The Art of Gathering Gold Dust

It was hot and dusty, a typical summer’s day in a small town in Uttar Pradesh. As a young sales manager at Hindustan Unilever, I was on my mandatory market visit. Today was the wholesale beat. Most of the wholesalers were working on a wafer-thin margin. Their way of working seemed to defy everything I had learned at IIM (Indian Institute of Management) Ahmedabad. I sat on an empty oil tin, sipping a cup of tea made mostly of milk and sugar. I noticed a fifteen-year-old boy manning the store in his father’s absence. I was in a good mood, so I decided to give him some commercial advice.
‘You shouldn’t be selling our products so cheap. By only keeping a 0.5 percent margin you will soon go out of business,’ I said.
The young boy smiled.
‘Sir, I don’t think you understand. I make a lot of money from your products. Let me explain. I sell on cash. I have about two weeks of stock, but I also get a week’s credit from your distributor. This means that I essentially have a net investment of one week. My investment rotates fifty-two times in a year and with a 0.5 percent margin in each rotation, that is a return on investment (ROI) of 26 percent. What’s wrong with a 26 percent ROI?’ he spoke with the kind of panache usually expected from a VC-funded entrepreneur.
I was stumped. It was nothing short of an epiphany. What the uneducated young wholesaler had just taught me
was how money is made by rotating money and not by the absolute amount of money earned in each transaction. It’s
like a wheel that turns very fast. And every time it turns, it picks up a little bit of gold dust and that way the gold dust
keeps accumulating.
I will never forget that lesson in my life. Very often you learn from the most unexpected sources.
These are not my words. This was sometime in 1992 when, as a management trainee, I remember listening with a lot
of interest as Mukul Deoras, then a marketing manager at Hindustan Unilever, narrated this story. I remember sitting
hunched over my notebook and furiously taking notes. He made a simple point. Don’t let vanity come in the way. Important life lessons can come from anywhere. The fact that this lesson has stuck with me for over twenty-five years is not only a reflection of the impact of the message but also the way it was conveyed.
Using stories to convey a message is a powerful technique. Over the years, I have used it intuitively. It would have just been a skill, if not for a curious set of events starting in 2011, the year that turned this conviction into a way of life and indeed my vocation too.
In 2011, I was appointed as the chief marketing officer of India’s largest timeshare company, Mahindra Holidays. My team and I had just completed the exercise of creating a new vision for the company. Along with this, we had also articulated four desired employee behaviours or values. The vision was ‘to make every moment magical’ for our members.
The expected behaviours were:
1. No room for ordinary (ordinary is not magical).
2. Experience is everything.
3. Make smiles.
4. Proud of our club.

This vision and the supporting values were very well received, especially by the seniors in the organization. But when the
euphoria of having identified these fancy, flowery and hopefully inspiring values died down, I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that this may have been just another esoteric exercise that would only result in a plaque on a boardroom wall.
I started wondering. Just because the people at our head office got it, is it a given that employees who worked in farflung
corners of India would get it too?

Anxious to address this, I read whatever I could find on the subject of embedding values. I also discussed this with consultants and experts. I went ahead and did a few things which may seem foolish in hindsight. For example, I wrote to the ‘contact us’ email IDs of a few companies whose CEOs in some interview or the other had mentioned the importance of
values. In these mails, I asked what they had done to embed the same. Most companies didn’t respond. The few that did
sent me annual reports and company brochures.
In the end, I was no wiser. So I did what I guess most people in my position do—I ran workshops designed to
share Mahindra Holidays’s new vision and values with the company’s top 500 managers.
However, six months after the workshops, my travels across the country showed that we were in the same position
as most other companies. Only a smattering of people could tell me what the values were, but even they were not very clear about what these really meant and what behaviour they would need to display on a day-to-day basis.
My quest to make these values come alive for employees took an interesting turn when serendipity connected me to
Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk, the founders of Anecdote, an Australian company that had been focused on something called ‘business storytelling’ for over ten years. ‘Business’ and ‘storytelling’ were two words whose individual meaning I knew but didn’t realize the power of using them together effectively.*
At a mind-opening workshop conducted by them, I learnt about ‘story listening’, an art of drawing out stories

* Shawn Callahan, Putting Stories to Work: Mastering Business Storytelling (Australia: Pepperberg Press, 2016).
Shawn describes in detail, through his decade of experience in the subject, the power of stories in business. With his permission, I have borrowed from his book and the workshops designed by him in my work and indeed in this book.

How to Build Your Story Bank

Two monks were walking from their monastery to another one nearby. One was an old wise monk and the other was a novice, an apprentice monk.
As they walked in silence, they came across a river. Unseasonal rains had caused the river to run high. On the banks of the river was a young lady in a kimono, not sure whether it was safe for her to cross. When she saw the two monks, she looked relieved and asked for help.
The young monk was aghast. He exclaimed, ‘Don’t you see that I am a monk? I took a vow of chastity.’
‘I require nothing from you that could impede your vow, but simply a little help to cross the river,’ the young woman replied with a smile.
‘I will not . . . I can . . . do nothing for you,’ said the embarrassed young monk.
At this point, the elderly monk stepped forward and said, ‘Climb onto my back and I’ll help you cross.’
Upon reaching the other side, the old monk put the lady down. She thanked him and he responded with a ‘welcome’. With that, he started walking towards his destination.
The young apprentice was agitated. ‘How could you do this? This is against our order. You are supposed to be my mentor. You are supposed to show me the way. When we return, I am going to ask them to change my mentor.’
The young monk went on and on till they reached the next monastery.
On reaching the gate, the old monk paused, looked at the young monk, and said, ‘I did carry the lady, but I put her down on the banks of the river. It seems like you are still carrying her.’
This is a beautiful parable that can be used in many business situations to make a point about carrying baggage and losing perspective or letting go of the past, or confusion between the letter and spirit of the law.
A year from now, if I asked any of you whether you knew the ‘two monks’ story, I am certain you will all answer in the affirmative. That is because stories stick.
However, say a few weeks from now, if you were looking for a story to use in your office to make a point about the confusion between the letter and spirit of the law, it is highly likely that many of you would not remember this story.
You may recollect that in the introductory chapter we discussed the process of cataloging stories. We also discussed a retrieval system that allows us to find the stories from our database using the business point we want to make, a system that should throw up ‘two monks’ when we look for stories about the confusion between the letter and spirit of the law. Since the creation of such a story bank is so vital, I am going to revise the process using this story. I hope you have downloaded Evernote and already stored the Gillian Lynne story.
Let’s start. First, we label the story. In my story bank, I have labeled it ‘Two Monks and the Baggage’. This is what Evernote calls the ‘Note Title’.
Then, in the body of the note, we put down the key elements of the story. In this case, they would be ‘two monks’, ‘river crossing’, ‘woman’, ‘carry on the back, ‘you are still carrying her. I am sure you will all agree that even a decade later if I gave you those five elements, just fourteen words, you would be able to recall and retell the story with a fair amount of accuracy. You may forget some elements like unseasonal rain or the fact that the woman was wearing a kimono. Neither is essential to the message of the story. You will remember more than enough to get your point across.
The next thing you need to do is create tags for the various business points you think you might illustrate using this story. Perhaps they will be ‘putting down baggage’, ‘letting go of the past, and ‘letter and spirit of the law’. A great way to add tags is to tell the story to a few colleagues and ask what it meant to them. Someone may say ‘removing biases’ or ‘missing the ability to observe because you are stuck on an idea’, after all the young monk did not enjoy the journey in the beautiful location. Whichever interpretations resonate with you are the tags you add. The story is now
yours forever.
Someday, when you are preparing for a speech or a presentation and looking for a story on say ‘the difference between letter and spirit of the law’, the ‘two monks’ story will open once you open your app and search for the tag ‘letter and spirit.
Yes, you need to make this little effort to create ownership of the stories you love. But the effort pays back many times over in the form of being recognized as an inspirational, engaging speaker who connects with the audience.
Now, as you go through this book, use this process to store stories that resonate with you. As you make it a habit, your collection will grow and so will your reputation as a storyteller.
I will add a caution here. Not everything that is labeled a story is a story.
Let’s take this excerpt from a website. It appeared under the heading ‘Our Story. I have changed certain elements to not embarrass the people in that company who put together the website.
In 1775, our founder, John Doe, invested in this country and started, what is today, the nation’s longest-running financial institution. You could say, ‘The buck started here.’ In the 230 years since then, countries have been created. Borders have been erased. And new markets have emerged. But the essential things remain constant. We’ve endured by continually looking to the future and staying invested in innovation. We created the first, the first, and the first. Today, we’re the investment management and investment services company that oversees $32.2 trillion. And we’ve become one of the world’s top ten investment managers. We help clients conduct business in thirty-five countries and 100 markets, which gives us a unique vantage point to see the world like no one else. We’re. And we’re the investment company for the world.

Is that a story? Certainly not. It is a list of assertions. The other common mistake is labeling a sequence of events or a timeline as a story. Here is another real, but masked, example.

We were founded in 1890 during India’s Swadeshi (Freedom) movement. After failing in several ventures, we started making widget A and in 1915 we made India’s first item B, in 1920 our products were endorsed by senior members of the freedom movement, in 1925 we entered a new industry C, and in 1945 we set up an industrial township . . . so on and so forth till 2016.