From BookJive
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1940 |
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BS Engineering, Banaras University, India; MBA, PhD, Harvard Business School. |
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[edit] Biography
Ram Charan (pronounced Rham Scha-RON), the sixth of seven children, was born in a small city in Northern India in 1940 where he lived in the second story of a two story house shared with the family of his uncle. Seventeen family members lived in the small house that boasted a cowshed but no electricity or running water. From an early age, Charan’s chore was to make patties of dung which, when dried, became fuel for the cook stove. The children did their homework on the floor by the light of an oil lamp.
Charan’s father and uncle ran a small cloth shop until 1947 when it burned to the ground in one of the many firefights between the Muslims and the Hindus during the war for Indian Independence. Charan was seven years old. The brothers, in true entrepreneurial fashion, began again, and built a shoe shop.
As Charan has expressed many times in his books and lectures, it was in this tiny shop that he learned the basic principles of business. He worked in the shop daily, before and after school, doing what was necessary and studying between customers. It was during this time that he devised his now famous “one-page” summaries that contained the key concepts he had learned in each subject that day. Charan admits he was less concerned in receiving a good grade than he was in mastering the subject. He knew that mastery was its own reward and grades were only a reflection of that mastery.
At the end of each day, it was Charan’s duty to count the rupees in the till. From this hands-on experience of physically handling each rupee and understanding how each separate coin had its own place in the survival of the family, Charan developed a great respect for hard cash. He refers to cash as the “blood” of business, stating that if you do not have cash and cash flow, you do not have a business.
As the children of the household grew older, each in turn left school to work in the shoe shop. Of the 13 children, only two completed high school and it was Charan’s teachers who pleaded with his father to allow him to continue his education. As a result, Charan graduated from his studies at the local school and at the age of 15, entered the elite Banaras University, some 250 miles away, to become an engineering student. Although delighted to continue his education and deeply grateful for the financial sacrifices made by his family to keep him there, Charan’s years at the University were not truly happy ones. Self-conscious about his poor command of the English language, he was further confronted with his young age and trade caste. The majority of the students at the school was of a higher caste and would not socialize with the lower. Despite these conditions, Charan excelled and graduated 3rd in his class.
Upon graduating, Charan was recruited to participate in a work exchange program in Australia. Flying to Sydney on borrowed cash, (his grandmother had pawned her jewelry for the ticket); Charan found a job as a draftsman for a utility company and began to take night courses. As he had throughout his education, Charan strove daily to “master” each subject of his job. In his off time, he researched the company’s financial statements and spoke to his employer regarding the company’s cash flow—the blood of the company—and consequently revealed an issue that hindered the company’s growth. Charan’s influence and reputation within the company grew at a rapid rate in the four years he remained with them. In fact, Charan’s employers developed such a deep respect for his abilities that they encouraged him to leave the company and pursue his education by attaining a Master’s Degree from Harvard Business School. While at Harvard, Charan continued to utilize his ‘one-page key concept’ strategy to prepare for and survive the enormous workload.
As he had at Banaras University in India, Charan excelled in his studies, becoming a Baker Scholar and graduating with distinction in the top 3 percent of his class. Charan stayed at Harvard to earn his Doctorate and became a member of the faculty of the Harvard Business School. Although his classes were enjoyed by the students, Charan never considered himself to be “professor” material. He had little interest in academic research—the meat of professorship. Rather, as he had found in his experiences in his family’s shoe shop and in his various employments, he was drawn to the realities of cause and effect—finding problems and solving them in the tangible world.
It was a summer job experience when he was a student at Harvard that brought not only the joy of consulting to Charan, but one of the basic foundations of his philosophy of business. He was working for a gas company in Honolulu, Hawaii and, in his constant quest for mastery of the field, he not only studied all the facets of the business, he toured and studied the plant at all hours. He presented his employer with a financial issue, similar to the one he had encountered in Australia, and was told to solve it. Six weeks later, he had resolved the problem through financial, engineering, and communication knowledge. The financial problem was solved through improving the communication between departments and shift engineers, thereby improving the engineering. Implementation of integrated communication at all levels of organization has become a fundamental business philosophy that pervades Charan’s ideology.
Although he maintains an office in Dallas, and just this year leased an apartment there, Charan has never seen either. Unmarried and childless, he lives 356 days a year in hotel rooms around the world—his assistants mail clean clothes and necessities to wherever he may be at the time—and rarely, if ever, takes time off. Despite being a very wealthy man, Charan does not own a car (he never learned to drive), a house, or any of the accoutrements associated with a stationary base of operations. Known to fly cross-country or across the world several times a week, Charan does not own a private plane. Accordingly, he finds time spent in terminals to be valuable intervals in which to work.
Work is the definition of Charan’s life. He is a widely sought after speaker, but he does not consider himself a lecturer. For 30 years, he has taught at GE’s famous Crotonville Institute and was the recipient of the prized Bell Ringer (best teacher) award, but he does not consider himself a teacher. Charan classifies himself as a consultant but even that terminology does not truly define his impact or his value. People who have worked with him explain that unlike other consultants who evaluate a problem and set up a course of action, Charan asks questions and through those questions, elicits answers and solutions from the very people who hired him. Charan has been described as being the catalyst that inspires abilities already inherent.
Although highly recognized in the lofty penthouse offices of the world’s super businesspeople, Charan is more widely known to the general public through his many books, all of which are written in his straightforward, common sense manner. Charan’s ability to break through the tinsel and ornamentation of a business and find the core structure is evident in every publication. Each book illuminates a certain factor of business—effective boards of directors, building leadership, building strong business models, or properly executing solid strategy—through simple, common sense approaches. Every lesson, large or small, is for both the sole-proprietor and the CEO, for each lesson has its foundations in a small shoe shop in India—the foundation of business never changes, only the trappings.
- Charan is a director of Austin Industries, Tyco Electronics, and Six Sigma Academy.
- He was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources (2000) and Distinguished Fellow in 2005.
- He has served as co-host for the Fortune Forum on Corporate Governance and on the National Association of Corporate Directors’ Blue Ribbon Commission on Corporate Governance.
- Identified by Fortune as the leading expert in corporate governance.
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Title: Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don't
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| Author: Ram Charan |
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| How often have you heard someone with a commanding presence deliver a bold vision that turned out to be nothing more than rhetoric and hot air? All too often we mistake the appearance of leadership for the real deal. Without a doubt, intelligence, vision, and the ability to communicate are important. But something big is missing: the know-how of running a business — the capacity to take it in the right direction, do the right things, make the right decisions, deliver results, and leave the people and the business better off than they were before. This book provides an insight to the 8 fundamental skills needed by a CEO to succeed in 21st century leadership. |
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Title: EDS: Action, Urgency, Excellence (Seizing Leadership in the Digital Economy)
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| Author: Dick Brown, Ram Charan |
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| EDS should have been the leader of its industry when it was split off from GM in 1996. A pioneer in information technology (IT) services, the fastest growing industry in the world, it had a proud heritage, superb people, and a rich stock of intellectual capital. But structurally and culturally, it was unprepared for the rapidly changing IT marketplace. Competitors grabbed the lion's share of the growth, and by 1998, EDS was in trouble. With revenues flat and earnings declining, the stock price was sinking. At the beginning of 1999, the EDS board brought in Dick Brown, an outsider, to turn the company around. Brown and his new leadership team set out to tap the company's full potential for creating profitable growth and shareholder value. This book tells the candid story of the first phase of that effort, and it is an extraordinary story. Today EDS has new leadership, a new structure, and a new vision: EDS, the recognized global leader in ensuring clients achieve superior value in the Digial Economy. |
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