One year into my PhD at Rutgers, I dropped out thinking ‘what value does my invention of a problem, and its solution, have on the world?’ While there were already enough real life problems to solve, I wondered ‘what is that this engineer inside me was trying to achieve’? To me an Engineer is a tinker with an analytical mindset and a fiery intellectual curiosity. Be it tinkering with a new technology on an old platform or a new problem for a new product. Tinkering is what I call innovation and, eventually, lots of innovation leads to some invention. In Robert Metcalfe’s (founder of 3COM and inventor of Ethernet) words: “Innovation is weed, Invention is a flower.” Engineering is a process of getting loads of weeds (innovation/tinkering) before one comes across a flower (invention).

So, let me confess right at the outset: I’m an engineer at heart and a manager by my outfit. A combination in which, the manager in me mingles with the customers and the engineer with the techies. Now striking a balance, of understanding both the customers and the engineers’ needs, creates the leader I am at BEA, India. And the most important leadership quality is the hard act of influencing people around without having to control them.

As an R&D center head, my value is more associated with my knowledge about BEA, its organization and products, and knowledge of similar companies in the industry. Higher the knowledge, the better the influence I posses. However, leaders realize that their technical competency in a particular area can never outflank that of a practicing software engineer. He (software engineer) is a winner at the very first instance of comparison, but what keeps a leader ahead is his holistic understanding of the entire product. The software engineer does a component of the product. The knowledge of customer requirements, product architecture, internal design et al places the leader at a unique vantage point: How to orchestrate the development of a product in a holistic fashion.

To that end, every organization is one central mother pyramid that consists of many small teams of daughter pyramids. Pack of anchors sit at the top of each pyramid driving their team to perform better, bringing co-ordination and guidance to avoid the pitfalls. These anchors are no cookie-cutter engineers, but star performers who have had prior experience of innovating, inventing and delivering products—doing relevant work in similar or different contexts—but having learnt what mistakes to avoid. To take a leaf out of my life, my work experience in the U.S for 18 years with many product companies made me believe that I could facilitate the growth of a center myself. And my way of anchoring the organization was to hire or build a team of anchors who could in turn manage their teams effectively.

I’ve often experienced that finding senior people with the relevant technical skills is perhaps the simplest aspect of growing an organization. The technical skills of a team need to be balanced with the right attitude and energy levels of the team members. My role as a parent anchor demands me to always lead by example. My potent tool is communication; there is nary a better mode to express your requirements. It is important that communication is provided with elements of honesty and transparency every time. For example, at BEA’s R&D center, I tell my directs what is happening within the organization, why change is required and how it would affect us and what should be our priorities. That brings the right perspective and attitude within the team. And such rightly informed attitude creates a clean environment where work is fun and engineers play it out inside the organization.