Smart, not stupid

THINK TANK/London Businss School's Nirmalya Kumar

His name has featured in the faculty list of the Harvard Business School, IMD (Lausanne), Northwestern University (Kellogg), and now London Business School. His resume speaks about having worked in 40 of the Fortune 500 companies in a consulting role. He has a place on the board of two companies in India "" Bata India and Zensar Technologies.

The world might be his classroom, but Nirmalya Kumar, director, centre for marketing and co-director Aditya V Birla India Centre at London Business School prefers to call himself stupid. "I am still the same stupid guy. It's just that I work very hard," he says.

Kumar's inclination to the S-word is not too difficult to decipher. Because the 44-year old professor, (who looks much younger) had been frequently written off during his formative years. As a student at the La Martiniere school, Kolkata, Kumar often got the lowest marks in class. "I was always at the bottom of the class. I was not interested in school, it bored me," he reminisces.

In class XI, a teacher named John Mason (who later became headmaster at Doon School) walked upto him and said : "You waste time and you are a complete loser. But actually you are a smart guy. If you try hard you could be successful."

That brief interaction changed Kumar's life. "It took me exactly six months to get from the bottom to the top of the class. After that I never came second in any class I went to," he says.

Till date, Kumar swears by his school teacher's prophecy of hard work. He packs in 12 to 16 hours of work in a day and spells out the secrets of success to his students too. "Once you start becoming good at something, you suddenly find that it becomes interesting. Then you spend more time on it. When you spend more time on it you get better at it. This starts off a virtuous cycle," he says.

Hard working, he surely is. At the banquet hall of a Mumbai five-star hotel this month, when Kumar broke the early morning silence with a microphone checking exercise, he was preparing for World-Class, a day long annual session of the Aditya V Birla India Centre at London Business School, that was to start an hour later.

But how did he choose teaching as a profession? "All my life I never wanted to do anything other than teach. I only dreamt of being a teacher. Mason reinforced it and I realised the power of a good teacher. Today when I teach I am always aware of that fact," he says.

Another defining moment for Kumar was when he went to the US in 1983, to do his MBA and then his Phd from the renowned Northwestern University. At 25, Kumar was teaching management students at Kellogg a subject that he fell in love with as a teenager "" marketing. In another four years, he started teaching in executive education programmes, "often teaching people older" than him.

The initiation into marketing came from another Kellogg professor, albeit long before Kumar considered moving to that university. As a teenager he flipped through a book on his father's bookshelf, and was hooked.

The book was Philip Kotler's Marketing Management and Kumar's subsequent interactions with the marketing guru are occasions he remembers with pride: he co-authored an article "" "From market driven to market driving" "" with Kotler in 2000 for the European Management Journal and the latter wrote the foreword for Kumar's book Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO's Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation earlier this year.

The key idea in Kumar's book is that marketing people are spending too much time thinking about marketing tactics like advertising, promotion and pricing and not enough time thinking about marketing as a strategy.

"We need to escape from the whirlpool of obscurity that comes from being tacticians, to become strategists," says Kumar.

And don't expect paeans to branding "" the mantra most marketers swear by "" from Kumar. "I choose to talk little about branding because I believe marketing is all about real tangible value creation for the customer," he says, adding, "It's about living your brand and living your brand is about giving tangible value to the customer at a good price."

That also means less advertising. "The better your product is, the less you have to tell people about it because they find out themselves," he says, pointing out that a number of unique products and unique market-driving companies (ones that create innovative products that drive and create markets) do not spend a lot on advertising because they understand that it is word-of-mouth that is critical.

Delivering "real tangible value" is not just an impressive-sounding piece of advice Kumar gives to marketers. He follows it in his lectures as well.

As the suave professor enters the Mumbai World-Class armed with power-point presentations, copies of caselets, short films and the works, it's a point well made.