Mahindra - Change the Rules

The graduating class of 2014 and their families, Mr A.M. Naik, chairman, board of governors, members of the faculty, ladies and gentlemen.

It is almost customary for convocation speakers to terrify their audience by telling them that they are about to begin their lives. If I used that clich with you, it would sound patently unfair, wouldnt it? I would imagine that all of you probably feel as if a good portion of your life has already been well earned and well spent!

The very fact that you were admitted to IIM Ahmedabad means that you have been running the race of life for quite a while now. You probably studied diligently throughout school, worked even harder in college, engaged in a diverse set of extracurricular pursuits, worked strenuously to achieve high scores in the entrance tests, and finally, adopted a back-breaking pace just to make it through the last two years and qualify to wear those robes. The world lies at your feet today.

So let me confirm that you are not fledgling, inexperienced birds about to fly out of the nest and you need not be intimidated by this supposedly imminent and momentous commencement of your lives.

There is, however, a very different danger you face. The danger that forty years from now, you will be reflecting upon your life and declaring to your friends that your days at IIM Ahmedabad were the best days of your life.

Now I am not refuting or challenging the fact that you might have thoroughly enjoyed your stint here. What I wish for you is that things only get better from here onwards. And I want you to hit the ground running and have as few wasted moments as is humanly possible.

I have found that the days that I see now as the wasted days of my life were those when I didnt take an acceptable risk that I could have conceivably taken, when I didnt ask myself if there was a new and different way to do what I was doing, when I didnt set my sights as high as I possibly could have.

To give you an example, let me take you back more than two decades ago, when we formed a joint venture (JV) with Ford Motor to make passenger vehicles. Why did we do that? Well, because at that time, we had only just started making vehicles with hard tops, and were diffident about our capability to transition to the modern car-making world. We needed a mother ship in case our little spacecraft didnt survive out there. Some years later, during the tenure of that JV, when our home-grown Mahindra engineers came up with the concept of the Scorpio SUV, we dutifully sought our JV partners advice and assistance. I will never forget the day we displayed the model of the Scorpio to the top brass at Ford, who had gathered at the tiny facility of a boutique engineering firm in the UK.

We showed them a crude clay model of the Scorpio and shared our development budget with them. They seemed impressed and, right away, the vice chairman of the company offered to depute a team of seasoned Ford engineers to assist us in the development of the vehicle. At that point, the chairman interjected and said, No, lets not send any engineers at all. If we do, this vehicle may come out looking like a Ford car, and costing just as much. If these guys can really develop this car theyve just shown us at the cost they claim they can, then I think we are the ones who should be learning from them.

I owe Ford a debt of gratitude for leaving us to fend for ourselves. Because when I look back upon these events, I know that the choice Ford made put us solidly on the path of self-reliance. But I admit that I have often wondered how things would have turned out had Ford made a different choice.

What if they had not abandoned us to do the Scorpio alone? It is obvious that we would not have built the capabilities we possess today.

So I have asked myself: why did I make that offer in the first place? What was the source of diffidence that made us ask for an alliance? Could we have been more audacious, and attempted the impossible right from the start? Why did it take such an enormous leap of faith for us to conceive our own indigenously designed vehicle? Why did it take so long to believe in ourselves?

The conclusion I arrived at was that embedded in my generations psyche was a fear of flying, a deep fear of failure, a character trait that is the mortal enemy of entrepreneurship. And even when we indulged in entrepreneurship, we tended to stay within our comfort zones. An example of this that I enjoy citing is that of a good friend of mine, an outstanding businessman who has grown his family business into a formidable footwear chain throughout India. One of the extensions to his business was a new high-quality brand, conceived and created for a more upscale segmenta brand called Mochi.

It has performed extremely well here in India, but I recall a conversation with him, in which I asked him why he hadnt ventured abroad with that product, even as new and differentiated footwear brands were sprouting in the Western world. I told him that I could easily envision Mochi selling on a high street in London. It didnt seem too outlandish an idea; frankly, Mochi even sounded like a long-lost relative of Gucci! He was honest enough to admit to me that he just wasnt ready to take that risk; he was doing fine in India and the pond here was large enough.

I began pondering on why we were so timid, why we were afraid to compete in the toughest arenas. Why did some American college kids from my generation believe they could take on global heavyweights from out of their dorm rooms, while we believed we first needed to compete in the flyweight class?