 Vijay Govindarajan (Photo by Rose
McNulty)
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Vijay Govindarajan grew up in a small town in India, “in conditions that
would never have predicted what I’m doing today,” he observes. “I did my
schooling in my native tongue, not in English. Our school didn’t have benches
or chairs.” He traces his aspirations and his wider view of the world to his
grandfather, who “hammered home the message that education was the key. He had
tremendous ambition for me.”
Some of Govindarajan’s thoughts on business—and life:
“As individuals we must constantly renew ourselves. That’s how we remain
relevant. If you don’t change, you die intellectually. For most people,
particularly successful leaders, it’s very difficult to change. They assume
that the actions that led to their success must be correct and therefore they
tend to repeat the past.
“When I meet with companies I ask them to put everything they’re doing into
three boxes. Box one is managing the present. Box two is selectively forgetting
the past, and box three is creating the future. Companies tend to over-focus on
box one but boxes two and three are the keys to long-term success. My simple
message is that the future is now.
“My philosophy comes from the Hindu way of life, it’s called planned
opportunism. Opportunism is all about chance. While chance events determine
fundamental changes that come about in our lives, how we respond to these
chance events is anything but chance. This is where the “planned” part comes
in. Planning requires self-knowledge, understanding who you are, what your
passion is, what you want to be in life. Once you understand yourself, you’re
more confident about capitalizing on chance events. While the future is
unknowable—the planning part, building the right capabilities for the
future—these are in our hands.”
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