 Welcome to Leaders Room. My name is Peter Webb. I'm a Director of Research and Curriculum here at the EECLIF Leadership and Governance Centre. It's my great delight to welcome Shukanth Bollah, a recipient of the Ilea Award for 2016. Thank you very much for joining us here today. Thank you, Professor. I'd like to ask, if I may, a little bit about how you developed the energy to continue to do what you did. It's part of the story of your life, but your life has a lot of energy and a lot of challenges behind it. How did you get the energy to overcome those challenges? First of all, I think I don't view challenges as challenges or problems. I see set of challenges as set of solutions. So that is why whenever someone comes to me and asks, how do you overcome all these challenges? I keep telling them, look boss, I see a potential opportunity to a potential challenge. So therefore, I'm not evidently overcoming it, but I'm trying to cross over and then achieve whatever I want in life. So I also think, see, in general, I definitely feel we as human beings cannot achieve something by sitting in the lap of luxury. In fact, as you might know, research always shows our human brains are hardwired to produce our best efforts, only when there is hardship. And I do think we can definitely create hardship for all of us by setting up higher goals. And people often wonder, how can we set higher goals and how can we achieve them? We can. And if our response to challenges is to say bring it on, I'm sure the world will conspire to make our ideas successful. And this is a sort of energy I as a leader has from the beginning. Maybe it has come from the birth or maybe as people believe, when God shuts down the external vision, he might have opened up the internal vision for me to aim and change the world to create a better future for all of us. Beautiful. So your personal leadership energy, how would you describe your personal leadership energy in business? Energy here, I'm sure we are not talking about the Ken America potential energy here because leadership energy is not either of those two. It's the energy that keeps on increasing every day, unlike the real energy that discharges when we utilize it. The leadership energy in my own sense keeps on increasing whenever you see a problem around you. Because this energy is unlike the regular energy is not billed by the power or by the work or the electricity or whatever. It is billed by problems around us. So we as children or we as teenagers or we as adults face several challenges in life and only few of us will mind to think about the problems that we are facing. And even fewer of us who will bother, who care or even bother to work on these challenges and those less than 0.1% of those human beings can become leaders. And I'm happy to be one among those elite people. Whenever I see a problem around me rather than moving away from it, I always try and solve it because as Gandhi always said, we are the problem, we are the solution and we are the change that we are waiting for. So I want to be the change that I want to see in the future. So personally whenever I faced problems in education, I faced several challenges in work, I faced several challenges in life, I faced several challenges as stigma. So whenever someone comes up to me and say you can't do this, I climb over his head and proceed to the next level to prove that I can do it. Because I believe if you look at the ground, it's always filled with people who say no because but as you go higher, you keep on meeting people who say yes and that's what they see and perceive the world. And that is the group of people I want to work with and I want to partner with to increase my personal leadership energy to create better future for India and for the world at large. That's wonderful. And I wonder how does that inform your leadership style today when you're in business now? How would you describe the way you conduct yourself as a leader for your own business? I'm a hardcore cutthroat business CEO today, unlike a social leader, which is also there because I have multi-split personality where you might say, what is this shit? But I conduct myself as that way only because half of me or rather if you call it as your two eyes, one of the part of myself is the social impact and one of the other side of the equation of me is the commercial aspect of the business. Because I believe in order to bring long-term sustainable change, you cannot do charity. Of course you can do charity, there's nothing wrong with it, but that might or might not be sustainable and that might be good in the shorter term. But when you want to have a fundamental change that you want to create for the rest of the world and for the rest of the generation, I don't think charity works that way. So only the model of social entrepreneurship works and is sustainable. So it was initially very hard and challenging for me to marry these two approaches together to create a novel and scaling solution for the business that we are in today. So it was even harder for us because our social motto and mission is to create employment opportunities for the uneducated and unskilled youth disabled or differently abled youth of India and also the underprivileged people of India. Because let me tell you a little background. Ever since when I was born, people look like I came from the other planet as an alien because I was totally blind and I remember this proverb now, the famous idiom, the atom, apple in the eye. So including my parents, everybody in my community have never seen an apple because we don't get them in South India or they have never seen the term apple in the eye. So because it anyway doesn't matter much for them because they have never seen an apple nor I had an eye. So but those and everybody advised my parents to kind of move away from me and get rid of me or whatever. But I think I was lucky enough because my parents did not listen to the ignorant comments and whatnot. So the reason for sharing this is even today after 24 years millions of parents across the world do listen to the ignorant comments of the other people and smother or get away from disabled kids and that's how the separation begins from their birth. And even at school, even at workplaces, the isolation continues. So most people do not send them to schools and most disabled people are not even qualified to attend mainstream schooling. So the education for the challenged people is heavily kind of secluded and run by the voluntary organizations in the country. And these guys train in life skills and not job skills. Therefore when they approach their teenage level or youth age, most of these people are unqualified to work in the corporate setting due to lack of education and even in the blue collared sector because they lack the skills. And more importantly the corporate houses and the companies do not entertain these people because they think these people are simply idiots. So this is the situation even today. So four years ago we really were thinking how could we solve this problem that nobody have ever tried to solve it in the country. And we went on and told corporates and inspired corporates to hire disabled people but nobody was willing to do that because one these people are not again skilled enough. Two, the corporate houses doesn't know how to train these people and accommodate these people in their work culture. So that is preventing from about 100 million from about 10 to 15 crore of the Indian population. That's about 10 to 15% of the 1.3 billion people today. That's a huge chunk of people who does not have jobs. Imagine if we kind of bring these people into the economy from out of the economy, I'm sure there will be a GDP increase of more than 1%. So that is the big goal that we had in front of us three years ago. It is not a simple goal. And it was very hard taking these people, training them and putting them on to mainstream work. So everybody including big guys simply thought it's a big headache of taking these people and turning them and empowering them into productive workforce or productive citizens of the economy. Today people shut their mouths because we have proven that. We managed successfully these social enterprise model marrying the impact versus the marrying the commercial aspect. We were fortunate enough to attract top angels of India including Sri Ratan Tata himself interested in the company which is growing at 20% a month since inception till today. Today we are a company valued at 100 crores. That's about a billion Indian rupees doing about 0.3 billion INR turnover annually. Hiring about 500 people out of which 50% of them are disabled. Disabled you might think not hearing impaired or physically impaired. We take all kinds of disabled people including mentally challenged, artistic, down syndrome and physical, visual, speech and hearing what not. Whoever comes to us we screen them and provides appropriate work roles in our company and so far over the last four years we have zero attrition rate, we have zero accident rate among people with disabilities and we also had on an average we have a higher wage level among disabled employees when you compare to able-bodied workers. This proves given an opportunity anybody can thrive irrespective of their physical or mental obstacles and this is what I as a leader wanted to prove to the mainstream world and tell people look if we can break our stigma levels and if we can break our perceptions and try and open our eyes to see the world in a different way there are opportunities all over the place and this is what I have been proving and I want to prove to the entire world as we go on and achieve greater things with our company because our journey has just begun and we have miles to walk before we kind of land that big goal out. That's very good and I'm curious going back to an earlier comment of yours about how you reconcile the commercial imperative of business with the social sustainability that you want to achieve. I think as a businessman I don't even worry about the social aspect because for example we spend our money and we spend our energy in bringing these disabled people into our ecosystem and putting them at the workplace. Once we put them we forget that they are disabled because they give us best output equal to any of their peers and any of their buddies. So we really don't have to worry too much about their output once we train them at the workplace in the beginning. When you come to our commercial aspect we operate like a traditional cutthroat commercial enterprise from the outside and we don't even utilize a concept of our social mission wherever we pitch our investors pitch our products and pitch our stakeholders as well because we make products that people are proud of using using renewable sources of energies utilizing these disabled people who are so-called as useless in the beginning. So I as a CEO care only three aspects price quality and the viability of the product. So that is why we have no issues in marketing or distributing or selling our product irrespective of our social mission back of our mind. So we are traditionally a regular enterprise like any other company like the Amazon or like the Google or like any other company that you can think of. But I assure you in India today nobody is growing at 20 percent as we are growing typically in an unorganized heavily fragmented packaging segment in India which is even harder because when we came into business this industry was heavily fragmented, heavily boutique, seasonalized and marginally with mom and pop units. So it was very difficult for us in consolidating all these guys. So we had to consider various business models. First of all the reason why we came into this packaging field is that it is wide open. Like the Dixie or Solo in the United States there is no such company in India. So we wanted to be that Dixie or Solo Cup of India in making packaging and disposable products for the international market. So we worked on various aspects. Do we want to kill these mom and pop units or do we want to make them all stakeholders? That was our first question that we pounded upon and we decided rather than creating enemies we wanted to create friends in the business. So rather than pulling them out of the business we brought them all these cottage industries or cottage level players under our big umbrella. So over the last four years we have worked with over 100 cottage units across the country in supplying them all required ingredients of the product that they want to manufacture, giving them technical know how, suitable infrastructure, arranging them suitable small scale financing under our reputation and what not. So this actually enabled us to expand our operations country wide faster than we expected because if we in turn tried to pull them out of these, all these guys out of the business they would have retaliated like India retaliated last time so we didn't want them to retaliate against us. Instead we wanted to bring them up along with our journey. And the other concept was we have established ourselves as a consolidated player in not only providing essential raw materials to commercial industries, cottage industries but also finished product player which caters to corporate houses, international markets and what not. So this also enabled us to sustain our growth and to improve our growth as we continued our journey for the last four years. And the road ahead is not simple but it's not challenging. It's equal because we see challenges as opportunities as we go on. That's wonderful. I wonder if you have any advice for those young people like yourself who might be thinking of going down the same path of social entrepreneurship who might be wanting to do something similar. What advice would you give them? First of all social entrepreneurship is tough. It's not that easy. The word entrepreneur itself is hard to dream about because we need to sacrifice a lot of things. Because people don't understand why we want to do things differently. Why we put ourselves through a grinder doing things so differently than everybody around us who is like taking up nine to five jobs. Even today if you ask my father what he wants to do, he would happily smile and say I want him to get married to a beautiful girl and get a government job. But you know how it is right? Even you are entrepreneur. So the thought itself is hard to digest. And we can't work for someone. Instead we want to create our craft, our own future. That itself is challenging. So to overcome that we as entrepreneurs need stable mind, clarity of thought and the willingness to sacrifice all your luxury things. As I mentioned earlier it's always the hardship that prevails in the end. Hardship is what will give us that destination or goal reaching point. So it's not the end of the world when we face challenges. That means it's the new world is waiting for us next door. So we have to kind of go and figure that out where it is. As Helen Keller rightly pointed out whenever the door is closed somewhere the window will be open. But so long we look at the only closed door but we tend to not notice the open window. As long as we can notice the open window and try to figure out a way to reach our ultimate goal I think that's when we really can achieve whatever we want in life. Especially in this social entrepreneurship we need lots and lots of persistence, lots and lots of willpower because social entrepreneurs are considered stupid. The concept itself is pretty new to the world. Some people think it's fake, some people think it's going to be charity. All these banks will think it's unfundable model and your commercial investors also think it's unfundable model because they think they can't get 10x or 20x of their return. And philanthropists think it's unfundable because it's not a charity. It's a commercial aspect involved in it. So we as social entrepreneurs fall into a pothole. So we have to figure out a way to come out of this pothole and attract like-minded impact investors who are very less in numbers. You can count them on your fingertips across the globe. So as long as you manage to catch these impact investors who invest for impact and also for return that's when the tipping point will come to your business or to your mission. And I was very glad to find those kind of people in my earlier days of my journey as an entrepreneur and that is how I never looked back. And now everybody is looking at even the commercial venture funds and PE fund guys, every one of them are looking at us as a successful social impact model that has been proven in the country. I think you're talking about a new form of economic model actually. Oh yeah, actually. You're 100% right. It's a new form of economic model because you're not only making money for yourself and not only making money for your employees, you're making money for your investors as well and also at large for the entire globe because you're creating this change that will stay forever. So you're clubbing the social change versus the economic change. So it's a new economic transformation. That's wonderful. And just to conclude, I'd like to say how delightful it is to have somebody who was blind at birth and yet has such foresight and such ability to see through challenges that actually encourage the rest of us who apparently are able-bodied. Thank you very much Fiora. I think even people kind of look at that quite a lot now. I feel being blind and doesn't matter what you do now because it's hard to kind of compare a normal man doing the same thing versus a blind man. But I don't see a difference at all here because I might be blind externally, but I'm not blind internally right, but I was made blind by the perceptions of the people and not by the physical nature of it because having no eyesight doesn't prevent me at all in doing whatever I want to do to create my own future because to conclude, let me tell you a leader is someone who creates, who removes poverty from people by showing at most compassion because I believe poverty doesn't come from due to lack of money. It comes from due to lack of compassion for other people and a leader is someone who removes poverty from people by removing the loneliness and the leader is someone who does something good for other people, but we don't realize that in turn benefits us at the first place. Just it has happened in my career. So I think we all have to have this positive leadership energy to lit up the people who are living due to lack of this particular energy that is not evidently given by our parents. So we have to inculcate this and then that is when this big bold change is possible. Thank you so much for your inspiration. Thank you for joining us here at Leader's Room. We hope that you've been similarly inspired and that you receive foresight from this presentation. Thank you.