Failure Is Not an Option: When the Chips are Down Get up and Get Going

By Veer Sagar

Veer Sagar successfully converted from CEO to entrepreneur when he was 55, founding Selectronic, a pioneer of the back-office revolution in India. In this candid and unique book, a blend of self-help and memoir, Sagar takes you on his entrepreneurial journey. He illustrates his principles with stories from his life to help you develop the traits and responsibilities of an accomplished leader: to think out of the box, create successful teams, and nurture talent and innovation.


Sagar provides tips on how to make leading less daunting, including how to have difficult conversations with your bosses and peers and accept the vulnerability necessary to do good work, to enable you to set up and manage your own business. Think of Failure is not an Option as a motivational pep talk from your smartest friend and a must-read for anyone looking to build a successful career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9789356401266

Veer Sagar

Veer Sagar, a serial entrepreneur, successfully made the transition from CEO to businessman 26 years ago when he founded Selectronic, pioneering the back-office revolution in India. "Failure is Not an Option," a candid book written in Sagar's inimitable style, takes you through his entrepreneurial journey. Throughout the book, he regales you with anecdotes and lessons learned as he shares both his successes and failures in an easy-to-read, fireplace-style format. The book was written to internalize some simple and effective mantras to become an effective leader: to think outside the box, grow and nurture loyal teams, and stay ahead of the curve. Sagar also provides tips on how to make leading less daunting, how to have difficult conversations with your bosses or peers, and the importance of self-reflection and humility to succeed. Think of "Failure is Not an Option" as a motivational pep talk from your smartest friend, an inspirational first-person account to galvanize you into action, and a must-read for anyone looking to build a rewarding career.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Pain. I felt it in my bones, flaring from my skull and surging down my spine onto my limbs. Lying on the floor, splayed out like a starfish, I couldn’t move a muscle. My body was paralysed, but my mind was only too alive to the pain. There’s no coming back from this, it said. I would lie there on a rack of my devising forever.

My heart begged to differ. Get up, it said. You have work to do, places to go and people to look after. As always, the heart persuaded the mind. I ignored the shards of agony ripping through my body with every movement and got to my feet. At once, I felt better.

I could do it—get on a plane that very evening, endure a gruelling 14-hour flight from New Delhi to New York, attend the annual meetings with my clients and come back with my reputation for reliability intact and the business secure—with a little help from my friendly neighbourhood pharmacy and, of course, my wife, Surabhi. Armed with heavy-duty painkillers and muscle sprays, I embarked on my odyssey, feeling less like a conquering hero than a marionette held together with pins and glue.

Was I being reckless, haring off to the United States when I should have been in the hospital? I could have put off my clients, claiming force majeure, but to my mind, the risk was worth it. Fate had decreed that I would strike my head on a pillar that morning while attempting an inverted yoga pose. How I responded to the challenge was up to me.

Everybody falls, figuratively speaking, at multiple points in their lives. Rising each time you fall is the secret of success. That is the first lesson I want to impart. You must have the ability to get up, time after time, like a boxer in the ring after a brutal punch.

My body protested in the only way it could, fogging my brain and making it difficult to focus as I organised my documents. I persisted, only to forget my neatly arranged folders on my table! We landed at the John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport with my body supported by painkillers and my meetings unsupported by the forgotten documents. I soldiered on without them but with an oddly numb sensation in the left side of my body. My limbs may have been giving up, but my mind powered through. I emerged victorious from the crisis (more on my struggles later in the book).

The lesson here is that life does not guarantee a tomorrow. It’s now or never. What does not get started today will never get finished tomorrow. Also, your strength doesn’t come from winning. It comes from struggles and hardships, which prepare you for the next level.

I resolved to give shape to my long-pending dream of putting together my collection of professional and personal learnings in the form of a book—a book for dreamers who are striving for growth, success, adventure, innovation, discovery, possibilities and insights. I feel that I’m qualified to write it, having experimented every moment of my life with generally successful outcomes and a rising career graph. The bulk of these developments took place against the backdrop of the IT revolution in India, to which I had a ringside seat.

I am a founder member of the Association of Entrepreneurs (India) and vice-chairperson of the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC). I was a member at some time or another of the executive councils of all the major IT associations, namely Operational Research Society of India (ORSI), Computer Society of India (CSI), Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT), India, and National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM). I had the honour of chairing the organising committee of the annual conference of the CSI three times in three different cities.

So yes, I know what I’m talking about! I was also a member of the Working Group on IT for the formulation of the tenth Five-Year Plan (2002–2007) and the chairperson of the core group on information technology-enabled services (ITES) constituted by the Delhi government.

This book is not a rambling account of my fifty-six-year corporate and entrepreneurial journey or a window to the past. It’s a collection of my learnings written in an autobiographical style. Also, the book is for everyone because I’m neither a techie nor an MBA. My point is that there’s no substitute for learning on the job, getting down to the basics and working from first principles right from the lowest point in the chain.

I made some pretty strange choices but succeeded anyway. So, the book is about what I call ‘successful failures’ or how to convert failure into success. It is about the guts needed to face obstacles and the glory of overcoming them.

I have a poster of a tortoise in my room with the legend ‘Tortoise makes progress when it sticks its neck out’. Most people don’t make decisions because they are scared, lest they fail. However, there’s no bigger failure than not taking a decision.

The trick is to learn from failure and not be scared of it because that will always lead to success. Failure—the kind where you throw in the towel—is never an option.

ONE

HANGING ON THE EDGE OF A CLIFF

Iwas hanging off a cliff, holding on for dear life and feeling my grip begin to slacken. Then a hand reached out from nowhere and pulled me to safety. At least that’s how I felt as I grasped my saviour’s hand across a table at the Willingdon Club in Mumbai in November 1998.

My good Samaritan had no idea what that handshake meant. A second ago, I was the promoter-CEO of a lame-duck firm with no infrastructure, work or funds, poised to throw hundred-plus employees out on the streets. Now, I was in the money. I had the means to keep my brainchild alive, make a comeback and, most importantly, support my loyal staff.

Selectronic, India’s first medical transcription business process organisation (BPO) and my first and only entrepreneurial venture, was just a year old when it tumbled into a near-fatal crisis. Here’s what happened, in brief: I was on the cutting edge of India’s IT story, an acknowledged pioneer of the BPO revolution and the patriarch of a thriving firm. Then, to use the existentialist term, life happened—and it resembled a Greek comedy.

Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, struck me down. She appeared in the form of a lawyer, who not only seduced several key employees with offers of better pay but also left me with nothing. Then Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck, intervened with a helping hand in the shape of a bespectacled, grey-haired gentleman radiating gravitas and fierce intelligence. His name was Dr Purnendu Chatterjee.

The billionaire boss of The Chatterjee Group (TCG), then a business associate of financier-philanthropist George Soros, and an engineer trained at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Berkeley, Dr Chatterjee is a legendary dealmaker. His pact with me was that I would put his Kolkata-based TCG Software on the IT map of the world. The terms of the contract were generous enough to ensure that I could continue to meet my salary bill.

Selectronic would live on, and I would maintain my business dharma vis-à-vis my employees. I could have taken the path of least resistance, closed Selectronic and waltzed away to a high-end job in any one of a dozen IT firms in India, but that would have meant leaving my people high and dry.

The man who made things turn around for me was Richard Morgan, founder and CEO of Amphion Capital Partners. He was, along with Purnendu Chatterjee, on the board of Sybase, a software and services enterprise (which later disappeared into SAP AG). Richard was aware of my difficulties, and when he heard that Chatterjee was looking for someone to take charge of TCG Software, he strongly recommended my name.

A meeting was set up at the TCG headquarters in Manhattan. I presented myself at 888 Seventh Avenue, New York (George Soros was a few floors down in the same building), at the appointed time, intrigued to meet the famously reticent genius. I’d heard he was aloof, more at ease with numbers and computers than people. I love people, so I wondered if we would get on.

As it happened, I didn’t get to meet Dr Chatterjee that afternoon. Unbeknownst to me, it was a vetting session. One after another, the top brass of TCG dropped by to have casual chats with me. It later dawned on me that I was being sized up. They must have been satisfied with what they saw because a meeting was set up with Dr Chatterjee’s senior consultant in India, Dinesh Vaswani, later that month in Delhi. Although our initial interaction didn’t exactly get off to a flying start, after I joined TCG, I realised that he was a wonderful person. We became good pals, and over time, he became a family friend. The meeting didn’t go well. Dinesh was a hard negotiator and offered me a deal I could not accept. He proposed that I shut down Selectronic or sell it to TCG and join the firm full-time. Although I was like tiny krill to his giant blue whale, I had no intention of being swallowed up. I was keen to take up the TCG assignment to save Selectronic, not to sell it. I said as much.

Richard was furious, and I couldn’t blame him. He had my best interests at heart and couldn’t, for the life of him, understand why I would turn down a generous job offer with a company the size of TCG to stick with a failed enterprise. Being the nice man that he is, he gave it another try.

Thanks to his efforts, I met the great man himself a week later over lunch at the Willingdon Club in Mumbai. I wasn’t in the least bit nervous because I’d already rejected their offer, but I was curious to discover if Dr Chatterjee’s reputation for intellectual arrogance was justified. The gentleman I encountered in Mumbai had given me no reason to suspect otherwise.

I was pleasantly surprised. He was disarmingly spontaneous albeit business-like in his approach and responded with a naturalness that immediately put me at ease. I was thoroughly charmed. We got down to brass tacks and discussed the job objectives, the deliverables and my role and responsibilities. He was rather more accommodating than his associate had been and was perfectly fine with me continuing to helm Selectronic as long as there was no conflict of interest. All he wanted to know was whether I would honour my commitment to TCG Software: If there was a fire, would I be available to put it out? I assured him that I would give the company as much time as needed and not a second less. The deal was sealed with a handshake.

In the taxi on the way to the airport to catch a flight back to Delhi, I wondered briefly about how my wife, Surabhi, and my three daughters, Suhasni, Vandana and Niharika, would react to the double whammy. I would not only continue to run Selectronic but also take charge of a whole other company as well and in another city to boot!

It didn’t make sense to them, or anyone else, that I would sink the money I made at TCG into Selectronic, which had no work, infrastructure or resources at the time. How do I explain it? Call it a never-say-die or a try-try-again spirit or sheer pigheadedness on my part. I just didn’t know when I was beaten. I simply had to succeed. Failure was not an option!

I may have absorbed the spirit of the turbulent times in which I was born, the summer of 1942. The Quit India Movement, a struggle led by freedom fighters and not quitters, was launched that year. In the face of tremendous odds, with all-powerful forces ranged against them, they did not back down. No more could I.

This dogged persistence manifested itself early in my life when, as a boy, I found myself propelled into an alien environment. The year was 1954. Guru Dutt’s Aar Paar was playing in theatres, the Portuguese were being chased out of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and a British athlete was prepping to run the first four-minute mile.

TWO

FIND YOUR SWEET SPOT IF YOU WANT TO SHINE

Igrew up in a large, happy joint family in a nice house surrounded by rice fields at the bottom of Banjara Hills, a suburb in Hyderabad, far away from the centre of the city. I could read and write early and excelled in school. This fact did not escape my father, who served as a superintendent in the police department. He did not have the resources to provide his large brood with more than a basic minimum of material comforts. Each of us would have to make his or her way in the world, and without capital, education was the only means of upward mobility in newly independent India.

Good schools were few and far between, and he certainly couldn’t afford the fees. As we played in the dusty grounds of Banjara Club, he mulled over the problem, the furrows on his brow getting deeper by the day. He found the answer in a newspaper. In 1953, the Government of India launched a scheme of fully paid scholarships for deserving children in its public schools. My father applied, and as luck would have it, three of his sons (Shanti, Anand and I) and one grandson (Vijay) made the cut. We were all allotted seats at the Lawrence School, Lovedale.

Founded by Brigadier-General Henry Montgomery Lawrence, the school was intended as a military-style boarding school for the children of British Indian Army officers. Post-Independence, five years before I arrived there, it had been handed over to the Government of India. Still, it retained its exclusivity and was regarded as one of the most prestigious schools in the country.

Nevertheless, the fervour of socialism sweeping the country had not left Lovedale untouched, prompting the board of governors to throw open the school doors to less privileged students, alongside the scions of the rich and powerful.

A month later, my father bundled my two younger brothers, a nephew and me into a third-class train compartment and set off for Lovedale. As a rather precocious twelve-year-old, I was aware that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that the hopes of the family were riding on me.

To say I was proud to attend an institution that had produced some of India’s best minds would be an understatement. I was over the moon. Lovedale was the stuff of fairy tales, with its sprawling campus, magnificent buildings and libraries, vast playing fields, stellar faculty, well-appointed hostels and extracurricular activities galore. It was a far cry from anything we were accustomed to until then.

Day one passed in a flash as we scrambled to complete the admission process. I remember being relieved that all the Sagars were in the same house—Aravalli—and delighted with the dormitory where I would spend the next four years.

Reality set in the following day when I realised that we were the odd ones out—the scholarship kids. Most of the students were the children of industrialists, wealthy estate owners or high-ranking members of the defence forces. This fact firmed up my resolve to make a mark. By the end of the term, I told myself confidently, I wanted to stand out!

I didn’t get off to a good start. A senior came up to me and said, ‘Report to Senior Prince!’

‘The music teacher?’ I asked tentatively.

‘Yes!’ he snapped. ‘Tell him you are there for the B-flat major.’

Being a junior, I did as I was told and went off in search of the music department.

‘Sir, I have come for the B-flat major.’

Senior Prince looked me up and down as if he could not believe his ears. ‘Did you say B-flat major?’

‘Yes, sir.’

I had never heard of B-flat major. I assumed it was some species of musical instrument that would pour out a soulful melody as soon as I touched it.

Senior Prince held out a massive tuba, the largest of the brass instruments. It was rather taller than my four-foot, six-inch frame and wider than my skinny shoulders. I looked at the huge bell and convoluted tubes and valves and shivered in terror. By the time I had slung the heavy instrument over my shoulder and staggered to the bandstand, I was sweating bullets.

As instructed, I put my lips to the mouthpiece and blew, attempting to evoke a marching beat. But then, as part of the band, I had to march. I found myself quite unable to do both simultaneously. I could either play or I could move. When I tried to do both, I couldn’t keep up with the rest of the band, and those behind me would cannon into my back. I was forced to keep at it for two whole nightmarish days. The seniors had their fun, and Senior Prince had my measure: I was an eager beaver with more enthusiasm than sense.

In a matter of days, I figured out that being sought after meant excelling at extracurricular activities. You had to be good at arts or sports to outdo others. I refused to be doomed to anonymity. I was determined to become a star pupil even if it killed me.

I began by trying my hand at music, despite the fiasco with the band. I played every single instrument that I could lay my hands on with spectacularly cacophonous results. From the violin, I coaxed screeching and wailing sounds that could rival a colony of bats. Then, I tried playing the piano. My fingers invariably slid off the keys, producing a jumbled crash of notes that made people all the way across the yard wince. Finally, to the heartfelt relief of all music lovers, I accepted that I was tone-deaf and decided to switch to something else.

My next project was learning how to dance. I pictured myself as a budding Fred Astaire in a top hat and coattails, impressing everyone with my outstanding footwork and sense of rhythm. I looked forward to my first freshers’ dance in April 1954, when my imagined partner, Ginger Rogers, and I would burn up the dance floor. As it turned out, it was my various partners’ toes that were on fire from being stomped on by my clodhopping feet. My house captain, who had a broken leg in plaster, was a more graceful dancer than I. To say I had two left feet would be a gross understatement. That was the end of my short experiment with dancing.

Sports was next on my list. I liked cricket and was reasonably good at it, but I couldn’t get the hang of any other sport, be it football, basketball, volleyball or hockey. I was better off being a spectator and cheering from the stands than being on the field. I did make it to the school team and house teams occasionally but only when they ran out of players.

These setbacks merely strengthened my resolve to find something at which I could excel. In an article titled ‘Bat It Out’ in the Rotarian magazine in 1940, the legendary American baseball player Babe Ruth said, ‘You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.’ My search for the elusive differentiator continued. I wanted to be someone, to mean something to everyone.

I found a way to shine. As a voracious reader, I haunted the school’s grand library and kept myself exceptionally well-informed about history, geography and literature. I turned my passion for books to my advantage. If I could read, I could write. Soon, I was contributing articles and poems to the school magazine, which was my landmark moment. I received an overwhelming response.

From there, it was a short step to debating. I had read so much that I could speak extempore on virtually any subject with clarity and confidence. Then came the general knowledge quizzes, which I aced. After months of trying, I finally found my niche!

As the youngest member of the debating team and the youngest editor of the school magazine, I quickly made a name for myself. As the saying goes, ‘Hustle in silence and let your success make the noise’.

It was my quiet confidence onstage as much as my talent for public speaking that attracted my peers and impressed my teachers. I found it easy to establish a rapport with audiences, keeping them engrossed with stories, a dash of humour and off-beat takes on the subject at hand. The ability to break the ice effortlessly is a function of empathy. I could connect with the audience because I knew what mattered to them. Because I connected with them, I could make them believe in me.

Every laugh and round of applause was a small victory, a validation of my identity. I liked being a crowd-pleaser, and they loved me for it. Standing up there, entertaining, informing and holding them in thrall, I found my real/true self.

All my life, I have been the boy with a peculiar affinity for people and an inherent insight into their minds. The capacity to form meaningful friendships, the zeal to get to the bottom of any subject and to articulate my thoughts clearly and concisely and the ability to connect seemingly random dots—I owe all of these to my experiences at school. They have stood me in good stead and taken me to places I would never have dreamed possible.

Differentiate yourself.

If you want to stand out, pick a niche and excel in it. Be the best in the world.

Connect with people.

It is critical to connect with people to create an impact. People tend to believe those that they connect with.

Back Yourself

Boyhood is marked by several rites of passage, and I had missed out on an important one: learning how to ride a bicycle. In the 1950s, the bicycle was the most popular mode of private transport, with manufacturing centres such as Ludhiana turning out low-cost cycles. Bollywood had discovered the ‘bicycle song’, with Dev Anand chasing Nutan on a bicycle in Paying Guest to the tune of ‘Mana Janab Ne Pukara Nahin’ (the trend would continue into the 1960s until Bobby popularised the motorcycle). Never having mastered the art of balancing on two wheels, I was a stranger to the anarchic joys of riding. I learnt quite by chance. Here’s what happened.

We went on a trek through the Nilgiri Hills as a part of our school curriculum. There were ten of us—nine students and our housemaster, C. Mukherjee. From Lovedale, we marched along goat tracks to Mettupalayam, a town at the bottom of the hills. It was a one-week round trip, trekking during the day and camping at night. At times, the surreal beauty of the mountains held us spellbound, but for the most part, there was chatter and laughter. One night, we camped at the Kotagiri waterfall (also known as Catherine Falls), the second highest in the Nilgiris.