Leading Edge 2019 | Panel Discussion On How To Build Entrepreneurial Resilience
Some of the most successful entrepreneurs share their advice on how to build entrepreneurial resilience during a slowdown at #LeadingEdge2019. Quess Corp founder Ajit Isaac, Lemon Tree Hotels founder Patu Keswani and Clix Capital founder Pramod Bhasin enlightened the audience with anecdotes and their wisdom, in the discussion hosted by Outlook Business editor N Mahalakshmi.
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#LeadingEdge2019 #PanelDiscussion #Discussion #Business #OutlookBusiness #OutlookMagazine #OutlookGroup
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NewsTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Line by Woody Allen,
00:09 if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plan.
00:13 So, in the business world,
00:18 this is absolutely true of entrepreneurship
00:23 and entrepreneurs.
00:25 Whatever plan you may make,
00:27 one thing you can be sure of,
00:28 it'll be thrown out of the window.
00:30 So that's why this panel,
00:32 and there are no further questions to ask.
00:35 All three of you have to just tell us this journey,
00:38 and it's just a coincidence that all three of them
00:41 had a fairly successful professional career,
00:46 and yet you chose to take the entrepreneurship path
00:49 when it wasn't as popular or fashionable.
00:53 So, just take us through this journey
00:56 of plans going awry, things going wrong,
01:00 and yet, how did you overcome it?
01:03 How did you build resilience?
01:05 Was it natural?
01:06 What did you went through?
01:07 Just tell us your stories, quickly.
01:09 - So it was the--
01:16 - Think about it as though you're narrating
01:18 these stories to your grandchildren.
01:20 - So I gotta guess, fast forward another 20 years,
01:26 but it was about, it was the year 2000
01:29 when I decided to become an entrepreneur,
01:31 and I founded this company which is called Go4Careers,
01:35 which was then the Careers Vertical
01:37 in a horizontal called Go4I.
01:40 It was built with capital from JPMorgan Chase
01:44 and had a pretty high-profile launch.
01:47 But when we built the website to go live with it,
01:51 we found that if we searched for a doctor in Nagpur,
01:54 we'll get an engineer in Calcutta.
01:56 The algorithm just wouldn't work.
01:58 And to be an online website with a search engine
02:02 that does not work meant that you just can't
02:04 make any progress in the market.
02:07 So within one month of going live,
02:10 we actually turned offline and made this
02:12 a human resources company which found people
02:15 through the physical process, and we had a fulfillment
02:18 that was done offline.
02:20 And then we grew it from there to becoming
02:22 what is today India's largest HR service company.
02:24 So that is the first trip up that we had
02:27 and the change that we had to make
02:29 from what we started with to what we ended up with.
02:32 - A short story, but we'll come back to it.
02:37 - So I wanted to retire.
02:39 So you know, a normal guy who works in a company,
02:42 so Vineet, I was a butterfly.
02:45 I've now become an ant.
02:46 So I was listening intently.
02:49 So in my--
02:50 - The sequence wrong.
02:51 - I got the sequence wrong.
02:52 So in my mid-30s, I was in the Tata's, actually.
02:54 I was posted to Taj.
02:55 I ran some hotels at the Taj, and I got very bored,
02:59 and I went through the male menopause, okay?
03:01 And men go through the menopause here.
03:03 It's called andropause for those of you who don't know.
03:07 And I decided to retire as quickly as I could,
03:09 but I had no money.
03:10 I'm still going through it.
03:12 Pramod is an old friend, who knows?
03:14 So how do you retire?
03:17 So I had two very close friends of mine,
03:20 and I remember we went, in those days,
03:22 single malt was very expensive for us.
03:24 So we scrimped a bit and bought two bottles of single malt,
03:28 went for a weekend to a forest lodge,
03:31 and we decided we needed five crores to retire,
03:34 because if invested well, you'd get 50 lakhs,
03:36 and we were simple chaps, we still are.
03:38 So I had one crore of rupees, 70 lakhs of mine,
03:43 30 lakhs which I borrowed from my wife.
03:45 I invested it in the dot-com bubble,
03:48 and in nine days, it became three lakhs.
03:50 I still remember it.
03:52 So that was my first entrepreneurial thing.
03:55 So what did I learn, by the way?
03:56 - That was your first entrepreneurial venture.
03:57 - That's how I learned resilience,
03:58 which is never bet the bank, whatever happens,
04:02 no matter how sexy the opportunity, don't bet the bank.
04:05 Number two, always have plan B, C, D, E.
04:08 And don't think too, you know, don't get a bloated head.
04:14 My mother didn't slap me, unfortunately.
04:15 She should have.
04:17 But I was broke, so I was looking for plan B,
04:20 and AT Kearney was coming to India,
04:23 so they offered me a senior direct partnership,
04:27 and the only question I asked them was,
04:28 "Can I make five crores in two years?"
04:31 So I remember the CEO looked at me oddly,
04:33 but felt I was showing great signs of intellect
04:36 by asking such direct questions.
04:38 Said yes, I joined, and two years later, I had five crores,
04:43 which was quite a large sum in those days,
04:45 and I decided, because I had run in the Taj,
04:48 I had run all the business hotels,
04:49 and I had an idea of what was right and what was wrong.
04:51 So one thing I've learned in my professional life
04:53 is what not to do, actually, not what to do.
04:57 So I said, "I won't make these following mistakes."
05:00 So I built a small hotel.
05:01 I was lucky, about a dozen people joined me from the Taj.
05:04 The hotel was enormously successful.
05:07 So I noticed the lady who was announcing it
05:09 actually halved my company.
05:10 Actually, we have 8,000 rooms and about 10,000 employees,
05:14 so bad information by outlook.
05:17 Bottom line is that the company did very well,
05:21 and my instinct to retire was overtaken, actually,
05:25 by the desires and aspirations
05:28 of those first 20, 30 people who joined us.
05:31 And it's been a wonderful journey.
05:33 We've gone through all kinds of resilience
05:35 and downs and ups.
05:36 My broad view, by the way,
05:38 on a downturn and an upturn is very simple.
05:42 By nature, I'm an optimist.
05:44 Every one of us is either an optimist or pessimist.
05:48 What I have learned to be is neither,
05:50 and I think that's been a huge learning for me.
05:51 So I always, you know, I assume things are going to be,
05:56 everything will pass, and if you plan for that,
05:59 then I think you can be reasonably successful in outcomes.
06:02 - Yes, sure.
06:05 - Patu's, I don't know, Isaac,
06:09 but Patu's being amazingly modest as was Vineet
06:13 because these are enormously successful,
06:15 and what he's done in a very short period of time
06:18 is nothing short of astonishing.
06:19 In an industry which I always thought
06:21 was never going to survive very long.
06:24 But my story is actually, I think, a story of necessity.
06:29 I used to run GE Capital Asia in India.
06:32 I'd come here looking for the mythical middle class of India
06:36 which I never found.
06:37 We weren't making enough money.
06:39 I worked for GE under the Welch era,
06:42 which was a remarkable company,
06:44 absolutely fabulous company,
06:46 you know, the most admired in the world for many, many years.
06:49 And we were expected to, you know, make money,
06:53 find ways to make money.
06:54 And in India, as you know,
06:56 the future is bright and always will be, right?
06:58 So you're always going to make money at some point in time.
07:01 - I wish we had done this panel before the--
07:04 - Sorry?
07:04 Right.
07:05 - Can I say one thing?
07:07 You know, what I love about India
07:08 is what President Ronald Reagan said about Brazil
07:11 in the late '80s.
07:13 Somebody asked him, you know,
07:14 what do you think of Brazil?
07:15 He said, "It's a country with great potential,
07:17 "and it will always have great potential."
07:19 (laughing)
07:21 - Absolutely, it will always.
07:23 So I needed to do something to make money.
07:27 And therefore I came up with this idea
07:31 of doing back office business processing
07:34 for the world out of India.
07:36 That was my idea standing in a very hot parking lot
07:41 in Chennai with my boss and scratching my head
07:44 and saying, "What the hell do we do?"
07:46 We had running, we were running
07:47 an operating center for ourselves.
07:50 There was a singular problem.
07:52 The plan was to do this over phone lines
07:54 in homes with digital technology, trained people,
07:59 lots of people who understood US GAAP, mortgage accounting,
08:05 all of the other things we used to do in G Capital.
08:07 The only flaw in the plan was phone lines didn't work,
08:11 we didn't have any people,
08:12 there were no trained resources,
08:14 and there was no resources that I could go,
08:16 there were no office buildings in Gurgaon at that time.
08:19 Apart from that, it was a very good idea.
08:22 That's how we started.
08:25 - Sure, but Ajit, I did not find a low point
08:32 in your story at all,
08:34 except for the first venture, which is GoToCareers.
08:38 In your secret diary, you hardly talked about any low points.
08:41 It was just the first pivot.
08:43 You started as an online portal, it didn't work quickly,
08:45 you shifted to offline.
08:46 It sounds like it's just been a very smooth ride.
08:50 - So sometimes we also tend to simplify the journey a bit.
08:53 When we founded in 2007, eight,
08:57 which is exactly 11, 12 years ago,
09:00 we were a product of the then global financial crisis.
09:03 And everything that's variable cost
09:07 inside a company, advertising, recruitment,
09:10 and related areas, staff welfare,
09:12 these are all expenses which are discretionary in nature,
09:15 which companies would put a lid on.
09:18 So we found that the first two years were very difficult.
09:21 And we realized that to be in play,
09:25 we needed to do other things
09:27 in addition to human resources, like manage services.
09:31 And that's when we ventured into facilities management.
09:34 So in 2008, when we started,
09:37 our revenues were actually about eight crores
09:40 for the first year.
09:41 This year, we'll be about maybe 11,000 crores.
09:44 So that's the journey in about 10 years' time.
09:49 There have been also some pivotal moments.
09:53 So we had a private equity investor on board.
09:56 The investor wanted, they have an investment timeframe
09:59 of about five years' time, so about 2013,
10:01 they wanted to move on.
10:03 2013 was also when the Indian economy was showing a blip
10:06 because of policy paralysis,
10:08 and it was the year before the election.
10:10 And that's when we decided that we don't want
10:12 another private equity fund.
10:14 We like to have long-term capital.
10:16 We like to have proprietary capital of somebody
10:18 who does not have to return capital back to their LPs.
10:22 So that's when we made a connection with Fairfax in Canada,
10:26 which is an insurance company
10:27 and invests of its own balance sheet.
10:29 And that, in retrospect, has been a big decision for us
10:32 because then our outlook to business became more long-term.
10:37 Our decision-making was pivoting around long-term decisions
10:42 and not to create value just on the short term.
10:47 It was also then that we realized,
10:49 after Fairfax came on board, that it's good to raise cash.
10:53 - How easy or difficult was it to get Fairfax?
10:57 - Well, the first aspect was Toronto was minus 12 degrees
11:00 when we went there,
11:01 and very unwelcoming climate, so to say.
11:05 But Fairfax is run by a gentleman called Prem Watsa.
11:07 He's of Indian origin.
11:09 He went as an immigrant and built what is perhaps
11:12 among the top five insurance companies in the world.
11:15 - Called the Warren Buffet of Canada.
11:16 - Also known as the Warren Buffet of Canada.
11:19 He's a gentleman who makes a lot of difference to the moment.
11:23 He's very perceptive, and he's invested
11:26 about $5 billion in India,
11:28 and he's promised to invest another $5 billion.
11:30 So to find a meeting of mind with him was terrific
11:34 because his value system was very clearly aligned
11:36 to what we wanted to do here.
11:39 And he backed us completely.
11:40 He ran a very decentralized empire, in a sense.
11:43 He had 40-odd investments.
11:44 Each CEO had his own carve-out in terms of space,
11:48 and you'd meet him maybe once or twice a year,
11:50 so you got your space to do what you wanted.
11:53 So to get Fairfax on board was an easy decision,
11:56 and after that, we decided we'll do an IPO.
11:59 But when we decided to do an IPO, it was the year 2016,
12:02 and I still remember this.
12:03 It was in June or so of that time,
12:05 and Brexit had just happened.
12:07 It's still happening.
12:09 They're still threatening to go.
12:11 It may take some more time.
12:13 But because Brexit had happened,
12:15 a banker suggested that it may be improper
12:19 to go to markets and attempt to raise money
12:22 in public markets.
12:24 A week later, after Brexit happened,
12:26 Rexit happened.
12:27 Raghuram Rajan resigned.
12:28 So you didn't have a Reserve Bank governor,
12:31 and the markets were very jittery.
12:32 In spite of it, we decided to go ahead.
12:35 We listed our stock there on,
12:37 after we got oversubscribed 145 times.
12:40 So we had to sell a story of a services company
12:42 in the business services space, which nobody understood.
12:45 It was the first market offering of this type.
12:48 And then we listed it for about a billion dollars or so,
12:51 and then went on to do a follow-on round.
12:53 So at various stages, we've had to take decisions
12:55 that were important, that changed the needle
12:59 in terms of the direction that we would follow,
13:01 and had a significant impact
13:04 on what the future would be for us.
13:06 So today, we have 380,000 employees.
13:09 Last year, we added 56,000 people.
13:12 This year, the first six months,
13:14 we've added 59,000 people.
13:16 So sometimes, I'm wondering where is the dichotomy
13:20 in the story, so to say, about the slowdown in India.
13:25 And we think that moments like this,
13:31 when there are difficulties,
13:31 actually push companies to variabilize costs,
13:36 to process more of their transactional work
13:39 outside the company.
13:40 And companies like us, therefore,
13:42 have more of an opportunity in such situations,
13:44 which we are riding on today.
13:46 - Sure.
13:48 But listening to his story, it seems to me
13:50 that the toughest moment he's faced in life
13:52 is his seventh class exam.
13:54 Is that not true? (laughs)
13:56 He said that's been the toughest point of his life.
13:58 But, Patu, tell me, you faced quite some issues
14:03 with bureaucracy when you were building various hotels.
14:08 Especially the swimming pool story is very exciting.
14:13 You must tell us about that.
14:16 - Sure.
14:16 So, I think I told you this.
14:21 So Winston Churchill once said,
14:23 "If you're 20 and not a communist, you have no heart.
14:26 "And if you're 40 and not a capitalist,
14:27 "you have no brains."
14:29 Right? (audience laughs)
14:30 So somehow, I keep reversing this.
14:33 So, you know, like a butterfly to an ant.
14:36 So I was a capitalist at 20.
14:39 I'm now a hardcore communist.
14:41 So when I was a capitalist,
14:44 somewhere along this journey,
14:45 when I built this first hotel,
14:47 my father, who was a hardcore communist,
14:50 and I wasn't then, he said,
14:52 "I'm very uncomfortable with you making money
14:54 "because there is so much poverty and inequity in India."
14:58 So promised me only one, two things he asked me to do.
15:01 He said, "Never give a bribe.
15:03 "And number two is, always focus on your employees."
15:09 So Vinit, it's funny, if you read my articles
15:12 of 10, 15 years ago, even we said,
15:14 "Employees come first."
15:15 In fact, when I went public last year,
15:17 some press, and they're always up to tricks,
15:19 as you all know, one of them asked me a question.
15:22 "Is it true you said,
15:24 "dash, dash, dash the shareholders, employees come first?"
15:29 And I said, "Yes."
15:30 And my investment banker said, "Are you mad?"
15:32 Because obviously it was a big story that I said,
15:35 "Tell shareholders to get lost," in nice words.
15:38 So when I built my first hotel, I had no money.
15:42 I had five crores.
15:43 I borrowed four crores.
15:44 Nobody was willing to lend me money
15:45 because I used to wear jeans, I still do.
15:47 So I had to call a friend of mine
15:49 who I knew from my Tata days,
15:51 who on my personal guarantee loaned me four crores.
15:53 It was a bank, HDFC, as a matter of fact.
15:56 And I built the hotel, and the pride and joy
15:59 that I had as a middle-class guy,
16:01 because my father was a government officer
16:03 and my mother was a doctor in the army,
16:05 was I built a very small pool in this hotel.
16:08 And I'd never seen a pool,
16:09 and I could never believe that I would have owned a pool.
16:12 Now, India is full of wonderful laws.
16:15 So there was, in 1888, in undivided Punjab,
16:20 there was a drought.
16:21 I don't know if any of you are aware of this.
16:23 But there was a shortage of water 137 years ago.
16:28 And the British put a rule saying
16:30 there will be a water inspector
16:33 who will approve any water body in Punjab,
16:38 which included Gurgaon, which was part of Haryana.
16:40 So when I built this hotel,
16:42 what we didn't know, nobody told us,
16:44 is the water inspector also has to approve this deal.
16:47 So the hotel is open,
16:48 I'm salivating over this very tiny pool I built.
16:51 Suddenly, and I go back to my office,
16:54 and my general manager calls me and says,
16:55 there's a guy who's coming with a bandolier,
16:58 a gun, with a red light on a Jeep.
17:01 He happened to be the nephew of one of the ministers.
17:04 There's a sign of cure.
17:05 It's a job to take a bribe.
17:07 It's rent-seeking.
17:08 Haryana was full of that.
17:10 So he comes and he tells the general manager,
17:12 how will you put up this pool here without my approval?
17:14 He says, what are you talking about?
17:15 He says, well, you need my approval.
17:17 Now, 1888, (speaking in foreign language)
17:20 So pay me 5,000 bucks a month.
17:22 By the way, I told this story
17:23 to the chief minister of Haryana.
17:25 And they eliminated that role.
17:27 But anyway, 5,000 bucks, you will pay me every month.
17:32 Otherwise, I'll shut your hotel.
17:33 So a guy called me, and I said, okay, fine.
17:38 Tell him to come back next month.
17:39 So when I went back to that hotel,
17:42 I went and swam in that pool once.
17:45 Then I told them to drain the water
17:47 and fill the pool and make a lawn.
17:49 So a month later, this guy came back.
17:51 His name was some Chotala.
17:53 He was a Chotala, actually, interestingly.
17:55 And he said, give me my 5,000.
17:58 He said, why?
17:59 He said, where's your pool?
18:01 We don't have a pool.
18:02 So he said, are you guys mad?
18:05 You shut down a 10 lakh.
18:06 He knew everything, 10 lakh.
18:07 You see, when it comes to bribing and government,
18:09 they are so efficient in knowing the exact value
18:12 so that they can determine the rent-seeking.
18:14 It's amazing, right?
18:16 So anyway, he said, you guys are mad.
18:18 And the interesting thing is, after that,
18:20 nobody ever came for a bribe to that hotel.
18:22 Because they said, these are mad guys.
18:24 But this I learned from another mad group
18:26 called the Parsis, because I was part of Tata's.
18:29 And they behave like this.
18:30 - What was that one moment when you actually transitioned
18:37 from professional and decided to be an entrepreneur
18:41 and do the buyout?
18:43 And from there on, was there any point
18:47 when you sort of had this dilemma
18:50 that, I mean, why did I even do this?
18:51 And was there a moment like that?
18:53 - Sure.
18:55 Actually, there were a couple.
18:56 One, I think we did this under the radar screen
19:00 because Jack Welch never wanted us to do this.
19:02 So I had to do this myself, experimenting on the way.
19:05 No phone lines.
19:07 Even today, our office building on the highway in Gurgaon
19:11 is in a shed because there was none of the glitz available
19:16 that we surround ourselves with.
19:17 Today, you might have seen it.
19:19 It's just a shed where we transform the inside.
19:23 And then we spun off.
19:25 We raised capital with General Atlantic, Oak Hill.
19:28 We spun off.
19:29 Genpak today is 50,000 crores market cap.
19:36 It's not doing badly.
19:37 So by the way, one lesson,
19:40 do succession planning really well.
19:43 If you can do it really well,
19:45 it washes a thousand sins that you have committed.
19:48 But I think there were two elements
19:50 which to me are seminal and important as lessons.
19:55 And I was privileged to be with GE in one of them
19:59 and not in the other one or under the GMBRA.
20:02 So the first one was clearly 9/11.
20:04 9/11 had the power to destroy businesses all over the world.
20:09 You had no idea where it was going.
20:13 Planes weren't flying.
20:14 People weren't going back and forth.
20:16 Business stopped completely overnight.
20:19 Boom, like an ax.
20:20 It went down and you were left trying to figure out
20:24 exactly what you were going to do with your life.
20:27 Cataclysmic event, which companies which are
20:32 within their own spheres of countries
20:34 are relatively unaffected by.
20:38 Countries which are doing cross-border movements,
20:40 particularly with the movement of people and resources
20:45 was cataclysmic for us.
20:49 We did the huddle, we came together, we talked to the team.
20:52 I must have talked to 5,000 people that day in the team.
20:56 Directly, immediately about how do you manage the crisis?
21:02 What are we gonna do?
21:04 The level of uncertainty we were facing, et cetera.
21:06 And then we continued to do that over a period of a month
21:09 because it took a while for the air to be opened up,
21:14 for people to be allowed to go back and forth,
21:17 for people to start thinking about business.
21:20 And so to me, that was an enormous example
21:24 of how to handle a crisis.
21:26 And then the next one was when Lehman Brothers went down.
21:30 And as Vineet would know, 50% of our business
21:34 was financial services and the financial services market
21:37 imploded in front of our eyes.
21:40 Our share price went on New York Stock Exchange
21:42 from 15 to four.
21:46 Options that people had been given,
21:50 everything got wiped out literally within a week.
21:55 We were facing into enormous bad debts
21:59 because companies we were doing business for
22:01 could not pay us, our clients were collapsing,
22:05 business was stopping, absolute turmoil.
22:09 And so again, to climb out of that
22:13 when we were an independent company
22:14 and running as a New York Stock Exchange company,
22:17 that took a different level of resilience from the team.
22:22 And it was up to us to get the team galvanized
22:27 because losing spirit was the easiest thing
22:30 we could have done.
22:31 But maintaining that energy level and that resilience
22:37 was the toughest thing.
22:40 And I think to me, I'll never forget that lesson in my life.
22:44 Especially as I watched Lehman Brothers come apart
22:49 on my TV screen and knowing that all hell
22:53 was going to break loose in the next week.
22:55 - So we're running a little short on time,
22:58 but if you were to give us one advice
23:01 to any budding entrepreneur about how do you build resilience
23:04 and what does it take to be a successful entrepreneur
23:06 and go through all those hums.
23:08 (audience member speaks off mic)
23:12 - To me, it would be two things
23:16 that build resilience in a company.
23:18 One is culture and second one is--
23:20 - Personally as an entrepreneur,
23:22 because before you institutionalize a company,
23:24 it's just you leading everything.
23:27 - So culture actually flows from the DNA
23:31 of the entrepreneur in a certain sense.
23:33 I think all entrepreneurs,
23:35 one quality they need to have is to be stoic.
23:38 You have to be able to meet with situations
23:40 with along with pragmatism,
23:44 but also sometimes you have to be dogmatic
23:46 with your thinking.
23:47 You have to be singular in your approach
23:50 and you can't be recalcitrant about the future
23:53 and be hesitant about what's coming up.
23:56 You have to be an optimist.
23:57 You have to work with people
23:59 and that will then flow down into the company
24:02 as a cultural input.
24:04 If you have this, I think you also attract
24:07 the right set of people.
24:08 So the culture and people that you have around you
24:11 and I'm sure my panelists here would know
24:15 that the people that you build your company with
24:17 actually make the business that you have.
24:19 So that's I think the singular advice
24:21 that I'll give to an entrepreneur.
24:23 - Not very dissimilar.
24:30 I think the two things I've learned,
24:31 one is patience because it's very easy
24:35 to be impatient and say this is good, this is bad.
24:40 Let's do this.
24:41 So Sun Tzu writes about this.
24:44 Patience is what wins you always.
24:46 That's the first thing.
24:48 Number two, the other thing I've learned is being,
24:52 so I think I was always an optimist.
24:55 What I've learned in my life is this too shall pass,
24:59 I think I mentioned it.
25:00 So when everything is optimistic,
25:04 I've tried to become as pessimistic as possible,
25:06 which is difficult for me but I try.
25:09 And when things are pessimistic, I'm me.
25:14 So I think, I don't know what we worry about in India.
25:17 Once upon a time, in Indira Gandhi's time,
25:20 the Hindu rate of growth was two, 3%.
25:23 And we were happy with it.
25:25 Today at 5%, we weep.
25:27 So I mean, I don't bother too much about it.
25:31 If your business can sustain two to 8%
25:34 and you haven't done anything catastrophic,
25:37 I think you're fine, then you go.
25:39 And that's what I've learned at least in my last five years.
25:42 - Thank you, Bhattu.
25:47 For me in terms of what do I learn
25:51 about being an entrepreneur in many ways,
25:53 I just point to two things.
25:58 One, surround yourself with people
25:59 who are significantly better than you
26:01 and you must do that positively.
26:03 I think very few people end up doing that.
26:05 Tiger is a better CEO than I was
26:09 and it's showing now in the company.
26:11 So are many other people.
26:12 So if you surround yourself with that
26:14 and surround yourself with diversity of mind,
26:18 because then they bring ideas to the table,
26:20 they solve problems, they do a thousand things
26:22 which you could never do on your own.
26:23 So to me, that is a very essential element.
26:28 Two is a word I learned from Ramcharan
26:31 who used to come and teach us often at Genpact and at GE,
26:34 which is the word altitude.
26:36 Just climb out of the daily morass,
26:41 climb out of daily operation and think big.
26:45 One of the great things about the Chinese
26:47 and the US companies is they think global.
26:49 They wanna go out and rule the world.
26:51 They're not happy being market leaders
26:54 in Northern India or somewhere.
26:58 They will go out.
26:59 So altitude to me means you will do a lot of things
27:03 but thinking about the big picture always
27:05 rather than getting stuck on the small stuff
27:09 allows you to build things of global scale and size.
27:12 And I think that's something India Inc. must do
27:14 because we remain local fundamentally,
27:19 even though we have some great companies, they're local.
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