BENGALURU: To me, that meeting was a pivotal learning on how not to deal with youngsters. Over the years, I’ve obviously learned a lot — too much to count or list. Yet, every now and then, I get asked to ‘list’ what I’ve learned. So I wasn’t surprised with this question:
“If you had to distil all your learnings into three best learnings, what would they be?”
In a career spanning 39 years, if you ask me to give you the three best learnings it’s being a little demanding of me. I have learned from various people; my seniors, my clients, juniors, from the people of India, from my cooks, and my aged aunts. I’ve never stopped learning.
I’m still learning. I’m learning a lot from our young partners every day. However, I will attempt to answer this question.
I wouldn’t call them the three best ‘learnings’, I would call them three very important learnings.
And number one and two were both from Mani Aiyer, my first managing director at Ogilvy.
One: Take your work seriously. But don’t take yourself too seriously. Those who work with me or have worked with me will testify to the fact that this little teaching made such a huge impact on me that I unconsciously live it every day,
Two: You are not capable of doing everything. You might be excellent at something, good at other things and incapable on all things beyond these. So surround yourself with people who are better than you at various aspects of the game — especially those you are incapable of doing or doing well at. At the end of the day, advertising is a team game. And unless you have a great team, one star player cannot win you a match.
Three: No client is a bad client. It is your responsibility to get the best out of the client to be able to deliver the best for the client.
I would say that these three are really important. The third learning also connects to the need to believe in strong relationships. To expect someone to trust you from the moment you first met is not a realistic expectation. Trust has to be earned. Once trust is earned, liberties follow and you’re allowed
to fly.
I’ve seen clients who were deemed to be ‘painful’ or ‘tough’ by my predecessors working on an account or by my competitors who had worked with the client earlier — and I realised that, below the surface, there was a wonderful human being that they were not able to discover.
I’ve had the pleasure and honour of discovering many such lovely people beneath the ‘painful’ and ‘tough’ exteriors and many of these discoveries have become my friends ever since. Some of them have retired. Some of them have moved on to other companies or out of this industry; they may not be my clients, but remain my friends.
If you start off on the wrong foot and begin with mistrust, you might miss out on wonderful traits that lie hidden and undiscovered — and you could lose out on a relationship that’s good not just for your career, but good for you personally.
Let me illustrate this for you
The list of people who have become friends of mine for life is a long, long list. Let me start my very early days where I dealt with Muktesh ‘Micky’ Pant (the young brand manager on a new brand called Sunlight Detergent Powder when I was a fledgling account trainee), who I first met when he was with Hindustan Unilever. He then went on to PepsiCo and from there to Reebok India (he was employee number ONE there) and then to Yum! Foods as CMO.
He’s retired now, and I am fortunate to have him as a friend, even if we haven’t done business with each other for years now.
The story is similar with Harish Manwani, who I first met when he was in HUL. Our friendship has prospered as he moved up the ranks to the level of global chief operating officer of Unilever, a position he retired from.
(Excerpted from Open House by Piyush Pandey with permission from Penguin Random House India)