Leadership Lessons by Industrialist Anand Mahindra.

So what I thought I'd do would be to talk about rabbits. Yes, you heard me right. I'm going to talk about rabbits. Now, in English there is this phrase called 'frightened as a rabbit,' and that implies that a rabbit is an extremely timid creature and one that has no gumption or courage. But if you look at our own Panchatantra, the rabbit in fact comes out to be a fairly heroic character. Some of you might remember the story about the mighty lion who ruled a jungle, terrorized all the creatures in there, and they negotiated a peace with him, saying that every day one animal would be sent up for the lion's nutrition. Came upon the rabbit's turn. This rabbit had no intention of being devoured, thought for a bit, showed up late at the lion's den. The lion was angry and hungry. He said, 'What happened to you?' And he said, 'Well, you know, I was actually going to come with four other friends. There were five of us to give you a real feast. On the way here we met another lion who ate up the other four. Sent me here to tell you that he was the real ruler of the jungle.' And now of course the lion got really upset. He said, 'Take me to this upstart.' The rabbit took him to a well, told him to look inside, and said, 'That's your competitor.' The lion roared and jumped into the well and of course was done for. So when you look at this story about the rabbit, there are a number of interesting lessons that come out. First of all, the rabbit intended to survive. It had no intention of being devoured. And it knew that its enemy was several times its size, but it leveraged that size, it leveraged that aggression against its opponent. It also saw things that we usually see but used that information very creatively, and it used the power of its brain, not the power of its brawn, to get ahead. To me, the rabbit in a sense is the story of India.

So to summarize the good news: innovation is alive. Good news, Mr. Singh, that is alive, and social media has shown us that it's in fact thriving. It needs to be unearthed, it needs to be found. Now the fact is that we all criticize social media for how it intrudes in our lives, but as I gave you those examples, it's something that has been in fact provoked by social media. People want recognition, and I say that all of us should turn out to be people who are constantly on the lookout for these kinds of inventions. Cost competence is India's strength, not just low cost, not just low-cost labor. It's also about our intelligence combined with a low-cost approach, which is our strength. And I think we need to leverage Indian-ness. We need to leverage this capability we have to create new innovations at an incredibly frugal cost, which really is our strength. We need to apply that. But there's a big but which I need to share.

And the fact is this is the index of global innovation, the most recent one, and as we can see, even though China has broken into the top 20, we still are fairly low down on the list. So if I'm making this strong case that we have a strong innovation streak in us, then why are we not moving higher on this list? And my view is that jugaad is just not enough.

Now that sounds odd after I've given you so many examples of jugaad in those photographs that I showed you. I constantly retweet these elements of jugaad, so I am a believer in that spirit. But it just isn't enough. There is a trap in the jugaad phenomenon that it makes us complacent. It makes us think that what we are doing is fine. But jugaad is about making do, it's about compromise, it's about constrained resources. So it's a wonderful skill that we've exercised over time to do more with less, but it does sometimes involve compromises with quality, and it does not lead us to the kind of quantum innovation that India needs to really solve its large-scale problems. So we need to move away from that model.

And what I'd like to propose is, and Arnob is here, when I first did this if you remember we were in a Google Hangout where I talked about this, and I said we need to move from jugaad to jhakas. Now I don't know how many of you know the word 'jhakas.' It's a Mumbai phrase. Thank you, I see some Mumbaikars here. It's a phrase that's come from Marathi but it's become street lingo in Mumbai, and if you watch any Bollywood film, I'm sure that you'll Mumbai street lingo has used 'jhakas.' It really means awesome, unbelievable. That's what 'jhakas' means. So we need to move to that kind of model, if you will. If you like the video, do like, comment, share, and subscribe.