A summary of the talk delivered by Dr Prasad Kaipa, CEO, Kaipa Group, Campbell, USA at the Leaders Speak series held on 13 September 2007 at Chennai

It’s a great pleasure to talk to this group – for two reasons. One is I had a good fortune of studying in IIT Madras for 5 years. So to be able to come back o the place where you got educated, to be able to offer any pieces of information and know or whatever you picked up along the way, it is a privilege. Second, the MMA has a large reputation and it has become an institution by itself. To be invited to speak in front of its august audience is another privilege for which I am thankful.

What I thought before I start about my presentation, it is large group I cant ask each one to give introduction, but I thought if we could begin with checking some kind of large sense of how many are from senior management of organisation, from middle management layer (where you are neither in the top nor at the bottom but trying to get sometime soon). Now lets move to the industries, what kind of industries you represent. I can pick examples and give something of relevance you - power and refining, legal, IT, chemical, relationship marketing, pest control, communication, media and entertainment, education, automobile, academics, food products, banking. So there is a wide diversity that is present. I appreciate the interest you have. I will try to pick from variety of things as I talk. Let us see if I can touch upon some of them.

Who do you think is the youngest? Is there anyone under 20? We have all the way from 25 years to 70 years. Sometime people say learning ability and interest dies with time. Some of you being here it show that you are interested in learning and looking at what other perspectives are?

I will cover business context for personal leadership and why core incompetence might be an important topic to pay attention to. I will talk about what Vijay Govindarajan sometimes talks about as three boxes of leadership. I want to talk about how those three are connected with the requirement and the necessity for people to learn from within as well as from outside. Then elaborate little bit more on personal leadership and how that can be unleashed much further by discovering where our foot nail to the floor is. By the way core incompetence has not much to do with our in competencies; it actually has to do with our signature strengths. If there are something which you need to read further, I will give you a set of listenings too.

So the business context which all of you are familiar with, I am just naming it to make it present in the room as one context, the world in which you live obviously is changing significantly. Local businesses to regional, national, global, whether it is outsourcing opportunity it is relating to everybody being interconnected in one way or another. Today is my friend’s birthday who is in India. His cousin ordered something from San Diego and the product is made in New York and the regional place was in Europe shipped and delivered here by a local supplier and essentially it showed up today. World is becoming short and interconnected, you can actually order some sweets, whether it is some local Mysore Pak from Chennai or you can get Saravana Bhavan in silicon valley or whether you talk about getting Alphanso mangoes. So what is happening is all these things are no longer locally grown, locally supplied, locally enjoyed. You can get anything from anywhere at anytime. If you want mangoes in thick of winter in January, you can get them in some parts of South America or Australia. So time - place context is gone because of outsourcing and interconnectedness. What is also interesting is, once upon a time we talked about completely automated so that there is no personalization. Now it is completely personalized in a very impersonal way. That’s important for us to begin to know what is happening in terms of the world. And all of these were not thinkable a few years ago. We have been talking in the IT industry sometimes that India has been good in services, but not necessarily good in products. But to a certain extent may be the time for products is passing even in the US. Like right now, MS Office I am using power point, very soon power point might not be a product that you need to buy in a software and load it through a CD ROM into you computer. You will have your own version. Each time you connect to the Net, you might be able to get a software which is equivalent to a power point which will have the latest updates that means you might have to reboot your computer 5 times instead of thrice and you will get it online. Google supplies another stuff without even having any product. You can be connected to the net without any software you need you can download, use and work. You pay per use. Just like you have electricity that comes in, water meter that turns on, you might be able to turn on services which will be like utilities. It can be done in agricultural industry, any kind of automotive or industrial or informational society. It is possible to turn it in to service economy. What kind of service you provide, whether it is quality, customer satisfaction and cost become much more of a limitation, than the availability of a product, distribution, channels, marketing and sales. All have to be rethought in the service economy.

What it also means that role of employees is changing so much that everyone is looking at it and saying we need more self mastery, personal leadership from people. Why? Last week when I was in a conference NIPM one of my friends was telling me, he was sitting with HP VP of one of the Bangalore companies. Secretary comes in and says sorry to disturb meeting I need two minutes of your time. A candidate walks in and says you gave me an offer yesterday, today I have another offer which I need to complete by noon. If you can give me Rs. 5000 more per month and couple of thousands stock, I will sign offer letter. I will give 15 minutes after that cant do it, I will have to go with other company. Let me know about it. This is a 23 year old who is fresh graduate talking to HR - VP. This is something which probably was unthinkable a few years ago. Similarly when you talk about generation X and Y, last month in the US they were talking about how the generation Y, people who are in their 20s or teens, they would like to get recognized once a day. Not once a month, not once a quarter, but once a day for the good work they are doing. So managers are wondering, other than appreciating whether they can do anything else. This is not a joke, if you are not appreciated for more than a week or two weeks, chances are people are saying you are needed in the company then you are gone. If a guy does not come back from lunch break after two PM, you need to get worried you need to check whether there is replacement available. So the idea of loyalty, we did it obviously, a few years ago we told people, it does not matter how long you are in the company, we need to have competence. We are not responsible for your career, you need to manage your own careers. Now it is coming back and hurting the employers saying you did not want loyalty, so don’t come back and say we need more loyalty. So there is a significant shift that is happening.

If I were to frame it from a linear organizational past orientation outside in parts based perspective, things are becoming discontinuous or non linear people focused, it does not matter what organization or industry you are in, the key seems to be the people. It is no longer about the past what you have done. For example, Apple releases a iphone in June for USD 599, 8 GB phone. There were people waiting and bought in the first 60 days. iphone at 600 dollar a piece connected to the hip with one service provider, cannot change sim card, people were willing to buy it. Before even there is competition from outside, Apple drops it price by 200 dollars last week. One third of the price of a brand new product for which there is no competition. By the way by 74th day they have sold one million iphones. A 17 year old kid who decided to find a way to unlock the SIM card so that iphone can be used somewhere else, he happened to get a car, a brand new fancy sports car and 3 iphones and a job so that he can do that. So the idea of what is happening these days and who it is going to be coming from is actually requiring us to change from inside. You cant get anybody else to change, or have organizational leadership role or management role, it is about, am I willing to take a personal leadership to go for what I want, when, where and with whom I want. If you are able to take that lead to create the future that you want, no matter what industry, age, areas of expertise or city that you live in. It is like a buyers market.

When people are the focus, if that is what you have, that also means you can be a victim of circumstances saying nobody recognizes my leadership, nobody gives me promotion, nobody gives me an opportunity to really shine, is one approach. But personal leadership is where you begin to say, I have an opportunity to shine, to challenge myself and demonstrate something when everybody else is struggling and in some respect if you can begin to take personal leadership as something that you are paying attention to, then the opportunities are endless. This is because in some respects businesses are becoming temples. The educational system is no longer providing leadership, social system is changing so much that there is confusion. Who believes in political leaders these days? Religious leaders are having their own difficulties. So what it means is at some level the only system which everybody looked at saying it is only about profit, money and measures, is the system that has become underlying foundation for growth of not only economy but also people development, national development and at some level to a certain extent spiritual development. From that perspective what it means is, you can say if you are in a agricultural industry, fertilizer industry, sometimes extra bodies is what you need to get a job done at times. If you take industrial business that you are in extra bodies means no training necessary, you need to get job done. Whereas extra hands mean we need your skills, which means we will give you training so that there is efficiency. Extra heads became important in intelligent or information economy as we need to put our heads together to come up with a problem solving approach or creativity approach. But right now everybody is interested in how to capture hearts and minds of people. And to do that we have to do innovatively, do it in a predominance way and nobody is going to tell you how, when and what to do. By the time it goes up the ladder and comes down to the person who is actually in contact with the opportunity or customer, things move on.

Like someone was telling me, in PSBs all entrepreneurial people come and ask for loans, and if they was Rs. 3 to 5 crores, sometimes we have to go to the head office and our systems have 5 days, have loan committee meeting, have MD in town. By the time we make the decision they are already gone to ICICI or HDFC or HSBC. They are so dynamic, they will do it. They ask a question how come the same people in PSB keep cribbing about not getting what they want, but are going to private banks and work much longer hours and actually produce remarkable results. Where is personal leadership showing up in business but not necessarily in some other sectors? So the challenges are like a low employee engagement. 20 to 30 percent of employees will provide results and rest of people, some of them are not skilled, not resources or don’t have the attitude. But there are some who are actively working against the organisation. So if you want to increase productivity, if you can turn 70 people who are disengaged, atleast have half of them you can double productivity. For example, Ford Motor company, when they started in Chennai region they realized you cant have all the amenities and facilities for the driver. Here the person who will enjoy them is driver, actually owner sits in the back. Entire rethinking of what Ford Escort was just for India had to be done. They had to customize it for India.
Toyota, the no. 2 auto company in the world, in US they are really playing low key because of upcoming elections. Even though Toyota employs more number of American employees and have American factories. They are still considered to be Japanese company. That means leadership at different levels requires taking on challenges of what this globalization means in a localised way. Same way the executive leadership in organisation percolates into locally are you being a leader. If not what are you waiting for. If you are, are you unleashing your strengths, your core differentiating factors. Why because I think each of us have got a unique DNA. Unique specific way in which we live, we operate , communicate and function. Like I call a Prasad keeps on prasading, wherever I go I will have my way of communicating, laughing and joking. Similarly, each of you have your own. When you come in to the room, people will get energized or when you leave they will get energized. Each of us has a unique way in which we interact with the world. Some of them are signature strengths, some are signature weaknesses. Everybody knows about them most of the times except us. That means whatever got you to this place, whatever signature strength that you have that you count on whenever you get in to trouble to get you out of that trouble, may be that is the one that stops you from going from here to anywhere else in the future. I am suggesting, your biggest strength potentially is your biggest weakness. That is what I call core incompetency.

We have to focus on managing events, managing processes. Managing event is about functionality, managing process is about efficiency, but managing people is about effectiveness. But leading oneself is presence. There is a certain leadership presence. This is becoming powerful concept In US, Peter Sengi and 3 of his colleagues released a book called Presencing. How to bring your presence to wherever you go. It is one of the key leadership concepts. So I am saying, if you have to look at leadership, you have to begin to look at it saying how to I bring in these four dimensions my leadership, my signature strength and become aware of my core incompetencies, so that functionality, efficiency, effectiveness and the greatness all could be delivered appropriately in an appropriate manner.

So let me just talk about how this personal leadership is not just our concept. If you take Leonardo da Vinci he talks about this. Even though we probably have more documented self mastery principles than anywhere else in the world, I just wanted to bring in examples from somewhere else. One from Rome, one from Germany. He who cannot command himself should obey, but many can command themselves, but much is still lacking before they can obey themselves.

Laword Sew, another several centuries ago, he talked in China, he who controls others may be powerful but he who has mastered himself is mightier still. So what we call as personal leadership has been talked about all the way from Sew to Christ, to Da Vinci, to even Greek philosopher in 5th century BC. So something to do with personal leadership while is a concept centuries old, is come of its time in business concept because of changing realities. More technology changes, more globalization comes, more the world gets in to a chaos, more we find what does not change. More we go back in to our DNA our essence and our personal leadership, that is where we need to go in to.

Leadership is at the fulcrum. While many of us talk about producing business result through strategy, having right people, right plans who give the clarity and direction and having right culture in your organisation, Yarn Carlson, a old Scandinavian Airlines CEO used to say you need to pay attention to moments of truth. Every time customers comes in touch with your airhostess, baggage handler, any time, at that time if that persona does not demonstrate leadership it is a missed opportunity for entire company because they will never come back to you again. So every employee has to be treated as a leader. Without that we might be losing lot opportunities in service economy to grow. We want necessarily in top or middle management to know where exactly the opportunities are. Wherever the outer boundaries of organization is intersecting with the rest of the world, that is where opportunities show up. So how do we begin to help our people and ourselves to truly be inspired, to lead and to seek out and to create opportunities for company and ourselves. So personal leadership is not about individual but there is also a front of the hand back of the hand, it has serious implications for the growth of the organization.

So in the three gaps which we talk about, if you want to look at the core incompetence, majority of the time, especially for Indians, the core incompetence is not in knowing, not in feeling, but actually being who they are already are in action. That means, knowing doing gap. While it is a big issue for us, more we know, more intelligent we are, our core incompetence might be that we get in to analysis paralysis and we don’t make decisions till we know everything completely or we don’t take risks unless we know there is no risk anymore. So in some respects, the knowing doing gap might be very important to pay attention to in IT services especially if you are an engineer or project leader you have to pay a lot of attention, people watch you do, not what you know or what you say. It is not about how much you know that makes a difference what you do with what you know is respected by others. On other hand, middle managers and senior executives have to pay attention to the gap between feeling and doing, because once you come to certain level, it is not about what kind of an expert you, but how much of a domain expert you are that matters. How you get your people to believe in what you say and get things done. That means effectiveness is not to do with expertise, it has to do with learning to communicate negotiate and empower people to become effective. So to a certain extent the competence of a manager is dependant on bridging the feeling doing gap. That is called emotional intelligence. That’s why they say IQ will get you the job, but EQ will keep you the job. And people hire you for what you know and what you do. People fire you for what you don’t do, and what you don’t feel, but what everybody else feels around you. On the other hand, the most important, because of the core incompetence concept and personal leadership, Indians have to pay a lot of attention to bring the being in connection with our doing because that is where our true capacity, our true limits are tested and that is where not only we will shine, India will shine much beyond what we have been able to do. If you take Infosys, Satyam, Wipro, TCS, many of the companies in the IT services industry if they were able to put India on the map of the world in terms of intellectual and IT that we are the place to go that allowed us to create a capacity for economic growth. On the other hand, if we want our Indian presence to be felt all through we have still a spiritual wisdom, one of our core competence which is not yet being used in management, even though the maximum number of books coming out in the area of leadership are in the area of spirituality and leadership. Spirituality in the work place because of the worker disengagement, because of lack of vision, lack of clarity in career planning, people changing five careers before even they are 40 years old there is no meaning, no passion, no purpose for many people. It has become such a routine, where you go early, come late at some level because of that aspect the being is something that is actually not taking enough importance, not given enough importance. We are already talking about stress management. We need to take it a new level. We need to do research on Indian management approaches, whether it is Vedanta management,Jain management, Buddist management. Whatever we call it, we need to do more work in that area.

If you want to bridge the gaps and increase your personal leadership effectiveness, you need to understand what kind of activities are you effective, functional, what kind of activities are you ineffective or dysfunctional. For eg if people ask me to write a paper and send it ahead of time, you wont get it from me. Unless you call me and I describe it to you, you write and type it. If you ask me to sit down and type it that’s not going to happen. I am dysfunctional in writing. Similarly, like you have a non profit organisation, rotary is having an event, they ask for volunteers to serve and cook, if I am a cook in Le Royal Meridien I will volunteer, if they ask me to serve, I can do something in waitering, I am paid large amount of money to cook. Activity is more important than action that actually results from it. So if you take these four equations and look at it and say they are products and if any one of them on the right hand side becomes zero, the product is zero. What is common to all of them, doing. That means your personal leadership becomes zero as soon as you don’t take any action. That includes today. If you don’t take some action when you leave this room to unleash your personal leadership, some steps or ideas, if you don’t put it into practice, what you will be left with is a wonderful feeling sometimes, not so wonderful feeling for other people, it is all hot air, so it is like you release hot air, they get inspired and get something. But what are you going to do with it. It is not about doing, but about thinking, thinking does not occur in your head. My primary research is on how people think, and create. I have interviewed 17 novellariates 200 top experts in past 17 years. One thing I learnt is what you have in your head are thoughts but thinking occurs in relationships, in interaction, it does not happen when you sit and somewhere. Sometimes you may have an insight, you can turn it in to a new thinking, but very rarely you think alone. You have to begin to look at it and say number one what is common to all of them is action, action is different from activity. We all have big checklist, I have so many things done. But prioritization will get the job done. Important things like exercise, cutting on fat food, all we never get the time. Things which are easy, we keep doing them. You need to recognize if you are activity oriented or action oriented. You have to take action in the area which makes a difference.

Efficiency is about thinking and doing and very little to do with feeling. It has to do with making processes and things to be smoother, but has nothing to do with taking into account people. That’s why we say, when you go to HR or administrative departments they talk about processes, they don’t look at effectiveness. Some focus on processes, it does not matter what gets done and what does not. That is where efficiency comes. Effectiveness is what is called professional managers. It means I will do in a bland impersonal way and I will do all the right things and push all right buttons and will be polite in exactly the way in which I was told. Like call centres. They are very polite and nice, but there is nothing personal. I tried to say, looks like you are from India, I am from India, they say not supposed to say where we are from. There is feeling that is appropriate to get the job done, but that is no authentic. There is efficiency to make sure you are satisfied in the transaction but there is no originality and they get the job done, but at the end you feel like you talk to an Indian robot, instead of American, Malaysian or mechanical robot, you got Indian robot who is professional in their approach but there is nothing human in that approach. So when you bring presence of who you are, your passion, your vision, your commitment that is when you bring the being. The core incompetence is where you are stuck whether it is because of your greatness or because of something else. So to bridge that being doing gap there are four things you need to pay attention to xxx develop your personal leadership which is not get in to a mechanical professional mode. There is a professional mode that is very different. There are some people who can bring who they are and take it to the next step. One is, you need to know where you are going, not because someone else told you, but based on your life experience based on who you are as an individual, not as Hindu, Jain etc but beyond that. Like a Prasad if I were to look at where do I want to go when I really grow up. I need to have clarity - noble aspiration. Financial aspiration put aside for the moment. This is like Dhruv Tara, common to many religions. You have this idea of reaching the highest position you can occupy, like Dhruv who ended up next to the sun. As a young 5 year old boy could not get place on lap of his father and decided to pray and go for highest position he could end up with. Similarly, where do you want to end up? If you truly want to bring life to your personal leadership, you need to bring clarity in your intent and purpose.

Opposite to this is a core incompetency. What are the kind of traps you keep falling into? The inability to see ones own strengths that worked up to one situation but beyond that if you don’t develop a different way of dealing with it, you are going to fall really quickly without you knowing it. Where are you stuck? Where is your foot nailed to the floor? All of these ways are representing wherever you are blind, wherever you take something for granted, wherever you think this is your winning or success formula that you rely upon each time you get into trouble, you need to reexamine it. That signature strength, the flipside of it leads to core incompentencies, leads to blindness in moving forward. The third one I talk about is energy trigger especially Indians because we are so much society conscious. We have a strong GPS system –guilt, pride and shame. If you don’t actually it does not matter, your kid may be there, all your neighbors will tell your kid what they should do and should not do. We have such a social system, everybody knows what everybody else should be doing, the expectations are high. Unfortunate problem is, we all know what everyone should be doing except us. Everybody wants to get very quickly. In operating from the GPS system, we don’t have any idea where do we get energy from. We all do various things to get energy. But what is our reliable repeatable energy charging system especially after you are totally drained, had a really bad week, what would you do to recharge yourself. Why am I saying this is some people may go to a concert listen to carnatic music, draw, paint, you need to know what is one reliable repeatable way in which you can get charged even in a worst scenario. It is like saying power system, you just put it in the right plug, you don’t have to do anything, energy system means you just have to plug it in and stay with the system. Do you know what your energy trigger is?

Fourth thing I talk about is energy drain. Some people like accounting systems, logistics. So if you don’t know what discharges you, like example I had a CEO whom I was coaching in Adobe Systems. And that gentleman hates details. He was division head for a large enterprise system, a visionary. He says when I am running 1.5 billion dollars, you don’t give me all little details. So the moment someone gets in to details, operational details as it was in Adobe for many other groups, he is a new guy who came in from other company. He started fidgeting, he explodes after that he explodes. Once he explodes everyone begins to say he does not have culture, breaks glass. Next thing he knew regarding the macro media merger, he is gone. Why? He was unaware of his own limitations of what drains his energy and has alarm system to catch himself from doing something that damages whatever he has been building up so far. Similarly, what us your energy draining system? Are you aware of it? Do you know what kind of alarm system you can set up before you can start exploding, before you get irritated and other people say boss is not in good mood? That means you will not know exactly what is going on around you because of your inability to listen to bad news, you will be the one who will be surprised most of the time. I had a situation with one company where Malaysia and Singapore head were fighting so much, that all people under them have created an alternate system. They realized if you bring to these people they cant take decisions. Once everything is over, they will bring to these people. Similarly in your family, what do people tell you that you need to control. What do people who care about you say you better moderate. What do people say watch out for? Those are somethings you need to pay attention to. That is where bridging the being doing gap begins to happen.

Let me give some examples of how personal leadership, when it is not paid attention, to where signature strengths becomes weaknesses. Howard Dean is a gentle man who is in US the Democratic National Congress (DNC) Head. Few years ago when this Times cover came in, he was presidential candidate and he was so ahead of his competition, Bob Carry and others, they published this saying he is the winner. Then February of 2004 he came to a place where when he lost the contest, he started screaming and shouting. Basically people said he has gone coo coo. He was so crazy in front of TV. Look at his own comments on himself. His core incompetence and signature strengths are not something we don’t know. He said he very blunt and direct. This is something I hear a lot from Indians. Hey I don’t take politics. I tell you as it is. As if it is a biggest gift by being blunt and direct. You can expect to hear the truth. It doesn’t matter you are bleeding listening to the truth. Pitch is that I am different from every candidate in the race. Haward Dean after one performance where he exploded in front of TV audience completely lost his ability. Does it mean people don’t know? Actually when they wrote an article about him and signature strength is that he is very decisive and passionate and he can get very angry with people when they bring bureaucracy and he uses his anger to get his job done. Only thing that the reporter said was in USA today is that do we trust the nuclear button with him. Other than that I think he is a perfect fit.

Summarizing some of what I said, is that your signature strength is something that is unique to you and you have to rely upon it to get out of trouble and it will make you succeed even when the odds are high. This is what actually gives you certain competence either is it because of your nature or nurturing you receive. So please think about what is your signature strength. If you don’t get anything begin to identify your signature which helped you from inside when everything else failed. If you cant think about it by yourself, think about what other people say as your unique strength is. You need to know what your signature strength is and unfortunately many of us may not be as aware. Talk to your spouse, kids, friends, they can point it out to you. Why because that signature strength is the one that actually leads to your core incompetence. They can see both sides. The shadow side of signature strength which is core incompetence, the positive side of it that led you to where you are. As I conclude to define core incompetence, blind attachment to or reliance on a particular manifestation of one’s signature strength that has brought success in past but now applied blindly anywhere else. If you want to think about core incompetence, recall some comments which people made who care about you. If you are arrogant, you think I don’t have that problem you are in bigger trouble than anyone else. Higher you go, more you need to pay attention to the signature strength and core incompetence. Signature strength has served you really well when your career has shot up, but if has stalled. Harward Business Review says, 67 to 70 percent of people who are in the ED or COO roles never will make it to CEO because they are so good at what they do, other people cannot visualize them being able to get out of their comfort zone.
That means whatever you are good at, unless you begin to develop detached engagement and begin to gain larger perspective, you will be stuck there for rest of your life.