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Over the last few months, I shared anecdotes about the Cybage “wonder years” —the years the entrepreneur in me learned to ‘walk’! Going by the conventional chronological order of story-telling, it now seems appropriate to switch over to the Cybage “shaping years”—the years when I learned to ‘run’ as a CEO! What is the difference, you may ask. Well, the difference lies in the firing engines. When you are learning to walk, it is your heroic ‘resolution’ that keeps pulling you up after every fall until your instincts figure out the art of balancing. But when you start running, the right ‘technique’ takes precedence over ‘resolution’. If you want to be a professional runner, it is not important how fast you can sprint from day one; rather, what matters is whether you have figured out the right technique first.

For an amateur athlete, this learning of the right technique requires a well-shaped professional coach. However, when you are a professional entity, learning the right techniques, fascinatingly, requires amateur coaches! A battalion of them! In all shapes and sizes—customers, employees, vendors, extended friends and families, and society in general. Shaping you up with 360 degree stretching exercises! Of course, it is for each individual CEO to decide whether he wants to shape up by exercising to build power, stamina, flexibility, and resilience; or just continue sitting on his executive chair relying purely on his genetically inherited IQ and common sense to stay professionally fit! An option to choose between a coach and a couch!

Interestingly, regardless of whether the CEOs come from a coached or a couched background, they all share one thing in common when it comes to bestowing credit of their professional success. This credit is always bequeathed only to two categories of “influencers”: sung heroes and unsung heroes. These praises are extended in many forums, particularly in vote-of-thanks speech opportunities. In these speeches, the names of the sung heroes are invariably explicitly mentioned first—big customers and partners, executive-level employees, and often the immediate supportive family members! A fashionable corporate commentary is never concluded without a lion’s share of very touching credits showered on all the unsung heroes representing the overwhelming core of the nameless army. This makes a classic debate topic: Who deserves more credit collectively for having influenced an organization’s mindset and success—A smaller group of stars who have individually made a ‘deeper’ impact, or a larger group of masses who have together made a ‘wider’ impact?

Unfortunately, somewhere in this classic “deep vs wide impact” debate, the identity of the true “Impacter” of the corporate executive think-tank gets squeezed! You see, all these sung and unsung heroes are just a metaphorical representation of coaches—All coming with their share of good and bad baggage. The real coaches are the interactive “incidents” involving these flesh & blood beings, a series of random instances that one remembers for years to come. Thus my subsequent newsletters in this “shaping years” series would be an attempt to pen down guiding incidents involving real people connected with Cybage. I will stick to only those ancient episodes that I still vividly recollect as if they happened just yesterday. The hypothesis is … if I can still remember such events without digging out from memory annals, they ought to have shaped my CEO thought- process; therefore, somewhere they got imbibed in my personality and perhaps even ended up becoming an integral part of the Cybage DNA….