Derek O’Brien wears many hats. He is a quizmaster, Member of Parliament and the Vice-President of the All India Trinamool CongressO’Brien was at IIM Calcutta during the B-school’s annual business summit ‘Intaglio’ as a speaker and had a candid chat with PGP students at IIM-C.

Excerpts from the interview:

You have worked as a sports journalist, then moved on to advertising and then a quiz-master, author and finally into politics. How do you juggle those hats?

There are no hats. There is only one hat. The one hat is communication. Ideas and communication. If you have certain beliefs and ideas, you can communicate those ideas. I was doing that for a year as a journalist. But for advertising and quizzing, my mission statement is ‘making knowledge interesting to people’.

If you change one word here and one word there, it can apply to a political party, it can apply to a knowledge company also.

So the basic skills don’t change. The stage changes; the scale changes.

Knowledge is important for a political party but in India, unfortunately, we have not seen the rigour that goes into designing policies or solving governance issues. Do you think this is evolving?

I am not sure what rigour is, from your point of view. Has ITC got better rigour? Or Mahindra? Or does Cadbury have better rigour?

Eventually, political parties are the only ones, unlike corporates, who have to seek a fresh mandate every time. ‘X’ becomes the chairman or MD of a company at the age of 49. Yes, he is answerable to the shareholders but you know how these companies work.

Here (politics), you have to go to the people.That’s the tough part. Of course, politics is evolving. Ten years ago, when a quiz-master came into politics, they said: “My god! Derek. You have got a successful career. You are going to screw up”. Now it is fine if an Infosys director wants to join or the MD of Royal Bank of Scotland wants to leave her job and join politics.

Things are evolving but politics is a kind of derided profession…

That will change. See, eventually, whether you like it or not, the real action is to change people’s lives.

Your mom or my mom or my dad might not get out of their multi-storeyed buildings and vote.

However, this guy (points to a driver) will because that is the only thing which equates him and me. We are on the same page here.

He knows that, by doing this, he has got one vote and I have got one vote.

We talked about industry friendliness, but it is not just big corporate houses that get you development, there are also small-scale entrepreneurs, public-private partnership models, and so on. What innovative models or ideas would you put forward?

Let me try to answer this in two parts. The first part is Bengal needs to fix the vehicle. It is like keeping a car in water for about five days and it starts rusting. There is a financial fix that has to happen.

There is a Rs 85,000 per capita per child debt burden for every child born in Bengal today.

Now you are servicing a debt, a huge debt, so the first fix we need is a moratorium on the debt. This is where the political muscle is needed after 3-4 months. This is the first fix.

The second thing is about work culture. If that changes everything else changes.

For instance, annual appraisals. Whether you are an industry minister or a big-shot in the party, you have to perform or perish. It is an appraisal and you are on the line.

Exactly, every skill of yours, the way you handle people, the communication skills, ideas…. You have to have a team that handles every single aspect. I have been in corporates for nine years.

The kind of talent there is needed in Parliament… there is writing, thinking, speaking, interpreting, strategising.

Leave the politics aside, if you take the AAP as a brand: it has a strong brand name — the AAP.

Aam Aadmi Party’s acronym is superb and simple. You need a visual identity too. Nike has a swoosh, the AAP has the cap.

You know, 90 per cent of communication of Trinamool has Mamata Banerjee’s face on it. That is the brand. So everything you do must be something about the brand. Today, if I give a lecture at the IIM wearing a white kurta, 70 per cent of the batch would switch off even before I started.

( The interviewers are students at IIM-Calcutta .)

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW