Why Antarctica?

Two beautiful events await me on 1stJanuary,2019 One personal and one professional. I guess that pretty much stays in harmony with my lifelong belief of work and life moving in harmonious integration with a “Fancy for Work and An aptitude for play”.

That would be the first day of my post retiral life from a formal career. Vimala, my wife, and I will start the next phase of our lives. That is also the day we will set foot on Antarctica, the 7th continent, the white continent. Pretty excited about the whole thing and why not?

Please read on …

Many ask me, “Why Antarctica?”. “Do you really have to do strange or random things merely because you are retiring and will have nothing else to do?” Feel free to laugh if you are tickled by my ensuing explanation, but here is what it is. You will all get there in time and I do wish that you would be as excited about your own ‘that day’.

The strange revelation over the past few months has been what retirement means for most. More on that later in the blog. Let me get back to my core theme here. Why Antarctica on the first day of post retiral life? It is all centered around what retirement means to me.

What starts on the 1st of January,2019 is the phase 3 of my life. Let me explain.

Phase 1 was from the time I was born way back in 1960 to the time I acquired an MBA from a worthy B School (IIM Calcutta) and was ready to spread my wings. I call it the phase of preparation and dependency. It was incredible how my parents, those two amazing people (RIP), filled those 24 years with an enormous amount of love and care and gave unquestioningly to make sure I was a good human being, an honest friend, a loving member of the family, a competent professional with a solid work culture and an ethical new entrant to the world of work. They used the limited means we had in the growing up years to teach me (and my 4 siblings) a healthy respect for resources and the need for integrity in the face of adversity. The sacrifices they made were what only parents are capable of making for their offspring. In all my early years, I neither fully understood nor appreciated what it took them to bring up 5 children equipped with loads of love but limited means. But as I grew up and learned to appreciate, my heart filled with warmth, love and gratitude. Parents are God’s way of neutralizing the grit and grime of life. Nothing else can come anywhere close.

I started life in this phase as a baby not capable of anything and climbed to the top of the ladder of growth to the next phase … I was ready and rearing to go. Readiness for life was the climb of phase 1. It was hard work duly rewarded by a University Gold medal for academic distinction and MBA from a reputed B School. The need for academic excellence as an insurance against inadequate means meant giving up on hobbies, sports etc., and putting my head down to work hard for academic success. Life is always about knowing ones priorities at a given point of time. The foundation for my life ahead was laid . But the foundation is only as good as the super-structure built on top of it. Thus began the next phase of life and the journey to build that worthwhile super-structure.

 Phase 2 of my life: The phase of responsible contribution.  Looking back from the vantage point and rear-view mirror of today, this was an incredibly rewarding phase of life which started when I first reported for work on the 2nd May,1984. I was super equipped with the intelligence that the T School and B School imbued me with but ill equipped with the wisdom life can only teach you.  I was, at that time, too green to understand the difference between intelligence and wisdom in life but was bouncing around with an enormous amount of positive energy and a belief (that stayed with me till date) that each of us was born to making the world a wee bit better place (Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Successrings in my ears whenever I think of that). There was this strong  conviction that success in career comes from the relevance you create for yourself and the impact you make for others around you. “If your presence does not make a difference, your absence will not matter” was the one liner (one of many one liners that became a part of my lexicon over the next 3 decades) my teams heard from me relentlessly.

Fairly early in my career, I knew that there is no place in life for mediocrity and being a passenger with no significant contribution is a bad place to be in. Mediocrity to me was a mortifying fear and I was determined never to go down that terrible slope. Ethics, trustworthiness and integrity were the guiding principles. (Beautifully captured by Mr Azim Premzi at Wipro when he said “If it is grey, it is black. Integrity is binary”). Commitment to promises made were sacrosanct (beautifully captured by Mr Martin Armitage, the then group CIO of Unilever in his “Say Yes and do it or say No”)

The next 35 years (12,662 days to be precise) have been heady and each phase was something to give an arm for. I had some incredible highs such as the reward from Ann Livermore of HP for leading world’s first ITIL certification for Integrated Applications and Infrastructure operations and I had some crushingly low days. I made some amazingly good career decisions and some very dumb ones too. But each event had its meaning in the larger scheme of the whole journey. “It all happens for a reason”, as my dad used to say.

Over a dozen   high impact roles in completely unconnected domains under some truly inspiring leaders marked this phase of life. An intrinsic ability to unlearn and relearn constantly gave me the confidence that I could take up any role, get comfortable with it and acquire the competence to lead and succeed in it. The role my bosses played in giving me that confidence was God’s gift. I am, ever so thankful to the amazing leaders I worked with :  Gopal Srinivasan and  G Ramaiya at TVS Electroncis,  Ashok Soota,Som Mittal, Ram Agarwal and  P P R Rao at Wipro, Pradeep Kar at Microland , Som Mittal,Charles Fan and  Mike Beck at Hewlett Packard and Debashish Chatterjee (DC) at Cognizant ….   The list of mentors and leaders goes on…. Great leaders help you live to your full potential. Each of them did.

The roles I played were very different and gave me some deep expertise in highly diverse areas like specialty industrial plastics, Import Policy, Toyota Production System, Business Planning, complex ERP implementation, manufacturing systems and automation, TQM, incubating and  scaling new businesses in the areas of ERP, Complex IT Infrastructure Management, Contact Centers, Corporate Learning, Service Delivery Excellence, deep competence in Complex programs and intricate operations  and so on. I was fortunate to work with multi cultural bosses (Indian, American and Chinese ) and lead multi cultural teams (there was a time the 14 people reporting to me were of 14 different nationalities). That taught me the cross cultural empathy necessary to learn and appreciate differences. Passionately striving for diversity and inclusiveness became a way of life well before they attracted the attention they enjoy today.

To the uninitiated mind, that might sound like a career all over the place. But the perceptive mind of any evolved leader would quickly see  the common thread. The world in the middle of the 4th  Industrial Revolution calls it “Learning Agility” – the willingness and ability to constantly unlearn and relearn and to apply the learning for high performance in a completely different role. It was hard work all the way.  But I wouldn’t have liked it any other way.

But what gives me the most satisfaction in these years was my constant belief in the innate potential of people. “Tell them what they are and they will be just that. Tell them what they can be and they will surprise themselves with the peaks they can climb to” was the philosophy I subscribed to in all my roles (can’t recall who said that to me first and when). That helped build high performance leadership teams consistently. Helping them with work and life skills and teaching them the discipline of excellence in work and the need to be relevant and impactful is what I feel really proud about. If my presence did not make a difference to my customers and my teams, my absence wouldn’t have. I worked hard and relentlessly to avoid irrelevance and mediocrity.

There were many successful milestones that I feel extremely satisfied about. Each of my roles involved setting up an entity, building leadership teams and people to scale it with poise and grace, creating the strategic and operational frameworks need for scalability and building a solid succession plan and moving onto the next role – often in a different domain. The organizations I worked with rewarded me generously with challenging roles and they rewarded me fairly, financially. The latter is incredibly important to move with confidence into the next phase of life. But the best part of it all was the opportunity I had in  developing people. Very touching messages I receive from many of them convince me I was on the right track with people all along. Thank God for that. There is no undo ( Ctrl Z ) in life. You have to work diligently to get it right.

As in the first phase, I started at the bottom of the corporate ladder and grew up in the career lattice succeeding and contributing in each role of the 2ndphase of life. The years added to my wisdom, empathy, maturity and equanimity. I worked really hard to be worthy of each role and the trust my leaders vested in me in handing over uncharted territories to me. The roles added enormously to my quiver of skills : ability to take a systems view with a growth mindset, ambidextrous leadership to fly high to strategize or swoop low to get into the trenches to execute credibly, to be a demanding and caring leader who invested in the success of the teams, a trusted partner to my customer and a constant collaborator to my business partners. They taught me to question status-quo, drive change collaboratively, co-create, leverage appropriate technologies and. drive transformation consistently and at scale.

I contributed responsibly, relentlessly and – hopefully – non-trivially.

The pillar of strength through this phase was my wife – my emotional anchor, my spiritual tether and the center of my existence. This was also the phase my two boys were born. Vimala and I brought them up with love, trust, respect and investment in opportunities – in exactly the way our parents did. The boys are a joy. Great human beings with rock solid value system, respect for people, empathy and integrity. They have  curious minds capable of learning constantly as they follow their own passions in life. As I approach the phase 3 of my life, they are firmly into their own phase 2 journey. They are wise, smart, well informed and nurtured great personal hobbies. The family vacations we had took us far and wide and made them non parochial global citizens.

I go to bed each night full of gratitude and thankful to life for the day. I wake up each morning  each morning full of anticipation and enthusiasm. I am thankful to life for all its kindness and generosity and I am grateful to the friends, family, teams and business associates who made the  phase 2 of my life so rich and rewarding.

I am ready to enter Phase 3 of my life with poise, confidence and calm.

Phase 3:  Phase of purposeful impact. That would be theme for life that starts when I retire on 31stDecember,2018.

It is quite strange how the people I speak to respond to the concept of retirement. To many , it spells the end of the road, a drift into oblivion and insignificance. The irretrievable  loss of identity.

Not so in my world view. To me, it is the start of something huge.

It is an enormous opportunity to springboard from the 58 years of existence, experience and learnings to make an impact without the stresses and pulls of establishing my equity all the time or striving to build the financial security needed. We were thrifty and wise in our financial planning and I am not stressed about the fact that my earnings from work stop now. Our caution gave us the financial freedom needed moving forward.

This is the time to give back. This is the time to mentor and coach others to give them the chance that my leaders were ready to give me. This is the time for social impact in helping those who have not been as lucky as I have been. This is the time to pursue worthwhile causes like girl child education and care for the abandoned old aged.  My last two years in the career as the Chief Learning Officer of a global corporation with over 250,000 people was an eye opener to the world of possibilities lifelong learning opens to every single person in this age of 4thIndustrial Revolution and Digital Transformation. There never was a better time for people to be in. That also places on the shoulders of people like me, the burden of accountability to give back because we have been the fortunate recipients of opportunity this industry and society had to offer again and again and again.

This stage of life is an opportunity to pursue hobbies that had to be relegated to a low priority in the rush and tumble of career and the responsibilities in bringing up a family. The world has an enormous cornucopia of subjects to learn about: history, technology, civilisations, adult human learning, music and foreign languages, arts and hobbies … the list goes on. This is a time to be curious and to learn relentlessly – lifelong. The challenge is one of plenty to choose from and not a dearth of things to do. Retirement is life’s payback time for our contributions made in the years of active career.

And then, there is travel to see the world, meet people, learn cultures …. The planet has so much more of unseen wonder.

There are these myriad relationships and bonds to be invested  in generously. Family, friends from all the way from my high school days, relatives from the extended family, colleagues from various roles, contacts from my business life and acquaintances from my social life. It is time to invest time unhurriedly and without any expectation. Relationships make the world  a better place.

This is the time to invest in mind, body, heart and soul as Stephen Covey so aptly described. This is the time to invest in health and fitness to ensure they are on your side in the years ahead.

This is the time for faith, goodness and creating happiness to all around you.

This is the time to manage a lifetime of savings to ensure financial independence and an ability to share with the needy.

I am rearing to go, unshackled from the ,obligations and deadlines that are an integral part of a corporate career. There are no points to be made or hypotheses to be proved. There are no preset milestones to be reached or expectations to be lived upto.

It is an open sheet of paper to write the next chapter of my life story on.

It is the start of a beautiful journey which ,I hope, would be as incredibly blessed as the first two phases of my life.

There are many ways I could have plan to start the Phase 3 of my life  – many many ways.  But I chose to stay with the one common theme of the first two phases. Start at the bottom and climb to the top as relevant in that phase. But , in the untethered and relaxed state of mind I am in, I chose to do that literally and perhaps slightly comically, Let me start at the bottom of the planet and move up to see the world – literally and physically.

Antarctica , as it happens, is at the bottom of the planet and that is where I will start Phase 3 of my life.

There is a hidden script in life. Things happen to a beautiful rhythm and sequence one should not be surprise about. So, when Facebook threw up this advertisement about the curated Journey to the White Continent my reaction was simple. That’s just what I was looking for and I signed up  in January 2018, a full year before the commencement of the cruise.

I am penning these thoughts from 40,000 feet above the ground, on board my Emirates flight EK247 from Dubai to Buenos Aires on my way to Ushuaia where the Antarctica Cruise sets sail on 30th December aboard cruise ship  L’Austral.

Having transitioned my last role to my worthy successor, I was free to take the week off and set off – to have our 1st Antarctica Landing on 1st January,2019: the 1st day of my Life Phase 3.

I write these lines in a state of utmost peace and satisfaction. I have no regrets about the 58 years that brought me here. I cherished the great times I had. I celebrated the myriad accomplishments and I learnt from the utterly bad days I went through. I made some great choices and there are a few acts and decisions I am not proud of. But in the balance, I have been a responsible parent, a loving husband, an affectionate son and brother, a demanding but caring boss and an ethical member of the corporate world and society.

Life Phase 3 is calling and I am ready to set sail in a few  days on the 1ast January,2019

That my friends is the long explanation for “Why Antarctica” … The question to ask is not “Why?” On the contrary, it should be  “why not?”.

Would be delighted to hear your thoughts and your own reflections on this first personal blog post of mine.

Wishing all my readers all the love and affection life can bring to them,

A N Rao ( Achuta Narasimha Rao) 26 December,2018