A few weeks back, I was speaking at the Indian Institute of Management at Bangalore to a group of alumni. We were speaking about something called “connecting the dots”.

Steve Jobs spoke about it eloquently when addressing students at Stanford University and showed how one thing in your life always leads to the other - how his biological Mother’s obsession led him to attend college, drop out, attend only the classes he chose, which led that to his interest in calligraphy, which in turn became a differentiating factor about Apple. When the events unfurled, he had little idea of how it would all come together. Each valuable step was a piece of the jigsaw puzzle of his life.

So, there is a larger meaning to everyone’s past and current situation - sometimes happy and sometimes difficult. Yet, it is all a run-up to something larger, something yet to happen. Most of the times, Steve says, we can only connect the dots looking backward. But sometimes, we come across people who can connect the dots looking forward as well. These are the ones who have a vision for the future. It may be a personal vision or an organizational one. Once they build that vision, it develops a life of its own; it attracts other people who commit to a shared vision and go on to build a vision community.

Here is a man I know who can connect the dots looking forward. I have written about him in my book, The High Performance Entrepreneur.

Captain Gorur Gopinath came out of the Army and wanted to become an organic farmer - he actually did that. During his farming days, he happened to meet an old buddy, an ex-helicopter pilot, who had quit the army and unable to find any job on the civilian street, had become a manager in a courier company. Dot. Then one day, Gopi was leading a delegation of farmers to China. On the way, he read about a young Vietnamese lady - she had fled the US occupation, migrated to overseas, grown up to become a helicopter pilot and one day, she came back to see her motherland, she cried upon seeing the devastation. She wanted to help rebuild. But what could she do? The only thing she knew how to do was fly a helicopter. But then a country like Vietnam needed infrastructure and access and there were hardly any airfields. So, she decided she would start a helicopter company there. Dot.

Gopi was very deeply stirred by the story and then it occurred to him that in many ways, India was no different than Vietnam - we had not been bombed but we had the same poor infrastructure and lack of access-ability; if Vietnam needed a helicopter company, so did India and you know what? His Army buddies, who had flown the choppers all their lives, were becoming managers in courier companies! Dot. Gopi connected them all and that is how Deccan Aviation was born.

One day, he was flying a chopper to Goa from Bangalore and asked the pilot to fly low so he could see the ground below. As the bird whirred over the vast land, Gopi saw something you and I easily miss. In every hamlet over which he flew, he saw television antennas.

Again, he was seeing the dots.

It occurred to him that a billion Indians were not waiting to be fed and subsidized. A billion Indians could fly! The dots were connecting one more time, of economic liberalization, surging middle-class and the capacity of the ordinary Indian, even those from rural India, to fly a plane at least once in a life time.

Gopi saw the connection between volumes and pricing, people’s latent aspiration and the power of business to transform. India’s low-cost airline was born. He took Deccan to where no one had gone before - Hubli, Dharwad, Belgaum, and beyond across the length and breadth of India.

Then came the acquisition by Kingfisher; the inevitability dawned on Gopi and he knew that he was a seer more than a doer. The baby had become adult; it had outgrown him. The best interest of the entrepreneur and the organization lay, not in a fatal embrace but in separation. Again, he was connecting the dots.

And now finally, to politics! There are several dots out there: a revival of middle-class angst against lumpen politics, visionless, partisan nation building and a wary nexus between bygone forces.

He chose to fight the elections as an independent. Now let us imagine a hung Parliament. Imagine parties seeking favor from elected independents to form a government. And imagine Gopi running the aviation ministry. Connect the dots, looking ahead.

☼

When we look at the future, we do not always correctly connect the dots. That is how Columbus, who was trying to come to India, landed up in the richest land of the last century. Not a bad failure, if you asked me.

So, going wrong can not be the reason for not attempting to connect the dots.

When we do connect the dots looking forward, we build “memories of the future”. When we succeed, we actually live in them!

This piece here is dedicated to Madhuri, who asked me at IIMB how you connect the dots and waited so patiently. Thank you Madhuri.

Nyenrode has a strong Indian connection; it has many Indian students, some great Indian faculty, and association with the Indian Institute of Management and last year, ex-President Abdul Kalam was here to receive an honorary doctorate. I come here often, sometimes to deliver a lecture, sometimes to listen to someone else. Today I am here to participate in a roundtable conversation on sustainability. Among others, a great reason to be here is to listen to Dr. C.K. Prahalad who would be the keynote speaker.

Yesterday was a wet day in Netherlands; it rained like an incessantly weepy child. You could not make out through the haze that the daffodils are breaking free and the tulips are like ballerinas held at the wings before a grand performance. But today, the Sun has come up nicely. And, as in a prelude to a grand musical, just as smaller artistes come on stage to perform with aspiration and abandon, I find beds of colorful spring flowers asking to get noticed like tiny ballerinas before the tulips come on stage.

The Little Ballerinas

We are now at the courthouse building of the palace where the roundtable is in session. To many westerners, Dr. C.K. Prahalad defines the idea of India. I have known him for two decades now and each time I listen to him, it is an uplifting experience. In times like this, you need to hear what thinkers like him see as tea leaves in the cup. “You can not be an academic unless you are an optimist,” he says. It sounds simple and profound just like he makes his point on a dozen other issues on sustainability.

Convert sustainability from being a concern to an opportunity for innovation. That is the core of his message. He goes on to say that we need to be looking at “next practices” and not the best practices. If every one is emulating everyone else’s best practices, we will all stagnate in a mediocre world.

Extortion and guilt giving may work to raise the temperature on the issue, but they do not sustain. We must focus on wealth creation – doing well and doing good - at the same time!

Every system in the world is under great strain.

It is not about the trees we cut; it is about the microbes we destroy that science has not even started to know.

All the oceans are under peak harvest level.

Ozone layer depletion can actually blind people.

How did it all happen?

☼

In the last 70-years, while taking care of the consumptive needs of just 1.5 billion people, we created the ecological damage. Now 1.5 billion people will be added to that number in India and China alone – and combined with people moving up the ladder elsewhere, 2 billion new members will be added to the world’s middle-class. And that leads us to unimaginable stress on the system – the Planet will survive though people may not, unless we pay urgent attention to the underlying issues.

The impact of pollution, destruction of fisheries, and destruction of forest land – crosses national boundaries.

Today, the eco-footprint of an American is 9.6 hectare; that of a Russian - 4.4, for a Chinese it is 1.6 and for an Indian, it is .8. In the next few years, that .8 will double but the bigger issue is that it will double for a huge mass of people.

In dealing with sustainability, regulation and compliance take high priority no doubt, but they are not enough. Large forums are critical to solve the problem, even if that sounds counter-intuitive.

Wal-Mart buys probably $25 billion Chinese goods. It can discipline its suppliers. It has the power, as do Marks and Spencer. But could these companies also educate their customers? Of course. Wal-Mart alone could educate 100 million people who come to throng its isles.

We need to think of big business as an ally. Not adversary.

The current world of economic uncertainty and volatility will do big business good. These would force issues. They push the idea of sustainability from Corporate Social Responsibility (Guilt Money, he calls it) to core business and draws this interesting 5-box model on two axis: Integrating sustainability with the core business and Innovation.

At the bottom is compliance; it is the least innovative. But, an opportunity none the less. Think of the US. Different states have different pollution norms. Within California, there are different norms for San-Francisco and San Diego. The US and Europe and Asia have different norms. What savings could be made if we pushed standardization as the starting point and compliance as a driver for sustainability?

Then look at just operations – operations of companies and governments. Telecommuting will become the norm in the years ahead. AT&T saves $500 million a year in space alone because people are working out of home. When UPS mandated a simple idea of no left turns for their delivery trucks and a last-in-first-out idea for package delivery, they saved 3 million gallons of gas. Mathematical algorithms can make you green!

Then look at products and services. CISCO re-conditions routers and gives them back! Random House has mandated that it would use 30% uncoated paper. Unilever says 100% of its palm oil would be sourced from sustainable agriculture.

If Coke reduces water usage by 20%, it would save 50 billion liters of the precious resource! Operations have enormous potential of saving if we choose to innovate.

Think of detergents that need to be transported to take up store space. What if the same washing capacity is packed in lesser volume? Compact the detergent.

What if in cold countries, washing machines could work with cold-water detergents?

What if Fedex and DHL and UPS did not carry fat printed reports across the world but digitized them at the source – teleported them over satellite links and printed them closer to where the delivery is needed – like at a Kinkos for Fedex and not lugged the reports across oceans.

What about learning bio-mimicry?

The best cements are made by corals. But they do not pollute.

Cement plants across the world produce 1 ton of carbon emission for that one ton of cement – every time.

What about waterless detergents? After all, dirt is a deposition on substrate surface.

What about converting coal to methane without sending miners down the shaft?
We could ask bio-organisms do the work.

How about eatable packaging? Imagine the billions of shampoo and pan masala sachets that choke the drains, kill the microbes and just sit there without becoming soil.

The Civil Society and Big Business must work together to make the breakthroughs happen.

☼

CKP thinks we will come out of the current crisis, but how?

CKP Speaking

“Man did not come out of the stone-age because we ran out of stones. Man innovated,” he says. “Man will not run out of fossil fuel to find the next big thing. We will innovate.”

For that, all of us must think big. And start small.

Do not eat the elephant all at once.

Listen to everyone; listen to the people who say “No”. In free societies, people must learn to build coalitions. Coalitions are the future.

Strategy is not about unhindered march forward. You must learn to go two steps forward, one step sideways, and sometimes, another backward and repeat the process.

The current crisis is actually very good. The eco-system we will build will be very different from the economy we leave behind.

Organization size for coping with complexity has gotten out of hand. A 7-feet-tall person cannot stand to attention for an hour; his legs would simply break up. Man is not inherently designed for a 7-feet structure. Our big fat organizations falling is all due to inherent un-sustainability.

We need to learn how to build scale without size.

☼

Roundtable Participants with CKP - I am in the red tie

It is well past eight in the evening now. Outside the castle’s courthouse where we are gathered in a big circle discussing the future of the world - more importantly - the future of man, the spring flowers have gone to bed. Tomorrow, I must leave before they are up. By the time I return to Nyenrode again, they would all probably be gone. I feel a sense of emptiness, a certain longing whenever it is time to leave this beautiful country of canals and castles, tulips and windmills.

But Bangalore is waiting and so are all of you to whom I lovingly bring a piece of my world every now and then. So, I shake hands with the wise man and turn to my room. He says in parting, it is about quality of leadership. Someone must say it got to be done without knowing the details. It is about building wellness measures. We must address the issue with the entrepreneurial spirit. Profits are a better driver than fear, guilt, coercion and policy. And finally, it is about respect for nature.

Man must live in harmony with nature. It is time to give up the desire for mastery!

And what is going on in this world? A lot, of course! But in the midst of it all, India is happening.

Last night, I was meeting the chief technology officer of a company in Chicago over dinner in an Italian restaurant. An elderly waiter came to our table, smothered the signature roasted garlic with olive oil and before announcing the specials of the evening with the usual pomposity of restaurants that serve good food, looked at me and asked if I have seen the movie? Not yet, I replied.

He proudly said he had and that he did so three weeks before it walked away with 8 Oscars. “And yes, I saw the Oscar ceremony as well and you know what made me feel good?” - He asked me with his heavy Italian accent. Without waiting for my reply, he intoned, “The movie is about people of an Indian city, but the characters - so many of them - are Moslems and the Music Director - Rah-Man - is a Moslem!. The future belongs to India”

After the dinner, on my drive back to my hotel, I was seeing a replay of the Oscar ceremony in my mind. The effortlessness with which Rahman was walking in and out of the stage, when he was crooning, making his acceptance speech in English laced with unrehearsed Hindi and Tamil, it all looked as if the 8 Oscars were no stretch - they were just a logical, expected act of flow.

“Jai Ho” is no longer an Indian desire; it is part of a universal stimulus package!

This morning, it is another day and for me, another city. As I was rushing out of my hotel to catch a cab to the airport, I grabbed a copy of the USA Today. I saw two pictures on the front page. One, was of President Barack Obama delivering his “we shall prevail” speech. On the same page, there was another picture - this was a man of Indian origin, and he had been chosen to deliver the traditional rejoinder from the opposition!

USA Today wrote, “Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who delivered the Republican response to Obama’s speech from the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge, called on his party to return to core values and object to massive government spending intended to boost the economy…Jindal, 37, was elected in 2007 and is one of a crop of Republicans whose star power has risen since the 2008 election. He recently gained attention for refusing millions of dollars in unemployment assistance bound for his state in Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan.” Inside the cab, on my way to O’Hare airport, I found myself humming, Jai Ho!

The Titanic, as we all know, sank in her maiden voyage from England to the US in 1912, taking along with her 1400 people. Some of the people who had designed or been involved in building the ship had serious doubts about her design, but they had kept quiet as she sailed because they did not want to look foolish in front of majority of their colleagues who did not seem to share their doubts. Even as she was on the ocean, it seems that other ships in the vicinity had radioed the Titanic, warning her of icebergs - she ignored those: read someone did not exercise the professional requirement to ask questions on how they might impact the ship.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave clearance for a covert attack on Cuba by 1400 Cuban exiles in what has been termed as the Bay of Pig disaster. Intelligence reports indicated that such an attack would result in a popular uprising in Cuba resulting in the ultimate unseating of Fidel Castro. Contrary to expectations, when the 1400 invaders arrived, they were far outnumbered by the Cuban military that was forewarned of the assault. 1200 were taken as prisoners and 200 died in the fiasco. One key assumption that was made during the infamous invasion was that the exiles would dissolve into Cuba without questioning the fact that between Bay of Pigs and the mainland lay eighty miles of swampland. When the mission failed, it was apparent that the President had been misled and it was even clearer that people who doubted the success of the strategy had suppressed their urge to question because everyone else seemed to be so patriotically pushing the idea! After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a term called “groupthink” emerged and subsequently researched very extensively by celebrated Yale psychologist Irving Janis in the seventies. Janis brought to light how groups of decision makers become blind to impending warnings when they are bound together on a mission and members fail to raise critical questions because of the need for false harmony.

In 1986, in one of NASA’s worst disasters, space shuttle Challenger exploded, 73 seconds after lift-off, killing all 6 astronauts and Christa McAuliffe, a school teacher on board. It was the tenth voyage for the space shuttle and the most watched on television because of the historicity of McAuliffe’s presence. The space shuttle’s explosion made it one of the most cited case studies in contemporary engineering and management theory. The space shuttle exploded because of a defect in what was termed as the O-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster. This part was made at Morton Thiokol Inc., a sub-contractor of Marshall Space Center. Tests indicated that the O-ring was not reliable at temperatures below 53 degrees and people knew about that fact. The Challenger lift-of took place when the temperature was 36 degrees - it is obvious that no one asked a question while the shuttle was given the go-ahead.

What happens when thinking men and women, sometimes highly educated and sometimes highly experienced, gather around a table to discuss matters of great importance and then because of their unanimity, they lead to unimaginable damage to life, property and organizational reputation? Why do they fail to ask critical questions? Why do they sometimes have the questions but choose to remain silent? Is it caused by a desire for false harmony? Is it the fear of ridicule? Is because they are beholden? Or, is it the sheer abdication of responsibility? Is it likely to driven more by cultural factors? Or is it just the DNA of an organization?

In truth, it is all of the above and probably some more. It is also about size. In every large organization - public and private, where groups of people routinely gather around teak paneled tables to dwell on matters of consequence, fail to act as professionals. For the one that meets the eye, there are countless many that go unnoticed. The truth be told: even in the United States where there is a bigger tradition of failure-analysis, highly placed individuals routinely fall prey to “groupthink”. On our part, we would all do well to know that it may well be happening in our own organizations where every time a critical decision is taken, the voice of dissent is not been listened to as intently as the voice of approval.

For more on the subject, read ‘Leading with Questions’ by Michael Marquardt and see you soon.

The idea revolved around a basic concept - when a CEO experiences personal growth, the individual buoys the company up. Such growth on a sustained basis, is not an accident. It is therefore that behind high-performance companies, stand high-performance CEOs.

Take for example Andy Grove of Intel.

The forty years or so he spent at Intel can be equally divided into 10-year periods of being a start-up entrepreneur-cum-chip designer, the chief operating officer, then the chief executive officer and finally, as the chairman of the board. David Yoffie, Professor at Harvard University and long standing member of the Intel Board, told me once that it was as if they were four different people; such was the transformative, personal growth experienced by Grove.

We see similar cases in India when we look at the career trajectories of CEOs like Ratan Tata or a Narayana Murthy. Why is it that some CEOs keep growing and some hit the glass ceiling? What can an entrepreneur-CEO do to keep growing? These were the conversation pieces at the TiE Panel had. The Panel members were Hema Ravichandar - the much talked about HR and Strategy consultant who saw Infosys grow up, Dr. Pallab Bandyopadhyay of Perot systems and Rishi Das, founder-CEO of Career Net. Towards the end, the Panel took questions and as happens in case of any engaging Panel, we ran out of time for that one all important question that came at the end: What are the signs that should tell an Entrepreneur-CEO that it is time to get help? May be, move away to the next role within or to sometimes, move out? It came from an entrepreneur-CEO in the audience; so it wasn’t your typical idle question at the end of a session.

☼

Leadership requires what Peter Drucker termed “planned abandonment” - only that leader who can let go can experience planned abandonment so that the individual may expand his or her capacity and in the process, take the organization along. Inability to do so stifles the organization. The sad news is that there is no one to tell the entrepreneur-CEO, because of the very position the individual holds, that he indeed is the cause of his own, and the organization’s stagnation.

I have been pondering over the question on tell-tale signs for the last few days and I finally decided to take a crack at the question myself. I want to share a few situations with those who are interested in the subject - these situations, if evident in multiple numbers in the life of an entrepreneur-CEO, should send the signals that it is time to get someone smarter for the job and move up or move on. So, if you are beginning to question your own competence to run the tasks you currently do, check out the following. If many of these look familiar, it is time to get help.

1. Your books of accounts are not current for successive quarters. Closing the books has been a big ordeal. You do not believe in the numbers yourself. You are having trouble understanding what your chartered accountant is talking about. Your cheques have bounced a few times.

2. You are leaving office everyday around dinner time for the last six months.

3. For the third time, you have missed the delivery deadline.

4. When a recent significant prospect visited you, you were at a loss to understand what she was talking about. Her language was Greek and Latin to your ears even as you kept nodding intelligently through the conversation.

5. Your people are not confiding in you anymore. No one seems to disagree with you on anything you say. You sense false harmony when you are around.

6. You have lost 2 of your top 5 accounts last quarter.

7. You no longer understand your own manufacturing process or that of your best competitors.

8. Recently, you were at an international tradeshow - you felt lost.

9. You have crossed sales of Rs. 100 crores. But you really have no clue of the differences between sales and
marketing functions.

10. You have been feeling irritable at home. You cannot focus. You do not finish a book and can not sit through a movie. During the last vacation, you went to bed every night thinking about work.

11. You believe you have a second-rate team. You cannot imagine in what significant way they can grow up and become valuable to themselves and to others. You sometimes do not know what to do with them.

12. You have lost 3 key people in sales and cannot understand why.

13. You had a great ride for three years. You have no idea what the next three years would be like.

14. You do not seem to know the top three weak spots of your business, which when taken, could get you
out of business.

15. You have failed to raise the second round of funding.

16. You know the market is in Europe. You just have not been able to get there. You somehow do not like selling and feel awkward opening doors for sales calls.

17. You did a fantastic job with one customer or in one vertical or in one geo. For 18 months, you have tried but you simply cannot break into others.

18. You feel that you are physically slowing down.

19. You go to the Club during daytime.

20. You know that the business has potential but you feel as if you are a single-engine, two-seater aircraft of World War II vintage.

21. You read comics at work and have caught yourself surfing the Net for trivia. Personal friends drop in while you at work and you enjoy it.

22. Your wife is feeling bitter about how much time you are giving to the family.

23. You missed your flight thrice in the last three months. You feel lethargic to go to work.

24. You do not remember the names of the top people of all your 10 customers.

25. You were cheated thrice in the last one year.

26. You are ten years older than most of your buyers.

27. It has been three years since you started the business. You are obsessive about designing the marketing collaterals by yourself.

28. You hate to travel.

29. You have defaulted in filing statutory returns and pay the taxes even though there was money in the bank.

30. For the third year in a row, you are not profitable.

31. Three of your clients have complained about poor quality and you really do not know how the issue could be fixed - you have yelled at your people but that is not helping.

32. Your competitor is growing faster than you; the industry is growing faster than you as well.

33. Your competitor’s sourcing baffles you.

34. You just did not have time to exercise in the last six months, have not taken a vacation for a year. You
do not have an active hobby and have not helped with the children’s homework as far back as you can
remember.

35. You have not invested in R&D in the last three years after finding success with the initial product and your competition is doubling their R&D investment.

36. You do not get any Press, your competitor does. You do not know why.

37. You have not learnt any new word in the last one year. You have not gone to a new tradeshow in the same period. You have not added any new book to your reading list. You have not landed in a new airport in the same period.

38. You have the same set of professional friends and you discuss the same thing over beer.

39. You have not met a customer in the last three months. You do not feel like.

40. You know three positions need filling up in your company. You believe you need to meet the candidates yourself. You simply did not have the time.

The problem with being an entrepreneur and a CEO is that you are a Type-A personality, it is your own show and no one will come to shape your career for you. You have to read the signs, watch yourself and make way for more competent people. If you do not vacate your existing ground, how would you take a new one?

“Overall, the job of a CEO”, says my long-time friend and Professor at the Penn State University, Ragu Garud, “is to lead. It is not to fight fires. Leading requires the ability to create frameworks that others may use and that needs energy, power and connections”. Further away you are from that state, lesser you are doing your real job. It isprobably time to consider “planned abandonment”

With that, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers. I will connect with you all in 2009!

Vice Chancellor, Principal, Faculty, Members of the Senate and the Syndicate, my dear Students, Ladies and Gentlemen.
My being with you this evening is historic for me. The Ravenshaw ethos is part of our family heritage. My father studied here. My uncle studied here. Three of my elder brothers studied here. The eldest topped his class throughout and was elected vice resident of the student’s union. The third brother chose activism over academics as his calling and was the president of the college union in his time.

I was the last born and lived with my parents and an immediate elder brother in far away places like Koraput and Keonjhar. As we grew up in those places, we were told stories about the great Ravenshaw College, and we aspired to one day take our place in its imposing red structure. We learnt about the great academicians who taught here, the minds who mentored young people who eventually became destiny’s children. We were also told about something mysteriously transformational in the insipid food of the Ravenshaw hostels that sent people straight to a place called Dholpur House in New Delhi.

To us, Ravenshaw was sacred ground.

Unfortunately for me, by the time I was ready to come to its hallowed precincts, my father had retired. The last two of the brood were picked up by the elder brothers - by then one was a bureaucrat in Bhubaneswar and the other had started a fledgling legal practice in Cuttack. My immediate elder brother got allocated to study at Ravenshaw under the tutelage of the lawyer brother; I was sent to live with my eldest brother in Bhubaneswar and asked to go to the BJB College there. I have to admit that I felt deprived.

So, whenever I got a chance, while studying at BJB College, I came here - I stood by the Sun Dial or peeped into the Kanika Library. Sometimes I came to debate here. On two occasions, I won the Inter-College Debate competition held at Ravenshaw College - they used to be held in the Physics Lecture Theater and on one occasion, Dr. Mayadhar Mansingh was one of the judges. To be judged by someone like him gave me a sense of high I carry even four decades after! The prizes for the debates - one in English and one in Oriya - were instituted by Dr. Mahendra Kumar Rout, then Principal, in his father’s memory.

Each time, after I won the debate, Dr. Rout made it a point to tell me how he wished I were a student at this Institution! I carry that endorsement as a badge of citizenship. The thought that I was so welcome here then, makes me feel legitimate as your Chief Guest this evening. Today, when you choose me over the thousands of more well-known Ravenshawvians who have made an impact, you have taken away the last sense of banishment that I carried in my inability to make Ravenshaw my alma mater.

Ravenshaw College was born in the year 1876 because of the untiring efforts of an Englishman named Thomas Edward Ravenshaw. He called it the Cuttack College. He was a British civil servant in India. His vision for building an institution of learning has several lessons for all of us.

One, that vision was larger than life. As all visions must be. It was in fact, what we may call a “hairy, audacious goal” particularly at a time when Orissa was coming out of the great famine of 1866.
Secondly, that vision did not have anything to do with Mr. Ravenshaw’s self-interest - he was doing it for the posterity of a people that were not his own.

Thirdly, and very importantly, the vision was opposed at the time of its birth. Great vision is always invariably put to test early on and that is when many of us become frustrated. We want the world to come to our door steps because we have a dream. Only those dreams have a right to be born that can withstand opposition and cynicism.

But I am not here to talk to you about the power of vision, nor do I want to pay tributes to the great man who did not even want his name to be bequeathed to the institution he wanted to build. Instead, today, I want to talk to you about the burden of dreams.

Ravenshaw - from now on I mean the 132 year-old-institution - has not just been a place for mass-manufacture of employable graduates. On its sacred space, not just lives, but movements have been launched. We would all do well to refresh our memories on some of those without which we would not be worthy of the people who have once walked this very land before we did.

An educational institution is not just about prescribed curriculum, about question papers and answer sheets: it is a place to learn about life and living by dialogue and diversity, it is the place for creating the capacity to learn, to question, to innovate, to push and be pushed back, to romance life and make life a worthy place for those who will come after us.

The report card for Ravenshaw on that score is a glowing tribute to every single brick that became a sentinel of our freedom; this remarkable red edifice chose to do more than be a witness to time-it chose to be an active participant. Tonight, I would like to take you down the memory lane to give you a glimpse of that report card.

1903. Modern Oriya consciousness began in the formation of the Utkal Sammilani by Orissa’s first graduate, first post-graduate, and first practicing lawyer, Madhusudan Das. When that Utkal Sammilani had its first session here on the Idga Ground in Cuttack, history tells us, it was attended by 335 delegates from the outlying areas; zamindars, representatives of the Gadjats, the Commissioner himself, two Christian missionaries, local intellectuals like Radhanath Roy, Madhusudan Rao, Bishwanath Kar and the Principal and students of Ravenshaw College assembled to engage in the deliberations.

1920. Students of Ravenshaw, like Harekrushna Mahatab, N.K. Chaudhury and their fellow alumni, opposed the idea of the same Madhusudan Das accepting ministership of the British created government and distributed leaflets in protest; they disturbed a progovernment felicitation meeting. Their activities were reported to Mr. Lambart, Principal of Ravenshaw College, and their parents were asked to withdraw the two from college just a week before their BA examinations. In the years that succeeded, parallel to the uprising of Oriya consciousness, was the beginning of the national freedom movement. When India made her shift from self-rule to demand for full freedom, the chants for freedom first reverberated within the four walls of this great Institution before they spread far and wide.

1930. When the Orissa Pradesh Congress Committee gave a call observing January 26th as “Independence day”, history tells us that the hostellers of Ravenshaw College took the lead in organizing the celebrations and many students gave up a meal to contribute to the funds of Utkalmani Gopabandhu Das towards the national freedom movement. Then came the Salt Satyagraha and the post graduate students of Ravenshaw College actually dropped their examination in support of the struggle when a batch of protesters marched from Khurda to the sea to defy the Salt Act of the British Empire.

1937. Even as Orissa acquired statehood under the British Empire, there was no legislative assembly for people’s representatives to represent their will and legislate on their behalf. It is no small coincidence that the grounds of Ravenshaw College were chosen for the very first meeting of the Legislative Assembly of Orissa on July 28th, 1937.

1942. At the forefront of the Quit India movement were the students of Ravenshaw College. On 15 August that year, 200 of them protested. They actually set the office room on fire. Among the arsonists were Banamali Patnaik, Ashok Das, Biren Mitra, Suraj Mal Saha and Bibhudendra Mishra. The last two were detained under the Defence of India Act and sent away to the Berhampur Jail. The movement spread to all other educational institutions in the state. Born of famine, child of a foreigner’s vision, Ravenshaw College was the vortex of political, intellectual and literary movements in Orissa for the first seven decades of its existence. That is probably why it has produced countless heads of state, poets, politicians, judges and bureaucrats who spread their impact far and wide.

1947. And then came seven decades of relative silence, except for the student unrest of the 1960s that spread to the far corners of the State. As the nation got largely busy with itself, Ravenshaw College no longer buzzed with the higher call, its portals gradually settled down to a collective ambition that ran from the Cuttack railway station and terminated in New Delhi where the Union Public Service Commission had its home.

The corridors of Ravenshaw no longer reverberated with the footfalls of the revolutionary, the thinker-doer, the game changer - they only echoed gently a legitimate middle-class aspiration to become a permanent employee of the government. To the job seeker, Ravenshaw became a means to an end - a good education that guaranteed a good job.

If we make a roll call of the chief secretaries to the government that independent Orissa ever had, we will find that an overwhelming majority of them come from this single institution. That principle applies equally to the coveted Indian Police Service, the Allied Services and their less coveted state counterparts.
In the six decades after independence, Orissa progressed in some sense and regressed in others, but Ravenshaw, despite its innate capability, gently withdrew from its task of producing thought leadership. The same person who ran towards the safe harbor of a government job could have aimed for the Nobel Prize, the Booker and the Magsaysay Award. But the burden of dreams had been lowered for the time.
The time has come to change that.

Today’s Orissa, like today’s India, is in deeper strife than she was a hundred years ago. We need to address this.

I believe that the idea of the Indian State, of elected government, of a judicial system and of the protection of law and order, is ceasing to be relevant to an increasing number of people. A record number of Indian territories are ungovernable by public admission. It is no longer Jammu and Kashmir and the far flung border areas in the North East; the fact is that deep inside states like Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and many others, an increasing number of districts find themselves unable to guarantee anyone the right to life, property and equality of justice.

Here is our own state where policemen are mowed down in districts like Koraput. In Nayagarh, barely two hours from the state capital, hundreds raid the armory of the state as if it were a college picnic and vanish as easily as they came. In Kandhamal, someone is burnt alive, someone is raped and twenty thousand people become homeless, as if we live in the backyards of Somalia or Rwanda. All over India, government is retreating to the metros. The rich and the worrying are building “gated communities”-they do not realize that shrunken freedom is no freedom. Their gates are gates of fear and not freedom.

At the core of the problem is the issue of widespread corruption. The reason our police, our bureaucrats, our judges and our politicians are afraid is that we have become a collectively corrupt society. When you become corrupt, you lose the moral authority to govern. All forms of authority are finally about the moral right. Only the moral right gives us the power to stare down an opponent, as has been proven time and again in human history, from the days of Moses to those of the Mahatma.

When the Oriya language and identity was in question, Ravenshaw College had a view point; when the Salt Act was passed, the students and the teachers at the Ravenshaw College had a position; when the British oppression became intolerable, right here in the fields of Ravenshaw, the Union Jack was trampled. Ravenshaw’s students wrote love poems and secessionist literature with the same ease.

So, how is it that our middle-class, poverty of the mind is not on its priority?

How is it that when Kandhamal burns, Ravenshaw’s conscience does not agitate?

While the scourge of corruption has touched the marrow of the civil society, why are we are not dialoguing here for a more sustainable future?

The burden of dreams must return once again so that the hallowed grounds of this great institution can show the path to a people at crossroads with themselves.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are three kinds of freedom. Each one is more difficult to win than the other; each is more intense, fuller of churning, more demanding of loyalty than the one before.

In the first six decades of Ravenshaw College, India and, within that, the people of Orissa struggled for political freedom. Contrary to popular myth, we are not midnight’s children; in reality it was a night of decades, and our freedom took many generations of working, many lives had to embrace the cause without fear of the consequence.

That was our first freedom. Between 1947 and today, we have been battling for our second freedom: economic freedom for our people. In these intervening six decades, we have not had a famine of the 1866 variety. Although floods and droughts have been the bane of Orissa, they have not quite been like the great famines that once wiped off generations in a single go. Our people have starved to death during this period, but it was nothing compared to the specter of the past. With effort we have come this far and the battle for economic freedom is largely won.

But now, we have to embark a more crucial journey for a more difficult freedom to win - it is the freedom of the intellect. Unlike political freedom, and in some sense, economic freedom, this one is not about unshackling from an external opponent. Rather, it is about unshackling the mind from within. More than ever before, we live in times of widespread corruption, visionless politics, non-inclusive development and a near-total disregard for the environment. These are oppressors in our own minds and the potent destruction they may cause is larger than anything a foreign hand ever could.

To strive for freedom of the intellect, you have to develop a sense of destiny. You must know that you have a purpose larger than your own self.

You must develop the true desire to learn, beyond the mundane need to equip yourself with a qualification.

You need to develop the capacity to deeply question the state of things. You have to put your stake on the ground.

You have to build substance and the power to serve others in many valuable ways.

You must believe in your own self, follow your heart and not seek approval from a society that expects you to change it.

You must speak your mind and be accountable for your words and actions.

You must not be content with the measure of the times, for you are here to build a scale for the future. You must create your own path and not be path-dependent.

For this, the burden of dreams must return again.

Not everyone can carry a burden of dreams.

A burden is, after all, a burden, and when it is a burden of dreams, it is a life-altering experience.
The burden of dreams is not in what the eyes see; the burden of dreams is what you and I must affectionately carry in our bodies and on our chests so that we can live a worthy life.

Only blessed ones born on a sacred space can bear that burden of dreams.

Ravenshaw is the sacred space. The question is: are you willing to be the blessed one?
Thank you once again for inviting me this evening. As you take on the burden of dreams, I pray that Ravenshaw gives Orissa her first Nobel Laureate, her first winner of the Booker Prize and her first to claim the Magsaysay Award.

Go Kiss The World.

There are many messages in this story. One, tough times are about shared pain. Two, when the pain is shared, the bond that ensues is the greatest return on investment - we retain that middle management even nine years after! Finally, there is the inevitability of non-performance and there is an economic consequence of carrying it. Non-performers must be let go. The issue is timing. It is a known fact that in every single company, across industries, there are at least 5% people who do not pull their weight or cannot. Sometimes, this is because of attitudinal issues, sometimes the problem is lack of competence and yet sometimes, companies have hired wrongly. There is no way a customer or an investor can pay for them. In good times, they are invisible, in bad times - they appear like mangrove bushes in low tide.The best thing about being in the bottom 5% is that you really know that fact.

The greatest favor you can do to yourself is not sit there to get the bad news: accept the reality that this job, this company, this career is not for you. Get out and do something else - it may mean a salary cut, a social ignominy for a while, but I can tell you that it may be the greatest move in your life to brace reality and rebuild your career. When 9/11 happened, I personally know a head of Human Resource who actually re-started life as a “handy man” - he was good with tools - over time, he added a realtor and a placement business. He started off slowly but with patience and self-confidence, even after the tide returned, he did not go back to be a mangrove bush. So, rather than lament, ask very hard-hitting, fundamental questions: who are you? What are you really good at? What is your passion? What is that one thing you could really excel in? It is not going to be easy, you rather have your old job - but know what? If it was not this downturn, the sheer fact that your bosses at work think that you are not a performer is a disgrace that would kill your self-respect. So, why seek kindness?

Now to the trigger-happy organizations that use a hire-and-fire mindset that and pull the plug than build shared pain: know that this winter is not going to be your last. People will remember what you did to them and if you did things without sensitivity, care and concern - remember that getting rid of people always leaves behind residual toxicity and it damages the hand and the heart and the head of the organization. Make sure, you have exhausted all means before you take up the easiest option. Communicate transparently, involve everybody, explore other cost cuts, ask people to do alternate things, consult your customers and suppliers, and retrain people. Finally, if you have to let go of some people, for Heaven’s sake, don’t ask the HR folks to show them the door. Line managers must know that this one is their job. Only when line managers get involved, fairness returns.

The SME Summit had an air of uncertainty - the timing is such that it is natural for people to question if at all it is a good time to be a start-up or are these times particularly bad for being an SME?

At the Shangri La Hotel in Delhi, the venue for the summit, MindTree co-founder Krishna Kumar and I were sharing a room the night before. The morning conversation was pretty much pre-ordained by the news of collapse, gloom and doom in the capital markets as we waited for breakfast before heading down to the summit venue. We were discussing the issue of bad times and good times and what they do to business. Then a young waiter came in, bringing with him our idli and tea. As he set down the food, we shifted our attention to him. He was about twenty four, very pleasant and clearly knew and liked his work. KK and I started a small conversation with him. Where was he from? What had he studied? Who was his family?

You will be surprised how everything changes with these three unhurried questions.

He said that he was from the hills of Himachal Pradesh - when he spoke those words, I could see the mountain streams and apple blossoms in his eyes.

Then, blushingly, he told us that next month he was getting married!

KK and I were delighted - we congratulated him.

The young waiter thanked us, collected the tray and, with a glow at the thought of the young-bride-in-the-waiting, walked out on an invisible carpet of clouds.

He had heard about the bailout packages in the US, the shroud of rumor about the ICICI Bank, the layoffs in the airline companies and the impending slow down.

But he is getting married next month.

What can be a bigger act of confidence in the future than raising a family? Bringing a coy bride all the way from the land of the gurgling streams and apple blossoms into the harried capital city where our man would return to work - serving idli to people who become friends between a loaded tray and an empty one-people whom he may never meet again.

KK and I watched his receding steps to realize a simple truth: slowdown or not, people will marry; they will visit friends with the new bride wearing a pair of jeans but with her hands covered in those white and pink bangles that notify the whole Universe about her change of status; they will celebrate; they will mourn; one day they will get up in the morning and wake the kids up who must now go to school; they will go to work; start a new business; they will cook a meal and eat; they will fight with their loved ones, kiss and make up and then sleep. So, we told ourselves, the world does not really come to an end after all.

☼

The times, whether bad or good, do not target anyone just because he is a start-up or a SME. People marry while the stock market collapses, people also start companies, get new customers, and make good and bad business decisions. Some plan to build the first floor and some close shop. So, there is no point in despair.

☼

At the NASSCOM summit that morning, I told people about the hatch-rate among wild salmons called Coho.

Coho salmons are one of the most prized fish - both as game and food.

They spawn in fresh water and return to the ocean where they grow up to become adults. When the time comes for them to reproduce, they return to their place of birth and lay eggs. Out of 2500 eggs an adult may lay, only 375 survive. Of these only 30 become “smolts”; these are big enough to migrate to the ocean. Of these, only 5 become adults that grow up in the ocean and of these, only two one day return to spawn.

All creative acts must follow a similar process - that is Nature’s way. It is a sobering thought. As against the 1250:1 chance of success among spawning salmons, in our lives, we expect every single creative effort, every enterprise to become a success. It simply isn’t going to be that way. That has nothing to do with good times and bad times. There is no point blaming the economic environment because the economic environment only mimics Mother Nature.

Like the two fish that will return to spawn, we simply must keep working hard, duck the nets and the bears waiting upstream, swim further away and pray a little bit longer. Along the way, we attend a birthday, a christening - sometimes a funeral and, if we get the chance, certainly the apple blossom wedding that is due next month.