Redefining Success

In November last year, nearly 200 entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs aspiring to scale up their business and personal capabilities came together to attend a very special business leadership program called INSIGHT: The DNA of Success. Designed by Sadhguru and facilitated by Dr. Ram Charan, globally renowned CEO Coach, the panel comprised some of the most successful names from the Indian business sphere, including KV Kamath and GM Rao.

The second edition of the program will be underway during 23-26 November 2013 at the Isha Yoga Center. Leading up to this exciting event, we have been bringing you a video series called “The Business of Wellbeing.” As part of the panel discussions at INSIGHT 2012, Sadhguru and Dr. Ram Charan were interviewed by Indrajit Gupta, former Editor of Forbes India magazine. In this video, they discuss the young generation, information overload and the urgent need to redefine success.

An extract from the video

Indrajit Gupta: Organizations are getting younger… there’re many young people joining the workforce and that’s bringing down the average age. So one of the major challenges to my mind, from the conversations that one has with business leaders, is how do you connect with that “genie” employee? Do we need to really re-design our organizations to meet the aspirations and expectations of today’s generation? If so, how do you do that?

Dr Ram Charan: The key here is that the young generation today is very versatile. They have instant knowledge and information that the previous generations didn’t have. That requires a change in attitude. That’s the first thing. Second, the young generation does and can do multiple tasks. And their cognitive side is changing, because the information is instantaneously available and they can connect. Also, they want to do the meaningful work. I remember 30 years ago, a big industrial family in the top five in the nation… they have a son coming up, and the father says, “You got to go and work on the machines in the factory for two years.” Today’s millennial will laugh at that, because you’re doing the same repetitive work and not building anything in the mind. Now, you have got to provide an intellectual challenge. They like to collaborate, create teams… they will recite superb theories and concepts…. But, don’t mistake: they want to accomplish something, they need coaching but you cannot insult them. So use their brain power, help them, work them through, ask the questions and try to make them successful. Once they get successful and get into the nitty-gritty, you have some very important human capital going forward. That’s the way I look at it.

Indrajit Gupta: We were used to working in organizations for five even ten years. Today’s generation doesn’t want to. So, how does a modern organization deal with that? The whole issue of employee loyalty – is that dead?

Dr Ram Charan: In investment banking in America, at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, these people recruit young people and they are assigned in the first year to the senior people. These senior people take the young people with them to the clients and they have an apprenticeship system, where they are exposed to the CEOs and CFOs of client companies. And they’re learning how the senior partners are interfacing and those people go quickly from spreadsheets to good questions in business and finance. And within three years, they begin to get superb assignments. We’ve got to figure this out. You can’t lose good human capital.

Indrajit Gupta: Sadhguru, do you believe that we need to start creating space for more careful deliberation, because insights don’t come otherwise… Are we losing our ability to reflect and carefully deliberate solutions?

Sadhguru: I think, in terms of reflection, I think we’ve gone down seriously, because there is an overload of information. So much is available, like never before. Just ask anybody, they know what the Hubble telescope is showing, what is happening here, what is happening there… too much information! I don’t think there’s enough reflection within the younger generation. When you are just loaded with information and there is no necessary assimilation and reflection – one thing that’ll happen to you is, your attention span will go. An attention span deficiency is being seen as a qualification today, which is a serious mistake we’re making. Because, maybe you can play with gadgets, maybe you can do things, but serious developments in science and truly innovative things, path-breaking things will happen only when we are capable of paying constant attention to something.

You see a huge volume of success around… I think that is a technological feature. The previous generation, it's not that they were less smart, it is just that technology has created so many pathways and so many possibilities. We are so hugely empowered – what ten thousand men could do, one man can do today. When such a phenomenal capability has come to us, how we exercise it is very, very important.

The new enterprise needs to think: you cannot have sustainable growth and sustainable success, if you don’t have a sustainable planet. The general aspiration is the whole world wants to live like the United States of America. According to Living Earth statistics, if the whole world has to live like an average citizen in United States does, we need four-and-a-half planets. But we have only one. We have only one and we need four-and-a-half, if we want to succeed. So, somewhere we should pray for failure – which is not a good thing! So we have to redefine what enterprise is, we have to redefine success; we have to redefine what we call moving forward. If we call moving backward as moving forward, we’re asking for trouble. So, yes, we want everybody to succeed. But it is also important, because we are hugely, hugely empowered like never before – no other generation has been as empowered as we are today – we have to redefine success. Otherwise, we’ll pay a very high price if we succeed.

Editor’s Note: INSIGHT: The DNA of Success - A Leadership program with N.R. Narayana Murthy (Founder, Infosys), Ronnie Screwvala (Founder UTV Group (Now Walt Disney India)), and Sadhguru is going to conducted from Nov 26 - 29, 2015 at the Isha Yoga Center, Coimbatore.

Visit the website www.ishainsight.org, or contact +91 83000 84888, leadership@ishainsight.org for more details.