USA TODAY · MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2007 · 7B
Executive Suite Today: Advice from the Top
CEO succeeds through silence
Practicing the sphere of silence
1 hour of daily reflection gives you time to set goals, get focused Vijay Eswaran (pronounced Veejay Eeshwuhrn) is not well known in the USA, but throughout Asia he has become something akin to a CEO/spiritual guide. Picture a Kung Fu episode with David Carradine running Hong Kong telecommunications, travel, e-commerce, entertainment conglomerate QI Group, a company less than 10 years old that is approaching $1 billion in annual sales. Eswaran, a Hindu Indian born in Malaysia, starts each day monk-like with an hour of silence, a practice detailed in his book In the Sphere of Silence. From a time zone 12 hours away, Eswaran, 47, spoke with USA TODAY reporter Del Jones. Following are excerpts, edited for clarity and length. Q: Aren’t CEOs a bit busy for new-age gobbledygook? A: I was talking to a talk show host a few months ago and he reminded me that I was the CEO of a multinational corporation, not some swami sitting on a rock meditating on a lotus garden. I said, “In today’s world, if you’re going to be CEO of a major corporation, you need to be a little bit crazy.” Q: Are most CEOs crazy? A: It pays to be different. To me (an hour of silence) is practical, a structured, analytical approach to life. It’s not about moving to another plane or traveling between planets. It’s taking control of where you want to go, where you need to be, why you need to be there and constantly checking on those things. Life is fast, demanding, chaotic. Q: OK. Tell me how you came upon this secret of silence. A: I did it at my granddad’s knee, about age 5 or 6. When he was alive the entire household became virtually silent for that hour. It’s a very traditional part of our heritage in India. It’s called mouna, which means silence. Essentially it’s yoga of the mind. It’s traditional to do this in the early part of the day in the two hours before the sun rises, known as Brahma muhurta, when the day is born again. Q: Is it like prayer? A: It is not of religious significance. It does have a spiritual side, a recognition that there is something beyond dashing around 9 to 5 that defines the purpose within us, a gift that we have to begin unwrapping. I’m a Hindu, but where I got to understand this process better was when I spent some time as a lay monk in a Franciscan monastery in Italy. I took an oath of silence for 33 days right after I graduated from college. It brought me back to the practice that I had given up in college amid all the partying. It was a Catholic process, but it made me understand the value of what I’ve been doing all my life. Communicating with your maker, if you should choose to believe in one, is relevant. It’s not prayer, not asking for something or needing something. It’s a time of asking questions as you would to a buddy, looking upon your maker as a guide. Here are the things I’m being challenged with, things I need to deal with that are making me lose ground. What do I do? Where do I go? The answers eventually materialize, in my experience.
About Eswaran uMalaysian citizen of Indian origin. BA degree in economics, University of London (’84). MBA, Southern Illinois University (’86). u Lives with wife Umayal in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. uIn 2006, received the honorary title Dato’ — like knighthood — from Sultan Ahmad Shah of Pahang in recognition of contributions to economic growth in the region. uHas received standing ovations from Indian businessmen after speeches that declare “this is India’s millennium.” uLaunched QI in 1998 as an ecommerce start-up. Headquarters are in Hong Kong. Gets its name from the Chinese character Qi or Ch’i, which means spiritual energy. QI businesses include vacation resorts, telecommunications, a private mint in Germany, TV stations in Australia, Malaysia, Dubai and the U.K. Large investments in publicly traded companies in India and Sri Lanka.
QI Group
An hour of power: Vijay Eswaran, CEO of QI group, spends an hour of every day in silent concentration, thinking about what he did the day before and what he needs to accomplish in the coming days, months and years.
easier lifestyle than begging for food. Being the pope, now that’s a whole different challenge. If you take a world-class CEO and put him running a monastery, I think the monastery would probably derive great benefit. It will require the same attributes and skill sets. You need to lead people, have vision. But you also have to desire that poQ: How should Westerners get sition in life. You need to want to be started? there, but the talents required are A: It has to be customized. To- essentially the same. day’s world is not as structured as 50 or 100 years ago. We’re not livQ: What do you mean when ing the lives of farmers. The best you say that the best decisions time would be when you begin come from detachment, which your day. For a lot of people this is is a byproduct of silence? not possible, and they should do it A: Detachment does not mean at the end of the day. dispassion or apathy. It’s the reverse. It’s the ability to love more Q: What exactly should we do deeply, to care, to feel more deeply. for that hour? One can only do that when you’re A: It’s not sitting in a sea of tran- not attached to emotions. Emoquility trying to figure out the tions get in the way, particularly meaning of the universe. It’s about when they involve a decision for taking control of your life. It begins people we love. My responsibilities with analyzing the day that has are probably different than the avgone by, going through the goals erage person. I have a couple of that you had set and seeing what thousand souls that are dependent you achieved and what you failed upon a decision I make. The deto achieve and trying to derive les- tachment is even more vital. sons. Then, plan the next day and beyond. There is a Chinese saying Q: These are times of multithat goes: “A beggar lives meal to tasking. Can we read or exercise meal. A peasant lives day to day. A during the hour of silence? farmer lives season to season. A noA: Anything’s possible, but I’ve bleman lives year to year. A king been doing this most of my life and lives 10 years at a time, but an em- I have not been able to take it to peror lives a century at a time.” that level yet. There is a certain How much of what we do today amount of walking around. I counts in a month or six months? strongly recommend writing, beThe point is to go deeper. cause you are really communicating with yourself and you can look Q: So the silence isn’t med- back upon it later. itation, it’s strategizing? A: Most of us allow life to pick us Q: Can you think of something up like a piece of driftwood, and we specific you have gained as a get thrown back to the shore every CEO that came out of silence? once in a while. We’ve lost track of A: It happens every day. You look where we wanted to go, what we at problems in 3-D because of the wanted to do, the purpose of our depth. I walk into meetings with a existence. Are you with me? new armory of information that looks like it’s coming off the cuff. It’s Q: I’m trying. like practicing before you play the A: It stills the rest of the planet, game. That’s all it does. It makes the continuous din you are assailed me better. I’m mentally fit, I’m fastwith from the time you are born. It er on the uptake. forces you to slow down a moment, detach yourself and take a good, Q: So, what’s the meaning of hard look at yourself. life? A: Each of us will have a different Q: Should monks be CEOs? answer for that, and we’re all right. A: Anyone can be a monk. It’s an The answer changes as we grow.
uBest time is early morning, but it can be when it’s more convenient. The key: consistency. uMaintain silence and focus for one hour. No phones, laptops, TV. If you get distracted, start back at the beginning. uFirst, analyze yesterday. Note progress and identify reasons for failure. uNext, plan goals for today, tomorrow, next week. uNext, plan long-term goals. List them in order of what you plan to achieve in a year and beyond. Do this every day. uNext, go through notes taken the previous day to refresh the mind. uSeek knowledge by reading a non-fiction book or listening to an educational CD for 10 minutes. Summarize what is learned from the reading or listening. uCommune with the Lord for the last 10 minutes. Ask questions in your heart that need answers. Write it down. uSilence is like exercise. A person who never does it would rather get shot than get started. Once started, he would rather die than stop. Source: In the Sphere of Silence
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Venture capitalist shares his tales By Russ Juskalian Special for USA TODAY Before Google there was Netscape, Tandem Computers and biotech pioneer Genentech. A name behind all of these success stories: Tom Perkins.
Money Bookshelf At some point, each was a budding start-up in need of funding, and Perkins was there to believe in them — and reach into his venture capital fund, now called Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Needless to say, Perkins’ investments made a lot of people — and himself — fantastically wealthy. He basically built Silicon Valley. Since those days, he’s developed an addiction to huge sailing yachts, married and divorced writer Danielle Steel, been convicted of manslaughter in France, written a pulp novel and succeeded at his most difficult assignment — fixing the San Francisco Ballet. Valley Boy is a collection of stories about Perkins’ life, from wanting to be a TV repairman to building his “crowning achievement,” the $130 million, 289-foot clipper, The Maltese Falcon. The stories are enough to give the reader understanding of where Perkins came from and how he found success. But the collection is
by no means exhaustive. In Perkins’ show Perkins chose. words, “If we were together over a Perkins agreed to fund Sloot’s few dinners, or were traveling on a venture and soon he, Sloot and anvoyage, when it was other investor were my turn, these are the drinking champagne stories I would tell.” and eating chocolate To pull together a cake. The next morning, sometimes disjunct sePerkins got a call that ries of chapters, PerSloot had died. kins introduces each That left a problem: with personal notes Sloot had disclosed his that range from a few technology except for sentences to a few the “compiler” program pages. They paint a picthat translated the imture of Perkins as irrevages into data. Fearing erent, confident to the theft of his invention, he edge of arrogance, and Valley Boy: The kept this key part. thoughtful in a brash, Education of Tom The compiler was Perkins humorous way. never found, and PerThere’s the bizarre By Tom Perkins kins’ team of scientists story of Jan Sloot, a Penguin, 320 pages, could not reverse-engiDutch engineer “who $27.50 neer it. had no academic creNo one has come dentials and who had been for close to packing so much data into most of his life a television repair so little memory. We’ll likely never technician.” know if Sloot’s invention was geSloot was working on fitting nius or a hoax. hours of video onto a smartcard Perkins has led a life that and claimed to have a prototype. A abounds with such stories. For his smartcard, at 75 kilobytes, holds first venture — making portable laabout 1/50,000th the data of a sers — he even shared Berkeley, DVD. Sloot’s invention seemed to Calif., office space with famous LSD violate the laws of physics. chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley Perkins is a graduate of MIT in III (featured in Tom Wolfe’s Electric physics, and a skeptic, but soon was Kool-Aid Acid Test). convinced that Sloot’s breakOne thing readers are left wantthrough worked. Perkins flew to ing: to have heard the yarns from Amsterdam, and Sloot recorded Perkins, while sailing the Mediterand played back on the spot a TV ranean on The Maltese Falcon.
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