Nitin Seth

Thank you IIM Lucknow for inviting me to address the new MBA Class of 2016.  This is the 7th year running I am here to talk to the new batch.  This is a yearly ritual that I dearly look forward.  I graduated from this institute 20 years back and always relish the opportunity of coming back.  It is so nice to come back to your roots, celebrate the progress the institute continues to make, meet fresh minds and share a little bit of what I have learnt in my career.

I would like to start my address by offering my heartiest congratulations to all of you in the new MBA Class of 2016 for getting into this prestigious institution.  These two years of the MBA program are potentially amongst the most important years of your life (certainly was the case for me!!).  They are not just an opportunity for academic learning but for self-reflection and all-round development.  Your objective of these two years should be to build a solid foundation that prepares you to face and conquer life.

I have been reflecting on what messages I should share with you, what will be most helpful as you start this new and important journey of your life.  I finally decided that I would discuss some questions or challenges, which I feel every young professional should be posing to themselves.  Based on my personal experiences of 20+ years career I have tried to distill 6 challenges, which if you answer well should help you achieve enduring professional and personal success and happiness.

Without further ado here let me lay out the 6 challenges that I would like to discuss today and also share briefly why they are important:

Some of these questions you might already be thinking about, some perhaps not.  Hindsight is a great virtue and I have some based on my 20+ years career and fair share of ups and downs.  Based on that I have posed what I feel are the most compelling challenges for you to reflect on.  Now let us explore each of these challenges and I would like to share some solutions based on my experiences, which will hopefully provide you some food for thought.

1. What are the right career choices for me?

When I was graduating from IIM Lucknow in 1996, career choice for me was about getting the best job.  And, how did I define the best job – company that had the best brand, offered the best compensation, and where I saw my peer group joining or wanting to join.  20 years after graduation, do I think those were wrong objectives?  I don’t think they were wrong, but in hindsight they were not sufficient.  Career is not a sprint; it is a multi-stage obstacle course.  When you take a longer term view of your career, additional perspectives start becoming important.

So how do you make the right career choices?  There are different approaches you could take.  One end of the spectrum is what I call the default view, which is to go for the best opportunity.  The other end of the spectrum is the idealistic view, which is to follow your passion.  I believe these views can be joined up.

I believe magic can happen when you find the “Sweet Spot” where your passions, skills and opportunities come together.   At the intersection of these three forces, you realize the powerful and sustained purpose of your life.  That leads to tremendous energy and a reinforcing cycle that leads to both professional impact and personal satisfaction.

Finding your “sweet spot” is a journey.  Passions are the likely starting point.  Passions are a source of energy.  They light up your life and bring joy and vitality.  They are also the foundation for excellence. You are likely to give your best in what interests you and brings you happiness.  Passions are like a luminous compass that light up the way to your purpose.  Follow your passions and you would have begun your journey of life well. However, passions alone are not enough.  They need to be coupled with talent or skills.  Now, building unique skills and competence is not easy.  It requires hard word, patience and discipline.  There are no short cuts to excellence.  It takes time and you have to keep at it.  Devil will test you in this process.  You will face the “pain barrier” and feel like giving up.  But, you have to persevere, overcome the “pain barrier” and not give up.  As you do that, you will find that you have built some valuable skills that will take you far.  Finally, you need the right opportunities to channelize your passions and skills.  This coupling with opportunities is necessary – there is little point playing the most brilliant orchestra to an empty theatre.

Finding this “Sweet Spot” in your career and life is not a predictable formula.  It is a patient journey, an exciting adventure, a voyage of discovery.  For this you need to take a long-term view of your carer.  You need to realize that your career is perhaps a 30-40 years journey.  You probably need to have different emphasis for different stages of your career journey.  I would suggest for the next 5 years, the most important objective for you is learning.  So, choose a job that provides you the best possible platform for learning and experimentation that will help you discover your “sweet spot”.

All of us have a great leader inside us.  We just need the right spark to ignite the leader within us.  Unlocking of the leader within me happened at IIT Delhi.  I had gone to IIT as an introverted, slightly under confident boy.  There I had the opportunity to become the Sports Secretary for my hostel.  I was ignited by the goal of helping my hostel Aravali win the sports championship. This generated enormous energy in me and I was able to transmit that to build a great team that achieved some outstanding success together. Once the leadership genie was unlocked and I started developing my leadership formula, I was able to naturally apply it in different aspects of my life.  So friends, find a cause you are passionate about.  That is the best way for the leader within you to come out.

Once you have sparked the leadership genie within you, there are at least 3 capabilities that you need to develop to grow as a leader:

First is the ability to see and set the Big Picture.  A leaders job is not always to solve problems, his most important job is to identify and frame the right problems to be solved.  He needs to identify the “North Star” towards which the team/organisation can rally.  He will be able to do that if he is able to look beyond the immediate and see the big picture.  Now, how do you build the ability to see the big picture? You do that by recognising there is always a “bigger box” and learning to ask the “Why” question persistently as opposed to focussing on the “What” or “How” questions that we normally do.  (There is a famous Ted Talk video by Simon Sinek on “How leaders inspire action” that brings out beautifully the concept of starting with the Why. I would strongly recommend you to see it).

Second is the ability to build deep relationships and inspire people.  When I joined McKinsey in 1996, one of the senior partners speaking at our induction training said that to succeed you either need to know something or to know someone.  At that time, I felt that I would be the “know something” types and that success by knowing someone was a bit superficial.  As I have gained more experience, I have realized better the tremendous value of relationships.  People respond more to trust and emotions than to knowledge and logic.  Building trust is a critical test of a leader.  “Trust Equation” is a great framework to understand how to build Trust.

Trustworthiness is driven by your Credibility (expertise, knowledge), Reliability (consistency of actions) and Intimacy (personal connect).  However, the most important driver is Self-Orientation in the denominator.  All the great work because of the earlier three factors can be undone by a perception of self-centeredness.  In summary, building trust as a leader is essentially about imbibing and living the philosophy of “giving before getting”.

Third capability is courage and the ability to take risks.  Leading is not a popularity contest, it is about doing the right thing and that is rarely easy to do.  Therefore, you will face opposition and challenges.  These are the real tests of a leader, their “moment of truth”.  You need to have the spine to stand up for your beliefs and your people.  You can’t play it safe as a leader.  You have to take risks and say what you mean.  Facing the moments of trust with courage are crucial for your credibility as a leader.  Now, courage and risk taking is an acquired skill.  The more you practice them, more that muscle grows!!

Final thing I want to say on leadership is how to sustain yourself as a leader.  Please recognise, all your great work as a leader can be undone in a single moment of indiscretion.  Many great leaders fall because they get arrogant, stop listening and lose touch with people.  They start believing they are larger than life and therefore sometimes end up making catastrophic mistakes.  Your best antidote for such fall is humility.  Always stay humble and grounded (BTW, humility does not mean lack of assertiveness!!).  Humility will earn you the love and respect of people.  Moreover, it will also allow you to listen better and avoid making big mistakes.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are linked but not necessarily the same thing.  Innovation is about creativity and entrepreneurship is about building something new and taking risks.  I see many entrepreneurial ventures that are not innovative, which I believe is one of the main problem with start-ups in India.  I strongly believe you need to develop both these capabilities in conjunction.  I also believe these capabilities are not just about doing a start-up, these are equally relevant today even in a corporate job.

There are 5 things that will help you become more innovative and entrepreneurial:

3.1.  Experiment and have a range of experiences.  Innovation and entrepreneurial ideas are not driven by books.  They are driven by your imagination.  And, imagination is based on your world view and range of experiences – think Newton-Apple, Archimedes-Eureka.  So experiment with your life and have deep experiences.  And MBA program provides you so many opportunities to have a range of experiences in a short period of time.

3.2.     Connect the dots.  Innovation rarely happens in a box, it often happens at the inter-section of boxes.  So, try to connect together the various experiences of your life.  Your most compelling ideas will likely come from those connections.  Steve Jobs, perhaps the greatest innovator of our times is a great example of connecting the dots.  He had varied interests, music, calligraphy, zen buddhism.  He was able to connect them together and also learn from his many failures to create the most outstanding innovative products that our generation has known.

3.3.     Following your passions.  I have talked about following your passion earlier, and it is a necessary ingredient here as well.  Especially when you are working on a start-up, you will come across moments when financially and logically the business might not make sense.  At those moments, it is really the strength of your passion that carries you over the humps.

3.4.     Audacity and Thinking Big.  Successful entrepreneurs think big and at a scale that many of us might find crazy and daunting.  I am seeing this first hand in Flipkart working closely with our co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal.  The scale and audacity of their ambition is often simply breath taking.  And, I believe that is a key ingredient behind the meteoric success Flipkart has achieved in a short span of time.

3.5.     Risk Taking.  Again risk taking is something that I have talked about earlier.  You cannot be an innovator or entrepreneur without taking risks.  Please let go of your fears, take more risks and do follow your passions.  The downside is less than what you think and upside lot more.  Even if you fail, it will not be a catastrophe.  For me leaving McKinsey when I was doing well there and setting up my venture ActiveKarma was a big risk I took early in my career.  The venture failed but I was able to recover and get going again very quickly.  Moreover, what I gained from the experience was invaluable.  I learnt how to build a business and manage with limited means in an uncertain environment.  I am convinced this experience has helped me subsequently do better as a manager, entrepreneur and leader than what I might have done otherwise.

Many of us are caught in a ‘’rat race’’, a never stopping treadmill of desires. We work hard towards meeting our desires. However, our desires keep on rising. As soon as we fulfil a cherished desire, a new one pounces upon us. The treadmill of desires just keeps going faster and faster and it becomes very difficult to get off it. This leads to increasing stress and loss of peace of mind.

Spirituality has been a great help to me in finding balance in life. Spirituality is a widely used but not well understood term.  Spirituality to me is about going deep within myself and connecting with my inner self.  There are many paths to this process of self discovery and making the inner connection.  Meditation and Yoga are two well understood ways of doing that.  I have been doing “Art of Living” for past 15 years and in recent years have been reading The Bhagavad Gita. Art of Living has taught me practical techniques of Yoga and meditation, while The Gita has given me a great framework to understand life.  Together, these have helped me go deeper within myself, reduce stress, feel calmer and increase my work capacity.  At an even more fundamental level spiritual practices help in getting clarity & wisdom, a sense of abundance & contentment, and a feeling of love, peace & connectedness.

We live in a material world so it is not possible to run away and become a hermit, and nor do our ancient Indian texts encourage that. However, it is possible and desirable to find a balance between spirituality and materialism in our daily lives. I would encourage all of you to explore spirituality and adopt some spiritual practices in your daily lives. India has such a great heritage in spirituality and there is wealth of wisdom, so make the most of it.

Business school is a very intense experience where life might feel like a sprint.  But, life is not a sprint; it is more like a marathon with many twists and turns.  Life is not a predictable formula.   Sometimes your best efforts go waste and sometimes you get success that you never anticipated.  That is the nature of life; it is not linear and deterministic.  It is uncertain with many unpredictable ups and downs.  That is why it is very important to strengthen your core, be resilient and have a source of positivity within yourself.  This inner strength is necessary to sustain yourselves for the long run.   Before you embark on the journey to change the world, you have to make sure you are strong within!!

For that, cultivate interests and passions outside of work.  They will give you a fresh and deeper perspective on life.  They will also recharge and rejuvenate you and ensure that you have the energy to play a long innings.  For me, my big anchor in life is my family.  I am married, have 3 beautiful children and a large joint family.  My wife and family are an enormous source of strength in my life and keep me centered.  In addition, I have multiple passions and pursue them actively.  I am passionate about sports and play squash couple of times every week.  Even when I was in IIM Lucknow despite the busy academic schedule, I did some sports most days.  On a related note, most of my friends from IIT and IIM who were active in sports have ended up doing very well in their professional careers. Sports teaches you a lot about life and I believe there is a high positive correlation with your eventual success!! Finally, I love traveling and typically take at least 2 vacations every year.  All of these passions are my “secret formula”.  They help rejuvenate me and keep my system going at high energy levels in this long race of life!!

This might feel like a strange question to consider when you are so young and there are million other things going through your mind.  Moreover, solving problems for the community or country might not feel like my problem or something I can do much about.  It is something that we typically believe the government needs to address.  However, it is important that you consider this question as much as the other 5 challenges I have posed to you.

We are at a fascinating juncture as a country.  We now have two great assets that make me feel very optimistic about the future.  First, is the youth of the country.  We have over 500 million people below the age of 25.  It is not just the numbers but that the youth have a very different mindset.  They are not encumbered by past failures and have a positive ambition and confidence about the future.  Our second asset is us, the educated middle-class.  This segment is rooted in Indian values yet many have had global exposure.  Moreover, many now have financial surplus where they are not limited by the insecurities of making ends meet and can contribute back.

 However, many challenges remain for our country that pull us back – poverty, the need to create jobs, dysfunctional & unsustainable cities, poor governance and corruption being some of them. All of these pose grave risks for our future as a country.

It is imperative that all of us contribute towards the development of India because so much needs to be done and the problems are so grave that I am convinced that government alone will not be able to solve them.  If enough of us don’t contribute, we could be looking at a catastrophic situation beyond imagination.

So what can we do?

I explored politics a few years years back but realized that it was not my cup of tea, at least not at this stage of my life.  I then found NASSCOM, the industry body for the IT/BPO industry as my platform to contribute.  I co-chaired and then chaired NASSCOM Haryana for the past 5 years and found it to be a great way to contribute not just to the industry but also to the development of Gurgaon, the IT capital of North India.  In particular, me and colleagues focused on the issue of the transportation infrastructure and how to make Gurgaon more sustainable by encouraging public transportation and non-motorised modes of transportation like cycling.  It has been a difficult journey but with persistence we have been able to drive some positive impact on the ground and more importantly build a coalition of well-meaning administrators, corporate leaders and citizens who are trying to drive positive change.

The point I am trying to make is that there are so many ways in which you can contribute and each one of us can make a difference.  So, pick up a cause you feel strongly for.  As Mahatama Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see”.  You can start small but be persistent.  You will find that small actions add up and the “system” that might seem unmovable in the beginning will also begin to move.

With this I would like to conclude my talk.  In summary, I would like to leave you with 5 action themes that you would have seen come through multiple times across the questions/challenges that we have discussed today:

My very best wishes to you for the next two years at IIM Lucknow and for the career and life journey that awaits you after that.

God bless!!