Harpal S. Kumar is the chief executive of the London-based charity Cancer Research.

Q. Your career kicked off at the consulting firm McKinsey. Can you explain a little bit your decision to go into the charity sector?

A. While I was at McKinsey I had a client, The Papworth Trust, which is a charity, and I did a piece of work for them after which they said to me, “Would you come and implement this strategy for us effectively as chief executive?”

Q. How was that transition?

A. If you look at running a charity versus running a commercial business, the degree of overlap in terms of the things that you have to think and do as a chief executive is very, very high — probably 80 to 90 percent. The metrics are different and the nature of people you generally have in a charity are different, but beyond those two things everything is pretty much the same.

So the fact that one thing is a charity and the other isn’t, isn’t really at issue. What is at issue is the nature of the organization. What is it trying to do? Do I engage with that? Is that something that I want to spend my time doing? Do I think it’s important? And if it is, I’ll do it.

Q. Can you talk a bit more about the differences between charity and commercial organizations?

A. There are some differences in terms of people. Generally speaking, in a charity I don’t think that motivating people is a challenge. People who come to work in a charity are already extremely motivated. They’re probably not as well paid as they could be paid somewhere else, so they’ve come because of other reasons, which is that they believe in the cause. I never have to speak to anyone in this organization about putting the hours in because people work every hour under the sun.

But there’s a corollary to that. Sometimes people are so passionate that they don’t always sufficiently distinguish between what’s really high value and what’s less high value. That’s a management challenge. How do you stop doing things? Sometimes people’s passion can get in the way because everything is important but you can’t do everything. We have to channel our energies into the areas where we’re going to achieve the greatest impact.

Q. Thinking back to when you were a student, what would that Harpal say about the one that is here today?

A. I think he’d be pretty pleased. He’d definitely be surprised. I started off life as a chemical engineer, so the notion that I would be running the biggest cancer charity in the world and be immersed in the world of cancer research and cancer medicine would not be something that crossed my mind. This is an organization that has an enormous impact and I feel very proud about what this organization achieves and to the extent that I have a small role in that.

Q. Was there someone in your youth who made you into that person who wants to have that great impact?

A. My parents, probably. Both of my parents were refugees, so they had absolutely nothing. They got to wherever they got to in life through hard work, through being prepared to do whatever it takes to move forward in life and to overcome whatever obstacles were in front of them.

Q. Where did they seek refuge from?

A. When India and Pakistan came into being — the end, effectively, of British rule in India — they both lived in what’s now Pakistan. As Sikhs they couldn’t stay in Pakistan so they had to move to India and they both ended up in refugee camps. My father came to England and worked sweeping factory floors. My parents did shift work, so one of them would look after the kids while the other went out to work. My father had a grocery shop, so I spent my afternoons and weekends working in the shop. And so hard work was something that was ingrained into me from a very, very young age. But equally what was ingrained into me was that if you work hard, you can achieve things.

Q. Is that also what helps you when things don’t go your way?

A. Absolutely. You don’t get everything right, but if you believe in what you’re trying to do and if you work at it, you can usually find solutions. Both helped — my sort of upbringing but also what engineering teaches you. Engineering is all about problem-solving. Actually, as a training for life and for running a business, it’s great.

Q. So, chuck the M.B.A.?

A. No, the M.B.A. is incredibly valuable in my case.

It gives you exposure to a broad range of business problems and helps you develop approaches to how to think about these problems and an exposure to how other people have approached those problems.

Q. How do you approach business problems?

A. It sort of depends on the nature of the challenge. But certainly something you learn very early on is that there is never perfect information. So you have to be able to make decisions on imperfect information. But A, having the courage of your convictions, and B, being able to spot when it was the wrong decision and quickly changing course if you need to, is necessary. Hopefully you get it right more often than you get it wrong, but you have to be able to spot it when you got it wrong.

Q. Was there anything in particular that you learned from your first chief executive role, which was at The Papworth Trust?

A. Probably the most important thing is get the best team of people around you. One of my chairmen once said to me, “The thing you’ll always realize is that you never hire fast enough and you never fire fast enough.” And that’s true. And you can always do more to get a team of really good people. And equally, when people are not performing, to deal with it quickly.

Q. What else?

A. Spotting talent and bringing them into the organization, sometimes even when you don’t have an opportunity for them.

If you find someone really good, getting them in and letting them grow within the organization, is something I did in that first role, and it proved to be an immensely successful thing to do.

Q. What do you mean by letting people grow?

A. Really good people will create opportunities for an organization that aren’t necessarily visible to the board or the executive. That’s why one of the things I look for is creativity, because they will create opportunities that you might not see otherwise. It’s about spotting that talent and then giving them the space to develop their ideas and to work with those ideas.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/business/global/07iht-manager07.html?partner=rss&emc=rss