LINKEDIN SERIES - THE CORPORATE LEADERSHIP SUCCESS STORY

I am an avid reader.

I make it a point to visit a bookstore whenever and wherever I can. Whether on business or on a holiday, I make it a point to reach the airport early enough to study their retail, to see the buying trends, and also to spend time in a bookstore.? If I visit any mall and find a bookstore, I must find time to see what’s on display in the store.

And every time I visit a bookstore, besides, fiction, I make it a point to check the business and leadership sections. I have always been fascinated by books written by great leaders and management experts. Especially books and authors that write on why companies with certain characteristics succeed, why a particular company thrived, or how an individual played a significant role in that success. And every bookstore has fairly large sections covering such topics. ?Personally, i am not particularly enamored with those who write about how to make money, or how they got rich. I was taught that being rich needs to be a side product of what I do, not the daily end goal by itself.

However, with all the time that I have been spending in bookstores, and now also browsing books online, I find books on a particular segment too few and far in between. Books which explain why companies fail. Almost all of us who are well-read and part of the business world know that majority companies fail and several large companies falter, slow down and eventually some of those fail as well. I completed my graduation in 1980. Since then, most of the companies who were in the top 20 at that time don’t exist, or if they do, they are not in the same form and structure.

So, there has been a huge churn in the top companies over the past four and a half decades. And this is not because industries are stagnating or declining. Global demand for food, oil, steel, chemical products, fmcg products, banking services, transportation and particularly electronics goods has continued to grow. Consumers still shop. Data of growth of the years is only moving one way – upwards, but with dips and corrections in between. Upward growth is the only way any company strategizes. But a lot of the companies dominant in the 80s and 90s and even the early part of 21st century are not necessarily dominant today in their respective industries.

If we look at India or even GCC, many of the family-owned business groups that ran some of the biggest companies in the 1980s and even the 1990s are shadows of their former selves, while some continue to flourish and prosper.

The point being conveyed is that countless successful business books try hard to figure out what characteristics are shared by inventors, innovators, leaders, or other successful types. If they spot a particular shared characteristic, they feel that they have discovered a magic secret or clue of some kind. But have they really found the magic clue?? Or are we forgetting that facts pertaining to the past are not the same as data to be used going forward. At best, these can be pointers.

Many of us may have read the book “Good to Great” written by Jim Collins. In this book, one essential character that is mentioned of successful companies is the culture of discipline. Yet, one can find many companies which have failed despite a culture of discipline. On the other hand, one can see many successful companies, especially startups, which are indisciplined in their existence.

Daniel Kahneman explains it well in Thinking, Fast and Slow: “The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge uncertainties of existence... Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need.” And obviously, going by the large numbers of books being printed and sold, the thought process works.

I have personally read several books, one of them being “Every street is paved with Gold”, written by Kim Woo ?Choong, who went from hero to zero at Daewoo, and had to be given a prison sentence. There are many such stories and books which were written when companies and individuals were at their peak, only to realise that some years down the road, the books carried no meaning of substance.

My personal assessment is that we spend a lot of time building up our operational and technical expertise, simply because these are easier to measure. We then use training courses and books to practice becoming leaders. We do trainings, we soak up all the leadership approaches and models out there like sponges. I am party to the same charade.

All this is fine. Yet, are we overlooking the one thing we must really know inside out in order to be able to lead with honest impact and integrity– the real ourselves?

Isn’t it true that in order to lead in an emotionally integrated way, we need to first confront ourselves with our own personal stories? ?Don’t we need to take the time to get comfortable with our past, and present, and then ethically and honestly self-author an imagined future for ourselves?

Don’t we need to listen carefully to the internal narrative "stories we tell ourselves"? Don’t we need to analyze the dominant story which served us until now, is it true or false? Will this story continue to be helpful for the person of the future that we wish to become?

Starting from this festival of lights, what if we do a review of our past life story, and ensure that foresight, adaptability, fairness, integrity, accountability, and empathy are woven into our narrative and these become the superpowers, the guiding posts that we draw upon daily as future leaders. ?If we write more books where we talk about not only success, but also the 80 percent of our corporate lives which had setbacks, and of what kind, would such books sell?

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