The rearmost seat of a Mitsubishi Pajero, I discover, is not the most comfortable of places. But, there I was, squashed, legs drawn up, and interviewing Ram Charan, once called the ‘most influential consultant alive’ by Fortune magazine. Considering that the other three travellers were all either in their 60s or 70s, I, as the youngest, had offered to squeeze myself into the rear seat.

We’ve just departed from the Great Lakes Institute of Management, over 50 km from Chennai, where the 74-year-old Charan had a large contingent of 20-something students hanging on to his every word. The Pajero is headed to the Hilton and this gives me some time with Charan. In the SUV are Bala V. Balachandran, founder and Dean of Great Lakes, and industrialist T.K. Balaji, Chairman & MD of auto parts maker Lucas-TVS. Charan and Balachandran joined the faculty of the famed Kellogg School of Management in 1973.

In his lecture earlier in the day, Charan, pacing up and down the large auditorium, gave the Great Lakes students some simple takeaways on leadership, distilled from working with top leaders like GE’s Jack Welch and Jeffrey Immelt. He made five seemingly simple but powerful points to the students: Ask the right questions; listen well; seek out viewpoints; zoom in on the crux of a problem; read people well. These characteristics, he said, define all great leaders.

The man himself is an enigma; Charan, who earned his MBA and PhD from Harvard Business School, ceaselessly travels, consulting with leaders around the world. He owns no home or car and doesn’t know how to drive Most of the time, he is either on a flight somewhere or in a hotel room.

Despite consulting for some of the world’s richest businessmen, Charan himself does not seek worldly possessions; ‘My watch is a $30 Timex,’ he emphasises during the conversation. When S Sriram, Executive Director of Great Lakes, asks him if it’s just legend that he gets his clothes FedEx-ed by his secretary in Dallas to wherever he’s travelling, Charan says it’s true: “Four times a month; it’s cheaper than the hotel laundry!” But on this India trip, he says he’s getting his clothes laundered and the next Fed Ex-ed set will land at a hotel in Florida.

Here are some edited excerpts from Business Line ’s exclusive interview:

What are the biggest challenges CEOs face today?

It’s the serial uncertainty; things are more volatile. Uncertainty has always been there but now there are forces that have accelerated with more frequency and more volatility. But, as human development has taken place (over the years), the coming generations will rise to the challenge and create innovation, productivity and education to deal with that uncertainty. That’s the general one; then you go industry by industry, country by country; there are different degrees of uncertainty, and the successful leader will have to have the competence to deal with it.

So, how do they deal with the uncertainty?

We can see long-term unstoppable trends, but we cannot see the short-term volatile trends. So, we need to focus on three things: One, we should accustom our mind to detecting early warning signals. Second, make the organisation more agile and flexible, and third, continue to incubate ideas and be ready for the future. I have avoided the idea of forecasting; if you can forecast, the issue does not arise and if you can figure it out, wonderful!

How do you view the second coming of CEOs in companies they founded? Steve Jobs and Howard Schultz, and, closer home, N.R. Narayana Murthy?

What is happening is that the decisions made by the boards on the CEOs – some of those fits between the person and the company – were basically wrong. And, so they made a choice to have the CEO come back as his confidence, image and knowledge of the business could help and he, too, has had a chance to reflect.

I was involved in bringing Steve Jobs back and that was out of desperation. Total desperation. And the condition he made was to fire the whole board except two people. And that was a big gamble: could he turn it around? Despite leadership characteristics traditionally not being there (for Jobs), he was brought in for his skill. Michael Dell could not turn it (Dell) around in the form of a public company. We still have to see how he will do. I think he will. Howard Schultz did very well for Starbucks, he has rejuvenated it and created a lot of innovation; he brought back the basic concept of the business, which was social ambience, social interaction and customisation at the shop level.

Have Indian companies become truly global today?

They may have a global footprint though many don’t have a global mindset. But, there’s no need to have that. You don’t have to be present in some 200 countries. You know how to work, lead, align, synchronise, but there’s no way you’re going to master so many countries. Indian companies are making progress. A number of companies are moving out of India to build their business and I see more companies going to do that.

You work with several top CEOs in the US. Like they say, it’s lonely at the top – where do they go for inspiration?

They search for it. They are like sponges, ready to absorb ideas. It’s built into their chemistry. None of them I know has all of them (the characteristics of a good leader), and I don’t expect them to have all of it, but then they supplement themselves.

And most of them have never been to B-school?

Most of them don’t have an MBA; an MBA is to learn tools, a few techniques. But an MBA does not teach leadership. Teachers are not leaders. You can learn a few things that can enhance your entrepreneurship. You can learn how to raise funds or manage your cash flows in an MBA.

What kind of leadership style do you advocate?

Again, you need to see what stage a company is in. If a company is broke, no cash, that’s one kind of style. If a company is doing well, and you want to grow globally, you may require different leadership. But, today, the mindset among Indian leaders is that we can be globally competitive and be world class. That will be a board item for most CEOs.

What about your inspiration? Is it from reading or meeting people?

Mine is very simple; I say every night, what are my learnings for the day? The day you stop learning is the beginning of the end. When I look back on my life, I was perhaps doing it right after I left India. I was a draughtsman and was learning the finance side of the business without knowing why I was learning it.

You quit a tenured professorship at Boston University in 1976; was that a turning point for you?

The tenure wasn’t an important thing for me. My philosophy was very simple: if I am not contributing, I am in the wrong place. I had no worries about making a living. I live on very little. I live on Indian values.

It’s fascinating that you work with top leaders who are extremely rich but yourself don’t yearn to possess much…

This is the old Indian philosophy, as in the Urdu saying: khaak sey aana, khaak sey jaana (loosely translates as ‘from void to void’ or ‘from dust to dust’). We all know how we are going from here, and all these material things don’t do anything. So, I like to live in a simple style, in a simple way; that’s my whole philosophy.

I was with the CEO of a company few years ago. He opened a box to show his watches, expensive ones, and asked what I was wearing. It’s a $30 Timex, I still wear it (points to his watch). This watch is as good as anything else to tell the time. I am not going to buy an expensive watch, I don’t need it. All my clothes are from Jos A. Banks (a US retailer) at cut rate; they give me a 50 per cent discount. If people don’t like my clothes it’s too bad. But they don’t care as long as they’re neat.

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