Leadership Summit Topics

How Successful Leaders think

Shouvick Mukherjee, VP & CEO Yahoo! India,
Amit Chatterjee, VP & Country Manager, CA India
Dr. P Anandan, Managing Director, Microsoft Research India

Innovation Opportunities from India- Leading an Innovation Driven Organization

Sanjay Nayak, CEO & Managing Director, Tejas Networks

Great Leaders take Risk

Sridhar Jayanthi, Senior VP, Engineering & Managing Director, McAfee India
Rakesh Singh, VP, Products and Managing Director, Citrix R&D India

Leadership takes over where logic ends

Speaker: Dr. Vivek Mansingh, Country Head, Dell India R&D Center

Managing the Most Talented

Vijay Anand, VP India Development Center, Intuit
Vikram Shah, President and Directot, NetApp India

Innovation: The Key to Technology Leadership

Dr. P Anandan, Managing Director, Microsoft Research India

Identify Great Leaders Early

E.Balaji, Director and President, Ma Foi Randstad

Closing Note
Janakiraman S, President & Group CEO-Product Engineering Services, Mindtree

Author: Anuj Magazine Page 1

 How Successful Leaders think
Speakers:
Shouvick Mukherjee, VP & CEO Yahoo! India
Amit Chatterjee, VP & Country Manager, CA India
Dr. P Anandan, Managing Director, Microsoft Research India

My assessment notes:
 It was more of a Panel talk with 3 speakers speaking one-by-one and the Yahoo CEO acting as a moderator.
 It was a good session overall with no use of PPT and with lot of personal anecdotes by the panel.
Key Takeaways:
 Qualities of a Leader (by Amit Chatterjee):
o Sincerity of purpose.
o Walking the Talk.
o Leading from the front
o Value system that a leader creates for his team is very important.
o Ability of Objective listening.
o Exercise a lot of Emotional control over self.
o Leader is someone who never gives up.
o Leader has an ability to excite and bring in a lot of energy.
o One who works very hard and plays very hard.
o Leader has to be fair to all.
o Leader is charismatic- Has an appeal to the team
o Good leader always over-communicate.
o Good leader believes in building the second line of leadership.
o Good leaders look to hire people better than self.
o Good leader is responsive to the team.

 Importance of failure (by Dr. P Anandan):

o If you have not failed, then you are not a leader.
o Don’t make the same mistake again.

 Most important things constituting a leader (by Shouvick Mukherjee):

o One of the key things for a leader is to build the consensus.
o Good leaders create vision by inclusion- including all the people involved.
o A leader’s vision cannot be different from the needs of people and the organization.
o Some keys to achieving the vision
 Pegging the goal.
 Have belief in the team.
 Course correction during plan execution.
 Plan the work and work the plan

Author: Anuj Magazine Page 2

 Innovation Opportunities from India- Leading an Innovation Driven Organization
Speaker:

Sanjay Nayak, CEO & Managing Director, Tejas Networks

My assessment notes:

 Tejas Networks is a telecommuncations company fully originated from India.

 Sanjay Nayak, the CEO presented with passion about some key points in leading Innovation driven organization.
 Overall a good session that attracted a lot of questions from the audience.

Key Takeaways:

o Building the team:

 Hiring the right team
 In alignment with the overall vision of the organization .
 People with Fire in the belly- high energy, positive, can-do attitude.
 Best way to develop people is to challenge them.
 Making hard decisions
 When people don’t scale up.
 Dealing with wrong hiring choices quickly.
 When people lose “Fire in the belly”.

o Leadership Challenges: What worked

 Tackling Adversity
 Every crisis is an opportunity to innovate and improve.
 Customer orientation
 Are you solving the “real problem” ?
 Customer comes first.
 Reinforce your vision- The power of positive thinking.
 There can be 99 reasons why something could not be done. It takes positive thinking to find that
1 elusive reason on why that very thing should be done.
 Hire someone who is smarter than you.
 Leader need to be stubborn- Should never give up.
 There is always an easy way out in anything you do. And that easy way can be unethical. That is
where the value system of the organization comes into picture.

 Attitude towards tough problems- This is a tough problem, may be I need to be working better
than I have before. But lets do it.

Author: Anuj Magazine Page 3

 Great Leaders take Risk
Speakers:

Sridhar Jayanthi, Senior VP, Engineering & Managing Director, McAfee India

Rakesh Singh, VP, products and Managing Director, Citrix R&D India

My assessment notes:

 This was again a panel discussion and quite enlightening of all.

 This session was again not PPT driven and involved sharing of real life experiences around risk taking. This was
moderated by Sridhar Jayanthi.

Key Takeaways:

 Both panelists seem to agree that one of the biggest risk that a professional can take is deciding to start a Start-
up operation.
 In Start-ups, the major risks are around constraints and having to manage your new born business around those
inevitable constraints.
 In a Leadership team, Risk is a way of life.
 There was a reference to the book- “Design of Business” in one of the discussions.
 One striking quote- “If you don’t take risk, you are stagnant. And if you are stagnant, you are not going linear but
falling back literally.”
 Take risk to grow people and help them take your place.
o One such risk story was narrated by Sridhar Jayanthi. In one of his previous organizations, they I think
hired a person (who was a construction worker) to take care of cleaning/housekeeping stuff. This guy
had not even completed his schooling but was quite passionate. One of the tasks that he was involved in
doing was collect the printouts near the printer and ensuring that the place was clean. One of the things,
he observed was that during every Friday, there were many printouts (around 100s) that were fired and
the printer invariably used to give problems in printing the jobs on Fridays. This guy was a keen observer
and he could figure out the problem and not only fixed it but suggested a very productive way of doing
the routine job that not anyone else could think of. Foreseeing his talent, One of the bosses there
spotted him and took a risk of training this guy on programming languages and computing stuff. This
person picked up the stuff quite steadily and started contributing a role of Engineer very soon. Within
few years, he scaled himself as a Manager of Development and by the time Sridhar left the organization,
he had scaled up as a Director of Development.
o An Amazing story of a construction worker who turned out to be an immense success in technology
areas. This happened primarily because some took a risk with him and considered him suitable for a
technical role.
Author: Anuj Magazine Page 4
 Building Risk culture requires-
o Risk Enablers
o People who are grounded having Inner peace.
 Rakesh Singh narrated a story of founder of Runners High, Dr. Rajat Chauhan, who showed
tremendous guts to leave the job (after a successful higher education in US) to do something he
found more meaningful for life i.e. become a running coach. It takes great deal of peace with
inner self to do something you really want to do especially when going against the tide.
o Sense of humors
 Rakesh Singh again illustrated an example of a Pakistan cricket player- Shahid Afridi. During the
recent Test cricket series with Australia, he was faced with barrage of lightning fast bouncer
deliveries in an over from Mitchell Johnson. One after the other, he was faced with balls that
just whizz past his head, ears, nose etc. and he was all clueless about what was happening. After
few such balls, in an unusual gesture, he took off his helmet and just laughed out loudly with
mouth wide open (without worrying about millions who were seeing him) to calm his nerves.
The lesser mortals who have succumbed to pressure but here was a rather unorthodox action to
deal with adversities. What better way than to just laugh off the problems and face what coming
next.

 Create a risk environment in the organization-

o What you rewards and how you handle failure determines the risk taking appetite of the organization.
o There was a talk of organization which used to reward the Best failure. How many organizations do
that ?

 How can Managers become risk takers ?

o First and foremost- One got to be a risk taker.
o A lot of times success and failures in career is because of what opportunity one picks up. Great leaders
grab the opportunity when they find it.
o Get buy-in from the people. What people say about you and way they perceive you is important.
o Be genuine and be visible-
 People should be high skilled communicators.
 Don’t be arrogant or boastful but be visible and market yourself and your achievement in a right
manner.
 Quiet achievers are very hard to find in an organization.

Author: Anuj Magazine Page 5

 Leadership takes over where logic ends
Speaker: Dr. Vivek Mansingh, Country Head, Dell India R&D Center

My assessment notes:
 It was a great session from a speaker with great oratory skills.
 This session was again not PPT driven and more an extempore kind of a session.
 This session had the maximum audience involvement during the session (and post session Q&A also).

Key Takeaways:

 Leadership is about defying logic.

 Leaders are made not born. The research says only 10% of them are born.
 What do leaders possess ?
o Leaders create a vision that is far-fetched:
 World steps aside to a person who knows where he is going.
 Goals and vision are different things.
 Goals are measurable and logically possible.
 Vision is usually insane at first look. Usually very difficult or near impossible to achieve.
 You should have a goal in the direction of vision
o Have written goals:
 Any road is good enough if you don’t know where you are going.
 Large part of our brain do not work on logic.
o Passion:
 Great leader possess passion.
 Passion is absolute commitment to something you want to achieve.
 Every great leader had great passion.
o Earn Trust:
 You choose to be lead by someone because of trust in them.
 Building Strategy and trust are a potent quality of a leader. If I have to be without one, I would
leave out Strategy.
 The values you stand for help build trust.
 Predictable behavior promotes trust.
o Leaders communicate:
 He made a mention to Obama being a supreme Speaker with reference to his speech to African
leaders in Egypt.
o Leaders ultimately are admired for getting results:
 Leader need tremendous execution skills to get results.
 They challenge the status quo more often.
 Leaders execute well.
 It is very important for the leaders to lead self before leading others.

Author: Anuj Magazine Page 6

 Managing the Most Talented
Speaker:
Vijay Anand, VP India Development Center, Intuit
Vikram Shah, President and Directot, NetApp India

My assessment notes:
 This was a panel discussion. The format started with a PPT introduction followed by Open discussion by the
Panelists.
 Somme good views shared across the art of people management.

Key Takeaways:

 Defining top talent ? Top talent is someone-

o Who is of course, competent.
o Have strong passion for work.
o They are driven internally. Have innate sense of being driven.
o Top talent owns the outcome.
 You don’t need to tell them what to do.
 Owning the outcome is a single thing that differentiates the people.
o Top talent loves big goals.
 Goes beyond the obvious to achieve something big.
 Managing key talent-
o Pay close attention to talent in your team. Identify their strengths.
o Be generous. Call the talent to other’s attention.
o Keep them committed to the goals of the organization and ensure that they feel those goals are worth
achieving.
o Keep them challenged and motivated.
o Identify the talents in them and help develop them.
o Give them more flexibility.
o Trust them. Demonstrate trust, don’t just say it.
o Expect and help your talented people to outgrow. The million dollar question is- Can you work for your
subordinate in future ?
o Get a respected manager to lead them.
o Manage peer and senior level politics for them. (These guys are always allergic to politics).
o Talented people express themselves differently. You need to talk their languages.
 How much time you get to spend with people ?
o Managers have to work harder and more continuously.
o Managing them sometimes is high maintenance.
o Managers need to show some leeway, some flexibility, space/room for the top talent to grow.

Author: Anuj Magazine Page 7

 Innovation: The Key to Technology Leadership
Speaker: Dr. P Anandan, Managing Director, Microsoft Research India

My assessment notes:

 I didn’t quite like this session as rather than being a generic topic on Innovation, this keynote was more of a PR
for Microsoft.
 It was presented by means of PPT with many slides with cramped data.

Key Takeaways:

 Microsoft Research mission Statement:

o Expand the state of art in each of the areas which we do.
o Rapidly transfer innovative technologies into Microsoft products.
o Ensure that Microsoft products have a future
 One way to ensure success in Research is through Peer reviewed Publications.

Identify Great Leaders Early

Speaker:
E.Balaji, Director and President, Ma Foi Randstad

My assessment notes:
 This was a PPT based session, which was quite monotonous.

Key Takeaways:

 Honestly, I didn’t find anything key thing (that was not covered in other sessions) to be listed here.

Author: Anuj Magazine Page 8

 Closing Note
Speaker:
Janakiraman S, President & Group CEO-Product Engineering Services, Mindtree

Key Takeaways:

 A Leader is true to self and avoid self-deception.

 There was a mention of the book- “Judo Strategy” in the talk.
 Leaders prepare team for worse when things are good.
 Leaders look for opportunity when things are worse.
 Leaders need to demand results but also show empathy and look to achieve a bigger cause.

Author: Anuj Magazine Page 9