Playing snakes and corporate ladders

Only a true professional — as opposed to a tactical climber — can scale the summit of his profession and remain there, IT entrepreneur and author of The Professional, Subroto Bagchi tells DNA.

What prompted you to pen The Professional?
Today, professionals in every sphere are defining what it means to be an Indian — be it Indian filmmakers, writers or doctors — it is no longer just IT. Yet there is a dearth of conversation on this subject in India. So I felt the time is right to put it cohesively together. The book looks at what I call the foundational qualities of a professional.

So what makes anyone a professional?
I open the book with the example of a grave-digger I’d met, who has dug more than 42,000 graves in his life-time. There’s nobody to supervise his work, but most white collar professionals need supervision. Basically, if you qualify to be called a professional, then you should be able to self-certify completion of your work, without supervision. And this is all about integrity.

It’s all very well to talk about integrity. But a lot of offices are filled with people who revel in office politics; and usually people with integrity may be at a disadvantage over the less scrupulous ones. Can you survive in the corporate world by being just a professional?
You used an interesting phrase, “just a professional”. There’s nothing called “just a professional.” Look, for every example of the unscrupulous who seem to get ahead, there are other examples of people who make it through the odds. For example, you may have a boss who likes people to just hang around even when there is no work, maybe that’s how he doles out favours, and maybe some people benefit by it, but you have to learn the hard way how to survive in corporate snake pit. My book is not that.

Let me rephrase my question: does being a professional make you vulnerable to those who are not?
Yes, maybe it does, but that’s par for the course.

Then why should anyone want to be a professional? The organisation may gain by their professionalism, but what’s in it for them?
You know how a knife is sharpened. It is sharpened against a rough surface. So if you don’t go through that rite of passage, how will you become a well-rounded professional? How will you know what not to do when you are the boss? I spent the first five years of my career learning to deal with issues such as sycophancy and backstabbing. Don’t think that because you act professionally, there is a fast lane for you. Or that there’ll be nobody to pull you down. You have to fight your way through. There are no short cuts.

While the professional’s primary allegiance is to the company, the company’s primary allegiance is to the shareholders and not to the employees. This comes out in the open during a downturn when even loyal professionals are laid-off to protect short-term shareholder interests. Do you see a contradiction here?
No, no, it’s not like that at all. Any corporation worth its salt today has to understand that business is a three-legged stool. The three legs are: your customers, your employees, and then your shareholders. An entrepreneur has to have an equal allegiance to all the three legs, otherwise the stool will topple over. If you say, hey, I am only accountable to my shareholders, and that is what drives my company, the company will not sustain. That approach is now old world, it no longer holds true. And this is what brings the idea of professionalism into the centre of the conversation; it is no longer optional. As India becomes a global player and international competition comes in, who wins finally will be determined by who understands the language of professionalism better and is able to speak it to customers, employees and shareholders.

In your chapter titled ‘Not suffering false attractions’, you advise young professionals against jumping jobs. But why shouldn’t anybody make the most of a boom in the job market, especially in times when everyone wants to become a CEO by 30?
There is a job, and there is a profession. If you use your profession like a slot machine, then one day you’ll get used up. A profession is a 40-50-year-old thing. Things catch up with you. That is why one must think long-term. If you use your job as a stepping stone, some day your job will use you as a stepping stone. I’ve worked with overachievers all my life and I find that overachievers are the best friends and the worst enemies. You don’t even need the system to shoot you down; one day you will do some utterly stupid thing, and a few steps short of the summit, you will fall off. That’s what happens. Don’t take a tactical view of your life.