Zero Se Hero — A journey of entrepreneurship, leadership and life

The shop opened at nine, but my father was there by seven, and so, from the age of eleven, was I. Nothing about those two hours was instructive in the way people mean when they use the word. We swept. We counted. We wrote the same three columns into the same ruled book. What I learned was not accountancy; it was that a business is a promise you keep every morning whether or not anybody is watching you keep it.

Years later, when I had staff and a plant and an office with a door that closed, a supplier asked me how I decided who to trust. I told him about the ruled book. He laughed politely, the way people do when they have asked a serious question and received an answer about somebody's childhood. But it was the honest answer. I had never found a better test than whether a person did the boring part when there was no audience for it.

That is really what this book is about. Not the deals, which were mostly ordinary. Not the numbers, which anyone can look up. It is about the boring part, done for forty years, and what it slowly turns into.

From Zero Se Hero, chapter one. © Rajiv K Poddar.