Leadership is exhibited in everyday life by very ordinary people who show extraordinary foresight.My father, known as KV Iyer, or, Venkiti sir, born in a small village at the southern tip of India, was a born leader. Lateral thinking is very important to think big. My father sowed the seeds of a leader’s vision in my thinking. He represents to me a thought leader. “What you earn is not as important as what you do with what you earn.” This was his paradigm. He was a teacher, raring to become an entrepreneur. At a time when no one in his village knew what a typewriter was, my father, a simple man with several commitments and financial limitations, saw it in Chennai (then Madras), where he had gone for a Teacher's Training program.He saw it being used in offices, and that the people who knew how to use it got jobs as secretaries in government offices. He saw many typewriting institutes. He enrolled in one. Every evening, after the Teachers' Training, he would rattle off at the key board until wee hours of the morning. In two months he achieved a speed of sixty words per minute. Lesson One: Identify and learn a key competency that will take you where you need to go.
He invested all he had and bought three typewriters. He came home to his small home town Suchindrum where no one had seen such a 'contraption'. His grandmother raised hell when she thought he had gone crazy to buy this dark unwieldy thing at such phenomenal price when he had three daughters to marry off ( two of us were born later),and a son to educate! He had a hard time convincing her that this would revolutionise the way people worked and would herald a new era in his life, and the lives of other villagers. He set up an institute called Forward de Commerce.He went door-to-door demonstrating to people how this skill would fetch jobs. He had the statistics at the tips of his fingers and the conviction at the core of his being. He went to prospective students’ homes and projected the return on investments. Lesson Two: You must measure what you expect to accomplish. Without measurement, you tend to operate in the dark.
He visualized branches all over the state. He had a mission he was passionate about - to make this skill accessible to girls. His mission was to make girls economically self-reliant.He estimated how much of the income would be reinvested in infrastructure and expansion, and how much on execution and operation. Lesson Three: Strategic planning involves developing a mission statement that captures why the organization exists, and a vision as to how the organization will thrive in the future.
He constantly upgraded services to tide over competition. He knew he will not be the only service provider for long. He kept in touch with typewriting institute proprietors in cities and learned of latest service offerings and challenges.He never took advantage of the fact that he was the pioneer in that area and had established an unbeatable reputation.He competed with himself all the time. He appointed his own students as managers at this institute. He would buy them bicycle, uniform, festival dresses and sweets. He constantly offered new and unheard of events which in today's terminology would be called Employee Engagement Measures.He set up branches in Nagercoil, Thakkaly, Kulachal, Kuzhiththurai, and Thiruvanathapuram. He made many of his own students local managers and empowered them. For students there were always additional offerings. He invited organizations to paste in his institutes advertisements announcing vacancies. There was a good discount on fees for girls. He offered free training on how to face an interview. He organized campus interviews. He announced prizes for best performers in examinations. He organized get-to-gethers of alumni and present students to establish a net work, and inspire confidence.Every year there were picnics and get-to-gether and these were arranged with gusto and pride.Lesson Four: Every organization must learn to adjust with a continuous flow of new intelligence.
Soon he had boys and girls thronging to his institute. He set up a separate institute for girls, so that conservative families would also encourage women's education. He believed that our focus should be on increasing value, not necessarily earnings. For example, he said, if we invest in education of girls, and many of them ended up as home makers, traditional accounting would consider it as expense. But, this is an investment for the qualitative improvement of our next generation. Ultimately he established eight institutions. More than forty thousand students, atleast fifteen thousand of them girls, studied in these institutions. Lesson Five: Accounting performance and economic performance are dramatically different.
Well known as Venkiti sir, this K. Venkitasubramonia Iyer, had vision, farsightedness and tenacity that we cannot pick up from any school of management. He was known for his strict disciplined approach, powerful voice ( he introduced shorthand too,and listening to his dictation was the greatest joy of my life)and compassionate treatment. These students popped up at the least expected places - once a student-turned railway ticket examiner heard him tell a fellow passenger in a Bombay-bound train that he was travelling on an emergency and was waiting for the Ticket Examiner to see if he could get a berth allotted; after quietly making arrangements for a berth for his teacher, the former student stood in front of him and surprised him; once during a sight-seeing tour, at the India- Pakistan border, at midnight in total darkness, he ventured out of the railway compartment with his friend, and the soldier who came to warn them recognized his voice and treated the entire train of tourists with biscuits and hot tea! Students who reached very high positions talked to him with the same respect and affection they displayed as his students when they were teen agers. When he passed away the hundreds of letters of condolences that poured in for months spoke of his leadership, and brought out many facets of his personality that the writers had experienced. This was leadership nurtured by nature!
