‘When you reach the limits of logic, use your gut’

What lessons in management can we possibly learn from bonsai crocs, which are stunted because they are confined to a small enclosure soon after emerging...

What lessons in management can we possibly learn from bonsai crocs, which are stunted because they are confined to a small enclosure soon after emerging from the egg? Or from the caterpillar whose transformation to a beautiful butterfly is so painful? Or from flies that cannot fly straight, cave crickets that are comfortable in darkness, or pigeons which fail to reach home? Well, plenty, as Tata Sons Executive Director R. Gopalakrishnan has eloquently argued in his jargon-free forthcoming book, ‘The Case of the Bonsai Manager—Lessons from Nature on Growing’. Filled with anecdotes he has been collecting for more than a decade, the book draws from his rich management experience. “No one sets out to be a bonsai manager… a manager’s growth gets stunted by his own acts of omission and commission. To achieve his full potential, a manager should explore new possibilities, going beyond the analytical and the logical to gut and instinct,” he says. Sudipta Datta spoke to Gopalakrishnan, who spent 31 years at Hindustan Lever before joining the Tatas in 1998, about his new book on how managers can tackle big-ticket mergers and acquisitions, and why a good story always clicks. Excerpts:

• What inspired you to write the book?

About 10 years ago, the number of reports about top leaders getting fired started attracting huge press coverage; it also caught my eye and set me thinking. I wondered why successful people, CEOs, VPs and so forth make seemingly elementary mistakes? Is this inevitable or is there a way to reduce these mistakes? One also cannot escape the similarity with life itself. The way we try to minimise them is when parents and grandparents try to leave a legacy of stories which embed in the mind and come back at important times. Management also bears a similarity to life. My profession happens to be management, so I write with that perspective, but the messages could apply to life in general.

• How did you think of linking nature and management?

About 10 years ago there was an explosion of TV channels like the National Geographic and Animal Planet. I was fascinated by what happened under the sea, in the air, how a tiger devours its prey, how mating happens. Animals also have a brain and act accordingly, but their brain is different from that of humans. That’s how the connection came to my mind. I wanted to see whether the stories derived from nature were applicable to management. That’s how the idea began.

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• So you have been building a library of stories for years.

Yes, I got my first opportunity to try it out at the All-India Management Association. I used one of these stories hesitantly, experimentally, and surprisingly, I wasn’t booed out. People came up and said it was novel and interesting. Then I started collecting. For instance, I had heard the bonsai crocodile story at a Unilever conference in Zimbabwe, and years later, I found that the same thing was happening to katla fish in 24-Parganas, West Bengal. I have collected almost 30 books and videos.

• Drawing from nature what would your advice be to managers?

As the world changes rapidly, it is important to appreciate that analysis and logic have limitations. They can get you so far and no more. When you have reached the limits of analysis and logic, you have to use the gut. I often use the metaphor of a man who is trying to drive on a foggy morning on a mountain road, trying to go from place A to place B. Does he drive his car at 100 km an hour? No. A business leader these days is like this driver on a foggy road. Yet we expect a business leader to drive like Michael Schumacher all through. At the end of the day, you have to drive the way you can drive: if you are the guy who is seeing the fog and you look tentative, so be it. Just do what you have to do and let the results turn out whichever way. That’s what I call relying on intuition.