Mudar Patherya talks business and Sachin Tendulkar

Lesson 1 In business the ISO certification stands for process consistency This means that if the process is stable the end product will be consistentu00a0When Tendulkar was a boy he would wet tennis balls in his residential colony He would then ask his friends to bowl at him Most would assume that Tendulkar would do this to get the ball to come off the pitch faster normally wet tennis balls skid quicker and provide batsmen the feel of quicker bowling Tendulkar was a childstrategist he would inspect the face of the bat to see whether he had middled or not If the shot was offcentre he would tell himself to see the ball till the end After all if the process was right the runs would come Lesson 2 In business the successful achievers respond to rapid economic business and technology changes through reskilling When Tendulkar failed in a couple of early 2011 World Cup matches he went back to the drawing board At nets he did something unusual Got the bowlers to throw balls from halfpitch The conventional skilling process would have been to hit the balls thereafter Tendulkar raised the bar Once he had seen the ball early he would shut his eyes then drive the ball within an arc between where cover and point would have been If he could do this with his eyes closed then he reckoned that in the match he would be safe ndash with his eyes open Lesson 3 In a world marked by diverse variables the operative business word is lsquoderiskingrsquo A decade ago the Australians figured that they had uncovered Tendulkarrsquos weakness Feed him outside the off stump Get him to open out on the off side Induce him to edge The bowlers reckoned that if they fed him outside the off stump two things could happen He would edge and be caught behind or in the slips Or he would ignore temptation be frustrated into runlessness and give his wicket away Tendulkar responded flexibly he scored all round the wicket instead Eventually he scored 241 in the Sydney Test ndash without a single cover drive Lesson 4 In business success comes down to how you manage the fine print When Tendulkar played in high temperature regions he recognised that he would first have to stand the test of personal fitness and stamina So he would do something unusual get up in the middle of the night to drink as much water as he could so that when he was engaged in a long innings the following day he could be nearcertain that he would have adequate liquids inside him to prevent him from cramping Thereafter his skill would take over Lesson 5 In an industrial environment success is drawn from high capacity utilization gradually this translates into lsquomuscle memoryrsquo or intellectual capital Tendulkarrsquos daily discipline was practice 79 am match 930430 and practice 5307 This was when he was 12 years old As an extension he played matches 54 days nonstop during one of his school vacations Lesson 6 Value engineering is the shopfloor approach that makes it possible to get more from less Tendulkar would ask net bowlers to deliver from 16 yards When one apologised after hitting him Tendulkar is said to have told him lsquoMake me uncomfortablersquo When Shane Warne prepared for the 1998 battle against him on Indian turf Tendulkar lsquorecruitedrsquo Laxman Sivaramakrishnan to bowl round the wicket into the rough which Tendulkar had artificially created The result he batted and batted explored every possible delivery and once his muscle memory was adequate he went ahead and lsquomurderedrsquo Warne in the Test series Lesson 7 In business one needs to know which strategy to pursue valueaddition or costcutting In his maiden firstclass match Tendulkar scored a century Not marked by distinctive hitting On the contrary Tendulkar calibrated his strokeplay ndash neither too hard for the ball to reach the outfielders fast and neither too soft for the closein fielders to retrieve in a hurry The result he converted ones into twos and transformed twos into threes He was only 15 then Lesson 8 When you chase perfection you achieve excellence along the way Tendulkar would watch the ballbyball replay of each of his Test innings Lesson 9 Good businesses invest in cuttingedge technology The higher investment is more than recovered through incremental returns Tendulkar would generally refuse runners whenever he was injured because lsquoI would be two yards faster anywayrsquo Lesson 10 Strong businesses innovate so extensively that when others are focusing on the conventional capture of market share the strong businesses would have created a new market instead Television commentators discovered that when Tendulkar batted there would be an extraneous sound just before he played a shot They went back to the studios They slowed the frames The ball was not making any additional sound The bat was not rubbing against a pad or any other object Much later they concluded that the sound would be coming only from the batsman This is what they discovered Tendulkar would audibly predict how many runs he would score off that ball ndash between the time it had been bowled and been played lsquoTworsquo if he felt there was an opportunity lsquoFourrsquo if he felt the delivery was a lollipop Mudar Patherya watched Sachin Tendulkar make his debut in Karachi 1989 before switching careers to write on business u00a0