Rajat Gupta Speaks for ISB..Convo 2009..

Let me first add my welcome to all of you and my congratulations to all the friends and family visiting here and of course to the graduating Class of 2009. On this occasion there are many acknowledgements, many thanks that are due. And of behalf of the Board, I would really like to acknowledge some of those. First, I would like to acknowledge the contributions of the faculty. There is a large group of visiting faculties who come here at the ISB year after year and really give their very best to all of you. We have also seen extraordinary growth and talent in our own resident faculty. Dean Rangnekar already talked about nine publications in world-class journals. For such a young faculty, that is really an outstanding achievement. I know that they have made extraordinary contributions to you. We all owe a great deal of thanks to their efforts to make this School extraordinary. This School also has an extraordinary group of dedicated leaders who have built this brick by brick, and effort by effort and we must also acknowledge them in making this system work. Particularly noteworthy this time, I would thank Savita Mahajan who has stepped up to take the challenge of building our Mohali campus. Ajit Rangnekar, our Dean, took over under fairly difficult and trying circumstances. I had to make a very simple call and he had no hesitation in saying ‘I will do everything I can’, and clearly what he has been doing with all of you, with the school, has been truly outstanding. Thank you Ajit. And then to M R Rao. His academic excellence, his follower-ship amongst his academic colleagues, the respect that the entire ISB community has for him, his contributions to build this School to where it is, is unparalleled and will be always remembered. Thank you very much M R. M R has agreed to stay on as distinguished professor, as Dean Emeritus, as the senior academic person on this campus, as a mentor of academic colleagues, as somebody who can give a lot of wisdom, do his research and teach future generations. So M R, we are thankful again to you for accepting that. Thank you very much.
I am very proud of the journey the School has been on and what it has accomplished. But as these ratings come out and we get lots of accolades, I would remind you that I in my heart believe that perhaps our brand is a little bit ahead of reality. All this means is that we need to continue to strive to do the right things, continue to improve and not rest on our laurels, in fact be a little insecure and say we probably don’t deserve this ranking fully and then maybe what we need to do is to work harder and build on a number of things and make sure we deserve this ranking. So I urge all of you while we should feel great pride, we should at the same time think that there is enormous amount of work ahead and we are all in this together.
I too, like Arun would like to share with you some of my learning from a long journey and they are actually very similar to what Arun said and I will say them a little bit in my own words. I was in your shoes roughly thirty-five years ago, Arun I have you by a few years! And if I reflect on that time and I reflect on the early years, the thing that I remember the most, and the lessons that I learnt, the first one was, you can learn from every experience and everything that you do. I remember when I came out of business school I said I must have the right job and the right experience and is this the right thing for me to do and so on and so forth. I soon realised that if you have a truly learning mindset you will learn from everything and in fact you learn from unexpected things. And things that you thought would teach you a lot sometimes don’t and vice versa. And what I discovered is the mindset you go with. If you go with a learning mindset you will learn from pretty much everything that you do. The second very important lesson that I learnt was that whatever you are doing, you should think a little bit outside the boundaries of it. Don’t contain yourself to doing your job well or even excellently. That is in fact not fully sufficient. You have got to look outside the boundaries, you have got to look at what is good for the institution, beyond your immediate job and that is how you will learn a lot and develop your leadership capabilities. The third interesting observation is to try to work with people but even more than that to try to make them successful. If you try to make others successful, they in turn will try to make you successful. No matter how brilliant you are, no matter how good you are, no matter how hard you work if you rely only on yourself and if you believe that only your capabilities will carry you to great heights and you don’t need the help of others you are sadly mistaken. If you engage everybody around you by helping them they will help you in turn and you will be more successful than you ever dreamed of. Another thing that is very important in a sense to me, has always been, go outside your comfort zone. As soon as you are getting a little comfortable about something and the way your state is, change something deliberately to make sure you put yourself outside the comfort zone. That will truly make you think more out-of-the-box, think more creatively, learn new things and again be more successful. It is very important that you be true to your own self, that you be true to these values. It is sometimes very expedient and very short-term to do things to please others, to do things to be successful in the short-run; in the long-run they don’t help you. Because fundamentally you have to live with your own self longer than you have to live with anybody else, you have to be true to your own values. Last, and I wish I had done it even earlier, working hard in your career, being successful of course gives you lots of things, lots of material things, own personal power and fame ,but in the end that does not fully satisfy. A great deal of satisfaction comes when you give of yourself without any expectations. So start giving back to society. If you are transforming yourself from working only for yourself or your immediate family into working for some greater good and giving back to society you will feel an extraordinary level of satisfaction. Sometimes people will say I will do that when I have been successful in my career. My advice is do it early, do it in whatever way you can and you will get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of that. Let me close by telling you my story. When I was graduating, it was in 1973, the United States was going through a recession and it was a very tough job market. On top of that I was on a student visa in the US and most employers would not even talk to me. I was reasonably worried about whether I would end up with a job or not. And I went for a set of interviews to McKinsey. After two interviews they turned me down, they said you don’t have enough experience. I had no experience. I went from IIT into Business School into being there. I said I can’t get any experience because nobody else will give me a job, in fact no body else wants to interview me. They said well that is not our problem. That is when a little bit of luck came in. I was sitting in a class pretty depressed. My professor in Retailing called me after the class and said you look very upset what is the matter. I told him that McKinsey had turned me down. He said ‘I will go there, they are making a mistake. Let me write to them and say they should interview you.’ And he wrote to them and said you should interview him and invite him to a full day of interviews. I got interviewed and I got the job. I am sure that many of you sitting in this room are thinking what am I going to do. I am also delighted that most of you have jobs that you wish; some of you are still in that process. Certainly don’t get disheartened; things will happen that will fulfill your dreams of what you want to go forward with. But most importantly it is interesting to me, I look at it and say ok are you doing everything you can. Is everybody around, and I asked the question to our Board, are we doing everything we can to make sure that the Placement experience is outstanding for this batch in this very difficult circumstance? I asked the same question of the School, of our Placement Office, are we doing our very best and I ask the very same question of you. Are you applying your mind and doing the very best? If you are then you should be very happy. The outcomes will be whatever they should be and I am sure that they will turn out to be alright. In a strange way, and I have done this now for all eight graduating classes, I will close with my favourite shloka from The Gita which talks about simply this philosophy which translates into - You have a right to work. Not only do you have a right to work but you have to do that work with the right intentions. Not only do you have the right to work but you have to do the work and do it with the right intentions, but you have to do the very best you can and if you do all those three things then it does not matter what the outcome is. In fact the less attached you are to the outcomes, the better at peace you will be with yourself. This is no excuse not to do your very best, not to strive for excellence, in fact quite the opposite that is what it says. I know that you have studied hard, you have done the best you can in the last twelve months, and you are doing your very best in finding the right opportunities for you. Don’t worry about whether you have the right job at this time or not. It will come. I wish you the very best for your life, for your journey, for your career and thank you again for this day and thank all of your family and friends who have come here to support you. Thank you very much.