[CTQ Smartcast] Enabling change in organisations and becoming great at lifelong learning, with Dr Ranjan Banerjee

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee is the Dean and Professor-Marketing at BITSoM (BITS School of Management). Dr. Banerjee has moved seamlessly between corporate and academic careers: he's been an entrepreneur-consultant, helping top firms with innovation change management before becoming the Dean at SPJIMR, one of India's top business schools. He is the co-author of "The Made In India Manager", which explores the rise of Indian-origin leaders on the global landscape.

In this Smartcast conversation with CTQ co-founder J Ramanand, we explore what it takes to be a good learner at any age, lessons learnt from leading a management school, the way managers need to prepare for the future, and the lessons gained from from watching great teachers teach.

 

Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.

 
 
 

Read the shownotes below, or skip to the transcript.

Some of the things we spoke about

  • The story behind his PhD in marketing

  • How one can be a good learner at any age

  • Being prepared for future transitions

  • What being a Dean has taught him about management and leadership

  • The vision behind BITSOM

  • Lessons from delivering management education online

  • What a manager of the future will look like

  • What distinguishes a great teacher from the rest

AND

  • Dr Ranjan’s personal practices & systems to keep learning

PLUS

  • Frameworks and books that have strongly influenced him

Links to Books, Articles, Ideas mentioned in the Smartcast

If you enjoyed this Smartcast, you will also like How Should Consultants and Business Analysts Think About Future Relevance.

Read the transcript of this episode

[CTQ Smartcast] Enabling Change in Organisations and Becoming Great at Lifelong Learning, With Dr. Ranjan Banerjee

[00:00:00]

Ramanand: Today's guest is Dr. Ranjan Banerjee. He is the Dean and Professor of Marketing at the BITS School of Management. Dr. Banerjee has moved seamlessly between corporate and academic careers. He was once an entrepreneur consultant, helping top firms with innovation, change management, before becoming the Dean at SPJIMR, one of India's leading business schools. He's now moved to a new role. He is the co-author of The Made-in-India Manager, which explores the role or the rise of Indian-origin leaders across the world. In this conversation, we will speak to Ranjan about change, leadership, how he learns, and organizations and how they can foster culture.

Ramanand: Hi, Ranjan, welcome to the Smartcast.

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: Hi, Ramanand. It's good to see you again, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Ramanand: Thanks, Ranjan. You recently started a new stint as the Dean of a brand new institution, but I actually want to roll the clock a little back 15 years ago, to something that has always caught my attention. You were running a company, you were into consulting, and then you decided to up and leave for a Ph.D. in marketing in the US. Tell me a little bit about how that happened. What is the story behind it? What was the intention behind it?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: The intention behind it was that a lot of these things that have happened have come as accidents. If I really look at it, I left Unilever to set up a training and consulting company. In 10 years, that became quite successful. My company got known, and I got known for doing a certain set of things very well. [00:02:00] I remember I was doing this workshop, and I was doing the third edition of this workshop with an MNC. I remember getting a standing ovation. Sitting down at the end of that standing ovation, I felt hollow, because I said the real work for the standing ovation I did three years back. What happens is that initially, everything is new, and then you get known for certain things. You get asked to do more of those certain things. Then the question you have to ask yourself is did you do this for the money? Did you do this for enjoyment and learning? For me, money is always a happy side effect. It's the enjoyment, learning, and contribution.

Then I sat down and said, what do I want to do? I think one thing that is a common theme is I want to be the best teacher I can possibly be. That goal has been there since, I guess the goal first crystallized around 2000 to 2005. Then the question is, when you try to be the best teacher you can be, there are two elements. One is delivery, the other is content. I felt I was quite okay at that time on delivery. The question is, how do you acquire content? Very convoluted piece of reasoning.

I went to IIM Calcutta, I met some of my professors and came to two conclusions. One is I should do a Ph.D. because that will allow me to develop depth and breadth and different thinking. Then I tried in India, and then I somehow felt that the kind of people who were advising in India, were not people I know. This is not a negative thing. I just didn't find somebody I really looked up to. I started looking at the US.

There's a long story about getting a Ph.D. because getting a good scholarship to a top school is a little bit difficult if you're applying at 39. It took me some time to figure that out and to get around that. There is kind of a story in that. I think your original question was ‘why?’ [00:04:00] It is because I wanted to be the best teacher I can be. The logic was to invest. What did I do? What were the risks? My wife and I sat down. I think it really helps in these things to have a supportive partner as well as a friend as a partner. What are the pros and cons? What would we have to do? We'd have to do a Ph.D., and I would have to hand over my company to somebody else to run. What's the worst-case scenario? The worst-case scenario is I flunk out of the Ph.D. in one year, and my company collapses. That's your worst-case scenario. We sat down and said, what will happen if that happens. We said I will come back to India, I built the company once I can build it again. the moment you can accept your worst-case scenario, then you say to hell with it, and you put everything into your best-case scenario. That is the way I've always made these choices. I've had a plan A and plan B. I had a plan B, I can live with and the moment I can live with my plan B then I forget about it plan B, and I just put everything into my plan A. That's the formula. The idea is that, beyond a point, great teaching is about enhancing the quality of your thought and your content. It turned out, I think, to be the best decision I ever made in my life.

Ramanand: Interesting. How did you approach learning as a doctoral student? Especially, with a lot of corporate work behind you? How is it different from being an undergraduate or postgraduate? Tell me about that.

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: I think there are two pieces to this. As an undergraduate, you have your own set of insecurities. I don't think it is easy when you walk into, for instance, an IIT, and you recognize that there are people who are significantly better than you. It's not easy to admit that there are people who are better than you. It's also not easy to put up your hand and say, [00:06:00] I don't understand. Then that results in all sorts of things. One is that you escape, second is that you have many other activities that you can be good at. There is this phase, and there is this lack of acknowledgment of weaknesses. The inability to say, I don't know, and I don't understand, at an early age is a great inhibitor to learning. Now, when I went into the Ph.D. program, it was a mathematical Ph.D. program. The last time I had done high-level maths was at the age of 23.  I was good at it, but it was a 15-16-year gap. I remember going into my first class and somebody is saying the inverse of the Hessian is positive semi-definite. I vaguely knew what inverse was, I mean, I knew what a matrix inverse was. 

I didn't know what Hessian was. For me, Hessian was a rope, and definite was an English word. What this actually meant was that the matrix of second derivatives is always positive. For one month, I was the old guy in the room. The rest of the class was 23 to 29, and I was 39 going in. I put up my hand at the end, and I said, I don't understand. After I said that, I would go back to the original paper and struggle. By the end of one month, I had more than caught up with the class. My point is that the big difference is that at that age, you don't care what people think of you, you've given up too much. You're focused on learning. I think that if any student can have that mindset, that I need to get the best out of my own capacity to learn and let the grades and rewards and anything else be a happy side effect, then you quickly realize that not many people do that. Then the kind of self-belief that you build is a lot deeper.

Ramanand: By now, do you have a general theory of what it takes to be a good learner at any age?

Dr. Ranjan Bannerjee: I think, ‘I don't know’ [00:08:00] and ‘I don't understand’ is a very good start. Whenever you don't know, you have to acknowledge to yourself your own weaknesses or gaps. Accept those gaps. Once you've accepted those gaps, dive in and do what it takes. The second is, I think, you need to be self-aware. If I were to really simplify this, just really discover your six-year-old. The six-year-old is willing to experiment, the six-year-old is trying to do things and the six-year-old doesn't hesitate to ask questions. Asking questions, I think is one.

There is also something I call the six-year-old test, which is that if you cannot explain something that you claim to have understood to a six-year-old, then the problem probably is that you haven't understood it. You haven't understood it fundamentally enough. Another piece there, if you want to really understand anything, teach it to somebody else. Teaching is a very good way of learning. Many times when I wanted to learn a subject, I've committed to teaching it. I've typically committed to teaching it with three months or four months’ notice. Then I've gone on to build expertise in that subject.

The third piece, and I tried everything, do not use a complex word when there is a simpler word. Do not use jargon just because it is in your repertoire. Simplicity and clarity of thought and communication is a personal value. I think it is a very critical personal value.

Ramanand: The other major shift that you did, after coming back successfully with a doctorate in hand, was you decided to get into academia. You're certainly a Dean at one of the top colleges in India, not just one of the top colleges, but one which has an ethos of its own. It's not just like walking into any job. Tell me a little bit about that transition. [00:10:00] Did you have to rejig yourself in terms of management, expertise for being a Dean? Or is it like being a CXO of a company? Or did that corporate experience kind of just transfer over?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: I don't think it's as simple as the corporate experience transferring over. Ramanand, there are two questions, right? One is how did the transition happen? The second is how did you handle the transition? When we came back from the US, the original plan was to be a professor for a couple of years and then come back. We came back for family reasons, my mother wasn't well a couple of times, and we just wanted to be home. When we came back, I had settled on this life that said, I will teach in multiple institutes, and run my consulting company. That was a happy life. Essentially, what I wanted to do is always make student teaching an executive teaching and stay in touch with the industry. Whether I did that, as an academic consultant on the side, or the consultant doing academics on the side to me was a matter of designation, and it's not anything else. 

When we came back, I had said that look, I'm happy with this life, but if I get a chance to build an institution, then that's interesting. The reason I thought it was interesting was that I had both sides. I knew the CEO, and I could talk to the CEO. I knew the academic and I could talk to the academic. I thought that qualified me uniquely. There are two ways of looking at this. Somebody, a traditional academic might look at my profile, and say here is a guy who has no clue of what he wants to do in life. He did a Ph.D., went back to corporate, continuing to teach on the side. The corporate would say he's a consultant, but he went and did a Ph.D. when his company was at its peak. From my point of view, it was all very logical, but it took an unconventional organization to see the potential of that profile.

How did it happen? I went for my 25th Alumni Meeting at IIM Calcutta, and I had no intention of looking for a job. There was a batchmate, who came and said, there's this [00:12:00] institute called S.P. Jain, they are looking for a Dean, would you be interested? This was a dream or aspiration that I had when I had come back in 2010 when I came back to India from the Ph.D. It didn't happen in 2011, it didn't happen in 2012. There was supposed to be an IIM Pune, which I thought I would apply for, but that became IIM Nagpur, so I gave up on that. I had given up on it. I had given up on that particular aspiration. Then it fell into my lap in 2014. Honestly, at that point, we said, who will leave Pune and go to Bombay. Then I said there was Deepak Parekh doing the interview, and there was Srikant Datar doing the interview, so I went and checked it out. When I went to SPJIMR, there was something about the place. It was down to earth, it was value-oriented, all the people had pride. This was an institute that had taken the best of the West, but it had distinctly Indian elements. That was what attracted me.

The second element was, why did I think I could do the job? I had never done academic administration. I understood teaching well, I understood research well, and I understood change management. I believe that these three were enough, provided you were reasonably good with people. Perhaps that was naive in hindsight. There were other things that I had to learn. I think the change management aspect is because SPJIMR had a leader for 28 years and a void for one year. That change management aspect was crucial. I think it is generally accepted, Ramanand, that my stint at SPJIMR has worked pretty well. I mean, I have some of my best friends there. The institute finished 36th in Financial Times tied with IIM Bangalore. The institute has done well. Of course, the credit goes to the team there. It was a good stint.

Ramanand: Now let's come to your current role. [00:14:00] You made another transition very recently. Tell us a little bit about the BITS School of Management, it's a fledgling institution that is coming to your care. Tell us about it. What is the vision behind it? What is the institution that you're trying to build?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: You know, it's a fledgling only in one sense, right? It's not a fledgling in another sense. If you look at it, BITS Pilani has 55,000 strong alumni, it is an institute of national eminence. It is basically, BITS Pilani is saying we want to build a world-class Business School out of Mumbai, India. What attracts me is, I saw ISB coming up 20 years back. I think what ISB has achieved in some senses, is quite remarkable in 20 years, if you look at the path over 20 years. One thing that I had said to a friend in 2017 when that friend had asked me, what will you do after SPJIMR. I had said, if somebody gives me the chance to build a world-class Business school in India from scratch, then that would excite me.

I got on it in 2020, which said that you're trying to build a world-class Business school from scratch. The only difference is Mr. Birla is the chancellor. We have the backing of BITS Pilani, there's already an alumni base, we're already Institute of national eminence. We had the chance to do this from scratch because, look at it this way, a country of India's population, Masters in Management in Financial Times ranking, there are five Indian Institutes in the ranking, but there should be 10. Does Mumbai have enough world-class business schools? Forget it, let's do something more basic. There are at least 5,000 to 10,000 world class graduates going into the MBA pool every year. How many of them get a world-class education? There is a market gap? Very clear, number one.

Number two, and this is a larger piece. If you look at our MBA curriculums, we created them originally [00:16:00] for the manufacturing organization of yesterday, with functions called marketing, finance, operations, information management. Today, technology is no longer a business function. It is embedded in everything we do. Today, if you look at our current situation, we had a health crisis. That health crisis has become a social crisis. It has become a financial crisis. The ecosystems are linked.

Third, every business person or every executive is today managing in a matrix. You have to often work with. There is so much that has changed about the world of management, that in any strong school, your challenges, that your curriculum, your building curriculum is like changing wheels on a running train. The advantage of a new Institute is, you can craft this curriculum from scratch.

The balance between hard and soft skills, design thinking as a compulsory course, teaching students history, teaching students about perspectives from the liberal arts, analytics not as just as a specialization in the second year, but embedded in… What does the future-ready MBA of tomorrow look like? I think that is one thing that is being clearly kind of built-in this new institute. The second is, it's a new institute, but it's not a new institute. We have hundreds of BITS Pilani alumni who are coming forward to help. They're on our governing council, they're building, that is the asset. The third is Mumbai. Ramanand, I don't know if you know, but we have already got a collaboration with London Business School. For a new school to have its first collaboration with London Business School, I think the London Business School's first significant tie-up in India. They had ISB long ago, but that's not enough. This is currently the most active partnership. I think it's really exciting to build this up. Management institutes in India should not see themselves as competing. [00:18:00] We are expanding the pool of quality institutions in India. That, I think, is an exciting thing to do. There is so much we can do. One of my professors, Dr. Leena Chatterjee, has joined the Institute, and one of the things we are saying is that we are going to start with a compact batch size, two sections. We will have a personal development plan for every student. 

Can you think what the value of that would have been for us when we were going through, if somebody had said, these are your strengths and weaknesses, this is how you should look at your curriculum because we all drift through a lot of our courses and curriculum. right? If you get that clarity, and you get that direction, that focuses on reflection and learning, and a balance between hard skills and soft skills and technology readiness is potentially transformative.

This transformation, I think, becomes much more important because there are people who graduated in my batch and IIM Calcutta, who are still in the job they started with. That will not happen to tomorrow's MBA. The average MBA of tomorrow will have three to four distinct careers in a lifetime. Then learnability and reflection, the ability to learn. the ability to reflect, the ability to pivot, the ability to know yourself, these become far more critical. The softer EQ aspects are as important as the more technical, finance, marketing, operations that we have always taught. We need to continue that but we need to build this aspect as well.

Ramanand: There are quite a few things you just mentioned that I want to dig into. You have preset some of my questions. In fact, let me ask one of them instead of saving it up for later. You co-wrote a book called The Made-in-India Manager. A lot of the themes that you spoke of, the need for creative thinking, design thinking, resilience, learnability, [00:20:00] they all feature in the second half of the book. Essentially, you talk about the manager of today versus the manager of tomorrow. I think the example that you just took of your batchmate probably represents that change. If you want to take it one step ahead and say what will characterize the manager of the day after tomorrow? The manager of tomorrow is in your book, but you're looking further ahead. Fundamentally, what will be different about that manager?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: This is crystal ball gazing. This is also a positive vision, right? I think there are two or three things I can say straight off. One is the ability to lead non-hierarchically. If you look at the difference in the way we were parented, vis a vis the next generations are getting parented, we were still parented in a situation where our parents were authority figures. We had a limited number of choices. I'm not saying that's good or bad, I'm just saying that was the way it was. We have typically brought up the next generation, such that parents become friends at an early age, dissent or disagreement is no longer seen as a problem in the young. When these kids go into the workplace, they are not going to accept their bosses just because of their position. The way you lead has to be much more about a hierarchy of competence. It is much more about collaboration so that the flexible and adaptive manager of tomorrow is one thing.

The second is, I learned about something called the human-technology gap. This is something the Club of Rome had talked about 20 years ago in a report. Essentially what they had said is that technology is moving so fast, that no individual, [00:22:00] I don't care how tech-savvy you are, but no individual can keep pace with technology. What you need to do is figure out which are the technologies you are going to keep pace with, and which are the ones you need help with. The willingness and ability to get mentored by people who are younger than you, because they understand some things that you don't understand as well. This is one clear piece. The second piece I see, and this is a post-COVID thing, is that it has taught us the value of remote working. I think many companies will embrace this possibility beyond COVID, I hope. We all hope that you know, beyond COVID comes sooner rather than later. When they embrace this beyond COVID, what does this imply? 

I think there are two-three things. One of the things that this implies is that more and more people will be able to work from locations other than the metros. The second is work can be more about output, and less about how many hours you physically spend. The thing that this will do is, open up the gender workforce, like anything. I think a woman with discipline, who's managing a household can get as much done in four hours, as many other people can get done in eight. Once you start looking at the output, the gender disparity in the workplace should reduce. I see that as important. If you were to draw the profile of the manager of tomorrow, I would like to move to 50-50 at some point in time. I read somewhere, and this must be an exaggeration that if you bring the earnings, essentially, if you increase the women employment percentage to the male [00:24:00] employment percentage, GDP growth goes to 23% in this country. That's the kind of potential that we're talking about in the gender gap.

Ramanand: I think what you mentioned in the earlier part of this answer goes back to what you said you were doing when you were a student. Which is to put your hand up and say, I don't know this, or I need help with this. The teacher in this case could be younger than you as well, it could be someone in your office. Since we also spoke about things like being able to listen, or to learn, or to develop resilience, which is something that has been spoken about in the COVID or the post-COVID context. Younger people probably are coming through this kind of a different style of parenting. We can see that they are going to be able to walk into that kind of world. What about the manager who's currently grappling with these kinds of changes? How do you start getting practically building capability around empathy, listening, resilience? Are they going to be able to do it in the next couple of years as an individual? Let's say there is a manager listening to you saying, I clearly need to work on some of these aspects, which I didn't need so much earlier. What would you tell them to do? Especially in a world where there's no immediate feedback, or it's all little, it feels like no one sees you, it's all sort of running blind. How would you advise someone to build some of these skills in a practical setting? Especially when they lack authentic or immediate feedback?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: There are many answers, and this is a longer question. I believe that you already have some empathy, and you already have some resilience. Maybe the last one and a half years have built your reservoir in some way. Are you familiar, Ramanand, with the Stockdale paradox? [00:26:00]

Ramanand: Yes.

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: I think the Stockdale paradox holds a very good lesson, and with the risk of being repetitive, I will go through with that. James Stockdale was a commander in Vietnam who got tortured for many years and then survived the torture. Then he talked about Who survives in Vietnam? He talked about three categories. He says, there is the eternal optimist, who says I'm going to be home for Christmas. They keep themselves going till Christmas because they're optimistic, you know, in three months I'm going to be home, and I am resilient. There's a pessimist who says life sucks, and it's terrible, who can wallow in self-pity. Then there's the realistic optimist who says, I don't know how long this is going to last, but I need to prepare for when it does. I need to have a strategy for navigating this phase, as well as something to look forward to for the indefinite day when it gets better. How am I better prepared? What am I going to do differently? I think the big finding of that was that the eternal optimists were the first people to die. When you set a date and say life is going to get better, then your resilience just goes. Creating realistic optimism is the first thing, facing reality.

The second is this thing about not having help. Everybody must have two or three mentors, starting with somebody in your family, who can talk to you. A mentor to me is somebody who cares about you, and is willing to show you a mirror. The ability to seek out mentors consciously is the second.

The third one is, if you are a giver to other people, then you will just find it easier. One of the things that my students have heard me talk about this to them is that I'm a great believer in what I call the 30-minute favor. There are various points in time at which people reach out to you, they just know you somewhat, you taught them five years back or mentored a workshop and they said, look, I'm going through this, and I need this help. Often it's an introduction, often [00:28:00] it's 15 minutes of perspective. It takes 30 minutes of your time, and there is no immediate benefit to you. I think that if you always find that 30 minutes to help, that does a tremendous thing to your empathy, your listening. So, being a giver as a way of life.

The fourth one is a more philosophical thing. I think the problem is, the reason you lose some of these qualities is we all have them in some measure, are we take what I call a destination view of life. “Mereko CEO banna hai 40 tak '' or I want to do this by 45. I think if you take a journey view of life and say, here are these things I want to achieve and I'm going to enjoy the process of getting better at them, I'm going to get results to be a happy side effect. I think most people have problems with two things. One is they can't handle failure, but many people learn to handle failure. Handling successes is far more difficult. In handling success, the human tendency is to give yourself most of the credit and, luck less of the credit. While often it is vice versa and therefore, you overestimate your own contribution to your own success. If you look at MS Dhoni, he is a good example. His equanimity does not shift much between success and failure. I like to say there is no success and failure, there is only feedback. If you are able to have that kind of a journey view, then I think that's the fourth pillar in this space.

Ramanand: That's very actionable, Ranjan. One thing that you taught me personally, though I've never had a class under you, we have just had informal interactions, is that you introduced the concept of the premortem. Once we were meeting and you were talking about something, what you just said. The premortem is when you're anticipating failure and preparing for it, but I also read its counterpart [00:30:00] is the pre-parade, which is preparing for success. Which is what just reminded me of what you just said. Let me also ask a little bit about, since we're on the topic of COVID, and things like that. Now you've experienced over a full year of disruption when it comes to the delivery of management education. What have you learned from the last year that has informed your thinking on how people will learn in the future and how teachers should respond to this?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: I think there are two to three pieces. It is generally true that faculty who were more comfortable with technology took to online faster. There are faculty who are getting as well-received online as they were getting received offline. Let me put this differently, and I will give you two things. Just before I left my past assignment, there were 100 students in the hostel. I said, since I'm leaving, and the institute allowed it as an exception, we got 30 students wearing masks into a room. We were not having online classes, but we got 30 students into a room with a capacity of hundreds. They were all sitting six feet apart. I went in and I said, ask me any questions. It was like an open house learning session. I did three of these. I had taught online for a year. If you talk to any student there, they will tell you that the energy in those offline sessions and the kind of openness that you get is far in excess of what you can get in an online session. Physical classroom, good teacher, trumps everything else. The real benefit of online is it can make the good teacher available at slightly reduced quality to a larger number of students with less disruption. Hence, it is a very good thing. You can look at also many creative online-offline supplements. [00:32:00]

The other thing that we found is that if I were to ask students to rank this and say offline classes with peer learning, that’s at 9.5. Online classes, online peer learning, good teachers, let's say 7.5. Online classes, offline peer learning, close to 8.5 to 9. The biggest gap is not between online and offline. The biggest gap is the loss of offline peer learning. If there is a way that even with social distancing, you can bring in that offline peer learning, the student’s satisfaction goes up a lot. What happens is, they can steel themselves to do four hours or five hours of video classes. When you back that up with another four hours of peer learning, all of which is on Zoom, then the energy to have one-on-one conversation with people beyond those nine hours, is what people find difficult. That's the hierarchy. I think some things will change. Let me give you some simple things.

Our visiting faculty model in business schools has been that you get a visiting faculty, let's say you want somebody for one guest lecture, you plan the guest lecture two weeks in advance. The guy has to travel, it takes one and a half hours coming in, one and a half hours going, five hours of displacement, two weeks advanced scheduling. In the pandemic, I was able to schedule the top speakers in the world to come into a classroom for 15 minutes at two days’ notice. When it comes to short-term visiting faculty coming in for half an hour when our geography is history, you can source your visiting faculty from anywhere in the world at one week's notice. You have to have the network; you have to have the credibility, you have to know what you want to do. That's a disruption. The second is, you have to decide when you're teaching, because students are now used to online, [00:34:00] what part of this requires a lot of high-quality interaction? What part of it is structured content which you can record and give to students? Then the students have the advantage. They can study when they want to on their timeline. This combination of synchronous and asynchronous is again something that we'll have. Will the top schools go back to physical classrooms? Yes, they will. Will there be things that they have learned? Will there be hybrid models in operation? Yes, there will be hybrid models in operation.

Ramanand: Before we go ahead, Ranjan, for those watching this or listening to this, is a very good quizzer. This is not something we planned or listed, but Ranjan, I'm going to. I can't resist asking you one quiz question before we go ahead. Here it is. It's a question connected to you because it's a question about the Birlas. Okay, so here it goes. Are you ready?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: Yeah. I just hope I'm not embarrassing myself on the national stage.

Ramanand: No, I don't think that can happen. We know the Birlas established Birla mandirs all over the country. Each Birla mandir is dedicated to one prominent deity. Can you tell me where is the only Birla mandir in India, which is dedicated to the Goddess Saraswati, the goddess of learning?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: Okay, so this is like your typical quiz question, right? You can work it out. BITS Pilani would be my guess.

Ramanand: That is absolutely correct. It's BITS Pilani, which kind of makes sense, right? That's where you will have something dedicated to Saraswati. This is sort of an unusual temple. On this topic, I happened to visit BITS Pilani, once to do a quiz, long back. I was just walking through the campus, I stumbled across this Birla mandir there. I just happened to go inside, and that's when I realized that this is fairly unusual. This is not your typical [00:36:00] Birla mandir or a temple. That's why it went into the notes.

In this next segment, I'd like to come a little more to the corporate side of things. A common theme for your career so far clearly has been leading change, advising people around change, managing change. Any go-to frameworks, books, the kinds of concepts that have strongly influenced the way you approach any kind of change assignment? What are your go-to mental models like?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: I will give you material that is useful, but I don't have a single go-to mental model. Material that is useful is Quarter’s Seven Stages is good. The only difference is that Quarter describes the sequence, I don't think it's a sequence. I think a lot of it happens in parallel, and you must be prepared to jump steps. Books like Switch, books like the Power of Habit, even now you have the James Clear book, Atomic Habits. They are good at the behavioral aspects of change.

I think three or four things that I would say on change management, over and above structured frameworks. I think, in organizations when you do change management, carrying people along is very important, and demonstration is very important. If your top people are not demonstrating the values that you want or the behaviors that you want, change will not stick. The second thing is, my philosophy whenever I go into an institution, I assume and I'm not talking about a BITSOM, which is a startup, it's really something that you're building. If you go into an established corporate organization or an academic organization, that institution has been working before you came into it. One of the simple things to do is to not be in a hurry to make a change. I am [00:38:00] always willing to invest one to two months to just talk to people, and listen. If you talk to people and listen, they will tell you 20 things to do, some of which are easy to do, some of which are complex to do. Starting with the easy win with high impact, I think is a very big thing. When people come on board with momentum for change, then they start to believe. Let me give you some examples from my last assignment, which is SPJIMR, or I can give you a corporate example also, which is a very good one. I'll give you two simple ones.

One of the things I did was I asked people to tell me what's wrong. I’ll give you just two very simple ones that came. One was that when we go into a classroom, we don't know which is the light switch, and which is the fan switch. We have to switch on everything. This was a trivial thing that required getting somebody to put L&F below each switch with a marker. It seems like a small change, but the next day when people know which switch it is, and it's a problem they've had for four years, there's credibility. Or the software on our laptops has not been upgraded for the last two years. Or the faculty needs a place to meet, we don't have a lounge. I mean, I'm just giving you examples. You pick some of these and say these are projects and I'm going to get it done in two months and you figure out how to bring people along. 

Suddenly you got momentum and you also created something else. People know that the small issue is listened to. Then you have more people coming up and then slowly, you want to move it away from being driven by you, to empowering the next set of people and creating change. It's a cascade that you do. At some point in time, you want [00:40:00] to create a common purpose and vision, but I would never go into an organization and create the common purpose and vision as the first thing. I would first listen and then I would create some momentum with small changes, so that when you create the common purpose, at least 30% are on your side and they believe. There is this whole psychological transformation. The other is, I just believe one is buying. The second is never to talk down to any human being. If you are able to treat everybody with respect, and this is not small at all, this is huge, that you do not reflect your position in the way you talk to people. I think this is my combination. There is a lot in terms of, you have to be very smart about emotion, some changes must be visible, it must be demonstrated, but if you are claiming a certain ethos, you must yourself walk that ethos. You want your people to listen, but are you listening? You want your people to be tolerant of dissent but are you tolerant of dissent? A lot of those things.

Ramanand: Some of the things that you mentioned now we also spoke about books like Switch and Atomic Habits earlier. A lot of this research has gone behind how you influence people, the role of behavioral sciences, all that is kind of making its way into mainstream thinking. You've been talking about promoting design thinking, you're making it a core part of your curriculum here. We spoke about behavioral psychology and things like that. Are these the kinds of areas for leaders to learn from and grow, and that gives them greater leverage in the coming weeks? Why do you think this has not already happened?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: I think some of [00:42:00] these subjects, including behavioral economics, they've not really fully made their way from the academic mainstream to the practitioner mainstream. A lot of the research is very fancy and very clever, but it is all set out as paribus, the laboratory conditions are limited. You need to create small experiments for these to become more popular. I have done some of this with the corporate world and it helps. The challenge, I think, isn't this. Over-reliance on behavioral psychology to get things done or behavioral economics is a bad thing. It is a phenomenon that works very well at the fringes. It works very well for 2% input, 2% improvement; it does not substitute good strategy. No amount of use of behavioral economics can substitute for authenticity in day-to-day dealing, can substitute for simplicity and communication, can substitute for caring genuinely about your people. The fundamentals don't go away, the fundamentals can be enabled. Design thinking, I think, is a much larger piece, because design thinking is really giving you both a toolkit and a mindset to solve ambiguous interconnected problems. 

Ambiguous interconnected problems are the order of the day, the number of ambiguous interconnected problems is going to grow. I think design thinking is very important. The problem with design thinking is that design thinking has become very popular. In the world, whenever anything becomes very popular, it gets reduced to being faddish. We are very comfortable with tools and techniques, we are brought up with the structure. We know 12 different ways of ideating, and five different ways of creating insight. I don't think that is fundamental to design thinking. I think those are enablers. The critical thing in design thinking is, can you go out and have a conversation with multiple user categories? [00:44:00] Where you're really going into the conversation as open-ended, and as I don't know, I don't understand that kind of a thing. When you have an idea, are you willing to quickly convert that idea into a tangible prototype and put it in front of users? Are you willing to get rid of the notion that I must perfect my idea before I take it to somebody else? The mindset aspect of design thinking, which I think really goes back to the six-year-old child we spoke about, I think that is what people find difficult, they don't get it. You have all these people who are talking about design thinking and they're talking about techniques, and I worry because when I sit across the table with them, nothing about the conversation suggests that they're applying it to their own life.

Ramanand: It's kind of paradoxical that they've taken something like design thinking and turned it into a set of tools. I actually want to ask you that we spoke about the possibility of a hybrid work environment being the order of the day, a lot of the things that you spoke about need perhaps two people to sit together or for a leader to have channels of influence or cultural influence that ordinarily happened through physical spaces, through bumping into each other, those kinds of things. If their relevance diminishes in this hybrid world, what would you advise leaders to do instead? Let me take an example. Social media, for example, people telling their stories on social media, communicating more, the brand of the organization, all these things have now become things for leaders to do. How do you see more of these channels of cultural influence in a world where hybrid rules?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: I think even in hybrid; you will need to do two things. One is you will need to have people who are working remotely come into an office, once in two weeks, maybe just to meet people and just for socialization. [00:46:00] The second is, the big thing that leaders will have to think about is, we will have to have the ability to have agenda-less conversations in a remote environment. Reaching out to somebody for a conversation, which is not an appraisal conversation, not a feedback conversation, I think becomes critical. In a physical environment with a good leader, these happen naturally, because people can walk into a room. People don't walk into an online conversation; they don't just pick up the phone. Your people may be hurting and you don't know it. You need new mechanisms.

The second is that you need to figure out that with the nature of the context changing, who are the people you need to consult on what? For instance, your technology people often become far more critical, your facilities people often become far more critical. The role of HR needs to be redefined. Proactive outreach to employees from HR.

I would say three or four critical things. I think leaders need to have empathy. We will need to really look at management, and some element of inherent mistrust that is gone into management, right saying that, if I can't see you, you're not working. Say, I don't care how long I see you, what is the output, and I will leave it to you. We will have certain norms we agree on in terms of contactability, but I will leave it to you in terms of work and meetings and all of that.

I generally feel Ramanand, and this is a controversial view that online meetings are often more effective than offline meetings. When there is a clear agenda for an online meeting because the time is booked for one hour, we do not spend 15 minutes deciding what to order, another 10 minutes waiting for the order to come. Fewer people walk-in in the middle of the meeting. I think there is discipline. I will personally continue to do some activities online. For instance, online interviews. I've been quite happy with it. Some online [00:48:00] meetings I've been quite happy with. I just think the aspect of agenda-less conversation or somebody who's feeling down walking into a room for a chat, I think a lot of that is getting lost. The walls for release are getting lost. You might have more despondency; you might have people going through a lot. You will have to have new ways of reaching out to employees. 

You will also have to have the ability to develop empathy online. I think we are better at this in the last year. We can tell from a voice whether somebody is disturbed or not. We could always do that, but perhaps we are a little bit more sensitized to this. One, I don't think physical is going to go away. There are advantages to online. Leaders will have to find new ways of connecting. One is new ways of connecting themselves, but new ways of creating mechanisms of connecting also. Just because somebody is not saying something does not mean they're happy. That ability to proactively outreach to people and employees. I think all of this is there. Having said that, we're all learning. Personally, I feel that I'm better at building a team, when my initial 15 days are offline, after that supplementing it online is not a problem. But, I like that physical part, I also enjoy and maybe I'm just the wrong generation for this.

Ramanand: A lot of what you said echoes our experience because as you might know, Choose to Thinq has been remote-first from day one in 2014. In our experience, setting up these alternative ways or disciplines of getting in touch with each other, or writing culture has been very important to us. We almost liken it to rewiring ourselves, it's like going into a world where you need radar more than a line of sight. Perhaps as after World War II, a lot of people would have had to do. [00:50:00], is that you start to do a different kind of sense making. It’s not face to face, you're kind of reading the tea leaves based on other kinds of conversation. I think people are creative people and they will adapt. I think that's what we saw in the last one year.

Ranjan, we have about 10 minutes left on the clock. I want to ask a little bit about your personal practices, when it comes to things like learning, reading, staying ahead of the curve as well, because you are probably as busy as any CXO, around there. What practices and systems have you put in place so that you are able to give back to your students and to your team?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: One is reading. I'm obsessive about reading. At any point in time, there will be five running books that I'm reading. I don't need to complete all of them. It's all nonfiction. I need to read a book enough to get a gist. I'm a speed reader. That is a skill that I would advise everybody. Speed reading has two components. One is your eye span, how many words are you able to take in? You can train yourself. The other is to read for a purpose. Perhaps the reading for purpose is the larger scale. Why are you reading a book? What are you looking to get out of it? Look at the table of contents. The second for me is, all idle time is reading time. When I'm traveling, of course, but otherwise, I would be on flights, 10 days a month, or seven days a month. I would read on flights. I would read in waiting rooms. It could be a Kindle, it could be a book. At peak, I used to say five books a week, but it's gone down. If you care about reading, then I think you'll find the time for it. I'm always looking for books on Kindle. I used to like to go to a Crossword once in [00:52:00] two months. I would pick up 10 books when I go. Look for book recommendations. A lot of students give me book recommendations now. My home library is fairly large, and I haven't read more than 30% of the books in my home library. Books are one big thing.

The second I think is, just keeping different interests alive. Music is a big one. I'm very much into music. I have multiple playlists on Spotify. I'm a big video watcher. My students like to say that I'm known for having interesting videos. That means I would still be investing around two hours a week to identify and download new interesting videos. Your library gets old if you don't refresh it. I would probably have enough videos, I'd have at least 500 interesting videos, which are different. I can plug and play. Now I don't do it, but sometimes I would go into a class having planned three videos, but a library of 20. Depending on the question, I would pick a video and build it into an answer and that kind of thing.

I think the larger thing is, I've done fairly stressful jobs. Most people would argue that being the Dean of an Academic Institute is not exactly a stress-free job. I think if you enjoy what you're doing, and you let that reflect, and you have an inherently positive and curious filter on life, then that is good. The second is, I teach to learn and that's a huge thing. In every class, I'm learning something new. How do you motivate yourself when you're teaching the same subject five times? To me, the key is to read something new for every class or to try something new in every class. Experimentation with pedagogy, experimentation with [00:54:00] new content, experimentation with a different way of telling an anecdote. Let me give you another example. When I started teaching, Ramanand, I could not tell a joke. I was not good at it. There are people who tell a joke and it falls flat. I knew only one solution to any skills problem I had, which was books. I went and read Laurence Olivier’s biography. One of the things he talks about is, he says you must live a story as you're telling it. I tried to do that. Today people say I am a good storyteller. To me, the essence is, I'm in the story while I'm telling it, then the body language, the voice modulation, all of that just comes. I think if you have built a career and a life around things you enjoy doing a lot of other things fall into place.

Ramanand: A life in beta is just easier if you're just interested in everything. While on the topic of books, a lot of the business books that one has access to or one sees, they tend to be Western-centric. Therefore, there are a lot of people who yearn for something more relatable. Books like the one that you've written, they've offered more rooted observations and stories on Indian leadership culture, the drivers behind it. Any other books that come to mind that fall in a similar kind of space that people should be reading as well?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: You're talking about books that are relatable in the sense that they draw from an Indian ethos?

Ramanand: Right. Also, they're probably Indian leadership, war stories, not things that we take for granted from a Western lens.

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: There is this set of books that some of my former colleagues have written on shapers of Indian institutions. You should look at Mr. Gopal Krishna’s books. Prakash Iyer is very interesting. [00:56:00] I think some of Devdutt Pattanaik’s books are quite interesting. We haven't done enough, Ramanand, in terms of producing Indian thought leaders out of India. I think that is one of the things that we at BITSOM should be trying to do more. There was the late S.K. Chakraborty out of IIM Calcutta, some of his books. I mean, you have to decide how accessible those books are in terms of content. Ramchandra Guha, very interesting. There's a guy from IIM Ahmedabad called Vijendra Tripathi, again, somebody I would say is very interesting. Some of Amartya Sen’s books you could look at. I think you will see more coming out of India, I thought both Chandramouli’s books are very relatable. The late Chandramouli wrote Catalyst and Get Better at Getting Better, which probably sold less, but I rate that as a better book. These are very good books.

I had to give a talk on Gandhi as part of my last job, and I will always get petrified when I was asked to speak on things that I didn't know very well in front of audiences who know more than me. I would end up reading for that. There were two big talks that I had to give in my last assignment. One was, I think, when I was two months into it, I was asked to speak on Vivekanand’s birthday, on his contribution to education. I spent a month studying Swami Vivekanand. A remarkable treasure trove. I mean, practically everything that we have said about education, this man had said so much time ago. Read Swami Vivekananda, read translations because there is so much depth, read My Experiments with Truth. It's a fascinating glimpse. Read Gandhi's view on trusteeship management as a theory of management. I'm not the best at this. A lot of people and I started that journey, I haven't gone deep into the journey. Yamini [00:58:00] Krishnamurthy is another journey that I think has a lot of potential. A lot of good Indian authors on the fiction side are coming up. My fiction reading has tapered off, so I can't give recommendations there. I think that's a weakness. I used to write short stories. That's an aspiration that is gone. You know, in the pandemic, I wrote one short story, and that was after 15 years. That's an aspiration. Maybe one day you'll see a book of short stories from me, maybe after I've hung up my boots in academic leadership, there'll be a collection. Whether anybody will read it or buy it is, of course, a question mark, but I will write it definitely.

Ramanand: We know what happens to your aspirations, you usually get them done. A couple of questions before we wrap up. One is that I think you've by now watched some great teachers teach. In your estimation, what distinguishes a great teacher from the rest?

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: I have a very simple one-word answer to this. Then I will embellish it with many examples. My one-word answer is sincerity. You must care very deeply about your students. If I had a second, the ability to put yourself in the shoes of your audience, and think audience-centric and not content-centric. There are many experts who are not good teachers. There are many moderate experts who are great teachers. Having said that, let me say three or four more things. Subject mastery helps, but once you have subject mastery, the audience's journey through a class is what the great teacher is able to spend time on. The second is the great teacher chooses a style that suits their personality and is unafraid to express their personality in the classroom and there is no formula. 

There are teachers who teach well with PowerPoint slides. I avoid PowerPoint slides; I believe most audiences switch off when they have too many [01:00:00] slides. I like to think that your thought flow should be natural. I believe in interactivity, there are teachers who don't, who are much more chalk and talk kind of a thing. One is deep sincerity, curiosity. Today, ideally, I would say the great teacher needs to be T-shaped. I would say depth in a subject plus breadth, the ability to make connections outside the subject. I want to give you one example, and I've used this example multiple times. There was a teacher from IIM Calcutta called Satish Chakraborty. I still remember this example. I've used it in many other contexts. He came into one class and he was teaching regional development. He asked how many of you have read The Hound of the Baskervilles? A few hands went up. What was it about the dog that did not bark? The story of the dog that did not bark was because the dog did not bark, the crime was committed by an insider. I use that in design thinking to basically say that you must listen to what customers are not saying. Now, my point is that the moment you have this mindset, then you are looking for cues for teaching in multiple places and dimensions. 

This is very important because it makes teaching relatable. If you're saying, what can we learn about leadership from Captain America, now that is a very interesting hook. You must not trivialize the hook, but your ability to see teachable moments in everyday life. A very simple one, you want to introduce listening. There is this wonderful scene in Dil Chahta Hai, where Saif Ali Khan is trying to say something to his girlfriend. He doesn't get a word in and she puts the phone down. You do nothing, but you just [01:02:00] play that clip for two minutes and say, what is it that Saif Ali Khan's girlfriend is not doing? There's an interesting anecdote to this. 

There was one group where they said, actually, the girlfriend is not the problem, Saif Ali Khan is the problem. She's trying to speak, he’s continuing trying to speak, he should just hear her out. Interesting perspective. My point is that the lens of seeing, and this is particularly true for management, is seeing teachable moments in life, and finding those aspects of life that interest and excite your student, and then bringing it back. Then I see teaching as a hugely creative process. I think that sets the great teachers apart, that they do see teaching as a hugely creative process.

Ramanand: I think we've touched upon Holmes and Dil Chahta Hai in the same answer, which I think just proves the point you're trying to make. Ranjan on that note, thank you so much. It's been a very interesting one hour, listening to your takes on so many different topics. Here’s to the teacher and the student in you.

Dr. Ranjan Banerjee: Thank you so much, Ramanand. Great conversation.

CTQ Smartcast, Smart Conversations, Systematic CuriosityChoose To Thinqmanagement, leadership, manager skills, LearningComment