“Weak human species is strong due to supreme gift of idea”

Sanjeev Aga at IIMA ConneXion :Thought Leadership

By Japan K Pathak, Ahmedabad, 6 November, 2011

Last week I attended one more wonderful conference at Indian Institute of Management(IIM) Ahmedabad. This one was a two-day conference ‘IIMA ConneXion’ organized by Post Graduate Programme for Executives(PGPX) department of IIMA. It’s an annual conference and this year’s conference had good bunch of speakers. The subject choosen was ‘Thought leadership’. I have reported this conference in Gujarat Samachar in Gujarati text. Here on DeshGujarat I am putting it online in a series. And this is the first post.It contains glimpses of Idea cellular’s former CEO Sanjeev Aga’s speech:

-Human is neither fastest nor strongest creature in the world. Human can’t fly in the air like a bird, or can’t survive inside the water like a fish. But the best quality of human species is that it is not locked in environment. Put tiger in desert and it will die, or pull fish out of water and it will die, but human creates his environment at any place. Because human has idea, the supreme gift. Our product Idea was named after this supreme gift that humans possess. It is an idea that doesn’t lock human in environment. And therefore thought leadership is the best leadership. Many prime ministers would come and go, people would forget their names, but people who gave us thought leadership, be it Galileo or Steve Jobs recently will be remembered for generations.

-East lost dominance of ideas to west. Europe and America replaced India, China, Japan as territories that generate ideas.

-In telecom industry there are no workers, there are only managers. At every level, in every moment, too many decisions take place at every level.

-A child may go wrong, but you love him. Similar rule should apply in management between the boss and his/her employee.

-Each person has capability of being creative and innovative. It is not that only painters, dancers, artists and musicians are creative. Innovativeness, creativeness is needed in all activities, especially in management.

-Things move so fast in the world of technology that the ideas of last four years would not work in next four years.

-Dominant command type organization will find difficulty in generating participation.

-It is privilege to have an opportunity to name an organization. We were Birla Tata AT&T and we got an opportunity to name an organization. The name Idea was selected, but as it is a dictionary word, we couldn’t claim patent for it. So we toppled capital ‘I’ and made it an exclamatory mark. And based on experience, I can say that power of the word has brought more success to us than we thought. Idea is among first 500 words of vocabulary. It is very campaignable word.