Leadership to Last , livre ebook
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158
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English
Ebook
2022
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Publié par
Date de parution
24 janvier 2022
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789354924354
Langue
English
Publié par
Date de parution
24 janvier 2022
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789354924354
Langue
English
GEOFFREY JONES TARUN KHANNA
LEADERSHIP TO LAST
How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
1. Managing Families
1(a) Adi Godrej
1(b) Rahul Bajaj
1(c) Sanjay Lalbhai
1(d) M.V. Subbiah
1(e) Patrick Chalhoub
1(f) Jaime Augusto Z bel de Ayala
2. Committing to Values
2(a) N.R. Narayana Murthy
2(b) Prathap C. Reddy
2(c) Nalli Kuppuswami Chetti
2(d) Mallika Sarabhai
2(e) Seema Aziz
2(f) Shinta Kamdani
2(g) Robert Brozin
3. Innovating for Impact
3(a) Devi Shetty
3(b) Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
3(c) Yusuf Hamied
3(d) Nandan Nilekani
3(e) Syed Babar Ali
3(f) Mo Ibrahim
4. Contesting Corruption
4(a) Jaithirth Jerry Rao
4(b) Narayanan Vaghul
4(c) Sir Fazle Hasan Abed
4(d) Suresh Krishna
4(e) Anu Aga
4(f) Nandan Nilekani
4(g) Mo Ibrahim
5. Challenging Gender Stereotypes
5(a) Zia Mody
5(b) Naina Lal Kidwai
5(c) Shabana Azmi
5(d) Keshub Mahindra
5(e) Ela Bhatt
5(f) Shamlu Dudeja
5(g) Seema Aziz
5(h) Rosario Baz n
6. Promoting Inclusion
6(a) Devi Shetty
6(b) Ratan Tata
6(c) Laila Tyabji
6(d) Runa Khan
6(e) Peter Wharton-Hood
7. Creating Value Responsibly
7(a) Anil Jain
7(b) Anand Burman
7(c) Anu Aga
7(d) Fadi Ghandour
7(e) Mar a Emilia Correa
Appendix
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
To our families
Introduction
Society tends to glorify the get-rich-quick entrepreneur-build a company and go public, then (maybe) give to charity. Nothing wrong with that, but here we are more interested in iconic leaders in India who have demonstrated leadership to last. We have also included selected examples from elsewhere in South Asia and other emerging markets to illustrate that the ideas the Indian entrepreneurs speak about have echoes in the views of their compatriots in the so-called Global South . All these stalwarts have built, to general acclaim and acknowledgement, organizations that are seen as forward-looking and innovative, subscribing to a code of ethics, and generally contributing to the betterment of societies. To our minds, this is the trifecta that is a lot harder to achieve than unicorn status. Nothing wrong with unicorns, but it s not what we re after in this book.
This book draws on a large set of in-depth interviews with business leaders across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East conducted by Harvard faculty as part of the Creating Emerging Markets (CEM) project. The last three decades have been transitional in much of this emerging world. The idea behind the project was to capture the memories of the men and women who built transformational organizations in this era. The high-level contacts and the financial resources of Harvard Business School (HBS) enabled the project to access the most important and impactful people in many countries. One promise made to all of them was that the database of interviews would be available to everyone free of charge and without restriction for research and teaching. They were giving back by helping build a collective memory about how iconic organizations were built.
The project started with a few audio interviews of top business leaders in Argentina and Chile. The business leaders of these two countries were traditionally highly discreet, so starting here was a test of whether Harvard s name, along with a generous dose of enthusiasm, would open doors. It did. From 2012 the geographic scope of the project was expanded, with a particular focus on India, where HBS had strong and enduring connections and a robust local research presence. The project expanded by mid-2021 to 152 interviews, each at least one hour long and frequently much longer, in twenty-eight countries, conducted by twenty-five Harvard faculty members. The video archives continue to grow even as we write.
Any curious reader sees that there are tomes written on leadership daily. As academics teaching in a management school, we are of course aware of, and informed by, much of this incredible work. For example, the work that distinguishes personalist from situationist perspectives reminds us to pay attention to both the attributes of the individual leader and the circumstances within which he or she works. The work on leadership being both embodied in a person and being the cultivated result of a process is similarly informative.
What, then, do we bring to this leadership discourse? First, is the obvious variation in settings. The leaders that our Harvard colleagues and we have had occasion to engage with are from across the developing world. The countries in CEM account for 43 per cent of the world s population; perhaps more importantly, the challenges that these leaders have navigated are emblematic of those faced by 82 per cent of the world that lives outside the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations. We leave aside the much more extensively profiled leaders, mostly from the US and other OECD countries, as scholars and pundits have trawled over those examples extensively. Any social scientist knows that sample variation is a driver of insight, so prima facie, accessing vastly more varied data points such as ours on leadership journeys is bound to be informative. Our submission in this book is a small first step, we hope.
Second, is our focus on the longue dur e. We are focused on lasting institutional change, triggered by individuals over multiple decades-an intrinsically historical exercise-not on episodes of individual CEOs as saviours. It has become a clich in some circles that history matters , but it really does matter in many ways. A little history stops us from reinventing the wheel, an all-too-common phenomenon among management scholars on the lookout for the new and exciting. There are patterns, waves and ebbs and flows in history, which are ignored at one s peril and understood to one s advantage.
A little history also helps differentiate a fad from a trend and enables a much deeper understanding of the here and now. In the context of this book, for example, we can see how resilience is built into cultures represented by many organizations in this book. We can ask whether this resilience is newfangled, or the result of these organizations having navigated near-existential crises, or capitalized on unique opportunities, over past decades.
Third, we focus on the power of narration, of storytelling. We present but a lightly edited narrative, straight from each proverbial horse s mouth. It is the unvarnished sense-making of people widely admired by their brethren for having achieved lasting institutional change in challenging milieus. Of course, there is a sample selection issue here-by design we do not learn from the failures of other would-be entrepreneurs-but that is not the exercise here.
To see why storytelling matters, just consider these two alternative stories of the texture of US society within which both of us work, as immigrants. French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville s narration in Democracy in America ( De la d mocratie en Am rique) of a year of his travels in 1831 conjures up the idea of America as the home of individualism, liberty and democracy with a healthy dose of free-market principles. In contrast, Left-wing historian Howard Zinn, in his A People s History of the United States , offers a narration from the view of the marginalized-they neither experience liberty nor have the freedom to express individual creativity-in the same American society. They re as different as chalk and cheese!
So, what do we take away from these hundreds of hours of fascinating narrations in CEM, only a few highlights of which can be shown here?
The first is that the featured entrepreneurs lead with ideas and actions. Some organizations started with a clear long-run vision that has been actualized, others had an emergent animating idea. In all cases, the leaders nurtured a coalescing of organizational energies on an idea, a theme, that drove things forward, that acted as the entity s economic and moral compass. Significantly, this nurturing always entailed action, not just thought. We see throughout that actions speak louder than words.
Second, they lead from within the organization, of course, but equally also lead in shaping the context. In a country-India-and other environs-South Asia and other emerging markets-where investment in public goods is sorely lacking, it is insufficient to focus on the ensemble of individuals who comprise the organization in question. The ecosystem must be catalysed to compensate for institutional inadequacies as well. We see the leaders recognizing the intertwined nature of economic and social problems in these settings. It s hard to address one problem without being bedevilled by another, and it s hard to rely on the absent institutional foundations that normally propel creativity when societies have under-invested in them for a long time.
The diversity of settings is an exciting feature of the book-we have companies that some would consider too traditional-but it s their very stability that provides a base for the innovation and creativity on which we want to shine a light. In any event, almost axiomatically, if one wants to examine leadership that lasts , you re inevitably going to look at entities that have been around a while. As you ll see, their existence is anything but inimical to the even flashier forms of entrepreneurship.
Equally, we have newfangled tech industries represented here. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw s Biocon brought the life sciences movement to India; several software entrepreneurs put India on the world software map some decades ago, and their skill sets have in turn over subsequent decades permeated many of the interstices of society. The mobile revolution in Africa was unleashed by Mo Ibrahim s Celtel (the descendants of that entity are now part of Bharti Airtel in Africa).
Truth be told, we find as much to learn from incumbent enterprises, if you
