LESSON #1: YOUR MOST PRECIOUS ASSET IS YOUR HEALTH
Ana noticed that self-neglect was a recurrent pattern in my behaviour. By damaging my health I was helping no one and achieving nothing. My travel schedule down to around 100 flights a year. I have had a yoga trainer for the past couple of years. Besides three days of yoga and breathing exercises every week, I go to the gym twice a week. I have lost 4 kg in the past four years as I have cut down on my sugar, fat and red meat intake.

LESSON #2: REFLECT DEEPLY TO UNDERSTAND YOUR DEEPEST DESIRES AND TRANSLATE THOSE INTO TANGIBLE OUTCOMES (AND LET GO OF EVERYTHING ELSE)
I spent the best part of a year reading and reflecting on this subject before founding Marcellus Investment Managers at the age of forty-two.

So, how does one find one’s deepest desire? Robert Greene’s book, Mastery, has a three-step method:

Step 1: You must connect (or reconnect) with your inclinations, with your sense of uniqueness. In that regard, Step 1 focuses on looking inward—you search your past for signs of that inner voice. You try to clear away other voices—parents’, friends’, teachers’—that might confuse you. Greene says, ‘You look for an underlying pattern, a core to your character that you must understand as deeply as possible.’

Step 2: Having nailed Step 1, you look at the career path you are already on (or the one that you are about to begin following). When you are choosing this career path, you need to avoid making needless distinctions between your professional and personal life.

Step 3: Once you have figured out your career path, you need to give yourself a mental model of how your career will broadly pan out. Once on this path, you discover certain side routes that attract you, while other aspects of this field leave you cold. You adjust and perhaps move to a related field, continuing to learn more about yourself, but always expanding off your skill base. It is when you do something that others find effortful—even difficult—but you find enjoyable, that you are connecting with your deepest desires and you are taking the first baby steps to mastery.

This is the very expression of playing to one’s strengths: registering rapid learning curves and feeling energized in the process.

LESSON #3: INVEST EMOTIONALLY IN PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS BUT BE OBJECTIVE ABOUT PROFESSIONAL DECISIONS
I found it hard to ascertain which relationships were being built with sincere intent and which ones might have an element of ulterior motive associated with them. As a result, I decided that I would not let anyone get close to me—my fear was that if they got close to me, they might take advantage of my proximity to them.

I had avoided investing emotionally in my closest professional relationships but in order to avoid hurting people, I had taken emotional professional decisions. For example, I let underperformers stay in my erstwhile firm for far longer than I should have.

As a result, in Marcellus, my colleagues and I regularly head out in the evening to play cricket matches under floodlights on Friday evenings (followed by pizza and other indulgent snacks).

The entire firm heads to the countryside or to a resort for a weekend outing every six months. There are monthly lunches for the whole firm and there is a birthday cake-cutting day every month (to celebrate that month’s birthday girls and boys).

However, when it comes to difficult decisions, I hold my nerve and try my best to take an objective, rather than an emotional, stance. For example, in 2019, a young, hard-working employee did something that was unethical. The recommendation from HR was that the youngster should be asked to leave. I acted upon the same recommendation immediately.

LESSON #4: ALLOCATE RESPONSIBILITIES, SET THE GUARDRAILS FOR PERFORMANCE AND THEN ASK YOUR COLLEAGUES THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
I was no longer in a position to provide readymade solutions to the business problems faced by my direct reports; my job was now to understand what my colleagues were doing and ask the right questions.

The first type is ‘Completeness Questions’
For example, if we are reviewing Marcellus’s technology-and-IT budget for the next financial year, I will ask my team in tech and ops whether we have thought about what tech support our US sales team will need, what systems our traders will need, what trade monitoring systems our compliance team will require and what financial data our analysts will want to buy.

The second type is ‘Think Differently Questions’
For example, if we are reviewing our office space budget for the next financial year, I need to ask, given how many of our colleagues now prefer to work from home, whether we need one desk per Marcellus employee or 0.7 desks per Marcellus employee.

The third type is ‘Are We Focusing on The Right Things?’ Questions
For example, whenever a client asks me, ‘Should I invest with Marcellus?’, my response is, ‘What would you like your equity portfolio to do?’ or ‘What are your investment goals?’ Only if a client is clear in his head about his investment goals (e.g., ‘I would like to retire in fifteen years’; ‘I would like to send my kids to study abroad in ten years’ time’) do I get into the discussion around ‘Is a Marcellus product appropriate for you?’

My job as a leader in such situations is to keep everyone’s focus on the difficult questions.
Questions are a means for a leader to tap into the unique ability that human beings have: the ability to collaborate. Almost every product we see and use, indeed our relationships, are born of collective effort.

LESSON #5: AIM FOR AN ENVIRONMENT OF 0 % POLITICS, 0% FRICTION AND 100% COLLABORATION
Rather than making the team more than a sum of its parts, talented professionals are made to feel like virtuoso performers rather than members of a high-quality orchestra.

The second thing I spent time figuring out in the opening months of creating Marcellus was how each member of the management team would have only one job, and that job would be unique to that person. As a result, there would be neither duplication of responsibilities nor competition between colleagues.

The focus would be on outgunning the competition rather than your colleagues in the firm.

Learning from what the American fund manager Ray Dalio has said in his book Principles,7 the third thing I did was to request two of my colleagues—who are not founders of Marcellus—to write a compensation document that would define how all of us would get paid, how the bonus pot would be calculated at the end of the year, every single member of the leadership team would be able to see what every other person is getting paid.

LESSON #6: CREATE CIRCUIT BREAKERS (OR SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES) THAT PREVENT YOU FROM BEING YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY
Discussions with my fellow founders on difficult subjects are best done in the first half of the day, when our mental batteries are fully charged.

‘Saurabh, you need to stop thinking like an equity analyst and start thinking like an owner of a business.’

LESSON #7: PREPARE METICULOUSLY FOR INTERNAL MEETINGS WITH COLLEAGUES
Put the agenda of the meeting in the meeting invite and either provide background material or seek briefing material well in advance.

Ahead of the meeting, I ensure that I read the material carefully and the day prior, I spend time thinking through how the meeting will pan out.

What sort of issues or roadblocks are we likely to hit in the meeting?

Once the meeting begins, I sit back and listen for as long as possible as my colleagues give their inputs on the problem at hand.

Since all of us have read the same briefing material coming into the meeting, the meeting rapidly becomes focused on solutions and the way forward.

Given the quality of the talent in Marcellus, the solutions usually come from the team at large.

In the rare instance that my colleagues are stumped, I amp up my mental intensity and explain how in my two decades of managing businesses similar to Marcellus I have seen similar problems getting resolved.

LESSON #8: GIVE YOURSELF AND YOUR COLLEAGUES TIME AND SPACE (RATHER THAN PUSHING YOURSELF OR THEM MORE)
Pushing people relentlessly rarely results in positive outcomes.

Ana offered to do a collective Zoom call with the Marcellus leadership. On that Zoom call, Ana asked each of us to do a couple of seemingly simple exercises, such as each one talking about a difficult time in our lives. She also asked us to say what we admired most in our colleagues (Ana did not allow us to waffle; we had to be specific.

Principle 1: Frugality: Not buying or owning things that add very little to your life not only saves you money but also frees up mind space for more useful activities. I have at any point in time owned one suit, six shirts (one for each working day of the week) and one pair of shoes. I wear these items until they wear out, regardless of what the latest trend in men’s fashion might be.

Principle 2: Positivity. I am now a hardcore believer in positivity.

Principle 3: Reduction of clutter to improve focus. I have no Twitter or Instagram accounts and I don’t have WhatsApp on my phone or on my computer. Ultimately, these two practices significantly improve the time I get to do deliberate, focused, deep work.

Principle 4: Daily meditation. Meditation is a practice where an individual trains her attention to achieve a clear, calm and stable state of mind.

LESSON #9: BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR EXCEPTIONALLY CURIOUS PEOPLE
When we built Marcellus, provided the applicants’ qualifications passed basic levels of hygiene for that role, we increasingly ignored the qualifications of applicants.

Instead, we create a series of case questions focused on helping us understand how much our prospective colleagues read, what sort of material they read, what sort of podcasts they listen to, how they seek to constantly upgrade their skill sets and how they apply this knowledge to practical business situations.

So, for example, when we interview analysts, we often give them the last ten years of annual reports on a listed company and tell them to identify the most critical business issue faced by the said company which, if solved, will transform the company’s fortunes.

LESSON #10:  LEARN TO COMMUNICATE AS CLEARLY AS POSSIBLE TO BOTH INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL AUDIENCES
Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle of communication wherein the most efficient method of communicating a message or a point of view is:

You begin by stating the ‘Situation’, i.e., the common point of view or knowledge that you and the audience share;

You then state the ‘Complication’, i.e., the issue at hand or the ‘burning platform’ issue about which the audience is worried;

You then state the ‘Question’ that the audience wants answered or the business problem that the audience wants a solution for; and

Finally, you state the ‘Answer’ or the solution.

This simple but very effective format of communication is called ‘Situation-Complication-Question-Answer’ or S-C-Q-A in short.

THE CHARACTERISTICS THAT ANA CHANGED IN SAURABH
What stands out are the huge ‘jumps’ between 2017 and 2021 when it comes to Hope and Teamwork!

While in 2017, Hope had ranked at twenty among the twenty-four traits for Saurabh, by the end of 2021, Hope ranked first. Individuals with this strength strongly agree with statements such as ‘I believe that good will triumph over evil’, ‘I always look on the bright side’, or ‘Despite challenges, I always remain hopeful about the future’.

We were working around the clock, all on Zoom. After months and months of this, many of us were experiencing signs of exhaustion and depression. One of the levers that got the team through was Saurabh’s unrelenting optimism. His energy was contagious as he envisioned, often with data and facts, a bright future for all of us at Marcellus.’

In 2017 Teamwork came in at 22/24, but by the end of 2021, it ranked 3/24.

‘In our leadership meetings today, when there is a disagreement in the team, Saurabh will let others drive the decision-making even if he disagrees with them in about half the cases. Whereas prior to the coaching in 2017, Saurabh would, in 90 per cent of the cases, choose the “my way or the highway” approach.’

Making money is not his primary motivator. Rendering Marcellus profitable is a marker of success for him if it stands in support of those that matter to him: his family, his team and his clients.

His honesty also manifests in his candour of speech, which he brings to work.

Another marker of creative leaders is their proclivity to work on several projects simultaneously, often generating ideas for one project while still working on another, cross-fertilization of ideas being a positive by-product.

Writing books seems to be for Saurabh a way to capture as well as generate ideas. His nightstand always has at least five books on it that he is reading simultaneously.

LIFE IS TRANSIENT
I had realized as a teenager that much of what we tend to get excited about when we are young—wealth, power, friends, community, respect—is transient.

I instinctively memorized the lyrics of the Dire Straits song, ‘The Bug’ (1992):
Sometimes you’re the windshield
Sometimes you’re the bug
Sometimes it all comes together baby
Sometimes you’re a fool in love
Sometimes you’re the Louisville slugger
Sometimes you’re the ball
Sometimes it all comes together baby
Sometimes you’re going to lose it all

Even today, I hum these words to myself, both on days when I am feeling on top of the world and on days when I feel miserable.

My abiding memory of my childhood years is of my parents discussing on a weekly basis how little money we had and how little we could do to improve our standard of living. Everything I do is my way of ensuring that the next generation of Indians—my children’s generation—does not have to get the raw deal that my parents and my grandparents did.

I try to balance the needs of my body and my family’s needs with my professional goals.

MOST INNER CRITICS ARE DEVELOPED IN CHILDHOOD
Given that most inner critics develop in childhood and adolescence, we are dealing with a very established voice usually, and many interventions by the coach are needed to firmly establish the client’s inner balance of a positive mindset versus a critical mindset.)

TRY TO STRIKE A BALANCE WHEN RAISING YOUR KIDS
We try to achieve a balance between ensuring that the children focus on their academics and cultivate other interests (baking and writing in Malini’s case and music and football in Jeet’s case).

We hope, as parents, that a decade hence, both our children will have found their place in the world.

LIVE INTERESTING LIVES SO THAT YOU CAN TELL INTERESTING STORIES
The best leaders are also often great storytellers. They tell themselves the right stories that help them be true to themselves and their values.

They also know how to engage those around them with a narrative that creates a sense of shared purpose and direction and inspires alignment on how to overcome challenges.

Stories do not need to be long to bring a message across. Hemingway’s shortest story makes this clear: ‘Baby shoes, never worn, for sale.’ Stories need to move us, invite us to reflect, and possibly call us to action. The best stories are based on experience and observations and are not necessarily amusing or clever.