A Ring Beneath My Feet

When I was 15 years old in high school, my parents, in desperation, promised me a gold ring if I passed the 11^th grade with a first class. That was just the incentive I needed because I did get that first class. And the gold ring became my prized possession for about 9 years. One day, when we were on the beach in Mumbai, having a good time with some friends, while playing around in the water, I felt the ring slip off my finger. I desperately tried to catch the ring but it fell to the bottom. I saw it through a foot of water and stomped my foot at the spot where it had fallen. I could actually feel the ring underfoot. I could also feel the wave pulling strongly at it. To my horror, I could feel the sand underneath give way. When the wave had gone, I plunged my hand into the sand, desperately searching for the ring, but there was no sign of it. The next wave then came in and I knew that it was a lost cause.

The Right Word. Be Heard

I wonder if you have ever heard this line: "Decisions are taken by those who show up." The underlying implication of that line is that if you don't show up, then your voice is not included in a debate or in a decision that has been made.

I started thinking about how being able to voice one's opinion is so needed in today's world. Each one of us, must use the voice that is given to us. If your voice is not heard, then some of the things that you are good at will never get put on the canvas. You will never get heard, and what may ultimately come out could be less than what is the best for the situation or for the company or for the process that is being worked on.

Vulnerable At The Top

I came to Bombay when I was about 21 years old. I remember travelling with my dad along the Western Express highway, passing all the shops that sold marble and granite. My dad once asked me if I knew how to determine what was authentic marble and what was not. I confessed that I didn't. He smiled and said; "You will know good authentic marble by its faults." The pun was intended, I think, at that time to make sure that I understood.

But today, I thought that it was a good metaphor for our own lives. When you look at synthetic marble, you see that it has no faults or imperfections; yet it doesn't last. But true marble comes with its fault lines and lasts a long, long time. The same can be applied to our own lives – when we allow our faults and imperfections to be shown, our authenticity allows us to connect with people at a much better and efficient level.

Ron Carlucci wrote an article just a few days back published in Harvard Business Review and he says, "A leader's greatest source of credibility is, ironically, their vulnerability. Owning imperfections wins trust; hiding them doesn't." Why then is it that we hide our imperfections? Why is it that we cannot allow people to see us as we really are, to understand that we are human after all? Why this desire to cover up and seem to be perfect in every thing that we do?

On Being A Competent CEO

Novo pen is a pen that I use and I use it a couple of times a day. It has more value for me than all the other pens that I have around me. I pleasantly surprised to read that Lars Sorensen, the CEO of Novo Nordisk, was voted the best performing CEO by Harvard Business Review for the year 2015. That was good to read and to know that Lars Sorensen, among the myriad number of CEOs all across the world and in different companies, had been picked as #1.

But as I looked at that, and thought about CEOs and the roles that they play in organizations, I wanted to do a little bit of research and see the extent of CEOs' impact on companies. It's interesting that the impact that CEOs have on companies ranges from 2% to 22% depending on the industry. This was research that was done and recorded by Todd Warner in Harvard Business Review. It seems like just 10 or 15 years ago, competencies that CEOs had were very important in determining the kind of jobs that they were given and the kind of impact that they had on their companies.

Dream On - Strategically

The other day I was sitting in my office and made myself a cup of coffee. It's a daily ritual for me, one that I really enjoy—fresh coffee, percolating through the machine, the aroma filling the office… J I had an appointment in a couple of hours and so I was dressed for that. I very gingerly picked up my cup of coffee and sat down, putting the cup carefully down on the table. As I leaned forward to take my first sip, I held the cup away from me so that nothing would spill on my white shirt. The next day while sitting at home enjoying a cup of coffee, I realized that I hadn't gone to any of the extra pains that I had taken the previous day in drinking my coffee. I just sat there in my home clothes, not really concerned whether I spilled anything on myself or not – I just enjoyed the coffee!

As I reflected on these two scenarios, I realized that "intent" was at the very centre – to be very careful on the one hand, and a lack of it on the other. On the one hand, clearly wanting to make sure that nothing spilled because I was going into a meeting, and on the other hand, not bothered at all, just a 'qué será, será' kind of attitude.  Without intent to be careful or to do something, we are very much like people without a rudder. We just let the wind take us where we want; it really doesn't matter. Yet, life is not lived that way. Life is lived with intentionality -- taking the oars in our hand and steering our course, not letting ourselves be carried around by the vagaries of wind or weather.

Your Defining Moment

Roberto Goizueta took over as CEO of Coca-Cola in the 1980s, a time of huge competition between Pepsi and Coke. Executives from Coke were trying to increase their market share by just 0.1% to be able to say that they were ahead of Pepsi. Roberto decided to do something different. He called a meeting of all his executives. In that meeting he said, "Tell me, what's the average fluid intake of an American per day?" The answer: "Fourteen ounces." Next question: "What is Coke's share of that?" They answered, "Two ounces." Then Roberto said, "That's our answer. We're not going after Pepsi, we're going after the other 12 ounces. Our competition is water, tea, coffee, milk and fruit juices that Americans consume in the remaining 12 ounces." Coke never looked back after that, putting up vending machines at every street corner, making their products easily available, and won that particular battle hands down.

There are times in our lives when defining moments are called for. As somebody said, "There's a defining moment in every person's life. Within that moment, everything that that person is, shines its brightest." And for Roberto, this was the defining moment. A defining moment is one that is not just taken by an extrovert or somebody who is outgoing. It's a moment in time, whether you are an extrovert or an introvert, rational or intuitive, whatever your personality type is, when you feel that there's something that has to come out of you, that needs to be said, and which will make a difference. That's a defining moment. It defines the situation, defines the people; it defines who you are in terms of leadership.

Diverse Unity

Coming in to London yesterday, I was able to travel on the new 787 aircraft, the Dreamliner, an aircraft that I'd been wanting to travel on for quite some time. It was a wonderful experience – great legroom, big windows, and so on. But it was a long flight and towards the end of it, I was looking for things to do. So I went to the screen and looked at some of the games. One of them was: "What Kind of a Leader Are You?" it caught my attention and piqued my interest. So I went through all the questions asked and it was obvious that they were trying to see whether you were an authoritarian leader or one who worked with consensus.

It made me think about leadership and different styles. What kind of a leader are you? To understand leadership from one aspect, because there are so many aspects of leadership, I want us to look at the 1996 attempt that was made by two very experienced mountaineers, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer. They made the trip up to Mt. Everest along with several guides and 8 paying clients. Many of the members actually reached the summit on May 10^th. But here's the tragedy! On the descent, they encountered grave danger. In fact, 5 of them, including both those experienced leaders, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, perished as they tried to descend the mountain during the night and during a storm. What a disaster! To be able to actually scale Mt. Everest and then perish on the way down.

It's All About Culture

Simon Sinek is probably a name that you have heard, and he is increasingly being followed on Twitter; his TED talks are so well received. Most of his talks found on YouTube too, have received much following. And his books are well worth reading. I was looking at conferences that are available around the world and find that, very often, he is one of the speakers that are invited for leadership and corporate conferences.

But, I was reading this book that he had written, "Leaders Eat Last" and in a chapter in the book called 'Destructive Abundance', he talks about a leadership lesson. He titles it: So Goes The Culture, So Goes The Company. In it, he documents the way Goldman Sachs moved from a point of being such a well-known, respected company in the seventies. And how Gustave Levy, the senior partner in Goldman-Sachs in the 1970s would talk about what he called 'long-term greedy.' Long-term greedy meant – "Sometimes it was worth taking a short-term hit to help a client because the loyalty and trust it produced would in time pay back in spades." And he adds, "Pay back it did."

Sinek goes on to document how Goldman Sachs at that point – their selection criteria was never actually academic based. They never picked the top people, the cream of the class. Their selection criteria was always – could this person fit into the culture of Goldman Sachs? That was the key ingredient that was used to recruit people. But he says, "Somewhere along the line, about 30 years later, around the turn of the century, that particular culture began to break down, and academic pedigree began to be the way they started picking people even before seeing whether it was a culture fit. Slowly, that began to break down. Soon the company began to slide down, have layoffs and so on." And we know what happened with the insider trading and all that in the last 5 or 6 years and how it has affected the company culture.

Above & Beyond: The Extra Mile

Yesterday I happened to watch an episode out of an old television serial that had aired quite a few years ago called ER (Emergency Room). It revolves around doctors, nurses and other staff, and how they handle situations that arise out of the emergency room. In the episode that I watched yesterday, one of the doctors who is taking care of his father who has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, brings his father home to stay with him. They have never had a good relationship all their life, but he decided that in these days, he would take care of his father. It's a tumultuous time – the father is not really easy to get along with. One day his father reminisces and talks about the time that he was in the Navy – how his greatest thrill was to be on a ship watching the bow slice through the waters and ride the waves. His eyes lit up with just the thought of being out on the sea. As his son Mark watches this, he decides to take his wheelchair-bound father onto a boat. There's a wonderful picture of father and son on the boat, enjoying the wind in their faces.

As I watched it, I thought to myself – there's a level where we do the things that we are supposed to do because it's duty, a duty of a child to his parent. And then, there are things that we can do that go far beyond that. I think that's what the extra mile is all about. It's going beyond what duty calls for and that's a good perspective for all of us as we look at our work spaces and ask ourselves the question, "in the company that I am in, do the people who report to me or I report to, go the extra mile? Or do we just say: "This is what is expected of me," and then don't do anything further.

Handle That Crisis Right

In 1872, a man by the name of Julius Maggi took over a company from his father. He was the first person to bring out a protein-rich legume meal to the market. Then he followed it up with a soup-based legume meal in 1886, about 14 years later. Julius Maggi was the founder of the company Maggi GmbH in Singen, Germany, which is still there. In 1947, this company merged with Nestlé to bring out what we have all come to know as their flagship product – Maggi noodles.

Today, Maggi noodles is under fire with it being banned across India for having more lead content and containing MSG. it brings to the fore questions about how they are handling it. The jury is still out on whether they have handled it successfully or not. But pundits have been talking about it and drawing leadership lessons from it. I thought it would be good for us to look at it very superficially, given the short time that we have, and see if there are any lessons that we could learn as this continues to unfold, because it isn't over yet.

I think crisis is the crucible in which leaders are either made or unmade, or broken. You either come up and take the heat and hold it and are able to lead during that time, or time will tell whether you are slowly pushed aside and a new person comes to handle a situation that went out of control.

More Than Just Coffee

I'm not sure how many of you frequent Starbucks here in India, but Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO of Starbucks, is an inspiration. To read about some of the things that he has done, to look at some of the decisions that he has taken, are just so good in terms of the boldness, the enterprise, the innovation of the man, right from the time that he got into coffee, captured by this whole notion of finding a community place between home and office that people could come to and just sit and enjoy coffee and conversation with each other. Out of that birthed the Starbucks coffee houses. But also before that, going to Italy, going into coffee places there and seeing the way coffee was dealt with in Italy and trying to do the same thing in the US. This all spoke for his heart in creating a wonderful community that would be based around sipping coffee.

Yet, as we look at his life, if seems that as he got into Starbucks first as Director for Operations, left and came back again as CEO and then actually bought the company through local investors and was its Chairman for many years. When he gave up as CEO, he stayed on as Chairman. But right around 2007-2008, as Starbucks began to increase beyond any plan that they previously had – they were starting 7 new stores a day – they were mushrooming all over the place. Howard Schultz realized that they had lost their initial capacity to engage both the partners, or the baristas as the employees are called at Starbucks, but also the community, the consumers who were coming. He said that it almost seemed that there was a sense of loss in terms of what Starbucks had initially started out to do.

Character - A Leadership Essential

I'm not sure how many of you were on the call last week when I was talking about APIs or Application Program Interfaces. I'm going to piggyback off that for this talk, so just to mention what I did say. I was talking about APIs and the information glut that we have or are giving out each and every time we get on to different web sites or use different applications. We talked about how APIs are really apps that interface with each other and take information from one app so that companies can then offer various other services that they themselves don't have. We looked at how Expedia, Orbitz or MakeMyTrip are able to offer beyond flight data and bookings for which they really started out, but also now offer hotel bookings and even car rentals and train bookings as well.

All of them use these Application Program Interfaces to add these value services to clients. But along with that, we find that a huge amount of information, or personal information, is being passed on to these companies. They hold all this information. Last week we looked at the company Uber – their cabs have the information of where they picked us up, at what place of business they dropped us off, whether it was a social call, what time of the day it was, the location, the time duration that the cab was used, all of that – the information is available.

It's All About Context

Some of you may have seen or read a book by Thomas Friedman called "The World Is Flat", written quite a few years back. It was a landmark book when it came out, won the Financial Times - Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. It was a futuristic book, which was very well received; Friedman was pointing out that there were changes coming and the world needed to take note. In his concluding chapters, he references Margaret Whitman, who was then CEO of eBay. She has since moved on and is now with HP. But she gave ten years of her life to eBay, took over in 1998 and served till 2008. During her ten years with the company, she oversaw its expansion from 20 employees and $4 million in annual revenue to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue.

He references her and talks about the time when she had just gone public with eBay. He says that one day they were looking at the way things were going on – they had gone public in September 1998 in the middle of the dotcom boom – and stocks were going crazy. She says, "One day, I was just minding my own business, when her secretary came up to her and said that Arthur Levitt, Chairman of the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission that oversees the stock market), was on the phone." They are always concerned about the volatility of a stock, whether there is manipulation and so on. In those days, for a CEO to hear that Arthur Levitt was on the line, was not a good way to start the day.

THE WEAKEST LINK!

by Dr. Cecil Clements (12th February 2013)

I was thinking about different leadership issues and how organizations were affected by the kind of leadership that is provided. I remembered an old adage that says, “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” There is so much wisdom in that one line, as pithy proverbs go. They are lines pregnant with information. Let that stay at the top of our talk this morning. I want us to look at leadership tips that come from a couple of people.

Jim Collins influenced a man called August Turak who offered 6 leadership tips that he had learnt from Jim Collins. These are worth thinking about.

ALLOW ME INTRODUCE YOU TO…

by Dr. Cecil Clements (20th November 2012)



I grew up hearing a name that you may or may not have heard over the years, but it’s a name that my parents used to use often – Emily Post. I remember coming across her trademark book on Etiquette, written way back in the 1920’s. Emily Post lived between 1872 and 1959 and she is remembered mostly for the book that she wrote on Etiquette.

She defines etiquette as, “Whenever two people come together and their behavior affects one another, you have etiquette. It is not some rigid code of manners. It’s simply how persons’ lives touch one another and how they ought to behave in that particular situation.” So she put together a book that has been the trademark book on Etiquette for almost a century. Even though she passed away in 1959, her family has taken over. Today, her granddaughter-in-law Peggy Post continues to do wonderful work in this whole area, taking what her grandmother-in-law wrote many years ago, making it relevant even today in the different spheres that we have.

STRATEGIC INTENT

by Dr. Cecil Clements (23rd October 2012)


I was thinking about how to bring about the whole topic of intent, about being very clear about what we needed to do and having the intent to do it. The other day I was sitting in my office, made myself a cup of coffee, carefully carried it and sat down gingerly, making sure that the cup was held away from me, as I got comfortable. Then I leaned forward, taking all these pains because I didn’t want to spill the coffee on my clothes. The next morning I was sitting at home, having another cup of coffee, lounging in home clothes, this time quite unperturbed about dropping any coffee on myself.

OOPS! I’M REALLY SORRY

by Dr. Cecil Clements (2nd October 2012)

The expectations of a new product are always very high, especially when it comes on the heels of a good history. I think those expectations were high with Apple’s iPhone 5. Everybody waited with bated breath, wondering when it would be ready. As the new product came in, sales just mushroomed wherever it was launched. It was huge.

Then, somehow those expectations came crashing down when people started using the Maps that Apple offered on iPhone 5. Those who were living in the US found themselves strangely being put in another part of the world. All that excitement turned into anger against Apple. The talking point in the last couple of days has been the apology that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, offered. There are many who admire him for doing that because he went up and said, “Listen, we goofed. We made a mistake. We didn’t give you a quality product.” Then he even advised followers to download the products from their competitors.

JUMP ON MY WAGON

by Dr. Cecil Clements (25th September 2012)

All of us try to bring change in different situations that we are in; we try to bring change within our spheres of influence, in the company, our families, our social circles. We try to bring change because we have an idea that is an important idea (at least, we think it is) that we know will be better for people in adopting that idea. All of us have been in situations where, even though we have thought that the idea is a great idea, we’ve found that the people around us don’t really think so. While some may think so, they may just flirt with the idea a little bit and then drop it. And the result is a lot of frustration on our part. It can either lead us to think ‘middle of the road’, to abandon our creative edges, or it could lead us to a lot of frustration and resentment towards the people who are not willing to get on our particular bandwagon.

WHAT A LEGACY!

by Dr. Cecil Clements (11th September 2012)

I read this eulogy that was delivered, thought that it was a quote from W.H. Auden, but I’ve not been able to verify it, so give me that little bit of freedom. It says this, “There are many streams, but only here and there, a great Mississippi. There are many trees, but only here and there a great sequoia giant. There are many echoes but only now and then an original voice. There are many musicians but only now and then a Mendelsohn or a Mozart. There are many politicians but only now and then a commanding statesman. There are many people but only now and then an outstanding individual.”

DREAM TO REALITY

by Dr. Cecil Clements (17th July 2012)

Increasingly these days I hear talk of good values, I hear companies that talk about core values that are based on integrity and honor and find that there’s attention towards ethical decision making. I am always encouraged and thrilled when I hear that ethics and corporate culture can be one, that they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Every time I read the book ‘HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything …. In Business (and in Life)’ by Dov Seidman, I am encouraged by what he says. I’m just going to talk about the ‘5 How’s of leadership’. Dov Seidman is Chairman and CEO of LRN, a company since 1994 and has helped over 15 million people in over 700 companies worldwide. They have offices in New York, Mumbai, Los Angeles and London, but Fortune Magazine calls Dov ‘the hottest advisor on the corporate virtue circuit’, and I think the key word here is virtue. The Economic Times also named him as one of the ‘Top 60 Global Thinkers of the last decade’.