Applying the tenets of Hinduism to business, Anil Sachdev manages to wed ethics and corporate practice in the companies he sets up
Seldom does life and career turn out according to plan; the main narrative, perhaps, yes, but the many sub-plots too? Hardly ever. So it’s rather intriguing to meet someone who says he knew the “script” at 19, and whose life over the next nearly four decades, has worked out almost exactly according to it. Call it perspicacity or good fortune, Anil Sachdev, the 55-year-old founder of the School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL), one of India’s leading HR consultants and the founder of two very successful consulting organisations — Eicher Consultancy Services (ECS), and Grow Talent — has had both in good measure. Not to forget, a talent for leadership that had him heading operations at Eicher’s tractors’ division at 27.
Precocity has been a feature of Sachdev’s life. The fifth son of an armyman, he finished school when he was 15 (“I got a lot of double promotions. It was possible then,” he says), Sachdev went on to do a graduation in chemistry and then an MBA from Pune University when he was just 20. In the 1970s, an MBA was neither well known nor provided the defined progression and lucrative possibilities of today. “I also got married at 22 and was a father at 25,” he adds.
Ask him why he chose to do an MBA and Sachdev attributes it to a strong desire to do something for his country, ingrained when he was very young, and the exhortations of his guru, Swami Chinmayananda, on the need for ethical businessmen who would serve India and return it to its former glory. The Swami has been a defining influence.“My father became a devotee in 1959 when I was five. At the age of 11, I used to take a train from our home in the army cantonment in Dehu Road to Pune 45 minutes away, then take a bus to Tilak Road and walk to swamiji’s lectures,” he remembers.
It’s not a religious influence so much as a spiritual one, embedded in India’s syncretic philosophical tradition. “The essential meaning of Hinduism, swamiji always said,” says Sachdev, “is not to follow rituals or tradition, it's a way of life that should help a Catholic become a better Catholic, a Muslim a better Muslim, a Jain a better Jain. It’s a credo that emphasises the universal force of unconditional love, the practice of oneness of people and discovering your own potential.”
It’s a teaching that Sachdev has woven into the fabric of all the institutions that he has set up. First, there was ECS, which Vikram Lal, Eicher’s chairman, asked him to set up, which had a “rather unusual” mission statement: India’s economic development without spiritual impoverishment. In practice, it means three things — “using the right means to make money”, “learning to do more with less, the notion of just-in-time production, waste elimination, quality” and “creating a community at the workplace so that employees felt a sense of ownership”.
It was very successful. “We were the first Indian consultancy hired by American Express for a global project to improve the quality of its services,” says Sachdev.
Ten years later, Sachdev decided to walk away from his charge, in the belief that “the shadow of the founder should not fall on an institution” beyond 10 years. Grow Talent, his next venture focusing on HR consultancy alone, was born with blessings and funds from his ex-clients at ECS: Keval Nohria, then MD of Crompton Greaves, gave him a blank cheque; Analjit Singh, ' 50 lakh; Adi Godrej, a significant commission. There was also Rajeev Dubey, who headed the Tata group company Rallis then. Grow Talent, says Sachdev, had a unique focus in its HR consultancy —“help individuals and organisations realise their maximum potential and identify positives inside people and workplaces.” This was an approach that married the Indian spiritual tradition of seeing divinity in every human being, says Sachdev, with the theory of “positive psychology” and “appreciative inquiry” developed by professors Suresh Srivastava, David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry at the Case Western Reserve University.
Written into Grow Talent’s business model was the decision that “10 per cent of the company’s gross profits would go towards serving the poor, and of the remaining, one-third redistributed to employees as bonuses, one-third reinvested in the company and the other one-third used for strategic purposes. Every year, employees would gather at the Chinmaya ashram in the Sandeepany Himalayas for a three-day retreat, meditating on what they learnt, and going down to the nearby villages where the mission had an integrated development project running.
The practice continues with SOIL, which Sachdev set up in 2006 selling 66.7 per cent in Grow Talent, because he wanted to focus on education. SOIL too was founded on the bedrock of ethical business practices. “Most educational institutes in India,” Sachdev says, “are run in an unethical fashion. They have a trust on one side and a company on the other, and the trust outsources all the money-making to the company.” To get around the problem, SOIL is run like a company — “teach good business in class and practice good business in life,” says Sachdev. SOIL is different in other ways too; for example, yoga is not an adjunct but an integral part of the curriculum.
The plan, now, is to build a residential campus and grow SOIL into a scale where it produces 5,000 ‘leaders’ with “vision, competence and enthusiasm” a year through its one-year full time course and part-time executive courses — it’s doing about 500 students now.
Earlier this year, Sachdev was invited by the cabinet secretary to become a “strategic coach” to the government — one of 20 such appointees from the private sector — to help ministries prepare a strategic plan. “I was reminding Arun Maira [member of the Planning Commission who oversaw these appointments, and also interviewed Sachdev for his first job with TELCO] that as a 19-year-old trainee I had told him that I would work with the Planning Commission of India one day to create a thinktank that would help in India’s transformation,” says Sachdeva. Life has come full circle.
