MERRY MEADOWS - Chapter 13 - Cerebral Fillip

Of the many TCS characters, colorful or otherwise, that it has been my privilege and pleasure to make the acquaintance of, let me start with JJ, Jamil Janjua, who is readying himself for open heart surgery in Dubai as I write this, and I wish him a speedy recover to his former hale and hearty self, ameen.

(ED – Since I last wrote, JJ has experienced a successful surgery, is out of the ICU and back in his room, and engaging with his physiotherapist, Allah be thanked).

JJ is a high flyer, and once captained the old warhorse of the aviation industry, the Boeing 707, before being grounded on medical grounds from PIA. He formed the first interesting twist that I noticed at TCS. As captain of an airliner, JJ was the commander of his airship, and in that capacity could even solemnize marriages.

For a flyer there can be nothing worse than being grounded, and contemplate in midlife a brand new career away from the deep blue skies. After an adjustment period that I am sure took its emotional toll, and he was ready to engage with active life once more, JJ’s cockpit association with flight engineer-turned-entrepreneur Khalid Awan came to his rescue, and JJ found himself in the manager operations job at TCS in May 1986 helping engineer his erstwhile engineer’s ship even as his erstwhile engineer occupied the captain’s seat. JJ’s rise back to the captain’s seat would happen over a decade and a half later, but not before the TCS ship had sailed through some fairly severe turbulence.

Cool Hand Luke

For some reason JJ has always reminded me of a Greek tycoon, his short stature and very Mediterranean features, adorned with a trimmed beard and moustache, present a package at once dignified and dashing, exuding a calmness and tranquility born of meditation and the practice of yoga. Now that I come to think of it, I have never seen JJ lose his cool in the 12 years that I have known him. He could just as easily have passed for Napoleon Bonaparte, except Bonaparte didn’t have a beard and was taken to encasing his right hand in his coat between the second and third buttons. I have never seen JJ do that either.

There’s another aspect to JJ that bears mentioning. I have always seen him use ‘jj’ in lower caps. While this may run contrary to established written communication norms, it is born of both humility at a personal level, and deference to the living legend Javed Jabbar, who also goes by the initials JJ. Begging Jamil Janjua’s pardon at both a personal and professional level, I am taking the liberty of using the capital letters JJ to denote him, knowing full well that the elder JJ, Javed Jabbar, would have no objections. 

JJ couldn’t hack Naveed Awan’s stewardship of TCS, and having risen to the chief operating officer’s position over a ten years span, JJ left TCS in 1996 and took up a job with the British Council engaging in youth development, with a special focus on public speaking, and running the Hyde Park Juniors program. In the post Naveed Awan period JJ was recruited back into TCS in May 2001 and assigned the COO’s mandate.

What struck me as poetic irony was the role reversal. JJ was now co-piloting a ship with his former flight engineer in the captain’s chair. JJ didn’t seem to have any problems with that, and having Saqib Hamdani as his director operations, a competent team was formed that permitted the captain to catch a snooze midflight, and enjoy the fruits of professional management.  

JJ had always been a strong proponent of human resource development, and once he was back at TCS he took hold of the company’s public relations effort and gave it a cerebral fillip when it came time to celebrate the second decade of TCS’s existence in 2003. My own recruitment into TCS was part of this cerebral fillip, and in focus was the customer newsletter that he had started in the early 1990s, the TCS CONNECT. It was an 8 pages affair comprising company news, and published bi-monthly. I was to contribute one report every issue.

The TCS head office was located in the Nursery area on Karachi’s Shahrah-e-Faisal in what had once been a large residential accommodation converted into a fairly spacious office. Housing about 30 people, the couriers sorting area, the nerve center of the operation, was situated in an adjacent premise. An interesting feature of the TCS head office was the large bronze bell prominently placed near the entrance. Any employee having a grievance or some good news to share could ring that bell out loud, and members of management and others in the vicinity would gather to hear the grievance and seek its resolution or share in the joy of accomplishment which was mostly the case.

A bit dramatic in line with the Mughal tradition of Adl-e-Jahangiri, but it served its purpose. TCS had remained a union-less organization through a very tumultuous period of Pakistan’s history, and the credit for this was given to a fair and open ownership driven by the best interests of its employees. The bell somehow went missing when the head office relocated to its present coordinates at the Karachi Airport, but by then TCS had evolved, with multiple channels open to staff to make known their issues and successes, and a proactive management that stayed ahead of the curve in the resolution of those issues and celebration of the successes.

For the twentieth anniversary celebrations JJ had prepared a special menu, a veritable feast for thought, as it were, with high teas that did justice to the physical appetite for food that built up during the extremely thought provoking proceedings. Based on the principle that 20 percent of the customers in any business generate 80 percent of the revenue, JJ had drawn up a ‘hit list’ of the top TCS corporate customers whose top managements were invited, at regular intervals right through 2003, to the Royal Rodale Club on Khayaban-e-Sehar, a stone’s throw from the shores of the Arabian Sea. Here the leading minds of the time regaled the gathered with facts and philosophies culled from the four corners of the globe that further grew the already formidable minds in attendance.

The New Order Unfurls

JJ’s stint at the British Council had lit a major bulb in his head, and evidence of this lies in the inaugural issue of the resurrected TCS CONNECT (Issue #1 Volume #1, July-August, 2001) that he initiated upon his second tour of duty with TCS. Next to the Chief Operating Officer’s Message is an announcement about the visit to Pakistan of the legendary management guru Tom Peters for a seminar and workshop. That announcement, titled ‘Tom Peters’ Seminar’, was an early indicator of the new management style in vogue at TCS. Some part of that announcement’s text introducing Tom Peters bears reproduction.

“He describes himself as a prince of disorder, champion of bold failures, maestro of zest, professional loudmouth, corporate cheer leader, lover of markets, capitalist pig…. You get the picture. He has even been featured in the cartoon strip ‘Dilbert’ as a ‘spitter’ when speaking in public. The Economist has tagged him as an Uber-Guru (super guru), while his unconventional views have led Business Week to describe him as business’s ‘best friend and worst nightmare’.”

In the very first issue of the newsletter TCS CONNECT JJ defined the new order for those who were paying attention, and right through the year of the 20^th anniversary celebrations the Royal Rodale Club played host to some scintillating events, raising the curtain on Omar Khan, and bringing to Pakistan on his very first visit Professor Dr. Edward de Bono, the father of lateral thinking. Many years later we would also play host to the father of radiant thinking, Tony Buzan, as well as the father of thinking about thinking, Peter Senge..

In 2001, unbeknownst to JJ, the Octara germ had already been planted in his brain where it would ‘fester’ and grow in the glow of public adulation, and in a few short years turn into a thriving, standalone business enterprise, and act alongside as a major relationship builder for the TCS brand. Human resource development was the name of the game if Pakistan was to break out of its vicious cycle of poverty and debt. Corporate leadership at all levels of the management hierarchy, whether in the private or public sectors, had to be brought up to speed, and induced and seduced into leaving the box within which most of us were very tightly packed.

Daydreaming Mangroves

Writing for TCS CONNECT put me through a crash course on how the human brain could be right sized and its many short circuits repaired to yield a world full of win-win outcomes that would make humanity a sight for sore eyes. It was wonderful! It fed my afterburners with the kind of fuel that kept them burning inexhaustibly. The beauty of it was that it did not take up any time or energy, aligned as it was with what I’d rather have been doing. It allowed me all the space that I needed to chase up issues in the public domain that I was passionate about, and in the year 2003 the environment bug had bitten me in a big way with mangroves on my mind. I had expended considerable time and energy connecting the dots and bringing together various stakeholders onto a common platform. The conservation of Nature was in the public interest, and therefore of interest to TCS, I successfully pointed out to the TCS management.

There was a lot of good work being done by the IUCN and WWF, as also the Sindh Wildlife Department, and the WWF’s Wetland Center, situated in the midst of a thick mangroves forest in the Sandspit backwaters, was a major development that unfortunately through uninspired management had by and large failed in mobilizing ecotourism, and fallen a long way short in creating awareness amongst the multitudes of Karachi about the great benefits to human life of this marine jungle.

To its credit the WWF did have a coaster service that ferried the occasional groups to and from the Wetland Center, but which somehow failed to transform into a scheduled shuttle service. The massive concrete structure at Sandspit was clearly at odds with the natural mangroves environment within which it was situated, but it had multimedia facilities as well as some informative maps and other displays that educated the visitors on their marine environment. But it was in no way close to the effort that needed mounting considering the scale of deforestation and land reclamation that was taking place, posing a clear and present danger to the survival of the mangroves.

My friend and squash mate of old, Azir Mumtaz, a dashing officer in the Pakistan Navy, had enabled for me a meeting with his former boss, a rear admiral posted in a senior position at the Karachi Port Trust, the ranking landlord and trustee of Karachi’s coastal belt. The patch that had caught my attention was the fast fading mangrove jungle in Chinna Creek right in the center of Karachi, as it were, and not a one hour’s drive away as in the case of the WWF Wetland Center. Here I wanted to see erected a skywalk on bamboo stilts that snaked its way through the mangrove treetops, making for an undulating aerial walking track interspersed with bird watching platforms. The Chinna Creek area was just waiting to be transformed into a marine wildlife sanctuary, and I was all set to mobilize eco-tours, and make a little cash alongside fighting the good fight championing mother nature.  

Along the Chinna Creek were situated the Beach Luxury Hotel, the Boat Club, the Naval Officers Residential Estate or NORE-1, and further up there was the Boating Basin with its food strip of restaurants, the largest in the country by some accounts, that attracted thousands of people and their families from all over the city. The Chinna Creek mangroves skywalk could make ecotourism a profitable reality, and offer a platform where the citizenry of Karachi could experience Nature right in the middle of town.

To Azir’s credit I have to admit that he is one of the very few people I know who can comprehend my drift, no matter how outlandish or farfetched it might appear to the average and often above average minds. Our problem in Pakistan has been that any project not driven by dollars and cents short term profitability is consigned to the dust bin without a second thought. Azir’s boss, the admiral, was possessed with an equally keen eye for projects that tread off the beaten path, and he immediately understood what I was driving at. Thank God for naval officers imbued with the bigger picture.

I have been often reprimanded by friends and family for making my own life unnecessarily difficult. Had I requested the KPT for a mobilization advance I am sure it would have been forthcoming. But the whole idea was independently generating awareness along with a cash flow that would meet operational needs, and not as an adjunct of KPT. This I was sure I could manage from the powerful stakeholders that lined the banks of Chinna Creek and needed sensitization on the issue of mangroves conservation and promotion. From the KPT all I needed was permission to operate in its domain, and this was readily forthcoming. The admiral recognized a good PR project when he saw one.

Fiasco

But a PR project is only of any use once the organization has been fulfilling its core responsibilities. The KPT was under public pressure for having cleared a large tract of mangrove forest for the development of its officers housing society, and this had drastically reduced the size of the Chinna Creek backwaters, and with it compromised the natural de-silting of the Karachi Harbour that the daily tidal ebb and flow ensured. The KPT had taken its eyes off the ball, and the silt had begun accumulating, rendering depth charts outdated.

On the 13^th of August, 2003 the TCS 20^th anniversary celebrations were in full flow at the Royal Rodale Club, with Allama Iqbal’s grandson Azad occupying center-stage with his harmonium, singing in a voice most melodious verses from his grandfather’s collection, in commemoration of Pakistan’s Independence Day. Suddenly the air-conditioning of the Royal Rodale auditorium was overwhelmed by a foul and suffocating stench of diesel, bringing proceedings to an abrupt close and sending to the auditorium’s exits a clearly panicked gathering of Pakistan’s corporate elite.

On July 28, 2003 The Tasman Spirit, a Greek registered oil tanker, had run aground while approaching Karachi Harbour. For a while there it had held its ground even as crisis managers scrambled to retrieve the situation. But the Monsoon winds made for very rough seas, and when over two weeks later the crisis remained unresolved, the Tasman Spirit keeled over and broke up, emptying its guts into the sea. Over 12,000 tons of oil got spilled into the Arabian Sea polluting, according to the IUCN, 16 kilometers of pristine coastline.

Adding insult to injury, the ship's insurer offered 10 million rupees (about $180,000 in 2003) in compensation to the Karachi port authorities, and agreed to pay all cleaning expenses. What a cruel joke and a half. Understandably, the Chinna Creek mangroves skywalk went completely off the KPT’s radar, and I was too embarrassed and angry to approach the admiral for any follow up. Such are the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurs who seek to go off the beaten path.

Merry Meadows - Memoirs of an entrepreneur