2009

1. With new lessons learnt from China and Morocco in 2009, I am more optimistic today than ever about achieving ‘inclusive growth’ by enmeshing the interests of small farmer with those of big business. Traditional business models structured the relationship between a farmer and an agri-business as two principals transacting at any one exchange point along the supply chain. Instead, one can forge crop specific hybrid partnerships depending on whether heavy investment, high-end technology or labour intensive crop care can potentially alter economics of different individual legs of the value chain, eventually delivering the best overall outcome. The Government too has a key role to play, through enabling reforms and infrastructure investments.

2. Photography, a personal passion, got a big lift this year when I upgraded my camera to a Canon 5D Mark II. Shooting Bodhisattva Padmapani at ISO 3200 in the dark Ajanta Caves, or capturing the massive Kailasa temple at Ellora in a full frame were magical moments! A quick walk from one end of the Hyderabad Tank Bund to the other re-activated Shiv’s Third Eye series of albums. Third Eye in China followed soon after. Tagging the pictures with comments & putting them together as albums, and sharing those albums with friends multiplied the joy 3x :-)

3. That reflection on ‘sharing’ brings me to another highlight of 2009 – my active engagement with the Digital Social Media beyond the ITC Intranet. I got on to Twitter this year, and stepped up action on Facebook. Finally, after nudging by many of you, I even started writing a Blog! Interaction with people always energized me. These media have enabled such interaction asynchronously and allowed me to be in touch with many more friends without intruding into their personal time or space. Smart interface applications on BlackBerry made the whole experience seamless and literally 18x7. Many friends joined me virtually through Facebook as I traveled in rural China; the collective journey added so much value to me. My live tweets from various conferences bring in comments from ‘followers’ with such diverse perspectives that my learning quotient will never be the same again.

4. On work front, the biggest satisfaction of the year was launching of an initiative where we learn from ourselves, branded “Teach ABD”. The origin of this idea goes back six years. 2003 was the first time we articulated the big vision of eChoupal with much clarity. Implementing such a grand plan required ‘insightful front line’ and ‘action oriented back office’, in addition to the roles in a typical traditional organization viz. ‘strategizing top management’ and ‘executing field force’. The front line should be as aware of the strategy, as the senior managers should be of the field realities. When I was asked by our Chairman, if building such an organisation was possible, I had shared the illustration of Vedic God Indra’s famous pearl necklace described in the Avatamsaka Sutra. "In the heaven of Indra, the network of pearls is so arranged that if you look at any one, you see all the others reflected in it, in this process reflections of reflections continue infinitely.” Six years later, as we rolled out Teach ABD, I am confident that such an organization will be a reality soon. After gaining knowledge of instructional design, special task forces of our own people developed content in various identified areas like customer engagement and data driven decision making. This content, in turn, is being delivered through a series of training programmes conducted by our own people who volunteered to be Teach ABD Champions. These are important early strides in building an ever transforming organization.

5. Can’t reflect on 2009 without feeling sad about Andhra Pradesh. Not just the tricky Telangana issue which is a live bomb today as I write this piece, but the drought and the floods before. And the untimely death of YSR. Not to forget the shock given by Satyam Ramalinga Raju at the beginning of the year. Hopefully 2010 brings better luck to AP & Hyderabad!

6. Last week, when the ABD team voted me the King of their Hearts, I recalled Jodhaa’s advice to Akbar about the importance of winning hearts as opposed to battle victories (remember Aishwarya’s “aap sirf fateh karna jaante hai, raaj karne ke liye dil jo jeetna padtha hai” or something to that effect in Gowarikar’s Jodhaa Akbar). Thanks ABDians for the love and affection!

7. Wish you all a great 2010…

Who made a difference in my life?

Another piece from my old contribution to Manthan (ITC-ABD's Intranet) in June 2009 (written on the occasion of launching "Let's Teach Ourselves" initiative in ITC-ABD)


Who made a difference in my life? Oh, so many! A very large number of people, indeed. Real people that I interacted with in blood and flesh, as well as virtual people that I only read about. I learnt some very big ticket life skills, many ideas that inspired my work professionally, and several ‘how to do better’ type every day things. I wouldn't be what I am, but for these teachers and role models…

I can write a whole book on what others taught me, but here are a few for the moment...

Siddi Mallaiah, a stranger to start with: That was 1981. As part of IRMA’s rural immersion fieldwork programme, I had to live in a village for a month. Siddi Mallaiah, Secretary of the milk society in the village Cholleru (some 100 km from Hyderabad) was my host. After I landed in the village, I realized that he was also the local post master, and an agent of LIC too. He was an RMP as well, dispensing both allopathic and homeopathic medicines! His daily routine included tuitions for local school children in the evenings, and adult literacy sessions in the night. Of course he was a farmer, on top of all this. He had a two acre farm. While the day to day farming was looked after by his brother, all commercial decisions (like crops to plant & timing to sell etc) were made by Siddi Mallaiah. Whenever he traveled to the nearby town, he always went with a list of things he had to buy on behalf of others from the village and carry them back. His resourcefulness, his multi tasking capacity, and his smart time management skills were a source of inspiration for me when we designed the role of “Choupal Sanchalak” eighteen years later. Not to forget the way he facilitated my interaction with everyone that I wanted to meet – across castes & classes – in an effortless manner, given his relationship with literally everyone in his village. After all those mind boggling roles he was performing, he wasn’t rich. Facing all the usual challenges of rural India, he had to burn all his entrepreneurial energies in simply staying where he was. This experience has also reinforced the goal of my professional life i.e. innovate institutional mechanisms to make markets work for the poor.

Matthieu Delorme, my counterpart from a Partner Company: Flash forward nine years to 1990. I was then an Export Manager-cum-Trader in the erstwhile ITC-ABD. All I knew about trading till then was buying & selling after a high-level supply-demand analysis. Matthieu was a Senior Trader in Continental Grain Co in Hongkong (where I was posted for a few months in 1990, as part of a multi-business collaboration possibilities we were exploring with them) who taught me the intricacies of technical analysis, besides helping with my skills in fundamental analysis. More importantly, I internalized several trading execution skills like massaging a position, managing parallel positions and so on during that stint. The formats of Daily P&Ls, Weekly Market Analysis Reports we use today, and actually much of our current Risk Management Policy have been built with the foundation laid by Matthieu.

YC Deveshwar, the Big Boss at ITC: A few more years later, along 1998 & 1999, I had the opportunity to interact closely with YCD, while negotiating the alliance between ITC and ConAgra on commodity trading business. Till then, my ‘only principle’ in a negotiation is the much clichéd ‘work towards a win-win’. During this interaction, I learnt a better approach. First, with the help of some lever, try and move to a position of strength in any negotiation. Squeeze out a good deal from the other side with the help of this lever, then offer a ‘win more - win more’ solution to the counterparty from that position of strength. The continuous improvisation you can do in this process is amazing. You are always in a position to make offers that others can’t refuse. The Don Corleone way! Building those first levers proactively is an instinct I developed since then.

My father: Lot of colleagues experienced me for my approach of, “Don’t get stressed”. “If you can do something about it, do it! Why worry?” “If you can’t do anything about it, just relax! Why worry?” This is a trait I learnt from my father, essentially between 1976 and 1983 when I had to take crucial decisions early on in my studies and career. Like, giving up my Engineering Seat to study BSc (because I would be a graduate in three years, instead of five), and giving up IIMA seat to study at IRMA (because the fusion of rural and management had appealed more than the time tested business management) etc. Decisions that I need to take are different now, but the approach stayed with me.

Before closing, I thought I would share another secret. My approach to learning from these people and so many others follow a three step process: Step 1. Reflect what the “teacher” would've done in this situation. Step 2. Practice. More practice. Step 3. Teach someone else. This is when you become an expert!

2008

Uploading an old piece I wrote for Manthan, ITC-ABD's Intranet, at the end of last year...

1. I completed twenty five years of my work life on 14th April 2008, leading to a flash-back on how I stumbled into rural management as a career and what I made of it. I am truly lucky to have a convergence between the ‘call of my life’ and the ‘mission of the organisation’ I work for. With eChoupal 3.0 just set in motion, it is like taking a fresh guard at the stumps in my silver jubilee year.

2. April also gave me my latest gadget, the Amazon Kindle. With a habit like reading five books at a time, all the time, there couldn’t have been a better mate. You can buy a book with the flip of a button, take hundreds of books wherever you go, dismantle the shelves at home to make space, highlight paragraphs, make notes, change font size and what not. And at 10 oz, the weight is no more than a large cup of ice-cream! Some great books I’ve read recently include Predictably Irrational, Presenting to Win, Einstein’s Enigma or Black Holes in My Bubble Bath, The Back of the Napkin.

3. August 2008 brought India’s first Olympic gold in an individual event through Abhinav Bindra. Hopefully that’s the beginning of a richer haul, and also the last time we heard the usual refrain ‘Can’t a country of Billion people win one Olympic gold?’

4. September took me to Mount Everest! No, no… I didn’t climb; I just took a Mountain Flight to see the snow mountain from under five kilometers away. What a magnificent sight it was. This visit completed two ends of a spectrum for me; some years ago I went to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth.

5. October was a gala event in Boston. I was speaking at the Harvard Business School Centennial Summit there. Harvard has been my dream school, because three out of every four cases I was taught at IRMA was written at Harvard. To be part of its hundred year celebrations was a great feeling; this was again thanks to eChoupal.

6. November will be sadly (and angrily) remembered as 26/11 for a long time. One SMS I received in the aftermath was very revealing, ‘Irony of Modern India: The politicians divide the country by words, while the terrorists unite it with bullets’

7. In December, at the Pan IIT alumni meet in Chennai, I saw the Agastya Mobile Lab on a mini van. Packed with over hundred science experiments, mostly Physics – my favourite subject, this lab was a great exploration of the every day world all over again for me. How I wish every child is exposed to such experiments to make learning interactive and encourage curiousity instead of the routine rote method used in most schools.