Harmony at Work

An interview with Rashmi Bansal, Founder/Editor JAM Magazine, and author, Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

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Thank for talking with us, Rashmi.

Thank you, Dharmaraj. It’s nice to be on the other side of the interview table, for a change!

How did the idea of the book come to you?

I have been an entrepreneur and have been fascinated by entrepreneurship. I have covered entrepreneurship extensively in my writing over the years. IIM Ahmedabad (IIM-A) approached me and said, “We have this idea for a book, and what do you think?” I said, “I think it’s a great idea and I think I should do it.” I just knew that I had to do this book. It was also an opportunity to meet people and just understand what this whole journey is all about.

Had they lined up interviews for you?

No. The whole process was quite entrepreneurial. The idea was to document the success stories of IIM-A graduates who have become entrepreneurs. We had some broad guidelines on what we wanted to do. But that was about it. The one line brief of this book really was to inspire a lot of young people towards entrepreneurship. I really wanted it to be a book, so I didn’t want to have any extra “management-y” stuff like jargon and lots of figures and tables and diagrams and business modules and stuff like that. I wanted to really just capture the stories of people.

Initially the thought was to cover the ones who have made it big. So we put down on the list all the people who have actually had an IPO (initial public offering on the stock market) and who are running companies that are pretty large and well known. We wanted to have people from different sectors, industries, and age groups—to have a mix of different kinds of stories. I suggested that we also ask our alumni to nominate people. So we sent out a mailer to all our 27,000 alumni of IIM-A to nominate any person they knew about who was doing something interesting.

Towards the end [of the interview process] I felt we should have some people who have not built a huge empire—maybe a couple of social entrepreneurs and maybe one person who has decided to keep his company quite small. Because every person I met said, “I had to face a choice of whether I want to grow this company or be happy at a certain level.”

Because when you grow you have different kinds of challenges and responsibilities. It’s just a whole different experience. And there are a lot of people who are just happy being small—the whole “small is beautiful” model: “I have control over my life and my time. I don’t want to go to ten thousand people.” So I thought we should have somebody like that.

That’s how it took shape. We did have initially 10-12 people we definitely wanted to feature. A few came in through the recommendation of alumni, and they were very interesting also—and a few more just to add some variety, because I wanted different aspects of being an entrepreneur.

I wish I could have found more women. But it was really not so easy. Historically in management education there haven’t been so many women. Right up to the 1993 batch in which I graduated, we had hardly fifteen girls or less. So from that pool to find women who were entrepreneurs wasn’t so easy.

What we appreciate about the book is how conversational it is and how one can recommend it to anybody who is interested in entrepreneurship or how a particular company got started.

I have been writing since I was 17 years old. I started writing for newspapers back then and this has always been my style. I’ve never been a high-flown intellectual kind of writer. I always have wanted to write things that the maximum number of people can read, but which has something interesting. I feel that I’m taking your time; you’re giving me your attention. So I should add some value to you. I should entertain you. I should inform you. For example, the book has a little bit of Hindi mixed with English. I think it’s 98% English and 2% Hindi. Some people have written to me since then saying that I should have given translations. But that’s my style.

The very first person I met was Rashesh Shah. He said in the interview that he uses a book called Market Wizards, which was published in 1987. That whole book is a collection of interviews where a person who was a trader met other traders on Wall Street. Rashesh said, “That book is very different from any other book because the author, being a trader, had a better insight and rapport with those people. You are doing something similar. You are an entrepreneur and you’re interviewing people like me. You’ve been through it. I don’t feel like I’m talking to a journalist.” I think that aspect also set people at ease. I bought Market Wizards and had a look at it. I didn’t copy the way he’s done it, but yes, that set the tone for how I was going to do this project.

I just had no idea how I was going to structure this book. I didn’t know if there would be one chapter on each person or on different topics. I thought, I’ll go and meet 8 or 10 people first and then we’ll decide. In fact I did almost all the interviews before I started writing the book, because I didn’t get a sense of how to go about structuring it.

I made 2-3 versions of how the book could be written: one that was very straightforward, and a second one—which we used—in which I do comment a little bit. I think everyone who read it felt that version works better, because I’m doing the role the reader would like to be doing. You can’t be with the person being interviewed. But you should feel like you’re there. So, I’m like a sutra dhaar (one who weaves a story). I somehow hold it together: like when a certain point really impacted me, I would comment about it. I would reflect what you might be thinking while reading. Or at least that’s what I try to do. For each person I interviewed, I would try to feel what was the basic theme of that person, and what was the main thing about his story.

One book that I was really inspired by is Po Bronson’s What Should I Do with My Life? I read this book about 4 years ago. I recommend it to all the people who are in career dilemmas. He actually took this one question—what should I do with my life?—and he interviewed about 50 people. He wrote about each person and how they’ve answered the question. Of course, he’s done a much higher level of immersion into their lives: he’s gone and lived with each person, and he’s had several visits with that person. I think he short-listed a huge number of people and brought it down to 50. So he probably spent 3 years writing this book, which I didn’t have.

I was first told do it in 3 months. I said, in 3 months I can’t even get interviews with everybody because I have to go to 6 cities to meet people, and everyone is just not free, waiting to meet me. I said it’ll take 3 months to do the interviews, and it’ll take 3 months to write it. While doing the interviews I was also working at JAM full-time. Afterwards, when I started writing, I actually took a break and wouldn’t go to the office at all.

How did the organization of the book come to you—in terms of those who always knew they wanted to be entrepreneurs and then those who came into it?

Originally I had sorted them industry-wise or age-wise or whatever. But when the book came together, that didn’t seem right. Then I just did it this way. I can’t tell you how I did it. See, that’s my feeling: it’s not just me doing it—it’s something that is really being done through me. When I’m doing it, it just comes to me that this is how I want to do it.

It seemed to me that there’s always this question: are you born or made? I think there are some people who have that clarity and temperament and know it pretty early. Most of those guys are in that section. And there are others who didn’t think so, but then they saw the opportunity, and something clicked, and they said, “this is a great thing to do.”

Like I said, I have been doing this work for so many years. Basically your mind has the ability to organize. Maybe partly because I went through the MBA, I have little bit of analytical thought. I don’t know what else I might have studied or learnt there, because I don’t remember anything. So, when you see a set of data, you see some kind of a cluster, and say, “this looks like a bunch of people, that looks like a bunch of people….”

Recently I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. What this guy says is totally true. The main essence of that whole book is that anybody who has become successful in any field has probably spent about 10,000 hours of their life in that field: working at it, practicing, honing their skills—basically because they love it. He uses the example of The Beatles. The Beatles actually played in Hamburg. They had this gig where they had to play for 8 hours at a stretch. For a year or two they did that. And that’s how they really came together as a group. They just played, played, played, and being better and better at it. I think with anything it’s like that. With me, I’ve been writing for almost 20 years now, and not thinking that one day I’m going to do X or Y, but just because I like to write.

How did you get started as a writer?

The time I started writing and sending my stuff to newspapers was a time when young people were not encouraged too much. All the newsrooms were with “oldies”—40+ people. And we didn’t have computers, so we had to type it on an electric typewriter. If we had a single mistake, we had to take a white ink…put a postage stamp…and put it in an envelope and send it there. And most of the time it will come back with a rejection slip.

But I did it because I really loved to do it. I said, “So what? I’m going to keep at it until Times of India publishes one middle.” And one day they published my middle. I used to wonder whether anyone ever opens it and reads it. I don’t know whether the editor of that middle column got tired that every week she sends, so let me just publish one. It was a huge great achievement for me at that age.

Looking back I feel probably this book is why I went to IIM-A. I really wasn’t interested in management education. I didn’t like it much. I didn’t like what I studied there as subjects. I liked the place, the institute, the exposure, the peer group, everything. But I just didn’t like anything about management subjects—especially accounting, finance, and operations. The only things I liked were marketing and human resources, and organizational behaviour, but that was like hardly 20% of the course. All the hard-core stuff that really is management I didn’t like at all.

I went back there for our 15-year reunion in January 2009, when we had sold about 50,000 copies of this book. We sat in the same classroom where we used to sit. We used to have name cards and places to sit. Everyone had a fixed seating arrangement in the first year. And some of the professors who taught us came, and they presented me with a silver plaque to commemorate 50,000 copies. Everybody was very happy. Apart from the fact that it sold 50,000 copies, the fact that I got this in front of all these people, it made me feel really good.

Because I didn’t have the conventional story. I didn’t take a placement after I graduated. Most of my classmates earn more than me, have fancier houses, or whatever. But that day I felt like the rock star of my class. Because they said, “you did what you wanted to do, and you’re doing it so well.” So everybody was proud of me, and I felt happy. I think that IIM-A has a tradition of taking a few conky people like me. Because we have, apart from the people in this book, a whole lot of other people who have done something different. Maybe it’s just the fact that they get the confidence after going there that they can do anything. I don’t know.

Can you tell us about your new book?

This first book got so much response. Every day I get 2-3 emails from readers. One of the recurring things is, “you’ve covered these MBA’s from this very well-known institute, so maybe they would have been successful anyways”. I don’t think that was the message of the book. The message was, “look, even if you’re from this institute, you have to struggle.” But I thought, we had no idea that this book was going to become so big, that it’s going to sell 100,000 copies and get translated into so many languages, and that people are going to write saying this book has changed my life. This is a good opportunity to do a sequel covering different aspects of entrepreneurship—not looking at IIM or MBA’s at all, but just looking at entrepreneurs who have very good, interesting stories. So that’s what I’m doing right now.

I think the interesting thing about the first book was that people found someone they identified with. Because there were many different kinds of people and stories, and you got attracted to something. In the next book also I’m looking at different kinds of entrepreneurship. It could be a business, it could be a social organization, it could be something even beyond that. I think entrepreneurship is a quality that everyone can have in their life. Even if they are working in a large corporation, they can be enterprising.

More than entrepreneurship, the theme is really “Stay Hungry”—the fact that, if you stay hungry, you’re always going to achieve more of your potential and more of your dreams. Otherwise you may have a very good, comfortable, successful life in conventional terms. But somehow you will feel a lack. You will feel that there’s something missing from my life, because you know you were capable of more. That’s broadly the theme of the second book. And here it’s totally my choice of who I want to feature and how I want to do it.

One thing that encouraged me in reading the book was to see so many big companies like naukri.com, Subhiksha, or Edelweiss, and to hear about their humble beginnings. When you hear how humbly they started, it gives you encouragement in your own humble state and think, “why not?” Along those lines, do you have any thoughts or advice for younger folks?

I think the biggest issue I see with young people today is that they have taken this whole thing of “I’ll get into the right college” as the end of their ambition. They try very hard, and they struggle, and they get into the college of their dreams like an IIT or IIM or whatever. Or, on the other hand, they don’t get into the college of their dreams. Either way, they don’t see that that’s just the first point. That’s the steppingstone for their whole life.

Even if I get into the best college, I still have to find the way forward. I have to find something where I really am able to give my best, where I am able to achieve what I am meant to achieve in my life. Not only achieve in terms of reaching a certain designation or salary or whatever, but to really wake up every day in the morning and feel charged up to go and do what I’m doing—to feel I’m making a difference. I’m not saying all of them have to become entrepreneurs. But to really be alive, to be looking to learn and grow continuously—that, I feel, is not happening as much as it should.

If you graduate today, you have to first go through the grind. The first 3-5 years is always going to be a learning experience. Just because you are from a good college, you can’t insulate yourself from the world. If you are in marketing, you will have to go on the street and be a salesman—which is a way many companies in the past trained you. If you join Hindustan Lever, you actually go to the villages to be an assistant salesman.

Be an entrepreneur if it’s really your kick, but get 2 years of experience in the field where you want to join. Start your enterprise, or go work with a smaller company. We have IIM students who are working with small companies where they get the responsibility of becoming a CEO. Do something like that where you get overall experience.

If you are in a job then also give it your best. Don’t just go out like a robot everyday and do your bit and come back. Do more than your bit. Take the initiative, have the energy, know that you can make changes happen. Not immediately, not today, but over time, yes, there are many ways in which you can influence your company, your team, and your boss. Don’t just accept that “this is the way the world is, and this is the way it’s going to remain; I just have to take my salary cheque and go home”. Then you are not going to be happy.

What questions should people ask themselves when trying to find a job, besides “what is the salary?”

When you wake up in the morning, don’t you know what you’re going to wear? Don’t you know what you’re going to eat? Haven’t you chosen someone to marry? You’ve chosen, right? You’ve made a choice. So why is it so difficult here to make a choice? You can make a choice.

You do have a feeling about what you like and what you don’t like. Sometimes you’re just not listening. You have to be able to listen to yourself. When you find your mind is focused, your energy is high, and you’re feeling interested, alive, and excited—that’s what you should be doing. It could be whatever. It could be the industry or the function. It could be the kind of company you work in, the environment you work in, anything.

You just look within yourself. You stop bothering about what other people say and the things you “should” be doing. Because it’s your life. Everybody else is a well-wisher—your parents, your friends, your teachers—but they are not going to be living that profession or doing that work for the next 30-40 years of their lives. If you have to go against them, you go against them. I think they gradually come around. Because if you’re doing something you love and you’re passionate about, you will make a success of it. And then they’ll say, “yes, we all knew that you had the potential.”

See also: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish launches in Hindi

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Tags: business, entrepreneur, IIM-A, leadership, mba, opportunity, success

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under interviews, leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.