Charan never stops. He sleeps in a hotel every night ("Professor Charan,
welcome home," is how the doorman greets him at the Waldorf on Park Avenue),
except when hes sleeping on a plane or, rarely, in someones house, which can
happen when a client takes pity on him. "I got in the habit of having him over
for Christmas because he had no place to go," says Reed. "He was going to sit
in a hotel room. Thats hardly right."
Interesting.
Umesh
Rajen & Ajanta Barua <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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Received message:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/30/8405482/index.htm?postversion=20070429
FORTUNE MAGAZINE
The strange existence of Ram Charan
What he does is hard to describe. But the most powerful CEOs love it enough to
keep him on the road 24/7 and make him the most influential consultant alive.
Fortunes David Whitford reports.
David Whitford, Fortune writer
April 24 2007: 9:12 AM EDT
(Fortune Magazine) -- The Al Manzil Hotel in Dubai has been open for business
all of 18 days on the Saturday night in January that I show up with Ram Charan.
The lobby is strangely quiet; there doesnt seem to be anybody else staying
here. The surrounding neighborhood is called Old Town, but in fact its a
construction site from which are rising what will one day be the worlds
tallest skyscraper and the worlds biggest mall. Soulless and kind of creepy,
Im thinking, but Charans thoughts are elsewhere.
Already he has claimed an overstuffed chair in the center of the lobby and is
talking on the phone. After 12 hours of isolation on the flight from J.F.K.,
Charan is back in business, deep in private conversation with a client in New
York City. He looks tired, and no wonder. He began his day with a 4 A.M. Friday
wake-up call in Richmond (he did a Squawk Box live remote on CNBC), and he has
a head cold. But he is in no hurry to go to bed. Charan doesnt care what time
it is. He doesnt care what day of the week it is. And the last thing he cares
about is where he is. As long as Charan is with a client - or can get one on
the phone - hes home.
Thirty years ago this month, Ram Charan (pronounced "Rahm Scha-RON") quit a
tenured professorship at Boston University to devote himself full-time to
consulting. Today hes alone at the top of his profession - not a consultant so
much as a guru, a corporate sage, with unparalleled access to boardrooms across
the globe and intimate, enduring relationships with an array of powerful CEOs.
Among them: Jack Welch, formerly of GE (Charts, Fortune 500), who says of
Charan, "He has this rare ability to distill meaningful from meaningless and
transfer it to others in a quiet, effective way without destroying
confidences"; Dick Harrington of Thomson Corp. (Charts) ("He probably knows
more about corporate America than anybody"); and Verizon's (Charts, Fortune
500) Ivan Seidenberg ("I love him. Hes my secret weapon"). "Hes like your
conscience," says former Citicorp CEO John Reed. "Just when you sort of think
you have everything done and youre feeling pretty good about yourself, he
calls you up and says, Hey, Reed, did you do this and that and the other?"
Theres another aspect of Charan, not unrelated to his success, that sets him
apart from his peers, if not the whole human race: what Jack Krol calls
Charans "strange existence." "When I was chairman and CEO of DuPont," says
Krol, "hed show up at the house Sunday morning at nine, and we might spend
three or four hours, and all of a sudden hed disappear. He would go anywhere
at any time that you asked him to meet with you. Business is his whole life."
That sounds like an exaggeration, but its not. Having uploaded himself into
the global economy, Charan circulates, continuously, with something like the
speed and efficiency of capital. Consider the itinerary he sketched at dinner
one night a few months ago in New York. He had just agreed - for the first time
in his career -to let a journalist travel with him and watch him work. "I
should tell you where Ive been the last few weeks," he began in heavily
accented English. "I go to India on the Friday of the week before Thanksgiving.
I am Sunday morning in Bombay. Monday morning I am in Delhi. Wednesday Im in
Bombay. Thursday Im in Bangalore. Saturday Im in Trivandrum. Wednesday Im in
Johannesburg. Friday morning, at seven, I am in New York. I have a two-hour
meeting with a CEO who has flown in to see me. I have two more meetings and I
fly out that night to Dubai. I am in Dubai on Sunday and Monday, then I come
back here. On Thursday night I fly out to Jubail, Saudi
Arabia. Then I come back here. Tuesday morning I have a whole-day schedule in
New York. Tuesday night I go to Milwaukee. I came from Milwaukee last night.
They diverted my plane so I had to stay in Pittsburgh. I had a meeting this
morning in Philadelphia. I had three meetings here in the afternoon. And Im
here tomorrow, with GE. Then an hour-and-a-half phone call. Then Im going out
tomorrow night to West Palm Beach. Monday morning I have a breakfast meeting in
New York. And then Im flying out to Perth, Australia." At least he flies
first-class.
Now consider what comes next: more of the same. Charan never stops. He sleeps
in a hotel every night ("Professor Charan, welcome home," is how the doorman
greets him at the Waldorf on Park Avenue), except when hes sleeping on a plane
or, rarely, in someones house, which can happen when a client takes pity on
him. "I got in the habit of having him over for Christmas because he had no
place to go," says Reed. "He was going to sit in a hotel room. Thats hardly
right."
Before he was a consultant, Charan lived in dormitories. Before he was a
professor and a student, he lived in YMCAs. Now he doesnt live anywhere.
Charans one nod to a conventional rooted life is the office he rents on North
Central Expressway in Dallas (thats the address on his passport - he is a U.S.
citizen), but he cant tell you anything about it because hes never been
there.
"I really thought the two ladies I interviewed with six years ago were just
yanking my chain," says Cynthia Burr, who manages Charans hideous schedule. "I
said, Where does he keep his stuff? Everybody has stuff. Its really hard to
wrap your arms around something like that, but its true."
Three days a week - on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday - Burr and a colleague
pack a cardboard box with shirts, underwear, and socks, perhaps a clean suit
(there is a tailor at Neiman Marcus who has Charans measurements on file), and
maybe a V-neck sweater or a pair of khaki pants. They toss in toothpaste,
razors, shampoo, a shined pair of 9½ EEEE shoes, whatever he needs ("He doesnt
buy anything himself," says Burr), and send it by FedEx to Charans hotel,
wherever that may be. The box comes back two days later filled with dirty
laundry.
Charan doesnt own a car because he never learned how to drive, and besides,
where would he keep it? A plane, perhaps? With a day rate that clients say can
top $20,000, he could afford one. "If I was Ram, the one thing Id have is one
hell of a nice plane," says his friend Bill Conaty, senior VP for human
resources at GE. But Charan is not Conaty. "I use the time sitting in the
terminal," he says. "I have never missed an appointment in my life. I dont
want to get lost in this private-plane business." (He does regret, however, not
accepting an offer from American Airlines in the 1970s to buy a lifetime
first-class upgrade for $100,000.)
He trundles through airports pulling a mismatched pair of black canvas rollers,
one held together with maroon duct tape. His watch is a Timex. Given all the
hours he spends in transit and his lifelong passion for the Indian vocalist
Lata Mangeshkar, I suggested once that he might enjoy an iPod. The idea seemed
to upset him: "No, I dont do that, I couldnt do it. Would just distract me.
Music can make you very sentimental. Couldnt do it."
Have I mentioned that Charan has never married? That he has no children? And
still I havent come to possibly the most peculiar aspect of his personality. I
mean that which sets him apart from virtually every person he comes in contact
with, none more so than his overachieving CEO clients: Charan has no goals. He
never set out to become a globetrotting consultant, any more than he dreamed of
attending Harvard Business School, or becoming a professor, or even so much as
one day earning a living beyond the small city in India where he was born.
_____________________________________________________________
For page 2, click:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/30/8405482/index2.htm
For page 3, click:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/30/8405482/index3.htm
EXCERPTS:
Finally he found a job as a draftsman at a utility company. He worked days and
attended classes at night. Charan soon attracted the attention of his bosses,
one of whom invited him one day to his office. Did Charan have any questions he
wanted to ask? As a matter of fact, Charan did. He had been studying the
financial statements in his spare time, attentive as always to cash flow, and
had concluded that the company was borrowing money to pay its dividend. Was
this true? Charans boss was sure it was not. Until he checked with the CFO.
Oops. The young Indians standing rose accordingly.
While at Harvard, Charan worked summers for a gas company in Honolulu. Again,
he took it upon himself to study the books, and again he discovered a looming
problem with the dividend. This time his boss asked him to solve it. Charan
came back six weeks later. "The pressures in the pipes between 10 P.M. and 4
A.M. are too high," he reported. "You take them down, and your gas leakage will
go down, and you will make the dividend."
For page 4, click:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/30/8405482/index4.htm
EXCERPTS:
Charan knew this because he had been down to the plant in the middle of the
night and read the gauges. He had also noticed that the man in charge of
production was not talking to the man in charge of distribution; hence the
leakage. In other words, he combined financial acuity with engineering know-how
and an eye for the role played by interpersonal relationships to solve a vexing
problem. Charan says now, "Thats where this whole consulting thing really
began."
Generalizing about what Charan does for his clients is tricky, but that lack of
definition paradoxically is at the heart of his success. His method is no
method. He is wary of abstraction and belongs to no school of management
theory. "Converting highfalutin ideas to the specifics of the company and the
leader - thats the trick," he once confided to me in an elevator. "The other
part is working backward to define what the need is, and then searching for
what helps. Then you bring it to common sense, and common sense is very
uncommon."
That means no ready-made solutions. Instead, Charan brings observation,
curiosity, and care. He lets his clients decide how to use him. Sometimes all
he does is ask the right question. "I remember the first time he came to see
me," says Caperton. "We were driving to the airport in Charleston, W.Va., and
he said to me, Why are you trying to grow this thing so fast? I was sort of
shocked by the question. Three weeks later my financial guy came to me and
said, We dont have money to meet payroll. Charan realized we were growing
too fast, thats why he asked me that question. That was a much better way to
teach me, wasnt it?"
For the final page 5: click:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/30/8405482/index5.htm
EXCERPTS:
John Reed started working with Charan in 1990, before Citis merger with
Travelers. The stock was languishing, the company was struggling. "I knew what
I wanted to do," says Reed, "but I wasnt 100% sure how to get it done. Thats
a big distinction if youre in business. A lot of consultants come in to tell
you what you should be doing. This was not that. This was a question of how
best to get it done."
Reed says, "Ram is a catalyst in the real sense of that word. He facilitates
things happening but doesnt take part in them himself. And he is an immense
source of energy. When youre trying to get large organizations to do things,
energy is extremely important. He forces you to tell him what it is you want to
do, and he forces you to really be clear in your own mind what those things are
and what steps have to be taken. Often its getting the wrong guy out of a job.
But the point is, he starts out by basically forcing you to think with him and
be very clear. Then, okay, you notice that he isnt doing anything, hes just
forcing you to do it. Then once youve agreed on everything you want to do, he
calls you up every ten minutes and asks why havent you done it yet."
"Im a lucky man!" Charan likes to say. "I am allowed to do what I love to do!"
While I still dont really understand him, I am beginning to believe him.
Surely there are many ways to live fully and be happy on this earth; probably,
he has found his own. Of course he knows he cant keep this up forever. One day
hell start slowing down, and then hell begin to dispose of his money. He has
long financed the aspirations of his extended family in India, by paying for
their schooling and helping some of them get settled overseas. But thats it,
he says. No more money for the family. ("My people are not rich, but they have
enough to go on their own.") "Its going to be in India" is all hell say about
his coming serious philanthropy. "It goes a long way, a little amount there. To
enable people to accomplish things."
____________________________________________________
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Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
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