My Leadership Development

Hi This is one of my writings for a leadership course I had taken this semester at Rice.

I am a PhD student here at Rice University working on Nanotechnology: an agglomeration of technologies that promises to change the way the world works,. As a researcher, I enjoy the process of creating things, inventing systems and seeing them work successfully.

I would like to start a company selling an invention of mine to outside industry. It would be a nano-system that fits into a burning need of industry. The firm should be started while I am here at Rice University, taking advantage of the opportunities that this area offers. This firm would be one with me as the head and having a team of great people that go out and sell this invention. My organization would start up as a small company with a few million dollars in funding. I foresee that I shall be traveling the country trying to raise capital for my firm. Having a partner would be good, sharing the responsibility of doing the work. We would sample the market, presenting to major chemical and manufacturing companies about how our product would fit into their processes. We would land our first trial order, and then work round the clock to ensure that we deliver on it. This would lead to us hiring more people, scaling up facilities, and increasing our manufacturing base. Later on in its lifetime, it would have research labs with trained scientists using the money that we make to create newer products and applications.

When the company grows to a larger size, I would be involved subsequently in the macro management of the company, seeing that it focuses on the right issues and works on the right things and projects, and delegating more and more of my responsibilities to trustworthy people. By a process of organic growth, I foresee that we shall make a name for ourselves and be a large corporation, whose name would be taken in the same breath as Hewlett Packard and Dell s are today.

 

  Having read so many success stories of American and Indian Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have made it big, I too would like to be involved in doing something on my own.  Richard Branson, the creator of the Virgin group, is a worthy example. Without much management bombast and not much technique apart from following his own instinct, he managed to create a constantly innovating empire, all the while having a lot of fun along the way, what with his around the world hot air ballooning, swinging off trees at this private Caribbean island etc. Sergei Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google have brought together a great company founded on the ideas that they used to have fun thinking of while PhD students at Stanford. I would like to have my company have an atmosphere like Google, in which we have Employees enjoying their work, having fun, chilling out and doing good work at the same time.  

 

 At the same time, I would like to have a rich family, social and personal life, like my father. My dad, Raghupati Wahi, lost his father at the age of 10. My grandmother, having never worked before in her life, took up the job of a teacher to then bring up her three children with dignity. My father took an educational loan to complete his MBA in finance from one of India’s top institutions and thirty years later, he is in the top management of a 5 billion dollar conglomerate. I have never, in all this time, seen my father to be very stressed or worked up about anything. He is always calm, and positive about whatever he does, with a great enthusiasm. This applies to his relations with everyone and his attitude to work itself. He has a great habit of doing just one thing at one time, and focusing all his attention to it. Never negative about anything, he encourages and drives people to work better, and himself works really well with people. I would like to fit in his shoes and find my own, intuitive way of doing things.

 

From a birds eye perspective, right now I am in the process of:

Streamlining my life, building a good base for my work life.

This involves putting into place habits such as exercise, yoga, meditation, and affirmations that would ensure that I stay healthy and have a good internal attitude base regardless of how my path of work leads me.

 

Next, I see that I shall be involved totally in my research. At the same time, I shall be having an active social life, with a view to collaborating and teaming with people who would join me in a team to build the firm. This would lead me to open up to a large number of newer ideas, and encourage me to have a personal renaissance, furthering a virtuous cycle. I hope to continue on this and eventually reach the series of goals outlined earlier.

What I learnt from Entrepreneurial Leadership

Hi. This is a course I have taken in my first semester at Rice University, Entrepreneurial Leadership. It has been one of my favorites at Rice.  The following is a reflection on what I learnt from the course.

1. How important it is to be articulate! Especially in a highly individualistic, overt culture, where the subtext is minimum, and things have to be made clear in all aspects. Not only in an overt culture, but even in contextual cultures, the person who opens his mouth the most seems to be better off, than one who doesn’t.

  Presentation skills. While we were making the slides for the presentation, I could see exactly how much of the component of the work that we did was just plain “explanation and communication”, and how much of it was sit down innovation and discussing out the issues facing us in the on campus project.  I could also see the importance of simply explaining things and good language.  In my time at Rice, I would like to polish my speaking skills to a great extent, learning to be both articulate as well as brief, and at the same time having some emotional component to the talk as well. Additionally, I shall work on my essay writing. I realize that the reflections I turn in would be much stronger, carrying greater impact, were they written in perfect language.

 

1. How tough it is to be an entrepreneur! I have realized that my dreams of starting a  Google and Microsoft, are further away than I thought they were. A lot of infrastructure in the form of personal capability has to be built to reach the veritable castles that I am building in the air. I have always come from a secure and sheltered environment. My father has risen through the ranks of a large Indian multinational for thirty years, and thus I have never felt, insecure in terms of means or future.  I have also had pretty decent priorities since a child, putting learning and knowledge, almost above all else. This has allowed for good education all the way till now. Today, I feel that I should not take it for granted. I believe that I should always be working towards self betterment, sharpening the saw at the same time as cutting the tree. Hitherto, I have spent some useless time in low priority activities. Today, I wish I could develop a sense in myself of what to focus on and what not to pay attention to. This requires a mindset change. For example, I could be thinking in this way: “Let me get a small job, so that I may earn 400$”. Or I might think, “Let me spend the same time, wisely, and invest in activities that give me the greatest long term returns.”  This is similar in nature to  the difference in spending time on the internet to get a good deal, or spending the same time on talking to a wise and experienced mentor, so that one may learn from his wisdom and experience. In other words, maximizing the benefit one can get from ones time, by spending it in the activities that invest in us, rather than drain from us. This way of thinking is on the same lines as what is articulated in the classic, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. As the instructor also outlined in his speech, the greatest contribution that we can make to ourselves, lies in our capabilities and attitudes. “Stuff”, to borrow the perfect phrase, “does not matter”.

 

1. Today I also believe that Entrepreneurship may not be the hallowed path that I once thought it to be. The decision to throw the dice and risk it all in order to be one, has to be taken, keeping in mind the costs of stress, reduced personal time, that being working 24*7 shall put on me. For now, I have decided to take Brian’s advice, and focus solely on my PhD degree.  At the same time, I shall use strategies described above to keep my options open on the entrepreneurship front. It should be possible that when I develop something that I can commercialize, I have a good set of personal advisors and a “knights at the round table” type team that shall work along with me in reaching our goals.

 

1.  The world is wiser than our minds can articulate or reason it out to be. As an analytical person, I may be able to think about and put into words an observation. But the very process of analysis, I ignore and oversee some of the things that I would pick up, if I were to just “feel”. Thus, analysis is like a hour glass. By putting it into words, I do describe it, but at the same time, take something away from my whole experience. To feel completely is to know completely; all knowledge is but feeling. I noticed and studied the people that I spent time with, in the class. I particularly like how some of my classmates were so much at ease with themselves. These guys had the least number of “shaking legs/ twiddling fingers” type tics that many others did. Minor as it may be, it showed me how more to be relaxed, in a state of energetic rest. I like a couple of my group members’ self focus, and strong, “getting to the point” credo.  From each person, I learnt and took something. I learnt to bear with adversity and take loads of knocks, like the two buddy entrepreneurs showed us. I saw how a good networker can really change things around, like Brian did. I saw the feeling that students had in that particular session with Brian; his people IQ was so good, that the whole group of students were feeling visibly more involved with him.

 

1. The instructor’s personal story was really illuminating in a lot of ways. As I felt a sort of kinship in the thinking styles between me and Joel Ferguson, I was able to relate very well and understand how I may react in the future to similar circumstances. From the instructors life experience of having faced adversity and hardship because of being  positive, and optimistic, I learnt that life can deal you unfair hands. Reality just is. It is our interpretation that gives it its colors.  One can and must deal with reality as it is, and not get too much into how it should be. Similarly, life (and situations and events) is not positive or negative, or Godly or devilish, it just is.  For all our study and pedagogy of life, we should remember that all the external data and knowledge cannot beat our own intuition and feeling. Following one’s own intuition is a under rated skill, one that receives more coverage in the guise of words such as “street smarts” and “tough guts”, and “survival instincts” etc.  I have been continuing to realize how important it is for me to work more in intuitive directions and less in data oriented directions. For the past few months, my laptop has been broken and thus I have had the good fortune of not having the daily barrage of negative news enter my head. This inadvertently has allowed me to focus more on real life than the PC. Now that I have a laptop again, I am mindful to use it with good purpose, because the World Wide Web, like life, is infinite.

 

1. One thing that I had been avoiding for a lot of time in my own life was that politics in an intrinsic part of human relations. Some of us, like me, hitherto, have been thinking of politics as a four letter word, that our idealistic selves should not get into human relations. But as I said earlier, life just is, people just are. A few close people are those with whom one would not use conscious or habituated “people skills and tactics”. When one is working in a group, it becomes necessary to keep a pulse on group dynamics and observe the way things are going.  Politics is always present where people are present, and it is wiser to learn to play the game.

 

 

That’s about it. This class has been one of the best I have taken in a long time.

Customer satisfaction from my point of view

There are several companies that really understand my needs, and make me feel better for having chosen to take the services of that company rather than its competitors. Below are three of the more notable ones for me, and then lessons I learn from seeing how they service my requirements.

 

Making things Simpler:

As a graduate student in the field of material science, referring to current literature on any topic is an essential part of my daily routine. The internet and digital archives that can be accessed through Rice University’s subscriptions to the journals are a blessing. Earlier, I was accustomed to using Google Scholar ™, Scirus.com ™. These sites are still the most comprehensive result givers. But it takes some patience to sift through all the data, a lot of it irrelevant, after getting the search results.

Recently I was introduced to the ISI web of knowledge ™, a search engine by Thomson Prometric ™. The feeling that I got after doing my first search for topics on it, was phenomenal.

The ISI web of knowledge is an amazing search engine. I do not have to go anywhere else to get the best papers on the topic that I am studying. One search tab has all the features that one would want. It gives the most relevant results, with an array of the important papers arranged according to relevance.

The search that they have is superlative, and it has had a good effect on my time. Without wasting time on the superfluous, I can zero in on the useful stuff that gets results.

 

What I learn from them:

1. Personally: To be simple in my dealings with people.
2. For the company that I shall form: To cut to the chase, be direct, and put my goods on the table with all the data that my customer wants. To not overload the customer with marketing gimmicks and data. To promise something, and deliver reliably. To use “techniques” and the assorted yada-yada concepts keeping in mind the end goal of making things simpler.

 

Comprehensiveness:

 

Rice Graduate apartments:

I stay in an apartment in the Rice Graduate Apartments, which is located just off campus.

As a busy grad student, it is necessary for me to stay near campus. This helps me put more time into research and less time into travel. The Rice Graduate Apartments (RGA) meets all my basic needs, as well as many things that I was unaware of, which have a positive impact on my life.

They allow me to live hassle free; Apart from paying the rent on time, I rarely have to bother about any minor details like water, gas, problems with the neighbors, parking. Etc.

All my needs in one place, near the campus.

Because of the large number of Indian grad students staying in one place; we spend time together a lot; and I have a sense of community, and a social support network that adds a lot to my life. The amenities that are present include a well appointed lounge with recreational activities a pool table, several large screen TVs, table tennis, which provides for a good break from work. The management organizes events like weekly dining in a restaurant, decorates the building and gets people into the festive mood of celebrations of Halloween and Diwali.

Making things much easier are the weekly shopping shuttle on Saturday that goes from the RGA to local shopping enclaves like Fiesta and Target. On a daily basis, there is a shuttle that commutes from the RGA to the Rice University campus every 15 minutes throughout the day. This all but eliminates the need to own a car. A computer room in the RGA allows people to connect to the Mudd building network, and thus they can access their work from home as well.

Long story short: The RGA experience is amazing. Living in the heart of town within a great community is good.

 

 

What I learn from the RGA system:

1. Personally: Would be to keep adding to my own value in order to deliver more value to the people who deal with me. Keeping a perspective of always looking to contribute to what is happening around me.
2. For my company: The perspective to work with my customer to see what he wants and then deliver that value for him. To first deliver the main things, and then add the frills; to be comprehensive while at the same time retaining my sense of focus on the key issues.

 

Excellence, excellence, excellence: Germany.

 

I have had the good fortune to have visited Germany twice within the last two years. Each time I go there, I return even more amazed at the level to which perfection is detailed in everyone’s everyday life.

The system runs on rules. Every person has a function to perform, and the pursuit of perfection in that function is every person’s goal. That results in all the details of public life being superb; the roads are spotless: anyone could eat off them, the trains run on perfect time, lines are short and few. My experience with German companies was expectedly, excellent. Here are two of the best run German firms.

 

Customer service quality:

a. Lufthansa:

Having flown internationally in Thai, British Airways, Lufthansa, US Airways and Lufthansa, I have no hesitation in naming my best experience out of these: Lufthansa: Superb. Very polite, everything is obsessively perfect, the airhostesses are exceedingly polite and sensitive to your needs. I asked for Newsweek, Time and The Economist, and they were all brought to me with the best of smiles. The plane feels well looked after and neat, no grubby low cost seats here, even thought the tickets were really cheap. Service felt so good…..the response to my making a request…any request was such as to make me feel good that I made the request. It was in sharp contrast to the clearly fake and glint edged smiles that I felt during my whole trip to Thailand, including Thai airways. British service is also good, but felt more…real….the European experience, however plastic the people were, they were perfect in it.

 

b. Deutsche Bahn:

German trains are expensive, comprehensive in their service. The very design of the trains is so people friendly. The use of the bicycle is promoted. Trains have facilities for us to take cycles on board for use in the town where we get off. I took a train journey with my friend for Karlsruhe to Cologne, taking our cycles on board. With hardly any hassle, we reached the town of Bingen-am-Rhein. There was train staff on all the stations that knew English, and were thorough and courteous in their help. We did miss a couple of trains on our journey, but with peoples help, soon got on our way.

In the town of Karlsruhe, I once missed my bicycle on the train. I rang the train company- KVV, operated by Deutsche Bahn, and they promptly told me where and when I could pick it off again.

I twice left my bag behind on a train, only to have it delivered to my doorstep in one case, and at the lost and found in the second. When we missed a scheduled regular train from Mannheim to Karlsruhe due to the fault of a bus driver, a bus also operated by Deutsche Bahn, we got free first class tickets on a much better train to our destination.

 

What I learn from the whole system of Germany:

1. To continually focus on operational perfection when I run my firm.
2. To learn to balance spontaneity and compulsiveness.
3. To cultivate a healthy, wholesome culture of being nice and courteous to everyone.

How teams and teamwork, work

One of the primary concepts on which good teamwork is based, is that good teams have good chemistry going with each other. Often times, people may be individually very efficacious, but may not gel well together with other people in a team. This leads to the whole teams suffering.

In my experience during my undergraduate days at the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, every year had four large scale festivals being organized by the students. We had to arrange the sponsorships, invite the guests, and work with the administration and people in charge, all to ensure the smooth success of the show. Typically, students who could mobilize more students to work with them were given the highest responsibilities. This category of people had the highest self respect (cause) and peer respect (effect) of all the undergrads in the institute. These guys, in temperament were socially sensitive people who got along and naturally inspired people who hung out with them, to be like them. They seemed to have been born leaders. Most of them had an intuitive expectations of the others emotions which they had honed to a fine art. They in turn led teams, which might not have had the most brilliant ideas, but had the most effective implementation of good ideas. An often time, as you may have noticed, best is the enemy of good, especially for thinkers and intellectuals. Thinking is a much vaunted skill and talent, harnessing this talent; one must also learn to deal with negative thinking, over thinking, “imps of the mind”. That’s why, as a rule, the most effective teams were characterized by each of the individuals having a high amount of self faith and mutual faith, thinking to just about the right extent . The leader acted as a go between all the diverse opinions that the team held. Each individual was made to feel valued by the person of high social value, the leader. The individuals themselves were a diverse bunch of people. As, we observed in the on-campus project as well, the greater the diversity, the better the initial creative ideas coming through. However, there is an oft-ignored creativity in just implementing simple ideas, in dealing with the issues that are associated with every series of actions towards a goal. This type of creativity goes by the name of “street smarts”, and “wit”. Effective people have that and a high ‘spontaneous-problem-solving’ quotient. The best functionaries, had a high quotient of this quality.

Inter personal problem resolution: The inherent “Indian value” of tolerance made inter personal issues, present, but tolerable. Diversity in thought added to mutual respect, give and take, and tolerance made teams work together very well.

Group dynamics were always, a complicated function of emotion, friendship, egos, and intelligence. The finest teams, in my personal opinion, were led by men who had a veritable “PhD in People Skills” .

In my experience of working in the team for the “Entrepreneurial Leadership” class, I noticed that our team functioned well, when we worked well together, were nice to each other. I had a different way of thinking before going into the team projects, and after it was through. My prior experience always led me to believe that chemistry, and team building would be the first steps that should be taken. Instead, I faced a new concept, a very professional, clear cut, no nonsense manner, in which every person was assigned a particular job and had to complete it, independently. As I did not have the signature of clear leadership in the team, and also I did not have time to assume them, I got on with the way things were going, and did not impose my priorities on them. Some of my team members did have an annoying habit of pulling each other down, and making petty kidding jokes, which did not work to the benefit of the team. It is my endeavour to make myself immune to anything I perceive to be negative. Therefore, I was annoyed with that, as it went against my idea of good team spirit, but I did not allow myself to be affected by it. Another thing that was present was the high amount of individualism. As I have arrived from a very different culture, only a few months back, it took some getting used to. The US has the highest rating of any country, worldwide, in the “individualistic thinking” indicator, according to the Geert Hofstede indicators published on www.geert-hofstede.com. This report suggests that the high individualism quotient is prevalent in countries of British descent, including Canada, New Zealand, Australia. Continental Europe in this aspect tends to be similar in its outlook, to Asia, having a larger “shared”, cultural commonality. The advantage of this high self focussedness, is that even outsiders who are worthy of leadership, and give shareholders what they want, can grow to the top of their professions, not encountering the “glass-ceilings” that they might encounter in high subtext and background based cultures. The disadvantage is that communication across the cultural, a sort of “wisdom of crowds” wave is tough to transmit. It is also tougher to transmit a common vision, when people are all in it for themselves, and find it hard to look beyond their immediate noses. Communication from parent to child may be stilted, leading to a lack of experience being transferred across generations. Individualism is excellent for people, however, it is recommended that one builds upon both ones self focus and ones positive social skills.

This experience is far removed from my previous experience as an undergraduate. India, being a highly social culture with a good “Asian style” sense of divisions in class, as compared to the flat more socially equal “Western style” , gave rise to its own unique dynamics of social motion in the teams. It is fair to say that it would be tougher for a Westerner to come and make his mark in an Indian setting than for an Indian to make his mark in a Western setting, because of the complicated nature of social behavior prevalent in most Asian countries.

My main point is that cultural issues play a very large role , in determining how teams operate and function. Not only is that true for India and America, it is true across the globe. Having said that, a few common characteristic points exist as well. Reviewing these points, they would be that every effective team has;

1. A strong leader, a “main –man”, “main person who’s responsible”. The “main man” should have a good personal relationship with all team members, high peer credibility, good feel for politics, high personal charisma and dynamism.

2. Great interpersonal chemistry, vibe, interdependence, shared sense of goals.

One team that I relish being part of is the theater class that I am taking this semester; Introduction to Acting. It is led by a person who is very passionate about and thus good at her work and craft. It seems to me that the fundamentals of her life are very well in order. Apart from being involved in theatre, she teaches Ashtanga Yoga, and practices Buddhist meditation. Like she has, a system of “good habits” that I mentioned my aspiring to inculcate in an earlier reflection, has led her personality is awesome, and that shows so much in the work that she does with us. Undergrads, who might be lazy and sopoforic in other classes, come to life and perform like hell in her class. It’s a classic case of personal charisma and passion fuelling great, five star leadership.

Thus, at the very basic level, good teams boil down to good people, with diverse skills, working well together. As has been mentioned in the class, it is the “collective genius”, a sort of “wisdom of groups”, that makes the team, living, breathing and working.