We need to focus on happy communities & happy shareholders: Sudhanshu Vats

The changing business landscape poses new challenges as well as offers new opportunities to business leaders, who need to adapt fast and think on their feet. Adgully caught up with Sudhanshu Vats, Group CEO, Viacom18, at the recently held IAA Leadership Awards in Mumbai, who spoke about the mega trends that will impact the way business functions in India.

Vats also spoke about, what he calls the 3Is of A formula – Inference, Influence and Intuition, which need to be combined with adrenaline – that can help young business leaders navigate the new world.

If you look at digitisation, it’s all pervasive now. It is not about digital products, it’s not about digital delivery. It’s about digital live; it’s about digital business and the digital way of doing everything. There is so much in store that even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched a Digital India programme. I think digitisation is a big phenomenon that is impacting all of us and will have wide ranging ramifications. It has implications for our businesses.

Digitisation will also put a lot of pressure on margins moving forward. It will question conventional revenue models and I think in that context it is one key mega trend that we need to continue to look to.

Another mega trend, which is known to all of us, is urbanisation. It is estimated that 65 per cent of the global GDP growth in the next decade will come from 600 cities around the world and of these 600 cities, 400 cities are likely to be from the developing and emerging world, and many of them also from India.

And with urbanisation, comes a set of challenges and opportunities. There are challenges in the form of management of water, waste, power, transportation, etc. At the same time there are also enormous opportunities, particularly for all of us sitting in this room and I think definitely so for the media, marketing and advertising fraternity.

The third mega trend, which to some extent is related to digitisation, is convergence – be it between media and telecom, between content publishers, content platforms and content consumer communities, and many other levels as well. We as business leaders, communities and societies recognise them.

The fourth and final mega trend is about sustainability.

What it means for businesses and corporate leaders

I think as business goes forward, we should look beyond profits and matrices, which conventionally businesses have been looking at and evaluating. I think businesses have to step up and become more responsible. We have to become part of the solution of the society rather than just being there. For us as business leaders, we have to focus on happy communities and happy shareholders – perhaps in that order. That will be the significant change.

That leads me to what the future of leaders and the leadership will be as we go forward. I think leaders from the future, based on the businesses and the mega trends that we have seen, have to see purpose there and vision. If that is the case in the constant flux and changing world, we need to examine what are the four key traits that leaders should have or are already beginning to display.

For me, it is the 3Is. The first ‘I’ is about ‘Inference’. As we go forward in this new digital world, we should learn to draw inferences because they could easily get crossed in the pixels. We could either look at them as pixels or we could begin to draw patterns out of them or see a picture in them. The leader will see those patterns and the picture. So inference becomes very important.

The second important piece is ‘Influence’. In the new world, the leaders need to be persuasive within the organisation, the stakeholders and influence them to become much more important.

The third ‘I’ is ‘Intuition’. Intuition is needed in the modern world because this world is more about taking risks. It is more about managing with limited HR and a lot of experience.

However, none of these will be useful if they are not coupled with ‘adrenaline’. So, this is the 3Is of A formula that I want to leave with the young leaders and the leaders of the future.