Introduction to Balconies of Leadership

During my father’s generation, a government job was the most prized. Throughout my career, a corporate job in a well-established and successful organization was highly prized. I wonder what my son’s generation will value.

A corporate job can be hugely satisfying. It all depends on how the person lives it. If he or she lives through the job as a means of earning a livelihood, you get one outcome. If the manager lives through it at high levels of engagement and leadership experiences, you get a different outcome. Such an outcome can be hugely satisfying because you first hone your transactional leadership, then develop your corporate leadership capability and finally, try to engage at a holistic level with some—not all—social and societal issues which concern you and/or the corporation.

During the fifty years of my career, I experienced leadership moments and learnings at three levels: transactional, corporate and holistic. I call these the three balconies of experiences and learnings. I should clarify the meaning of each of these three balcony levels as I experienced them.

BALCONY OF TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIP

In the first twenty years of my career, largely at Hindustan Unilever, I learned the principles and practise of business and management. The learning was focused on transactional leadership—getting your teeth into a problem or challenge, thinking up alternative ways to solve the problem or overcome the obstacle, rallying a group of people to execute a solution and then making a go at delivering the solution. Transactional leadership ranged from delivering sales targets for a set of company products in a national region, to increasing the company’s exports to other countries. I cut my teeth as an area manager in Karnataka with a soaps and detergents
portfolio, led the national business of the company’s foods business before leading the audacious exports drive of the company—audacious because the company had to earn 10
percent of its sales revenue from exports at a time when India’s exports were under 2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

BALCONY OF CORPORATE LEADERSHIP

In the next fifteen years of my career, mostly at Unilever, I learnt about the multidimensional tasks of running a company. At Unilever Arabia in Jeddah, it involved engagement with the many stakeholders in the firm—the principal shareholder, eleven local Arab partners, a very
multinational team of managers and employees in the company, the government and society. The lessons of this phase include executing on strategy and actions for a vision that the principal shareholders had enunciated. For example, in Arabia, Unilever had a vision to challenge Procter & Gamble (P&G), its principal detergent competitor frontally. I led the crack team to lead this audacious assault—with mixed results, I should add, with the benefit of hindsight!

Arabia was a geography where, for historical reasons, Unilever had a zero share of the detergent market and the rest of the market share was with P&G. Unilever and P&G slugged it out in many parts of the world in a ding-dong battle of raids and counter-attacks—for example, in Europe and America. However, in most emerging markets, one or the other held a position of imposing dominance. In India, Indonesia, and Latin America, for example, Unilever was absolutely dominant, while in Arabia, P&G had an upper hand. It was into this field of unequal power that Unilever Arabia was sent to battle. Needless to add, Unilever had several other advantages in Arabia and an operational war chest was provided by the shareholders, so, while the task was challenging, it was not life-threatening.

BALCONY OF HOLISTIC LEADERSHIP

The last fifteen years were rich with learnings and experiences in holistic leadership. Most of this period was in Tata. For the role and position that I had in Tata, the operational and transactional responsibilities rested for the most part with the CEOs of the companies. They, along with their teams, came up with detailed execution plans, held intensive review meetings and answered to the board on how well the company team had delivered on its committed targets. I had the privilege of sitting on some of the boards, observing and contributing to the process of visioning and monitoring, encouraging and supporting company leaders in their endeavours, and exploring the environment in which the company was operating. In a sense,
I had a perch from where I could observe a corporation in its larger sphere of working—the deep philosophies of why the corporation exists, the industry atmospherics, the
government and regulatory environment, the pulls and pressures of governance and competition, and the complex art of sharing with company leaders an exploration of higher
orbits of strategy.

One of my important experiences was that I was taken quite seriously by policymakers and industry compatriots. I was hugely privileged, not because I was smart, but because I worked in Tata. It was a tradition in Tata that the group’s leaders would play an important role in national economic development over several decades. I was one of the inheritors of that mantle.

My earlier books were from the first two balconies, based on my experiences and learnings at the transactional and corporate leadership levels. However, in the evening of my professional career of over half a century in management, I have now felt an urge to doodle about the view from the third balcony of holistic leadership. The dictionary definition of the word ‘doodle’ suggests that it is something rough, prepared absent-mindedly. Both these adjectives could well apply to this book titled Doodles on Leadership. This book is about engaging with leadership moments beyond the transactional and the corporate, the ‘aha’ moments that are concerned with more holistic problems that occur in industry, society, nation, values and people. It
has been written from the perspective of observations from a different position—the balcony of holistic leadership.
A VIEW WITH A DIFFERENCE

The view from this level is quite different to the views from the balconies of transactional and corporate leadership. But in what ways?

Firstly, it is a view through the rearview mirror. It tends to be hindsight rather than foresight or an immediate view arising from the cut and thrust of the action in the field. Secondly, it engages the mind in larger matters than the company and its operations. Why are things around us the way that they are—in the economy, in society, and in citizenship? Based on experiences, is there an alternative view that I can express? Business people should, and do, engage with such larger issues. It is among the more satisfying of the roles that business leaders can play in the wider society. Thirdly, it offers a chance to envision the world we think our children and grandchildren should inhabit. All views of the future will be considered naïve upon the passage of time. That has not deterred men—philosophers, scientists and artists—from imagining the future, based on trends and disruptions. Why should business people not do the same?  In addition to these three reasons, what makes the view from the balcony of holistic leadership even more interesting in this book is that it covers a wide range of subjects that have engaged me during the course of my career. My belief that all of these are of deep national interest has prompted me to present them as a book that citizens may be interested in. Some of the chapters draw on my Tata experiences, but, as the book progresses, the subjects become broader.

Know more about leadership and the balconies of leadership in R Gopalakrishnan’s book ‘Doodles On Leadership’: https://amzn.to/2xJy0rG