The human factors

Book Review - Dreamers and Unicorns: How Leadership, Talent and Culture are the New Growth Drivers

In a world of pin-stripes and stuffy business board-rooms Dreamers and Unicorns comes as a refreshing take by former HR executive Abhijit Bhaduri who’s worked across corporations such as Wipro, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Tata Steel, and Colgate and has written five books. Readers may infer that this latest one is a work that talks about a community at centre-stage in India’s corporate landscape in recent years —  start -ups and unicorns — but it is more than that. Dreamers and Unicorns is an apt way to describe what most new enterprises and start-ups strive to become. 

The title chapter is appropriately titled BC and AD. But these are not abbreviations of the now disused terms Before Christ and Anno Domini; they stand for Before Covid-19 and After Disaster.  But Mr Bhaduri begins his analysis squarely in the middle of the pandemic as it swells and rages across the world, resetting how governments function. But don’t expect a cohesive singular narrative in Dreamers and Unicorns, or even one retrospective. Instead, this is a consolidated aggregation of Mr Bhaduri’s knowledge across the years as he gleans insights into what makes companies and leaders tick and what makes the right ones stick to their course.  

The author jumps from subject to subject as he attempts to stitch together and analyse trends. Those familiar with Readers’ Digest will see a resemblance to some of the pictorials used here, which appear to be sketched by the author. This may have seen trivial in other works but it does the job here.  One such diagram details post-Covid trends for corporations and preaches the following principles: Think skills, not roles; prep employees for multi-career possibilities; and plan for soft skills development. All good points for any enterprise keeping its head above water in today’s volatile environment.

Mr Bhaduri says that even before a pandemic-gripped the world, companies that raced ahead did one thing right: Hire able experience makers and shapers.  Indeed, he makes the point that human communications rather than those of a digital nature offer better opportunities for solution-fixing. For instance, 300 million people live with colour blindness worldwide, he writes, but Zoom used to have red text on black for the “leave meeting” button. As Zoom’s user base expanded, besides improving the technology and encryption, they decided to use white text on a red background to make the button easily visible to users. But Apple’s iOS Colour Filters setting addressed that issue in 2016, Mr Bhaduri explains, as he goes on to suggest that relationships and emotion are the new workplace language and that the new working-from-home culture will have to rely on strong human bonds more than ever before. 

Mr Bhaduri has done his research to see how the world is evolving as evidenced by the multiple references to global corporation HR trends and working environments but he hasn’t excluded home-grown corporations from his homework. Mahindra & Mahindra launched activities for employees, which involved sessions with nutritionists, while Flipkart pushed employees to take digital chai breaks. 

Even as India’s business landscape sees unicorns and start-ups with burgeoning potential proliferate after the country shut down last year in March, there is no way any company, no matter how sophisticated its management processes and how deep its pockets, can be entirely prepared for speed bumps that suddenly appear. 

As an example, Mr Bhaduri cites how Bavarian automotive player BMW India lost two of its senior most executives within weeks of each other, leaving the company in an unenviable position — despite the odds of such a tragedy occurring not once but consecutively being a billion to one. Prepare for it, he cautions. 

Readers may expect a directive on the difference between a company being a unicorn and a dreamer in terms of their output, revenue, market cap and value proposition but Mr Bhaduri doesn’t go too deep into that, focusing instead on drawing on his own understanding of what makes up the backbone of any company — its human resources and people. 

Chapter seven starts with Mr Bhaduri returning to his alma mater XLRI in Jamshedpur and surmises how the world has changed in his context of memories. This is the narrative some readers may prefer and the author may consider tapping a personalised stream of consciousness for business books more intensely to widen the readership net. 

Ultimately, Mr Bhaduri’s overarching point after 100,000 words is that if there is a difference between dreamers and unicorns it is that one can precede the other. Though he doesn’t say so directly, getting from one to the other is a matter of more than processes; how an organisation’s people grow and lead the companies they work for is also important. In other words, there is no unicorn without a dream.