I have worked as a civil servant under Narendra Modiji for two decades in various positions at the Union and State Government levels. But my closest working experience with him came when I directly worked in his office as Principal Secretary to the CM in Gujarat for two years, 2004 to 2006. While everyone knows about his vast visioning ability and ability to look into the future, what is little known is his art of implementation and his ability to get work done by a large team of ministers and bureaucrats. As a student of management, I have observed this closely. I found that without a formal study of management, he has intuitively used some of the best principles of management in his leadership.
Foremost is his ability to identify the right person for the appropriate job. He has a natural ability to identify spark in a person and he picks up such a person for a high-level role. He has rarely gone wrong in this exercise. Having selected the right person for a job, he gave stability of tenure to each one, which is so essential for governance.
Then comes his habit of going into the nitty-gritty and nuts and bolts of every point. He patiently listens to all presentations made to him in any meeting. He asks the right questions to understand the subject matter at hand. After that, he comes out with some out-of-the-box alternative viewpoints that pleasantly surprise the participants. They all wonder why these points did not occur to them earlier. I have seen him startling top-notch consultants also with some futuristic ideas, which they had never thought of. Modiji keeps on holding review meetings of each of the Ministries in GoI, whether it is the Sports Ministry, Ayush or the Ministry of Social Justice. These review meetings keep departments on their toes. I noticed during my four-year stint in the Finance Ministry from 2014-2018 that he reviewed each ministry’s work more than once during those four years.
The fact that Modiji is a great orator is very well known to all. But very few know that his ability to communicate a complicated idea also to a group of bureaucrats or ministers is par excellence. He uses simple words and examples to convey his point.
Whoever meets Modiji in person is always so impressed by his listening ability. Whether you meet him for even ten minutes or one hour, he will look into your eyes and talk, never ever even looking sideways to give you a feeling that he is busy. This is a remarkable quality for a person with so much of a workload. There is not even a piece of paper on his table in his office. His ability to focus on the work at hand and live in the present is remarkable.
Everyone who meets him is stunned by his sharp memory of remembering his or her name and past interactions. The art of calling someone by his name immediately endears a person. Once, I had asked him how he remembered so many names. He frankly told me that if he tries to remember names now, he won’t be able to recall 50 names. But when he sees someone's face, his name comes as a spark in his mind. He admitted that this is a God’s gift to him.
In my multiple interactions with him in so many meetings, I have never seen him raise his voice or scold an individual. He may sometimes express his disappointment at a group of people, without naming a single person, when things do not progress as expected.
Modiji is always accessible to so many people. This gives him access to multiple viewpoints. He doesn’t remain confined to only a small group of people around him. So it is difficult for anyone to mislead him.
As a person working in his office as Principal Secretary, he used to give us a long list of things to be done. In one sitting of half an hour with him, two pages of ‘To do’ list in our diary would be filled up. In spite of noting down his instructions, sometimes we used to forget to report back to him. But he doesn’t. He will remind again. Even his third reminder will be as polite as this — “Hasmukhbhai, has something been done on such and such thing?” With such a gentle way of nudging, we used to get into action quickly. This is his art of implementation, without being angry or impatient.
The writer is an IAS officer, retired as Finance & Revenue Secretary of India