Leaders in their wonder years

The author's discoveries about leadership cannot be called revelatory

WHEN I WAS 25

The Leaders Look Back

Shaili Chopra

Random Business

208 pages; Rs 199

This book is targeted at millennials, that generation born between the late eighties and early nineties, who are “taking risks and starting up”. How many of them can be expected to read this book? Taking education levels (as opposed to bare-bones literacy) and income, the readership is likely to be less than one per cent. Adding the variable of personal inclination in this age group – a marked preference for 140 characters on a smartphone rather than a slim, 208-page book, for instance – would narrow the field even further. 

Those issues may be the publisher’s headache, but there are many other puzzling questions about its decision to publish this book under the “business” imprint. Conventionally, business books demand a degree of rigour and research and, certainly, some sort of framework of analysis. Though the idea behind the book is a good one, the content doesn’t check any of these boxes. 

To start with, we don’t know how the people profiled here were selected. The subtitle, “The leaders look back”, holds a clue of sorts. These chosen ones are all apparently “leaders”, in politics (Jay Panda, Shashi Tharoor, P Chidambaram), media (Uday Shankar, Rajdeep Sardesai), arts (Dimple Kapadia), business (Adi Godrej, K P Singh, Vikram Talwar), law (Zia Mody), banking (Kalpana Morparia) plus Jaggi Vasudev and the designer Sandeep Khosla. Why them and not others?

The author calls them “spectacular achievers” but this is surely a subjective judgement. Overall, you get the impression that she approached many people for interviews and these are the ones who agreed. 

The author’s discoveries about leadership, after she has interviewed these 13 people, cannot be called revelatory. Much of it is the standard Life Coach schtick. To wit: “These fascinating accounts of their lives are not career graphs, they are about how they learnt from their experiences, travel, people, the mistakes they made and how they embraced failure. They show why madness is a necessary ingredient in dreaming big….” 

We can assume that the inspirational element plays a key role in the author’s scheme of things for the aspirational generation. But two things stand out. First, all these achievers/leaders came from relatively affluent backgrounds. Many of India’s upwardly mobile youth are not necessarily so privileged. Would, say, a Dalit entrepreneur or politician not have been worth profiling? Second, e-commerce is bursting with youthful promoters. Yet not one representative from this space figures in this line-up. Not all of them are sub-25 years: Deepinder Goyal (Zomato) and Sachin Bansal (Flipkart), for instance, are relative veterans at over 30 years old. Their experiences would have been more immediate and relevant for the target audience of this book.

That is the question that springs to mind in the piece on Adi Godrej. The chairman of the Godrej group is in his early seventies, which means he came of age in the sixties, which was a very different time in India. Ms Chopra says although he was born in a privileged Parsi industrialist family, he “learnt his skills and values like any common man”. This “common man experience” amounted to working as a bellboy in a US national park where he learnt to live on a shoe-string budget.

Instead of focusing on, say, the lessons of coping with adverse change – Mr Godrej did, after all, cut his managerial teeth in the era when the command and control economy was constricting business opportunities – we get some apple pie statements. Mr Godrej is known to be an unconventional thinker. But in this book he seems to talk only in clichés — “leading from the front,” “mentors are key,” “knowledge is power,” “listen, listen, listen”. This is followed by a grandiosely titled section called “The Leader Speaks,” which is a variation on the same themes. 

Another enduring mystery: Why do people who target young people address them as though they are in Kindergarten?

In the piece on Shashi Tharoor, Ms Chopra writes of his coming of age as the young head of the UN Commission for Refugees. The piece has potential because Mr Tharoor talks about his job managing the rehabilitation of Vietnamese boat people against an unwelcoming Singapore government, balancing humanitarian concerns with hard-headed negotiation. “This incident ignited a spark in Tharoor…. He had become a young leader and felt the need to pursue this path,” Ms Chopra writes. What path? “[A] role that was set to contour the future of countries,” whatever that may mean.   

The best piece in the book is about Jaggi Vasudev, who transformed himself into “Sadhguru”. It’s easy to see why: He has taken charge of this narrative to make his case for spirituality. Anyone who has attended a session by this most perceptive and hard-nosed of men will marvel at his ability to convince the sceptics. He deserves a critical case study all of his own. 

Indeed, it is the uncritical interview technique, in which the authors allows the subjects to dominate the chronicle, that irks most. At most, these profiles work as a series in a general interest magazine. A book is stretching the concept too far.