Smart Leadership , livre ebook

For corporate leaders , the challenge is to find new ways of doing things. Smart Leadership: Insights for CEOs presents twelve CEOs who have done just that, and set new benchmarks for growth and performance in their respective industries in the process. More outstandingly, whether it is Kumar Mangalam Birla, N.R. Narayana Murthy, Rahul Bajaj or K.V. Kamath, they have shown how such growth can be sustained, year after year, even as the business environment becomes, in the words of one CEO, ‘ferociously competitive, rapidly changing and fluid’. In this compact but insightful book, Gita Piramal and Jennifer Netarwala draw insights from CEOs heading companies as diverse as Lijjat Papad and Tata Consultancy Services, on how they accomplished their goals in such a competitive environment. They come up with lessons on some of the core aspects of leadership: decision-making, building teams, nurturing talent, managing change, and an unwavering focus on growth. Indian companies are today grappling with the challenge of moving up to the next level of competition-one where an organization has a demand for its product or service anywhere in the world. Smart Leadership offers practical tips on effecting that transformation for executives at all levels.
 
Dr. Gita Piramal is managing editor of The Smart Manager , India’s first world-class management magazine, launched in February 2002. She is also India’s foremost business writer. Gita’s major works include the best-sellers Business Maharajas and Business Legends . She has co-authored two books, Managing Radical Change and World Class in India , with the late Sumantra Ghoshal. Both books won the Delhi Management Association  awards for their contribution to management thinking. Her most recent publication is Sumantra Ghoshal on Management: A Force for Good , co-edited with Professor Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School.
 
Jennifer Netarwala is a Mumbai-based journalist. She has always been interested in business and management and is currently a staffer with The Smart Manager .







BOOKS BY GITA PIRAMAL
 
Business Maharajas
 
Business Legends
 
Business Mantras (with Aparna Piramal, Radhika Piramal and Mukund Beriwala)
 
Managing Radical Change: What Indian Companies Must Do to Become World-Class (with Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher A. Bartlett)
 
World Class in India (with Sumantra Ghoshal and Sudeep Budhiraja)
 
Sumantra Ghoshal on Management: A Force for Good (edited with Julian Birkinshaw)

SMART LEADERSHIP

Insights for CEOs
 
 
Gita Piramal
Jennifer Netarwala
 
 
 
 
 
PORTFOLIO
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Portfolio by Penguin Books India 2005

www.penguinbooksindia.com

Copyright © Gita Piramal 2005

Some parts of this e-book originally appeared in a different form in The Smart Manager

All rights reserved


ISBN: 978-06-7005-832-7
This Digital Edition published 2011.
e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-118-5
Digital conversion prepared by DK Digital Media, India.

This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this e-book.


 
In memory of my mother, Pushpa.
To my family, Sohan Lal Kejriwal, Mukesh and Ruchi,
and to Nitin Nohria and Maneck Davar, without whom
The Smart Manager would not have been born.

Contents
Copyright
 
A Crisis of Leadership
 
The CEO at Work KUMAR MANGALAM BIRLA
 
Globalization ASHWIN DANI
 
Human Capital DEEPAK PAREKH
 
Transformation R.A. MASHELKAR
 
Growth K.V. KAMATH
 
Change Management RAHUL BAJAJ
 
Starting Right SHIKHA SHARMA
 
Decision-making SUBHASH CHANDRA
 
Becoming Great S. RAMADORAI
 
Performance Improvement N.R. NARAYANA MURTHY
 
Mergers and Acquisitions AJAY PIRAMAL
 
Managing Cooperatives JYOTI NAIK
 
Gleanings
 
Acknowledgements
1
A Crisis of Leadership
Finding New Ways of Doing Things

Two questions have always bothered me: what makes leaders special; and why are there so few world-class companies in India? The first question relates to the very nature of leadership. The second question is particularly relevant in India’s changing business scenario. Globalization is forcing Indian companies to assess themselves against global standards and the need to become world class is pressing upon our managers.
The quest to find an answer to these two questions led to this small collection of twelve essays. I am not sure we found complete answers, but I do believe we have uncovered some interesting insights.
The first insight is that the two questions are inextricably linked. I believe that there are too few Indian world-class companies because there is a crisis of leadership in corporate India. Today, more than at any time ever in its history, India has better access to technology, resources and information. It has a large base of accessible talent that is greedily tapped by international companies. Yet only a small percentage of Indian CEOs have managed to use these advantages effectively to create world-class quality, products and services, processes and assets for themselves.
We have too few world-class companies and too few business leaders. Before launching The Smart Manager , the management magazine I edit, in February 2002, we conducted a survey to assess the size of the CEO market. While we discovered that India had 183,000 MBA students enrolled annually, and that there were over 500,000 general managers, every direct marketing agency we spoke to told us that ‘there are only 8,000 CEOs who matter’. We need more companies, more business leaders, and they have to be of global calibre. That is why we started this research. And this book is about the torchbearers who light the way.
Practical Aspects
As Professor Nitin Nohria of the Harvard Business School explains, an organization is world class when there is a demand for its product or service anywhere in the world. This implies that location is immaterial and that the product or service is globally competitive in terms of pricing and quality. But what does this really mean in practical terms? What do we need to do in terms of strategy, organization and management to become world class and remain there?
In terms of creating world-class products and services there are many companies that come to mind. Tata Motors has developed India’s first indigenous car (Indica) and is marketing it to Africa and the UK. Mahindra and Mahindra, a Mumbai-based firm that ranks among the largest tractor companies in the world, has opened tractor assembly plants in the US and is targeting the Chinese market as well. Incidentally the company has also become the first tractor company to receive the Deming Prize for quality management.
Other CEOs have introduced Indian consumers to world-class services. One of these is K.V. Kamath, who ushered in a revolution in Indian banking. ‘We believed that the Indian customer was prepared to look at technology,’ he recalls in his essay. ‘So we said, let’s put in the ATMs, Internet banking and a call centre the key technology channels. We stepped ahead of the competition and were able to seize market share.’
We also found excellent examples of companies that have built world-class assets , such as Reliance Industries, Jamnagar refinery and Nicholas Piramal’s R&D centre in Mumbai. ‘We were looking to get a leg-up in the research end of pharmaceuticals,’ says the latter. A substantial investment in human and financial resources was made to bring it up to world-class levels after Nicholas Piramal acquired it from Hoechst.
However the area getting the least attention of Indian CEOs is that of processes . American statistician and quality guru W. Edwards Deming, who was responsible for the Japanese post-war industrial revival in the 1950s and 1960s, discovered that over 90 per cent of problems are due to bad systems, not bad people. But it is people who write the systems. The best IT and BPO companies in India have established world-class performance measurement and HR processes; others such as Hero Honda, Asian Paints and Hindustan Lever have developed high level skills in areas such as supply chain management.
One of the best examples of a world-class p