BOOK REVIEW

“CRASH –
Lessons from the Entry and Exit of CEOs” by R. Gopalakrishnan

Mr. R.
Gopalakrishnan is a well-known corporate leader, management author and adviser
who needs no introduction. However, a few words about him will be useful to the
young reader.

He is the
author of best-selling books such as The Case of the Bonsai Manager, When
the Penny Drops: Learning What’s Not Taught and A Biography of Innovations:
From Birth to Maturity.

Interestingly,
Mr. Gopalakrishnan
studied physics at the University of Kolkata and Engineering at IIT Kharagpur.
He also completed an Advanced Management Programme at Harvard Business School.
Apart from serving as Chairman of Unilever Arabia, M.D. of Brooke Bond Lipton
and Vice-Chairman of Hindustan Lever, he has been Executive Director of Tata
Sons and several Tata group companies. At present he is Corporate Adviser, the
Mindworks, and is actively engaged in both instructional and inspirational
speaking.

While many
people talk about the path to the top of organisations, very few are honest
about how difficult it is to stay at that position. Mr. Gopalakrishnan
analyses the ‘software’ challenges which leaders confront every day and shares
the insights he has gained while developing, managing, investing in and
supervising a variety of companies. He points out that great leaders continue
to excel not just because of their skills and intelligence, but also by
connecting with others using emotional competencies like empathy and
self-awareness.

The book is
divided into two parts. In Part One, which has five chapters, the author
explores some pertinent questions: Is company performance a surrogate for
leadership and CEO performance? If a company falters, is it related purely to
the CEO’s performance? Conversely, if a company does well, does it redound to
the credit of the leader?

Mr.
Gopalakrishnan
observes that to be successful, a CEO requires cognitive intelligence as well
as intuitive emotional intelligence – which means that he or she must possess a
responsive sense of empathy for the views of various stakeholders. In his
experience, once a person gets into a leadership role, there are forces that
cause his or her emotional intelligence or sense of empathy to shrink. This
poses a real and hidden challenge to the leader, a challenge for which he or
she is unprepared. The power of a leader ‘damages’ his / her brain. This damage
cannot be totally avoided, but its pernicious effects can be mitigated.

He then goes on
to examine why power causes this kind of brain damage. He asks: What brings out
the best in a person? Perhaps a need to challenge one’s capability? He opines:
When leaders feel that their intelligence is being tested rather than being merely
incentivised through money, their motivation is triggered. Money helps, but
ambition is aroused by internal drives and challenges. This is what people in
leadership positions experience when they assume a bigger responsibility.

The author
further observes that power causes a significant behavioural change in leaders.
Leaders tend to be self assured; but they need to be so if they have to lead
their people; however, the line that divides self-assuredness and
over-confidence is a thin one. The leader’s confidence can be rooted in logic
and data, or it can be rooted in feelings and emotions. If his / her confidence
is based on the best available data, then the leader comes across as authentic.
This is a positive form of self-confidence. If the leader’s confidence is not
data-based, he / she may seem impetuous or someone who is not rooted in
reality. This is a negative form of self-confidence.

How and why
does power damage the leader’s brain? What happens in cases of behavioural
change? Does the person change because of power, or because of being placed in
a radically different context? Or is it that the people around view him / her
through a separate set of lenses? The author puts it simply, and shorn of
jargon – that leaders loose a bit of their emotional capacities, those very
emotional capacities that were essential to their rise. That holding power
changes the way they process their world. They became impulsive, less
risk-aware and less adept at seeing things from other people’s perspective. In
other words, power blinds the leader to others’ perspectives, power turns the
leader into an abstract thinker, power leads to unrealistic optimism about
goals and power leads to the view of the world in terms of goals already set.

Mr.
Gopalakrishnan concludes
that power intoxicates and it impairs human judgement: in short, the
acquisition of power causes ‘brain damage’. Every leader, whether in politics,
in society or business, is vulnerable to this danger. Several leaders learn to
cope with the inevitable threats and dangers, but many fail. They become
victims of the affliction.

Thus, in Part
One of the book the author examines the above questions and issues on the basis
of his extensive study of the available literature on the subject, and his long
years in business in leadership positions.

Part Two of the
book, divided into 15 chapters, tells similar stories of various well-known
business leaders, such as Carly Fiorina at HP; Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase;
Vikram Pandit at Citigroup; John R. Walter at AT&T; Lee Iacocca and Mark
Fields at Ford Motors; Michael Ovitz at Walt Disney Company; G. Richard Thoman
at Xerox; Jim Donald at Starbucks; Travis Kalanick at Uber; Chris Viehbacher at
Sanofi; Ramesh Sarin at Voltas India; Klaus Kleinfeld at Arconic; Anshu Jain at
Deutsche Bank; and Vishal Sikka at Infosys.

In the
Epilogue, the author quotes Thomas Middelhoff, a top-notch, famous executive in
Germany, CEO of the German media giant Bertelsmann, later found guilty of
misusing corporate funds and sentenced to three years in jail on charges of
embezzlement and related tax frauds. After his release from jail and in an
interview to Financial Times in May, 2018 he said, “I was out of touch
with reality and thought that certain rules did not apply to me.

Ability brings
you to the top, but character keeps you there”. He admitted that a key flaw in
his character was constantly craving public attention and affirmation. Over the
years, he felt that he had been carried away by narcissism and hedonism.

The book is
based on the author’s extensive study and research on the subject, which is
borne out by the copious notes at the end of the book running into about 30
pages wherein he has given references to all his sources.

Filled with
anecdotes and analysis of various situations CEOs may find themselves in, and
unconventional advice to help them, Crash: Lessons from the Entry and Exit
of CEOs is for veteran leaders as well as for those who aspire to start
their own ventures. The book is useful not only to CEOs and other senior
management executives, but also to every person who is running even a small or
medium-sized organisation.