India's Olympic dream: Leaders need to set a vision before there can be any change

In my article last week, I had spoken about the lessons on empathy that managers could learn from the Olympics. Now that the Olympics have drawn to a close, we see similar reactions in India. There is recognition of the two medals (Sakshi Malik and P V Sindhu) and a couple of other standout performances (Dipa Karmakar and Lalita Babar), a general acclamation of the fact that all the standout performances have been by women who have had to fight their way through numerous obstacles and also a lot of lamentation of the fact that a country the size of India can't do better than just two medals.

Commentators have waxed eloquent on the fact that we don't have the right systems in place and if you add to that, the fact that there is a general disposition on the part of parents to emphasise academic achievements over extracurricular ones, it is no wonder that we are where we are in the Olympics medals leaderboard. However, what I haven't noticed yet is the recognition that for change to take place, it needs to be initiated from the very top, with the leadership setting out the larger vision.

Let me illustrate this with a couple of examples, one from Germany and the second from India. When Germany's football team failed to qualify for the group stages of the 2000 European championships, the football federation decided to address the failure and to help revive German football. They understood that this was going to be a fairly long process that would require at least a decade or more to take place but they clearly set out their vision of improving German football by instituting 121 national talent centers, each with two full-time coaches that would help 10- to 17-year olds with technical practice. In addition, all the club teams were required to set up youth academies. They also made changes at the grass-roots level to help identify young footballers starting from preschool all the way up. Their efforts bore fruit at the last world cup played in Brazil when a German team that consisted of young players who had come up through the ranks won the World Cup with a brand of exciting soccer that captivated audiences.

The second example that I want to talk about is the Indian Prime Minister's Swachh Bharat campaign. It was brought home to me rather forcefully during Deepawali celebrations last year. After the families in our apartment complex had finished bursting crackers, we asked everyone to help clean the place up. As the kids collected the trash and dumped it into a series of trash bags, every single one of them would yell "Swachh Bharat". This was quite extraordinary, since if 6-year old kids were imbibing the lesson, then in about a decade, we would have a generation that would have grown up with notions of cleanliness missing from mine. And what this required was for the leader of the nation to stand up on the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day and set out that broad vision. Obviously, there would be the nay-sayers and detractors. In general, though, I do find a significant improvement in the overall consciousness about cleanliness over the past year or so compared to earlier, as evidenced by the improvement in the cleanliness of the railway stations, always a good benchmark, as well as in citizen participation in keeping sections of the road and pavements clean. Self-help groups in Bengaluru and elsewhere take their own time out on weekends to help clean up roads. Temsutula Imsong is a prime example of this through her Shramdaan scheme where she and her team have helped clean up the environs around the ghats in Varanasi.

So what's the learning from all of this? If India needs to do better at the Olympics, we need a clarion call from someone high up, setting forth the vision of India getting say at least 10 medals by 2024 and then working towards it. This would imply shaking up the system and allocating appropriate resources but without that, we would continue to witness only individual feats of brilliance and otherwise familiar lamentations of our mediocrity.