Hear from Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev of the Isha Foundation and consultant Dr Ram Charan who have designed unique leadership programmes to help entrepreneurs scale up their businesses
At Forbes India, studying and tracking capitalism is part of our core. Much of our work as journalists has been around observing entrepreneurs, their ambitions and the challenges they face in scaling up their enterprises. That is why we call ourselves the drama critics of business.
That is why a few months ago, when the Isha Foundation announced the setting up of a unique leadership programme designed to help ambitious entrepreneurs scale up their businesses, our ears perked up.
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev of the Isha Foundation, who without doubt is a child of the East, and Dr Ram Charan, one of the foremost CEO coaches in the world, author, and consultant, who has his roots in India but is a practitioner of management from the West, got together to create this programme. We were intrigued. Making it more interesting still is the fact that some of the best business leaders in the country are resource leaders for the programme.
To understand what seems like a dichotomy, Indrajit Gupta, Shishir Prasad and Shravan Bhat engaged in conversations with both of them. What emerged are a set of insights that puts fresh perspective on wisdom that draws from the East and the West. Edited excerpts follow.
The full video of the conversation between Indrajit Gupta and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev can be viewed at www.youtube.com/forbesindia
Forbes India: Can you share the inside story of how this programme was created?
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: In India, when a good leader comes up, people start worshipping him. What a leader needs is not worship, but reinforcement. So, we have leaders who are like stars who come and go.
We ought to build leaders at various levels, particularly in business, because economic activity decides the nature of society. While speaking at economic summits and to leaders in India and outside, I have noticed that the most serious issue people have is a lack of insight into what they are doing, or what they could do. That’s how we ended up creating this programme called Insight.
To be a leader, you need integrity, inspiration and insight. Integrity makes people trust you. Without earning the trust of people, there is no activity you can perform successfully. And you need to be inspired because it isn’t roses every day. A rose plant is full of thorns. Once it pokes, you need to be inspired enough to go beyond that. But if you don’t have the insight you might climb up the wrong tree. Based on this we formulated this programme with Dr Ram Charan.
Most businesses in India are family-owned, or they come from a certain community. They grow to a certain level because of prudence, understanding of the situation and a fire in the belly. But a lot of companies are stuck between Rs 250 crore and Rs 750 crore. They have everything in them to go global because they have grown up in India, which is like being in an obstacle course every day—the lack of systems, infrastructure, interest rates. But they can’t go beyond because certain ingredients are missing.
What are these ingredients, and what stops them from growing? We focus on identifying bottlenecks and showing ways to get past them. Because what somebody sees as a bottleneck, somebody may see as an opportunity.
FI: Another stress point for an entrepreneur is managing peer
group relationships and performance all at once. How do you manage both expectations and performance?
Sadhguru: Being an entrepreneur means doing what you want to with your life. When you’re doing that, there is great joy. But slowly you forget that and try to live up to expectations. But success is not measured only in terms of your size. It also ought to find expression in terms of who you are, your capabilities and competence. So, there is no need to be pressured as long as you can find full expression and, above all, establish your way of being.
FI: The formal learning systems
in our country make it difficult to deal with failure. How much of a barrier is that?
Sadhguru: On the contrary, I think in our society, success is more stigmatised. Because whenever somebody succeeds beyond a certain point, people start talking about morality and religion to stigmatise them. The reason why Indian families and people are so much averse to failure is not because of the mental make-up, it is because of our social structures. In other societies, there is enough of a net that allows opportunities to climb up again. This can be changed by looking at failure not as some kind of done thing for life—but as an ingredient of adventure.
The question you ought to be asking is: What is the level of risk you are willing to take when there is no social net? It’s more a financial and social reality than a psychological one.
Forbes India: You’ve articulated in your work that “to stay successful over a long business cycle, leaders need to be perceptive to change”. How can this be cultivated consciously?
(This story appears in the 23 November, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)