How India’s Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management

The Harvard Business Review(South Asia ) issue for March 2010 contains an article titled Leadership Lessons From India :How the best Indian companies drive performance by investing in people by Peter Cappelli, Harbir Singh, Jitendra V.Singh and Michael Useem, all professors at Wharton School of Business at University of Pennsylvania.

India has been commanding attention among management and business researchers from major universities especially those from the US and Europe. Being one of the fastest growing economies, it is quite natural that this is happening. The article has been developed from the book the authors have written: The India Way: How India’s Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management (HBPress) expected to be released this month.

The study was conducted among 105 executives from top companies in India. While apparently the authors find wonderful things happening in India, their findings mostly point to a people-centric approach among the major Indian corporates. They also find that most of the Indian CEOs are hands on when it comes to strategy.

While the study has given high marks to Indian CEOs(or MDs as they are usually referred to in India) for their priority in employee development, a discernible reader will have a few questions that remain unanswered at this stage. These questions are:
1.Were the employees also interviewed to find out whether the opinions of the CEOs/MDs ratified by them? CEOs themselves should not sit in judgment such things.
2. The article quotes Mr.Vineet Nayar of HCL bracing the motto ”Employee first, customer second”. This very approach to business could be flawed. While good people will put lot of their insights in developing the knowledge about the customers and their needs, without customers , there can’t be any employment. When customers buy the products or services of the company in large numbers, business will thrive and when they stop buying the products, the business will suffer. Employees can definitely contribute to business but there is a limit to which employees can contribute to the improvement of business. Economic pressures can always put a company to face difficult times in business. So, I don’t think that Mr.Nayar’s view is necessarily correct. I would have appreciated if he had said that employees are above shareholders as employees might be taking a higher risk than investors today.
3.The book talks about investing in people by way of training and development. Most of the training according to me that happen is routine to improve management skills on job. They don’t necessarily impart training in business orientation or entrepreneurship development.
4.There is no mention about the succession planning among the Indian corporate. Is it because that is not necessarily an issue considering that most of the companies are family managed?
5.The sample companies seem to be very small compared to the number of companies listed on Indian stock exchanges.
6.The article also fails to mention anything unique about Indian management practices. Or , it does not address the issue why a unique Indian management way has not been developed despite the fact that as an economy, we have been lot of importance to management education and development.

While in general, the Indian business leaders could be classified as different in positive ways than their western and especially the US counterparts, how many of them can be said to have attained significance in their realm of leadership? What is it that takes a leader from being successful to being significant? A study of leaders who have been significant by making a difference in the way they achieved their own goals or their organizations’ goals point to one important factor, namely extra-ordinary courage. While most of the successful people and entrepreneurs showed courage to some degree, their failure to become significant can again be attributed to the lack of that extra courage that is required to take one from being successful(even highly successful) to being significant. By significance or being significant, I mean path breaking difference in the way they thought, executed, and contributed to the discipline(like technology, management etc) and impacted a whole lot of constituencies. How many of the Indian leaders could claim to have embraced such path-breaking differences to enter into a realm of significance except for a few handfuls like JRD Tata or Dhirubhai Ambani?

The article is only an excerpt. Let’s wait for the book for the complete picture to make our final comment.