CHENNAI: Books on leadership, entrepreneurial insight or betterment of any other aspect of personhood now housed in the ‘self-help’ category, enjoy a sort of unhindered proliferation especially in the Indian market. Their reach seems to border on omnipresence, and their sales are evident from the pomp with which they adorn the main desks of any bookshop. Sriprakash Nadadhur Sridharan’s Building Blocks (Garuda Prakashan; Rs 499) is one of the latest additions to this burgeoning pile, trying to impress upon the reader that ‘all of us can be leaders’.
Like many who try their hand at making inroads into this genre, Sriprakash has been a tried and tested entrepreneur. The founder of Prajna Consulting, a boutique consulting firm, he has over two decades of experience in business development, consulting, and marketing. In his own words, he lists two instances of significance that prompted him to write a book, after years of experience outside anything remotely related to writing, much less publishing.
“There are two instances that deeply impacted me,” Sriprakash states, continuing: “My interaction with S Srinivasan, former head of leasing, Sundaram Finance — he spent quality time with us (me and couple others) during our summer internship and taught us on varied subjects. What he made me realise was, ‘A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle, it only spreads the light.’ It made me dump my insecurity especially with respect to sharing knowledge.”
Moving on to the second, he mentions: “Another one was the John C Maxwell leadership workshop that I attended when I was a management trainee at a leading conglomerate. I was thrilled to attend the workshop as he was one of my favourite leadership gurus. It focused on some of the basics like active listening, active learning, communication, etc. Later in life, I realised that they taught me a few powerful lessons that changed my life forever.”
Building Blocks acts as a condensation of Sriprakash’s formula, whose experience as a leadership columnist has served him well. This condensation pools into a mellow mist of ‘70 attributes of leadership’, or what he calls ‘A to Z’ of leadership. The titular ‘blocks’ refer to these attributes, and build up to enact the fullness of a leader. The attributes, he believes, are not exclusive to those who assume positions of objective esteem; leaders, he stresses, are everywhere and inherently all of us.
Bringing the notion of leadership right down to the median individual, it seems, is key to achieving an orientation that sees the fulfilment of such potential. As he attests, the nature of this is purely anecdotal: “I started believing that there are leadership lessons in every incident that we come across in our lives. I started observing things around me and my near/dear ones which were not only interesting but taught me lessons for life. I started penning them down in my notepad.
Though I wanted to share my learnings with the society at large, it would have remained in my diary forever, thanks to my mom for getting me out of my comfort zone and seeding the thought of getting it out as a book. I slowly started converting my writings/scribblings to simple stories that are relatable and which could drive home powerful leadership lessons.”