<div><strong><em>By Subroto Chattopadhyay</em></strong></div><div> </div><div>Teacher’s have been the fulcrum of Indian civilisation and have been bestowed the most respected status in our hierarchy over centuries. </div><div> </div><div>A nuanced and sophisticated descriptor of a teacher is Acharya, and by some definition, the moral compass of an Acharya’s teaching is his or her conduct. </div><div> </div><div>On the other hand, it is this continuous tradition of Guru-Shishya relationship and its “parampara”, which is the tradition, that has been the foundation of Indian education. The great Upanishads, which roughly means “sitting down near”, implies that a Shishya sits near a Guru to receive knowledge.</div><div> </div><div>This story is about an Acharya, Professor Labdhipat Raj Bhandari aka Labdhi Bhandari (LRB), who graduated from IIM-A in 1965, joined Hindustan Lever in 1967, obtained his Ph.D from Columbia University in 1972 and then taught in IIM-A till 1988. His chosen area of specialisation was marketing.</div><div> </div><div>LRB went to a government high school in Sojat in the Pali district of Rajasthan — it was a hindi medium school — and then joined the newly formed University of Jodhpur for his undergraduate programme.</div><div> </div><div>In hindsight, it was perhaps his environment and the surroundings that made him sensitive to the realities of smaller towns and villages and their citizens, their aspirations, their responses to various stimuli and their behaviour as consumers. This made his perspective very different from marketers who were city-bred and relied on secondary data and an occasional upcountry tour to understand these markets.</div><div> </div><div>AT IIM-A, he faced, by his own admission, familiar challenges due to his lack of fluency in English and his lack of advanced numeric skills due to his background in humanities. To put it in perspective, he found reading cases in English difficult, since Hindi was the medium in his school. His scholastic track record was outstanding and he believed that bright guys need to work hard, contrary to the popular belief that smart guys don’t need to work hard, instead they work smart. His passion to overcome these hurdles is inspirational. He graduated from IIM-A with great grades and evidence that he had the makings of an astute marketing professional.</div><div> </div><div>His first, and only job in the corporate world, was with Hindustan Lever, and he went through the rigorous paces in product management and cut his teeth on significant brands of the day like Surf and attendant innovations which brought him to the notice of David Webb the marketing director. It was Webb who hand picked LRB to the marketing research function which was being beefed up. His contemporaries like Hrishikesh Bhattacharya (who happened to be my first Marketing Manager a few years later in Brooke Bond) remember him with respect both as a professional and a caring friend.</div><div> </div><div>Though he was A-lister, and fast tracking, LRB was perhaps inspired by Charles Handy’s sigmoid curve of creating a discontinuity due to his internal conflict of “developing management science” and “management in practice”. </div><div> </div><div>I quote from LRB papers.</div><div> </div><div>“The latter could lead to narrowing of vision, ambition and values with a focus on going up the business hierarchy.” </div><div> </div><div>“In an environment where the only expression of one’s achievement is one’s progress in the business hierarchy, climbing up the pyramid assumes supreme importance for most people. Environment being highly competitive, it creates unpleasantness among people one has to work with. One creates enemies every time one climbs a step. I believe it is difficult to enjoy day-to-day work (which occupies most of our time anyway) when you have to work with people who you know resent you.”</div><div> </div><div> “I believe that a lot can be done through teaching in terms of focusing the priorities and responsibilities of trained managers, which could have some impact on where these human resources are deployed. It could make a difference between using one’s talents to convince people that one brand of shampoo is better than another, and using the same talents to sell the idea of ‘family planning’ or ‘nutrition’ or ‘small enterprise’.</div><div>So LRB does the unthinkable. He resigns from HUL and applies to Wharton School and Columbia, and on being accepted by both joins Global Business Program at Columbia University for a Ph.D programme in the fall of 1972.</div><div> </div><div>Proffessor John Farly was advisor for LRB’s Ph.D thesis. His research focused on understanding the impact of the rapidly growing Indian population. He won a grant from the Population Division of the Ford Foundation. This supported roots for the so-called ‘social marketing’, which deals with the use of aspects of marketing skills to deal with social matters, such as nutrition and demographics. (Quotes from Prof Farly).</div><div>LRB returned to IIM-A as faculty in 1976 and for the next 12 years he taught several generations of managers, and advised, consulted and provided thought leadership to students, business leaders and the government. </div><div> </div><div>While LRB was from the western seaboard and HUL, I had the privilege of working in the east in Calcutta for another institution, ITC, which is a learning organisation and believes that it needs to ramp up its skills and capability by imbibing from the best.</div><div> </div><div>In 1987, ITC was building its brand management structure and requested Professor Bhandari to advice. LRB conducted several workshops which helped flesh out a robust structure to support this strategy. We at the time were drafting the plans for our agri-business division to which I had been seconded. Khokan Mukherjee, the legendary marketing professional, was my wonderful boss and we consulted LRB on this new business we were embarking on.</div><div> </div><div>It was, to borrow a phrase from MJ Akbar — a swivel moment: I was his pupil and he was my tutor. He helped me think through a strategy and I discovered how a good teacher can tease the best out of you. Some thought starters were: supply creates demand, sell value and not price, look for a market in the gap. His suggestions were thought provoking and not slogans or clichés. His views then, captured in my notes, reveal the elegance of insights and teaching methods.</div><div> </div><div>He did not survive an air crash in 1988, but over the passage of time he is amongst the people who have remained as a watermark in my memory and often times his edict that ‘analytical training can be used to solve life’s real problems’ has proven to be true. </div><div>To quote Socrates, “I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think...” LRB’s legacy is the knowledge he imparted along with teaching the art of asking the right questions. I believe he fulfils the criteria of being an Acharya in India’s finest tradition. </div><p><em>The author is Chairman, The Peninsula Foundation. Inputs have been taken from a blog reconstructing LRB</em></p><p>(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 21-09-2015)</p>
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