“Do you know how vindictive these marketing and advertising legends could be?”. I was interacting closely with marketing head who’d been in client servicing for a couple of decades across agencies before he moved to client-side and doing really well. 

I didn’t bite but during our interactions of the project I got to hear snippets and they gave an interesting perspective.

This is all too common. All heroes have feet of clay.  Only the people who work with these legendary figures and work with them closely know how difficult some of them can be. 

I was watching TAR (brilliant film that should have won the best picture instead of ‘everything…’ but that’s me) starring Cate Blanchett which portrays the difficult side of a superlative maestro.   The question that keeps coming through and she herself tries to address at the beginning (a brilliant scene) is can you separate the art from the artist?  Charlie Chaplin, Picasso, Woody Allen (avoiding Indian names here) have had interesting lives and perhaps in today’s woke world they might have got a lot more flak and judgement for what happened in their personal lives.

But in the corporate world its different – what matters eventually is what I call the Mangeshkar exemplar.   The great Lata Mangeshkar and her sister have been accused time and time again of not giving new singers a chance and quelling the careers of their competitors.  It was a different time when the market was not really ready IMHO to take in different voices like that of Usha Uthup, Rekha Bharadwaj etc. and the most popular register in India including in the South was the one that the Mangeshkar sisters sang in. But here’s what made a difference IMHO. Lata Mangeshkar delivered and delivered brilliantly as her colossal collection of superlative hits across the decades shows. 

And that is what also applies to the legends who made it to the top.  They delivered when they got there.

One of the leaders who moved to the top regionally and then globally had politically out-maneuvered every competitor in his way and made them redundant or they moved out, leaving leadership had no choice but to go for him.  But once he reached the top the performance of the company really blossomed and the team he’d put together was simply best-in-class. 

This is key, because and here I think everyone is familiar with cases where someone made it to the top through whatever means but failed miserably.  The Mangeshkar exemplar is that if you don’t have competitors you don’t mess up or take it lightly you still work hard and deliver like she did and remained at the top for over six decades.

One interesting aside was that every such leader always has some lackeys who brown nose her/him and once s/he moves to a new company these lackeys (usually sub par performers) move in with him.  The Mangeshkar exemplar for these executives is that these leaders manage to do well despite of this deadwood they bring with them as a package.  Because in the cases of the leaders who failed a lot of this was because of the deadwood they bring in or allow to latch to them.

We need to break free from the woke diktats of cancelling everything that irritates us. It’s important to separate the art from the artist and look at it objectively.  Agree or disagree, it’s nice to know that even in the case of the workplace, Lata Mangeshkar helps set standards for leadership.

PS: This post reflects only my personal opinion and viewpoint and not that of any organisation or industry body. Disclaimer applies.