Insightful Insights On Leadership Matters For Developing Intrapreneurs By Mr Anand Pillai

Mr Anand Pillai addressed the teaching fraternity of CHRIST, Lavasa on Leadership Matters for Developing Intrapreneurs on 3rd January 2020 at CHRIST, Lavasa as part of Faculty Development Program. As he contemplated and looked beyond his corporate career he shared some valuable inputs. Mr Anand Pillai is the Managing Director of Leadership Matters, Inc, a company which focuses on building an intrapreneural culture in organizations. He is also the Adjunct Professor for Strategy and Leadership at IMT, Ghaziabad.

With more than 35 years of rich experience in the corporate world, he has handled challenging assignments in general management and as head of operations (from GM to CEO to CLO) in Fortune 500 companies.

In addition, Mr Anand is a Leadership Coach and Organization Transformation Guru. His focus is to ensure that clients lift their performance skills and behaviors, apply world’s best management practices and hold individuals accountable for their own learning and development. He has coached CXOs, senior and middle managers across the IT, Finance, Banking and Insurance, Manufacturing, Government and Hospitality sectors.

Mr Anand Pillai has been a much sought after speaker in many national and international forums in addition to being a guest lecturer in leading B Schools. He has done extensive research on cross cultural relationships, intrapreneurship and innovation (Blue Ocean Strategy) and is widely consulted on these three subjects across the globe. He has been featured in the book “Leading with Wisdom” along with 30 other leaders (Steven Covey, Abdul Kalam to name a few) in the world and also in `Open Source Leadership’.

At the outset Mr Anand clarified the basic distinction between intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship within an organization. The focus ought to be on innovation, initiative and team building within an organization. He mentioned that positioning matters and CHRIST has to develop its own positioning. If one is not number one in any category then another category must be created in which one can become number one. He inspired them to have an integrated campus and in doing so they will get the best students or faculty and corporate links to target a large mass. To substantiate his point he gave actual examples of some popular companies and mentioned how strength became weakness and lead to failure. For instance Maruti positioned itself as a common man’s car and hence failed in the premium category.

Mr Anand further motivated the teachers to be observant and identify an opportunity when others fail to do so. In order to build world class leaders business opportunity identification is a must. An intrapreneur need not worry about fund raising or cash flow to start a venture. The prime focus should be to check whether the product is marketable, has financial feasibility, sustainability or internal capability expertise. He mentioned quite categorically that decisions are made emotionally but justified rationally and success lies in how to get the maximum out of minimum. He further added that personal limits might hinder success and one ought to also overcome organizational limitations. The team must have the ability to identify the weakling and target marketing.

According to Mr Anand academicians can excel in research with rigor and relevance. To to drive across the point he referred to the three click rule of a website regarding Digital Marketing such as one needs precisely three seconds to get information, three clicks for a transaction and above all one should be able to get three takeaways.

Regarding Developing Escape Velocity (velocity required to escape the gravitational forces) he questioned the audience about their gravitational forces and gave a meaningful equation ie. Stress = Effort/Value. In other words it meant that when effort is less valued then stress is more.

Mr Pillai referred to Yerkes - Dodson Human performance curve according to which too less stimulation (or less stress) or too less motivation will lead to distress and contribute to impaired attention, boredom, confusion and apathy. On the other hand simulation/motivation contributes to focused attention, emotional balance and rational thinking results in Eustress (positive stress). Similarly too much stimulation and lot of stress results in impaired sensitivity, excitement, burn-out, disorganized behavior and eventually leads to distress. In this context he referred to Okinawa, a village in Japan which boasts of maximum centenarians. He appreciated their practice of Ikigai which rightly suggests that movement is fundamental to life, one must make passion a vocation and practice community living to lead a long and happy life.

Mr Anand advised the teachers to read the book OUTLIERS. He further motivated the teachers to practice principle of maximum efforts which means that despite best intentions people don't put maximum efforts but do so under compulsion. A teacher must also avoid unconscious bias and not be judgmental as it affects diversification. They should unleash their creativity and take fear of failure away rather they ought to learn from failure. He rightly articulated that leaders are made in current zone and not in comfort zone. He referred to mindset, skillset and will set and inspired them to treat failure as an opportunity to learn.

 Mr Anand conducted an interesting activity and asked the teachers to write down their individual obvious and hidden asset and do the same for the college too. He further elaborated his point by referring to leverage and connected it to an ability to translate failure into success. He inspired everyone to leverage hidden assets and asserted that despite limited resources one can achieve a lot. He paraphrased JK Rowling’s speech on failure which can be summed up in these words; `it is impossible to live a life without failure until you live so carefully that you won’t fail so that you will be failed naturally’. According to Mr Anand failure is a stepping stone to success. 

The post lunch session focused on how to leverage your hidden assets with specific reference to lagging indicators and leading indicators and differentiated between the two. He categorically mentioned that lagging indicators are typically output-oriented, easy to measure but hard to improve or influence such as percentage of passes, admissions, placements and research publications. Whereas leading indicators are typically input oriented, hard to measure but easy to improve or influence.

 The leading indicators of CHRIST, Lavasa were written on the board incorporating everyone’s suggestions. They included all hidden assets such as cream of students, well rounded personality with specific reference to holistic development, culture of discipline (Value System), diversity of students and faculty, younger faculty with high learning agility, mixing campuses, interdisciplinary subjects (Flexi credit system of VIT), location, weather and infrastructure.

 To conclude his lecture Mr Anand inspired the teachers to go after certain values or criterion and must make efforts to leverage the infrastructure of Lavasa campus. He signed off with an assignment and asked the teachers to list seven indicators in each table. They ought to start with the results they want (lagging indicators) and then work backwards to identify the necessary action (leading indicators) to achieve those results. All the faculty members must work diligently on leading indicators and change the rules of the game.