Ravi Venkatesan debunks 'great man' theory of success, says it's all about the team

Ravi Venkatesan, former chairman, Microsoft India, debunks the belief that one person is responsible for the success of a company. For him, it’s all about the team.

If you were playing a game of word association, Facebook will likely get Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft -Bill Gates, Apple - Steve Jobs. There is a tendency to identify corporations with personalities. ‘The great-mantheory of leadership’ as Ravi Venkatesan, former chairman, Microsoft India, said at a recent event in Mumbai. And he is increasingly “getting disenchanted with it”.

“I think there is something very wrong in the telling of history, where we attribute that success to one person. Whereas behind it [the success], there has always been a team,” Venkatesan told ETPanache, during an interaction following his talk in Mumbai recently. “If you look at the success of Microsoft, what would Bill Gates have been able to do without Paul Allen, without the business and execution genius of Steve Ballmer and many others? It was the team that achieved it. Every team has one person who is the face and that happens to be Gates over there,” he said.


Giving the example of Apple, Venkatesan said Jobs’s second innings at the company was successful not just on his own merit. “The second extraordinary success of Apple was not just Steve Jobs. It was Steve Jobs coupled with the execution genius of Tim Cook, the design genius of Jony Ive — it was a team.”


Also, there is a team at work, and then there is a team at home. “We don’ t remember that behind that person and personal life is somebody supporting him or her. And that is coming out with Jeff Bezos and his recent divorce. Mackenzie [his wife] played an extraordinary role in the success of Amazon. So, it’s not just at the workplace, there is also a team in life and a support system. It takes all of this to make it happen, yet we wrongly attribute all of it to one human being,” he said.

The same is the case with politics, according to him. “Would Bapuji [Mahatma Gandhi] have been able to do that [his contribution to the freedom struggle] without Pandit [Jawaharlal] Nehru, [Sardar Vallabhai] Patel and so many others? I don’t think he would ever have taken credit for it as an individual,” Venkatesan said.

Even in his life, Venkatesan feels his biggest contribution has been building a strong team. “If you say what did Ravi do? Well, he did a better-than-average job in hiring the right people and giving them support. So, I think it is a completely flawed idea that one person saves the day. This great man theory is bunk,” he said. Leadership, by definition, is collaborative, according to Venkatesan. Some individuals coming to the rescue of a company or nation or even civilisation are random events that can’t be predicted.

Speaking about a world where every young person can be a leader, he said, “The rest of the times we have to find a better model. My own experience is that there are leadership qualities in all of us. They are stunted because of the environment, lack of encouragement, most of all, lack of self-belief. If I were a leader, who would want to follow me? This limiting belief leads to leadership qualities that are stunted. Tap into that and you get a transformation.”