The Hindu Business Line : Emergence of the fractal savant

INDIAN industry is at the crossroads. More and more Indian companies are coming into the global limelight. For instance, ONGC, Reliance, Hindustan Lever, IOC, Wipro, SBI, Infosys, ITC, Ranbaxy, and HDFC figure in a recent Business Week survey of the top 200 emerging market companies.

This is no doubt admirable. The question however, is how admirable is it? What is new, what is different about these companies? In what manner have they put something different into practice? What is unusual in the way that they operate?

It is easy enough for a company to identify best practices in its industry or even in other industries and then make a go of replicating that. It is easy enough to hire managers who have made it work elsewhere to make it work here. But has the company truly tapped into a unique source of creativity that would give it wings forever?

In other words, is the company just another player in the pack — sometimes leading, sometimes falling back — or is it really a leader, continually reformulating the industry within which it exists?

Once upon a time, there were airlines like Pan Am. These fell by the wayside, to be replaced by others like United Airlines. But how different is United Airlines from Pan Am? This is the crucial question, and one that Indian corporations have to consider in earnest as they continue to grow more global.

Is business going to continue forever in the same manner as it is conducted now, or is it going to truly capture the imagination of employees, customers, and stakeholders, to sing of the possibility of the human spirit? Bill Gates has said about Microsoft, "Microsoft is a company that manages imagination". This is open to interpretation. But it is definitely the right idea.

In "Fractal Space: A new dynamics of organisation" (Business Line, December 17, 2003), in making reference to the stuck-point fractal, we indicated that the business world is at the vital level, and that so long as it continued at that level, the stuck-point fractal would automatically come into being, resulting in events such as recessions, unemployment, and needless destruction.

The need of the hour, thus, is to cross into the mental level. This needs leaders and organisations that do not toe the line, but create new possibility at the next level in the global fractal journey — the level of the mind. Hence, to create a company that is a replica of another is of little value.

What is needed are unique companies that live their uniqueness, because that is how they have been made, and that is who they are.

But unique companies are not made through amassing best practices or even managerial talent. They are made through the vision and passion of a living personality. Enter the fractal savant. Case in point — Dr Venkatasawamy, founder of the renowned Aravind Eye Care System.

Dr Venkataswamy had already retired from government service without any substantial savings, when he decided to start this organisation. He was impelled by one thought alone — to remove needless blindness in the world. His anchor, thus, was firmly at the mental level.

That gave him the strength he needed, and in spite of initially being turned down by banks because he was considered a bad bet, today, over the course of 25-years, the organisation has grown from the meagre 11-bed start-up to five hospitals spread over south India.

Approximately 200,000 surgeries are performed a year and, since its inception, 1.5 million cases of blindness have been removed and close to 12 million relieved of other eye-related problems.

The organisation has higher margins than any of its kind anywhere in the world, and what is more, approximately 70 per cent of its patients are treated free. Needless to say, the institution has become a model for removal of unnecessary blindness the world over.

Yet, it was not just the conceptual vision that caused this success. Dr Venkataswamy had retired as Head of Department of Ophthalmology at the Government Madurai Medical College, and as an accomplished eye surgeon at the Government Erskine Hospital, Madurai. He held these posts for 20 years and pioneered a number of successful programmes along the way, including eye camps, a rehabilitation centre for the blind, a low vision aid clinic, a glaucoma demonstration centre, an ophthalmic assistant training programme, and a rural rehabilitation for the blind project.

Thus, not only had he acquired and mastered the `physical' level knowledge of understanding and treating many aspects of the eye thereby creating a strata of stability, agility, and repeatability, representative of the physical level, and a solid foundation on which to begin to fulfil dreams, but he had also developed the vital level dynamism that effectively uses the physical skills to create significant `flows' through which the skills could be successfully leveraged and spread.

Further, he had integrated or organised these skills and capabilities around his conceptual-level vision of removing needless blindness in the world. Depending on our point of view it could be said, that the aim of `removing needless blindness in the world' sought for an able instrument with the physical and vital level wherewithal, and found it in the person of Dr Venkataswamy.

Alternatively, it could also be said, that the uniqueness that was within Dr Venkataswamy progressively expressed more of itself through the years. First exercising the foundation level skills at the physical level, it began to experiment on a vaster scale to develop dynamism, the ability to mobilise others, to focus energies, representative of the vital level.

Only when it saw that these basics had been mastered, it allowed its raison d`etre, its swadharma, its life purpose, its uniqueness, to clearly step forward, expressed by the aim of `removing needless blindness in the world'.

It was not necessary that this high aim ever become active in the person of Dr Venkataswamy. However, because he successfully passed through the levels of the physical and the vital, mastering the needed skills on the way, it was impelled to come forward.

At the end of it all, through fulfilling the journey from physical to vital to mental, it can be said that Dr Venkataswamy has become an embodiment of the fractal journey.

Further, in listening to him speak it is clear that his motivation is to serve the thought behind the fractal journey — that great thought that wants all to rise from the lower levels of life, and in this case, from an inability to function in society because of blindness, to the higher levels, of having a more meaningful personal, communal, and social life, through the removal of unnecessary blindness.

Hence, being in alignment with the great thought behind the ubiquitous fractal, and embodying mastery of the levels of the fractal journey that continued to present themselves to him in his life, he stands as a fractal savant, the leader in tune with the pervasive organisational-fractal. And let us remember, that the pervasive organisational-fractal appears to be the substance of the vast dynamic creativity that animates progressive movement.

The organisation he has created speaks of uniqueness in every way we look at it, and if we were to look deeply enough, we would find that this uniqueness emanates from the uniqueness of Dr Venkataswamy.

Its unparalleled outreach into the villages, its unique backbone comprising of people from the villages, its innovative assembly-line surgical theatre, its hospital atmosphere that redefines the notion of health-care, stand amongst a few quick indications of the nature of this uniqueness.

This is what must happen in all companies that want truly to become great. They must similarly become unique, by becoming the embodiment of living personalities who have mastered their areas in life.

Textbooks, best practices, managerial expertise, fancy technology is well and good. But it will not give wings to a company, and will not let it rise above the turmoil and quickly see new possibilities when the going gets tough.

The fractal savant, on the other hand, being an embodiment of the pervasive organisational-fractal knows the pulse of markets, the pulse of possibilities, in a different way.

The development of fractal savants must become the modus operandi in Indian companies now at the global crossroads. This indeed will be truly creative, and truly admirable.

(The author is founder of Aurosoorya, a firm specialising in creativity and innovation. He can be reached through the Aurosoorya web-site at www.aurosoorya.com)

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