Harit Nagpal's Business Wisdom Takes Centre Stage In 'Adapt: To Thrive, Not Just Survive'
Harit Nagpal, MD & CEO, Tata Play and one of the popular names in the brand circuit with an illustrious career spanning almost four decades across various categories recently launched his maiden book ‘Adapt: To thrive, not just survive’.
He gets candid with Anurag Batra, Chairman & Editor-in-chief, BW Businessworld Group and Founder, exchange4media Group in a chat about his debut book in the segment - BW Dialogue on Leadership, wherein he spills the beans about bringing back the focus on how to identify who your customer is, what the customer segments are, what customers you don't want, and more.
Edited excerpts:
What made you write this book? Why did you feel there was a need for a book like this?
Anurag, I've spent about four decades in the industry, six industries and wherever I've gone, I'm always told that the world is changing. The basics are changing. It's like saying that the sun has started revolving around the earth or the earth has again become flat.
Basics don't change. I mean, just about a few days ago I posted an opinion poll on one of the social media sites where I asked business basics remain constant or business basics change with time? 83 per cent people of 700 plus people responded with the fact business basics change with time. Basics are basics.
That's why they called basics, because they don't change. So this was a book to remind people that basics remain constant. The environment around us changes and we have to adapt to them.
Basics don't change. So I've basically picked up about 10 business basics and written a fictionalised account on each one of them, just to remind people that basics don't change, environment changes. And the second thing, changing environment, or disruption as we call it these days, is not a threat, is not something that you have to avoid.
Actually, a good business person should start looking at opportunities in a disruption. If there is a disruption happening around us, how do I catapult my business using the disruption as an opportunity. So those are the few thoughts that were in my head before I started writing this.
You call the book ‘Adapt. To thrive, not just survive’. And you put the image of a chameleon – a chameleon, whose best known secret is to be able to adapt to every surface that he's on. Do you think Indian businesses are adapting well? Because you said the best part of doing the book was researching sectors and industries that you weren't part of, though you've been part of four or five industries. So give us a sense of why this name, why this image? And do you really think Indian businesses have kept pace with changes?
Look at the chameleon. The chameleon actually changes its colours based on the environment. And it does so only to survive, not to get noticed, blend in and survive. Not thrive.
What is the life of a chameleon? 50,000 years ago, or even five lakh years ago, the life of the chameleon was exactly what it is today. The quality of a chameleon's life. Your and my life, if you see over the last 30 - 40 years, has been changing, getting better every passing year. The quality of life that we're leading today is better than what it was a year ago, certainly better than what it was five years ago, and most certainly better than what it was ten years ago.
So humans have learned to thrive in a changing environment. A chameleon has learned to survive. This was just a symbol of how you can survive and how you can thrive. Businesses, not just in India, but anywhere in the world, have actually learned to thrive.
Because businesses ultimate objective is to create products and services for people like you and me. And if our lives have changed dramatically over the last years, then the businesses must have thrived. They couldn't have just survived.
Give us an example of business in India that you think has really kept pace and adapted and has thrived.
I think that's true of every sector. Look at any, you can name any service that you're using today.
Is it the same as what it was a year ago? Are new features being added? And is the pace of adding new features gone up? Telecom, media, airlines, motorcycles, retail, whatever business comes to your mind, just compare what they were offering a year ago and what they're offering today. And certainly if you compare what they were offering 10 years ago versus what they're offering today, things have changed and they're changing at a much more rapid pace than they were now. You can't say that for every operator in every industry, but for sure there are one or two operators in every industry who are changing much more rapidly than they were in the past, and they are the ones who are leading.
The book is a lot about identifying your customers, segmenting the customers before you launch a product or service, asking fundamental questions. Who is your customer? Why will he or she buy it? What are the offerings available to them? What are the customers you don't want? Do you feel that in an era of abundance, where almost everything sells because of certain numbers in this country and affluence growing in the country, do you think business owners and marketers have forgotten this very basic art of segmentation, or is it being ignored, especially by the start-ups?
So my observation has been that a lot of businesses are products in search of customers, or technologies in search of customers.
I've discovered a great technology. I think it can make up for a good product. Now I don't know whether it has 10 customers or 10,000 customers or 10 million customers.
How fragmented are they located? Can I even reach them by communication and tell them my proposition? Can I physically reach them in terms of distribution? I've not studied that.
So there are two parts to it. First part, how do you design the product or a service? One is that you discover a technology, and then you start looking for customers for it.
Second is you go to a customer and figure out what his latent needs are. And then you go back to technology and ask them to create a solution for those problems. The ideal way, obviously, is to figure out what the customer's pain points are, and then go to technology to create a product or a service or a proposition for that person. That's the ideal way you'll be solving. You'll be 100 per cent fit there. How often are we doing that? I'm not sure. Some are, some are not. So that's one big part. And the second big part is every business's purpose is to make money.
If you're a product in search of a customer who's scattered all over the place, and it'll take you a lot of money to communicate your product to them and to deliver the product to them, then you may not make money. You may have a good product, but you may not make money in the end, and therefore, your sustainability will be in question. So from both these perspectives, it's always better to figure out what is my benefit of the product that I'm selling. Where is my customer? Where are the profitable customers? And are they willing to pay the kind of money that I'm asking them for?
I was reading one of the chapters where it's a traditional, at least in the setting, in the book, traditional publishing business. And the father says, do you think Steve Jobs went home to home, asking people what they need? So really, there are formal ways of doing market research and segmentation, and there are informal ways which are observation, asking fundamental questions. What do you think works in today's environment? Because there is enough data, but are there enough insights?
You need both. So I've seen people who are so obsessed with data, that they lose sight of the insights.
And there are some people who work only on insights, and they forget the data. And if you hang on with one of these methods, it doesn't work. Data is supposed to give you some ideas as to what to look for, give you some data points, as we call you call them, and then you connect those points, and that creates an insight.
So it's a combination of what you observe and what the data tells you, and that leads to an insight by themselves. Data alone or insights alone, you have to have a miracle or you have to be very lucky to be able to produce a proposition out of just an insight or just data.
Coming to the ten chapters in the book, when an author writes a book, of course, all the chapters are important. But is there a favourite chapter of yours?
These are basics. You can't avoid them. So this is a building that we're sitting in. You say, which pillar is more important? No, I think every pillar is important because if one pillar gives away, the others may not stand.
One of the chapters is touching customers heart, creating a brand that connects in an era of multiple choices in a category, multiple offerings. The connect with the consumer matters. It always mattered. That's why customers love brands and stick by them. Give us a sense of what's in this chapter. Touching customer’s hearts.
See a lot of advertising. You see, for example, when you sit down in the evening, watch about one hour of television, you see about 10-12 ads, maybe 15 just make or take. How many did you connect with? How many do you recall? How many made you like the brands that you. And very few.
We've gone into a sell mode. We're not in the tell mode or endear, the customer mode. And in this chapter, for example, there's a conversation between a father and a son where the father casually asks the son about his friends and the son says, this is the friend I like and this is the friend I don't like.
And the father's probing deeper and saying, okay, why don't you like him? And why do you like him? And the questions come that this one is caring for others, this one is spending beyond his means. And the father says, is he spending your money? And the guy says, no, he's not, but he's spending beyond his means. And he says, look, brands are like people you've just decided based on the activities of your friends - who's the friend you like and who's the friend you don't like. Customers in the same way, based on the activities of brands, take a call on I like this brand, I don't like this brand. So, when you're launching a brand, do things that our customer is likely to like, identify with affinity, find it endearing.
So he's tried to explain it through metaphors he's used from friends and other things.
In your introduction, you talked about that the basics haven't changed. The introduction in the book that retaining good talent takes effort, getting people to work in teams takes efforts, still work in silos. What are the business basics that haven't changed over the years?
Nothing has changed. The basics are still the same. You still need to have a proposition. You still need to have a proposition that appeals to the customer. You need to produce it at a price at which the customer is willing to pay. You need to communicate it so that it touches his heart and therefore he wants to buy you.
You need to make it available close to his house. You need to have an organisation where there are like-minded people who are willing to work in teams towards the customer. Listen to the customer and keep modifying the product.
They need to stay. You need to have a work culture, so you need to have constant, ongoing innovation in the organisation. These are basics which were being done by businesses 100 years ago, 50 years ago, ten years ago and yesterday, and will continue for the next, I don't know how many decades now.
Clearly you have a chapter on work culture where a healthy team engages everyone. That's the title of the chapter. Give us a sense of what's in this chapter.
Well, you could have people working in silos, and very often when you walk into an organisation and you ask them, and this I've seen personally also say, okay, explain to me in one word, what is the culture of this organisation? And most importantly, the words that come in are of togetherness and charity and trust and all those kinds of things. They may or may not connect with the business objective of the organisation, the industry that they're in, the need of the organisation that it is fulfilling in the industry lifecycle that we're sitting on. So the words that need to be picked up by an organisation which define its work culture need not be values.
Values are very important. We need to have them. Our parents taught them that, like, I will not take what is not ours and things like that.
But these are not work culture statements. Work culture statements are collaboration, experimenting, taking ownership, speed, depending on what stage of lifecycle you're at, culture is very important. Work culture is important.
Work culture that contributes to the purpose of the business at that state in time. So I may have a work culture that requires collaboration right now, tomorrow, speed may become of importance. In early stage of the life cycle of a business, experimentation may become in a small organisation, ownership may be of prime importance.
So you have to define basis what stage of lifecycle you're in and what is the nature of business you're in. What are the cultural elements that will contribute to the end result or delivery of your business objective? Values are essential for every business that I will contribute to the society, or I will not take what is not mine, or I'll pay my taxes, or I'll be a good citizen.
These are things that are a must. These are bedrocks.
Now there is a chapter which is called from PowerPoint to one point where you talk of very focused reviews which lead to progress of the business. I think as a business owner, I really like this chapter because really that gives you insights and tells you what's working, what's not working, what you need to do for the future. Give us a sense of what is your own feeling when it comes to business reviews in India. Do we do it right? What can we do better?
What you should not do is don't use the reviews to punish those who failed in the past. Use reviews. Whatever has happened, has happened. You can't rewrite history.
I think the purpose of a review should be to identify opportunities for the future. That's all we can control. We can't control the past.
The problem is, 90 per cent of the times, most reviews are trying to figure out who made a mistake. Where did we go wrong? Yeah, it's important but more important is, where's the opportunity? What can we do better? And if the focus shifts from 20 per cent of what can we do better and 80 per cent of who made the mistake to 80 per cent of what we can do better and 20 per cent about where we made the mistake, and let's learn from it.
Reviews would be much more productive.
You talk about more than an assembly of parts. You talk margins. How to build profitable businesses, right? Give us a sense. Why is this chapter important? Have you seen businesses doing lines of business which are not very profitable, but just every business has a few lines which are pets of the owner or the CEO or somebody in the organisation? It is not making money.
It is not even serving a customer purpose. But is there because I like it? Every business has a couple of lines. Why are they there? Why can't we be dispassionate? It's not serving the company's objective.
It is bleeding the bottom line. It doesn't even have a future. In the foreseeable future, 20 years later, you may start making money, but for 19 years, you would have lost much more than it'll ever make in its lifetime. And it's not even serving a customer purpose. Otherwise, they would have bought it at a price that it was costing you. But we carry them, and every business has a couple of these lines.
Who is this book for? Is it for the CEO for business? Is it for a founder of a business? Is it for the CMO who should be reading your book?
So after I'd got the manuscript right, I actually sent it out to a few of my trusted friends and colleagues just to get their feedback. As to am I doing the right thing? Is it appealing somewhere? And who's the audience? Exactly the question. I said, who should I be pitching it for? Because if I'm writing about customer segmentation, then I should also be following the customer segmentation process myself.
And the feedback that I've got so far is, yes, it is important for the students so that they form their basics right in the beginning. But if you take the whole spectrum, are the people at the top, in the C-suite levels also following all the basics, or are they taking them for granted and going by gut most of the times, like you rightly yourself, said that when I read it, the questions I tried to apply to them, to my business, and I found that we were also not doing some of those things. So what has come out, at least so far, is that it's relevant to the student, to the young executive and even to senior people who may have forgotten some of the basics or applying some of those basics to the businesses.
You've been in leadership positions for at least two decades. More than two decades. You worked for four decades. You said business basics have remained the same. Yes. Have the leadership styles of leaders changed in the last decade or so?
Leaders are getting a little more participative. It's not a unidirectional flow. Four decades ago, the person at the top was supposed to know everything and was supposed to be telling you what to do, and you did what was. Management style has become a little more participative. Lot more participative, I would say, over the last four decades, I've seen that because people have realised that one person can't know everything more and more, and that's the cause of it.
You worked in five - six industries, but you worked in telecom. Now 14 years at Tata Play. What is happening in the media and in entertainment domain? Because that's a business that you built from scratch. Where are we headed? What are the two, three trends that are so big right now that we can see them, but there are two, three trends that are very small but are likely to become very big in the future?
Well, I don't think media industry has ever been consistent, constant, or static, as you may use it. You and I have seen; we did not even have television then. We had only one black and white channel, and then we had multiple coloured channels, and TV screens became larger. OTT appeared, and now it's a combination of everything.
So when a new technology emerges or a new platform emerges, the older ones don't die. They co-exist. For example, if a private plane has come into play, commercial airlines don't die, and trains also keep growing.
We are launching a Vandebharat every week, and buses are also growing. And there is a metro in every city. But motorcycles and cars are not reducing in numbers.
So every platform continues to grow. So there is an emergence of new platforms that is happening. OTT has come in.
It will find its own shape in which it will come out. Right now, it's plethora of apps. These apps will need an aggregator.
Just like TV started off as multiple channels, then aggregators by way of cable and DTH appeared. Similarly, there'll be aggregators that will appear in OTT also, because in the end, a customer has got to find it easy to discover the content that he or she wants to watch.
And we got to make that happen. So that's what it is moving towards. Any industry at any given point in time is in a state of flux because new technologies are emerging and are consolidating and are getting better.
The one thing on everyone's mind the last 12 months is the emergence of artificial intelligence, the growth of generative AI. Give us a sense of how it is impacting your business. And you also talk about how we evolved from means of communication to today using AI in our businesses. Give a sense of how you're using it in your business. What are the implications you see?
So any new technology, I mean, when email came or laptops came, or computers came, or it came, made the tediousness of your business reduced the tediousness of the business.
She was spending less time in searching for things or creating data points and more time connecting them. AI is a leap, a big leap, which will save you a lot of time in the doing part of it and increase the time on the thinking and the connecting part as such. So I see it as a leap.
Just as emails was or computers were or excel was or any of the technologies that came in the past, it's only going to improve the quality of our lives.
We are entering a new year. We're in January 2024. It's a big year because there are elections. It's a big year because there is a Ram Mandir. Also, very importantly, there are big events. The events in the cricketing calendar, there were events in the musical calendar. What are your expectations from 2024?
Nothing different from the previous years. More things will happen more often. That's our life now.
Few things used to happen less often when we were young. And with every passing year, the number of things and the frequency of those things has only increased. And you will have.
And each of those events also became bigger because technology helped us make them appear bigger. So that's exactly what is going to happen in 2024 - there'll be more events, there'll be larger events, and they'll happen more frequently. And that's going to be the story of our lives going forward every year.
How do you keep yourself updated and try and evolve? And the fact that you've been able to evolve your business very entrepreneurially, you've been there for 14 years, you got a lot of things right. How do you make sure you adapt, you thrive? What is your personal leadership mantra? What do you do to be able to spot trends?
So I've reached the conclusion that I don't know everything. I can't know everything and I can't do everything. Therefore, you have a team which is capable, attitudinally right.
You give them inspiring objectives and get out of their way so that when they're busy doing what we've agreed to do, you're not breathing down their necks. Because I've always personally hated people who breathe down my neck when I was delivering when I was younger. So I don't come in their way.
They deliver. And that leaves me with a lot of free time to spot new trends. Go meet customers, check out what's happening so that I can create more inspiring targets for them going forward while I'm sipping coffee.
So it's spending more time with the customers, spotting trends and creating more inspiring agendas for the organisation is where I spend my time.
As much as Batra enjoyed reading the book, he recommends in the BW Businessworld 2024 January first edition, among the 12 books to read in 2024 - Nagpal's book ‘Adapt: To thrive, not just survive’ is one of those books.
