<h2>Executive Summary</h2><ul><li><p>Sustained growth comes from <strong>finding new ways to create value</strong> as organisations evolve and markets change.</p></li><li><p>Building an enduring business requires leaders to <strong>think beyond the next quarter</strong> while staying disciplined in day-to-day execution.</p></li><li><p>Strong organisations are built by people who <strong>bring different perspectives, ask difficult questions</strong> and are <strong>comfortable challenging</strong> one another.</p></li><li><p>Mr Sabharwal argued that India's reform agenda should focus on four areas: <strong>decriminalisation, deregulation, digitisation and decentralisation.</strong></p></li><li><p>India's pharmaceutical industry shows what can happen when supportive policy is matched by <strong>entrepreneurial ambition and long-term investment.</strong></p> </li></ul>.<p>At a recent IMA India Forum session in Bombay, Manish Sabharwal used the story of Desh Bandhu Gupta and Lupin to examine why some companies, careers and countries continue to grow while others become trapped at a certain level. Beyond a point, Mr Sabharwal argued, progress does not come from adding more land, labour or capital. Strategy is not about putting more cooks into the kitchen. It is about finding a different recipe. Few observers in the 1970s would have predicted that India would become one of the world’s most important suppliers of affordable medicines, or that a company founded by a chemistry professor would grow into a global business. The journeys of Indian pharma, Lupin and Mr Gupta challenge the idea that destiny is fixed.</p><h2>Courage, Choice and Luck</h2><p>Mr Gupta grew up without electricity or running water and carried a lifelong limp because a childhood fracture was not properly treated. He began as a teacher and professor, but repeatedly chose restlessness over security. He left jobs that constrained him and refused to close Lupin when its debts mounted. For Mr Sabharwal, entrepreneurship is often an “unjudgeable” journey. Decisions that appear irrational at the time may form a coherent pattern in retrospect. Misfortune also shaped purpose. The deaths of a friend and siblings from tuberculosis drew Mr Gupta towards medicines for the disease. His limp prevented him from joining the Air Force, while his dismissal from BITS Pilani pushed him towards industry. Luck nevertheless matters. People make their own luck, Mr Sabharwal suggested, but not in circumstances of their choosing. Openness, diverse networks and persistence improve the odds.</p><h2>Policy and Enterprise</h2><p>Indian pharma was not created by entrepreneurship alone. India’s Patents Act of 1970 and America’s Hatch Waxman Act of 1984 created opportunity, but entrepreneurs converted it into global capability. Mr Sabharwal compared development to Scrabble. Government provides the vowels, the private sector the consonants, and progress comes from forming longer words. Software and pharmaceuticals became India’s longest words. The wider lesson is that Indian companies do not need to be Western to be modern. Domestic pharmaceutical businesses overturned the assumption that multinationals possessed permanent advantages in technology, management and meritocracy. The industry has also strengthened India’s global credibility and soft power.</p><h2><strong>The Crisis that Remade Lupin</strong></h2><p>Lupin’s public offering began its most difficult period. Flush with money that the core business did not immediately require, the company invested in real estate, joint ventures and other non-core activities. Losses accumulated, debt rose, senior managers left and Lupin came close to failure. Mr Gupta himself went through periods of depression. The turnaround took nearly a decade. Assets were sold, debts addressed, a new management team assembled and the company recommitted itself to pharmaceuticals. Lupin invested in the United States well before the payoff was visible and reorganised around clearer profit and loss responsibilities. Mr Gupta also replaced a compliant board with directors who could act as a hearing aid, a mirror and a seat belt rather than as poodles. The crisis turned an instinctive entrepreneur into a more reflective and strategic manager. Lupin survived because it learned.</p><h2>Five Balances for Enduring Organisations</h2><p>Mr Sabharwal drew five organisational lessons from the founders of Indian pharma. Leaders must balance the next quarter with the next quarter century, risk with patience, teamwork with individuality, thinking with doing, and brains with brawn. Mr Gupta wrote that a 25-year plan is not the same as 25 one-year plans. Leaders must meet immediate obligations without allowing short-term targets to consume long-term purpose. Strategic patience is not passivity. It combines a considered bet with the discipline to let compounding work.</p><p>Effective teams need not consist of people who like one another, but of people who respect complementary abilities and can work through disagreement. Cognitive diversity matters because organisations become fragile when everyone shares the same experience and blind spots. Business plans may be written in poetry, but they are executed in prose. Thinkers without operating responsibility become detached, while doers without strategic perspective become mechanical. Strategy can no longer remain confined to a planning department. It must become a line responsibility. Capital, headcount and hours worked are not enduring advantages. What matters is how intelligently resources are combined. More money than a competitor is not a strategy. Productivity, culture, technology and judgement are.</p><h2>India’s Unfinished Transformation</h2><p>The discussion then widened from companies to the country. Mr Sabharwal remains optimistic about India, but believes its principal constraint has changed. Infrastructure, finance and skills remain imperfect, but are no longer the dagger at the heart of growth. The binding constraint is “regulatory cholesterol” and India’s uneasy relationship with entrepreneurship.</p><p>India’s economic challenge is also frequently misdiagnosed. The country does not simply have a jobs problem. It has a wages and productivity problem. Too many people remain trapped in low-productivity employment, particularly agriculture. The objective must therefore be formal, productive, non-farm employment supported by urbanisation, industrialisation and stronger human capital. Cultural explanations offer little help. India’s growth rate changed after 1991 without any comparable change in its civilisation. Culture can become an alibi for poor policy. India’s transformation remains unfinished because society and the state have not fully renegotiated their relationship with entrepreneurs, enterprise and wealth creation.</p><h2>The Reform Agenda</h2><p>Mr Sabharwal identified four reform priorities, decriminalisation, deregulation, digitisation and decentralisation. Progress has been made in removing criminal provisions affecting employers, but deregulation remains harder. Businesses still confront a maze of circulars, notifications, guidelines and orders that often lack a single authoritative source. Digitisation must move beyond uploading PDFs. Businesses need common identifiers and reliable digital access to regulations. Prior approvals should be reduced, licences made perpetual where appropriate and self-certification expanded. Decentralisation is equally important. Many labour, education, health and urban issues cannot sensibly be managed from Delhi or even at the state level. Power follows funds, functions and functionaries. Local governments will remain weak until all three are transferred to them.</p><h2>The Message for CXOs</h2><p>The questions for business leaders are practical. Are we using more resources or finding a better recipe? Is the board a poodle or a hearing aid? Are we building only for the next quarter, or also for the next generation? Lupin’s history shows that difficulty can become reinvention, but only when courage is accompanied by reflection, discipline and institutional change.</p>
<h2>Executive Summary</h2><ul><li><p>Sustained growth comes from <strong>finding new ways to create value</strong> as organisations evolve and markets change.</p></li><li><p>Building an enduring business requires leaders to <strong>think beyond the next quarter</strong> while staying disciplined in day-to-day execution.</p></li><li><p>Strong organisations are built by people who <strong>bring different perspectives, ask difficult questions</strong> and are <strong>comfortable challenging</strong> one another.</p></li><li><p>Mr Sabharwal argued that India's reform agenda should focus on four areas: <strong>decriminalisation, deregulation, digitisation and decentralisation.</strong></p></li><li><p>India's pharmaceutical industry shows what can happen when supportive policy is matched by <strong>entrepreneurial ambition and long-term investment.</strong></p> </li></ul>.<p>At a recent IMA India Forum session in Bombay, Manish Sabharwal used the story of Desh Bandhu Gupta and Lupin to examine why some companies, careers and countries continue to grow while others become trapped at a certain level. Beyond a point, Mr Sabharwal argued, progress does not come from adding more land, labour or capital. Strategy is not about putting more cooks into the kitchen. It is about finding a different recipe. Few observers in the 1970s would have predicted that India would become one of the world’s most important suppliers of affordable medicines, or that a company founded by a chemistry professor would grow into a global business. The journeys of Indian pharma, Lupin and Mr Gupta challenge the idea that destiny is fixed.</p><h2>Courage, Choice and Luck</h2><p>Mr Gupta grew up without electricity or running water and carried a lifelong limp because a childhood fracture was not properly treated. He began as a teacher and professor, but repeatedly chose restlessness over security. He left jobs that constrained him and refused to close Lupin when its debts mounted. For Mr Sabharwal, entrepreneurship is often an “unjudgeable” journey. Decisions that appear irrational at the time may form a coherent pattern in retrospect. Misfortune also shaped purpose. The deaths of a friend and siblings from tuberculosis drew Mr Gupta towards medicines for the disease. His limp prevented him from joining the Air Force, while his dismissal from BITS Pilani pushed him towards industry. Luck nevertheless matters. People make their own luck, Mr Sabharwal suggested, but not in circumstances of their choosing. Openness, diverse networks and persistence improve the odds.</p><h2>Policy and Enterprise</h2><p>Indian pharma was not created by entrepreneurship alone. India’s Patents Act of 1970 and America’s Hatch Waxman Act of 1984 created opportunity, but entrepreneurs converted it into global capability. Mr Sabharwal compared development to Scrabble. Government provides the vowels, the private sector the consonants, and progress comes from forming longer words. Software and pharmaceuticals became India’s longest words. The wider lesson is that Indian companies do not need to be Western to be modern. Domestic pharmaceutical businesses overturned the assumption that multinationals possessed permanent advantages in technology, management and meritocracy. The industry has also strengthened India’s global credibility and soft power.</p><h2><strong>The Crisis that Remade Lupin</strong></h2><p>Lupin’s public offering began its most difficult period. Flush with money that the core business did not immediately require, the company invested in real estate, joint ventures and other non-core activities. Losses accumulated, debt rose, senior managers left and Lupin came close to failure. Mr Gupta himself went through periods of depression. The turnaround took nearly a decade. Assets were sold, debts addressed, a new management team assembled and the company recommitted itself to pharmaceuticals. Lupin invested in the United States well before the payoff was visible and reorganised around clearer profit and loss responsibilities. Mr Gupta also replaced a compliant board with directors who could act as a hearing aid, a mirror and a seat belt rather than as poodles. The crisis turned an instinctive entrepreneur into a more reflective and strategic manager. Lupin survived because it learned.</p><h2>Five Balances for Enduring Organisations</h2><p>Mr Sabharwal drew five organisational lessons from the founders of Indian pharma. Leaders must balance the next quarter with the next quarter century, risk with patience, teamwork with individuality, thinking with doing, and brains with brawn. Mr Gupta wrote that a 25-year plan is not the same as 25 one-year plans. Leaders must meet immediate obligations without allowing short-term targets to consume long-term purpose. Strategic patience is not passivity. It combines a considered bet with the discipline to let compounding work.</p><p>Effective teams need not consist of people who like one another, but of people who respect complementary abilities and can work through disagreement. Cognitive diversity matters because organisations become fragile when everyone shares the same experience and blind spots. Business plans may be written in poetry, but they are executed in prose. Thinkers without operating responsibility become detached, while doers without strategic perspective become mechanical. Strategy can no longer remain confined to a planning department. It must become a line responsibility. Capital, headcount and hours worked are not enduring advantages. What matters is how intelligently resources are combined. More money than a competitor is not a strategy. Productivity, culture, technology and judgement are.</p><h2>India’s Unfinished Transformation</h2><p>The discussion then widened from companies to the country. Mr Sabharwal remains optimistic about India, but believes its principal constraint has changed. Infrastructure, finance and skills remain imperfect, but are no longer the dagger at the heart of growth. The binding constraint is “regulatory cholesterol” and India’s uneasy relationship with entrepreneurship.</p><p>India’s economic challenge is also frequently misdiagnosed. The country does not simply have a jobs problem. It has a wages and productivity problem. Too many people remain trapped in low-productivity employment, particularly agriculture. The objective must therefore be formal, productive, non-farm employment supported by urbanisation, industrialisation and stronger human capital. Cultural explanations offer little help. India’s growth rate changed after 1991 without any comparable change in its civilisation. Culture can become an alibi for poor policy. India’s transformation remains unfinished because society and the state have not fully renegotiated their relationship with entrepreneurs, enterprise and wealth creation.</p><h2>The Reform Agenda</h2><p>Mr Sabharwal identified four reform priorities, decriminalisation, deregulation, digitisation and decentralisation. Progress has been made in removing criminal provisions affecting employers, but deregulation remains harder. Businesses still confront a maze of circulars, notifications, guidelines and orders that often lack a single authoritative source. Digitisation must move beyond uploading PDFs. Businesses need common identifiers and reliable digital access to regulations. Prior approvals should be reduced, licences made perpetual where appropriate and self-certification expanded. Decentralisation is equally important. Many labour, education, health and urban issues cannot sensibly be managed from Delhi or even at the state level. Power follows funds, functions and functionaries. Local governments will remain weak until all three are transferred to them.</p><h2>The Message for CXOs</h2><p>The questions for business leaders are practical. Are we using more resources or finding a better recipe? Is the board a poodle or a hearing aid? Are we building only for the next quarter, or also for the next generation? Lupin’s history shows that difficulty can become reinvention, but only when courage is accompanied by reflection, discipline and institutional change.</p>
