‘I know management, it is no rocket science’, says Arindam Chaudhuri

Your new book is set to hit the shelves. What is the new book all about?
The new venture is, in a way, a sequel to Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch which had a few management theories in it making it a book for people interested in management. The new book Discover A Diamond In You is entirely for the masses. There is no question of adding any theoretical dimension. Count Your Chickens… was written in 2001. The new book contains about eight years of additional learning.

The last eight years have been very dynamic in the world of business, economy and society as a whole. How has this been captured in your book?
All the references in the book are phenomena seen over the last eight years — like the success stories of Google, Facebook, eBay, etc. They have seen their peak in the last eight years. Having said that, the fact remains, principles of success more or less remain the same over time. I’ve tried to build upon nine principles of success which I call the ‘Nine Ps of Success’. If you look at them, for every P, I have examples which are current, and which also have some relevance in the past. So be it past or present, the principles of success remain the same. That is what I’ve tried to show. It is all about how you build upon them.

What inspired you to write another book?
My inspiration has been to reach out to more and more people. If IIPM grew, it was to reach out to more and more people. I was teaching 45 students in a classroom and the urge was to teach more. But it can’t grow beyond a point. After 3,000 students, i wondered how I could reach out to more people. So I wrote some books. Then, I realised that three lakh people had read these books, but most may have forgotten it after reading it once. So I started magazines that people will read every week. This book is also from a similar perspective.

What is the USP of this book?
The idea was that there should be a book that anybody from age 10 onwards can pick up, read, understand, get inspired by and be able to inculcate those principles. Also, the idea is to address the youth in a manner that appeals to them. This book is 59 pages in text apart from graphs, charts and tables in 112 pages. That is why I call it a 59 minute guide to success. Anybody who picks up the book can finish the book in 59 minutes. We’re catering to the instant-coffee generation. The idea was to give the reader something just the way it appeals to him. And once you get into it and the mood is set, it should be a spurt in every body’s life.

What traits of Arindam Chaudhuri do we get to see while reading the book?
I believe that you cannot have a foundation to your personality and character if you are not passionate and do not have positive energy. I have always believed that there is no shortcut to success. You have to work very hard and performance is very important. However, the fact that you have passion and positive energy and you are willing to work hard doesn’t mean you will be successful. That is where perseverance comes in. You have to keep fighting back, keep bouncing back, again and again, till you get success.
There are three more Ps that are very important: perspective, principles and patriotism. I have compared the human being to a diamond as a metaphor in my new book. The first P is for carat: passion and positive energy. These define a human being’s depth like in a diamond.  The second P is cut. In a diamond, the cut is extremely important. A jeweller spends months to bring out its shine.
Colour of the diamond depends on how well it refracts the light that hits it. This is your personality and people skills. When you take the diamond to the jeweller, he puts it under the lens to see whether there are any black spots. These black spots a person removes from his personality when he has perspective, principles and patriotism. Without these three, he can’t reach anywhere.
I believe you can be very successful, but that doesn’t mean you will be remembered or idolised. Today, the Indian parent typically says, ‘be street-smart’. They are ruining an entire generation by giving this bad advice. The difference between being street-smart and principled is the difference between ordinary businessmen and JRD Tata or Narayan Murthy: these men achieved more simply because of their patriotism. They did it for their country, not for their individual businesses.

You mentioned certain directions the youth are getting. On the flipside, there is cut-throat competition in the world. How do you see this dichotomy?
There is absolutely no dichotomy between these two worlds because to become successful you don’t need to cheat. If you cheat, one day you will fail in any case. You can be extremely righteous, principled and very successful. In fact, most of the competition is because we have created a bad system. There are fewer seats and more students competing and thinking that good education is rare. One of the most sought-after courses is management. The best example of this is that IIMs have deliberately kept 100-150 seats. Six IIMs put together take out only 1,050 students every year. This is a huge shame. That’s why people think that there is so much competition. However, this can be changed. The IIMs  have 100-acre campuses. They could be teaching 5,000 students in each campus. They would still maintain the quality of education. When they say that they cannot maintain the  quality of education with such a large number of students, it is rubbish.  I know management, it is no rocket science. It can be taught to anybody. In a management classroom, you get physics, chemistry, political science students sitting with engineers and English (Hons) students. It’s something that can be taught to everybody. It’s not so difficult that you can teach only 150 students in a 100-acre campus. You do that because your aim is to limit education and thereby milk education through packages. The aim is that if fewer students are sent out into the market, their packages will be higher and so will the glamour element. If they increase the number of students they let into the IIMs, their packages and the package of an IIPM student is going to be the same.
 
How do you see the educational reforms proposed recently by the government?
I see reforms as a farce. I see a few good intentions but they’re meaningless if you do not carry it off in the right manner. If you say you want to abolish boards, it creates controversy and news. It is a good thing to abolish boards and allow privatisation. But these are the only focal points of the government’s reforms. Reforms should be the other way round. These should just be incidental.  Education reforms have to first be carried out at the primary level. If students do not get good education at primary and secondary levels, they reach nowhere. Reforms should not focus on reservation. In 20 years time, the generation that comes out should be so well-educated that they can compete in the market without reservations. Reservation is when you can’t give them good education. 
Also, the country needs to move towards better basic infrastructure. We need to say that in five years we will make our infrastructure so good that every student going to school will be a different human being when he passes out 12 years later.
The government should be forced to change everything, which it should have done way back in 1950. Shamefully, we are stepping into 2010 and still talking about it. I do not see any such committed dialogue. I see farcical symbolisation of reforms, but that is not going to change education.