Biz Lounge — Max Healthcare's CEO on corporate culture

From Mint's Biz Lounge interview series, filmed while Dr Bakshi led Max Healthcare. Colleagues describe a chief executive who listens, decentralises decisions as far as he can, and interviews senior candidates on a Saturday in a pair of jeans. He is asked what he carried from McKinsey into a hospital network. What follows is an edited transcript of his answers.

On what McKinsey taught him. McKinsey is one of the best people-focused organisations I have seen anywhere in the world. They understand that their core strength is their people. They keep lean buildings and lean infrastructure. They hire the best from the best campuses in the world, and then they put a great deal of time and effort into making those individuals successful: training them, giving them honest feedback, putting them in situations where they can succeed. That has become part of my DNA.

Healthcare is not very different. It is the nurse, the doctor, the janitor who makes the difference. The real cutting-edge work starts to happen when your people are excellent. That is what I have been trying to carry across into Max Healthcare, and I am already seeing some benefit from it.

On the biggest leadership lesson so far. If you have the right person, and that person has the skill and the will to do the job, the job will get done. It does not matter how much intellectual problem-solving and analysis you generate around it. It comes down to a human being who understands what needs doing.

So we are doing a lot of training and a lot of one-to-one conversation, to get clarity on what we are trying to do, how we will know we have succeeded, and how we will know something is still a problem. Do that a hundred times a day, and get a thousand people doing it a hundred times a day, and the organisation suddenly starts to move.

I would not quite call it a lesson, but it is interesting to watch how well people respond once they are given clarity. Indians work very hard and are very smart. It is the lack of clarity that confuses people and organisations. The clearer we make things, the faster we move.

On what he would change about the job. I love what I am doing. I came into an organisation that had grown very suddenly, and I am in a systems-building mode, creating things that will scale. We have had real success with that. But I miss being able to walk into an ICU, talk to patients and sit with families. I am not able to give that enough time, and I hope to do more of it over the next year.

On whether leadership can be learned. Absolutely. I think it is a misnomer to say leaders are born. Leadership is not rocket science. It is doing the right thing, and it goes back to very basic things.

It is not command and control. It is not, here is my vision, now be my followers. It is talking to a lot of people and moving together. That matters particularly in a knowledge-rich industry like ours. We are not a manufacturing company, and we are not an army. In a knowledge-rich industry, a doctor is a leader in his own right. A nurse is a leader in her own right. A technician in an operating theatre knows more about that procedure and the instruments it needs than perhaps even the surgeon does. They are all leaders. Once they start working together, the magic starts.

On a favourite motto. You have Alaskan huskies. There is one dog that leads and the others follow, and somebody researched how that dog became the leader. Is he the most dominant? The most aggressive? Actually, it is the dog that listens most to the other dogs, that is most sensitive to what the others are thinking, and can represent them.

That matches my own experience over the last thirteen or fourteen months. Listening to people, applying some basic management and scientific principles, and synthesising it back as: this is what we are all saying, so let us do this. It works like magic.

So leadership is about inclusiveness, about sensitivity, and about action. It is not theory. You have to do things, you have to experiment, and you will fail at two of the five things you try. But unless you do something you will never get anywhere.