Batting for oddballs

He brings in one more M to M&M: Maverick. It’s a trait Anand Mahindra, MD of the multinational Mahindra & Mahindra, would love to conform to. It has helped him tolerate, and nurture, his company’s oddballs. “If you lose them then you are depriving yourself of a vital element,” he says. Vinay Kamat tries to log Mahindra’s maverick quotient .

Leadership is truly about knowledge management. At Level 1 is the leader himself, who has to be a nowledge-assimilator, trend-spotter, ideator, and executor. At Level 2, the leader helps create tomorrow’s knowledge leaders by creating a nursery of ideation. How have you been able to create a process of innovation?
The messages I transmit are very important. People hear me talk about leadership, globalisation, innovation, financial returns and customer centricity. (But) I have got to walk the talk and I have got to convey the message. The more often you say it, the more you tell people. At the risk of boredom, one has to repeat and be consistent about certain key messages.

Then, an organisation believes in credibility. Innovation is not Anand’s flavour of the month. Does he really mean it? How many times is he saying it? Is he saying a new message which is clever and peppy but not consistent? Of course, innovation is incomplete without reward  and recognition. So, one of the first things we did was to create the Chairman’s Award for Innovation within the group. You have got to build internal heroes, the innovation heroes.

Lastly, we created the Sand Pit. The Americans call it Skunk Works. Anybody can go to the president (of the auto business) and say, “Look I have this great idea”. So, at any given time, the president, apart from having XYZ number of projects underway, will have Sand Pit projects. The electric three-wheeler, the Bijli, is the most visible outcome of the Sand Pit project. And, it came from a person three years away from retirement. We have learnt that innovation is not a prerogative of the young. And it is not always about rocket science. It is about process and application.

But how do you make that happen? 
I go around telling people to ask themselves what they contribute at the end of the day. Did I do one thing, no matter how small, which was world-class today? It might be cleaning the desk in a certain way; it might be one more step to one more revolutionary combustion engine. If everybody in this company does one thing world-class, it’s that collective increment, the kaizen, which will move mountains.

As a CEO, how do you access cutting-edge knowledge every minute?
Conversations and contacts with people help a lot. You have to combine curiosity with willingness to access and accept the new devices of information. I force myself to do some kind of surfing everyday.

I have always valued the benefit of travel. China and Japan are incredible countries for trend-spotting. Even though they are seen to be conservative, they are the most adaptive, the most clued in.

Blogs provide us with critical inputs. We have made it mandatory for everybody to read (US) farmers’ blogs. We sit here doing extensive studies about what is wrong with Mahindra tractors. But it’s all there on farmers’ blogs. They tell you what is wrong with our products. You don’t have to spend on a research programme; blogs tell you about your positives and negatives.

When you deal with your Sand Pit heroes, do you also factor in the cost of eccentricity you are likely to incur on such mavericks?
One aspect of Sand Pit is a huge tolerance for mavericks. I guarantee that every company will always have one guy who everybody hates, nobody likes to work with, is arrogant as hell, always points to himself, but comes out with ideas that nobody can come out with. We don’t have a cost of eccentricity; we just firewall. And, at the cost of criticism from our team players, we say we have to, as an organisation, show tolerance for mavericks.

Do leaders have to be mavericks to understand, and tolerate, mavericks?
It’s arguable. You have to have the intellectual curiosity to understand that innovation comes from the most unexpected sources. If you lose these sources, if there is a systematic genocide of unconventional sources, then you are depleting yourself of a very vital element.

So the innovation ecosystem of a company consists of curiosity, access to information,
a structured brain-storming process, a conventional product development process, as well as a Sand Pit. And it requires these unexpected sources, these mavericks, to survive. They are all a part of this teeming jungle called a company.

A company like ours, which has been around for 60 years, develops mavericks on its own. They come out of the woodwork sometimes and everybody knows where they are and who they are.

They do not like hierarchy. The word is anathema to them. It’s fun having them around. They are workaholics. They will not work for a week, then disappear into the garage for a week and, after sleepless nights, roll something fantastic out of there. The way you manage them is completely different. You can’t ask them to punch in and punch out. It takes a little bit of courage to do it.