Only partly ready for new role in HCL: Roshni Nadar

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Q: Are you as aggressive as your father because that is the one thing that everybody that we have spoken to about him say that when Shiv Nadar wants something he doesn't take no for an answer. Is that the same for you as well?

Roshni Nadar: I have lived in the house, under my mom and my dad; you think my dad is aggressive. My mom will go after what she wants and how.

Q: So clearly we should be worried about you considering you've got the aggressive side of both of them?

Roshni Nadar: Yes, the aggressiveness is there but I am not as aggressive yet.

Q: How would you assess her at this point because you've built so many entrepreneurs in your career at HCL and now you've got your daughter whom you are nurturing and grooming? What is your assessment of her as an entrepreneur?

Shiv Nadar: As a first generation entrepreneur, I always had a paranoia that something is about to happen around the corner. That kind of restlessness with which a first generation entrepreneur runs a business, and then when you want to build an institution you have to exhibit patience, caution and extreme ambition, and when you do that you should not be afraid to fall.

In that, what I had to teach Roshni was since the time she was a baby I had been encouraging her to fall. Right from the beginning I have evolved her in that mode that you must go and try and do things and think of things that are much larger.

Q: What have you learnt from your dad? In your style of management, how you approach problems, challenges, what have you learnt from him?

Roshni Nadar: Plan B. Must have Plan B. Plan A is going to fail. In anything actually, if I tell him this is the plan I have, the first thing he says what if this doesn't work, then what, do you have a backup? And a sustainable, almost equally matched backup, we are not talking about something to throw back on. That is one thing that I have learnt. Even in the way that he has worked over the years, have seen him making notes about everything, I also now write everything.

Shiv Nadar: One thing which she does extremely well which I have very carefully watched is she doesn't micro-manage.

Q: So that she hasn't learnt from you?

Shiv Nadar: That's the only way by which people have a sense of belonging to the organisation because they build things.

Q: Is it easy to do that? Is it easy for you to be Shiv Nadar the Chairman as oppose to Shiv Nadar the dad when you're actually dealing with her?

Shiv Nadar: I am a lot more gentle with her whereas with my colleagues at work that part of it you don't know - I was a terror.

Q: So she doesn't have to face any of that?

Shiv Nadar: She didn't have to.

Roshni Nadar: He has been extremely patient with me and he is always been extremely patient with me.

Shiv Nadar: But work-wise when we talk I am a bit distant at that time and I also try and test her instincts.

Roshni Nadar: But on one point in the last six months, my instinct nailed it and his instinct, we had gone in with his, and it was wrong.

Q: What was that?

Shiv Nadar: We cannot tell you.

Roshni: We can't tell you but I was gloating all day and after that I went and told mom and then mom gave him a piece of her mind for it too.