The Perfect Vision of Dr. V.

Who Is Dr. V.?

For Dr. V., leadership begins with the pursuit of self-knowledge and a vision bigger than any that can fit in the prospectus of a single corporation. All his life, Dr. V. has resisted smallness. Yet there is nothing egotistic about him. He asks himself, "How can my work make me a better human being and make a better world?" That question is at the heart of the mystery of leadership. And to answer it is to seek perfection.

"Two qualities for leadership are to be a visionary and to know execution," says Dr. V. "If I can go from consciousness to higher consciousness, then I'll be a leader."

Dr. V.'s work is to fight blindness in the world and in himself. The two missions are one. He realizes his destiny by his work. Helping people see is to achieve a new level of consciousness.

His philosophy derives from a difficult but ideals-driven past. Dr. V. was born to a farmer's family in 1918. There was no school in his village. In the mornings, he had to take the buffalo out to graze, and then he would walk nearly three miles to school. Years later, when a school finally opened in his village, there were no pencils, paper, or even a slate. The children collected sand from the riverbed, spread it smoothly over the mud floor of their thatch-roofed schoolhouse, and wrote in it with their fingers.

Dr. V.'s father was a follower of Gandhi and a man who believed in perfection. "We were not thinking of amassing money as our goal," says Dr. V. "We always aspired to some perfection in our lives." Perfection, as he defines it, is a means of following God or of pursuing a form of higher consciousness.

Gandhi's ideas of celibacy, nonviolence, and truthfulness appealed to Dr. V. In 1948, after three of his cousins had died of eclampsia (an attack of convulsions) in the last three months of their pregnancies, Dr. V. began postgraduate medical training at Stanley Medical College, in Madras, training to become an OB-GYN. Rheumatoid arthritis struck him soon after graduation, and he was hospitalized for almost two years. Severe pain began then, and it has never left him. "When I finally could stand," he says, "I felt as if I was on top of the Himalayas."

There was also the pain of a terrible conflict in his life. He had been schooled in perfection by his father, and now he was barely able to work. What saved him from despair, says Dr. V., was meeting the philosopher Sri Aurobindo, a rebel in the Free India movement who had opened an ashram in Pondicherry. From Aurobindo, Dr. V. learned meditation and found a purpose: He came to believe that man has not reached the highest level of evolution, but that evolution will continue for several more stages until a higher intelligence is created. "Even the body has to be more perfect so that a new creature will result," says Dr. V.

But spiritual teachings, inspirational and useful as they may be, still are not enough. "I am not an idea man," says Dr. V. "The task is not to aspire to some heaven but to make everyday life divine." When he switched to ophthalmology, he had to train himself to hold a knife and to perform cataract surgery despite his physical pain.

I ask Dr. V. a simple question designed to get him to talk about his unique vision: "What are your gifts?" I ask him. Dr. V. replies, "People thank me for giving them sight." This is no error of translation, no slipup of English. Dr. V. considers his gifts to be the things that he has given others, not what he possesses.

Here is another clue to the mystery: The reward for work is not what you get out of it but what you become from it.

Marketing That Reaches the Deepest Part of the Market: Your Soul

Aravind offers a service so good that it creates its own demand. In that respect, you could compare it to FedEx, the Gap, or Starbucks -- but only if you didn't care about how ridiculous that comparison would make you sound. Part of Aravind's service package includes love, courage, and total care. "You identify with the people with whom or for whom you work," says Dr. V. "It is not out of sympathy that you want to help. The sufferer is part of you."

"Market driving," a term coined by Philip Kotler, a professor at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management, refers to the creation of a need that didn't exist before. What all market-driving companies have in common is that they are guided by a vision or a radical idea rather than by traditional market research. These visions involve high risk -- and unlimited upside potential.

Aravind has brought its market-driving vision to the world's boldest and largest marketing segment, the one that will define future markets: the poor.