What will change everything in near future? Experts speak

The second Forbes India Leadership Awards rewarded and recognised India's top leaders at a glittering ceremony at the Oberoi in Mumbai.

This time around, seven of India's top CEOs shared their thoughts in three minute presentations. All keynote speakers were given one simple question to answer. What is the one big thing that will change everything for everybody that no one knows about yet? The speaker line-up included N Chandrasekaran, Nitin Paranjpe of HUL, Kumar Mangalam Birla, William Bissell of Fabindia, Adil Zianulbhai of McKinsey India, Karl Slym of Tata Motors and Akhil Gupta of Blackstone. To make sure this was an interactive evening, every member in the audience was given a tablet computer with a custom built FILA app allowing them to vote for each CEO. N Chandrasekaran, Managing Director, TCS: If you look at the last four years, we have gone through a tremendous turbulence from an economic perspective. We have been debating, discussing and going through a process by which we can recover from it. What I believe is that when the history judges these four years, it will definitely not remember this period as a period of economic turbulence. Instead, it will be remembered as a period of great digital transformation on how the technologies have transformed all our lives forever. Let’s take two points in time, the Beijing Olympics and the London Olympics. When the Olympics happened in Beijing, there was no iPad or tablet. At London, 55 million people watched the games through iPad. During Beijing, Twitter was hardly known and it did not even have a million subscribers. In London, there were at least 140 million people who were tweeting. If you take Facebook again, it had less than 100 million users and it has grown 10 times to cross billion users in these four years. No one would have imagined a game like Angry Birds would be a hit. Today, it has revenues of USD 100 million with 70% margins. No one would have imagined a start-up company with 16 employees with absolutely no revenues will get picked up for billion dollars - Instagram. Things are changing, changing so fast. Every process, every business, very industry is getting re-imagined. What we do at TCS is to go through the same transformation whereby we are democratizing innovation and empowering our staff to create a future. We don't know what is the point of arrival but we are getting there. Nitin Paranjpe, CEO & MD, Hindustan Unilever: I am conscious of the fact that even as we have gathered here to celebrate this evening, we are doing so at a time that trust and confidence in business is at a new low that is ironic. It is ironic because it is business that over the last many ages has contributed more to improve the quality of life of people through innovation and enterprise. Unfortunately, the model of capitalism that we follow today has been questioned by many, it has been narrow, self-serving and not addressing the larger interest of society. It is also ironic because there was a time that the world needed business to contribute and recreate growth and stimulate the economy. Unfortunately, that is not the case, the signs are everywhere. Surveys across the world show debt in trust in business. Movements like ‘Occupy Wall Street’ are merely a reflection of the growing anger that the public has about how business is being run. _PAGEBREAK_ We need to do something. It is time that we find the way to reinvent this model of business that we practice for so long. Now before we can do so, it is really important to understand how that business gets here, and to do that, I am tempted to go back in time and think of a business how it first started. It is clear to me that the origin of business was in this whole space of finding a way to serve the needs of society. In doing so, business found the way to make money. Unfortunately, over a period of time people have lost sight of its purpose and the focus of making money has reached a stage where that has become a ‘be-all and end-all’ of business. If we had to reinvent the business model or the capitalism, as we know it, we simply have to do something quite simple to get the purpose of business back at its centre. Purpose must lead, profits will follow. Now at one end, this seems quite simple and you might wonder whether it is game-changing. But it is because if we do not do this, I am absolutely convinced that the business will lose the right to serve. Society will soon not give us the opportunity to have any model, which is good for business, but not good for society. Equally if we get it right, we will collectively create a new business model, which will take us on a new path of growth. A new path of growth, which is good for business, good for people and good for society, good for the planet – that’s what we are trying to do with Unilever. A goal that we have articulated under what we call the ‘Unilever sustainable living plan’. We want to grow a business while having an environmental footprint, and simultaneously, increasing or improving our social and economic impact. We don’t have all the answers if truth be told, but we do know that not finding a solution is not an option. We need all like-minded people to come together at this time because the answer can be found. When we do find that answer, we will have recreated a business model that we know can be the force for good in society, it has been in the past and it can be in the future. Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman, Aditya Birla Group: To start with, I believe the seeds of the unknown are always found here in the known. If you look at the last four years since 2008, when we had global financial crisis, governments all across the world have been decisively interventionists. They have been interventionists in the guise of being protectionist, interventionists in the guise of being socialistic. Therefore, globalization, as we have come to understand it in the last decade and a half, has been rolled back partially as we would say in Indian lingo. In terms of protectionism, we have seen two kinds of protectionism. The more obvious one, of course, has been raising of tariffs. The second has been the raising of barriers to non-tariffs, which is by strong laws, against environment, against labour. Therefore, you have seen a scenario where liberalisation in its current form, in its original form ceases to exit. On the other hand, you have seen governments becoming much more unabashedly left of centre. You have seen government bring out policies that are far more socialists than they were ever in the past. The unfortunate thing is that business is being accused of being non-inclusive, businesses being accused of working for the benefit of only a few strata of society. _PAGEBREAK_ Again, this is something that lacks the enthusiasm that business would like to see from society in general. It hampers industrial growth, and therefore, it hampers growth of societies as a whole. The consequence of this is that the state has much bigger role to play going forward than it has had in the recent past. I believe that going forward, for many of us who are planning to take our companies global; one of the reasons which we have been planning to take our companies global is the fact that investing abroad gives us the advantage of clarity over an investment horizon. When you make an investment, you are clear about what government policy would be during the span of your investment. With governments becoming more interventionists, with governments bring about changes in policy making in a more prolific way, I think that is an advantage that we will see eroding over a period of time. That is something that we will have to take into account when we weave our global dreams. The one thing or the few things that cannot be roll back are culture, fashion and music. As my kids were saying, you cannot put tariffs around Katy Perry and around Adele because kids all around the world will love them and will be fans of theirs. The government really cannot put tariffs around them. Adil Zianulbhai of McKinsey India: Humility is something that all of us need to think about for the next few years for three reasons. First, given how much things are changing including what Chandrasekaran talked about and what Kumar Mangalam Birla talked about and others, there are so many unknown unknowns. There are things that we don’t even know, which seem to come in and change the environment and chance our plans and what we try to do as leaders. Given that much uncertainty, one should be very humble about our ability to predict what will happen, and to make those changes ahead of time, so that we can be prepared for it. We have to be little bit humble about what we know. Secondly, we need to be a little bit humble. I think when the economy is growing dramatically, we all took credit for it and said it’s us and it’s not the environment. When our companies did terrifically, we said it is us and now the things are not going well. We are the first to blame everyone else. We need to be a little humble that we put too much on our capabilities when things were going great. We did to change the things necessary that we can do well when things are not going great and recognize how much the environment helps us as well as hurts us. _PAGEBREAK_ Number three, if you think back on your past, many of us were helped by leaders who were humble. When we were younger and we needed help a lot of people whom we looked up to showed great humility in helping us. In almost any leader that you think about, humility is one of their great characteristics that we have forgotten. When Forbes asked me what is the one thing that we should think about for the next year in terms of leaders? I said humility, and with all humility, I end before my three minutes. William Bissell, Managing Director Fabindia: The application of technologies coupled with the political and economic rights of individuals and the benefits of modern ways of organizing institutions and businesses has ushered in an age of unprecedented prosperity and a higher standard of living in quality of life than we have ever experienced before. But it is also bought us to the cusp of a great challenge as we relentlessly pursue the idea that only what can be measured matters. We have found ourselves surrounded by a way of thinking that is taken deep roots within our political, economic and social institutions reinforcing the status quo. Ultimately, what can’t be valued in a most limited sense ceases to exist. Here is what I believe is coming up next. Once again a tiny but growing group of individuals in business, in the arts, in academia are preparing to reinvent our future. What will change in the near future is the way we measure things and how we define success and benefit. Today, we measure health as the absence of disease. But sooner, I hope we will learn to realize that there exists a state of wellness. Today, we measure success of corporations by the amount of profit they generate but soon, we will learn to look at the amount of other benefits they generate and how these can be included in the way we define their success. Today, we measure the success of individuals by their outward achievements. But soon, we will measure them by what they contribute to the common good as parents, volunteers and stakeholders in their society. Today, we measure the health of a society by the growth of its GDP but soon we will measure it by the absence of strife, the happiness of its citizens, the quality of its rivers and forests and the abundance of its biospheres. Today, we measure our lives by how much money we have, and yet soon, I hope we will measure it by the amount of goodness we generate within our families, our communities, and ultimately, in the world. Karl Slym, Managing Director and CEO, Tata Motors: We are going to talk about transportation, and then, I am going to take that into leadership. Transportation, we all know, started from the wheel and it is very quickly progressed into where we are today. Many people don’t know actually what is available in transportation today before we even move into what potentially could be the future. Did you know that there is collision protection available today? We can ensure that cars will not crash any longer. Did you know that if you lock your keys in your car, we can unlock the car for you from a satellite in the sky and make sure that you can get your keys back out without having to poke that piece of wire in, smash the window or anything else. Did you know that we can diagnose your car from that same satellite and understand what is wrong with your vehicle, and potentially repair it without you even knowing that we are making those modifications to your car. This will make you a satisfied car owner. Those kind of things are available today that many of us don’t really know about. If we look at the photography environment, it took over 800 years for the idea of the first picture to turn into the first picture that we saw. However, it took only 5% of that time to take that first picture into digital that we know today. Who was the first company that came up with a digital camera that actually failed in the digital business? Kodak was the first to come up with digital but they did not actually make use of that visionary idea, and therefore, you all know where Kodak is today. So, the speed and the decision making is key for us as leadership. Which company said that no more than five computers would be required globally? IBM. Finally, from my own company, who did not sign the Beetles because they were never going to be a success? I am afraid it was Dick Rowe. As leaders, you have got to actually see what that right vision may be. _PAGEBREAK_ As far as Tata Motors is concerned, we only have the canvas of the vehicle, and actually, the advanced apps will help you chose what your car is everyday and you can, therefore, drive that. Anchor: Now our final speaker for the evening. He is someone who believes that India will beat the hell out of China in the near future, the Mr Akhil Gupta. Akhil Gupta, Chairman and Managing Director, Blackstone India: I believe that India’s future will be brighter than China in the next 10 years. The reason is that once India and China become middle income countries, there will be high growth without innovation led productivity growth. That, in turn, will depend on the openness of the culture and how evolved the political, social and economic institutions are. History teaches us that these systems evolve in a manner roughly comparable to biological evolution. The two components of biological evolution are variation and selection. Variation in today’s context is diversity and selection in today’s context implies free institutions and free competition. For 5000 years, when new ideas, religion or people showed up on India’s shores, Indian society selectively assimilated them into the Indian ethos. This process of re-combination has made India one of the most diverse societies in the world. By contrast, China’s history has followed a different pattern. China has much lesser variation, and in addition, the Chinese state plays a much stronger selection role within the economy. Now when we talk about China’s GDP being four times India, some of us feel intimidated. Actually, if you measure China’s advantage by the numbers of years, they are ahead – it is only 12-15. India is 50-100 years ahead of China, when it comes to our evolution of our socialist tuitions, which foster open society, variation and selection. My hypothesis is based on the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter. As you know, he is a Harvard economist who coined the term “creative destruction”. He differed from the leading economist of his times. May be he was thinking about India. According to him, the entrepreneurs innovate by figuring out how to use inventions, they don’t have to invent themselves, and by introducing new means of production, new products or new forms of organization, Schumpeter also pointed out that the mother load of innovation is the recombination of existing ideas. I would say that due to the energy of entrepreneurs, our culture, our open society and our institutions are all in place to beat China. The major risk in my scenario is increasing level of corruption in our society because in my framework, corruption means that it is interfering with the true market selection processes. This is the first problem we have to solve before we can solve others. If we can solve that, we will gather again in 10 years, you will be as much of a believer in the Indian story better than China that I am today.