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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  How to find your ‘shape’
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How to find your ‘shape’

On building a career around the activities you enjoy the most, and refiring at the end of a 48-year stint in the corporate world

R. Gopalakrishnan. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/MintPremium
R. Gopalakrishnan. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint

PUNE :

R. Gopalakrishnan, non-executive director of Tata Sons, the promoter of major operating companies of the Tata group, was in the Capital last month to speak at the Times LitFest Delhi.

We caught up with him at the Tata directors’ bungalow on Prithviraj Road to talk about his new book, Six Lenses: Vignettes Of Success, Career And Relationships. Edited excerpts from the interview:

What is the basic premise of your book?

If I were to make an elevator pitch on what this book is about, I would give three points:

u Each person tries to understand people through the experiences they have had;

u There is no reality, only your perception of reality; and

u There are seven billion people in the world. Everyone is born like a smooth shiny pebble. By the time we are five years old, 10 years old and so on, our experiences make indentations on our surface. That’s why each of us has a different “shape", even when we have similar backgrounds.

What do I mean by shape?

Metaphorically, I think of the world as a blue sky where each one of the seven billion people on Earth has an emotional garage. It’s where they find job satisfaction and fulfilment in relationships. We are each looking for the emotional garage that bears our shape. Some of us have found it. Some of us are still looking around.

How does one look for one’s shape?

You try different things. It might take four-five attempts, or it might just take one. But once you find your shape, you just know it. One thing I advise young people to do is to find out what they enjoy best and try to find a way to make money doing that.

People say management is like a science. But I think it’s more like the performing arts. In science, you do something 100 times and it gives you the exact same result 100 times. That’s not how it is in the performing arts or sports. Each time Roger Federer goes on court, it’s a different game. Without getting esoteric, I wanted to draw lessons that are not philosophical but practical. There are several business book categories:

u Where someone tells you how they set up a company, usually with a photograph of the person on the cover. This is not that type of book.

u Where someone else writes about a Steve Jobs or a Jack Welch—well-known people, celebrities. Many of these are good books; and I have read quite a few.

u A book of techniques, where the writer talks about a problem they had in their company and how they solved it. They offer that solution as if it were a Brahmastra (a weapon) that will work for readers too.

My book is not about celebrities. It is about people like us, PLUs. People like my friend Nihal Kaviratne, Jamshed Irani and my wife Geeta—full disclosure: She is my wife, but I interviewed her with pen and paper in hand. Geeta is an ideas person, and she chooses to put those ideas into fund-raising (for cancer patients at the Tata Medical Center). If I asked her to write about her experiences, she wouldn’t want to. Just as I would hesitate to ask someone for money, even if it is not for myself but for an external cause. We have each found our shape, the things we enjoy doing.

When Sachin Tendulkar writes about his life, a large part of it has to do with cricket. My rangmanch (stage) is business.

Tell us about the title of the book.

Success is defined by meeting the standards other people set for you: a house, a car, a job. To me, fulfilment is the other side of the same coin. You need to find out what’s important to you in life, and strive to achieve that. When I go to an optician, he makes adjustments to the lens that are just right for me. I can’t wear your glasses and you can’t make do with mine. You have to find out what’s right for you, you have to find your own fulfilment.

The six lenses (purpose, authenticity, courage, trust, luck, and fulfilment) help you do that.

But you don’t always enjoy life—or work.

No. But everything depends on your perspective. You could learn to enjoy selling Dalda to kirana (grocery) shops. You could say your job is to go to 30 lalajis through the day and sell Dalda to them. It’s factually correct. Or you could focus my lens on the story each kirana-shop owner has to tell. I learnt to enjoy it.

Young people also make a big thing about work-life balance. I don’t think it’s a balance; you have to maximize both.

How does this apply to entrepreneurs?

I often mentor start-up founders now. I was at an e-commerce start-up conference in Hong Kong recently where I made the point that it sounds like a dream to build a billion-dollar company, what they call a unicorn. But a start-up is like having a child at home. Children will crap and they will have to be changed. Similarly, things will fall apart in a start-up and you’ll have to clean up the mess. The same start-up will grow into an adolescent and then a grown-up. An entrepreneur has made a conscious decision to start up. They have to be ready to deal with the mess.

Would you say that you have found your shape?

Different things work for different people. Some people get satisfaction out of working with children who have cancer, others teach slum children because they enjoy it. Those things are not for me, not because I don’t care—I would happily write a cheque (for these causes), but they are not the things I enjoy doing most. We each need to choose a path in life that best expresses us.

Even when I was a student at the St Xavier’s College in Kolkata in the 1960s, I enjoyed teaching. I would teach slum children from 6-8pm. I was a reasonably good student, so my professors encouraged it too. I was teaching foreign trade in Bombay University in the 1980s, even after joining Unilever. I must have given a hundred keynote addresses at (professional) colleges. I do these things because I enjoy them.

Through 48 years of my corporate career, I have been doing four things: writing, advising, speaking and teaching. I tell people I am not retiring; I am refiring. I am creating something called Mindworks, which will be built around these four activities I enjoy.

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Published: 20 Dec 2015, 04:21 PM IST
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