Book Review: Mind Without Fear - Rajat Gupta

Mind Without Fear is the fascinating memoir of the first Indian-born CEO of a multinational corporation, Rajat Gupta. It takes us through the highs & absolute lows of an enterprising Indian immigrant to the US who successfully breaks through the glass ceiling but stumbles towards the fag end of his career after getting embroiled in white-collar crime

His achievements -
* Orphaned at 18, he managed to get into IIT.
* After graduating, secured a plum job at ITC but chooses to attend Harvard Business School in 1971
* After graduating from Harvard, joins McKinsey, where he would spend his entire thirty-seven-year consulting career, including his nine-year term as the firm's leader.
* During his 9 year tenure as MD, McKinsey more than doubled the size of the staff and tripled revenue
* During his final years with McKinsey and after his retirement, Gupta transitioned from business leader to business statesman, bringing his wealth of experience to bear on some of the most pressing global issues around public health and education.
* Board member of major corporations including Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, and American Airlines and advisor to the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the World Economic Forum.
* Served as chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation advisory board, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the International Chamber of Commerce, and was the founding chairman of the Indian School of Business, the American India Foundation, and the Public Health Foundation of India.

Rajat Gupta was fined in millions & incarcerated in 2014 on three counts of securities fraud. A bulk of the book is his defence of how he was misjudged -

I was jailed for alleged personal gain, for a fabricated white collar crime, and,  at most, a careless mistake

The basis of my conviction was a handful of circumstantial interactions and hearsay statements that an overly zealous prosecutor spun into a conspiratorial narrative - one that was all too easy for the jury to believe in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis

This is a sad tale of an accomplished leader who solved complex problems for corporations & large organizations but was "too naive in his abilities to judge his two closest and criminal business partners (McKinsey partner, Anil Kumar & Raj Rajaratnam)". Rajat's story teaches us that no matter what heady heights we scale & overstretched we are, we have to be ever watchful of our dealings & whom we deal with.

Some notes and quotes from the book:

Rajat speaks highly of his father but also reveals his father was "arrested as a young man for impersonating one of the students he was tutoring in order to help him cheat on an exam. The student was paying him handsomely for this ruse, and my father who intended the money to go to his revolutionary cause, decided that the end justified the means."

Gupta's patriotic Bengali father died when he was sixteen while his Punjabi mother died two years later.

Indian School of Business (ISB) was ranked among the top 20 business schools in the world by Financial Times, just seven years after its opening.

In October 2008, the stock market had its worst week in seventy-five years.