Foreword

The subject of Saurabh Mukherjea and Anupam Gupta’s book is high performance. They prescribe a number of steps to achieve it and narrate sparkling stories to illustrate it. This is altogether fitting, for Indians have always learnt how to live their lives from stories, and this is why India has one of the richest storytelling traditions in the world. In this spirit, I would like to narrate a couple of my favourite tales that will illustrate the fundamental principles in this book.

The first one, called ‘The Mouse Merchant’, is from an eleventh-century Shaivite Kashmiri anthology, Kathasaritsagara. It is a story about entrepreneurship, in tune with our age of start-ups, and demonstrates some of this book’s principles in action: simplicity, collaboration, innovation and determination. The hero of the story is a young man whose father, a merchant, had died when his mother was pregnant, and his wicked uncles had stolen his inheritance. His mother had since supported him by cleaning houses and doing other menial work. Though poor, she persuaded a teacher to instruct her son in writing and mathematics. When the boy grows up, his mother says to him, ‘Remember, you are the son of a great merchant. Go and make a fortune. Meet Vishakhila, the richest merchant in our city, and he will give you advice.’

The next day, the young man goes dutifully to the rich man’s mansion. While waiting outside, he sees a dead mouse in his courtyard. When the rich merchant appears, he asks him if he can have the dead mouse. Vishakhila laughs.

‘People come to me for money and favours; don’t you want anything?’

‘No, sir,’ says the young man, and he thanks him for the dead mouse.

He sells the mouse to a widow with a cat, who lives near his house. With a few paisa that she gives him for the mouse, he buys two handfuls of channa, which he grinds and makes into little packets of snack food. With a pot of water and his snack food, he goes and stands under a shady tree at the crossroads outside the city. In the afternoon, loggers arrive from the forest, put down their bundles of timber and sit down to rest. The young man offers each of them a snack packet and water. They are grateful but since they have no money to repay his kindness, each one gives him a log of wood. On the way home, he sells one log to buy channa and stores the other logs at home. The next day he repeats the same thing, and then every day for the next three months, until the logging season stops with the arrival of the monsoon rains.

Because of its scarcity in the market, the price of timber begins to climb. His house is by now full of wood and he slowly begins to unload it in the timber market. By the end of the season, he has made a killing. He buys a shop in the timber market from his profits, and by the next season he has become a timber merchant. He also finds that he has a competitive advantage over other merchants because the loggers know him as the young man who was once kind to them at the crossroads. Since they prefer to deal with him, his market share begins to climb. Before long, he becomes the richest merchant in the timber market.

A few years later, he discovers that the profit margin from building ships from wood is much higher than from trading the same wood in the timber market. He looks for a master carpenter who knows the art of building ships and persuades him to take him on as his partner. Soon he has become a major player in the ship-building business. Before long, he discovers that his shipping customers are making even higher margins than shipbuilders like him. He seeks and finds a shipper in distress, provides him with capital and common sense, and before long he is running a successful shipping company. By now, still in his early twenties, he has become the richest merchant in town. He visits a jeweller and asks him to make a mouse of gold. When it arrives, he takes the mouse to Vishakhila, the wealthy merchant who had given him the dead mouse. He narrates his story and thanks him for getting him started with the sole capital of a dead mouse. The old man is delighted to hear this tale of entrepreneurial success and gives him his daughter in marriage.

‘The Mouse Merchant’ contains most of the six steps to reach peak potential that Saurabh and Anupam describe in this book, and it may well inspire a generation of young entrepreneurs in our age of start-ups. Some of you will protest, arguing that this story is fiction and not a real-life case study, such as the kind you read and learn from in an MBA class. I shall say in my defence that I have learnt that the line between fiction and nonfiction is very thin. The difference is that fiction has to make sense but nature and life do not. If you are not persuaded by my tenuous logic, I offer you this story from real life.

When I was a practising manager, I learnt more about high performance from our new assistant security guard than from the two summers I spent at the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School. We called him Kawade—no one was quite sure if it was his first or last name. He appeared one evening at our office at 5.30 p.m. to man the night shift. He was from a small town in western Maharashtra, where he had completed tenth grade. He didn’t know much English, and we laughed at the way he mispronounced our company’s name.

Kawade had a childlike curiosity and learnt quickly how the office functioned. In the first few days he picked up how to make tea and coffee, and between his rounds he was happy to make it for anyone who wanted it. Even though he didn’t know much English, he learnt to operate the telex machine—we used telexes in those days!—and soon he began to send simple telex messages. The same went for the switchboard. Between his security duties, he could be found answering the company phone after hours. Before long, with his inquiring mind, he trained himself to operate the film projector. As a result, young marketing executives of a consumer products company began to enjoy the unbelievable luxury of reviewing the advertising of their brands after office hours.

I got a taste of Kawade’s magic late one evening when I needed to speak urgently to our finance director. I knew he was travelling but wasn’t sure how to reach him. Kawade made a few calls, discovered that he was staying at the Ashok Hotel in Delhi and connected me to him within minutes. If you needed anything after hours, the mantra became, ‘Ask Kawade!’ As a result, I noticed that people began to stay later and later at work because our office seemed to function more efficiently after hours than during the day.

Nine months after Kawade arrived, our telephone operator had to go on maternity leave. I learnt through the grapevine that Kawade had requested to fill in for her temporarily—he said he was tired of working at night. The personnel manager refused flatly, saying that ours was a multinational company that received phone calls from around the world. How could he, with his poor English, answer incoming calls when he couldn’t even pronounce the company’s name correctly? I gently suggested that we try out Kawade for a few days, and if it didn’t work out, we could always get another person. The personnel head agreed reluctantly. ‘He may surprise us!’ I said as I left his room.

So Kawade had a new job. A few days later, our company lawyer asked me in passing if we had acquired a new EPABX system (which expands to Electronic Private Automatic Branch Exchange, a business telephone system). I looked at him quizzically.

‘Your phone is now answered promptly on the second ring; earlier I had to hold on till the fifth or sixth ring.’

I smiled and told him that Kawade was our new EPABX system.

As I was going for lunch, I stopped by at Kawade’s booth and asked him, ‘Why do you answer the phone so promptly?’

He gave a reply that took my breath away. ‘There may be a customer at the other end,’ he said, ‘and we might lose an order.’

Kawade brought the same curiosity, a bias for smart improvisation, a positive energy and an attitude of service to the daytime office. He quietly went on to become a role model and gradually transformed the atmosphere around him. Eventually, this modest, self-effacing, non-English-speaking non-graduate rose to great heights in our company. The lesson I learnt from Kawade’s success is that attitude often matters more than skill or intelligence in creating a high-performance organization. Unfortunately, companies consistently make the mistake of recruiting on the basis of credentials, skills and intelligence. If you want to create more Kawades, hire for attitude and train people in skills. You can teach skills but not attitudes, which are formed early in life.

Both ‘The Mouse Merchant’ and Kawade teach us some of the same principles laid out in Saurabh and Anupam’s book: 1) simplicity is an unblemished virtue; 2) innovation in business is often more important than capital; 3) collaborative skills will always take you far; 4) it is determination and persistence that move the world, often more than intelligence and credentials; 5) the mundane attention to detail and the ability to implement are as important as ambition and strategy.

Kawade’s most endearing quality, however, was something rare, and I would like to dwell on it before ending this foreword. He had a childlike quality to turn every activity into play, no matter how menial or routine. And so he seemed to love the work he did when others got quickly bored. In fact, he tended to get so absorbed in it that he would forget himself. As a result, he didn’t seem to care who got the credit. He was happy to act for the sake of the activity rather than for a personal reward associated with it. In other words, he came close to being a karma yogi that the Bhagavad Gita talks about. I was always a little sceptical about Krishna’s advice to Arjuna to act selflessly until I met Kawade. I didn’t believe that human beings could shrink their egos that far. It seemed like a nice ideal to strive for but it seemed hopelessly idealistic, somewhat like Marx’s ideal of absolute equality. Kawade taught me the rare art of self-forgetting, which is not only the path to human happiness but also to high performance.

Every CEO would obviously like to fill his company with Kawades but the question is: can one institutionalize the attitudes and practices associated with Kawade? Can our companies create a culture of self-learning, self-development, simplicity and collaboration? If we learn to recruit people on the basis of attitude rather than credentials, if we can foster and reward the spirit of curiosity and service, then we might get ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

New Delhi

January 2020

Gurcharan Das