Want to Be Successful? What Does That Mean?
By Mukul Pandya*
In February 1998, when I joined the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, I had been a business journalist for almost 20 years. I had worked half of that time in India and the rest in the U.S. Wharton hired me to start a new publication featuring faculty research. The school runs one of the top MBA programs.
In May 1999, my colleagues and I launched Knowledge@Wharton, an online journal whose mission is to share knowledge – for free, at absolutely no cost to the consumer -- from Wharton and other sources, with anyone who wanted to learn.
As the editor in chief, I was fortunate over the years to meet and interview well-known leaders from business and politics – such as Andy Grove, the co-founder of Intel; Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of GE; Christine Lagarde, the former head of the International Monetary Fund; and India’s former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, among others. In many interviews with leaders, I often ended by asking the same question: How do you define success? Their responses contained a wide range of views. I was intrigued – and occasionally inspired – to hear many different opinions about what it means to be successful.
This month I retired after running Knowledge@Wharton for 22 years. I consider myself lucky since I was able to pursue this career without earning an advanced degree in the U.S., which is the typical path for Indian professionals who migrate to America.
As it generally happens at such times, I received warm and congratulatory emails from friends and colleagues about my retiring. One message was from a young colleague named Don. He had joined the Knowledge@Wharton team eight years ago, when he was, in his own words, “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, fresh out of college with a terrible haircut.”
Don started out by doing administrative work, but as a gifted musician he soon gravitated towards creative work in the Wharton studio, helping to produce videos and podcasts. Having been present at many interviews, Don ended his email with these words: “I’ve heard you ask this question many times in the studio, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard you give an answer to it. So, I will ask you now: Given your years at Wharton, and even what you accomplished prior to starting Knowledge@Wharton, how would you define success?”
Don’s question turned the tables on me. For more than 40 years, I had tried to be a tough journalist asking challenging questions to all sorts of people. Now I was at the receiving end. Surprised that coming up with an answer was difficult, I struggled to respond. The more I reflected upon the question, the more I realized that the way I thought about success had changed a lot over the years.
When I was a boy, aged maybe around 10 or 11, I believed that success meant achieving a goal or task that someone -- often my parents or teachers -- had assigned. If I did it well, I got a reward. When I was in primary school in Mumbai, for example, I fell in love with the music of the Beatles and asked my parents if they would buy me a guitar. That was an expensive gift for a young boy in India. My parents, who were teachers, told me that if I did well in my exams, they would think about it.
I was good at languages and social sciences, but awful at math. Still, with determination fueled by a guitar, I slogged even harder. When the results were announced at the end of the academic year, I had the third highest marks in my class of 45 students. In previous years, my score was generally among the top 10 in my class, but never in the top three.
I got the guitar - and that was success! In those days, I measured success by yardsticks like good grades or prizes. The results were usually based on how much effort I had put in to achieve the goal. It was a narrow, self-centered view.
This approach continued through most of my college years and even in my early years as a journalist. In 1979, I started out at The Economic Times in Mumbai, after a B.A. in economics from Ruia College, Mumbai University. While working, I also completed an M.A. in economics from Mumbai University.
As a journalist, the yardstick of success changed from grades to the number of stories I could publish in prestigious publications or awards I won, but the self-centered approach continued. Over time, my stories were published in The New York Times, The Economist, TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Success was all about me and what I could achieve.
That perspective began to change when I had to manage a team. In 1988 I became a chief copy editor at Business World, a leading Indian business magazine, and I had to oversee a team of four copy editors. That was when I discovered that the self-centered view that had served me for so long was a handicap in this new context. If I continued to focus on myself, my success would be limited to what I could achieve on my own. If one thinks along these lines, it is difficult - no, impossible -- to manage a team and lead it well. It was far better to give up some control and, instead, focus on what the team could achieve collectively.
Giving up control does not mean giving up responsibility; rather you still need to keep an eye on what is going on and step in to intervene if necessary. But most of the time, if you have the right group of colleagues, and they know a lot more than you about their fields, and you support them in pursuing what they are good at and what they love to do, you can achieve remarkable results.
As a result, in my mid-career years my view of success became less self-centered and more inclusive. Success was not just about me; it was also about the team - the team plus me. If the team succeeded in achieving its goals, we all succeeded. This approach served us well in Knowledge@Wharton, as our readership grew to millions, and the team grew larger.
But just when I thought I had found the mantra for success, life taught me how wrong I was. In May 2016, I was in a meeting in my office when I developed an unbearable pain in my belly. I fell to the floor, my colleagues called the emergency medical team, and I was rushed by ambulance to the Penn Medicine hospital. Fortunately, it is across the street from the building where I worked. Diagnosed with acute pancreatitis, I was hospitalized.
It turned out to be a serious illness with a long recovery. I was on medical leave for seven months during which I had little or no contact with my team. And I noticed something interesting: Though I had disappeared without a moment’s notice, the work at Knowledge@Wharton continued without missing a beat.
I realized then that I suffered from the founder's illusion - the belief that many founders have, whether they have created a project or a company. They start to believe just because they have led the creation of an enterprise, small or large, that their presence is essential -- if not indispensable -- to its continuation. That belief is often an illusion.
When I returned to the Penn campus, many professors whose research was featured in Knowledge@Wharton did not even know that I had been away. Recognizing and coming to terms with my own impermanence was initially humbling, but ultimately it was liberating. I realized that even if I were not around, Knowledge@Wharton would continue, and the mission of sharing knowledge would endure. If Knowledge@Wharton had collapsed in my absence, that would have meant failure. The fact that it went on -- and that it will go on after my retirement -- spells success. Success is about the team without me. At the end of my formal career, this is the highest form of success I can imagine.
My perspective has not just changed – it has become the opposite of what it used to be. It has gone from viewing success as being all about me to not being about me at all -- and that is just as it should be. When you commit yourself to an audacious goal like sharing knowledge for free with millions of people, that mission is just too large to be contained in the space of a single person’s career or even life. If the team continues to serve the mission even though you are gone, what greater success could there be?
As I wrote my response to Don, I was feeling immodestly pleased with myself for coming up with what I thought was a fresh point of view. But again, I was wrong and self-centered. What I thought was fresh is one of the oldest ideas about success. I suppose it is one of those enduring truths that each of us must learn and keep learning for ourselves in the context of our own lives. You see, at the end of a letter that a friend wrote when he moved from a prominent corporate job to a university, he included a poem written in 600 B.C.. The words of poet Lao Tzu - 2620 years ago - expresses this perspective far better than I can today or ever could:
A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists,
Not so good when people obey and
Acclaim him,
Worst when they despise him.
“Fail to honor people
They fail to honor you;”
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done,
his aim fulfilled,
They will all say,
“We did this ourselves.”
May you be safe and happy. May you find your own road to success.
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