An enduring institution is built not just on physical and intellectual layers, but on a foundation of emotional infrastructure
Subroto Bagchi
When we think of building something, we often think of the physical. But an institution is not a hotel. It is not an airport. These days, you can build a world-class airport in 18 months. An educational or research institution, or any institution of lasting value, takes a much longer time to build.
A celebrated journalist, Harris Macray, once wrote a seminal book called What Works. He examined the 100 most admired educational institutions in the world and found a startling commonality: all of them were more than 100 years old. This sends a very important message. It tells us how long it truly takes to build an institution. It is a long, patient process.
The question then is, what is it that is required to build a great institution?
Many years ago, I collaborated with the celebrated management professor Vijay Govindarajan to look at some of the finest organizations across the world—for-profit, not-for-profit, educational, industrial—to understand what makes them truly stand apart. We co-created a paper built on the idea of infrastructure.
When you look at institution-building, it is wise to look at it as an act of creating infrastructure. And this infrastructure must be built at four distinct layers over a long period of time.
The lowest layer is the physical infrastructure. This is the beautiful campus, the well-maintained gardens, the buildings. What this gives you is “presence.” When you drive up to a campus, you see the physical manifestation of the idea. You are present. People cannot ignore you.
Today, that physical layer is intertwined with the digital infrastructure. You cannot conceive of a campus today without first thinking of the Wi-Fi bandwidth, the smart classrooms, the e-library. This, too, gives you presence.
But if you just throw in physical and digital infrastructure, will you become a great institution? The answer is no. Beyond these two layers is the third, the intellectual infrastructure. This is the quality of the teachers, the pedagogy, the methodologies, the processes, the systems, the network. This is what gives an organization its “differentiation.” It’s how you are different from the Tom, Dick, and Harry institutions that may spring up in the middle of a paddy field. It is very easy to build physical infrastructure; it is very difficult to build intellectual infrastructure.
But here is the interesting thing: even if you have intellectual infrastructure, in today’s world, it is extremely difficult to keep your differentiation for long. What once took ten years to copy now takes 18 months. The world is moving at a very fast pace, and somebody else will quickly overtake you.
This is why the fourth layer is the most critical. We found that the greatest institutions, across all disciplines, have something more. On top of the physical, digital, and intellectual, they have built an emotional infrastructure.
Intellectual infrastructure may give you positioning, but it falls short of what we call “memorability.” The world today hankers for, needs, desires, and craves memorability. Are you worth remembering as an individual? Are you worth remembering as an institution?
Memorability does not come from your campus or your curriculum. It comes when you are able to build the emotional infrastructure. We realized that organizations that succeed in this excel at eight specific things.
First, they build proximate leadership. The leaders are close by. You can touch and feel them. In many places, leadership is remote. You see a leader’s face on television, but do they come across as someone close to you? Probably not. Then you think of someone like Barack Obama, and even people who have never met him feel close to him. Great institutions consciously create this approximation. In a smaller campus, for instance, you run into your professors, you run into your warden. You can extend your hand and touch the people who matter. That is proximate leadership.
Second, great organizations are “meme-plexes.” You have heard of a multiplex, where multiple movies are screened. A “meme,” in this context, is not an internet joke. It is the DNA-equivalent of an idea. Just as your biological DNA is a unique signature that has replicated itself uninterrupted for millions of years, a “meme” is an idea so strong that it perpetuates itself. India is an idea. The tri-color is an idea. The national anthem is an idea. These are strong memes that have replicated themselves from my parents’ generation to mine, and to my children’s. An organization is a “meme-plex”—a collection of powerful, core ideas. As long as those ideas are strong, the organization will continue.
The third pillar is constant communication. This sounds simple, but most of us, most of the time, are not communicating. We are transmitting. Transmission is what the television does—a one-way broadcast. Communication is a two-way process. As I speak, some of you are nodding, making eye contact, silently returning the vibe. An organization, to be emotionally strong, must be like a beehive. Bees don’t just live there; they are communicating all the time. There is a constant hum, a buzz. Communication must be an organic expression of the institution.
Fourth is the presence of support networks. An institution should be able to count the number of vibrant, functioning networks within it. Networks have rules. The internet is a great example. You don’t just suck from the internet; your device contributes by sharing the load. A network is like an ATM: before you can draw money, you must deposit cash. The greatest network on the planet is the rainforest. It’s a complex, vibrant ecosystem where the microbe is connected to the insect, the insect to the plant, and everyone is continuously communicating. A healthy institution flourishes just like a rainforest.
The fifth, and a very important, pillar is learning from adversity. Great families learn from adversity. You will hear people remember a grandmother telling them, “We came penniless during the partition,” and they tell these stories as badges of honor. We don’t look down upon adversity; we say, “I am a child of that.” Yet, in an organization, managers often don’t want to hear bad news. But people don’t bond in good times; we bond in difficult times. Organizations must build not “adversity avoidance,” but “adversity resilience.”
The final three things are Vision, Values, and Extreme Exclusivity.
You must have a vision. The word comes from the Latin videre, “to see.” Do you have the ability to see your organization 10 or 25 years from now? If you, as a leader, can create a vision of the future, other people will come forward and form a “vision community.” This is what Gandhi did. He created a vision of a free India and built a vision community around it, and the poorest of the poor came and threw out the most powerful empire on Earth.
Next, you need values. Values are your heartbeat. They are your polar symmetry. If you don’t have values, you can never become memorable. You may have differentiation, you may have presence, but the world will not make you a part of its memory.
Last, but not least, is extreme exclusivity. Great institutions are built on the power of exclusivity. If it is easy to get into, it will be easy to get out of. The oldest institution in the world is the family. It has continued, non-stop, because it has retained its exclusivity. How my family celebrates Durga Puja is different from how your family does. The sambar in one South Indian family doesn’t taste like the sambar in another. That recipe is guarded jealously. That is exclusivity. An institution must have this. Its campus festival, its research journal, even the way its students and teachers argue—these things must be unique.
Building an institution is, therefore, an act of architecture—physical, digital, intellectual, and, most importantly, emotional. It is this final layer, built on these eight pillars, that creates true “memorability.” It is what allows an idea to outlast its founders and endure for generations.
(This article is adapted from a transcription of the Foundation Day Lecture on ‘Organization Building’ delivered by Subroto Bagchi at ASBM University in 2022. Mr. Bagchi is a celebrated author, entrepreneur, co-founder of Mindtree, and former Chairman of the Odisha Skill Development Authority.)