If the world outside is a reflection of the world inside, then what is the inner world of a Beingful leader like? To understand it better, consider the story of a business leader hardly known outside his country. It is the story of Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy (Dr. V to all who knew him), a physician who started the Aravind Eye Care System in India to provide services to the blind and created a business that excelled financially and compassionately.

Since its founding in 1976, Aravind has provided high quality and highly affordable services to 32 million patients and performed more than 4 million surgeries. Despite the majority of these surgeries being free or heavily subsidised (costing $15 on average), Aravind had a robust business model that consistently generated operating incomes at 45% of revenues for several years. Aravind’s costs of operations were about 1 percent of the costs of comparable services by the UK’s National Health Service, which meant that Aravind was actually a $3 billion dollar business that was a hundred times more cost effective than similar organisations.

When he passed away in 2006 at the age of eighty eight, Dr. V left behind an organization that was one of the most efficient, compassionate, and innovative in the world for providing high quality health services on a large scale. In sheer productivity, Aravind’s surgeons are far ahead of others. They average more than two thousand cataract surgeries a year, compared to the Indian average of four hundred and a US average of two hundred. Dr. V himself did more than one hundred thousand surgeries in his life. That is a number simply incredible to contemplate!

The Inner World of a Leader: Dr. V