There is no arguing with success and Ashutosh Garg is an eminently successful entrepreneur. After virtually inventing the organiSed retail model for health and beauty outlets in India, he has built Guardian into one of India’s largest pharmaceutical retail chains in a little over five years. He has honed the art of store-opening to a point where the first customer can walk in within 35 days of the lease being signed.
It is not only as an entrepreneur that Garg has made his mark. Before turning to organised retail, Garg has had a stellar career as a professional manager, starting with ITC, where he spent 17 years and became the youngest managing director of a group company (before parting from them with some acrimony). His talent has found international recognition from the World Economic Forum, which identified him as a “Global Leader for Tomorrow”.
This is, however, not an evaluation of Garg’s career (which is clearly outstanding) but of his book, which merits a more mixed review. Let’s start with the title. The book section of Amazon.com yields 60 entries for The Buck Stops Here. While these may include some double entries, clearly the title doesn’t score high marks for originality. Moreover, the phrase doesn’t capture the spirit of the book as well as one depicting ingenuity or perseverance — both of which find repeated instantiation in the book — might have. On the contrary, there is at times a less-than-magnanimous tendency to blame subordinates and colleagues (frequently by name) for things that have gone wrong.
Much the most valuable part of the book comes from the examples and precepts provided by Garg for budding entrepreneurs. Garg spent six months actually running a pharmaceutical store — a sleeve-rolled stint that entrepreneurs venturing into a new industry might do well to emulate. He ruled out a family-run organisation and prescribed the same rules for promoters, senior management and staff. He eschewed huge dollar outlays on brand and logo design, settling instead for what small, creative outfits could deliver locally. He encouraged his independent directors to be genuinely independent rather than acting as the promoters’ puppies. Garg’s advice is generally sound even if he didn’t take it himself (he took no salary for the first 36 months — which he regrets) or if it borders on trickiness (teaching sales assistants to hold on to the prescription when some items on it are not available, so that the customer doesn’t take the entire order to another store).
Garg rose through the finance function and, while writing about the “Financial Side of Business”, he tellingly drives home even common-sensical guidelines (e.g. on providing adequate funding or controlling costs) with memorable examples. He is not as incontrovertible in his chapter on “People Management”, reading which might lead one to conjecture that not all his employees may be as devoted to him as he would have liked. For one thing, he is slow to trust them and makes it part of his credo that “Trust … must be reposed slowly and sparingly”. Consequently, empowerment is likely to be at a discount. The rules for authorisation, which Garg revels in creating, are understandably an accountant’s delight but are probably another drag on employee engagement. Loyalty, for Garg, seems to be a one-way street and, under the guise of needing a different type of person as the business grows, he seems almost eager to dispense with those responsible for laying the foundations for that growth. In more than one instance, the principles he enunciates are at variance with the practice he promotes. While these contradictions may provide mild amusement to the reader, they can undermine a leader’s credibility and erode employee commitment.
If the entrepreneurial part of the book is intended as its nutritional component, the part dealing with Garg’s career as a professional manager is clearly the spice. Garg was miffed by the way ITC treated him and this is payback time. Starting from the hapless personnel officer, who acted tough about Garg’s residential accommodation in Kolkata, skirting past a senior subordinate, with whom Garg shared a relationship of mutual distrust, and going up to the chairman, who gave Garg his marching prompt, we are treated to a bog’s eye view of one of corporate India’s exemplars and of all the remarkable opportunities it missed. Of course, Garg finds several people in ITC worthy of admiration and praise but even the purported heroes have vulnerable heels. For instance, Garg’s guru in the hotels business of ITC had a coded way of instructing the hotel management to appoint, with no consideration for merit, certain candidates recommended by politicians, bureaucrats and others.
The last part of the book deals with Garg’s personal life and acts as an anodyne, relieving the acidity contained in the parts dealing with Garg as an entrepreneur and as a manager. One can only applaud Garg’s struggling-student to corporate-captain story, his unstinted affection for his wife and children as well as the devotion he feels for his parents. His filial admiration is clearly reciprocated, though a wise editor might have advised Garg against advertising it by having his father pen one of the encomiums that recommend the book to the reader.
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I have often wondered why celebrities engage ghost writers or co-authors to tell their stories. Here is a book which provides the answer with awful clarity. Successful entrepreneurs are not necessarily gifted authors. For all the interesting ideas and majedar masala that The Buck Stops Here contains, it is not easy reading. The book is filled with tiresome repetitions, excessive chest-beating and statements of pious, future-intent that have more place in a corporate brochure than a book. The text is littered with scores of names that have as much meaning for the reader as that of the third make-up assistant in a movie’s credits. Through all the disjointed anecdotal discharge, it is difficult to keep hold of the overarching themes and linkages of the book. Connections become even more difficult for want of an index of any kind.
I don’t think Garg will break out a new strip of Digene from one of his stores after reading this review. He writes, “I have learnt over the years to be thick-skinned to what people think and what they may say. This has served me well.” A review is not going to stop him. Nor will it prompt him to stop any bucks other than the ones that find their way into his capacious pockets.
The reviewer is CEO, Banner Global Consulting
THE BUCK STOPS HERE
My Journey from Manager to Entrepreneur
Ashutosh Garg
Penguin Books India 2010
Pages 308; Rs 499