The Sixth Commandment: Be Caring

Summary: Look after your colleagues, suppliers, distributors, & customers. Nurture a corporate culture focused on learning, on process, and on “means” (rather than “ends” such as financial targets).

[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/]

“Unless you know the individual, it’s very difficult to advise that individual as to what he needs to do….The process is more important than the results. And if you take care of the process, you will get the results.” — MS Dhoni

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For most of my career, my management motto was “If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working”. In-line with this motto, my operating strategy was to push myself and my team to the limits of human endurance. Then one evening at a party in Mumbai, the limits of my primitive thinking were made apparent to me.

“It was a pleasant January evening in Mumbai and I was attending a client’s son’s wedding in the northern suburbs of the city. The wedding was being hosted on the lawns of a nice hotel and I remember, at this very pleasant engagement, standing in the middle of the lawns with a drink in my hand. It was early 2018 and…As I mingled with the guests at the wedding, I bumped into a couple of ex-colleagues who used to be my direct reports. As we exchanged pleasantries, it struck me that both my ex-colleagues, who were in their thirties, looked fresher and fitter than I had seen them before. I asked them what the secret of their new, improved, youthful look was. For half a minute there was silence, and a couple of awkward glances were exchanged between my ex-colleagues. Then they explained that while working for me, they had been pushed so hard that they had no time to go to the gym and ended up spending twelve hours of the day working. Because they used to spend so much time under pressure in the office, they would end up consuming endless amounts of tea and coffee (which in India is inevitably heavily sugared), while snacking and smoking alongside. The result was expanding waistlines and falling levels of energy, even as I, blissfully unaware of all this, ramped up the pressure to deliver.

After getting this download from my ex-colleagues, I lost my appetite for dinner that evening. I proceeded to congratulate the newlyweds and then headed home to contemplate what my hard-charging management style had done to able men and women in the prime of their careers. Speaking to Ana in the months and years that followed, the realization dawned on me that pushing people relentlessly rarely results in positive outcomes. There will be times when the Titanic is going down, and in a ‘fight or flight’ scenario, you have to ramp up the adrenaline rapidly to help your colleagues and yourself, but such circumstances should be the exception rather than the norm. In fact, if such circumstances are the norm and you are fighting fires every day, then there is something seriously wrong with your business and beating up the team isn’t going to solve it.” – Ana Lueneburger & Saurabh Mukherjea, ‘Unfiltered’, pg 132

So if beating up your team isn’t going to solve your business’s problems, what will? In tough, highly competitive industries, why will smart young women & men in the prime of their lives work hard for me day-after-day? As I tried to answer this question my mind went to back to what I had learnt from Asian Paints’ promoter, Jalaj Dani, whilst writing ‘The Unusual Billionaires’ in 2015:

“…senior employees are looked after well. Once an employee spends ten to fifteen years with Asian Paints, his relationships with the promoter families and senior management professionals become extremely strong. Thereafter, the organization will intervene to help the employee’s family for any need in his personal life. Some examples of such interventions I came across in our interactions with some current and former senior employees of Asian Paints include ensuring the best quality of healthcare support when an employee or his family member encounters debilitating illness, and taking care of the well-being of employees’ family members during any emergency situation.

As Jalaj Dani told me, ‘It’s about the feeling of being a family. From funerals to weddings to attending other personal events—it’s the sensibility of being sensitive about it.’ Hoon adds, ‘I once asked Choksey why Asian Paints does not pay the managers well. He answered that whilst we are the best paymasters to salesmen, clerks and labourers, we don’t need to pay the managers very highly. When I bring these boys from business schools, there is a price that they have to pay to get experience here. I know some of them will leave after getting trained because they will be offered a better salary within the first three to five years of joining. But those who will remain with me over the longer term will be looked after well by the organization on all fronts.’…

“Relationships with dealers built through nontransactional initiatives: The company’s relationships with its dealers have been built over decades. These deep-rooted relationships go beyond its stellar IT systems that make dealers’ lives easier. Several dealers have told us that Asian Paints has gone beyond its call of duty to help its channel partners should they face any unexpected problems. As Jalaj Dani told me, ‘Dealers are part of our family. If we find that they are affected due to unforeseen events such as riots, floods, earthquakes, etc., we ensure that the best support is provided to them in every possible manner, including extending the credit period, so as to help them get back on their feet.’” – The Unusual Billionaires , pg 53

Living & working in India is far tougher than doing the same thing in the West. Hence one of the things that I have learnt to avoid is read Western books on management by hard-charging alpha males like Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, and Donald Trump and apply that to India. What helps motivate talented, committed Indian professionals is empathy, skilling, and a support system both inside and outside the office. To the extent our modest resources in Marcellus allow us to do so, we try our best to look after people. Whenever I have forgotten this simple mantra, I have paid for it dearly.

Someone who understands how to manage talented Indian professionals far better than me is India’s former World Cup winning captain, MS Dhoni. Repeatedly in his career – both for India and for Chennai Super Kings – Dhoni built a core team of players he had faith in and then stuck with them – through victory and defeat – for years on end. The result is evident both quantitatively and qualitatively.

When Dhoni was at the peak of his powers as India captain (2007-14) the Indian cricket team displayed energy, camaraderie and confidence. They were helped by Dhoni’s repeated pronouncements that he preferred to focus on process and on the variables he could control rather than obsessing about performance (i.e., the end result). Team members began to trust each other more and ended up performing better in crunch situations than they would have otherwise done. Remember, Joginder Sharma’s famous last over to Pakistan’s Misbah-ul-Haq in the T20 World Cup Final in South Africa in 2007.

In Bharat Sundaresan’s blockbuster bestseller, ‘The Dhoni Touch: Unravelling the Enigma that is MS Dhoni’, Joginder Sharma’s climactic over in the 2007 World Cup is covered in detail and if you read the detail, it becomes why in high pressure societies humane, clear-headed leaders are able to thrive:

“Dhoni’s decision to give Joginder Sharma the final over of the World T20 final, with Misbah-ul-Haq on strike, is always used to illustrate his ingenuity. That decision has been well highlighted over the years. It was a calculated gamble based on the skills that the Haryana medium-pacer had displayed in the nets. It was also, says [Kiran] More, an instance of the unique Dhoni skill to match real-life situations with cricket.

‘Often in life, the best person to go to in a desperate scenario is one who has nothing to lose. Joginder fit the bill perfectly, and all he wanted to hear was his captain say that he trusted him,’ says More. Dhoni himself has often spoken about his captaincy as being based around gut-feel and using the experiences he’s had in life. There are enough instances of those to fill up another book. How about the cheeky tactics he suggests to bowlers like untying and tying their shoelaces in the last over of an innings, especially in a run chase, to play with the batsman’s mind and ruin their momentum.

‘He has more confidence in his decisions than most of us normal people. All decisions he takes himself, and has had nobody to blame if they haven’t worked out. He’s never scared of taking a decision,’ says Chittu [aka Seemant Lohani, childhood friend of Dhoni].”– Bharat Sundaresan, ‘The Dhoni Touch: Unravelling the Enigma that is Mahendra Singh Dhoni’ (p. 114). Penguin Random House India Private Limited. Kindle Edition. Insertions in square brackets are ours.

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.