Go Kiss the World

In his first book The High Performance Entrepreneur, Subroto wrote about the challenges of setting up an enterprise, based on his experience as a co-founder of MindTree. In Go Kiss the World, he goes a step further, relating his life story and drawing lessons from it for the young professional.
Subroto Bagchi is a romantic at heart and this rings loud and clear when he writes. When he advises professionals not to lose the child in them, the genuineness of his belief is reflected in the way he writes. Every step (and occasional mis-step) of his life so far has been at once a source of wonderment as of learning.
Starting from his modest childhood as the last child of an itinerant bureaucrat in Orissa, Subroto flowered into the corporate leader and entrepreneur that we know today. How did this evolution happen? Family figures played a role – he learnt the importance of dignity, tenacity and honesty from his parents. Frequent moves as a child gave him the curiosity to seek diverse experiences as well as the temperament to handle them. His early jobs taught him how to manage organisational politics (management trainee at DCM), influence and negotiate with people (sales at HCL and PSI), and coordinate across functions (sales coordinator’s role at Wipro). But clearly, Subroto has several innate traits such as leadership (Best NCC cadet at the national level in his school days), communication (an ability to make himself “memorable”), optimism and perseverance which have helped him achieve whatever he has. Above all, he obviously has the capacity to reflect on, and learn from his own actions, and to be perfectly honest with himself – in this book he has been quite candid about some of the failures in his life.
Subroto cautions high achievers against overplanning, and advocates placing tenacity over ambition. I suspect that this advice won’t have too many takers among today’s youth. In fact, this book seems to belong to an earlier era, not to the world of the internet, social networking, and seven figure salaries to graduating MBAs. But if Subroto’s aim is to make you stop and think, there is plenty of food for thought in his elegant and sometimes poetic narrative.
The only complaint I have about this book is that at times Subroto is not as objective and critical with his baby (MindTree) as he is with himself. Hopefully, that will be corrected in his future writings…