Dimensions of leadership

Leadership to Last: How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind

Author: Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna

Publisher: Penguin 

Pages: 344

Price: Rs 599

Leadership is a subject that is written about most abundantly. It is estimated that four new books come out every day, and that there are 57,136 books on offer from Amazon, all bearing the word “leadership” in the title. I am myself guilty of authoring several such books. So, here is the 57,137th book from two Harvard professors.

One can write about leadership from multiple perspectives, not just enterprise management. Dr Tehemton Udwadia, India’s top surgeon, has recently written a fascinating book — with the subtitle “Life lessons beyond the O.T”. From his professional career, he draws leadership lessons from surgery, several that are applicable in any field — for example, “if you are helping someone, you should do it with grace”, or “my two chiefs taught me more than surgery, they taught me civility, empathy, care and compassion…”. I reckon that wonderful life lessons can be drawn from human experiences in just about any field.

The book by Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna under review is derived from a huge library of hours and hours of interviews with emerging market leaders. As part of an ongoing research project, Harvard is accumulating data from these interviews year after year. Interestingly, anyone can access this library and for free, at that. It could well emerge as the management equivalent of the adult development Harvard Grant Study, the longest study stretching over 75 years.

Geoffrey Jones is a serious historian — he has authored a book on the modern history of Unilever titled Renewing Unilever. Tarun Khanna is a strategy academic. The credentials of both authors and their institution must make it attractive for any reader to pick up a copy — and the reader will not be disappointed. Most leadership books focus on one institution and one leader and try to tease out the lessons from the vertical, personal narratives. The book under review is quite different. The authors have chosen seven horizontal themes of leadership and covered several leaders under each slice — Managing Families, Committing to Values, Innovating for Impact, Contesting Corruption, Challenging Gender Stereotypes, Promoting Inclusion, and Creating Value Responsibly.

The array of leaders covered vary from Asian/African — for example, Fadi Ghandour, Maria Emilia Correa, and Mo Ibrahim — to South Asian — Ratan Tata, Nandan Nilekani, Syed Baba, and Fazle Hasan Abed. The reader is assured of differently expressed perspectives on the chosen theme. The positive feature is that there is a summary of the lessons after each interview, so the reader is not left bewildered.

The title of the book is somewhat intriguing. There are two expectations from such a title: First, that the focus will be on the institution and, second, that the institution would already be considered to be long-lasting. As you read the book, you realise that neither is true, at least based on the content of this book. It is, of course, easy to see that the repertoire of interviews in the Harvard library has been sliced and diced in a particular manner. The organisation of this book makes it an easy read, free of jargon and heavy concepts. 

The subject of leadership permits opposite conclusions to be drawn from the same observations and data. Why do many American voters think of Donald Trump as the ideal President, whereas approximately a similar number regard Mr Trump as a major liability? The authors refer to the conclusion of French diplomat, Alexis de Tocqueville, that “America is the home of individualism, liberty and democracy”, whereas left-wing historian Howard Zinn avers that “the marginalized neither experience liberty nor have the freedom to express individual creativity.”

In the horizontal titled “Managing Families,” the experiences and views of well-known leaders are covered — Adi Godrej, Rahul Bajaj and M V Subbiah, to name a few. Many Indian enterprises are family businesses, so it appropriately appears as the first horizontal of the book. As you read these interviews, you realise the merit of the Arabic saying that “every knot demands patience and its own unique method to get unknotted”.

I found the second vertical also fascinating. The issue of running and growing a “clean business” is of great interest to many. The interviews of Narayana Murthy, Prathap Reddy and Nalli Kuppuswami Chetti are of great relevance to leaders of emerging business institutions.

It would be fascinating if Indian B-School academics would extend the value of this book by continuing a journey started by the Harvard professors. Since the archives are accessible free to every researcher, academics could slice and dice the available data to bring out with coherence what good CEOs do to convert good companies into long-lasting business institutions. Bhavan’s S P Jain Institute of Management and Research had made a beginning through their research of six business institutions, but there is still much wisdom to be gleaned. If this book by Professors Geoffrey and Khanna can trigger Indian academic research and thinking, it would enhance its worth in gold.

The reviewer is author and corporate advisor