THE POWER OF PURPOSE

Find your purpose, revisit your goals, exhorted Hon. Rtn. Anand Mahindra in his speech last Tuesday

Businessman and humanitarian extraordinaire, Anand Mahindra, Honorary Member of the Rotary Club of Bombay, revived the art of shaking things up in his talk to fellow Rotarians last Tuesday. His talk, on The Power of Purpose, could not have been more persuasive.

Addressing his listeners, Anand said, “Imagine that you work for a company that has been bought by a competitor but it has been bought out for only one purpose: to liquidate your company because they want to eliminate competition. However, they are going to pay everyone in your company, the net present value of your entire earnings during your
lifetime.

“So, you have no reason, economically, to regret the liquidation of your company. And here is where you need to ask
yourself, what would you still miss about going to that company? If you find that, you have found your purpose.”

This is how Anand Mahindra transmitted his understanding of core purpose: a search for meaning, for which one must
go back to the future! Go back to your goals at the foundation of your company. Speaking for himself, Anand said, the
goal of the company was that India is second to none, the founders of our nation and of our company passionately
believe this. We will prove them right by believing in ourselves and taking Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd. worldwide for the quality of its product and services. This is the purpose of Mahindra and Mahindra.

He added: “The road is the strategy, the milestones are your mission, keep moving to the next milestone, the North
Star are the values which make sure that you will not take short-cuts. The rainbow, you may not reach it, but that is your core purpose. You don’t say I will achieve my core purpose in a set frame. It is always in front of you!”

Anand remembered how an advertiser had told him, a while back, “All round the world there is trust deficit for large companies”. So, said Anand, it is important to leverage and harness the power of purpose to have a global company. To this, the advertiser said, “Change your entire purpose and go global.”

People want a company with purpose, felt Anand, where, if they buy product, they also buy meaning. This led him to challenge conventional thinking to enable people to rise. This is about the three pillars: Accepting no limits, thinking innovatively and driving positive change. The core purpose gets the deserved fruits over years. The magic of purpose is seen when people come to work to drive a positive change, to make a difference and not merely for money.

In the latter half of the meeting, Anand involved Rotarians in the thought process. The first question he put to them was: “Why do we do what we do?” The first person to answer it, rather beautifully, was PP Rtn Shailesh Haribhakti. In the words of J. Krishnamurthy, he said, “You are born! Now live life!”, adding, “The motivation for me comes from, if something you lead can eliminate the issue that you don’t like. Life, it is going to end. Live fully in the moment until death comes. Hopefully the tradition will continue or they will start a new initiative.”

Rtn. Sabira Merchant, “It is a purposedriven life. I want to do something because I don’t want to rest and I want to fulfil the goals that the Lord has set me up to do.”

Visiting Rotarian Eugene Medina was not spared either. Eugene answered: “Meaning matters. Death doesn’t matter, what you do matters, meaning lives on. We are looking at immortality. If you have no purpose; you are dead.”

The next question tossed was: “If you weren’t doing what you are doing; what else you would be doing?” Rtn. Vinay Sanghi said: “What I do makes me happy, so I am not sure if I would do anything else.”

Rtn. Zinia Lawyer: “Immortality, either you write a book or you procreate. Leave a better world for your children.”
Rtn. Camellia Panjabi: “Already into the second phase of life: promoting regional food. Write a book to help other women learn from my experiences.”

The last person that Anand posed a question to was his dentist, PP. Rtn. (Dr.) Zerxis Umrigar, asking him: “Which day
are you the happiest?”

Zerxis replied with a counter question: “Why would one want to focus only on one’s own life?”

Anand confidently replied: “I knew what you were going to say and that’s why I brought with me this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, which effectively paraphrases what you just said: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Anand Mahindra concluded by thanking the Rotary Club for making him part of a family whose slogan of “Service above
Self” recognises the power of purpose since the Club’s very inception.