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Following Your Passions at Work

London Business School Alumni News - Issue 106 : March 2006

Alumninews talks to Visiting Professor Srikumar Rao about personal transformation

"The purpose of business is to operate so that every person touched by the business reaches his or her highest potential", according to Srikumar Rao, London Business School's popular Visiting Professor of Marketing and Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School. "Once you have that as your mission, you unleash a degree of energy that is incredible. Then, shareholder value will take care of itself." Professor Rao is making waves on campus, as he replaces usual business creeds - such as maximising shareholder value - with loftier statements.

Professor Rao emphasises the importance of allowing passions and moral values to lead us every day, rather than powerful titles and compensation packages. He takes it for granted that everyone wants to do their bit, and perhaps a little extra, to leave the world a better place. His goal is a personal transformation for those he teaches and for business itself. He says.- "I want to change the culture of business." He calls long hours at a job you do not passionately love and in a company that does not conform to your values "corporate hell".

Creativity and Personal Mastery is an elective for degree students and digs at the ways in which individuals identify their own values in life, achieve goals through those values, and improve society along the way. Typically the course Professor Rao runs involves regular once a week meetings over an entire day and a mandatory weekend retreat. He emphasises the importance of stepping outside of self-centred frameworks. At one week's session, he tells everyone to avoid the words 'I, me or my' in a conversation for an entire week, and not expect to hear the words 'thank you' from anyone. "You are gracious to people just to be of service to them", he explains. "You sincerely wish every person you meet well."

The more successful students become in focusing on the positive, the more their positive energy is radiated, and they do better in their job interviews

Another week's focus is appreciation. Instead of focusing on the negative things in life when you're stressed, list the positives -good health, love and so forth. His experience of working with students at London Business School and at Columbia is that "the more successful students become in focusing on the positive, the more their positive energy is radiated, and they do better in their job interviews".

It's a brave message, but a popular one among his soul-searching students.

Magnus Asbjornsson (MBA2005) completed Professor Rao's course while on exchange at Columbia last year. "A lot of MBAs come to campus at a crossroads in their lives. This is the only course that focuses your attention and energy on what to do at these crossroads, what's important to you and where you'd be happiest."

The reflection has paid off in spades for Magnus. Unlike his first year as an internship-searching MBA, he reached the final round of every interview he sat for as a second-year. "I wasn't trying to sell myself, I was trying to be myself" he says. "I wasn't trying to get the organisation to like me, I was trying to see if the organisation was a good fit for me." He now works in London as a consultant for Marakon Associates, "because they genuinely care about their people and work-life balance."

CPM alumni - as the hundreds of course graduates call themselves - are loyal to their guru-like professor for similar reasons. Some credit him with their happy love lives, most relish in the fact that they're making a difference through the work they do professionally. Alumni are so hooked that about ten of them joined his current students in London for their weekend retreat in November.

For those of us who haven't had the opportunity to be taught by Professor Rao, his guidance will be found in the pages of a new book, Are you ready to succeed? to be published early in 2006. Meantime, his advice: let your values and passions drive you, not false ambitions; "you have to feel that you are making a really positive contribution to the world", he says. "If not, change the organisation you are in, or find a slot where you can do that." And don't forget the alchemist in you: turn everything you touch into gold.

For exclusive tips from Professor Rao, please visit http://www.london.edu

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