Leadership to Last: New Book by Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna on South Asia’s Iconic Business Heads

The Mittal Institute’s Faculty Director, Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), and Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at HBS, released the print edition of their new book, Leadership to Last: How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind. It is out in India via Penguin Books. 

Society tends to glorify the get-rich-quick entrepreneur who builds a company, takes it public and then (maybe) contributes to charity. In Leadership to Last, Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna interview iconic leaders in India who have demonstrated leadership to last. There are leaders from South Asia and other emerging markets as well to illustrate that the ideas Indian entrepreneurs speak about are echoed by their counterparts in the Global South. All these magnates–Ratan Tata, Anu Aga, Adi Godrej, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Devi Shetty and Rahul Bajaj, to name a few–have built, to general acclaim and acknowledgement, organizations that are seen as forward-looking and innovative. They subscribe to a code of ethics and contribute to the betterment of society. The authors demonstrate that this is a lot harder to achieve than unicorn status. The authors corroborate how these stories are less about building a get-rich-quick organization and much more about triggering foundational and institutional change in society. These interviews, encapsulating the history of recent decades, eloquently lay out the opportunities and challenges of today and the future. The profiled leaders inspire awe by displaying audacity of intent, humility of demeanor and steadfastness of purpose.

The Mittal Institute spoke with Professors Khanna and Jones about the new book, in the video above and transcript below.

Mittal Institute: And how did the book idea come about?

Tarun Khanna: Well, I think when you start an infrastructural project like Creating Emerging Markets, you realize that it’s not sufficient to just create the asset, which is the collection of videos. We have now 150+ hour-long interviews recorded, often of people who are genuine celebrities in their home countries. Many times, they don’t speak to people, but we are lucky that we are at an institution that’s trusted and so people would speak to us. But you don’t just create the asset. You must then invest in creating the ecosystem around the asset so that people know about it. You must spend a lot of time making it easy for people to access. You must even invent new pedagogical techniques so that people know how to bring it into the classroom environment. We’re used to doing paper-and-pencil teaching with a chalkboard and people read the paper case like in the “old days”. Now a lot of information is multimedia – it’s sound, it’s video. It’s in different formats and different cadences. A lot of what we’ve been doing in this overall project is not just the actual video shoots of people, but also the other assets that are needed around it to make it work great.

Mittal Institute: Geoff, Leadership to Last is out now. What’s the quick synopsis of what this book is about?

Geoffrey Jones: It’s about the nature of business leadership in India, with a particular focus on the fact that India has seen the creation of businesses, which literally last generation after generation. Businesses which have some distinct characteristics, including responsibility, an ability to innovate, and an ability to survive in sometimes quite turbulent conditions.

Mittal Institute: Great. As a business historian, you’ve come to this project through a certain lens. There were hundreds of videos. How did decide who to focus on in this book?

Geoffrey Jones: It was tough, but I think we had some clear criteria. We wanted people who were truly impactful, so we started off looking at people who led giant businesses who were obviously impactful – Ratan Tata, Adi Godrej. We were fortunate that they agreed to talk to us.

Over time, we started to think of impact in a more diverse way. We talked to Shabana Azmi, the actress who was highly impactful not as a giant business leader, but in terms of her creativity.

Mittal Institute: What was interesting about what you wrote is that these weren’t just get-rich-quick solutions and institutions. These were solutions and institutions that were built to last. Could you elaborate on that a little bit more?

Tarun Khanna: We’re sitting in an HBS classroom and frequently we have ideas that are incubated here. We’re lucky enough to see them being formed and go on to become so-called “unicorns” – companies that rapidly reach a billion dollars in market capitalization or – super unicorns – $10 billion, and so on. There’s a big fetish in the media out there with, “Oh, there’s a new unicorn!” or “How many unicorns does each country produce?” We have nothing against them, but they’re not the focus of this book. We think of impact much more holistically.

Regardless of whether the entrepreneur has made herself or himself fabulously wealthy in the process, this book focuses on institutions that have changed the fabric of society. And for that, you need time to pass, so you’ll find that virtually all the entrepreneurs profiled in the book – and in the Creating Emerging Markets broader database – tend to be towards the end of their careers, when they have time to reflect on the entire arc of their achievements. That makes them cognizant of their own achievements, but also of their limitations – their very human limitations, as they are human beings like the rest of us.

Mittal Institute: After looking at them all together, have you found a special formula to make a lasting, impactful institution?

Tarun Khanna: There’s no recipe to follow. If they were, we would all be making these impactful organizations. However, there are some general principles we feel that are worth articulating, which is the point of the book. The book is thematically divided into things that entrepreneurs do: innovate, market, take care of their employees, and so on – pretty standard things in some ways. But the broader theme that emerges is that, particularly in emerging markets, in developing countries, which we think of as somewhat lacking the formal institutions needed to support creative entrepreneurship, the task falls on the entrepreneur to do considerably more than what he or she would have to do if they were sitting in Boston and they had access to all these amazing support services around them. You know, everything from excellent information to risk capital to adjudication services, to talent assessment, to valuation of intangible assets. It’s a long list. Now, where I grew up in India, even now as a middle-income country – let alone in many of the other countries from which we have profiled entrepreneurs for the Creating Emerging Markets project – many of these services are less developed than you would like.

So, a common theme that emerges in all these stories is that the entrepreneur, of course, wants to do what she wants to do – make an amazing film or run a financial inclusion business or do heart surgery on people who can’t otherwise access tertiary care. But in order to do that, the entrepreneur also has to do 50 other things that normally you would say, “Well, isn’t that the role of the government?” And the answer might be, in an ideal world, yes. But then your choices are you either you don’t do it because the government hasn’t got around to doing it yet and isn’t likely to do it any time soon, or you get up and orchestrate a solution to that infrastructural problem, also. So, I think this ambient sensibility of problem-solving needing to be not just about your immediate goal, but to be responsive to societal issues is a general theme that emerges.

Mittal Institute: Geoff, just to follow up on that, we’re talking here about the institutions, but what about the leaders themselves? What stood out to you about the leaders that made them iconic and lasting?

Geoffrey Jones: I think many if not all of the individuals we interviewed were full of integrity and generosity, often with a surprising degree of humility and a willingness to acknowledge when things didn’t work out or where failures had happened. I think strong values and genuineness shined out of a lot of them when we talked.

Mittal Institute: What were some of the challenges you faced in compiling this book and putting together the final product?

Tarun Khanna: I think the biggest challenge actually was in the logistics of getting these interviews in the first place. Right? Not to be underestimated. It’s a mechanical task, but think about pulling together hundreds of hours of interviews with intensely private individuals who are rightly careful about their stories and their reputations in infrastructurally-compromised locations all over the world. I think it’s the responsibility of an institution like ours to undertake a task like this for the greater good. I think the mechanics were very difficult to pull off. You’d have to have amazing camera crews in different parts of the world that met some global standards. Very hard to pull off in many places. So, things like that, I think, were the bigger problems than actually producing the book itself.

I would like to say that it’s amazing to me that nobody turned us down. I can’t think of a single instance when we approached someone and said, “Would you agree to be interviewed?” And they turned us down. There was one instance that I can remember when someone was very elderly, and that person has since sadly passed on and the family didn’t agree because of health reasons. And, of course, logistics may not comply because you had to be physically there, and so on. Then, COVID made doing interviews almost impossible the last couple of years.

But in actually pulling together the interviews, I wouldn’t say that the “best” interviews are in the book and the others are not. You have to put together a collage that fits together, and there may well be other collages that fit together equally well. It’s just that our limited creativity resulted in this particular ensemble that’s in the book, and we let the readers be the judge of it.

Mittal Institute: I love the diversity you have in the book – from the inclusion of non-profits to the chapter on women, which is really interesting, too. Could you elaborate a bit on how these women and some of the other marginalized groups that you spoke with have risen? What were some of the challenges and barriers they had to overcome? How did that influence the institutions that they built?

Geoffrey Jones: First of all, it was obvious from the interviews that there were many challenges, which frequently resulted from restrictive societal views. We interviewed women who were the first to break into their fields and faced great prejudice from their colleagues in doing so. That’s not too surprising, but hearing about it and how they overcame it was impressive. So, we had lots of positive stories, as well – after all, it’s very tough if you’re the first woman, but after that it gets easier. We learned about the importance of mentorship. Women needed other women as mentors and organized systems to promote this. We learned about the enormous challenges that women face in raising capital, but we also heard stories of how they found ways to facilitate that. In a way, the stories here confirm the worldwide challenges faced by women and, I would say, particularly in India in many respects. But we had a lot of learnings about how those challenges can be overcome, as well.

Mittal Institute: What advice would you draw from these leaders to give to budding entrepreneurs?

Tarun Khanna: I don’t think the advice would be unique to developing countries. I just think that the “upside” is higher and the “downside” is lower for being an entrepreneur in an emerging market. In other words, if you do manage to fix some problem, that’s significant. And I’m leaving aside trivial things like a small app that does something cute now. I’m talking about something that really solves a big problem that millions of people are facing. You stand to be rewarded enormously – both financially and non-financially, correctly so. But watching all the people that we’ve interacted with and trying to learn from them, I think you’re more likely to fail, and with less of a safety net.

Not all of our interviewees started out exactly the same way, but most of them had the commonality of starting off with a very ambitious goal in mind. And then they approached it in very bite-sized chunks. In some cases, the ambitious goal emerged over a few years or a decade – sometimes over multiple decades and a couple of generations of a particular family, sometimes much quicker than that.

Let me give you some examples. Zia Modi, an impressive woman and a Harvard Law graduate, seemed to be thinking a lot about the role of women in the legal profession and now runs one of the most impressive law firms in the country. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is a poster child of innovative India: Self-made biotech billionaire who started out in the brewing business doing enzymes and quickly saw over a 10-year period that the world was her oyster if she could really crack some other bigger problems and now is actively one of the first makers of much needed affordable insulin, including attempts at oral insulin, that will affect the world, and so on and so forth. There are a number of amazing men and women who basically had a big canvas they were painting on, even though individual years were more like a brushstroke on that canvas.

Mittal Institute: The break down of the chapters we’ve talked about is also really interesting. Why did you start with the chapter managing families?

Geoffrey Jones: Family is at the heart of business in almost all the Global South and certainly in India. It’s the starting point. It is the source of the stability that we’re looking at – how values are transmitted from one generation to another, rather than just being lost as people retire or die. So, I think family a great strength of business in India. It has its downsides sometimes, but I believe it also has enormous strengths.

Tarun Khanna: It relates to my previous comment. Look at what’s happened with COVID: the governments in the rich countries have flooded us with grants of all sorts of unemployment compensation and so on, correctly, because we were able to we have the mechanisms to do it in this country. But if you don’t have, for instance, social insurance in the country in as robust of a form as you might have here then entrepreneurship is a rough-and-tumble business. Most of the time, it’s also very lonely. So, in the absence of “insurance mechanisms”, you need financial stability as an individual entrepreneur, which the family can provide, as well as the broader family, to some extent. It’s not just financial crutches, you also need psychological crutches. You need to be part of some embedded structure and I think the family is usually that embedded structure. It comes with a lot of warts, as we all know. But the key to these people is that they took the good with the bad and tried to accentuate the good and limit the bad of the family side. A lot of the stories in the family chapter are very explicit about some tough things that had to be done within the family intergenerationally and within each generation to make sure that the good outweighed the bad.

Mittal Institute: You have such a wonderful collection here. What do you think makes this book different?

Tarun Khanna: A number of things make Leadership to Last different. First of all, it’s businesses that have lasted – for generations in some instances. That’s the focus of the book, therefore, that’s the defining characteristic of what’s different about this.

I think we also define success in very many multifaceted ways. If you want to reshape society, the only way to do it is not necessarily just by making a new widget that you sell. It’s also thinking about how to organize society in different ways. At Harvard Business School, we like to say that we educate leaders who make a difference in the world. We don’t say we educate leaders who only make a buck in the world. The choice of those words is intentional and we’re trying to live that choice in profiling people that we admire and we’ve learned a lot from.

Geoffrey Jones: I think a conventional book could have organized its chapters in a different way. There could have been a chapter on strategy, a chapter on raising finance, and a chapter on organization, for example. We chose a different route. We chose to focus on problems that we think are extremely important: inclusion, gender equity, and so on. So, I think that’s also a very distinctive feature of our book.

Mittal Institute: What was your favorite part of creating this book?

Tarun Khanna: We spent so long collecting these interviews. For me, to actually use them and see stories and a product emerging was a very fulfilling process. I think, for me, it’s doing the interviews. It’s just endless fun to be with accomplished people and have a one-on-one conversation for an hour, hour and a half, two hours. It’s like a masterclass delivered to an audience of one – the interviewer. We’ve had almost 20, 25 senior faculty at Harvard participate in pulling together the interviews from these different countries. I think they would all say they really enjoyed the actual interview process. I mean, how could you not? These are extraordinary people who have done extraordinary things and have the humility to tell you exactly what happened. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, looking back on the arc of their careers. That’s the most enjoyable thing for me, anyway. And I’m looking forward to continue doing this because this is a living project.

Mittal Institute: How did you come together as co-authors? What did each of you bring to the writing and editing process?

Geoffrey Jones: Complementary skills and personalities, I think, is the key.

Tarun Khanna: Chalk and cheese.

Tarun Khanna: We wrote an academic paper together about 15 years ago that had nothing to do with this book. Nitin Nohria, who was the previous dean at HBS, put us in touch and said, “You know, you guys have been working on the same thing for the last 20 years.” And I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Well, what you were doing by comparing organizations in different contemporary developing countries, Geoff has been doing as a historian in the British Empire over time. But it’s very similar sets of issues.” So, we put our heads together and said, “You know, that’s a great observation, and we could use a scholarly paper,” which I think was quite impactful. So, that’s how we actually met in a scholarly sense at HBS. Then, as I said, I just got involved with the videos with Geoff, and it’s kind of grown on its own and mushroomed. It’s good to see it happen, and it couldn’t have happened without the incubation environment at HBS.

Mittal Institute: Businesses are often demonized in India. What myths do you think this book can actually dispel?

Tarun Khanna: This is a very good question. For the longest time, there have been two contrarian threads in Indian society. Throughout the centuries, as far as I’m aware as a reader, one is the efflorescence of entrepreneurship. But there has also been a streak of several decades of anti-business sentiment. And it’s not difficult to see where it comes from. There are certainly cases of business misbehaving, taking advantage of others, and so on. But I think, in the main, that’s not the story that I would tell about entrepreneurs. I would tell a much more positive story in India and in many of the other developing countries that we’ve encountered. I like to believe in the goodness of men and women and to say that, by and large, these are people who are trying to do something really interesting, something very, very difficult, something very ambitious, and something that should make us all very pleased and proud.

Geoffrey Jones: I’m often asked by students and others to point out the most responsible businesses I can think of because they’re very interested in going to work for such a business. I repeatedly say to them, “You’ve got to look at India.” My short-list of truly responsible businesses in the United States is very short. My list of such businesses I could point out in India is much longer and it’s gone on from generation to generation. And so, it is quite extraordinary that there’s so much criticism of business in India. Yet, I think that some of the Indian business houses are some of the most responsible over such a long period that I can see and I’ve looked across the emerging world, as well as in the developed world.

Mittal Institute: There are still a lot of videos left. What’s next for the project?

Geoffrey Jones: Well, we wouldn’t mind developing a book on Latin America. In that sense, the Indian book could be seen as a pilot, and we are interested to see how people will react to it. Criticisms, praise or whatever. We have rich material in Latin America and growing material on Africa, too. So that’s one direction I think we want to go.

Mittal Institute: Tarun, what do you hope people will take away from this book?

Tarun Khanna: Just broaden their horizons. We all learn from analogy, comparison, and experimentation. Rather than be limited to stories that have unfolded in our immediate ambiance, the United States and even more narrowly, Boston, where we are sitting right now, why not learn from experiments all over the world, regardless of where you end up wanting to work? Because, as any social scientist would tell you, we learn from variation. If you only study one thing, you don’t know very much because there’s nothing to compare it to. You need to have a plethora of ways in which history is played out. And that’s what I think people can take away. I hope they enjoy the stories because they are incredibly inspiring, and I hope they broaden their sensibilities and work.