Review of ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins

Jim Collins is a teacher and researcher based in Boulder, Colorado. Five years ago he coauthored an international bestseller called ‘Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies’ with Jerry Porras. In it the authors identified 18 visionary companies and set out to determine what is special about them. All the companies were at least 50 years old, very famous and had outstanding track records. Their brand images were the best.

Collins and Porras compared these companies with 18 second rank ones who were successful nevertheless but who never quite became great. Walt Disney Productions for instance was compared to Columbia Motion Pictures. The authors instantly exploded the myth that these great companies all started off with great products and/or charismatic leaders. In fact most of the visionary companies did not fit into that model. The writers’ study led them to an interesting observation. This was an adherence to a core ideology, an active indoctrination of the employees in to an ideological commitment to the company.

Built To Last is no doubt a great book, but as Bill Meehan, the MD of McKinsey’s San Francisco office told Collins, ‘unfortunately it is useless’. Bill’s reasoning was that the companies written about in this book were great anyway and they never had to do an effort to turn themselves into great, from good. This inspired Jim Collins to undertake a research, which eventually took five long years. The result was an astounding bestseller, appropriately named ‘Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap …And Others Don”t’ which came out in ’01. The book still sells like hot cakes.

The highlight of this work is its insistence on data – tons and tons of data were unearthed on all the 28 companies featured in the book. Collins and his team of researchers sieved through 1435 companies and finally narrowed it down to a list of 11. The companies are Fannie Mae, Walgreens, Wells Fargo, Pitney Bowes, Philip Morris, Kimberly-Clark, Circuit City, Abbot Labs, Gillette, Kroger and Nucor. They have 11 direct comparisons and 6 unsustained comparisons in the book.
There were thousands of pages of interviews with key people that also contributed to the study. All the good-to-great companies, it was found, had a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted people to think in a disciplined manner. People did not matter so much as ‘right people’. In other words, people are not a company’s greatest assets, the right people are. It also meant that to ensure the company’s health it needed to periodically get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off it. The benchmarks on which the identification was made was not lenient by any yardstick – all 11 of the companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck!

According to Collins, ‘some of the key concepts discerned in the study fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.’ That is a fair enough assessment when we consider what the conclusions are. In a concise manner they encompass critical areas of management strategy and practice. In summary,
• Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
• The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
• A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results.
• Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
Good To Great should have been written before Built To Last. In many ways the former is a prequel to the latter. G2G is an eminently enjoyable read for anyone, and certainly so for industry folks.

(Jan 05)

Review of movie ‘Mangal Pandey: The Rising’ by Ketan Mehta

My own Ketan Mehta favorite is the 1980 work Bhavni Bhavai. Mehta’s most celebrated work may have been the later opus, Mirch Masala (1986). Both of these had Naseer Shah, Om Puri and Smita Patil in key roles.

Now in 2005, as the maturity of a committed craftsman in Mehta reaches its pinnacle with The Rising, only Om Puri from that crew remains – that too as a mere voice over. Anyway in the works of serious filmmakers, actors are incidental and so I will not harp much on the impact of Aamir Khan playing the lead in this movie.

One cannot deny that the talented Khan’s comeback after four years of hibernation, combined with a carpet-bombing marketing strategy (after heavy hyping, the movie is simultaneously released in as many cinemas as possible, to rake in maximum moolah before the junta could spread an opinion around) must have saved this film from the fate of a similar historical that bombed recently, Benegal’s Bose – The Forgotten Hero.

But let me leave hype aside and view the film on its merit. Assisted by an international unit, Mehta furthers the globalization agenda set forth by Shekhar Kapur some years back by matching up to the best of Hollywood in directorial merit.

The jarring notes are the songs, literally and figuratively. A Marathi model for a wet nurse and Amisha Patel in a role that reeks of tokenism, are incongruous caricatures in an otherwise ok cast. Also the Rani Mukherjee character ended up being superfluous. Channel Four’s Farrukh Dhondy who scripted the film may take the flak here. The likes of A R Rahman are better kept off such biopics. Classical fare, a la the Pandit Ravi Shankar score for Gandhi would have made more sense in an epic like this.

The vidooshak-like ‘achoot’ (untouchable) with his ubiquitous broom is evocative of the folklorish Bhavai. (The sutradar was deftly employed by Mehta many years ago through Raghuvir Yadav in Maya Memsab as well). The sets and costumes are a labor of love. The tension is sustained commendably well. It is debatable if the film is about Mangal Pandey’s heroics or his special relationship with Captain William Gordon, bhang and all.

The treatment of the latter is subtly handled and in the bargain the Tatya Tope/ Nana Saheb axis angle gets sidelined. Anyway one can rate this movie high. If The Rising helps bring about an attitude shift among desi viewers toward historicals, it would have achieved something indeed.

Tailpiece: Closer home, the picture is not rosy either. The last time they made a quality historical in Malayalam (Elavankod Desam), it proved to be such a disaster that the producer took the director (K.G. George) to court for damages.

(Nov 05)

Review of ‘The Argumentative Indian’ by Amartya Sen

India’s only surviving Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is a man of many parts. The great Indian litterateur and nationalist Rabindranath Tagore once wrote of Gandhi, ‘Great as he is as a politician, as an organizer, as a leader of men, as a moral reformer, he is greater than all these as a man, because none of these aspects and activities limit his humanity. They are rather inspired and sustained by it’. To a large extent Sen’s personality can be encapsulated in that statement. He is no politician or moral reformer though but an economist and social reformer of the first order. Sen’s agenda has always been much higher than that of an armchair economics messiah evangelizing market mantras or conjuring up capitalist abracadabra. Instead what he does is focus his energies on creating practical solutions to alleviate poverty and suffering in the planet he inhabits. His seminal works like ‘Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation’ ‘Rationality and Freedom’, ‘Commodities and Capabilities’ and ‘Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny’, people in the know contend, bring forth the magnanimity of this vision, the epic span of his world-view.

Amartya Sen was born in 1933 in Santiniketan, the University town identified with Tagore. The latter was a close friend of Sen’s maternal grandfather who taught Sanskrit there. So Tagore it was who named the baby Amartya meaning immortal – a rare instance of one Nobel Laureate naming another, that too in a country where number of this prize’s winners can be counted on the fingers of one’s hand. He was schooled in Viswa Bharati, Presidency College, Delhi School of Economics and Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught Economics at Kolkota, Delhi, Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. He is currently Lamont University Professor at Harvard. He received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 and the Bharat Ratna the next year. He has had no less than 53 honorary degrees conferred on him. Sen’s first wife Nabneeta Deb is a Bangla poet and Professor of Humanities at MIT. Their daughters are Antara (who edits The Little Magazine and writes a column in The Week) and Nandana (and actress and film maker based in NY). After parting with Nabneeta, Sen married an Italian called Eva Colorni who died of cancer in ’85 and with whom he had sired two children, Indrani (a journalist in NY) and Kabir (who teaches music in Boston). His present wife is the economic historian Emma Rothschild who is a Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge and an expert on Adam Smith.

As a child Sen was witness to the Great Bengal Famine of 1942 and that has had a huge impact on his later career and thinking. His fight against poverty with analysis than activism earned him the sobriquet of ‘Mother Teresa of Economics’. Sen is a scholar who is held in equally high regard by theoretical, empirical and policy economists as well as by philosophers and political theorists. One can add ‘cultural enthusiasts’ to that fans’ list, thanks to a book he wrote last year titled ‘The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History , Culture and Identity’.

The Guardian newspaper of London writes that there can be few people better equipped than Sen to write about India and the Indian identity, especially at a time when the stereotype of India as a land of exoticism and mysticism is being replaced by the stereotype of India as the back office of the world. Sen sure breaks those stereotypes and he does it resoundingly. In his expounding of the Indian socio-economic-cultural paradigms, he comes through as a cross between Shashi Tharoor and Gurcharan Das. One characteristic he shares with those writers is a scorn for the twisted logic of religious fundamentalists that make them give their own preferred flavor to history and geography. The collection of sixteen essays in this book includes two on the pillars of Bengali and Indian renaissance, Tagore and Satyajit Ray. This is only natural. The book takes it name from the first essay, where the author closely examines India’s rich heritage of heterodoxy and argumentative traditions of public discourse. Sen argues that India’s genius stems from stems from its diversity, from the way that its different orthodoxies have always been challenged. Indians have always had a habit of asking difficult questions. They also like to speak, often at length. India’s ancient epics are the longest poems ever composed, while an Indian delivered the longest speech at the UN. Sen has a subtle point when he says: In India during the 16th century, Mughal emperor Akbar was declaring that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him’ at a time when most of Europe was burning under the Inquisition. In Press conferences across Delhi’s intellectual circles, Sen is the only person who addresses our PM as ‘Manmohan’. The warm association between the two economists goes back to almost half a century.

The Argumentative Indian is undoubtedly a laudable achievement. It is an elegant product of one of the most distinguished minds of our time.

(Feb 06)

Review of ‘Out of My Comfort Zone’ by Steve Waugh

With the Ashes series around the corner and tickets for the traditional Boxing Day Test match already sold out here in Melbourne, I took to indulging some cricket nostalgia.

Many years ago, in the 1984-‘85 season to be precise, the University stadium in Trivandrum was witness to a historic moment in Kerala’s sporting history. The touring Australian cricket team had come down to the city to play India in what was to be the first one-day international on Kerala’s soil. Torrential rains in the afternoon meant that the match had to be abandoned after only nine overs of the Aussie reply to India’s 177 in 40 overs. Within an year of that event, most of that team from Down Under save some like Alan Border were gone, having signed up for county matches in the then apartheid-ridden South Africa. Few returned from the mandatory ban and this aftermath period was one of conflict, self-doubt and much churn in Australian cricket. Hardly a couple of years from then and the Kangaroos had given the world a preview of things to come by winning the Reliance World Cup in Kolkota in style. They have not looked back since.

Some of the above events had had a significant part to play in the life of Stephen Rodger Waugh, the eldest of four boys born forty one years ago to a banker and his wife in Panania, New South Wales. Waugh was a shy, ordinary bloke with limited talent. He was nevertheless passionate about soccer and cricket from a young age. One of the characteristics about Waugh that attracted me as a cricket enthusiast was this ‘Simple Simon’ aspect of his. He was no genius like Sachin Tendulkar or Martin Crowe, to take two contemporary examples. For the initial period he even struggled for his place in the Test eleven. How did this cricketer take off from such a tentative position to reach where he eventually did – at the pinnacle of world cricket? His Test record reads 10,000 runs, 32 centuries, 10 nineties, an average of above 50 and a remarkable captaincy that saw a 16 match winning streak (which ended with V.V.S. Laxman drawing the rekha). He played a record 168 Tests, 86 of them victoriously! In ODI he led the Aussies to the ‘99 World Cup triumph at the Mecca of cricket, Lord’s. He was an agile fielder and quite handy as a stock bowler. If all these were not enough, he also managed to carry out charity work in Kolkota, starting a home called Udayan for the children of lepers. Waugh’s 750 page tome of an autobiography titled Out of My Comfort Zone, tells us that sagacious story, straight from the heart. Before and after Waugh, cricketing books – biographies and autobiographies, authorised and unauthorised – have been inflicted on us by the cartloads. Most of them alternate between pompous ego-trips and drab, thinly-veiled statistics. Waugh’s book is one of the exceptions. It is well-produced, lucid and readable in spite of its forbidding size.

Steve was older to his twin Mark by four minutes. Growing up they had all the problems that such siblings have, including competition among them. Both sweated it out to make it to club, county, state and national teams although Mark clearly was naturally gifted as a batsman. Wife Lynette was a constant source of support and encouragement for Steve throughout his 18 year international career. She not only managed the house with three kids in his absence but also revved him up with the strength to recover from the many lows that a professional cricketer at the highest level is wont to experience. A long time friend like the Melburnian Shane Warne did have his wayward ways in spite of being arguably the greatest bowler that ever took breath on earth. This might have helped Waugh inherit the mantle of captaincy from Mark Taylor even though Warne was vice-captain before him. If we thought sledging was an Australian pastime, well this book informs us that there were others equally good at it. As Waugh took guard in his last Test innings at Sydney in ‘03, the 18 year old Indian keeper Parthiv Patel chirped at him with ‘Let’s finish it off with a slog-sweep’. To this Waugh coolly turned and replied, ‘Listen, mate, how about showing a bit of respect? When I played my first Test, you were still running around in nappies.’ While this was good fun the ugly brushes had been with the aggressors from the Caribbean. While on an English tour Waugh met Edward de Bono who gave him tips for one day match strategy like not getting out a batsman who was playing slow! While this certainly was lateral thinking, it was also a bit too much to digest for an Aussie with his natural attacking instincts. Former selector Ian Chappell, initially a Waugh-baiter, later came to accept him. Waugh pulls no punches in his mention about the rude and aloof Sourav Ganguly who arrived late for tosses and just walked away by himself after the same. On the other hand the refined Rahul Dravid, who incidentally wrote the foreword to the book, comes out as a friend who was as earnest in his constant quest for knowledge as he was methodical in his batting. One can’t help chuckle at Waugh’s observation that if there is an Olympic medal for staring, the Indian public would win it hands down.

Cricket lovers will adore Steve Waugh’s book for many reasons. While it is motivational reading to understand how much grit and hard work can pay one back, it is also a comprehensive chronicle of the most incredibly successful period in the cricketing history of a nation. Australia rightfully retains its Numero Uno ranking in the game today. One can safely say that none perfectly represents the spirit that made it possible than S.R Waugh, or Tugga as he was popularly known.

(Nov 06)