2. Growing Pains

I am really humbled at the responses I got for my first article. I heard from colleagues and friends after many years, some suggested writing a book, while some suggested posting several chapters together a-la Netflix style. I enjoy this format, though, wherein I can keep improvising based on live feedback.

One of the comments from Rajendra Mishra was rather reflective. He mentioned ‘speaking/operating from the heart’. We get so conditioned over years that we are mostly acting from our head based on our past learnings and experiences. The distance from the head to heart becomes the longest, as the proverbial quote goes. We tend to operate from the heart only when the mind has no answers or predefined playbook, as we all did during the initial days of the pandemic. However, magic really happens when we continue to imbibe our child-like qualities of curiosity, intuition, and creativity.

We had our annual Diwali meet last week with colleagues from Sterlite Power (a company which grew out of Sterlite Tech). While socially engaging with a colleague, he mentioned that I had squeezed out all his insights about ‘energy storage’, which he had evolved over time. I had no intention other than natural curiosity. Growing up, I used to ask my mother all kinds of questions, and she would patiently try to answer them. That, I guess, took away my fear of ‘stupid questions’.? That is one of my favourite pieces of advice to offer the new inductees in the company, that ‘there are no stupid questions, and they must continue to ask questions like a child’.??

That is another reason I tend to favour recent graduates joining us immediately after college, so we can learn and grow with them. I believe that all the qualities we want to imbibe in the organisation about intuitive innovation, mindfulness and flow, and creativity and curiosity are all very natural to the younger generation. It seems counterproductive to force kids to turn into adults and then try to push child-like qualities to conditioned adults

I know I have digressed quite a bit - now back to the story. As I mentioned in my previous post, in our second year of existence, we got orders for fiber from different parts of the world, were booking good revenue, and were reasonably profitable.??

I continued to delve in multiple areas and remember taking a decision to halt supplies of optical fiber to our own company’s cabling plant, as I felt we were not being paid the right market prices for it. This led to a temporary closure of the company’s cabling facility due to a lack of fiber. After this decision, I saw a stinging memo addressed to me and copied to several other people saying ‘Who is Anand to take this decision’.??

I have always been extremely selfish with learning new things in new areas. Throughout my career, especially in the early days, my colleagues would find it puzzling and maybe annoying that I wanted to understand or interfere in their area of expertise. However, I have always behaved and acted as if my role was larger than what it said on paper, as long as I believed I was doing the right thing for the company.??

I also had the advantage of having a great manager Mukesh Arora, who allowed me to operate across several functions and would promote? me several levels at times.

I had my marriage planned around this time and left for Calcutta. Almost immediately after my wedding, I got a message that I needed to come back early. The consignments of the fiber sent had issues at customer sites and needed to be addressed immediately. I cut my leave short and came back. I booked an open ‘Round-the-world’ ticket starting from Turkey to Austria to Brazil, so I could visit all these customers immediately. My wife continues to remind me that I still owe her a honeymoon.

I remember being in Turkey, a few kilometers from Northern Iraq, while the Iraq-Kurdish civil war was happening. I traveled to the facility via an overnight bus from Istanbul and had to give my passport to the plant authorities to visit the facility. They were extremely tough and returned my passport a few days later, only after we had reached a mutually acceptable techno-commercial agreement.??

I visited the Austrian customer next, who was extremely generous to work over the weekend as I was keen to finish the job. They were the most empathetic to our status as a newer player in the market and offered solid advice for a growing business.

The Brazil facility was owned by Japanese management, and that was an unforgettable experience. Every morning and evening, I would be sitting in a large conference room with me on one side, and over ten managers and engineers from the customers’ end on the other. They would quiz me on what my plan was to fix the problem, my daily schedule, and how I had performed by the end of the day. They were overall nice and someone from their team would take me out for dinner every evening after this ordeal.

I spent close to a month during this ‘round-the-world trip’, and while it was extremely painful going in, the learnings from this trip have held me in high stead throughout my career. It was my second year on the job, and I learned some tough lessons. I visited these customers alone, and these visits, in three different continents, with differing cultural insights, were eye-opening. They taught me some of the biggest lessons I have had in my life – specifically in terms of credibility, consistency, commitment, customer empathy and respect, and our brand.

We continued to carry business with all three customers and made some good friends.

The next blog will be about the ‘Dot-Com years and the associated feeling of invincibility’. Please continue to provide your feedback, as that is the fuel driving me.