Now two Indians, Subroto Bagchi and Vijay Govindarajan have come out with a novel, groundbreaking theory that is totally revolutionary. Bagchi is the CEO of Bangalore-based Mind Tree Consulting, an IT and global services firm that went public in February 2007. He has written a bestseller: The High Performance Entrepreneur: Golden Rules for Success in Today's World.

On the other hand, Vijay Govindarajan is one of the top ten strategy professionals in the world. He is a Harvard professor who moved to Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and is also a professor in residence and chief innovation consultant at General Electric.

He wrote a book, the Ten Rules for Strategic Innovation, which topped bestseller lists. Together, they have come out with a study, as yet unpublished, called, 'The Emotionally Bonded Organisation: Why Emotional Infrastructure matters and how leaders can build it.'

"We believe that the ties that bind people to organisations at an emotional level are the hardest to destroy and are potentially some of the greatest assets of organisations," said Subroto Bagchi recently on his visit to Dubai where he had come for the formal launch of Mind Tree's branch office in Dubai.

Bagchi defined Emotional Infrastructure (EI) as the factors that motivate people to do their best for the corporate good. He said EI is more difficult and time-intensive to build than physical and intellectual infrastructure - but it's also harder for a competitor to imitate. He said the theory of EI developed over time. Bagchi explained it to City Times in this exclusive interview:

So, what is Emotional Infrastructure (EI) and what is the basis of it?

It's a style of leadership that makes employees feel such a level of passion that they want to make personal sacrifices for the good of the company. We got the idea of emotional infrastructure from families. We found that the longest surviving organisation in the world is the family, be it in the US, Europe, UAE, China or India. And there is no perfect family. But there're some things that families do brilliantly that they have survived for millenniums. So what do families do as a unit of organisation that corporate or company leaders can adopt to make their organisations long lasting? If you build EI along with physical and intellectual infrastructures, you build a company that is going to have longevity. In short, we're asking organisations to learn from families.

So, how can corporate leaders create this emotional infrastructure?

We found that there are eight common factors in all the families.

1. First is leadership proximity. Family leaders, whether father, mother, uncle or grandfather are close to the family members. We call it on-demand leadership.

Just as leaders in a family are available on demand, so should leaders in an organisation make themselves available without questioning reason. And leadership has to appear as and when demanded by those who are being led.

So, leadership should be a servant leadership: it should be available, in time, place or form in which your people need it.

2. The second is rituals. All families have rituals, which may vary from communities to communities and in cultures. The powerful thing about rituals is that they carry or convey ideas from one generation to another. So a leader in a company should create and sustain meaning rituals that create the feeling of a family for employees.

3. The third is non-stop communication. Families communicate without any reason. In non-stop communication you connect with a person instantly when there is need to connect. This instant connectivity is so valuable in organisations but it is exactly the opposite there. In corporations, the higher-ups go to great lengths to keep things secret. Employees, in many cases, aren't told about financials. CEOs and other managers should keep their employees informed as much as possible so they feel like they're part of something.