Chapter 5 - Innovation
Day 8
I was told the theme of this conference is Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Social Business'. Just yesterday I was at the Economic Times Awards and I happened to listen to two professors from Harvard.
They listed about eight points in the presentation, explaining how a brewery in South Africa has excelled, then how other companies around the world have excelled.
And after that, they listed another 7 items, and I turned around to Prof RK Pachauri who was sitting next to me, and I said to him, "We already do these things."
What were those things? They said, "Bring in team work, bring out a commitment in people, a work and life balance moderating the amount of stress in their lives so that they do not burn out. Encourage the concept of participation among people."
Many among the audience
there, the successful businessmen, I tell you, some of them have not even completed their educational degree, but they have done very well in India.
So, what is the secret behind their success story? How did they make it? All that the Harvard professors were saying, these achievers sitting in the audience had already implemented in their businesses.
It is interesting to know. The first step to success is innovation. See, when innovation is a natural quality, personality trait in you, it comes up in every aspect of your life.
Innovation should be a part of your behaviour too, not just your profession. We have a rural development programme and within that programme, we have volunteers who come up with some really innovative concepts.
Sometimes even in as simple a task as making small carry bags. They will come up with something creative, going beyond the common prototype.
Once when I was in America, when we had about 500 volunteers who had assembled for a satsang, I told them, “Look, creativity is a part of divinity. Now you have to invoke that dvinity inside you”.
You have two months time. You have to do something creative." And everyone came up with a different project, and each one was very creative.
One person came up with 'ice-cream made without eggs, another with ice-cream without chemicals and there were a host of other innovative consumer products on display.
Then there was one lady - she was 60 years old - she did project on making handkerchiefs. She enumerated 17 points to her credit saying how her handkerchief was the best in the world.
And everybody was laughing and exclaiming about how someone could be so creative in things like making a handkerchief, I mean who would have thought of that?
So you see, innovation has to ooze from our behaviour. When you go home from work in the evening, if you like making a sandwich do not make the same sandwich every day.
Declare the next week a week of innovation, do something new. I sometimes go into the kitchen to cook but I never cook the same meal. It is always an experiment.
Ofcourse, there is a risk. Innovation goes hand in hand with risk. Sometimes it can turn out well, at other times, things may not go so successfully.
Most of the times, it turns out wonderful. If you use your intuition, your innovation will succeed almost every time and brings you immense satisfaction.
So, innovation has to become a part of our everyday life, whether it is to do with music, or any form of art, or cooking, or even in the way you conduct the meeting at your workplace.
It does not always have to be
the same thing. Once I was a chief guest at a library meeting in Jaipur. I thought the organiser was quite tired.
The general secretary of that organising committee was going in and out of the room. He never heard the talk. When it came to offering a vote of thanks, he wanted to come and garland me.
I jumped right in and took the garland from him and said, “Look, he worked so hard and he has sacrificed even listening or sitting and meditating”.
“He needs all the congratulations and attention of people because he has sacrificed his participation at the cost of completing all the arrangements”.
He was shocked. My point is, you need to bring in certain changes, create some dynamism in your everyday life and that is a true sign of being a lively human being.
We are not machines, we do not have to work in a mechanical manner. We need to be innovative. And the innovation should be very personal, very unique to each individual.
As I said earlier, there are two aspects to innovation - taking a risk and then playing safe. You borrow a sum of 10 lakhs from your father and say, "I am going to be innovative,"
And then you just spend all that money and come up with nothing. That is not okay. So you have to play safe. Entrepreneurship must, necessarily, combine risk and safety.
