Gopalakrishnan, CEO, The Mindworks; Former Director, Tata Sons Ltd.; Author & Corporate Advisor

Sustainable and honest enterprise is the petrol required to fire a top-class engine of national economic growth. If there is no “clean petrol in the engine,” a car cannot develop speed.

3 E’s OF SOCIETY

Business, or enterprise as I prefer to call it, is at the heart of society.  People engaged in the enterprise do not appreciate their contribution to society. People, who are unconnected with enterprise, of course, think of business as an instrument of ruthless money-making.

I propose a different view of how society functions.

Right through history, great societies have been built on what I call the three E’s, arranged in concentric circles: the innermost circle is enterprise; the middle circle is education, and the outer circle is enjoyment. Let me explain.

ENTERPRISE encompasses the activities of trading, manufacturing and digital. Enterprise also includes the players who are large companies, SMEs and start-ups. It is enterprise that generates jobs in society, income for people, and spending power among consumers. Under-developed enterprise means uncertain income, as evidenced by the experience with lockdowns in recent times. Indeed, I repeat my initial assertion that the single reason why south Asia has underperformed its potential is its failure to promote enterprise.

I use the word, EDUCATION, in a wide sense. It includes not just formal school and college education but embraces the civilisational advancement of society—arts, humanities, culture, sports, and public health. You need energetic waves of enterprise in the ocean of a society’s affairs to lift the boat of education/ civilizational advancement.

If an enterprise is bubbling and civilisational advancement is high, then society experiences ENJOYMENT, meaning contentment and well-being. Therefore, society must be as respectful and encouraging of honest enterprise as it is of culture, humanities, and public health, thus leading to enjoyment—as I have been privileged to experience, working for half a century in Unilever and Tata.

It is crucial to understand how an enterprise can be nurtured—honest, long-living, sustainable and energetic.

The golden ages of history—Roman civilization, the Kalinga period, the Ming dynasty, the Mughal empire, Renaissance period—all were characterized by the exuberance of enterprise, education, and enjoyment.

Without strong enterprise at the foundation, the structure that is built above cannot be healthy education and enlightenment. A strong enterprise develops in a society in which talented shapers of institutions transform “good companies with good leaders”. The words INSTITUTION and SHAPER are both important.

What is an INSTITUTION?

Think of the Taj Mahal at Agra and a kabristan in Park Circus at Kolkata. Think of Mumbai’s VT Station and Begumpet railway station at Hyderabad. Which would you regard as an institution? No prizes for guessing right.

An institution inspires three feelings in everyone. First, a sense of grandeur and awe; second, a sense of being solid and long-lasting; third and last, something that enhances people’s lives and happiness. AWE + LONG LASTING + SERVICE are the hallmarks of an institution. We will apply the same to an enterprise.

What is a SHAPER?

A shaper is a glue around which institutions are built. Institutions are built not by shapers but by people.

The shaper develops a grandiose idea and a detailed plan with the help of unnamed colleagues. A shaper ensures that what is constructed is potentially large, long-lasting and of great service to people.

Shah Jahan did not personally build the Taj Mahal, though his name is associated with its shaping. So also with Homi Bhabha and Atomic Energy Establishment.

APPLIED RESEARCH

I joined a team of five academics at Bhavan’s SP Jain Institute in Mumbai. This is a rare instance of a seasoned practitioner joining hands with five academics to do applied research in the field of business!!

There is considerable foreign research and several foreign publications about excellent or great enterprises, for example, Lessons from excellent companies by Tom Peters, Good to Great by Jim Collins, and Timeless Ventures by Haruo Funabashi.

We asked the question: where is the research and literature on Indian enterprises and institutions? We found rich material on Jamsetji Tata, Ardeshir and Pirojsha Godrej, Jamnalal Bajaj and other great pioneers. However, they are what we call Gen-C institution builders who founded great enterprises at different times and under different regimes. This set us on a quest to identify more recent companies—what we called Gen L for Generation Liberalization–with five characteristics:

1. A company which came into public consciousness around the time of liberalisation, say within the last half a century.
2. The company is already a successful enterprise, with the appurtenances of becoming an institution.

• The company has a very high reputation in the public consciousness, though, like all human creations, it may not be perfect.

1. The company makes a meaningful difference to society while producing great financial results for its investors, though it may not be the best among its peers.
2. The shaper is alive for us to interview.

In short, the institutions for our study should be exemplars operating at the convergence of enterprise, integrity, profit, social orientation, and sustainability. These virtues had to coexist among the companies we would research.

We identified nine companies which met these criteria. I contacted the CEOs to ask if their company would cooperate in our research project. Six companies agreed:

1. Late FC Kohli and S Ramadorai of TCS
2. Deepak Parekh of HDFC Group

• AM Naik of L&T

1. Uday Kotak of Kotak Mahindra Bank
2. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon
3. Harsh Mariwala of Marico

Together, these six companies accounted for one-third of the market value of companies listed on the BSE. They contribute about Rs 2500 crore every year to CSR activities. They are important companies in the enterprise ecosystem.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Our team spent 700 hours on desk research, validation of a preliminary model and detailed interviews with company CEOs, employees, associates, and other stakeholders. The research methodology appears as an appendix in each book.

We started in 2018 and completed the work in 2020; it was quite an exhaustive exercise. Rupa Publications published six slim volumes of 150 pages apiece, one on each institution. We could have published a massive tome of 900 pages. Such a volume would have certainly given the impression of great scholarship! However, we wanted readers to read some of the books, not just buy one big tome, so we made it accessible by publishing six smaller volumes.

The books are about institutions and not hagiographies. Just as you cannot write about the Taj Mahal without reference to Shah Jahan, the shaper is incidental to the institution in the way we have tried to write the books. That is why you will not see the shapers’ pictures on the book covers, though I rather suspect that it might have helped the sales of the book!

I should share the model we developed and the interesting things we found.

THE MINDSET BEHAVIOR ACTION MODEL

The metaphor of a river is helpful.

Human action emanates from the Gangotri of a person’s mindset. The Gangotri of mindset manifests downstream as the river of behaviour. That river then gathers force as a mighty flow, influenced by the actions/karma of the person as it meanders down to the endless ocean. Our team developed this model based on a literature search and test validation. We placed M-B-A as the three vertical columns of a grid we constructed.

We identified eight habits that Indian shapers practised, often quite unconsciously. These eight habits we listed horizontally. We now had a grid of 24 boxes per shaper, which is 144 boxes for six shapers. We set to populate the 144 boxes through our interviews and analysed them as part of the research.

Our research methodology and the matrix of 3 MBAs by 8 habits appear as an appendix in each of the six books. In the interest of brevity, I will touch upon three habits only in this talk. Since I will not discuss five habits, allow me to just list them. They are:

• Orbit changing
• Levers of change
• Break barriers
• Cyclical learning
• Stakeholder orientation