Veterans Unpacked | Sanjay Kapoor: Your next competitor can come from anywhere, and the winner can't take all

Former Bharti Airtel CEO Sanjay Kapoor says his "entrepreneurial endeavours follow Jack Ma’s axiom of being surrounded by Gen Y and Z once you are in your 50s".

Note to readers: How ​do corporate leaders surf life after hanging up their boots? What do they do next? What are the lessons they learned in their eventful journeys? What advice do they have for the current crop of leaders? Veterans Unpacked is a series of interviews aimed to offer readers lessons from retired bosses on life outside the corner office.

In a career spanning three decades, of which half has focused on the telecoms sector, Sanjay Kapoor has been in leadership positions at Bharti Airtel, Micromax, and Xerox India.

Kapoor was part of the team that made Airtel the No. 1 telecom player in the country, and took it to the world outside. He also played an active role in industry forums, including the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) and National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), and the global board of GSMA.

The Delhi native, who got his business degree from Delhi University, and is a graduate of the Wharton Advanced Management Program, started his corporate journey working for the manufacturers of Usha Fans and Sewing Machines, and now says he spends his time between entrepreneurship, advisories, boards of companies, in market leader positions, and philanthropy. Edited excerpts from an interview:

What have you been up to since hanging up your boots?

Actually, it’s a total misconception that I have hung up my boots; I am as busy as I ever was. After a long corporate career of over three decades, which included fifteen years in telecom, and building India’s largest integrated telecoms company, I consciously decided to pursue my future professional endeavours with a lot more flexibility, diversity and zing. I christened it a “Plural Career”, which in my case, morphed into three key buckets of entrepreneurship, advisories and board memberships, with some time to spare for writing and philanthropy.

What keeps you busy now?

My entrepreneurial endeavours follow Jack Ma’s axiom of being surrounded by Gen Y and Z once you are in your 50s, and essentially back their ideas and fervour to create value. While a team of professionals runs an e-commerce trading business owned by my family, my entrepreneurial interests, though minority, are diversified to cover telecom, edTech, financial services, clean energy, smart devices, social commerce and more. The common thread being that all these early-stage ventures have a digital angle which is in line with my experience and inclination.

Another endeavour which keeps me close to the Gen Y and Gen Z communities is being on the investment committee of Good Capital, which was launched by the founders of Investopad (an incubator) to leverage their existing engagement model with early-stage companies.

My advisories currently include senior adviser roles at BCG, Tanla Platforms, MoodAgent (Denmark) and PlayMakerIQ (USA). In the recent past I have also advised Asia’s first digital MVNO, Circles.life and a wireless fibre company from Delaware, WeLink Communications. Periodically, I also advise some funds and large institutional investors, selectively.

I have been an independent director on the boards of Bennett Coleman, PVR, and Indus towers. Currently I am also a non-executive director on the boards of STC (telecom service provider in GCC) and Tanla Platforms (cloud communication player). I am also an independent director on the boards of VLCC and OnMobile Global.

Then, I write for business publications, and my philanthropic efforts are focused towards supporting the Genesis Foundation for their program of curing (treating) underprivileged juveniles for congenital heart diseases. They have helped save life for more than 3,200 kids so far.

As adroit leaders, we build sustainable businesses and organisations that are not contingent on our permanency.

Looking back, can you tell us about three interesting events or anything that has stayed with you since?

The first big pivotal opportunity in my life was at Modi Xerox, to pursue a fully paid full-time MBA at Cranfield School of Management-UK, under Xerox’s global program to augment top talent. Once I was back with an MBA degree after 12 years of a successful track record at Xerox, my aspirations had skyrocketed, and to fulfil them, I had to move out and landed myself in the cellular telecom space with a lesser known Bharti Cellular Ltd, which had a large shareholding from British Telecom. Rest is history, as they say.

All CEOs, whether in promoter-led companies or board-managed companies, generally follow a delegation of authority (DOA) and so did I. Often, such documents run into several pages, and something unorthodox happened when it was time to fix my DOA with my boss Sunil Bharti Mittal. He suggested that instead of writing down what I can do and how, as the CEO, let’s write down what I can’t do or can do with permission both prior and post. The point was instead of a long laundry list of 20 pages, we stripped it down to the essence of a negative list of seven or eight things. Some of those few things needed explicit permission and some needed post intimation.

He also suggested that to empower me, let’s restrict it to a single page with the number of points restricted to single digits. What he meant was I could do anything not on that sheet of paper. That was music to the ears of any CEO. We achieved it and restricted the list to seven-eight items like brand name and positioning changes; selling or buying parts of the company; hiring or firing my first line; expenditure both opex and capex beyond budgets. Anything we miss out will be to the CEOs advantage, my boss said. This best practice has stuck with me ever since and I have replicated it in some other environments/businesses I have advised.

The top tier at Airtel would meet every year for a formal strategy session and revisit the vision, mission and values to gauge the progress. Often these gospels consume a lot of written space and are verbose to an extent that no one remembers them by heart. While recasting them for a fresh five-year period, my top team took it upon themselves to simplify these to an extent where every employee will be able to verbally recall the vision, mission and values so that it becomes a way of life rather than glorified statements and posters. This gave rise to the culture of prioritising objectives and making tough “or” decisions rather than easy “and” decisions to draw the best out of resource allocation.

What do you miss most about the C-Suite?

I am a non-addictive personality, played golf passionately and gave it up when it began to grossly eat into family time. I consciously practice to live my life in the present. The C-Suite days were glorious and mutually rewarding. They lent me my reputation and credibility to pursue alternatives in life, but I never took myself overly seriously as a C-Suite professional. The problem begins to brew when you credit yourself for most of what happened in the organisations and businesses you led, and only then does it become difficult to let go. As adroit leaders, we build sustainable businesses and organisations that are not contingent on our permanency. The C-Suite doesn’t miss you and will have your replacement in place post your exit, therefore I don’t miss the C-Suite but do cherish the time I spent there. My experiences and learnings there will be my treasure for life.

A post COVID environment will be inflationary, thanks to supply chain disruption, regulatory and ESG related changes.

If you had to relive your corporate career, what would you do differently?

Given my odds of being brought up by a single mother with limited financial resources, I cannot thank god more for his grace upon me and my family. With those odds I don’t think I could have changed anything for better than what I have. However, without the past odds, I would have spent more time internationally across continents and probably quit corporate life sooner to pursue entrepreneurship.

What are the changes in the corporate world that you see now that are vastly different from your time?

Generally the big shifts in the corporate world are on a continuum and don’t happen overnight, other than work-from-anywhere type situations forced by the likes of the global pandemic. The cheese was already moving during my times, and the velocity has now seen acceleration. The current environment will push corporates to think global (the next competitor-or collaborator could come from anywhere); collaborative mindset (learn to collaborate even with your fiercest competitor and remember winner can’t take it all); digitization will be on full-throttle (challenge will be to protect the digital assets) and populate the organisation with a right mix of digital natives, digital immigrants and digital aliens (experience vs. relevance); analytics (artificial intelligence, machine learning) will create the differentiation even in commodity businesses; customer experience and not customer service will decide the winners; great talent will have supply constraints and will command high premiums. A post COVID environment will be inflationary, thanks to supply chain disruption, regulatory and ESG-related changes.

Also read: Bharti Airtel forms ESG committee for sharper focus on environmental, sustainability agenda

Which business leader in the current crop impresses you?

A couple decades ago I would have instantly said Jack Welch. In this day and age, given the cataclysmic times we are in, there are different leaders I admire for different traits and accomplishments. I admire Tim Cook for ably stepping in the mega shoes of Steve Jobs. I admire Satya Nadella for rediscovering a behemoth like Microsoft. I admire Mukesh Ambani for his gargantuan vision to deliver colossal greenfield start-ups and upstage incumbents and I admire Azim Premji for being the torch-bearer of Indian entrepreneurs for giving back.

How do you plan for life after retirement?

India’s average life expectancy has increased to 69.4 years and urban India has a bit higher expectancy at 72.6 years. The current trends leave no ambiguity to conclude that retirement ages need to be deferred to a new normal, both for mental and financial semblance. Here, one size fits all does not work. For many like me, to be mentally and physically engaged with business and societal activities is far more important. As I advance towards the imaginary line of retirement as I am self-employed, the balance of activities will shift from commercial to non-commercial. Me-time will tend to increase significantly. Travel, which I enjoy, will be skewed in favour of leisure.

I sing in my free time and am a very ardent fan of old Bollywood music of the sixties to the eighties: Kishore Kumar, Mukesh, Hemant Kumar and so on. I have also been a trekker and mountaineer from early in my life

Is there anything you would tell your younger self?

I professionally envy those folks who have pursued their passion and converted their inherent talent or hobbies into their full time profession. To all youngsters I would say, the earlier you can discover you’re calling, your road to happiness will meet you faster. Earning money is important and should not be compromised but spend what you can afford to. If you leverage yourself to meet your lifestyle you will marginalise your ability to pursue alternative choices.

What is your advice for the next cadre of corporate leaders?

I have benefitted from the advice of management guru Ram Charan and have added my own insights for the next cadre. There are 60-70 traits known to practicing professionals, and each of us have 6-7 dominant ones. Play on your strengths and develop them, add new traits very selectively based on the environment and industry. Improving your judgement is paramount as a leader; learn from your judgements that went wrong. Observe all types of decision-making. Internal relationships are a multiplier for your leadership effectiveness. Work on them. Peer relationships are the toughest to manage. External relationships are a multiplier-on-multiplier and require a concerted effort over time; cherry-pick the ones you want to invest in. Don’t mistake networking with relationships. Online working may make that even tougher in the future.