Anand Mahindra: The Rebel Capitalist
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Back with Anand Mahindra. I’m a few days late but bear with me. I’ve barely been sleeping :D
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Issue 4
Those who understand time, understand the world
Two decades after Independence, in our school, when we finished our exam papers, the answer books would be collected and shipped back to England for correction. Colonialism shackles the mind. What was the message being sent to a 16-year-old? That we were not even good enough to correct your own papers? When I gave a talk in Silicon Valley a decade or so ago, it just so happened that there was one of my classmates from school sitting in the audience in California. And a year later he emailed me and he says, one of the British academic testing authorities had decided to outsource their correction papers to India and I thought to myself, ‘the world moves in a full circle, your time will come.’
Existentialism: Sartre and Camus
I was a sort of rebel when I was growing up, I tended to question everything. I was a voracious reader. I started reading the western philosophers. I read about existentialism, which questions life itself. And I remember the age of 16, asking myself, what the purpose of everything was. I was born into a business family. So ironically, it seemed as if my life had been already plotted out for me. So what I was rebelling against was the concept of some other person, even though they might be my parents, plotting out my cause for me. And I did not want to follow what seemed like a path charted out by somebody else. When I was in college, I almost joined the Communist Party of India because I was rebelling against all the fixed coordinates in my life that had been handed to me. I obviously wanted to create my own canvas. I was very fond of art, and cinema. And so when I went to Harvard College, I found the liberal arts system liberating. They give you four years to play around in a sandbox and discover what you might want to do. And so I majored in cinema and photography. Interestingly, my student thesis film did very well and I made a film on the Kumbh Mela. I had made my point.
The Art of Thinking
I've usually tried to make sure there's a relatively good disconnect in time, between thought and my words so that I have time to think about it
Your Science Denial is my Opportunity
And I say to governments, please, don't fight climate change. Don't invest in innovative technology. Let India do it. Let us get ahead of the game. And then you come in after we've put ourselves right on the top. Stay out of the game. Keep arguing with a 16-year-old girl. Everything our group has done in sustainability has actually made money and the businesses we've started in the last five years are amongst the fastest growing. Why are we even wasting time on arguments?
The Empire that Lee Kuan Yew built
Singapore went out and got a Global Advisory Council of a diverse set of people ranging from Larry Fink and others. They would gather us once a year in Singapore, and the council was led by the deputy prime minister. And I remember it looked like another talkfest and networking event. When I went back the next year, they began the meeting by telling us, ‘you said this last year, and this is what we've done about it.’ What I would do, therefore, is get a Global Advisory Council to pick on the best brains in the world, get them to come here (India) once a year, and make them feel that they're being heard and their ideas are being acted upon.
Great Men care about Legacy
When we were negotiating to acquire Pininfarina, I had this one seminal lunch with Paolo. There were other suitors for the company but I told Paolo that the reason for us to invest in Pininfarina was that we believed that it was important to fulfill the dream of his grandfather, who spent his entire life designing vehicles for other people. But somewhere inside himself, he had a dream that like his friend, Enzo Ferrari, he wanted his name on the car. And obviously, it is a very emotional moment today because I looked out for him and his mother is here.
The Woodstock generation to the Instagram generation
I grew up in a generation of Woodstock. And people from my generation missed the fact that young people didn't seem to have the kind of search for identity that we went through. They weren't questioning things. There weren't those coffee room conversations, questioning the world: existentialism, Sartre Camus, where's all that gone? It is all Instagram now. And the protests in New York gave me hope. Because it felt like the old days, it felt like people, young people were beginning to question again. And in America more than anywhere else, that generation is what brought an end to the war. So I'm optimistic because if these young people are going to become anything like that generation was, you're going to see change.
What’s stupid to most is obvious to some
One of the things trending today is this obsession with the millennial mind. Now maybe I'm a little biased, I'm over 60. But my view is, what about the aspirations of the aged population? By the year 2050, the population over 60 years is going to double from 12% to 22% and 80% of that population is going to be in low and middle-income countries. In fact, by next year, there will be more people over the age of 60, than five-year-old kids and below. So what about them? There's a huge opportunity there, just to pull something out of my head for what I call distributed leisure. If you look at older people, I don't want to go to Disney World anymore. I don't want to travel. Cities are congested. What about creating distributed entertainment spaces that are compact and cater to people like me? In India, one of the biggest selling products is something that looks like an old radio from the 60s and spews out Lata Mangeshkar tunes. And in my own group, we have revived a brand called the Jawa motorcycle, which used to be a legendary bike in the 70s. And today we are struggling to meet a waiting list that is a year long.
Change comes faster than we think
For too many years, we as a country (India) have suffered from a poverty of aspirations, not just poverty of income. There's that wonderful picture that's now a cliche about New York in 1901, where you could only see horses on the street. And then by 1914, all you could see were cars. The horse carriage industry was a substantial industry. People think of it as only horses. It was a huge ecosystem, involving stable boys, whips, tracks, carriage makers, all of that was part of an ecosystem and it vanished in 10 years. So if we look at that, this is not the first time in history that we could see a landscape that will change that dramatically.
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The next issue comes on 6th Nov - We go into the intellectual software of Tim Cook. I think there’s far too little documentation on his brain given he runs the most valuable company in the world. Excited to share it with you in 2 weeks.
- Abhishek