The first event during the day was Arun Sarin's keynote talk. Arun Sarin is the CEO of Vodafone, which is the largest mobile telecommunications network company in the world. Arun is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur and graduated around three decades ago. Arun spoke broadly on three key topics: leadership, globalization with an emphasis on India and China, and the mobile telecommunications industry.
The main impetus of the talk was leadership, especially in the context of IITians. Arun was of the opinion that most IITians are not realizing their full potential as leaders. Leadership is not merely the recognition that you are better than others and lead them to wherever you are supposed to go, but more importantly, it allows you to bring about fundamental change. Leadership allows you to achieve tangible results without fighting with the intricacies of team work which he described as "holding hands and singing songs".
Arun likes to think of three forms of leaderships but there is a catch - all three forms need to be practiced simultaneously. The three forms are:
- Strategic leadership
- Operational leadership
- People's leadership
Strategic leadership is about tracking change, how the industry is changing, how customers are changing, how suppliers are changing, how technology is changing, how the business landscape (e.g. competitors) are changing. Strategic leadership is about navigating this change with bulk of the organization you are leading behind you. On a side note, I'd strongly recommend Intel's former chairman and CEO Andy Grove's book "Only the paranoid survive" on this topic. Andy also presents strategic management as a method for discovering and adapting to change. Note the emphasis on discovering, as one fundamental argument of the book was that very bright people often don't spot a changing trend because of the inertia associated with day to day work. Anyway, I won't digress any further, just wanted to note how important this aspect of leadership is and all the points Arun mentioned can be found in Andy's book, e.g., the point about how easy it is to lose sight of your goal in day today operations.
Operational leadership.
The most important aspect of this leadership trait is that a leader must produce results everyday. Strategic and people's leadership is good, but to sustain the team spirit, to keep things ticking, you have to keep producing results at a regular pace.
People's leadership.
People's leadership is about connecting with people, making the right contacts, etc. It is about building great teams, attracting and retaining great people, inculcating team spirit in the people who work for you. A good leader sets great vision and goals for his or her team members and guides them to achieve those goals.
Even besides this excellent perspective on leadership, Arun's talk was very inspiring. He is a motivating speaker and has interesting perspectives on many topics. He spoke how he believes China is really going to be a powerhouse, and how India must make some tough decisions, especially in creating infrastructure if it hopes to catch up. He did speak very passionately on Vodafone's acquisition of Hutch Essar for $11.8B and how the deal took less time to be realized than it would have taken in the U.S. However, he did mention how other contenders for Hutch Essar were calling Ministers to unwind the deal even after it was signed and called for better transparency in the system.
Someone from the audience asked Arun the million dollar question about how to leave the comfort zone and take on the risks involved in leadership. We are all no doing too bad anyway as software engineers or whatever else that we do, so is the gamble really worth it? His answer was that you have to come out of the comfort zone to make a difference and achieve your full potential, there are no short cuts. Leave engineering, go to product management, sales and marketing, etc., whatever it takes to get to a position where you can deliver value through leadership. One other talk later in the day discussed how there are ways to mitigate the risk associated with leadership which makes the transition less painful, more on that in a later post. On a side note, a friend once told me that this is not really a gamble, gamble is when a penniless farmer mortgages his farms to buy a shop, that is a real gamble...
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