INTRODUCING SPORTING VALUES INTO OUR CORPORATE CULTURE CAN SPEED UP INDIA’S GROWTH STORY, SAYS SAMAR SINGH SHEKHAWAT,SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, UNITED BREWERIES LTD
People think that you have to have a flamboyant, luxurious lifestyle to succeed in the marketing of liquor products. More so, if you represent a brand as popular as Kingfisher, which is synonymous with ‘good times.’ But, there are a few who love to be unconventional. Samar Singh Shekhawat, Senior Vice President of United Breweries Ltd, is one such. A classically trained FMCG professional with more than 25 years’ experience in leading organisations, Shekhawat is undoubtedly the most high-profile marketer in the country today. Yet he turns out to be quite down to earth in a tete-a-tete with Corporate Citizen. Impeccably well spoken with a magnetic charm of his own, Shekhawat is as outspoken as he is creative. A passionate sportsman who has a wealth of experience in leadership roles in blue-chip global companies, this Rajput from Rajasthan comes out as one of marketing’s most original thinkers and influential speakers today. His story gives an insight into his unique character and personality which also symbolises India’s growth story through periods of significant changes in recent history. Excerpts of an interview on his career so far:
I was born in the tea gardens of Assam. My father was the longest serving tea planter in the history of India’s tea industry. We lived in big, colonial-era bungalows with lots of servants, lots of shikar and shooting. We had lots of elephants, cows, dogs, chicken and hundreds of goats. It was like growing up in George Orwell’s farm with open jeeps and trucks around. It was a very simple, sports-oriented, outdoor life, very masculine and macho which today’s kids cannot even imagine. We had no telephones and no newspapers.
I got placed on campus with the British MNC, Cadbury’s. Initially, I worked at its India head office in Mumbai as brand manager on Bournvita, as part of its market research team but within a month I was transferred to Bengulur to help the launch of Dollops premium ice-cream. Now, just imagine, I was an arts graduate, putting up an ice-cream factory, negotiating with contractors, engineers and civil supply people to buy plate- heat exchangers, boilers and cold storages and I knew nothing about this ice-cream business. Interestingly, since I grew up driving trucks on the tea gardens of Assam, as part of my job, I was asked to drive those massive trucks, transporting ice-cream from Delhi to Hyderabad, Delhi to Mumbai, Bengulur to Mumbai, staying at dhabas at night with cleaners. It was around 1989 or so. Today, you ask any MBA student to do it, he will quit the job. But I did it. Of course, later we hired truck drivers to transport ice-cream. However, soon they transferred me to Madras (I love to call it by the old name!) and I was there for about six months.
I found it a really pleasant place and experience. I didn’t know the language, the city, the culture, anything about it, but I learnt about a hundred words of Tamil and adjusted. Then I was moved back to Hyderabad where I stayed for about three and a half years. In between, I was promoted as Area Sales Manager and in 1992, I got married. My wife is from the erstwhile Bikaner royal family which I didn’t know until later.
No, it was an arranged marriage. She was also working but gave up her career after we were blessed with our daughter. When I got married, my uncle, Admiral VS Shekhawat was the Chief of Naval Staff and my father-in-law was Chief Secretary in the Himachal Pradesh government. Since it was Governor’s rule in HP at that time, the President, Prime Minister and the entire bureaucracy attended my marriage at Delhi’s Himachal Bhawan.
Soon after my marriage, I was transferred from Hyderabad to Mumbai because the company was sold to Hindustan Lever and I was moved to launch Walls ice-cream. But after some time, I felt I had done enough of sales and enough of ice-creams, so I moved to Delhi where my wife’s family was, and joined Energiser Batteries as brand manager. Within a year, they were transferring me to Shanghai but China wasn’t the story then that it is now. So, I was not very keen to go. Then I got an opportunity to work with Dabur in Delhi where I stayed for five years, from 1995 to 2000, to start up their range of natural products.
A new company was created and I used to report to Pradeep Burman himself. This was my first encounter with an Indian company. A little old school, very conservative, but I got a lot of respect as a person. I started a new business there and when it turned profitable, I felt it was time to move on.
It was towards the end of 2000 that I joined PepsiCo, the second largest American food and beverage MNC in the world, as marketing manager for the launch of its Tropicana fruit juices in India. For two crazy years, I worked with PepsiCo where I had to report to Vibha Rishi who was the Director Marketing. For finance, I used to report to Hong Kong, for marketing I would go to Brussels in Belgium and for business, I had to report into Bradenton city in Florida, United States. My passport got thicker and thicker as I would keep shuttling between these places. But then I was transferred into the beverage business. Till 2006, I worked with various brands of Pepsi, handled key accounts for them, including the Northfield marketing. In between, I was made General Manager. But, meanwhile in 2006, this whole revolution in food and grocery retail marketing started off. So, I moved to Kolkata with Spencer’s retail chain of stores owned by the RPG Group. I joined as the Vice President of its food and grocery business and worked there for four years, till 2009. Those were amazing years. When I joined in 2006, they had 55 stores and in just two years, we opened 350 more stores.
But I did it. Of course, later we hired truck drivers to transport ice-cream. However, soon they transferred me to Madras (I love to call it by the old name!) and I was there for about six months
At 50, there’s no way I can afford to be smug. My company could very easily decide to hire someone younger who would not cost as much, unless I retool & revalidate my position. I belonged to a generation that hung on to the wave of the economic boom post liberalisation, sure enough, but today a lot of us are older without having really acquired any new skills in the past 15 years. Don’t let that happen to you
Kolkata was an amazing experience. Kolkata is not a city. It is a philosophy of life. It is so different. You go through various phases when you work in Kolkata. The first is shock. How can things be so slow, so dirty and so lazy? Then there is anger. Then there is resignation that nothing is going to change. Then there is acceptance and then there is love. So, I think, I left Kolkata somewhere between the stages of acceptance and love.
I went to Bengaluru in November 2009 to join United Breweries or the UB Group, famous for its Kingfisher brand, as its Senior Vice President-Marketing. It has been a great journey in the past six years. I’ve met so many wonderful people and learnt from every person. People who know me feel that I’m now in exactly the right job. They think I have a very colourful life. They think I choose the Kingfisher Calendar Girls. They think I usually have lunch with the Virat Kohli and dinner with Chris Gayle. They also think I attend all Formula One races and that I’m always present at all the big fashion shows. That I watch all the Kingfisher East Bengal Football Club matches and watch all the IPL matches too. That I don’t do any work at all. But the fact is that it is all true, by the way. I do all this, but I keep telling people that at the end of the day, it is a beer company and I’ve got to sell something, that I don’t personally drink.
One piece of advice for the young kids is that everything that you are in life is a result of someone who took a chance on you. Someone hired you instead of someone else.Always be grateful to that person and pay it forward—just the way it was shown in a movie called Pay It Forward which has Kevin Spacey. Someone did you a good deed, you pay that good deed forward because it is the only way by which you will keep that chain going.
I admire sportsmen and sporting values a lot, especially those of tennis players. They are supreme athletes. Even if you’re a diehard Federer fan, you can’t get yourself to hate Nadal because he’s so humble. You see the speeches they make, so full of respect for each other. There are no scandals to their names. I have the greatest of respect for them all Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. They kill each other on court but when they give their acceptance speech, they are so full of praise for their opponents. They understand what happened to your opponent is not a matter of celebration. Sport teaches you to respect your opponents. We badly need these values in our corporate culture today.
At a business symposium at a leading management institute, Samar Singh Shekhawat, Senior Vice President, United Breweries Ltd held forth on ‘leadership and necessary life skills,’ and shared his learnings from his many-splendored corporate career. He had the students at the event hanging on to every word with simple but solid and workable mantras, presented with his innate wry humour. Excerpts from his talk:
Life has a totally different way of teaching you, in the classroom you learn your lessons and take a test. But life couldn’t be bothered with that particular nicety, it gives you your hardest tests whenever it decides, and leaves you to learn your lesson. The question is how will you go from there? And how will you validate the trust your company has invested in you?
Two young cricketers, Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli started their careers simultaneously. While, there has been no success story quite like Sachin’s, a hard to believe but true fact is that it was Vinod Kambli who was the more gifted of the two. But early success went to his head, and he lost the plot. Take an example of Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma. I have the privilege of knowing both of them well. While Rohit is the more talented of the two, it is Virat who has actually performed. But the day Rohit gets his head and heart together, he will smash records. I cite the example of sportsmen because I feel they are the truest competitive spirits ever, being a sportsman myself, someone who has played practically every sport under the sun, I cannot over emphasise the importance of playing a sport to keep a healthy outlook towards life and the opposition. It therefore appals me to come across younger and younger recruits who have never played a sport in their life. Our educational system is partially responsible, the overemphasis on academics which honestly does not impart you the skills to tackle life. While I do get it that not everyone’s into sports, it is hugely important for youth to have a passion, be it for writing, philately, digital media, whatever. Above all, be disciplined whatever path you choose, whether it is a career with an established organisation, or setting up your own venture.
At 50, there’s no way I can afford to be smug. My company could very easily decide to hire someone younger who would not cost as much, unless I retool & revalidate my position. I belonged to a generation that hung on to the wave of the economic boom post liberalisation, sure enough, but today a lot of us are older without having really acquired any new skills in the past 15 years. Don’t let that happen to you.
There will be moments in your life when your peers will be promoted over you, or maybe you will report to someone younger than you. But do remember, getting into the rut of comparing others will only lead to unhappiness. Please do note, you do not have the complete picture or the truth about what the person has gone through to get where he or she has. Chances are you may not be willing to pay the price yourself. Hence, the only relevant competition is with your own self.
Make the most of your time as management trainees, for that’s the only time in your life that you will have the buffering, sans the accountability, for decisions and mistakes you make. By all means, get it wrong but for heaven’s sake make a new mistake every time!”
Absolutely. If it were left to me, I wouldn’t hire anybody who hasn’t played a team sport. Today when we go for recruitment, we find that in batches upon batches, not even a hand goes up when we ask them if they have played a sport. I don’t even mind if you’ve not played competitively, I’m OK if you’ve played a sport even recreationally. But I feel sad when I realise that our children have just stopped playing sports. I, however, also feel that it’s not their fault entirely. Parents put so much pressure on studies and beating competitions that our kids find it nearly impossible to even think of doing anything else. Once they reach the plus two stage, they’re busy facing competitions—first it is for IIT/ PMT, then for MBA seats, then for jobs, then marriage and the rest. Their whole life has got reduced to facing nothing but competitions, one after the other. It’s not a joyful experience at all. Being successful doesn’t mean you give up completely on your basic values.
Corporate India to my mind is full of the most selfish, egotistical, self-centred and uni-dimensional people you can think of. They’re most boring, totally insecure, completely political. If you want to rise in India that seems to be the way, which is so unfair, because it goes against everything that we’ve been taught when we were growing up. The kind of upbringing we’re currently giving to our youngsters doesn’t prepare them to face the real challenges of the corporate world and it is not like this everywhere else in the world.
If you could answer that question, you could build the character of the nation. We have Gen X, Gen Y in play at our workplaces which have gone truly global today. We’ve to deal with global customers in diverse time zones. So our management students must be equipped with tools and techniques to delight global customers. They’ve to learn how to communicate effectively with ease. But all this cannot be done in one go at a management school. The corporate world requires grounding in core human values which need be nurtured and promoted over a period of time. But given the pressures of syllabus and time constraints, I don’t know how much could be achieved at management schools. But I won’t blame them either because, frankly speaking, you cannot change an individual’s basic character much at the PG level.
Today people push you, shove you, step on your line, just to move ahead. Look how bad we are as travellers. We Indians are the rudest travellers in the world because we are brought up that way. We feel bad saying sorry. We rarely admit our mistakes. All this matters a lot while restoring corporate relationships
The problem needs to be tackled at the primary level. We first need to correct things at that level. A child gets 90 per cent of education at home. How parents treat each other and how sisters and brothers are treated matters. My parents have been married for 53 years. Even today my father opens the car door for my mother, pulls out the chair for her, and on cold nights in Jaipur, he will sleep in my mother’s bed to warm her bed and then move over to his when she arrives so that she gets a warm bed. How many people do that today? Those old-school values have just gone past. Today people push you, shove you, step on your line, just to move ahead. Look how bad we are as travellers. We Indians are the rudest travellers in the world because we are brought up that way. We feel bad saying sorry. We rarely admit our mistakes. All this matters a lot while restoring corporate relationships.
Yes, to a great degree. I was once on a flight with Kapil Sibal when he was the union education minister. He told me we need 17000 more universities in the country. I asked him, what about the primary institutions? There is a complete mess over there. We need many more schools. We need to improve salaries of our primary school teachers. We need to make it a respected profession. In the good old days, people who started schools were genuinely interested in moulding the character of their students but today it has become a highly commercial venture. You look at the salaries of teachers in primary schools, it’s pathetic. Overseas, professors and teachers are like superstars, they are paid handsomely and corporates fund their programs. That’s why they attract the best minds of the country into their education sector. If I could be made PM of India for just one day and asked to pass just one law, I’ll make sure that our primary school teachers are treated well and education for the girl child is made compulsory and absolutely free! We are 1.2 billion people. Look at the human capital we have! Why should India not be number one nation in the world? But our problem is that we are indisciplined, have no sense of purpose and we have a crab-like mentality.
Firstly, an attitude, definitely! It is my belief that aptitude can be taught but not attitude. Either you have it or you don’t. Interest, passion, energy, all of this counts. I also like it when they have a point of view it’s alright if they get it wrong, they’re just so young but I like to see a mind that thinks for itself; I like people with points of view. Passion to go the distance is another plus in other words, I like livewires people I have to hold back, rather than push! Naturally, other factors like the job and the organisational fit play a role too. Also, the ability to see the bigger strategic picture; two, an abundance of curiosity and asking the right questions at the right time and three, great management skills as well as individual creativity that inspires other team members too. I measure these things through their ability to deliver against shared objectives within the given deadline.
Experience tells you whether this person will fit into your organisation’s culture or not but it also depends on how far you’re willing to extend the envelope. Do you truly want the organisation to change? In that case, you’ve to hire people brighter than you. Bill Gates says, “The secret of my success is that I surround myself with people smarter than me.” The best salesman may not necessarily be the best CEO and the best CEO may be a total disaster as a salesman. You hire different people for different skill sets. For those skill sets, they have to be better than you. So, hire the right people and give them access. Though today’s kids have far more access than we ever had, they want more. I mean, I was scared of my father but my daughter will sit on his lap and pull his cheeks and pinch his lips. I never had the guts to do so. But today’s kids also expect that kind of access with their bosses. In the old days, I would meet my CEO maybe once in two years but today my brand managers are meeting the MD every second day! Access is so much higher. So, you need to share and empower them, co-opt them into the joint vision of the company and stand up for them and, most importantly, berate them but in private, not in public. I like stretching high performers by encouraging them to lead cross-functional projects. Sometimes it helps in developing individuals for the good of themselves and the business.
All leadership is contextual, but having said that, things have changed like never before in history. Today’s leader has to be accessible, tech-savvy and willing to listen. In our day we saw the CEO probably thrice a year. But today, any youngster can walk into my cabin and ask to be heard. Of course, transparency and impartiality are timeless. Thanks to the advent of technology and assorted media, leaders are under more scrutiny than even before. Everything matters. How you interact with your colleagues, how you respond to their success; even the manner in which your wife deals with your colleagues is noticed! Employees are smart. Today instead of fighting amongst themselves, they’ll get the bosses to fight. You have to find a way around that. Given the multiplicity of demands and challenges, I have a simple mantra. When in doubt, over-communicate! Today’s position of authority needs you not only to lead, but also to be seen doing so.
By Pradeep Mathur and Kalyani Sardesa
