Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam with governor M.K. Narayanan at the CMA event. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

When former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam addressed a management summit organised by the nation’s oldest regional management body on Tuesday, he chose an example from his own life that succinctly drove home his leadership lesson.

“Have I learnt anything unique in management skills?” Kalam, the chief guest, wondered aloud as he took the mike to deliver the inaugural address of the summit organised by Calcutta Management Association (CMA), in association with The Telegraph, at the Bengal Chamber Building. What the former president and the father of the country’s missile programme went on to say had the members of CMA listening in rapt attention.

Kalam’s answer was embedded in an anecdote. “In 1973, Professor Satish Dhawan was the chairman of Isro. He told me he would put the required infrastructure and manpower at my disposal. With these, I was to put a satellite in orbit with a rocket system. When I launched SLV-3, the first one failed in 1979. There was a big media conference where he took me with him but took the responsibility of the failure totally on himself. In 1980, when the launch was a success, he asked me to go and do the press conference alone.”

This, Kalam pointed out, was the hallmark of a leader. “He absorbed my failure and gave me the success.”

A leader, he went on to say, must succeed with integrity and travel along unexplored paths. He urged managers to turn the inconvenience of people into emerging business opportunities. “Where there is wealth, there is scope for business. That is the beaten path. But serving the poor can also be profitable,” he said, citing examples like ITC’s venture into agriculture at a time agricultural growth was less than two per cent, Arvind Eye Care’s model of eradicating avoidable blindness in Tamil Nadu and ICICI’s microfinance offer to self-help groups when other banks avoided loans to the poor.

Sidhartha Roy, the president of CMA, explained why the association was formed and traced its journey over five decades. “The vision was to create a platform where managerial ideas could be developed,” he said, before going on to introduce the theme of the summit — India’s emergence as an economic superpower.

Governor M.K. Narayanan, the guest of honour, was sceptical of the premise of the theme. “No one can deny that India is a critical part of the global economy and the spectacular rise in our GDP in the past quarter century, but it is not right to view India solely through the prism of GDP growth. Growth alone cannot ensure social equity,” he said, before going on to list obstacles in the way — current controversies over land acquisition, dip in investor confidence, misalignment between obsolete and new practices…. “We are quite some way from achieving super power status,” he said.

Past president of CMA and chairman of the organising committee, Aniruddha Lahiri, gave the vote of thanks. Arun Maira, a member of the Planning Commission, delivered the Sir Jehangir Ghandy Memorial Oration later in the day.