Steps towards being Deergha Ayush: 7 lessons from famine-era Bengal

All companies periodically undergo turbulent transformation, apart from their continuous adaptation to changing circumstances. Continuous adaptation is a bit like diet control and fitness for an individual while turbulent transformation is a bit like a surgical procedure. The latter is more disruptive for people, and demands a large mindset shift among the key leaders (of the companies). It demands skills essential to survive and prosper for long (Deergha Ayush). I reflect on seven lessons I learnt about managing turbulent transformations. I choose a historical example from my early life; it offers great lessons for corporate transformations. A key ingredient lies in narratives that touch the heart.

 

I was born as a British subject in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1945. Lord Archie Wavell was resident governor general, a battle-scarred general and, interestingly, also a poet! He replaced a prosaic, less charismatic Lord Linlithgow earlier in 1945. While the world was preoccupied with the Second World War, the turmoil in Bengal was famine.

 

I was too young to know anything about all this. When I was eight or nine, I started observing enormous poverty around me, heard stories about the 1943-45 famine and I was struck by teeming crowds of refugees at Sealdah Station. Further, my father would narrate stories of his experiences through his work at a voluntary soup kitchen.

 

As an aside, in my childhood, my parents lived in 9, Elgin Road, opposite the ancestral house of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. The stories of Netaji’s escape from Calcutta — in 1941 — were fuel for youthful gossip, leaving my imagination filled with half-baked stories. Often obsessed with irrelevant facts, as a young person, I even recall the number of the car as BLA 7169 as belonging to the Audi Wanderer in which Bose did part of the journey to Europe!

 

How is all this connected to corporate transformations? The “Head Office” was preoccupied with the war while the “local CEO” stared at the developing famine. Lord Linlithgow had sent a message in 1943, seeking 500,000 tonnes of emergency rice for Bengal, but HO (read Prime Minister Winston Churchill) cited ship availability as the reason for not being able to accommodate the large quantity. Lord Linlithgow dutifully accepted this explanation while the famine continued raging and accelerating.

 

Soon after, he was replaced by Lord Archie Wavell. For security reasons, the word “famine” had been disallowed by the colonial government, and hence general awareness about the famine in the country and the world was very low. An artist, Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, was sent in 1943 by the Communist Party (then undivided) to draw sketches of pathetic, starving people, which were compiled in a book titled Hungry Bengal. The colonial government seized the 5,000 printed copies.

 

The Statesman was then a premium newspaper with a forthright editor called Ian Stephens. He was still around in my early school days. It was said that Stephens, somewhat iconoclastic, would cycle bare-chested to the newspaper office at Esplanade (central Calcutta). He was known for challenging the colonial government. Since the word “famine” had been banned, Stephens sent photographers to capture the effects of the famine since photos were not explicitly banned! By Pujo in 1943, the world was full of photographs and became aware of the gravity of the Bengal famine!

 

Meanwhile, Wavell “took charge”. Within weeks of assuming leadership, he travelled to Midnapore and affected villages. He was appalled by what he saw and experienced. Though he was Churchill’s nominee, he took cudgels for Bengal. He insisted on calling the famine “the worst disaster of the decades of colonialism”, demanded a million tonnes of rice for rural Bengal, and encouraged civil society to start soup kitchens, which is what my father took part in. On a personal note, my family was deeply touched in 1987, the year my father passed away, when we received a eulogy about his dedicated and active role in the soup kitchens of Calcutta!

 

The cost in 1945 was the loss of three million lives. Soon after came the 1947 woes of Partition, further aggravated two decades later by the refugee crisis of the Bangladesh war in 1971. I grew up till adulthood in Bengal, struck that my state was “hotobhaga”, which means hopelessly unfortunate.

 

What are the seven lessons from Archie Wavell relevant for corporate transformation?

 

First, leaders must recognise the existence and urgency of the crisis or problem. Second, they must experience and personally assess the crisis by getting out to the field. Third, they must be courageous enough to speak truth to power. Fourth, they must practise and encourage an action-impelling message of both heart and mind. Fifth, the implementation team must comprise people who are willing to work across organisational structures, viz be “boundary spanners” and not procedure-bound bureaucrats. Sixth, demand from the team an absolute commitment to the cause, which, in the case of the Bengal famine, was to minimise harm rather than to achieve an ideal. Seventh, and finally, do a continuous course correction so that the bigger goal can be achieved.

 

Born in Bengal when the province was ravaged by famine, Partition, poverty, and war, I carried these “heart plus mind” lessons into my professional world of corporate transformations. A passionate colleague, Hrishi Bhattacharyya, and I have coauthored a book titled Embrace the Future: The Soft Science of Business Transformation to exemplify successful transformations in the corporate context.

The writer’s latest book, JAMSETJI Tata: Powerful Learnings for Corporate Success, is coauthored with Harish Bhat. rgopal@themindworks.me