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Happiness is not a destination, it is
in fact, a companion along the journey of life. In his
speech on IIT-Mumbai's Foundation Day, R. Gopalakrishnan*
shares some insights on how to build and sustain a successful
career
Every
human being, every organisation is preparing for the
future all the time. Some try to anticipate it, some
prepare for every contingency, and most do a bit of
both. One thing is for sure: the future is not going
to be what it is supposed to be! The Indian institutes
of Technology (IITs) are preparing for a stronger R&D
focus. The students are preparing for a whole new professional
future. Most of my speech is directed to my young friends,
but a few comments first about our great institution.
Cumulatively, the IITs have turned
out 125,000 graduates and postgraduates of whom a third
are estimated to be overseas. IIT has become a powerful,
globally recognised brand with huge connotations of
excellence, merit and raising the bar. Such success
has come due to exceptionally professional standards
maintained for entry and a very high standard of pedagogy.
Let us pay tribute to our professors and directors over
half a century because they have created an island of
world-class excellence within a society which has evolved
on connections and favours.
In 1994, Peter Drucker wrote
a seminal paper called The Theory of the Business. He
argued that every organisation is built and run on a
set of assumptions about markets, customers, competitors,
value perception and so on. When those assumptions are
in harmony with the external reality there are conditions
for growth and success. When there is a mismatch, the
seeds of crisis are sown. The IITs have had a terrific
theory of the business, otherwise such huge success
would not have been achieved.
It has been proposed that in
the years ahead the IITs will be renewed in their purpose
by revisiting their theory of business, by recalibrating
the assumptions to match the new and emerging external
realities. We wish the IIT leadership all possible success
in this delicate, long-term change that is about to
be accelerated. For example, I have seen a paper by
Prof. Pankaj Jalote of IIT, Kanpur, where he has correctly
articulated changes to faculty appraisal needed to better
manage the faculty resources of the IITs, as they are
the key assets for doing R&D. He argues the case
for performance appraisal against pre-set goals, differential
rewards for high achievers etc. Coming from the corporate
sector, I cannot but agree with him, though I do recognize
the delicate nature of implementing such an essential
change. And this is only one example of the many changes
required at IITs as they adjust to a new theory of their
business.
I would like to share five
lessons with the young students about the professional
life that opens out ahead of them.
1. Become doers: endeavour
and action lead to prosperity
Certain ideas seem to have gripped popular imagination.
For example, that there is a pathway to quick riches
and the challenge is to somehow find that pathway, or
that rags to riches is very romantic, and such instant
gratification must be pursued at any cost. Or that thinking
jobs like strategy, consulting and design are somehow
superior to jobs like implementation and operations,
and so on.
IIT Kharagpur's motto,
Yoga Karmasu Koushalam, teaches a different lesson.
There is no substitute for endeavour and action in enhancing
prosperity and wealth. It is easier to know what needs
to be done than to actually do it. For example, the
power sector in our country which is in a crisis. At
independence, India generated 1,000 MW of power, today
it generates 100,000 MW. It costs Rs 3 per unit to produce
power, but the producer realises only Rs 2 per unit.
Revenue is lost through political largesse, through
theft and through inefficiency. Everybody knows how
to solve the problem, but the endeavour and action required
to implement solutions is missing. It takes intelligence
to think differently, but it takes courage to act on
that intelligence.
2. Challenge yourself
constantly: assumptions and context influence vision
Under a certain frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum,
and I look the way I am. Under another frequency eg.
X-rays, you get a Roentgen view of me. I am the same,
but you perceive me very, very differently.
Until his dying day in
1601, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe believed that the
sun and all other stars revolved around the earth. It
wasn't that he lacked the data to understand the error
of his thinking; in fact, it was Tycho Brahe's data
that his German assistant, Johannes Kepler, used later
to develop the current view of the solar system. The
devil was in Tycho Brahe's wrong assumptions on the
environment, so all his analysis too was wrong. So,
you need to have some way to constantly question your
assumptions.
Engineers in particular
abhor ambiguity or grey, they tend to categorise things
as black or white, good or bad, true or false. On the
other hand, nature revels in grey. For example, engineers
are trained to suppress turbulence in propulsion systems;
for them, the shortest distance between two points is
an efficient straight line. Nature leverages turbulence.
For example, a wisp of smoke does not travel upwards
in a straight line. Neither does blood flow in a straight
path in your veins, nor the sap in a tree. They all
travel in a logarithmic spiral. Engineers are beginning
to learn from such observations, which challenge their
traditional assumptions.
American novelist, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, observed that the test of a first-rate mind
is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the
same time while still retaining the ability to function.
So you need to train your mind to suspend its existing
set of assumptions to allow another set to also enter.
Aristotle noted that carpenters who wish to straighten
a warped board don't just put it in a jig that holds
it straight; rather they put it in a jig that bends
it in the opposite direction. We too must bend our minds
in opposite ways to be able to constantly challenge
ourselves in our context and assumptions.
3. Broaden yourself:
technologists are enhanced by social studies
I used to think that science begat technology which
in turn triggered social change. For example, scientists
understood solid-state physics, engineers developed
transistors and incorporated them into radios and televisions,
and these triggered social change. Only partly true.
It is not a linear or sequential process, there are
feedback loops and complex interplays. My experience
has taught me that the social systems influence the
exploitation of science and technology. The idea among
engineers that social studies are somehow an inferior
subject of study is flawed.
Science is concerned with
understanding the natural world. Its power has in the
concept of falsification, i.e. any scientific theory
is good till there is experimental evidence to the contrary.
For example, in 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann
announced that they had succeeded in producing nuclear
fusion at room temperature. Its acceptance lasted only
a few months as scientists found that the experiment
was not replicable. Scientific opinion turned against
cold fusion and the two scientists were greatly embarrassed
and shamed.
Technology is the means
to exploit the natural world. It predates the birth
of science by centuries. Clubs, axes, textile fabrics,
bronze and iron, all are technologies that were developed
by trial and error. Bronze was made by mixing three
parts of molten copper with one part of molten tin without
understanding the science behind it. In fact, science
and technology developed on near-parallel and independent
lines until 200 years ago. Thomas Edison, a most prolific
inventor, was openly contemptuous of scientists. The
near parallel lines met because the cause-and-effect
discipline of science actually delivered new technologies
that the traditional trial and error method could not
have — for example, the development of the transistor
in the late 1940s at Bell Labs.
Social studies are about
how people and society work, and about navigating the
waters of social intercourse to our advantage. Economics
and psychology belong here as indeed does management.
Sigmund Freud proposed his theory of interpretation
of dreams, a social study. His supporters presented
it as a sort of science, but it could not be subject
to falsification by experiments. It remained "true"
until new developments in psychotropic drugs helped
to challenge it. Likewise with management mantras —
the rules of success are true until they cease to be
successful.
4. Work incessantly:
beware of success because it destroys
All of us work diligently and hard in order to get success
and happiness. But it is quite often the case that once
we have got success and happiness, we do not know what
to do with them. The question then arises: should all
of us be working for happiness or with happiness? Happiness
is not the goal of our journey, it is our companion.
Aristotle said that whom
the Gods want to destroy, they first send 40 years of
prosperity. It is well proven from the history of men
that success (prosperity and happiness) leads to complacency
which leads to decline. That is why one must be most
alert and watchful at the peak of success.
The Greeks have this story
of Icarus and his father, Daedilus. The father was a
creative engineer who acquired great fame. He and his
son, Icarus, were failed after Daedilus helped the daughter
of Minos, the ruler, to elope with her lover. In his
incarceration, Daedilus hit upon the ingenious idea
of assembling a large wing with feathers held together
by candle wax. By attaching such wings to himself and
Icarus, they were both able to fly out of the open sky
jail in a dramatic escape. Icarus was so excited by
this success that he flew higher and higher towards
the sun until the heat of the sun melted the wax and
poor Icarus fell to his doom. That is why the idea "beware
of success" has been around for hundreds of years.
The mental model in our
mind is of success being like a space station, a destination
to which we can travel through hard work. In reality,
the mere approach to that space station changes the
trajectory of our space shuttle leading to uncertainty
all over again. In the completely unrelated field of
atomic physics, Werner Heisenberg propounded his Principle
of Uncertainty for which he got the Nobel Prize in 1932.
He said that to "see" the position of an electron,
the physicist bombards photons on to the moving electron
and this causes a change in the speed of the electron.
Therefore, the position and speed of an electron cannot
be determined simultaneously. In the same way, the position
and speed of the space station 'success' cannot be simultaneously
determined. Alertness and incessant work alone can be
the true companions of that traveler.
5. Be passionate about
your health
It is in the first 10 years after the work career begins
that the greatest neglect of youthful health begins.
Sportsmen stop playing sports, teetotalers drink alcohol,
non-smokers smoke, active people sit on chairs, starving
hostel inmates eat rich food and so on. These early
years are the ones to watch. There is the danger of
convincing oneself that one has not access to clubs
/ facilities or worse still, one has not enough time
to do right things about health care due to the stresses
of a career.
It is true that a managerial
career can be very stressful but equally true that only
one person can save you from the doctor's scalpel, i.e.
yourself. You have the health you have like a starting
balance in the bank. Grow it, maintain it, but do not
destroy it. The penalty is very high in later years.
A related point is about
good sleep. Neuro-scientists postulate that some brain
cells work at night and are dormant during the day.
That is perhaps why we sometimes say, "Let us sleep
over the problem tonight and discuss it again tomorrow",
in the hope there might be new insight on the next day.
If you sleep well every night, you are in danger of
being called smug or complacent. If you cannot sleep
well on many nights, you are called an insomniac. I
have a formula: if you lose sleep a bit on two nights
a month it is probably a good balance between stretching
to your full potential and working below your potential.
During your career you
will face problems and issues, potentially sleep-disturbing,
and whose roots lies in moral science. You need to resolve
moral and ethics issues squarely and by yourself. Once
you slip against your own ethical values, the descent
is rapid. It is just not worth it.
*Speech by R.Gopalakrishnan, executive
director, Tata Sons, at IIT-Bombay Foundation Day on
March 10, 2003.
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Uploaded on January 31, 2006
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