Nineth Commandment: Build trust with relationships & experiences outside your comfort zone

Summary: Build relationships with a broad range of people especially people who are outside your community and/your comfort zone.
[To find out what the Ten Commandments of Indian Entrepreneurship are, please click here: https://marcellus.in/blogs/the-ten-commandments-of-entrepreneurship-in-india/]

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie

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The first books that I purchased on my own were from the pavement booksellers on Sansad Marg in Connaught Place in Delhi. In the late 1980s, after school, I would walk to Connaught Place and try to identify a second-hand book to read on my long commute home in Delhi’s overcrowded DTC buses. In that era the only way of knowing which book was worth reading was by gauging the popularity of the book. Whilst racy thrillers from Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum were the staple of the pavement vendors, the only non-fiction book which seemed to be permanently on sale in every bookstall was Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends & Influence People”. So, I invested Rs. 10 on a much-used third hand copy of this ‘International Bestseller’ and spent several blazing hot afternoons reading this book on my bus ride home from school.

Like millions of people around the world, I learnt from Mr. Carnegie that there are five rules that make people like you:

Become genuinely interested in other people.

·    Remember other people’s names.

·    Encourage others to talk about themselves and listen carefully to them.

·    Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.

·    Make the other person feel important.

For a studious middle-class Bengali class topper in his early teens, these were earth shattering revelations. I internalised as many of them as I could and soon I was dining at my Punjabi classmate’s residence and picnicking with my Malayali neighbour’s family. More importantly, I persuaded the conductor of the public DTC bus which transported me to school every morning not to charge me a bus fare. As a quid pro quo, I woke him up every morning at 6.15 am so that he could get the bus moving at the designated time of 6.30am.

My father migrated to the UK when I was 14 years old and my ability to  pay for my books in the UK hinged largely on my meagre earnings as a newspaper delivery boy. As a newly arrived immigrant in the suburbs of London, I landed that newspaper boy gig by discussing with the distribution manager of the newspaper why Wimbledon is the greatest tennis tournament in the world.

Then as I entered my forties, I came to appreciate there is a less transactional and more relationship-oriented aspect to what Dale Carnegie is trying to tell us. This point hit me when two decades ago, just before I left the UK and migrated to India, a friend of mine in London took me to the weekly prayer meeting of the religious sect that he belonged to.

The prayer meeting was held in Pekham, a then working-class suburb of south London, on a Saturday afternoon. The congregation consisted of people from all walks of life from a variety of religious and racial backgrounds. I could see bankers, lawyers, local tradesmen, blue collar workers and the local supermarket checkout clerk praying together. When the prayers ended, coffee & cookies were served and those who had gathered spent an hour chatting with each other. Around 5pm, people started to disperse and the faithful had to walk past the donation box on the way out.

Basis what I had seen in the rest of the world, I expected them to drop a pound or two (around Rs. 100) into the donation box. Instead, to my astonishment, I saw that the typical donation was ten times that amount. One lady, who drove away in a sportscar, neatly folded a GBP 50 note and tucked it into the donation box before whizzing off.

As I walked home that evening, I tried to rationalise what I had seen and figured that customers seek discounts at the supermarket not because they don’t value the food or the toothpaste that they are buying but because they view that experience through a commercial lens. On the other hand, not only was joining the religious sect an entirely voluntary activity, but socialising with a variety of people, building relationships with people from heterogenous backgrounds was also a matter of choice. As a result, the faithful – who had chosen this sect – felt motivated to support their faith through chunky donations. The same sentiment, I realised, is what leads football club supporters to pay thousands of rupees for a Manchester United or Barcelona FC T-shirt – it is not a piece of clothing that you are buying; instead it is a part of your identity.

A few years later, I learnt from Dougals Atkin’s book “The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers” that people become addicted to “cult brands” for more or less the same reasons that people become committed to cults. Atkins explains how companies like Harley Davidson and Apple have fuelled such unshakable allegiances. The customer identifies with such brands to such an extent that she truly believes that she and the company are in it together.

My own affinity of Apple’s products then led me to read Walter Isaacson’s celebrated biography of Steve Jobs. I learnt about the great man’s trips to India and Japan, his love for Zen architecture and design, his faith in the power of Zen meditation, his ability to build relationships not only within Silicon Valley but also in the rising economies of East Asia, and his ability to convince his colleagues that impossible things were possible (the famous Jobs “reality distortion field”). To build a cult, I realized that you need a larger-than-life figure like Steve Jobs whose wide range of interests allowed him to span many worlds.

“Through my thirties, as I gradually managed larger business, for understandable reasons, a variety of people—suppliers, colleagues and clients—tried to build closer relationships with me. However, I was still new to India and having spent my youth and the entirety of my twenties working in the UK, I found it hard to ascertain which relationships were being built with sincere intent and which ones might have an element of ulterior motive associated with them. As a result, I decided that I would not let anyone get close to me—my fear was that if they got close to me, they might take advantage of my proximity to them.

The headhunting firm that had been hired by my erstwhile employer to interview me and assess me picked up on this. This, in turn, was part of the briefing that they gave Ana when she began coaching me. Ana, in turn, gave me further feedback on this subject in the autumn of 2017.

It took me more than a year to fully comprehend the feedback that Ana had given me. In the early months of building Marcellus, when our financial resources were scarce and the small team was working long hours to build the business, I realized where I had been going wrong. As mentioned above, I had avoided investing emotionally in my closest professional relationships but in order to avoid hurting people, I had taken emotional professional decisions. For example, I let underperformers stay in my erstwhile firm for far longer than I should have.

As Marcellus’s business gathered momentum, I knew that I needed to flip this paradigm, i.e., I needed to invest emotionally in my professional relationships, especially with my colleagues who were putting in everything they had towards creating Marcellus.

At the same time, I needed to make objective decisions, day in and day out, 100 per cent of the time, not just about our investments but also about people, their compensation and their roles.

As a result, in Marcellus, my colleagues and I regularly head out in the evening to play cricket matches under floodlights on Friday evenings (followed by pizza and other indulgent snacks). The entire firm heads to the countryside or to a resort for a weekend outing every six months. There are monthly lunches for the whole firm and there is a birthday cake-cutting day every month (to celebrate that month’s birthday girls and boys).” – Unfiltered, pg 117

Saurabh Mukherjea is the Chief Investment Officer at Marcellus Investment Managers (www.marcellus.in).This material is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered as financial, investment, or other professional advice. The inclusion of any book does not imply endorsement or recommendation by the writer or the publisher of this material.