took to a garden retreat to reflect on business solutions and innovations for which Panasonic became recognized globally. We spent a day there with the senior management of Matsushita. Every component of the garden—every pebble and boulder, stream and bridge, blade of grass, and plant that grew in it—had been placed or trained and composed so as to provide pure tranquility. The garden is now a heritage site and is held in great reverence by the Japanese and has attained the status of a temple shrine.
At the end of the Japanese leg of the programme, I made some time to trace Masanobu Fukuoka, the global god-figure of organic farming. I was told that he lived 1000 miles away on a remote island known for its thermal springs. I took a bullet train, Japan’s icon of modernity, to get there. Fukuoka’s farm was set deep in a small forest on top of a small hill. Entrepreneurs had built small cottages with rooms and small hotels all catering to the various hot springs in the village. Many of the springs were set indoors and some were set outdoors with a view of the mountains and the sky. Guests at the hotels were given a robe and a pair of house slippers, and there was a regular procession of people in robes walking up and down, to and from the springs. It was a strange feeling. I must have been the only Indian in a sea of Japanese robes moving along the street. I was almost reminded of the temple streets of south India where thousands of men and women move about during temple festivals attired in the south Indian equivalent of the Japanese robe, the panche and sari. Separate areas were earmarked for men and women. In the men’s section of the spring, guests had taken off all their clothing and got into the pool. This is the normal practice. I did as the Romans do and enjoyed a healthy dip in the steaming sulphur spring.
The following day I hired a taxi to take me to where Fukuoka had his farms. The cab driver stopped the car at the edge of the forest and said I would have to walk a couple of kilometres to reach the sanctuary. I made my way through the woods and finally found the house where Fukuoka lived. It was a traditional Japanese house on stilts with a wood-and-bamboo roof and wooden flooring. It had a flight of steps, made of wooden slats that led up to a large room on top. I walked u
p the steps. In the room, seated on the floor, smoke rising from a wood stove, was the man himself. He looked old and frail, his hair tied in a bunny knot above his pate and a long flowing, straggly beard. The room was a little cold and the wood stove had been lit to provide heating. There was a samovar in which water was boiling and a table with tea crockery on it. A few students were present too, listening to the old man and attending to him. I was welcomed in and offered a seat on the floor at the master’s feet. The atmosphere had a touch of the mystic. I was served tea and later a meal cooked in the kitchen. I spent a few hours with Fukuoka, a student acting as interpreter, and we were able to exchange a few words. Fukuoka, whose One Straw Revolution is treated as a bible of organic farming, was probably in his mid-eighties at the time. He instructed his students to take me around the farm. I fully savoured the silences of the farm. On my way back, when the rumble of earthmovers and caterpillars in the distance fell on my ears, I realized that the world had ignored Fukuoka’s warnings and had busied itself with incessant development, paying no heed to nature and its vulnerabilities. I realized that the world was moving in pincer-like on Fukuoka’s fragile haven and felt a twinge of nostalgia for the purity of the nature and life I had just left behind on Fukuoka’s farm.
At INSEAD in Fontainbleu I was fortunate to meet and spend time with Yves Doz, professor of global technology and innovation. We became friends and met later on my subsequent visits to France and during his visits to India.
We were expected to write a thesis at the end of each module of the programme. We had three months to write on a topic of our choice that captured the principle themes of the previous module. This was required to be completed before the next module. Each of us had a tutor assigned and were in touch with her/him over the phone and via email. Subsequently, the tutor visited the city where the participant stayed.
Simply Fly Page 24
