 Here today to talk to us about what her life has taught her and the lessons that she has learned. Please welcome to the stage, Ms. Anu Agha. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. I'd like to thank the Leadership Energies Summit, Asia, for not only just inviting me, but for their extremely warm and gracious hospitality. Thank you very much. I'm going to speak today about the challenges in my life and what it has taught me. Before I talk about the challenges, let me give you a brief background about my childhood. I grew up in Mumbai in an upper middle class family and I have two older brothers. I was good at studies. In fact, I did better academically than my brothers. But not once was I told that I could join the family business whereas my brothers were constantly reminded that they would have to join the family business. And the message which I continuously got was, I have to marry and produce. Since I had good people's skill, it was suggested that I do my post-graduation in social work and being an adaptive person. I agreed. My late husband, Roenton, before our marriage had joined my father as a senior executor. And after my father passed away, he became the chairperson. He was a very charismatic leader and could attract talent. In those days, we couldn't pay the best of salaries but the atmosphere we created, giving freedom, let people come with an idea, run with it and make it successful. It was a unique work culture and in spite of our small size, we enjoyed a very good public image. Life will always throw challenges and it is up to us to convert them into opportunities or feel trapped. Whenever I feel helpless, I imagine that I'm stuck in a corner of a room and that I've forgotten that the entire room is available for me to explore. So I think that's an important lesson. I would like to share three major challenges in my life and how I dealt with them. The first was, when my husband was in his 40s, he had a massive heart attack. And in those days, they didn't do a bypass surgery in India and it was suggested that we go to the UK. And on the second day, he had a stroke. And this brilliant man, forgot who I was, didn't know how to read or write. And this experience taught me three lessons. Doctors had said that my husband would never fully recover. But with determination and grit, Roenton wrote, that's my husband, A-B-C-D, one, two, three, four, for months. And he had this much grip in his right hand. And he told the physiotherapist, I want to tie the shoelace. And she said that will take a month. But tie a big bow on your thigh and after a month you'll be able to tie the shoelace. He tied the bow throughout the night and the next morning he was able to tie the shoelace. So this lesson taught me never to take an expert's opinion as final, but have faith in yourself. As parents, we all give great importance to education because we feel our wealth can disappear but nobody can take away our knowledge. My husband's stroke was a humbling experience. And I realized that one blood clot can take away all your knowledge. So the second lesson was, nothing in life is permanent. The third important lesson was to take care of our health and not to take it for granted. My husband was a workaholic, smoked and was attracted like a magnet to all the wrong foods in the world. And I used to take extra effort to cook things which were good for him. And with his keen sense of humor he said, it's delicious, do cook it when I'm out of town. So one thing is we need to look after our health from a very young age. When we returned from UK after about four months, well-wishers suggested that I joined the family business. At that time it was a private limited company. Though by training I'm a social worker, destiny took me to the corporate world. I worked for five years in the Human Resource Division under a wonderful boss and when he decided to leave, I became the head. Our two children, Mehre and Kurush, studied engineering in the UK and both decided to join the family business as trainee engineers. Mehre married a man called Feroz and we sent them to UK to turn around a small company which we had acquired and which was not doing well. And my promise to my daughter was that when she had her first baby I will be with her for six months. Four years later when Mehre was expecting her baby I went to the UK. In those days HR used to look after software issues, interpersonal relationship and I did not study the hardcore business. And I said to myself, when I come back from the UK I will start learning about hardcore business. After my grandson was born and when I was returning to India after six months my husband was very happy to have me back. And he drove from Pune to Mumbai to receive me but before he could come to the airport he had a massive heart attack and he died. So I was told when I landed instead of seeing him I was given the news that he had died. Two days after his death the board met and decided that I should be the chairperson of the company, executive chairperson. By then Thermax had become a public limited company a year before my husband had died. It was a very difficult period and I was missing my husband terribly and felt very inadequate to assume this responsibility. I kept devaluing myself and kept telling myself the only reason the board has selected me is because the family owns 62% of the shares. I was fortunate that I did not encounter any resistance from within the company or from the outside firm for being selected as the chairperson. People within the company knew me when I was heading the HR and welcomed and supported me. What I had to grapple with were my own self-doubts and putting myself down. Do you think this happens with women more often, besieged with self-doubts? The second challenge I had to face at this stage was that I had a choice. Either to feel helpless and wallow in self-pity, allowing my sense of inadequacy to grow or to hold myself together and take charge of my life. Soon after I took over as the chairperson, the Indian economy went through a downturn and Thermax's performance started deteriorating. Just to give you an idea, our 400 rupees share was quoted at 35 rupees. The terrible results were a wake-up call and we had to do something drastic. I convinced the board that we have to employ a consulting company to help us turn around. There was great resistance from the male executives. They said there is no need. Their consulting company will charge a hefty fee which we will not be able to pay and please have faith when the economy turns we will do well. But I didn't buy that. And I think males find it difficult to ask for help. It comes in the way of the macho image. Am I right? Thermax had to exit from many non-core business which added to our top line but eroded our bottom line. We brought operational efficiency which meant closing down businesses and asking people to leave. My husband and I had defined businesses somewhere we give employment. And in India where there is no safety net, it was very difficult to ask people to leave. We brought in robust performance culture and rekindled the innovators spirit. When we were doing well, we were known for our innovation. But with innovation for everything that works many fail. And when we were not doing well, our appetite to take risk was low. But when we again turned around, we became innovative. We reconstituted the entire board. Perhaps this was done for the first time in India and I had to ask every board member to step down and re-appointed a new board. My daughter and my husband were used to running business divisions but they had to make a choice. Either they remain executives or they become board members. This was a very difficult choice and they in a way resented me for asking them to make this choice. But finally they decided to be non-executive and joined the board. Those were tough and difficult decisions. But thanks to all the people within Thermax and within my family that supported me, Thermax turned around in 2002. I also think that I cannot take the credit for the turnaround for me and my people but also something like called destiny was also in our fever. When Thermax became profitable, the board decided to contribute 2% of our profit for corporate social responsibility. In India, since last year, it has become compulsory that you have to spend 2% on corporate social responsibility. But we started this years before it was made compulsory. I read a striking paragraph with which I agree wholeheartedly. The business of business is to generate growth and profits or else it will die. However, if that is the sole purpose of a business then also it should die for it no longer has a reason for its existence. This is more applicable in a country like India where we are surrounded by poverty and the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. It is imperative that corporates with its financial muscle and managerial resources reach out to the society. And we have to remember that business cannot survive in a society that fails. In 2004, I decided to retire and the board appointed my daughter Meher as the chairperson. She is a chemical engineer from Imperial College, has a good grasp of finance and has imbibed the family values and is far more suited than me to assume this responsibility. I am often asked why did I retire when the company was doing so well and I was in the media glare. I am from the HR background and I talked about and preached about planned succession. I had to walk my talk so that was important and I believe it's better to have a smooth well-planned succession. The second reason was I wanted to change gears while I had the energy and get back to the social work. And the third reason was an ego reason. I wanted to quit when I was very much wanted. I didn't want to stay on till I was 75 and 80 and all around said, when will this own woman get down? If you ask me what was the third and the most difficult challenge in my life, my response would be to learn to accept death and to come to terms with it. Like most people, I imagined that death is something that happens to other people. I was paranoid about death and whenever anything unpleasant would be said, I would find wood and touch it. Years ago when there was no expressway between Mumbai and Pune and my husband and I travelled by car and if the word death was mentioned, I would make him stop the car, find a tree and go and touch it. But today I know that if I carry the entire forest with me, I cannot change my destiny. After the passing away of my husband, I read many books on the subject of death and to some extent it did help. But intellectual inputs relate to the head and have their limitations. What brings about release, healing and transformation is the heart. For years I had heard of a Buddhist meditation program called Vipassana. Has anyone been for it? Put your hands up. Two people? Okay, good. It's a 10-day residential program and you are not allowed to speak, to read or write. And my husband used to tell me, I'd love to see you quiet for 10 days. My husband's death had created a deep void in myself and I decided to attend the meditation program. Since you cannot distract yourself by speaking or reading, you have to go within and discover your personal power. And what do I mean by personal power? Let me give you an example. Many years ago I had a small dog called Bimbo and it used to love biting people. My son-in-law called him a piranha. And one day a little boy of about six called Rehan came to our house and I forgot to chain him. And I said, oh my God, Bimbo went charging and I said, Rehan has had it. But in the middle of the lawn Rehan stood and with great determination said, Bimbo, stop! Bimbo froze. This dog had bitten several adults and here he was frozen because the Rehan showed his personal power. In the corporate world, many executives moan and groan that organizations do not give them positional power and hence they cannot be effective but they forget that they have their personal power and if ever you forget that, remember the Bimbo story. So far I have attended four repassion art programs and daily meditated for an hour. The end purpose of meditation is to make your whole life meditative. I'm very far from that and I'm still very reactive, judgmental and impulsive and yet I have found a lot of peace in my life. Yesterday we were talking over lunch and I was telling Rajiv that I'm still full of shit. The only difference is that shit is not smelling so badly. I realized that it is my choice to focus on my limitations and keep comparing myself with my husband and end up feeling small and inadequate or build up on my own unique strengths. I realized that if I go to an apple tree and say, please give me oranges, it can never give me oranges and I will not be able to enjoy the apples also. So learn what your unique strengths are and develop them. I realize that through repassion art that God is not partial to anyone and all of us sitting in this room will die. It is inevitable. Let me repeat, we don't know if we will have the lunch and hear the afternoon speakers but one thing is sure, all of us at some time are going to die. It's inevitable. What we do not know is when, where and how we will die. It is unpredictable. Death is a social leveler and pays no attention to age, status, wealth, opposition. Beauty, royalty, glitter and glamour could not save Princess Diana. I in my own world realize that with all my wealth and all that I had, I couldn't prolong the breadth of my dear ones even for a minute where death is concerned, I learned that God is not partial to anyone. I also realize the sun rises and sets each day and we don't become sad and say, oh God, why has it gone away? Why has it gone away? We have accepted this process that the sun will rise and set. Similarly, all of us are born and have to leave this earth but since we do not accept this inevitable process, we refer to death as a tragedy. To me, tragedy in life is not the death of a dear one, but the failure to get along with people who mattered to us and the failure to invest in ourselves. Those are tragedy. Once you accept that no living person can escape death, you value the time you have on this earth and life becomes full of meaning. Dealing with death releases a lot of energy and you have the confidence that if you can come to terms with the most difficult phenomena, you are able to face any challenge in life. In 2002, I was a chairperson of Confederation of Indian Industry for Western Region and I spoke up against the killing of over 1,000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat. I was one of the few corporates who spoke up but death had given me this courage. What worse can happen to me? An untested myth is that life is fair and that if we lead a good life, we and our dear ones will be rewarded by being granted a happy and long life and the evil ones will suffer. If life were to be fair, why is it that all of us have eyes, limbs and ears when others are born without? If life were to be fair, why is it that I don't have to struggle for my next meal? In fact, we have obesity and overeat while a large section of humanity has to constantly worry about where the next meal will come. If life were to be fair, why would we be shard with opportunities while others face a blank wall? Once I surrender to the fact that life is not fair, it keeps me from feeling sorry for myself and for others. I have empathy for others but I do not pity them. Fourteen months after my husband passed away, within two weeks I lost three more people who used to stay with me. My mother-in-law, who was 96 and waiting for God to take her away, died. A few days later, my pet dog Bimbo died and my son, who was 25 years old, with his full life ahead of him, died in a car accident. The pain I felt when my husband had died proceeded into insignificance compared to how I felt when my son passed away. As a woman, sorry, by then I had learned that after the death of a dear one, pain is inevitable. You can't escape pain. Your body will ache, your mind will go through turmoil, you can't sleep, you can't eat, there is pain. But suffering is optional. Suffering happens when you keep asking, why did it happen to me? You keep feeling sorry for yourself. Why has no answer and leads to more and more misery? As a woman, I had never lived by myself. Before marriage, I stayed with my family and after marriage, I joined my husband and the in-laws. After the departure of my husband and son, my house was empty and I found it very difficult to be by myself. But today, I value my solitude and love being on my own. But this change was a traumatic process. Most of you in the audience, in fact everybody here is younger than me and you may wonder that we've never had an experience of death and why are you harping on this? Well, from a young age, it's helpful to internalize that loss, separation and failure are built into our lives and at some stage we have to face them. In fact, everything that happens in our lives, every so-called misfortune, every rejection or loss, teaches us very profound learnings provided we allow our lives to be our best teacher. As human beings, we have the ability to convert the struggle to grace or wallow in self-pity. The choice is entirely ours. My son, having lived abroad for seven years, was very concerned about poverty in India and wanted a part of our personal income to be spent for social causes. After his demise, I was looking out for a credible NGO and everyone said go to Mumbai and meet a remarkable young woman called Shaheen who was running an NGO called Akanksha. So I went to Mumbai and I got involved with Akanksha which runs municipal schools between Mumbai and Pune and we have 15 schools on a public-private partnership and my company finances eight of them. About eight years ago, Shaheen decided to start something called Teach for India which is model after Teach for America and I partnered her from day one. In a short span of seven years, Teach for India has spread to seven cities and attracts the best of talent and we work with the underprivileged students in municipal and low-income private schools to bridge the inequity gap in education. I believe you have Teach for Malaysia and Rajiv tells me they are getting an award today and I hope some of you will know more about it and get involved with it. I would like to now share some of the lessons that as a leader I learned. Thermax was an engineering company and without having a degree in engineering and having no knowledge of finance in fact hating finance, how was I able to be the executive chairperson and turn around? Coming from the HR background, I knew my people well and I could empower them. With humility, I often said I don't know and our seat helped without me feeling small or ashamed. I did not feel threatened by senior employees who were experts in their field. In retrospect, I can see that a CEO becomes a leader when she is able to lead her own life with a sense of well-being and before she attempts to lead others. While life will keep on presenting hurdles and challenges, it is important attribute of a leader to face the world with equanimity. As a leader, I have found that I need the courage to listen even though what I hear is not what I like to. I have to peel my layers of prejudice and really listen to voices of dissent. I believe that a leader can always hire skills but the key attribute of a leader is wisdom. What do I mean by wisdom? Your unique and personal learnings from life as it unfolds and accepting its rhythm. In a lighter way, it is said that the intellect tells you that tomato is a fruit but your wisdom does not allow you to mix it up in a fruit salad. A leader has to define success not by mere growth or profit but by the legacy left behind for the future generation. With this definition of success, we need to be sensitive to our environment and to social causes in our community. I believe that we are the custodians of our wealth we create and from our corporate and personal resources, we need to reach out not only by writing checks but by getting involved, not only for ourselves but involving our employees. My family and I avoid getting caught up in the endless cycle of consumerism and extravagance and one-upmanship. We give 30% of our yearly earnings to social causes from our own funds. I would like to share now some of the learnings about life. I think we all need to aim high and challenge ourselves but let not success at work demand a disproportionate price by making us a failure in life because work, though very important, is a subset of our lives. My definition of success is to live an abundant life. Abundance can be defined as rich in experience, full, meaningful, significant, adventurous, lived with a sense of well-being. Well-being comes from being at peace with oneself and in harmony with others through meaningful relationship. What saps our energy is not physical work but negativity, turmoil and tension. From a distance, superfluous success seems to have all the glitter and glamour for which most people crave for. Let me assure you that without investing in yourself you may have all the worldly goodies and yet be a miserable failure in life. Hence, I would like to give you a thought that before you unidimensionally focus on professional success find a meaning and purpose in life. If you are not authentic and keep dancing to the tune of others you may gain fame and acclaim but as my favourite poem, The Man in the Glass says and I'm quoting, you may fool the whole world down the pathway of life and get pats on your back as you pass but your final reward would be heartache and tears if you cheated the man in the glass. We need to learn to express rather than impress. You know, expressing means saying from your heart. Impressing is very concerned. What do others think of what I'm saying? We're so afraid and caught up in what will others say about me. I have realised and have great freedom because I've stopped worrying about what other people think. When I go for my walk, I do my mouth exercises. I look at, do my eye exercise. I do my shoulder exercise and I say to myself, what I'm doing is it harming others? And if the answer is no, I continue doing because it's helping me. What helps in life is cultivating a big sense of humour, having a big dose of humour, not to be able to laugh at jokes but to laugh at myself or not to take myself or my achievements seriously. We need to internalise a profound saying that our stay on this earth is short, our roles dispensable and our impact in consequential. I believe that each of us has two sides within us, the extraordinary and the ordinary. Tell me, how many of you here are extraordinary? Put up your hands. Sad that so many of you are just ordinary. Actually, it's much easier to define ourselves as ordinary because then I can indulge myself and say, I'm just an ordinary person. Don't expect much from me and learn to live with my mediocrity. But if you accept that you are extraordinary, then you have to push yourself and give out your best. And the best example I can think of is Gandhi ji. He was ordinary and in South Africa, he discovered his extraordinaryness and we know what he did for our country. When I'm taking life easy, I need to remind myself that I'm extraordinary. And when I'm full of myself and my achievements and have a bloated ego, I need to remind myself I'm pretty ordinary. So a balance between these two is very important. I would like to end with my favorite story from Vipassana called Swimology. There was a young professor who went on a long voyage and being a professor, he took with him stacks and stacks of books. And there was an old sailor who was illiterate and he said to the professor, on this long voyage, will you please teach me something? So professor said, of course I'd love to. So the first day the sailor comes and professor asks him, do you know what geology is? Never heard that word. You live on this earth and you don't know geology. 25% of your life is over. So the poor sailor feels dejected and goes to his room. The second day he comes for his lessons and the professor says, do you know what oceanography is? He says oceanography, never heard of it. You are a sailor, you don't know anything about oceanography. 50% of your life is over. Third day, do you know what meteorology? Never heard of you? 75% of your life is over. Fourth day the sailor comes running and says professor, professor, do you know swimology? He says no, what's that? He says swimming, swimming. The ship is sinking and 100% of your life is over. So before we clutter our heads with all the technologies and lodges, learn the art of living which is swimology. Thank you very much.