Life lessons from Prakash Iyer — IIMA, former MD — Kimberly Clark, Best Selling Author
Life lessons from Prakash Iyer — IIMA, former MD — Kimberly Clark, Best Selling Author
In these exciting 38 minutes, Prakash Iyer speaks about his TEDx talk — Go Fly a Kite — and how one must overcome Ego in Leadership, his MBA at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad — way back in 1984, memories of the Red Bricks — Prof Ajit Mote , Prof Saha, Prof Abhinandan Jain; Prof Bhandari . He talks about lessons in marketing soaps at Unilever — HUL to Huggies diapers at Kimberly-Clark — more interestingly how he experienced marketing for adoption of diapers in India , managing Mumbai Indians IPL team as CEO in 2015, transition to a career in writing/speaking , views on Social Media, Covid 19, Ikigai , favourite books and advise to youngsters
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Life Lessons from Prakash Iyer
Q1. Drawing cues from your TEDx Talk “Go fly a kite”, in your early career days, who was the one who held your kite and hoisted it? Were they your parents and what was your family background?
Ans: The guy who held up the kite for me was really to the fact that it’s not easy for a kite to take off. Once it’s up in the air, anybody can fly it and very often it’s a good idea to get somebody who will help hold it for you and will actually send it out and help you fly it, and for me I think my father was a huge influence on my life and certainly all the early lessons, the interests in writing and perhaps in speaking, the confidence he gave me and the reassurance I think I owe it to him and to the rest of my family. I would say the teachers too in school were pretty big influence and I remember my English teacher who has a special place in my heart for her. I guess a lot of people at work, some early bosses certainly have been big influences and they are certainly the ones I saw as mentors. So there are lots of people that made a difference in my life and I am probably the person who kind of thrived onto the fact that hey you don’t have to fly a kite on your own, just get somebody to help you and then together you can fly that kite quite easily.
Q2. It takes a lot of time to get over your ego and approach for help so often when you are in leadership position you still have to get over the ego and ask a young sales guy for help. Doesn’t the conditioning of ego become a challenge?
Ans: I think it’s a good idea to set that ego aside and maybe it came to me pretty early in my life. I remember being the captain of the class cricket team and I always knew I wasn’t the captain because I was the best player in the team but because I knew they thought me good enough to be captain and thought I could get somebody else to help the team win rather than thinking I am the best player and I have to make this team win and I think it stayed with me for most of my career. So I believe a lot of people who get it right are people who don’t have any bit of ego. An ego can be a bit of a spoiler I think.
Q3. You entered IIM Ahmedabad in the year 1984 so was MBA in vogue then as much as it is today? What was the CAT percentile cut-offs then?
Ans: It’s interesting when you ask was it as popular it is today, I probably think the MBA graph has also peaked a few years ago and probably people are going to say is it really worth it very much right now, I am not sure about that, but I certainly think there wasn’t as much noise around the whole MBA thing. There weren’t so many institutes for a start; you had those few institutes from the IIMs and those were it. There was a place like Bajaj in Mumbai or XLRI in Jamshedpur, which were very popular and famous but they were far fewer than what you see today. Today you see so many schools. I don’t think there were any of us who knew about percentile cut-off, so I don’t think it existed. What’s interesting for me is that I don’t think it was as competitive as it might be today, where bright guys would probably score 99+2 to kind of make the cut. I do think if we were to do that test again I don’t know if I would make it. So the good thing for us in those days was that the classroom in business school was a lot more diverse and I remember going back to campus several times and I was quite amazed at the number of engineers for example in class. Gender diversity wouldn’t have been there, there would be like 5–6 girls in the whole batch, now it’s like 40% of the batch. We used to have 1 out of 18 dorms for girls and today you go there and see lots of girls which is a fantastic thing.
Q4. What has been your favourite memories from the red bricks, your favorite professors, if you could tell us?
Ans: I think there were some people who were quite legendary and in those days we had Professor Mote and Professor Saha teaching a course which brought everyone down to earth because here you were thinking that I made it to IIM Ahmedabad so you must be one of the smartest folks around and then that course taught you really know nothing about whatever it is that matters. I think they were amazing set of professors, Prof. Mote and Prof. Saha. There was also a professor called Abhinandan Jain who was another outstanding leader and I think things have changed now but in those days you could smoke in class so it was interesting to see Abhinandan Jain sitting in the class in his own style and I think he was quite a character, a strong influence to a lot of us. There was another terrific professor we had who taught us, he was like the god of marketing on campus, called Prof. Labdhi Bhandari who unfortunately died in an air crash a couple of years after we graduated from school, but he was quite fantastic. He was the person who would come and sit in the class and it would be so quiet that you could hear the fans on top whirring (now you probably have air conditioners, those days there were all fans), so he would pause, think, push his spectacle up his nose and everybody would be waiting to see the pearls of wisdom that were going to come out of his mouth then. He was quite a professor.
Q5. Coming to your professional life at HUL Kimberley, it was like 3 decades of marketing and sales and this is one question I really want to focus on, you sold almost everything under the sun, soaps at Unilever, colas at Pepsico, yellow pages at info media, so what are your key learnings from marketing and sales because it’s a lot of ground level of work. Is it career suitable for everyone? Who are the people that can actually succeed in this and really can make a career in marketing?
Ans: In those days, we all had a dream of becoming a marketing person, work in finance or in a bank, I must confess that consulting was only just about beginning to make it’s presence felt and investment banking was not something anybody had any idea of. There were really no investment banks to talk about. Marketing was this glamourous thing that you wanted to get into and we all had dreams that if you hit the jackpot you would get to work for Hindustan Unilever and you would get a chance to create all those fantastic ads and you would get a chance to choose whether Hema Malini should continue to be the Lux brand ambassador or not. It was this feeling that you would get to do these cool work around brands and it’s interesting that when you join Hindustan Unilever, you think that now people will direct you to your rooms and show you the advertisement rooms, but what they do of course is to send you off to sales. I think we learnt an important lesson that marketing really begins with understanding what happens out there, where customers part with their hard-earned cash for your product or service and therefore this whole idea being able to go and understand how does this work, how the sales work, how does the distribution happen, who are the consumers, what do they look like, that was a huge learning. I think that’s a lesson that stayed with me for my entire career so never mind which role I was in the business, never mind what product I was selling, I was very keen to be there in the front line with my sales team, trying to understand what makes shopkeepers buy from us, what makes consumers buy from us and I think that’s really how it works and in terms of suitability for people, I must confess that its hard work and I think a lot of people have a more glamourous options perhaps. Life was different and the fact was that your work took you to small towns, it meant a lot of travel. So if you were okay with that and if brands, consumers and communication excite you, then I think sales and marketing is a fantastic place to be and I do think that never mind if you are in business, no matter which function you are in, I think it’s good to spend some time in sales for two reasons. First, I think because you will learn what happens out there in sales and second, you will learn what rejection feels like, since you talked about ego earlier so when you are in sales job, you cannot have an ego because you might be a great guy from a big business school working for a large company but when you stand in front of Kanti Lal Ji, who is running a small grocery store, you still have to show respect and plead in a lot of cases to sell and he might still reject. You might then walk away saying “I lost today” but you have got to believe that “I lost today but I’ll come back tomorrow and I’ll win” and I think that’s a good lesson sales can teach you. I think it’s a great career, a fulfilling one but you got to ask yourself is that what you want to do.
Q6. Any lesson that you learnt from those territory sales managers?
Ans: Part of my job took me to a place called Hubli and one thing you learn in sales is the discipline of doing small things right so a lot of us gets bored if we have to do the same things over and over again. We want variety, people get bored if after 2 years their role has not changed or their domain hasn’t changed or they are not working with new clients, we get bored very easily. In a sales role there’s a lot of credit given to be able to do same things over and over again and doing it every time like it’s the first time. So in Hubli we used to have a distributor, where our products would come not in an auto or a tempo but on a bullock cart, but the interesting thing was the bulls were smart. So you would load the bullock and take it and it will automatically stop in front of the first shop, and then you go and sell and then get out, come back, get on it and it will automatically take you to the second shop. That is when we learnt to respect hard work and that was probably something that stayed with us.
Q7. What about creating a culture for Yellow Pages in India? Did you make special strategies to make diapers a way of life in India or Yellow Pages?
Ans: I think there are a couple of interesting lessons on what actually happens with a diaper and it’s a very unique kind of product because for a start the person who is using the product is not the person who is buying it and that’s an interesting dynamic. An interesting lesson that we learnt out of consumer research in those days is that very often in those days in a typical Indian home you had the mom and the baby but you also had the mother-in-law or the grand mom staying over there and the grand mom was often the gatekeeper when it came to using diapers because they didn’t use the same during their times. According to them, diapers are not something for the baby, it was something for the lazy mothers; the mothers don’t have the patience or time to clear the mess. I think across products you will probably find that you might have a great product and you might try to sell it to the person who will get the biggest benefit from it, but we forget that they are the gatekeepers in a sale and we all need to watch out for those gatekeepers and get them on our side.
Q8. What was the trigger for the major career transition in becoming a motivational speaker? Do you find this job more fulfilling than the corporate world?
Ans: I think there were a couple of triggers for this whole switch from doing what I was doing in the corporate world to actually moving on to do the stuff that I do right now. I wrote my first book in 2011 and it was called “The Habit of Winning” and even before that I have always been fascinated by the idea of speaking and being able to motivate people. Even at work I saw lots of bright, young people very smart who came to work but I don’t think they learnt the simple lessons which I thought were very important for success, not only in your career but in your life too. So I think the truth is you can spend 2 years in a business school and back in those days there weren’t a course on leadership or how to be a team player, either you had to learn it outside of the classroom or you didn’t but even if you didn’t it didn’t show in your grades so you could come out being the topper in the class, being fantastic in your grades, being able to crack the case and get all the quant stuff right but you didn’t really know what does it take to be a good team player or how do I get other people to help me and I felt that’s something I could make a difference with. I think I learnt a lot of fabulous lessons from people I worked with and I thought it was a good chance for me to try and share those lessons and the book perhaps was the first attempt in that direction. Then a second book and happened and I had begun to speak so even though I was working as the managing director of the business, I would spend the odd Sundays in going and speaking somewhere or I would spend nights speaking somewhere and I would try to do a bit of that and I was really enjoying it. Sometimes you have this thought that comes to your head that if you were run over by a bus tomorrow morning, what’s the thing you would regret not having done and for me I think it was this. It was really about saying what is it that I really love doing, what am I uniquely good at, what do I think the world needs and what will the world be willing to pay for and for me that kind of came together for me to say I think I should be out there speaking and writing and helping others in becoming as good as they can be and that’s what I have been doing for the last six years and I feel terrific even if there’s one person who I might come to meet somewhere in an airport in the good old days or if someone writes to me saying that they read my book and it inspired me.
Q9. What are your top 3 reads that have left an indelible imprint on you?
Ans: I would probably say that I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell and therefore “Outliers” is perhaps the book I enjoyed the most and I think Gladwell’s podcasts are extremely interesting. So I just love his ability to find connections between random and really research them and come up with some fantastic lessons so I am a big fan of Gladwell. In recent times, I think this book by James Clear “Atomic Habits”, I think that’s another fantastic book and for people who don’t read much non-fiction, it’s a good book to read. It can help you change your habits in pretty significant way. As a kid, one of my favourite authors was R.K. Narayan. He used to write these little books about life in a small imaginary town called Malgudi, you might remember the TV series named Malgudi days which was really built on R.K. Narayan’s stories and he had this little character in it called Swami. He was this mischievous boy who used to play cricket all the time and he was a member of MCC (Malgudi Cricket Club). Narayan would write about simple things that happen in our lives, he would write them in a manner so that everyone could understand and I think that might have had such an influence on me.
Q10. Is cricket your source of rejuvenation or fitness that keeps you going in spite of all the hectic schedule?
Ans: Rejuvenation yes, fitness no because I don’t play cricket very much now but I used to early in my life, I am big cricket fan. I think I try to get a lot of lessons from cricket, I try to use parallels from cricket to say how does it help us or what can it teach us in our lives or what is it that we can learn from it. So yes, cricket is a big part of my life.
Q11. What else features in your fitness regime?
Ans: Pretty ordinary actually. I try and work out a couple of times in a week, me and my wife go for a walk as often as we can and I haven’t done that for the last 3–4 months now but when I can, I go and play golf. I do it because I enjoy it. I suggest people not to do something because somebody else is doing it or because if I do this it will take me somewhere, that’s a very poor way to live your life. I often think a lot of young people make the mistake of choosing careers which they think are hot careers or because it’s very difficult to get into it so I must go there. I think that’s a lousy way to do it. You should take a career because it will take you where you want to go, because it makes you happy.
Q12. That also reminds me of your strength as the CEO of the Mumbai Indians 2015 and that would have been a unique strength from managing an MNC to managing a cricket team. So if you could quickly tell us about that as well.
Ans: That was in many ways was a dream come true in the sense that I’m a big cricket fan and I couldn’t have asked for more than to say get a chance to spend a season working with a cricket team and a cricket team as successful and as accomplished as Mumbai Indians, was really something. I think it was quite fascinating and you recognized both the challenges and the joys of a role like that. It was also a reminder to all of us that you should have a dream, everyone should dream. Everyone should want to do something. Never rule yourself out of whatever it is that you might have dreamt about and if you are passionate about something, and you keep kind of testing the water with it, things will happen.
Q13. A few weeks back you had a tweet on Sushant Singh Rajput’s demise, about having a lot of virtual friends but no friends in real life, so what would be your thought on that because COVID has shut down everything and work from home has really increased the isolation levels of people. We depend on social media but the entire psychological aspect of dealing with the self is not recognised. What are your insights on that?
Ans: I think I used the thought when I was saddened by what happened to Sushant Singh Rajput and for most of us we saw him as much as the Dhoni character and therefore for us he was that hero who got it right and to see him go was very very sad. I think it makes a broader point to all of us that we all need friends, we all need love, we all need people we can call our own. What happens in social media is that they have all got a DP which has this good-looking, big smile, sparkling eyes kind of picture that hides the reality of who we are and we all can’t keep putting up a facade all our lives. We need to be ourselves, we need to have someone we can hangout with, who will listen to us, who will like us for who we are and not for who we are pretending to be and I think that was really what I was trying to say. Coming back to your point about has it become tougher during COVID, maybe not because I think families have just got together, kids and parents are not going anywhere, they are all sitting at home and I think it’s a good time even now and I think work from home is only going to increase a good time for all of us to reach out. It’s good to sit with our moms and not take them for granted, you have got to sit with her and have conversations. Just talk about anything because that will bond you with people and if you are alone and not staying with your family, you still have the avenues online to still talk to each other. Instead of increasing the followers online, we should sit back and ask ourselves do we have those 3–5 people in our life who we would talk to, who we would know would help us out if we were in some trouble in a foreign country. More importantly, we should make sure we are that person to someone else.
Q14. A very common feedback that I get on my channel is that I always bring these accomplished leaders who have really done very well and it makes the ones who haven’t really done so well feel a bit left out. So how does one reconcile the self with the emotions?
Ans: Maybe the way to remember it is right now you are listening to somebody who as a little kid was flying kites in Jaipur, whose daytime passion was to fly kites, so I think it’s very important to remember that it’s not about success, I am not a CEO, I am just a guy. The good thing to remember is each of us has something that is unique about ourselves, so try and work on those strengths, try and become as good as you can be with those strengths. Try and be a learner all your life, try and help other people. Become the kind of person who just wants to help other people. If you ever go to a prayer ceremony after somebody passed away, nobody says that you were such a good man you had three flats in Bombay, nobody says that. They will talk about what did he do with other people, how did he make you feel, did he laugh, did he make you laugh, that’s what you are interested in. What we need to do for each of ourselves is to say how can I be the best version of what I could have been. There can be only one Sachin Tendulkar in the team but that doesn’t matter. You could be Rajinder Goel, who never played for India but people say he was the best spinner who never played for India. Bishan Singh Bedi says he was such a great guy now what else do you need in life if people are saying good things about you. Don’t try and be in a rat race and compare yourself with other people, but be the best version of yourself; push yourself, don’t slack.
Q15. Considering the mistakes you would have done in your career, so building on that what would be your advice to Prakash Iyer at the age of 20?
Ans: I am not sure if they are mistakes but I was like 19 and away from home and I just think it would have been a good idea if I look back and say that maybe I should have called my mom every day. Even when you grow up and start getting busy and say that you were in a meeting or you were doing an operation review and then probably head on to a dinner with colleagues and you thought you would make the call then but at that moment one young management trainee comes to you and asks you a question and then you’re stuck with that person for another 15 minutes and then you realise it’s 10 o’clock and maybe mom would have slept so you don’t call. If you ask me one of the better things we all can do is make that call.
