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