Acting out innovation

Strategic Management in the Art of Theatre (SMART) has been conceived and is run by a core team under the aegis of the India Theatre Forum, and managed by Junoon Theatre and India Foundation for the Arts. Pronoti Datta moderates this conversation between RAJEEV DUBEY,group president HR and corporate services and CEO, aftermarket sector, at the Mahindra group,and SANJNA KAPOOR, co-founder of Junoon and SMART,on how theatre breeds innovation
 
Pronoti Datta: You’ve done a lot of theatre. How do you think training in the arts at a professional or amateur level improves the workforce?
 
Rajeev Dubey: My involvement in theatre enabled me to connect very deeply with my self in many fundamental ways. Two, it gave me the ability to be here and now which I think is really important as you go forward in life. And it gave me a lot of confidence in myself and the ability to communicate. When you put all these things together it becomes almost like a training for life. And innovation. Theatre is the mother font for innovation and innovation is the mother font for all business.

 

Sanjna Kapoor: It’s actually very interesting, because Mahindra & Mahindra has had a focused articulation of culture within the organisation over the last few years.
 
Dubey: Yes, that is what we call the Rise culture. We are trying to create out-performing businesses and a culture of innovation on the basis of three views of the world; accept no limits,alternative thinking and drive positive change. And these three views of the world are brought to the everyday life of the company if leaders display the following behaviours. Number one, using the whole mind where you combine the left brain of logic, intellect, rationality with the right brain of intuition, connection, empathy. Number two, we want leaders to be multipliers of energy, ownership, empowerment and engagement that comes if you are not the command and control type. Third we want people who know how to manage fear and leverage failure. Because if you want innovation you have to take risks. Risk involves overcoming fear.

 
Datta: This is something with which theatrewallahs are familiar.
 
Dubey: Yes they are doing it all the time. It’s not only important to take risks but you know that there will be failure many times. How do you leverage the learning from failure?
 
Kapoor: This is the first day and a half of provocation that we do at SMART. We are looking at a culture of approach to your work. The fact is that you exist in an environment which has no infrastructure.But it’s this sheer determination and belief that brings you to being. Now how is it that we can empower ourselves with certain skills and learnings to really achieve our goals?

 
Dubey: Now theatre is also finding its way into a lot of learning and development. They are using theatre in plenty of business school curricula.If you look at the origins of META (Mahindra Excellence for Theatre Awards), we said that we look upon theatre as the mother font for innovation and by promoting theatre especially at the grassroots level out there in the non-metro areas, we are really doing our little bit to promote something which will be crucial for India.
 
Datta:  A lot of your patronage is culture patronage. You do the Mahindra Blues Festival, there’s META. So culture is obviously something that’s taken seriously by the organisation.

 
Dubey: By culture we mean the way we behave in everyday life, especially as we go about taking business decisions. Things which are thought to be ‘soft’ and things which some people believe reside in poetry and philosophy. What we realise is business is as much about poetry and philosophy as it is about hardcore implementation and money.
Kapoor: You have also spoken about building a culture of inclusiveness.
 
Dubey: There are really two ways of inclusiveness. One is how we interact with community. For us community interaction is morally the right thing to do. Because if we take from society we must also give back. That by itself would have been a good enough reason but we see some powerful business advantages. When  we interact with community, we get to know about unmet needs, under-served customers, under-penetrated markets.

 
Datta:  How to make theatre financially sustainable so that you don’t have to depend on patronage is a challenge.
 
Kapoor: Yes, I think that is a hugely uncharted area. Every single business house in India says there is no infrastructure and if you look at us we are working with negative infrastructure. For us, I would say when we mean inclusiveness we need to broker an engagement whether it’s with government policies or whether it’s making friends with people to understand what CSR can do in our world. We don’t always have to go out there with begging bowls but we do need support. No country in the world has the richness that we have. What we need in theatre is a marrying of possibilities, which moves (theatre) away from the patronage of the old. We do need to sustain and keep alive some of our rich traditions which need that support but we also need to create enabling structures that allow us to really thrive.