Prakash Iyer is in Chennai to speak about his new book The Secret of Leadership . His first book, The Habit of Winning , published by Penguin, was a big draw for its series of simple stories that one could draw life lessons from. He follows a similar tack in this book as well and believes anecdote and stories are a powerful way of conveying a message, especially to today’s twitter generation. In this interview, Iyer, the Managing Director of Kimberly Clark Lever, talks about the book’s structure, on why he uses a lot of sports to makes his analogies and why business school educated managers are taking to writing in a big way.

You have followed the same template of using stories and anecdotes as in your first book to make your point?

To get a message across to people, a story does it very well. It’s worked for me in my life. You also take the person out of the equation — telling someone you are like this and that immediately puts them on the defensive. But, if you tell them it happened in a world far away, in a completely unrelated context, and when they listen to that and say, hey, that relates to me, then the message becomes more palatable and memorable. If a person says that he relates to a story, I can tell what’s going on in that person’s life and what resonates with him. The ability to make a difference to someone’s life is a huge feel good factor for me.

Why have you used sports to make a lot of analogies in this book?

I use sport as everybody relates to it - it’s a great metaphor, especially cricket. You can learn a lot of lessons from that. Everybody knows how Ricky Ponting has this phenomenal ability to find the gaps and how he places the ball and knows where the players are placed. When he was asked how he does that, he said most players look around the field and all the fielders get imprinted in their minds. Ponting says, “I don’t see the fielders but the gaps get imprinted.”

It’s a simple but powerful idea on how we all look around and see the obstacles around and not the opportunities. It’s just a matter of getting your mind to see and orient itself to look for the gaps and opportunities.

What would be your favourite story from your book?

If I were to pick a favourite story, the first one is how a humble tea bag (the book’s first story) can teach us a few lessons. I am fascinated by this intersection of every day life, and at a larger level, life lessons and how you can relate anything that happens around you and apply it. All of us have read lessons on leadership, but how many can recall it? A tea bag becomes a simple set of lessons on leadership; now I have people writing in on how a tea bag can teach us leadership.

Another lesson is the one I learnt from my driver, who used to drive me around during my earlier job. He used to drive a BEST bus. He was telling me about his life and how he came to drive. Young children, he said, should remember that getting a licence doesn’t mean that you’re an expert; you’re given a right to drive and allowed on the road.

So, getting an MBA doesn’t mean you’re an expert, it merely means you can go and start practising as a manager. The bigger lesson is that we tend to think that leadership lessons come only from CEOs. The truth is you can learn from anyone, people around you display that (leadership qualities), you only have to keep your mind open to it.

Truly great leadership is about unleashing the power of leaders in the organisation. The lady who sits at a reception needs to behave like a complete leader, she has to see herself as the first face of the organisation, not because HR tells her to but because she sees herself as a leader ...that to me is an exciting idea.

There are a whole crop of business school-educated managers like yourself who are writing all kinds of books today - a trend set off by Chetan Bhagat. What accounts for this burst of creativity?

It’s the reality of the marketplace. Increasingly publishers are seeing an opportunity. Earlier no one had tried it and now it works. For me it’s not just creative expression, but I like the idea of communicating a thought and I actually feel that when all this is done and dusted, will you be remembered for gaining five share points in the market or will you be remembered for having made a difference to someone’s life? For me, the idea of a legacy is exciting. If someone is reading this book in some corner of the country and likes it, and if there’s a message that someone finds valuable, that is a powerful thought for me.

vinay.kamath@thehindu.co.in

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW