95 Years of Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam: Lessons in Leadership

15 October 2026 marked 95 years since Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam was born in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu. Most of us remember him as the Missile Man, or as the President who answered children's letters. But if you ask the people who worked with him, they will talk about something else: the way he led.

He never had a fancy management degree. What he had were a few simple habits, picked up from his teachers and mentors. Many of them are right there in his autobiography, Wings of Fire (written with Arun Tiwari, 1999).

He never had a fancy management degree. What he had was a lesson he learnt early in his career, from one press conference. It is still worth learning today, chahe aap ek startup chala rahe ho ya ghar ka budget.

Own the failure, share the success

In 1979, Kalam was the project director of SLV-3, India's first satellite launch vehicle. The target was to put the Rohini satellite into orbit. On launch day, the onboard computer put the countdown on hold over a problem in some control components. Kalam overrode it, switched to manual and launched. The second stage failed, and the rocket fell into the Bay of Bengal.
The press was waiting. Prof. Satish Dhawan, the chairman of ISRO, went in himself. He took responsibility for the failure, even though Kalam was the one in charge of the project, and promised the team would succeed within a year.

They did. In July 1980, SLV-3 put Rohini into orbit. This time, Prof. Dhawan asked Kalam to face the press.

Kalam told this story himself in a 2008 interview with Knowledge at Wharton, and summed it up in two lines:

When failure occurred, the leader of the organization owned that failure. When success came, he gave it to his team.

Nearly three decades later, it was still the story he chose to tell about leadership. Simple baat hai: when the team falls, the leader stands in front. When the team wins, the leader steps back.

What we can take from him at 95

Kalam went on to receive the Bharat Ratna in 1997 and served as India's 11th President from 25 July 2002 to 25 July 2007. On 27 July 2015, he collapsed while giving a lecture to students at IIM Shillong. He was a teacher till the very last day.

You don't need a big title to practise what Prof. Dhawan showed him. Stand in front of your team when things go wrong, and step back when they go right.

At India Bobbles, our hand-painted Dr. Kalam bobblehead has "Missile Man of India" written on its base. For us, the leader and the teacher in him matter just as much. Happy 95th, Kalam sir.

• SLV-3 story and quote: Former President APJ Abdul Kalam: 'A Leader Should Know How to Manage Failure', Knowledge at Wharton, 3 April 2008.


• Birth, Bharat Ratna, presidency dates and IIM Shillong: A. P. J. Abdul Kalam.