We have a lot of pre-conceived notions about hard work and hard workers.

• Only juniors work hard. Managing Directors, big bosses, etc, don't.

• Rich businessmen and entrepreneurs, who move around in imported cars and go abroad for vacations, don't work hard. They pay other people to work hard for them. They spend their time partying, posing for page-3 photos and doing wheeling-dealing.

• Dumb people work hard.

• People in simple and boring jobs don't work hard. They are lazy, or else wouldn't they be in bigger and better jobs by now? (This fits in with the stereotype of the hot-shot high flyer jet-setting around the world and working 16 hours a day, and a bank clerk being a lazy clock-watcher.)

I have learned many things about hard work in the last 25 years, some of which make me feel very humble. Instead of getting into my own thoughts and views, let's first look at a few people I've seen at some length.

Mukesh Ambani

We were consulting for Reliance Industries during 1997-2001, when Dhirubhai was alive and Reliance was still the biggest name in the stock market. The Reliance corporate headquarters was in Maker Chambers IV, Nariman Point.

Mukesh used to come to work in the morning at about 11, and stay till midnight or past midnight, six days a week. Since no one secretary could handle this load, he used to have two gentlemen, coming in two shifts, to handle his work day. Once in a while, I've seen him stepping out of the lift after (normal people's) office hours, at perhaps seven, for a walk and a chat in the building premises with one or other of his key associates like Manoj Modi. At seven in the evening, he'd appear to have enough energy to carry on for a few more hours.

Many years later, I was chatting with a very sharp gentleman, who was Managing Director of one of the three nationalised general insurance companies. He had dealt with Mukesh Ambani directly for various deals. All large manufacturing companies need public-sector insurance companies for insuring plants and machinery and for maintaining institutional-investor relationships (insurance companies are big investors in listed companies).

This gentleman told me that he had found Mukesh amazingly sharp. He said that Mukesh' grasp of figures was so incredible, he seemed to know each and every figure in each and every spreadsheet by heart.He had a total grip on the intricate details of any business case he presented. He said "I don't know how hard a person has to work to be able to get such a detailed, clear grip on each aspect of his dealings."

The interesting thing I used to note about the RIL headquarters is that the juniors used to leave at seven or eight. The seniors would continue routinely till midnight. I've often been there till eleven in the night, doing intense planning sessions with their then-CIO Jyotindra Thacker and his team. I've never seen him tired at 11PM. I've never heard him say "Oh, today's been a long day, let's do the rest tomorrow." And whenever he's made any indication of referring to his bosses, I've always got the hint that the bosses are there too, in the other sections of the office.

We have read about Reliance's proven ability to finish large projects ahead of time. Whenever I read such news items, I remember that one of the richest men in the world who heads this business empire works 15-16 hours a day and knows each figure in each spreadsheet.

Zia Mody

Zia Mody is the daughter of one of the most well-respected lawyers of India (Soli Sorabjee). She comes from an affluent family. She's married to a successful businessman who works in, among other things, real estate (the Peninsula group of developers). She doesn't need to work for a living.

She heads AZB and Partners, perhaps India's fastest growing large law firm. Her firm's per-head billing rate is probably the highest among Indian firms. And she's widely acknowledged as one of India's best legal brains. Even if she had to earn money, she has an entire firm (three cities in India, tie-up with one of the biggest international law firms worldwide) to do her bidding.

The following is her daily work schedule, six days a week. (And remember, she has grown-up professional children --- she must be at least 55 years old.)

She comes to office at about 11, and immediately starts working. She's either writing or checking documents, or on tele-cons with clients and counterparties, all day. She often doesn't get time to eat properly, taking a bite while sitting through tele-cons. She works this way till past midnight every night. Then she goes home. Her team continues working on various deals and documents even after she leaves. If they need her to review some document, they take printouts, put them in envelopes, seal them, and write her name on them. They leave these envelopes at a specific place in office and go home.

At about 4AM or 5AM, a trusted peon picks up all sealed envelopes marked with her name, locks up the office, and takes the envelopes to her place. He leaves them there.

Zia gets up at perhaps 7AM, and soon afterwards, sits with the sealed envelopes. She finishes reviewing and making notes on all these documents before she comes to office at 11AM.

This is how an affluent, 55-year-old mother of grown-up children works.

Some other lawyers

Pallavi Shroff is one of the three key lawyers who head India's most famous law firm, Amarchand and Mangaldas and Suresh A Shroff and Company (AMSAS). They were our clients from 1999 to about 2004. They have major offices in Delhi and Bombay, and smaller offices in a dozen other cities.

Pallavi is the daughter of one of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of India. She's India's most well-known lawyer specialising in anti-dumping law. Her husband Shardul, Shardul's brother Cyril Shroff, and Pallavi together run AMSAS.

Pallavi works from about 10 or 11 till past midnight every day, six days a week. She is often called for very high-profile social events and government events (she operates in Delhi, and many govt ministries are often her clients, making such social engagements her business obligations). She often leaves office and heads for such events, and heads back from them after an hour or two. She continues work after this, working till past midnight. She suffers from backache --- she regularly uses pain-killers and rarely lets this pain cut down her working hours. Keep in mind that she does all this when she heads a large firm --- a huge firm by law-firm standards, and she has no dearth of juniors to work for her.

Marezban Bharucha is one of the top corporate lawyers of Bombay. He must be sixty plus. I've observed him coming out for a drink with me on a weekday, when I drop in. After an hour or so, perhaps at seven, he heads back to office instead of heading home. I asked him once about his working hours: "Do you work 14 hours a day, six days a week, like these other top-shot members of your fraternity?" He smiled and said, "We don't have Sundays or holidays. We work seven days a week. I don't think we can tackle the pressure we handle unless we do this."

Marezban does not work alone. His firm is not half as big as AMSAS or AZB, but he has a full team working with him. And he's neither poor, nor young.

My friend in McKinsey

As some of you probably know, McKinsey and Company is one of the world's most famous strategic consulting firms. A friend finished his MBA from INSEAD and got a job with them. He described the typical work schedule this way:

When you are engaging with a client, you go to the client site, and put up in a good hotel nearby. You and your colleagues get up by six, finish breakfast, and have a first intense start-up meeting at about seven. After this, you head to the client site, and work from about eight or eight-thirty till perhaps seven in the evening, barely breaking for coffee or a sandwich in between. This workday is not just a sit-and-read or casual discussion programme --- the entire day is spent in very intense, tiring meetings with top management members of the client company, where almost the entire time is spent in running the client through a list of queries, looking at quantitative data, and making detailed notes of data obtained. Four hours of such work is as tiring as a whole day of "normal" office work for a "normal" officer in his home station.

At about seven, you get back to the hotel, and take a break for the next two hours. During this time, you may do the gym, take a shower, and definitely finish your dinner. At about nine, you and your colleagues meet in the hotel and process the data you've gathered during the day, analysing it, making notes, preparing a list of questions, for the next day. This goes on till at least 1AM or sometimes later. Then you head for bed. The next day is a repeat of the first.

These McKinsey guys are the highest-paid and brightest chaps in the consulting empire -- various state governments of India, and various central ministries, have consulted them on strategic issues.

Behind their high profile and tremendous brand image lies this reality of hard work.

Big names of the media and performing arts world

If you look at the actual daily routine of people like SRK, you'll probably find not less than 16 hours of work per day, at shooting sites, week after week, month after month. When we read about their partying, it's nothing like people like us going to Goa for a week. Their partying is almost always about industry networking, photo-ops, and business deal-making. The time that they really reserve for their family and personal lives is outside their 16-hour work days.

This is true about top musicians, singers, rock bands --- you name it. It is true of surgeons --- a very reputed orthopaedic surgeon I happen to know starts his first operation at 7:30AM every day, six days a week, and never returns home till about 10PM every night.

Colleagues in COSL

My first job after my BTech was with Citicorp Overseas Software Limited, a young group-company of Citicorp based out of Bombay, developing banking software. (This company later split to form CITIL and iFlex.)

There, I met many people from various backgrounds, many with BTech degrees from IITs and BITS Pilani, some with MBAs. It was a young, blue-blooded company with about 50 engineers when I joined in 1988.

Two of these engineers, much older than me, had spent about six months in a South American branch of Citibank, completing the deployment and UAT of a banking product. They worked seven days a week, about 12 hours a day, during this period, to ensure that delivery happened in time and the bank went live with this new system as per schedule. They had wife and kids back in India, and neither was trim or fit physically. This didn't change anything.

Over the next few months (I was there for just 14 months), I learned about many other such feats by other engineers.

Why?

Increasingly, the "forces of production" are shifting from plants and machinery to human capital. It's humans who produce. In ancient history, in agrarian economies, this production was by human labour. Today, it's by using the human mind.

Therefore, in modern companies, specially in the services sector, the largest cost is personnel cost, and the largest factor that affects profitability of a company is the productivity of its human team. This sector has accounted for more than 50% of India's GDP for more than a decade now, therefore it's probably okay to say that the nation's prosperity depends directly on productivity of its working population. It's no longer how big are your factories or how good is your monsoon.

And for almost all of us, at all levels, our productivity depends to a very large extent on how many hours of effort we put in.

The key to the success of some of the most amazing people, some super-stars, is the sheer number of hours of work they put in. Even if we ignore the page-3 super-stars, all other "successful" people we meet usually have a work schedule of 12-14 hours of solid work every day, after subtracting all time for chai, coffee, lunch, dinner and everything else.

Today, the idea of eight-hour workdays seems outdated. That was an idea born out of the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, but we cannot let go of it even today. In the industrial context, workers worked using their muscles as much as their brains, in hot and sometimes dangerous factory environments. For them, eight hours may have been a good upper limit to prevent "exploitative managements" from, well, exploiting helpless, poor labourers. For us, does the same figure make sense?

We may think what we want about it, but the guys who we all admire and want to emulate have already answered this question with their lives. No one becomes anything exceptional by starting work late, dallying over their cups of tea, and sauntering out of office before dinner.

There is another reason why hard work is the only path ahead. Increasingly, the world for us educated professionals gives us equal opportunity. All of us have

• knowledge of English
• access to Wikipedia and Google
• brains
• a corporate environment which lets us produce

The only thing, then, which separates the mediocre from the truly excellent or achievers, is hard work. If you have any doubts, see "How David beats Goliath" by well-known author Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker Magazine. Increasingly, the only difference between those who succeed and the rest of us is just one thing: incredible hard work.

A case study: our company

Our company's salary bill accounts for about 70% of our total expenses. (This is common for Indian software companies.) Our profit margins are slim (less than 10% of our total earnings). Again, this is common for companies of our profile, specially if they are also in the growth phase.

In such a company, let us assume that about 60% of the projects we do is driven by time and effort of engineers, and 40% is independent of time and effort put in (eg. projects stalled because resources not available, or engineers on T&M, etc). So, for 60% of our company's earnings, if engineers put in more hours of work, we will finish projects faster. And if we do that, then our earnings will increase even though our expenses (salaries, electricity bill, office rent, etc) will remain unchanged.

Let us assume that in this kind of scenario, each engineer who is not on T&M or not waiting for the client/server/whatever, decides to put in one additional hour of work every day. This means that 60% of the company starts working nine hours instead of eight every day. This means that their projects will now finish 12.5% faster than before. So, now, for 60% of the company, the earnings have gone up by 12.5% without expenses going up by a single rupee. This translates to 6.75% overall increase in earnings, for the same expenses.

In other words, our company's profitability jumps by 6.75% straightaway. For just one hour of extra work per day. This means that if the company has a total earnings of Rs.10 crores earlier, it will now earn a clean additional profit of Rs.67 lakhs due to this extra hour. You can do the math about what will happen if all of you start working 12 hours a day.

What will you get? Simple: a company with more profit margins can pay higher salaries. It is also precisely for this reason that growth stage companies need harder work from their teams. As I mentioned above, growth stage companies are aiming for a disruptive target: read "How David Beats Goliath" for what this really means.