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Missing in Action

Letter from the Editor: It's time we celebrated those promoters who learned to give up control without losing the founder's entrepreneurial instincts, like Shiv Nadar

Published: Oct 22, 2009 11:44:00 AM IST
Updated: Feb 21, 2014 12:38:31 PM IST

We’ve always tended to give our entrepreneurs too much credit for leading from the front. The image of a dominant leader who has his finger in every pie remains, for most part, our favourite management construct. I’d reckon it’s time we instead celebrated those promoters who learned to give up control, without losing the founder’s entrepreneurial instincts. Consider Shiv Nadar. He was the ideal prototype of a hard-charging, swashbuckling businessman throughout the nineties. He built up a formidable reputation for creating a fierce entrepreneurial culture inside HCL Technologies that was the envy of his peers.

But early this decade, HCL Technologies somehow lost its competitive edge and was overtaken by the likes of Infosys, Wipro and TCS. And so, for the past four years or so, Nadar has practically taken himself out of the equation. He studiously avoids media interactions and is even reluctant to be photographed (though he did agree to our request, after much prodding.)

I won’t give away the full story, but you’ve got to read Mitu Jayashankar and Malini Goyal’s story on how Nadar’s carefully orchestrated exit has impacted HCL. It’s a story that even Steel King Sajjan Jindal would like to closely follow.

When he was 25, Jindal rescued parts of his dad O.P. Jindal’s steel empire from atrophy. At 38, he built a hugely successful greenfield steel plant on the back of a completely untested technology — a move that his rivals termed as suicidal. Jindal is now starting to build the foundations of a diversified conglomerate, straddling power, ports, cement and aluminium.

And his biggest task, he tells my colleague Prince Mathews Thomas, is to create a team of leaders who carry the same courage of conviction that he had in building the country’s largest steel empire in about a decade.

As a magazine that celebrates entrepreneurial capitalism, we had promised that Forbes India would bring you such cutting-edge stories every fortnight. Now get ready for a special surprise.

The Daily Sabbatical is a new section on our companion Web site, based on an exclusive content tie-up with some of the biggest names in business education: Harvard , Stanford , INSEAD , Yale , Rotman , Oxford , University of Chicago , Thunderbird and IMD . Here, you get to meet the world’s best management thinkers and a chance to get acquainted with their ideas.

Our editors will carefully hand-pick the best and most relevant columns, interviews and videos from this vast treasure trove of management ideas and practices. We’ve also brought you the just released Thinkers 50 list. It features six Indians on the list. You’ll find exclusive interviews and profiles from Thinkers 50 also on The Daily Sabbatical.

I’d urge you to visit the site and sample the rich content. And watch out for more such surprises in the months to come.

(This story appears in the 06 November, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)

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