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Summary: Failure & success are like summer & winter i.e., they are a routine part of business life and should not be a source of exultation or heartburn. In fact, failure is an essential milestone en route to acquiring skills & learning along the way.
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/
“In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
And cut him ’til he cried out
In his anger and his shame
‘I am leaving, I am leaving’
But the fighter still remains.
– From the song ‘The Boxer’ by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel (1969)”
In 2010 Saurabh was hired by an investment bank in Mumbai to turn around their institutional broking business. Once that job was done, the said bank asked him to turn around their wealth management business. As that turnaround progressed apace, he requested the Board of the bank to make him the CEO of the overall investment bank. The specially convened Board meeting to discuss the matter was held on the first floor of the Oberoi Hotel on Marine Drive, Mumbai in December 2016.
Reflecting on that fateful meeting, Saurabh remembers the Board discussing whether he was the appropriate person to lead the firm. A decade on, he still remembers the sinking feeling in his stomach as he realised that the Board wasn’t convinced of his fitness to lead the broader firm. Quoting from the book that Saurabh wrote with his executive coach, Ana Lueneburger:
“The board wasn’t convinced. They said I needed to be tested and assessed to see if I was fit for the role. One of the world’s leading executive search firms was hired to interview me, test me and assess me. Their verdict, after subjecting me to a battery of tests and many hours of interviews, was that while I was a bright, hardworking individual with a credible track record of leadership, I had some way to go before I could be given greater responsibilities. My shortcomings—as per this report—were a tendency to fly off the handle when dealing with people I didn’t like, a low emotional quotient (EQ) and a ‘moody and irritable’ nature. In addition, I was also ‘naturally suspicious’ of people….” – ‘Unfiltered: The CEO and the Coach’ by Ana Lueneburger & Saurabh Mukherjea, pg 79
Disgruntled as he was with this state of affairs, Saurabh realised that he had little choice if he wanted to fulfil his aspiration to the run the firm as a whole: “Once the verdict from the experts was in, the recommendation from my bosses was that I get a coach to help me rectify the gaps in my skillset….The executive search firm was then asked to propose two qualified coaches for me. The first was an American lady who was now working out of Europe, and the second was Ana, a German national who had worked in New York for over a decade and was now working globally, based out of London.”
Ana began coaching Saurabh in September 2017. Looking back he recalls that “The sessions were two hours long and exhausting. There was pre-reading to be done and exercises to be completed. It was hard work. However, even as I doubted the usefulness of the exercise, I found the reading material interesting…thanks to the reading material Ana shared with me, I got drawn into the wealth of research conducted by psychologists on productivity and creativity and what drives these types of qualities, both at the level of the individual and at the level of the team. …as I read and reflected and spoke to Ana, over the course of the next six months I started shedding my insecurities and feeling progressively more relaxed about my abilities. She made me focus on my strengths. She helped me beat up myself less about my weaknesses. Slowly, the mental fog started abating.”
In the autumn of 2017, Ana visited Mumbai and spent three days speaking one-on-one to Saurabh’s colleagues (without him being present in the room) about his strengths & weaknesses. In October 2017, she presented this feedback to him. Quoting again from ‘Unfiltered’:
“Broadly speaking, by the time Diwali firecrackers were being burst in November 2017, I had realized that:
- I was good at working hard to think through tricky issues in finance, economics and business, and communicating those to clients. Alongside that, over the years, I had also learnt how to hire and motivate smart people.
- However, I struggled with knowing how to effectively push myself and my colleagues to work very hard over extended periods of time. I would often go beyond my own physical limits and would end up criticizing senior colleagues in front of others (inside the firm) and public leaders on broadcast and print media (outside the firm). As a result, I was quite firm if not rigid in my views and often failed to form deep relationships with colleagues and clients. I knew that a skilled adviser needs to build these connections with clients to anticipate and understand their needs, often even before the clients themselves are aware of them. However, I found it hard to act on this insight into client behaviour.”
Real time in that final quarter of 2017, Ana’s feedback hurt Saurabh in a way nothing else in corporate life had done. It stung him because no one else had in the preceding two decades done as comprehensive a survey of what his colleagues thought of him and given him feedback as unvarnished as this. “[It felt] as if someone is sprinkling red chilli powder on my soul…
The people whom I worked with closely were some of India’s most respected corporate professionals—they were either my bosses or board members of my then employer. Most of them were at least fifteen years older than me and highly accomplished—in fact, celebrated—professionals in their own right. What Ana’s feedback told me in blunt language was that not only did I not spend enough time with them (something they had asked me to several times in the years gone by), but also that when I did talk to them it was in a highly transactional context, when I needed them to do something for me.
My feedback report also told me that if I did not get what I wanted (or what I needed from them), I would explode in front of them and behave like a brat. I could go on and on, but I hope I have given you a clear enough picture of my ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ persona at that point…”
As Saurabh searched for inspiration & motivation to deal with Ana’s feedback, he remembered the chat he had had with Harsh Mariwala, the Founder of Marico, two years prior when he was interviewing Harsh Mariwala for his book “The Unusual Billionaires”. During those interviews, Harsh had told him that failure is part & parcel of the entrepreneur’s journey. In fact, a few years later, Harsh was quoted at length on this subject:
“Harsh Mariwala views failure as an integral part of the entrepreneurial journey. He believes, ‘Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.’ It’s a perspective that reframes failure as an opportunity for growth, a lesson in disguise….‘Entrepreneurs should not be afraid to fail but continue experimenting, prototyping and learning from failures.’…
“…let me say that failure is part and parcel of an entrepreneur’s journey. And there is a saying: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.” The same thing you can put differently: sometimes you win, sometimes you learn instead of losing! So any failure, any loss, is a great learning opportunity. And I think that’s happened to me many times because I’m not a management graduate, and neither has anybody mentored me in my whole journey or guided me. So I’ve been a self-learner. And often, you take some steps without realizing because you’ve not had an experience and nobody has guided you…
‘So, I think one key learning in the initial part of my career was that as you expand, you need specialist inputs in the area of quality, safety and legal product development, and you can’t take shortcuts! And that led me to establish our quality function, take safety far more seriously, and establish our legal and product development functions. So that happened in the very initial part of my journey. And I think that really helped me focus on my core. ‘The second failure, I would say, was when we entered a category which was very, very competitive and which had very strong brand names. We entered the baby category and started competing with Johnson & Johnson. And Johnson & Johnson is a very strong category where mothers have a very strong affinity to the brand…’
‘We did okay, but it was not good enough for us. So I think that led me to think about what categories we should invest in. And now, we are very clear that in any category we invest in, we should have a strong right to win. That means we should be able to, before entering the category, have something unique in terms of the product formulation, or we should be pioneering a certain product, or we should have a strong brand, which will enable us to win….
‘So I think we have learnt that each failure has its own set of learnings. And today, all I can say is that every entrepreneur goes through these failures. We should not be afraid of failures, and should go on experimenting and prototyping. And it’s okay to fail.’” – Source: ‘Against the Grain: Lessons from the Outliers’ by Pankaj Mishra (p. 12). Penguin Random House India Private Limited. Kindle Edition.
In the closing months of 2017, as Ana & Saurabh worked systematically to identify his weaknesses & the reasons for his temperamental flare-ups, he also spent time discussing Ana’s findings with his wife, Sarbani. Gradually he built a clearer picture of why he was failing to do justice to his talents:
“Having been through a difficult upbringing during my teenage years as my parents grappled with financial and emotional challenges, I had learnt early on in life that when you suffer setbacks, you are faced with a choice between (a) moping and cursing your luck; or (b) applying yourself and your brain to chalk out a plan of action that will take you to a better place. And once you frame difficult situations in this language, provided you can muster the strength, you will go with option (b). The first step for me was to figure out why I was behaving the way I was, and this is where Ana’s coaching really started clicking into high gear.
As Ana started helping me build a picture of what I was and wasn’t strong in, I began realizing that this desire to be the group CEO of the company I was working with was a waste of time and effort on my part—it would neither allow me to play to my strengths nor do the things I enjoy the most. Instead, using the pretext of seeking promotion, I would end up trying to persuade myself to not only become a very different person but I would also potentially end up trying to become just the kind of corporate drone that I had no affection or affinity for…
In the autumn of 2017, my family and I travelled for a short break to the holy city of Amritsar, home to the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple. We checked into our hotel at around 2 p.m., and by the time we reached the temple, dusk was descending on Amritsar. I remember sitting next to the large water tank that surrounds the Golden Temple shrine and soaking up the atmosphere and the history of the temple. I remember seeing inscribed on the wall of the Golden Temple the names of generations of Indians who had laid down their lives for a cause they believed in. I remember looking at Sarbani and my two children, Jeet and Malini, and realizing that a life well lived is a life lived pursuing a cause that you believe in. Broking, block deals and fund-raises for large companies were clearly not that cause, I felt, as I took a picture of my family, which remains my phone screensaver to this day—a permanent reminder of the impact of the Golden Temple epiphany on my life. As we left the Golden Temple and drove towards the India–Pakistan border checkpoint at Wagah, I remember clearly understanding at that point that I was at a crossroads, and that one path would have me spend the next decade doing transactional financial deals and feeling unhappy about the soullessness of it all.
So, what was the cause that I believed in? And what was it that I enjoyed? I went back to Ana with those questions, and Ana helped me confront them through the closing months of 2017….
As we entered the closing months of 2017, I reflected deeply on who I really was versus what people perceived me to be versus who I wanted to become. In parallel to working with Ana, I read voraciously about the psychological origins of identity and desire….
Ana’s coaching sessions and her candid feedback made me realize that I needed to snap out of my mimetic desires and find and embrace my own underlying identity. I needed to become a person I was happy being rather than a twenty-first-century Indian version of Gordon Gekko.
During Christmas 2017, I travelled to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago in the Bay of Bengal for our New Year’s break with the extended family. On my long walks on the pristine beaches of Havelock Island, it dawned on me that asset management can answer both the questions that had occupied my mind of late—namely, what is the cause I believe in and what is it that I enjoy…
A month later, I quit my job.”
Six months later, in August 2018, Saurabh co-founded Marcellus Investment Managers. Over the next two years, Marcellus would become profitable. Over the next four years, it would go on to manage more than a billion dollars of equity market investments for Indian families. Over the next five years, the firm would employ over 90 professionals half of whom would have an equity interest in the ownership of Marcellus. Out of Saurabh’s failure to become the leader of the firm where he was an employee emerged Marcellus Investment Managers, an employee-owned firm.
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.
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