AN ICMR-IIPM THINK TANK PUBLICATION COUNT …cycbth.org/browse/IssuePdfs/CYCBTH_April.pdf · AN...

BEFORE THEY HATCH

COUNTYOURChickensA 4PS B&M QUARTERLY SUPPLEMENT ON BUSINESS LEADERS

AN ICMR-IIPM THINK TANK PUBLICATION

THE LEADERS WHO REDEFINED BENCHMARKS FOR THE CORPORATE WORLD THROUGH THEIR ART OF

TRANSFORMATION

CORPORATE TRANSFORMERS

GOVIND SHRIKHANDEManaging Director - Shoppers Stop

M K ANANDCEO-UTV Broadcasting

GANESH NATARAJAN Vice Chairman & CEO,Zensar Technologies

NARAYANA MURTHYChairman Emeritus- Infosys

JAGDISH KHATTARCMD-Carnation Auto

RAJEEV KARWALFounder & CEO-Milagrow

MARSHALL GOLDSMITHLEADERSHIP COACH

PHIL EASTMANAUTHOR & SPEAKER

RONALD RIGGIOCLAREMONT INSTITUTE

CHANGE YOUR BEHAVIOR

CHARACTER BASED LEADERSHIP

WHY IT WORKS AND HOW?

VO

L-1

ISS

UE

-2

A

PR

-12

WILFRIED AULBURManaging Partner-Roland Berger

XERXES DESAIMD Emeritus - Titan

AND THEY SAID...Santosh SrivastavaSr. Solution Integrator,

Ericsson India

Akhs Ramaraju, Whole Time Director,

NCC Limited

Arun Kumar RaiLIC of India

Akash PandeySoftware Engineer,

Capgemini

The last issue of Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch titled “All in Family” was a very in-teresting read. I really appreciate the effort and hard work of the editorial team. Leader-ship is a theme which in itself is very vast, but the magazine covered all important areas of leadership. I especially liked the columns by in-ternational authors and the book review. All the best for further editions.

Your issue looked marvelous. The views expressed are clear and concise and the whole structure is impressive. Keep up the good work with high spirit and zeal and makes us knowl-edgeable .The inter-national columns added to the essence of the magazine. The design of the maga-zine was quite im-pressive.

I am a regular reader of Planman Media’s magazines and com-pletely enjoyed the last edition of CY-CBTH, which peeped through the upcoming trends in family busi-nesses in the country. It gave vivid informa-tion about leaders and leadership. My best wishes are there with the whole team of CY-CBTH. I look forward towards the next issue.

Congratulations to the IIPM Think Tank for coming out with such an informative journal that talk specifi cally about the leading busi-ness leaders. Dealing with contemporary top-ics, it was quite inter-esting to read the in-dustrial inputs from the mouth of the lead-ers itself. The cover sto-ry on family business was well written. Kudos to the whole team.

PHIL JOHNSONLEADERSHIP COACH

GORDON CURPHY

PRESIDENT, C3

DAVID VEECHEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ILS

EQ IS WHAT MATTERS THE MOST...

YOU NEED TO BE A FOLLOWER

LEADING FOR THE FUTURE

VO

L-1

ISS

UE

-1

O

CT

-11

BEFORE THEY HATCH

COUNTYOUR

ChickensA 4PS B&M QUARTERLY SUPPLEMENT ON BUSINESS LEADERS


EMAMI GROUP

LINC PEN &

PLASTICS

MADISON WORLD

FAMILY BUSINESSES

ARE ADOPTING

GLOBALLY PRACTICED

MANAGEMENT NORMS

AND ARE STRIVING

FOR SYNERGY AMONG

THE FAMILY MEMBERS

ON BOARD!

ALL IN THE

FAMILY

PRITISH NANDY COM-MUNICATIONS

Please send your feedback to: [email protected]

BEFORE THEY HATCH

COUNTYOURChickens

count your chickens before they hatch 4 april 2012

COVER STORY

Marshall GoldsmithAuthor, Professor and Leadership Coach.

CAN LEADERS CHANGE THEIR BEHAVIOR?

12

Phil EastmanAuthor of 'Character of Leadership'

THE CHARACTER OF LEADERSHIP14

Ronald RiggioLeadership Professor, Claremont Institute

WHY IT WORKS AND HOW IT WORKS34

Sray AgarwalConsulting Editor

THE FORTUNE BENEATH INTEGRITY42

EDITORIAL Are you there, Mr. CEO? 5

FLASH POINTSFacebook's billion dollar acquisition 6The King of Good Times hampered 7

KICK OFFS “We have to go a long way” 08Yogesh BansalFounder – ApnaCircle

MIDDLE ORDER"If you are passing through hell,just keep going" 09Ajit Andhare CEO – Colosceum Media

INFOGRAPHICSBeyond Numbers 10

INTERNATIONAL COLUMNCulture Controls Communication Carol Kinsey Goman 16The 'HOW' of Transformational Leadership Ashok Malhotra 32Transformational Leadership: What will be your legacy? Courtney Anderson 36

FAIR FORWARDThe amalgamation is intended to be a key strategic move 38 Sulajja Firodia Motwani Vice-chairman, Kinetic Engineering Ltd.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW"Time management can be taught" Pat BransAuthor of 'Master the Moment' 40

LEADING BY READINGAnswer to all your Whys 41

Cover Design by Ashvin Chitroda

17

Narayana Murthy 20Rajeev Karwal 22Wilfried Aulbur 24Govind Shrikhande 26Xerxes Desai 28Jagdish Khattar 29M K Anand 30Ganesh Natarajan 31


CONTENTS


PRINTED BY:Rolleract Press Servies, C-163, Ground Floor,

Naraina industrial Area, Phase-I, New Delhi - 16

DISCLAIMER :All efforts have been taken to ensure the veracity of the information contained in the research, however the IIPM Think Tank expressly

disclaims any and all warranties, express or implied, including without limitation warranties of merchantability and fi tness for a particular

purpose, with respect to any service or material. In no event shall the IIPM Think Tank be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, punitive, or consequential damages of any kind whatsoever with respect to the

and materials, although the reader may freely use the research and material provided, the IIPM Think Tank retains all trademark right

and copyright on all the text and graphics.

We are keen to hear from anyone, who would like to know more about IIPM Think Tank’s Publications.

You can e-mail us on [email protected] or alternatively call us at +91 9818244963

editorial & research

FOUNDER EDITOR: MALAY CHAUDHURIEDITOR-IN-CHIEF: ARINDAM CHAUDHURI

CHIEF CONSULTING EDITOR: PRASOON S MAJUMDAR

EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Namita Chhetri CONSULTING EDITOR: Sray Agarwal

SENIOR EDITOR: Akram HoqueASSISTANT EDITORS: Mrinmoy Dey, Sayan Ghosh

PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENT: Amir HossainCORRESPONDENT: Nidhi Gupta, Harshita Singh, Ganesh Roy

COPY DESK: Charu

design

DESIGN DIRECTOR: Satyajit DattaASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR: Manish Raghav

DEPUTY ART DIRECTORS: Pragnesh Patel, Siddharth KapilSENIOR DESIGNERS: Priyankar Bhargava, Alpana Aditiya,

Hitesh Mehta, Kuldeep SinghDESIGNER: M.F. Ashraf, Karan Singh, Vikas Gulyani

SENIOR ILLUSTRATOR: Shantanu MitraILLUSTRATOR: S.K. PandurangaIMAGE EDITOR: Vinay Kamboj

photography

GROUP PHOTO EDITOR: Ranjan BasuPHOTOGRAPHER: Sujan Singh, Mukunda De,

Sanjay Solanki, Vikram Kumar, Rangnath Tiwari,Shubash Chopra

CHIEF PHOTO COORDINATOR: Varun Pal SinghSENIOR PHOTO RESEARCHER: Sanjay Kumar, Ashutosh Vig

production

PRODUCTION MANAGER: Gurudas Mallik ThakurPRODUCTION SUPERVISOR: Digember Singh,

Satbir Chauhan, Soumyajeet Gupta, Dipak Basak, Mukesh Jha,

N. Ekantha Lingam, Deep NarainPRODUCTION ASSISTANT: Omvir Gautam

marketing

VICE PRESIDENT: Amim Ahmed VICE PRESIDENT (WEST): Guljar Singh

ASSOCIATES VICE PRESIDENT (AD SALES) : Sumit Raina, Rajat Sogani

GENERAL MANAGER (SOUTH): Sunil Kumar GENERAL MANAGER (EAST): Bhaskar Mojumdar

REGIONAL HEAD: Atul Kapoor

circulation

REGIONAL HEADS: Swaroop Saha, Bhupinder Bisht, Kunj Bihari Joshi, Venkat Narasimman, Joydeep Ganguly

SALES MANAGER: Manoj, Rizvi, Mukund, Parameshwara, Shihabuddin

CYCBTH online

CHIEF WEB DESIGNER: Neel Verma

SR. WEB DEVELOPER: Anil Sheoran, Christopher Mani, Sandeep Rohilla, Manoj Chandelkar

Progressive branding today is virtually incomplete without the exploitation of social net-working sites by the head of

the management teams or more spe-cifi cally, the CEO. Social media’s evo-lution in corporate world is rapid and lasting. It is the common man’s no-menclature that CEOs are imbibing; be it for recruiting, scouting, public en-gagement, or social CRM. The remark-able posts, intelligence, wisdom, and interaction with the consumers can fi nd a brand streets ahead of the left outs. Not only consumers, even the

employees productivity can be enhanced manifold by using collaboration tools like blogs and wikis by welding the team with organisational knowl-edge sharing. The value of knowing other people’s opinions, thoughts and ideas strengthen the network, which is possible only through inter-action through social sites.

The CEOs are fast realising the blip of not adhering to social media and have started using it from the top of the pyramid. The online marketing has become a trend with a Google research indicating that an average consumer source at least 10 different information tags before a purchase decision. In another survey conducted by Doremus and Financial Times, 60 per cent of the executives engage in all sorts of blogs, online advertise-ments and interactions (like LinkedIn) to make their buying decisions.

The maverick Richard Branson for example, writes in fi rst person in his profi les of Facebook, Twitter or Google+, where he narrates not only his business but also his travel experiences, his lifestyle and whatever he wants to share. The CEO Drew Patterson of Jetsetter, a consumer savvy travel startup experience about 40 sales each week through their website, offering hotels, villas and adventure experiences to its members. They maintain the most cordial relationship with prospective and existing members and interact with them regularly that centers from travel plans to honeymoon destinations. Finally, one of the strongest online market-ing companies in the world, called Kate Spade New York, led by its CEO Craig Leavett is achieving triple digit growth this year through social networking sites.

There is no doubt that social networking sites are fast becoming a major differentiator for all sorts of companies. All sorts of business are increasingly compelled to use social media in their fi xtures. Customer support will be requiring it to receive the complaints by using tools like CoTweet, sales department will be requiring gauging the business envi-ronment, marketing department will fi nd it invaluable for backward in-tegration and distribution department will use it to handle down line channels… et al. lt would be silly for any CEO to ignore 1.43 billion active users accross various social networking platforms. Its time to make sure, Mr. CEO, you are there.

ARE YOU THERE, MR CEO?

(SMS your views with your name and topic to 0-9818101234)

Namita ChhetriExecutive Editor

EDITORIAL

BEFORE THEY HATCH

COUNTYOURChickens

A 4PS B&M QUARTERLY SUPPLEMENT ON BUSINESS LEADERS



FLASH POINTS

INTERNATIONAL

BILLIONAIRES BY REGION (FORBES 2012)

FACEBOOK'S BILLION DOLLAR ACQUISITION

The news of acquisition of an 18 month old photo-sharing service 'Instagram' by world’s largest social networking site Facebook has

raised many eyebrows! More interestingly, Face-book has agreed to pay as much as $1 billion in cash and stock, for the transaction. Such huge acquisi-tion, just before going to public, though at a fi rst glance seem to be an awkward one, but in reality it has plenty of bottom line benefi ts. Instagram could have been a potential competitor if not in short run atleast in the long run. Notwithstanding, preventing Instagram from falling into the hands of competi-tors like Twitter or Google could be other factors for such massive amalgamation. It has also acquired Instagram’s 400 mn customers through the deal.

The last year was a very diffi cult one indeed for the business lead-ers per se as knee deep crisis of

Eurozone watershed, occupy Wall Street, and unemployment engulfed us one af-ter the other. In spite of the situation being on the rocks, the best of CEOs were being able to drift through viz. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckenburg, McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner who were able to bring sig-nifi cant growth but it was Howard D Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, who bagged the title of Business Person of the year 2011 by Fortune magazine. The top shot CEO of McDonald's, Jim

Skinner, who brought about a tec-tonic shift in the fortune of his cor-

poration by doubling its turnover from $50 billion to $100 billion in just 7 years of his tenure, fi nally decided to resign on June 30, 2012. Skinner was named CEO of McDonald's Corp. in 2004 and since then refocused the company on customer strategies, business disciplines and close global alignment. Skinner's leadership brought unprecedent-ed growth in the organisation with a com-pound annual total shareholder’s return touching 21%! The new McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson is likely to face a mighty chal-lenge to exceed his predecessor’s legacy.

MCDONALD’S CEO RETIRES

MAN OF THE YEAR

Region No. of BillionairesUnited States 425

Asia Pacifi c 315

Europe 310

The Americas 90

Middle East & Africa 86

World (Total) 1226

$60 MILLION STOCK SCAM

John Mazzuto, former CEO of Industrial En-terprises of America

Inc who pleaded guilty to grand larceny in a

$60 million stock fraud scheme and became a

critical witness against a former colleague, was sentenced to up to 4.5

years in prison.


NATIONAL

To address the crisis, Vijay Mallya wrote "All junior staff will be paid before Easter i.e. on Wednesday April 4th. All Pilots and Engineers will be paid on Monday April 9th and Tuesday April 10th"

The King of the Good Times and the largest airline by number of passengers, Kingfi sher Airlines had a very tough time during last four months. Since November,

the Service and Income Tax departments have frozen all bank accounts as the airline owes Rs 76 crore to the department. In addition to that it has to pay nearly Rs 60 crore to the IT department. Consequently, it was not able to make payment of salaries to its employees in the same period. The scenario worsened by the fi rst week of April, 2012 when the employees threatened to go for a strike if their dues are not paid, at the earliest. But Vijay Mallya addressed the whole issue and wrote a letter addressing all the employees of the company and promised to clear all the dues of all the staffs by April 4, 2012 and others by April 10, 2012.

THE KING OF GOOD TIMES HAMPERED

The Ministry of Corporate Affairs has set up a com-mittee headed by Adi Godrej, Chairman of Godrej Group to design a framework for the highest qual-

ity of corporate governance in the country. The group of members will draft a comprehensive policy structure which will allow the committee to govern companies without making any signifi cant changes on their inter-nal strategy. The committee is expected to make its rec-ommendation within six months from the date of its fi rst meeting. The committee will hold meetings with stake-holders in the corporate sector, academicians and pub-lic before fi nalising its recommendation. Other members of the committee are Kiran M Shaw (Biocon ltd), Sid-hrath Birla (FICCI), M K Chauhan (Asian Center for Cor-porate Governance and Sustainability) and more.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE LESSONS BY ADI GODREJ

GAME OF MOOLAH

We all know that cricket is religion in India but cricket is also equivalent

to money. The recent bidding to bag broadcasting right of Indian cricket matches in India has proved that. The contract with Nimbus would be terminated in July 2012. In a bidding, Star TV has bagged the right with magnum opus deal which is valued at Rs.3,851 crore ($750 million) to cover 96 matches in the coming six years. This simply shows that Star has to pay Rs.40 crore ($7.86 mil-lion) for each international match which is twenty per cent higher than what Nimbus used to pay — Rs.32.5 crore ($6.38 million) per match. Star Group's India CEO Uday Shankar is very happy with the deal and promised to provide better experiences to audiences.

The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC),

India's second largest for-eign bank has appointed Stuart Milne as the new Chief Executive Offi cer on April 1, 2012 for its India operations. He has suc-ceeded Stuart A Davis who acted as CEO for last three years. Milne will have to face several hurdles as his appointment came at a time when the banking sector especially foreign lenders are going through tough time due to high lending rate and the Euro-zone crisis.

WELCOME ABOARD

PHOT

O :

SAN

JAY

SOLA

NKI


KICK OFFS

“WE HAVE TO GO A LONG WAY”YOGESH BANSAL, FOUNDER OF APNACIRCLE, EXPLAINS TO CYCBTH THE VARIOUS WAYS HE ADOPTED IN ORDER TO FIND A FOOTHOLD IN INDIA IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH AMIR HOSSAIN

From USA to India, nothing was easy and all seemed sulk-ing. Yet, with determination, hard work and vision, growth is meant to be achieved. Yogesh Bansal com-pleted his Masters from University of North Carolina and

before stepping into the world of entrepreneurship, he had worked with McKesson Inc, USA. In March, 2006, he founded ApnaCircle.com. The company's core competency lies in fulfi lling profes-sional as well as social networking needs of the vast Indian popu-lation and has succeeded in nurturing a lot many careers. And with new ventures in fold, it certainly will bring a boom into the professional networking world. How did the concept of ApnaCircle come into being?Coming from USA, the concept of social networking was not new to me and I was always very fascinated and at the same time motivated enough to venture into the same. After moving to India, I witnessed that the Indian popula-tion is still deprived of this opportunity of getting to know the professional world through a social networking plat-form. I carried out a research with the help of question-naire survey and found that the youth preferred using tools like social media as a better way to interact. They rated their career as the highest priority followed by friends and then family came at third position. It was then that I de-cided to create a professional website ApnaCircle with so-cial elements in it to cater to the need of the society.What researches have you conducted before launching ApnaCircle?At fi rst, I was quite circumspect about whether it will work in India or is India ready for my product? But I decided to follow my instinct and we are a brand today. I think it was

an intelligent decision that I took long back because today social networking is a rage. Entire world is on Facebook, even the government has portal on it, so if I would have launched my product now, it would have been a failure. Currently, we have a customer base of 3 million.Despite pre-launch market research generating positive response from the target consumer, in many cases the product failed miserably. So how did you convince yourself?No research can give you all the answers, all you get is an overview from the research and you need to keep on in-novating your product in order to survive in the market. Initially all the emails of users were routed to my mail box and I used to revert on all of them. It helped me understand the consumer, their needs and what exactly they want from my product. I still think that we have only managed to cater to 5-10 % of social media requirement and there is 90% left to be done. We have to go a long way.How did you convince the investors?I was fully convinced and put all my money into the ven-ture. I would have become completely bankrupt if anything went wrong. So that’s the confi dence I had and if somebody see that you have put all your money in this venture – he will automatically get convinced. We don’t need money for survival now but we need money for expansion.You have started ApnaCircle in India and also some other ventures in USA, which country is better in your opinion to start a business?India and China are big markets with respect to their de-mographic dividend and it gives you a great opportunity as far as a start up is concerned. Whereas in USA, the mar-ket is saturated and tough. So, either you have to come up with a totally new and innovative product or the chances of survival becomes bleak. There was a time in USA, when people use to get loans merely by showing the business plan but now the procedures have been made more strin-gent. In India, we have smart coders which are available at a much lesser price as compared to USA. India is growing now and you will see many new innovative products com-ing from India in the next few years. Have you ever come across a situation when you thought of giving up?If you have faith in your product, you will never give up. Life is only one and giving up is always considered the easiest thing to do. At the worst, you might become bank-rupt but still you will have that peace in the mind that you tried your level best. I have been through all these phases but am proud that I never for once thought of it and I want all the young entrepreneurs to simply follow their instincts and success will come their way.

Yogesh Bansal,

Founder of Apna

Circle

Y O G E S H B A N S A L

count your chickens before they hatch 9

A J I T A N D H A R E

april 2012

“IF YOU ARE PASSING THROUGH HELL, JUST KEEP GOING”AJIT ANDHARE, CEO, COLOSCEUM MEDIA – FAST EMERGING AS ONE OF INDIA’S LEADING INDEPENDENT MULTI-GENRE PRODUCERS, REVEALS HOW DID IT ALL START TO MRINMOY DEY

Starting his career as management trainee with Uni-lever India in 1995, Ajit Andhare worked across sev-eral Unilever businesses from Feeds to Detergents and was posted to Unilever Thailand in 2007 as Re-

gional Activation Director in Hair care for Asia Pacifi c region. He founded Colosceum Media in 2007 successfully building it into one of India’s leading content development & Produc-tion Company with landmark shows such as Wheel Smart Srimati series, Splitsvilla franchise, Jai Shri Krishna & Mas-terchef India.To start with, I would like to know the start up idea of Colosceum Media.It was combination of two to three factors. Having worked in a large corporate and I realised the opportu-nities that is there in growing India. Inspired by various enterprises being fl oated by young entrepreneurs, I thought of building something for which I am not that experienced. The only corporate in this sector was En-demol, which is a MNC and therefore I thought that there is a clear scope. My focus was to create a multina-tional company. I really got an opportunity for Indian content market. I was looking at the size of the produc-tion in India. How it is spread between various catego-ries like fi ction category, animation and then I looked at how these companies evolved during the period of time. I understood the market structure and players.What kind of hurdle you faced during the start-up phase of the company?We started from the scratch and we had no background in this industry. We needed to build contacts and also faced competition from already established companies. The other hurdle was that people’s perception was that we are related to Network 18 and we had to make them understand that we have our own independent opera-tions. We had to convince them the Network 18 is only a part of venture capital. We have been trying to over-come these perception issues and now we are dealing with the industry. What are the changing trends that you are seeing in

the industry?The industry was becoming more professional than it used to be and the relationships now play less important role than they used to play earlier. Additionally, budg-ets are becoming bigger, scope programming and pro-ductions are also getting bigger. We are also seeing a lot of interaction from the people who are out of this in-dustry and they are fi lling the gap. Did you ever think of giving up?If you are passing through hell, just keep going. Tough times are always there in everyone’s life and if you con-tinue to ride on it you will come out of it.What are the upcoming shows that we can see in the near future?We are currently producing some contents. We will also be going to US to shoot ROADIES. We are going to San Fran-sisco, Los Angeles and Vegas, so that is something which is coming up. We are also planning to produce episodes Jaanbaaz (a reality show). There are three to four shows on the regional fronts that are in the pipeline.

"WE STARTED FROM THE SCRATCH AND WE HAD NO BACKGROUND IN THIS INDUSTRY AND ALSO FACED COMPETITION FROM ALREADY ESTABLISHED COMPANIES"

MIDDLE ORDER

Ajit Andhare, CEO, Colosceum Media


BEYOND NUMBERS

CEO (CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER) TURNOVER ACROSS THE GLOBE

CHANGE MANAGEMENT HAS BECOME A SIGNIFICANT PART OF TODAY'S CORPORATE WORLD WITH CEOS RESORTING TO THIS STRATEGY TO STAY AHEAD OF COMPETITION. AMIR HOSSAINAMIR HOSSAIN DOES SOME NUMBER CRUNCHING TO GRAPHICALLY PROVE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN THE SUCCESS RATE OF A PROJECT

According to a study by Booz & Company, 11.6% of the world’s 2,500 biggest publicly listed compa-nies got new bosses in 2010. The CEO turnover rate fell below 12% for the fi rst time since 2003 and was substantially lower than the 14.3% rate in 2009. At nearly 19%, the turnover rate was highest in Ja-pan. But much of this churn was because of people retiring – planned succession accounted for nearly four-fi fths of total changes.

Prosci's sixth global benchmarking study, since 1998, reports the insights and lessons learned from business leaders and change pro-fessionals in 575 organisations across 65 coun-tries. The 2009 report found that there is a sig-nifi cant correlation between Change Manage-ment effectiveness and meeting objectives & staying on schedule. Effective Change Manage-ment is strongly correlated with success of achieving business outcomes and staying on schedule & budget. Change projects that in-clude effective Change Management are fi ve times more likely to meet objectives and achieve desired business results.

Source: Booz & Company

Source: Global CEO Survey, PWC

Japan

0% 5% 10% 15% 20%

Brazil, Russia and India

Other Emerging Markets

World

US and Canada

MergerForcedPlanned

GROWTH VS NEW PRODUCTS/SERVICES CHANGE MANAGEMENT PRACTICESThe main objective of any corporate entity is to maximise their shareholders’ wealth. Diversifi cation has always been one of the most extensively practiced method to increase profi tability. The Global CEO Survey 2012 by Pricewater-houseCoopers (PwC) found that CEO's interest in driving growth with new products or services has increased over the past few years. In 2007, only 13% of CEOs added a new product/service in their current catalogue to increase their bottom-line. Taking a cue from past, around 28% of all CEOs want to adopt this formula of growth in 2012.

0%

10%

20%

30%

5%

15%

25%

35%

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

Source: Prosci best practices in Change Management benchmarking report 2009

With effective Change

Management

95% reported the objec-tives or the change

were achieved

71% reported the

change fi nished on time

With poor Change

Management

16% reported the objec-tives or the change

were achieved

16% reported the

change fi nished on time

INFOGRAPHICS

Percentage of CEOs in driving growth with new products or services over time

CEO Turnover


EFFECTIVENESS OF CHANGE MANAGEMENTEffectiveness of change management plays a pivotal role to enhance the suc-cess of any project. Moreover, change management has direct correlation with the success rate of the project. In addition to that, success rate of IT projects and non-IT projects vary with the effectiveness of change manage-ment. A study by Interface reveals that zero percent change management ef-fectiveness may lead to success rate of 33% and 67% in IT project and non-IT project respectively. The survey fur-ther explores that 100% success rate is only possible if an organisation either IT or non-IT put 100% change manage-ment effectiveness during execution of the project.

Source: Interfaces

Source: Interfaces

Source: Catalyst

0%0% 25% 50% 75% 100%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%IT Project Success Rate (%)Non-IT Project Succes Rate (%)

LEADERSHIP GAP IN INDIAThe whole world has realised the signifi cance of women participation in every fi elds especially poli-tics and corporate world. But, India is still lagging be-hind as far as women participation is concerned par-ticularly in the Corporate world. The gender gap is quite wide in India Inc across the ladder. Only 36% of women labour force is available in India while only 22.6% women are employed in organised institutions. The scenario gets worse when we move to the top management level from bottom. The gender gap in managerial position is very stark with merely 3% to 6% of women able to reach senior management level and only 4.9% women are part of board of directors in Indian companies.

36%Women in the

Labor Force

22.6%Women Employedby Organisations

3% to 6%Women in Senior

Management

4.9%WomenBoard

Directors

WOMEN LEADERS IN FORTUNE 500 COMPANIESContrary to populist perception, gender gap not only exists in India but can be seen among the Fortune 500 companies. Women’s representation in Fortune 500 leadership positions has stagnated in re-cent years. Women's representation as executive offi cers and board members has slightly increased by 0.60% and 0.90% respectively from 2009 to 2011. 10.00%

2009 2010 2011

11.00%

12.00%

13.00%

14.00%

15.00%

16.00%

%

%

%

%

Percentage of women representation in Board Seats

C H A N G E M A N A G E M E N T

Percentage of women Executive Offi cers

Change management effectiveness


INTERNATIONAL COLUMN

april 2012

CAN LEADERS CHANGE THEIR BEHAVIOR?

A SPECIFIED FOCUS ON DESIRED BEHAVIOUR AND CLASSIFYING KEY AREAS OF BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE IS MANDATORY FOR OPTIMUM RESULT

MARSHALL GOLDSMITHAuthor, Professor and Leadership Coach

People often ask, “Can executives really change their behaviour?” The answer is defi nitely yes. If they didn’t change, I would never get paid (and I almost always get paid).

The mission of behaviour coaching is to help leaders in achieving a positive change for themselves, their people and their teams. There are several different types of coaching including strategic coaching, life-planning, or organisational change but executives of-ten engage themselves in behavioural coaching as it only focuses on changing leadership behaviour for in-dividuals and teams. It enhances the leaders ability to deal better with ambiguity and aims to maintain satis-factory relationships with the Board, shareholders and employees. It also helps to become more creative and refl ective. But these types of coaching can only be suc-cessful with executives who are willing to make a sin-cere effort to change and who believe that this change will help them to become better leaders.

INVOLVING KEY STAKEHOLDERS As a behavioural coach, I have gone through three distinct phases. In phase one, I believed that the coach was the key variable in behavioural change. But I was wrong as a research done by me and my friend over 86,000 participants on changing leader-ship behaviour observed that the key variable for change is not the coach or advisor. It is person being coached and their co-workers.

In phase two, I spent most of my time focusing on my coaching clients. This was much better. I slowly learned that a hard working client was more important than a brilliant coach.

In phase three (where I am now), I spend most of my time not with my coaching clients but with the key stakeholders around my client.

How do I involve key stakeholders? I ask them to help the person that I am coaching in critically impor-tant ways:� Let go of the past: When we continually bring up

the past, we demoralize people who are trying to change. Whatever happened in the past happened. It cannot be changed. By focusing on a future that can get better (as opposed to a past that cannot), the key stakeholders can help my clients improve. (I call this process feedforward, instead of feedback).� Be helpful and supportive, not cynical, sarcastic

or judgmental: If my clients reach out to key stake-holders and feel punished for trying to improve, they will generally quit trying. I don’t blame them! Why should any of us work hard to build relationships with people who won’t give us a chance?� Tell the truth: I don't want to work with a client,

have them get a glowing report from key stakehold-ers and later hear that one of the stakeholders said, “He didn’t really get better, we just said that”. This is not fair to my client, to the company of to me. Pick something to improve yourself. My clients are very open with key stakeholders about what they are going to change. As part of our process, our clients ask for ongoing suggestions. I ask the stakeholders to pick something to improve and to ask for sugges-tions. This makes the entire process “two-way” in-stead of “one way”. It helps the stakeholders act as “fellow travellers” who are trying to improve, not “judges” who are pointing their fi ngers. It also great-ly expands the value gained by the corporation in the entire process.

STEPS IN THE BEHAVIOURAL COACHING PROCESSThe following steps outline my behavioural coaching process. Every leader that I coach has to agree to imple-ment the following steps. If they don’t want to do this, I make no negative judgments. There are many valu-

"EXECUTIVES OFTEN ENGAGE THEMSELVES IN BEHAVIOURAL COACHING AS IT ONLY

FOCUSES ON CHANGING LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOUR FOR INDIVIDUALS AND TEAMS"


M A R S H A L L G O L D S M I T H

april 2012

able things that leaders can do with their time other than work with me! Our research indicates that if lead-ers won’t do these basic steps, they probably won’t get better. If they will do these basic steps, they almost always get better!� Involve the leaders being coached in determining the

desired behaviour in their leadership roles. Leaders cannot be expected to change behaviour if they don’t have a clear understanding of what desired behav-iour looks like. The people that I coach (in agreement with their managers) work with me to determine desired leadership behaviour.� Involve the leaders being coached in determining key

stakeholders. Not only do clients need to be clear on desired behaviours, they need to be clear (again in agreement with their managers) on key stakeholders. There are two major reasons that people deny the validity of feedback, wrong items or wrong raters. By having my clients and their managers agree on the desired behaviours and key stakeholders in advance, I help ensure their “buy in” to the process.� Collect feedback. Determine key behaviours for

change. As I have become more experienced, I have become simpler and more focused. I generally recom-mend picking only 1-2 key areas for behavioural change with each client. This helps ensure maximum attention to the most important behaviour. My cli-ents and their managers agree upon the desired be-haviour for change. Have the coaching clients re-spond to key stakeholers. The person being reviewed should talk with each key stakeholder and collect ad-ditional “feedforward” suggestions on how to im-prove on the key areas targeted for improvement. In responding, the person being coached should keep the conversation positive, simple and focused. When

mistakes have been made in the past, it is generally a good idea to apologize and ask for help in changing the future. I suggest that my clients listen to stake-holder suggestions and not judge the suggestions.� Review what has been learned with clients and help

them develop an action plan. My clients have to agree to the basic steps in our process. On the other hand, outside of the basic steps, everything that I give my clients is a suggestion. I am much more of a facilitator than a judge. I usually just help my clients do what they know is the right thing to do.� Develop an ongoing follow-up process. Ongoing fol-

low-up should be very effi cient and focused. Ques-tions like, “Based upon my behaviour last month, what ideas to you have for me next month?” It can keep a focus on the future. Within six months con-duct a two-to-six item mini-survey with key stake-holders. They should be asked whether the person has become more or less effective in the areas tar-geted.� Review results and start again. If the person being

coached has taken the process seriously, stakeholders almost invariably report improvement. Build on that success by repeating the process for the next 12 to 18 months. This type of follow-up will assure contin-ued progress on initial goals and uncover additional areas for improvement. Stakeholders will appreciate the follow-up. No one minds fi lling out a focused, two-to-six-item questionnaire if they see positive results. The person being coached will benefi t from ongoing, targeted steps to improve performance.

THE VALUE OF BEHAVIOURAL COACHING Behavioural coaching is the widely used type of coach-ing. This process can be very meaningful and valuable for top executives. These are the people who have great careers in front of them. Increasing effectiveness in leading people can even have greater impact if it is a 20-year process, instead of a one-year program.

People often ask, “Can executives really change their behaviour?” The answer is defi nitely yes. At the top of major organizations even a small positive change in behaviour can have a big impact. From and organisa-tional perspective, the fact that the executive is trying to change anything may be even more important than what the executive is trying to change. With top ex-ecutives, behaviour may be the only leadership at-tribute that can be changed in a cost-effective manner. At that level it is usually “too late” for technical or functional education.

"LEADERS CANNOT BE EXPECTED TO CHANGE BEHAVIOUR IF THEY DON’T HAVE A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT DESIRED BEHAVIOUR LOOKS LIKE"



THE CHARACTER OF LEADERSHIP

THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEADERSHIP BEGINS WITH CHARACTER AND IS A LIFELONG PURSUIT IN WHICH

TIME AND EXPERIENCE MATTER SIGNIFICANTLY

PHIL EASTMANAuthor of 'Character of Leadership'

It troubles me that it will only take a few hundred words to share the profound reality that leadership is inextricably tied to individual character. Such an important subject should take volumes. However,

the brutal and simple reality is that after countless hours of consulting, coaching and advising, I become more con-vinced with each interaction that success is both enabled and stifl ed by leadership, and that leadership is at its cen-tre, is a matter of personal character. In our rush to fi nd ever-increasing effi ciency and effectiveness in organiza-tions, we have lost sight of the power of great leadership and what it takes to develop that leadership. We can, how-ever, regain our vision by proactively and positively de-veloping the character of those expected to lead. But fi rst, it is critical to share my defi nition of leadership - "Leader-ship is the ability to move a group of people through non-coercive means to an end that is, in the long-run best interest of everyone."

It would be nice if becoming an effective leader were easier. It would be nice if all the ideas and techniques you have read about or experienced in workshops were as simple to use as the author or presenter made them seem. However, the real world is something else again. Becoming a great leader is hard work. Being a leader is a tremendous responsibility. The challenges of leader-ship are numerous, the demands are steep, but the re-wards are magnifi cent.

Teachers of leadership have too often softened the re-ality of leadership, boiling it down to formulas, tips and tricks. Leadership development is a lifelong pursuit in which time and experience matter greatly. Like any oth-er long-term process, it is fraught with pain and exhilara-tion. To complicate the process further, the development of leadership ability does not even begin with leadership.

It begins with character. The ability to lead is built on a foundation of character. Every leader leads from his or her character, and, consequently, the shaping of a leader’s character is paramount for any organization looking to distinguish itself.

In 1987, I joined a failing company that was part of a crippled industry: I went to work as a commercial lending offi cer for a savings and loan. I was young, my career was young, and I was fortunate that this move was not the end of my banking career. Nonetheless, motivated to be part of the industry’s newly expanded powers in commercial lending, I joined the staff of a savings and loan. Little did I understand that the recently granted lending powers were a fi nal attempt on the part of regulators to save an industry that was terminally ill. The savings and loan in-dustry had been in trouble for years, and the demise of that sector ultimately cost the US tax payers $150 billion in 557 institutional failures. The major causes of the in-dustry’s collapse were the changing market conditions, over-investment in single-family residential mortgages, expanded regulatory authority and weak regulatory over-sight. Of those four major causes, only the fi rst is eco-nomic. The other three relate to leadership. The concen-tration of investment in mortgages, the expansion of powers to weak institutions, and continued poor regula-tory oversight were all leadership decisions. We have seen many similar leadership decisions in our current fi nan-cial-sector crisis.

Here is the key: The leadership decisions made as part of both the past and the current fi nancial crises have not really been a matter of leadership ability. They are a mat-ter of character. Leaders did not show the strength to stand against the thread of greed that weaves throughout capitalistic systems. Neither did they demonstrate a will-ingness to learn from past mistakes.

Beyond this illustration, the daily headlines and your own fi les overfl ow with examples of leaders whose char-acter shortcomings crippled their ability to lead effec-tively. Based on those numerous examples, it would be easy to approach character-based leadership develop-ment from a position of fear, with an eye to toward mit-igating the risk that leaders with poor character repre-

"CURRENT FINANCIAL CRISES ARE MATTER OF CHARACTER OF LEADERS WHO FELL PREY

TO THE THREAD OF GREED THAT WEAVES THROUGHOUT CAPITALISTIC SYSTEMS"

P H I L E A S T M A N


sent. We see this approach in the endless codes of conduct produced to keep people from doing the wrong things. The brutal reality is this: Policies, processes, and regula-tions will not curb the behaviour of leaders whose char-acter is defi cient.

The risk-mitigation approach to character and leader-ship development is appealing, because it is easier to see character clearly when it is fractured, rather than when it is whole. However, the more powerful (and more dif-fi cult) approach is not to focus on the endless tales of failure, but to choose a character model to serve as the basis for your leadership development efforts.

The Character of Leadership model has two basic prop-ositions. First, leadership is inside out; your character gives rise to your leadership. Since character fuels leader-ship, the exploration of character is of paramount concern to every serious leader and to every organization serious about leadership development. Second, context is every-thing. This means that every leadership setting is differ-ent, and the leader’s behaviour must adjust to fi t the group and the situation that the leader is part of and re-sponsible for.

The challenge with the ancient model of human char-acter was to relate it to leadership and then to articulate a set of behaviours based on each element that would allow leaders to begin a character-based leadership development journey. To do this, each of the elements is described in leadership terms. From a leadership perspective:� Faith is leading from a clear set of positive core values

that are demonstrated through leadership actions.� Justice is leading by doing what is right even when it is

diffi cult and costly; it is leading in a selfl ess manner and

fostering personal and team accountability.� Temperance is leading with personal humility, passion

and self-control.� Hope is leading by sincerely and convincingly articulat-

ing a bright future, especially when the immediate cir-cumstances look bleak.

� Wisdom is leading by effectively applying accumulated knowledge and experience to current situations.

� Love is leading by demonstrating a genuine concern, care, and compassion for people.

� Courage is leading by boldly seizing opportunities and fi rmly dealing with challenges.Beyond these descriptions, the Character of Leadership

model contains thirty-six behaviours that serve as a be-ginning for a character-based leadership program. Un-derstand that the seven elements and the thirty-six be-haviors cannot be the whole of what leadership is or should be. There are other leadership abilities specifi c to your organization that will need to augment the model.

At most, the Character of Leadership model serves as the beginning of your organization’s character-based leadership journey. At the least, the model should spark discussion in your organization about whether your leadership development program contains a strong char-acter component. As we grapple with the challenges and complexities in today’s multi-dimensional, global or-ganizations, I hope that using the Character of Leader-ship model in your leadership development program will provide a beacon from which you can navigate, because the challenges we face today are not economic, environ-mental, social, or legal; they are challenges of character and leadership.



Business leaders know that intercultural savvy is vitally important – not just because they have to deal increasingly with globalization, but also because the work force within their

own national borders is growing more and more di-verse. Every culture has rules that its members take for granted. Few of us are aware of our own biases because cultural imprinting is begun at a very early age. And while some of culture’s knowledge, rules, beliefs, values, phobias and anxieties are taught explicitly, most is ab-sorbed subconsciously.

Of course, we are all individuals, and no two people belonging to the same culture are guaranteed to re-spond in exactly the same way. However, generaliza-tions are valid to the extent that they provide clues on what you will most likely encounter – and how those differences impact communication. Here are three such generalizations.

Cultures are either high-context or low-context. Every aspect of global communication is infl uenced by cultural differences. Even the choice of medium used to communicate may have cultural overtones. It has been noted that industrialised nations rely heavily on written messages than oral or face-to-face communica-tion. Defi nitely, US, Canada, UK and Germany exem-plify this trend. But Countries like Japan, which has access to the latest technologies, still relies more on the latter. The determining factor in medium preference may not be the degree of industrialization, but rather whether the country falls into a high-context or low-context culture.

Cultures are either sequential or synchronic. Some cultures think of time sequentially – as a linear com-modity to “spend,” “save,” or “waste.” Other cultures

view time synchronically – as a constant fl ow to be ex-perienced in the moment.

In sequential cultures (like North American, English, German, Swedish, and Dutch), business people give full attention to one agenda item after another. In many other parts of the world, professionals regularly do sev-eral things at the same time.

In synchronic cultures (including South America, southern Europe and Asia) the fl ow of time is viewed as a sort of circle – with the past, present, and future all inter-related. This viewpoint infl uences how organiza-tions in those cultures approach deadlines, strategic thinking, developing talent from within, and the con-cept of “long-term” planning.

Cultures are either affective or neutral. With much angry gesturing, an Italian manager referred to the idea of his Dutch counterpart as “crazy.” The Dutch man-ager replied. “What do you mean, crazy? I think this is a viable approach. And calm down! We need to analyze this, not get sidetracked by emotional theatrics.” At that point, the Italian walked out of the meeting.

In international business dealings, reason and emo-tion both play a very critical role. Which of these dominates depends upon whether we are affective (showing emotions) or emotionally neutral in our ap-proach. Members of neutral cultures do not telegraph their feelings, but keep them carefully subdued. In cultures with high affect, people show their feelings plainly by laughing, smiling, grimacing, scowling – and sometimes crying, shouting, or walking out of the room. This doesn’t mean that people in neutral cul-tures are cold or unfeeling. But in the course of normal business activities, they are more careful to monitor the amount of emotion they display. According to a research, emotional reactions were found to be least acceptable in Japan, Indonesia, UK, Norway and the Netherlands – and most accepted in Italy, France, the US and Singapore. In today’s global business commu-nity, there is no single best approach to communicat-ing with one another. The key to cross-cultural suc-cess is to develop an understanding of, and a deep respect for, the differences.

CULTURE CONTROLS COMMUNICATION

GLOBAL BUSINESSES ARE HIGHLY AFFECTED BY INNUMERABLE CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AMONG

VARIOUS NATIONALS

CAROL KINSEY GOMANKeynote Speaker, Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant

"OF COURSE, WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS, AND NO TWO PEOPLE BELONGING TO THE

SAME CULTURE ARE GUARANTEED TO RESPOND IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY"


COVER STORY


TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERS CAN EFFECTIVELY INCREASE ORGANISATIONAL EFFICACY AND PERFORMANCE AND CAN

EFFICIENTLY EXECUTE THE CORPORATE DOCTRINE OF TRINITY. BUT THIS IDIOSYNCRATIC FACET OF LEADERSHIP IS IGNORED TIME AND AGAIN. MRINMOY DEY OF CYCBTH EXPLICATES

WHY AN ORGANIZATION MUST EVOLVE AND TRANSFORM IN ORDER TO SUSTAIN IN THIS CORPORATE WORLD


include specifi c parameters like debt reduction, cost control, profi tability measures to name a few, that de-fi nes the success of the program. For example, return on net asset became the metrics to measure successful transformation at Staples – a US-based company dealing with offi ce supplies. However, going against the wind some companies did not offi cially pronounce any formal transformation program but they made such sweeping changes that it became obvious that a change program is under way – PepsiCo is a case in point. When Pepsi experienced an infl ection point, they quickly sold off the restaurant business in 1997 and divested its bottling assets in 1999. Then they acquired Quaker Oats Co. and South Beach Co. making the intention of diversifying into health-food business crystal clear. In fact, since 2000, Pepsi has heavily invested in its international op-eration and saw its revenue getting doubled since the start of the operation.

As a matter of fact, there is no all binding scientifi c formula of how transformation should be done. Em-ployee resistance is one of the main reasons behind unsuccessful change processes. To eliminate resistance four basic conditions need to be fulfi lled.

Firstly, employees must see the point of change and agree with it. You need to have a compelling story with a balance of both positive and negative aspects to gener-ate real energy. On the one hand, a story focused on what’s wrong invokes the ‘blame game’ and fails to evoke and engage people’s passion and experience. On

WE NEED TO EXAMINE A COMPANY BROADLY BEFORE DETERMINING WHAT REALLY NEEDS TRANSFORMATION AND WHAT MERELY NEEDS INTENSIFYING

COVER STORY

he Dodo, a fl ightless bird found in Mauritius islands in the Indian Ocean, became extinct 200 years ago. It had an unfi t structure and was unable to fl y. Till the time the island was isolated, they survived. But once supe-rior species like human, pigs and monkeys appeared there, the existence of the species was endangered. Eventually, it failed to evolve with change in surround-ings, weather and became prey to other species. This one species is apt representation of 21st century’s lum-bering and stubborn examples that are reluctant to

adaption in complex changing business environment and thus get extinct in no time.

Constant and revolving transformation is the motif of the corporate world today. Outrageously high target for revenues and market share, a bold vision based on a striking business model or groundbreaking technol-ogy, major strategic moves like acquisition, joint ven-ture or merger – are deemed to be quintessential for the sustainability of a company in the long-run. In fact, change is all around us, increasing in velocity and driv-en by myriad external, internal, evolutionary and revo-lutionary forces.

Contrary to the traditional belief, no organization is immune. All companies go through a turbulent time which might be due to change in the marketplace or technologies or economic condition or introduction of substitutes or due to stiff market competition. At such situations, coping with this turmoil is the key to remain competitive. One of the detrimental factors of success-ful transformation is timely interventions of various change programs as any delay may prove to be too decisive to resurrect from downward spiral. However, any such blow does not come without any early omen. The key would be to spot these fi nancial, operational or market triggers early and should be dealt with prop-erly. In the words of Caroline Schoeder, “Some people change when they see the light, others when they feel the heat.”

Once the need for change is realised, you need to ex-amine a company very broadly before determining what really needs transformation and what merely needs in-tensifying or modifi cation. If a company is not perform-ing well does not necessarily mean all the processes are imperfect but only implies that they do not execute the important things with enough intensity. Even high-performing companies do many things imperfectly. Any change program with more than one page manifesto is bound to fail. Therefore, the eventual path of action should be narrow. While the exact nature of transforma-tion is specifi c to each company, most change programs

T


the other hand, overemphasizing on the positives might lead to dilution of aspirations and impact. Jack Welch, former CEO at GE, did strike a perfect balance between ‘What’s wrong here?’ – poorly performing businesses, silo-driven behavior, and ‘imagining what it might be’ – number one or two in the business, openness and ac-countability.

Secondly, the employees must see the top manage-ment are behaving in the changed way. This is gener-ally done through change of top management – the obvious reason being self-serving bias. Although change programs are not simultaneously initiated with a CEO change but it clearly indicates a break from the past including prior strategies. For example, Hewlett-Packard Co. last year (September, 2011) appointed Meg Whitmen, the former eBay Inc. Chief, who transformed eBay into a global online retail powerhouse, as the new President and CEO. She replaced Leo Apotheker who slashed sales forecasting several times, backtracked on promises to integrate mobile software into devices and more importantly even struggled to halt an outrageous plunge of around 50% in share price. The new CEO is expected to backtrack many of its major decisions taken during Apotheker’s tenure including the acquisi-tion of British software maker Autonomy Corp Plc. which investors claim to be overpriced acquisition. Avon, an US based Cosmetic company has named Sher-ilyn McCoy – a veteran long time Johnson & Johnson excecutive, as the new CEO a couple of days back. It clearly indicates that the company isn’t really inter-ested in Coty’s $10 billion takeover offer and would instead focus on transformation programs to arrest the slide in profi t declines.

Thirdly, there must be some incentives for the em-ployees for changing. Motivation towards accepting change depends upon the impact of the transformation program on society (building community, stewarding resources), customer (for instance providing superior service), company and its stakeholders, working team and above all the impact on individual employees (like career development, paycheck) to name a few. If the change program covers all these aspects then it is bound to unleash tremendous amount of energy which would otherwise remain latent in the organization. Small and unexpected rewards can have disproportionate effects on employees’ satisfaction with a transformational pro-gram. While turning around Continental Airlines, the then CEO Gordon M. Bethune, sent an unexpected $65 check to every employee when the company made it to top fi ve for on-time airlines.

Fourthly, employees must possess the skills required to make the desired change. A company – planning to introduce a new technology that would reduce cost or improve operational effi ciency, must train its employees beforehand to avoid resistance and the message should be given clearly leaving no room for speculation.

All these are easier said than done. The success rate of change programs is considerably low as suggested by various researches. As per John Kotter’s research only 30 percent of change programs succeed. In 2008, a McKinsey survey of 3199 executives around the world prevailed that only one transformation in three actu-ally succeeds. There are thousands of models and re-searches on how to make successful transformation. Although, these static and normative models are ad-mittedly helpful in presenting a vision of what ‘good’ look like and identifying some of the changes that can be brought but rarely do they capture the dynamic nature of change. So what really does happen is that although the prescription is right but it goes all wrong in the implementation phase. Most of the time the rea-son for failure is that the focus is either too broad or too narrow which creates confusion and results in typically wasting time and energy and creating mes-sages that miss the mark thus come up with frustrating unintended consequences.

However, most critical factor behind any transforma-tion is the change leaders. While most good managers try to keep things under control, the change agents are determined to shake up things and mainly depend on their market intelligence to get information about what the competitors are up to. They rarely apply standard off-the-shelf approaches and improvise on their past experience all the time. The key to remain competitive is constantly looking for the triggers and react quickly to keep their boats afl oat in the right direction. Charles Darwin in his book ‘Origin of Species’ on ‘Theory of Evolution’ mentioned, “It is not the strongest of the spe-cies that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Perhaps, this is even more suited to the corporate world.

Left: Charles Drawin – big-gest advocator of change for survival & Right: Meg Whitmen – new CEO in charge of trans-formation of HP

C O R P O R A T E T R A N S F O R M E R S


COVER STORY

Narayana Murthy graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from National Institute of Engineering,

University of Mysore. He completed his masters from IIT, Kanpur. He started his career with IIM, Ahmeda-bad. His entrepreneurial stint begun way back in 1976 when he started a company named Softronics but the venture failed to take off. He then joined Patni computers and fi nally in the year 1981, he founded Infosys. Today Infosys has its offi ces in 29 countries and development centers in India, China, US, UK, Australia, Can-ada, Japan and many other countries and has an employee base of 145,088 of 85 nationalities.When did you realize that you need a leadership change in the company and started building new generation leaders who can replace old generation leaders?Once the economy was liberalized in 1991, and we got listed in India in 1993 and got listed on NASDAQ in 1999, we became better known in the United States. More and more CFOs realized that there is a company who is going to grow, a company that is committed to the United States, it listed on our stock

“LEADERSHIP IS ALL ABOUT TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE”FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN EMERITUS OF INFOSYS, N R NARAYANA S MURTHY, DIVULGES THE WAY HE TRANSFORMED INFOSYS IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITHSRAY AGARWAL AND NIDHI GUPTA

fi nance, software development, and infrastructure building.3.Our leaders are our teachers: We felt that if we want our leaders for being trained to be successful, then they must listen to people who’ve actually handled the prob-lems, issues, the dilemmas, and the success of the company. It was like a real time as well as context based training. They must under-stand the context of the company very well and in order to teach this, who has the best credibility than the leaders who are actually taking the company forward to-day. For example, I used to give a course on leadership, my style, my belief and my convictions. Please throw a light on some of the transformational changes brought by you in Infosys?I realized that immediately after the economic reform, many for-eign companies started coming to Bangalore – IBM, Microsoft, Citi-bank etc., and if we wanted to grow, retain our people, and at the same time attract new people, then we have to transform the company. The shift was needed. We had to create a campus and we knew that no MNC would do it, not at that time at least. We de-cided to go slightly outside the city and create a green environ-ment, create excellent offi ces, wonderful technology, and make sure that the employees are very comfortable. Many people were not very enthusiastic about it. This was a big transformation, which I would term as “transfor-mation of mindset”. The second

A LEADER THINKS OF SOMETHING THAT IS UNIMAGINED BY THE

REST OF THE PEOPLE. FOR ANY LEADER TO SUCCEED, HE

SHOULD BE WELL-ROUNDED IN THE BUSINESS OF LEADERSHIP

exchange and therefore we should work with them. So when you combine the internet boom with the Y2K boom, this was a remark-able stand where there was excel-lent growth opportunity. There-fore, we realized that if the com-pany has to grow rapidly, we need to develop the next generation leaders. In fact, we established our leadership institute in 2000.What were the key areas or skill set which you wanted to focus while inculcating or pre-plan-ning these leaders?Leadership is all about transfor-mational change. It is about mak-ing impossible, possible. A leader thinks of something that is unim-agined by the rest of the people. Therefore, in order to help our younger people become such lead-ers; we realized that our institute has to depend on three important tenets: 1.Our company is our campus: If you want good ideas to come from the people, then there should be a sense of pluralism, there should be an environment of openness, curiosity, questioning, enlightened democracy and this will happen only in a campus en-vironment. 2.Leaders thrive in a certain context: If we want our leaders to succeed in Infosys, they should be well-rounded in the business of leadership. They should under-stand our business. We believed that, for leadership training, our curriculum is our business. Lead-ership training will help them un-derstand the intricacies of sales,


N A R A Y A N A M U R T H Y

program, we felt the need of a residential training program. We required a big residential training campus and we had to go to Mys-ore for the same. Our educational-ists were not very supportive at fi rst because they never wanted to shift. I had to explain the ad-vantages to them, explained how by making sacrifi ces today, we all will be better off tomorrow. What were the most transform-ing decisions you made?We articulated the global delivery model which means that in a giv-en project, 20-30% needs to be delivered near the customer, and 70-80% could be delivered from countries like India. This was formulized by us and we devel-oped the various necessary tools and processes and in some sense it became the standard for the entire industry. How important today it is for any company to keep on adapt-ing to changes to survive in this cut throat competition?Prof. Peter Drucker once said, “There are only 2 essential at-tributes for the success of a cor-poration they are innovation and marketing of that innovation.” You have to constantly innovate and you must sell this innovation to everyone within the company as well as outside the company. If your customers don’t value your innovation it is meaningless, if your employees don’t buy that in-novation, it won’t value. In an en-vironment like ours where we are going from country to country, we are going from application to application and where we are go-ing from technology to technol-ogy, the only thing which is con-stant is ‘Change’.

challenge was that how are we go-ing to compete with the big MNCs who were offering huge salaries? The only solution we could have for it was to go public and create Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP) and no foreign company or an MNC would be able to compete with us. Democratization of wealth was a big change for Info-sys. We were the fi rst Indian com-pany to go for CMM (Capability Maturity Model) level 4, we went for six sigma, we operated on Markham Boldrick’s Framework etc. It was a transformation of mindset into a globalised mind-set. Further, to get listed on NAS-

DAQ was very important for us to be completely prepared in terms of fi nancials. We voluntarily pro-vided our fi nancial results on a quarterly basis. We had to train ourselves in US gap, and make sure that we provide our results in both US GAAP and Indian GAAP. Later, we went on to provide the results according to eight GAAP.What was the biggest resistance that you faced and how did you resolve it?In 1998, we encountered that we were taking employees in a very large number and not all of them were well trained in their colleges, we had to scale up our training

THERE ARE ONLY TWO ESSENTIAL ATTRIBUTES FOR THE SUCCESS OF A COMPANY – INNOVATION AND MARKETING OF THAT INNOVATION

Narayana Murthy, Chairman Emeritus, Infosys


COVER STORY

Starting with Onida as a Mar-keting Executive, he went on to work with leading brands in-cluding LG, Philips, Electrolux

and Reliance. And fi nally, it was in 2007, Rajeev, who is credited for his excellence strategic abilities and exe-cution, adorned a new outfi t of a man-aging partner for Milagrow Business and Knowledge Solutions. The com-pany focuses on providing professional management services to the SMEs and MSMEs and partners them at all stag-es of development. How did this idea of Milagrow business come to your mind and what opportunities it offer to the SME and MSME sectors?Milagrow is just a fi ve-year old com-pany but the idea started cropping up my mind long ago. ‘Milagro’ is a Spanish word which actually means the ‘magic of faith’ but we added the letter ‘w’ with it as nobody in India understands Spanish and it becomes ‘Milagrow’ which is something the consumer can correlate very easily. As ‘Mila’ means meet and ‘grow’ means rise and together it means we will rise hand in hand. It was during my stint with Reliance, I felt that there had been enough of serving for commercial reasons and one

must have an initiative of his own. Secondly, the world is a one big mar-ket place and India is a nation of micro, small and medium industries. So, here we service our clients at every stage: from strategy to execu-tion to institutionalization. With time, people have started looking at us as specialists as the company pro-vides 360 degree practices depend-ing upon the economic status of the company, engage in CEO mentoring. Most of the companies actually fi nd it diffi cult to enter the Indian market. And before you joined LG, the company failed twice in its at-tempt to venture India. What transformations have you brought in the company to make LG one of the most successful MNCs?LG is a Korea-based company and the foremost thing I realised while working is that marketing is the sci-ence of appealing to the head and then getting into the heart while, HR is the art of appealing to the heart and then getting to the mind. And anything which has to do with heart and mind must be managed by the local people. The people in LG understood it well and I headed the sales and marketing division. In terms of branding a product, it’s very important to position a brand with a single-minded objective. And, it was not out of any big research, it was all out of my intuition that we choose that LG should stand for healthy products and living. Intui-tion is the highest form of learning as it is something which is immedi-ate and one can only have it only if he/she understands the market well and the customer’s need. For in-

“THINGS MAY NOT BE SUCCESSFUL AT TIMES”RAJEEV KARWAL, FOUNDER AND MANAGING DIRECTOR OF MILAGROW BUSINESS AND KNOWLEDGE SOLUTIONS TURNS THE PAGES OF HIS CORPORATE JOURNEY BACK AND FORTH IN FRONT OF MRINMOY DEY AND CHARU

INTUITION IS THE IMMEDIATE AND THE HIGHEST FORM OF LEARNING

AND ONE CAN ONLY HAVE IT BY UNDERSTANDING THE MARKET

WELL AND THE CUSTOMER'S UNMET NEEDS

stance, LG's Color TV with a golden eye stands for wrinkle-free eyes, washing machine is a fabri-care washing machine, microwave is a health wave microwave oven. So, for any brand to become success it’s important that the consumer should relate to the fact that this is the only brand which worries for me and will take care of my health. So, I used this rationale of getting into the heart and then to the mind. And this is the secret behind the success of LG in India. In your stint at Philips, it became profi table from being a loss mak-ing company – from a loss of Rs. 350 million to a profi t of Rs. 500 million. What kind of change management was involved?The main problem with Philips was its structure. It was a matrix or-ganisation with a wide organisa-tional hierarchy. In a matrix or-ganisation, there is a problem of the unity of command as the subordi-nates were to receive orders from two bosses viz., the Project Man-ager and the Functional Manager. This created lot of confusion and created problem of communication which ultimately affected the bot-tom line of the company. Once we overcame that problem and cus-tomised marketing of the products were done it turned profi table.After working successfully with so many organizations. How do you think change management is important in bringing changes in the company?With ownership mind set, passion and performance always come as a natural phenomenon. Change is a continuous process and you have to accept it. This change can come ei-ther from within the industry or from outside the industry. You have to be continuously on guard look-ing for triggers.As far as inspiration is concerned, people get inspired by reading autobiographies, books and fol-lowing the legacy of others. Who would you say were the people motivated you in your life?I am living my father’s dream. It is the thing which probably my father


R A J E E V K A R WA L

wanted to do due to family needs and moreover, there were not much opportunities. However, there is no individual as such who inspired me. But one of the books by Richard Batch left an indelible mark on me. I am someone who always want to test the limit of my mind and body.What is the one thing you think you could have done differently?Honestly saying, I don't have any regrets in my life. It doesn't mean that I haven’t made mistakes. I have made mistakes but have no regrets. There are lot of factors contributing to the success of a person in given circumstances. I have not been short in terms of my efforts, my passion and my ownership. Things may not be successful at times but I take it as part of life.What are the future plans of Mi-lagrow?I wouldn’t like to restrict Milagrow to India. I want it to be a world-wide brand. Might be at certain stage for our product division, we may go for joint venture with some company but it will not happen in the near future of two or three years.As a successful leader and entre-preneur, what advice you would like to give to budding entrepre-neurs in India?I would say to all the young entre-preneurs that its very important to go to the market, understand the consumers, come out with new products and services which are truly serving the unmet needs, process the technologies and insti-tutionalize them if you really want to build a scalable business. Else, you won't be able to survive for long in the market. We need to under-stand that people loose battles in the mind fi rst and physically they lose later.

MANY FACTORS CONTRIBUTE TO THE SUCCESS OF A PERSON IN GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES BUT I WAS NEVER SHORT OF MY EFFORTS, PASSION, OWNERSHIP

PHOT

O :

SUJA

N S

ING

H

Rajeev Karwal, Founder and Managing Director of Milagrow


Apost doctoral researcher from the Ohio State University Dr. Wilfried Aulbur has carved a niche for himself in the fast

developing luxury automobile segment in India. He headed Mercedes-Benz for fi ve years and played a pivotal role in the company's India's operations. In his tenure, the company marked its pres-ence in the truck and the bus business and expanded its research and sourcing operations. Now, he is the managing partner of the world's fourth largest consultancy fi rm Roland Berger Con-sultants, India. After serving with Mercedes Benz as the country's Managing Direc-tor and CEO, you decided to move out in 2010. What did infl uence you to take this decision?The years with Mercedes-Benz in India were rewarding and exciting. I thoroughly enjoyed addressing the market challenges together with the team at Mercedes, both employees and dealers. Roland Berger offered me a different chal-lenge. Setting up a consulting op-eration from scratch, building up the team and the brand, delivering value for customers in India in di-verse areas as Automotive, Indus-trial Goods & High Tech, Energy, Chemicals, Utilities and Consumer Goods and Retail by leveraging a global network of highly competent and entrepreneurial partners. It is a unique opportunity that I am re-ally enjoying.What were the differences in lead-ership strategies when you shifted from Mercedes to Roland?In a professional service company you deal with small teams of very

“CHANGE IS INEVITABLE IF THE COMPANY ASPIRES TO SURVIVE”REPLYING TO CHARU OF CYCBTH, FORMER MD AND CEO OF MERCEDES-BENZ WILFRIED AULBUR TALKS ABOUT HOW CHANGE IS DIFFICULT TO IMPOSE IN ALL CULTURES AND IS A THREAT TO THE POSITIONS OF ENTRENCHED PLAYERS

COVER STORY

Wilfried Aulbur,

Former MD and CEO,

Mercedes-Benz India

PHOT

O :

SAN

JAY

SOLA

NKI


thoroughly chosen people who work very intensively to come up with solutions for the clients prob-lem. This requires a different man-agement approach: It is much less hierarchy and much more leading by example, by providing the right environment and by motivating people with the appropriate chal-lenges. That's the internal aspect. What role do you think change management strategies play when one talks about company's overall structuring?We used to live in a world where 10-year plans made a lot of sense be-cause changes in the environment were few and mostly predictable. Today, globalization and dramatic economic, technological and po-litical change is common place and change management is a part of day-to-day management. Consumer preferences change overnight, standard consumer classifi cations become less relevant, new compet-itors appear out of nowhere, speed and complexity of business increas-es constantly as well as the ambigu-ity of the environment in which companies operate.

Companies that are able to adapt their strategies and their organiza-tions quickly to this changing envi-ronment will be the winners going forward. Change management projects need to be stringently run and focus on content, commitment, capabilities and culture.

However, it is important to real-ise that change management must not only address vertical confl icts of interest. For example, the last strikes in Germany of any scale and impact happened in the early 1990s. After that the infl uence of unions has waned and in a globalized en-vironment the opportunities for workers to leverage infl uence vs company management has weak-ened. Nevertheless about two-thirds of change management projects fail or fall short of expecta-tions. Today, change often not only affects workers, but also threatens the positions of executives who in turn will try everything they can to protect the status quo.

pected. One of the best ways to han-dle such resistance is to identify and communicate the WIIFM, ('What's In It For Me'). If people un-derstand the necessity and benefi t of change, then driving that change becomes much easier. A good exam-ple is the fact that social benefi ts and pay in Germany have been cut over the last number of years to en-able Germany to fi ght, e.g., Chinese competition in global markets. The WIIFM for German workers at that point in time was the preservation of jobs in Germany rather than a massive shift of all production over-seas. In Indian factories, improve-ments in productivity could even-tually be linked more directly to the performance of workers and supervisors so that company and individual interests can be aligned accordingly.What are the strategic differ-ences in Mercedes Germany and Mercedes India? And how diffi -cult was the transition for you?The competitive environment be-tween India and Germany and the challenges the management face are surprisingly quite similar. How-ever, customers in India do require a specifi c approach, targeted on their expectations towards Mer-cedes as a luxury brand.Do one need to alter style of lead-ership while implementing any change in the company?Change is very much part of our day-to-day business. As a conse-quence, there is no leadership style which is the 'right' leadership style for change, but each leadership style needs to be tuned into the company's culture, policies and take into account, that transforma-tion is a key responsibility of to-day's leaders.

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE IS TO BE EXPECTED AND THE BEST WAY TO HANDLE SUCH RESISTANCE IS TO IDENTIFY AND COMMUNICATE 'WIIFM' (WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME)

There are very few CEOs who have taken bold steps in transforming their companies. Do you feel that CEO's are still shy when it comes to unconventional innovations or managerial decisions?The job of a CEO is not an easy one. While some may realise the neces-sity of change when they often face legacy problems in their own or-ganisations which have grown with time and are diffi cult to dismantle. For many OMEs this means that re-source allocations have to be made correctly.How change management in In-dia is different from that of Ger-many? And who would you think are more active towards it: the Indian CEOs or the West CEOs?Change is diffi cult in all cultures as it often threatens the positions of entrenched players. It is in particu-lar more challenging in rigid, hier-archical structures. As far as India and Germany are concerned, one major difference is that in Germany vertical challenges have subsided over the years and major hurdles to change are often found within the management teams, i.e., in horizon-tal confl icts. In India, horizontal confl icts are important as are verti-cal confl icts as recent labor prob-lems, e.g., in the automotive indus-try have shown.

Secondly, I would not like to dif-ferentiate between nationalities and it is more important to focus on individuals. There are people who have the vision to grasp change with both its challenges and oppor-tunities and to thrive in today's complex and ambiguous environ-ment. Then, there are people who are more set in their ways, maybe even satisfi ed with the position they have achieved for their com-pany and for themselves. And in such a scenario, the fi rst set of peo-ple will be more likely to succeed in the 21st century.Change and transformation sometimes bring with itself lots of resistance and diffi culties? Did you face any such resistance & how did you address the same?Resistance to change is to be ex-

W I L F R I E D A U L B U R

COVER STORY


“THE PROS & CONS SHOULD BE DEBATED, DIFFERENCES SETTLED”GOVIND SHRIKHANDE, MD, SHOPPERS' STOP, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARU TALKS ABOUT HIS LEADERSHIP ODYSSEY OF REPOSITIONING THE COMPANY INTO THE LAP OF LUXURY BRANDS

COVER STORY

Redefi ning India's retail sector, Shoppers' Stop has aggres-sively tapped all unexplored markets across the country

and is growing rapidly. Under the lead-ership of Govind Shrikhande, the com-pany has witnessed signifi cant growth and has recently announced its plans of opening 24 stores over the next three years. He joined the group in 2001 and was promoted as CEO in 2006. He has vivid experience of 22 years and has worked with leading companies like Mafaltlal, Arvind, Arrow and Bombay Dyeing. He was a key member in launching Denim Revolution in India.In this long corporate journey, you worked with leading textile companies. How has been the journey so far?Life is full of rewards, joys, setbacks. I have learnt a lot over the last 27 years. I have been lucky enough to have some of the best bosses in my career - Mr Anubhai & Mr Mogra in Mafatlal, Mr Phadke in J&J, Mr Mir-chandani in Arvind . They acted as “Gurus”, for me and taught the fun-damentals of textiles, management & HR. I was also quite lucky when it comes to colleagues & teams who worked with me.

It’s Crucial in your life to love

CHANGE IS CONTINUOUS AND INEVITABLE, SO THE TOP

MANAGEMENT HAS TO LOOK FORWARD IN THEIR OUTLOOK TO FACE THE CHALLENGES OF

TODAY AND TOMORROW PHOT

O :

SAN

JAY

SOLA

NKI

Govind Shrikhande,

MD, Shoppers'

Stop


try, the drivers of the business, key challenges & solutions. Apart from the key leadership principles, I strongly believe that a leader must lead by example. So, a Mike Brearly can lead a good team to winning ways for a certain duration but if his own performance is below par for too long, his leadership will be questioned. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple was sacked from his own company but on his return, he took the company to greater heights through his personal drive. If I had to state only one characteristic, I would say leading from the front with passion.Who would you say are the people who had a tremendous impact on you as a leader? Why and how did they impact your life?I have looked up to various role models across various sectors. Right from the Nawab of Pataudi's fi ght back from an eye injury to play cricket at international level to JRD Tata's simplicity to Steve Jobs wiz-ardry to make complicated things intuitive to Narayan Murthy's achievement of creating a truly glo-bal company without having any business background to Kapil Dev's passion to excel & to always give 110 % ,,, I can go on & on.

Nearer to me, I have also been in-fl uenced by the personal character-istics of my grandfather & father. They were both hard working, hum-ble people who always helped others and always remained grounded, even when they had power and glory. And of course the Gurus that I mentioned at the beginning, Mr Anubhai, Mr Mogra, Mr Phadke & Mr Mirchan-dani. Each one of them has given me a lot . And I would be forever indebt-ed to all of them.

A LEADER NEEDS TO FOCUS ON STRENGTHENING THE COMPANY'S TRADING MODEL AND OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY IN ORDER TO MAKE THE BUSINESS RECESSION PROOF

best beauty halls in India through launch of brands such as Mac, Estée Lauder, Clinique Shishiedo, Dior Lancome etc.5. Expanding into Tier 2 Towns.There are very few CEOs who have taken steps in transforming the companies. Have you faced any resistance while implement-ing any change in the company? Inertia / comfort with the current and fear of the new are common traits amongst humans. That's why, very few people dare to think of new ideas and changes. While a lot of CEOs believe that 'if it ain't bro-ken, why fi x it', while the new breed thinks that creating new is part of the cycle of life. So, not all CEO's think of change as a must for trans-formation. Hence, they are reluc-tant to innovation.

Just as music lovers don't listen to the same song every day and every season, consumers want change. And many a times, they don't actually know what they want. In such circumstances, one looks at research, focus group stud-ies, market data, observation on retail fl oor to understand the change. Obviously, when a change is proposed, a lot of people need to change the way they currently op-erate. Hence they resist the change for their own valid and invalid rea-sons. Hence, it is important to bring objectivity, as the key to focus on the merits of the change. The pros & cons should be debated, differ-ences settled with the key stake-holders and a crack team to deliver the objective and they should be formulated along with key mile-stones towards the goal. Such an approach can convert the very thought of change into reality.What are the characteristicsthat you believe a leader should possess?A leader requires various skills & competencies – Personal & Profes-sional. The personal skills cover his HR skills – relationship building, learning capability, passion for work and team members growth etc. The professional competencies cover his understanding of indus-

G O V I N D S H R I K H A N D E

your work. The minute it becomes a Job, it starts weighing on you heavily & you know it’s time to change or move on. I have been part of some of the best moments in Indian Textile, Apparel & Retail Industry.How do you think change man-agement is playing a pivotal or key role in the growth of the company and re-structuring?India has changed dramatically over the last 20 years of my journey. It is now on its way to be amongst the top three economies of the world. It is the hub for IT, car man-ufacturing, fastest growing mobile market and retail market. Women are now coming on to their own and leading businesses, social service and consumption. The'Chak De' spirit is evident across various sec-tors and groups of youngsters.

Companies have to adopt to these changes in the consumers, economy, technology & competition, both lo-cal & global. We have gone through various changes over the last 20 years refl ecting this change. Some-times very successfully, sometimes not so successfully. The restructur-ing has happened in areas of man-agement & team structures, technol-ogy, people practices, store design, customer service, formats etc.

So change is continuous, inevita-ble and necessary and our manage-ment has been fl exible and forward looking in their outlook to face the challenges of today and tomorrow.What are the changes Shoppers’ Stop brought under your leader-ship to penetrate the Indian re-tail market?I would say there are fi ve key things that, we as a team have achieved, over the last few years:1. Repositioning our brand to abridge to luxury positioning from a contemporary level, through logo evolution and other touch points.2. Strengthening our trading model and operational effi ciency to make our model recession proof.3. Closing down loss making for-mats.4. Taking a leadership position in the beauty category by creating the

COVER STORY


“TITAN STANDS FOR SOMETHING BIG”FOUNDER AND MD EMERITUS OF TITAN INDUSTRIES, XERXES DESAI, TRAVELS BACK IN TIME AND REVEALS HOW HE BUILT THE BRAND 'TITAN' OUT OF NOTHING IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH SRAY AGARWAL AND CHARU

The Oxford-graduated Desai is the man behind the country’s premium and leading globally recognized Indian brands – Ti-

tan. Under his leadership, Titan has be-come the world’s sixth largest watch manufacturer and marketer and exports watches to about 32 countries. What was the idea behind starting the company and how did you come in the picture?It was the time when I joined Tata Press and the company was identi-fying a project which Tata’s would be permitted to enter. But every time, we identifi ed a project either the government of India or the Government of Tata said ‘no’. But one day, I got a call from TIFR and was asked to print a book. Then, I

got familiar with the author of the book, Jaivardhan Mahadevan who happened to be the chairman of the watch industry. After discussing the project with him, we fi nally sent a proposal to JRD Tata. Unfor-tunately, nothing worked out as the stakeholders declined to work with us as they wanted to launch the product in any country except In-dia. But the industry took a new shape when Rajiv Gandhi came to power and we were asked to apply again. And fi nally, the government agreed to form a joint sector com-pany in collaboration with Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Cor-poration (TIDCO). So, it took almost 16 years to start Titan and it was in 1987 that the products started hit-

ting the market.Where did the name Titan come from?Titan stands for something big. Also, it is a cheeky way of asserting the Tata’s presence in the project. ‘TI’ stands for Tata Industries while the second half ‘TAN’ standsfor Tamil Nadu Industrial Develop-ment Corporation.What were the changes incorpo-rated under your leadership in Titan?Success fi nally lies in getting things right and we were able to under-stand that the watch industry is a very rationale industry. Moreover, the timing of Titan’s launch was in our favour as the opposition was weak so it was a cake-walk for us. We had a team of young people and a huge number of people joined us from HMT in the manufacturing di-vision. The culture in our company was not rigid or bureaucratic as we were far from Tata’s headquarters. We experimented a lot many things at the same time and even broke the rules too. How important it is for a CEO to manage the entire transition?Change in a way, is being structured upon people, upon CEOs, in a man-ner that desn’t happen in 60s, 70s, 80s. And there is a perception that we should change with time. It’s not the change that change, it’s the question of understanding the mar-ket not only in India but worldwide, not only what is happening in the market but also what is happening in the laboratories and people’s mind the world over. We focused on what could be the product for next generation, what could be its style with not much focus on current competition. One doesn't think about current competition as it is changing continuously. One needs to tap the market aspirations.Who were the people motivated you throughout your journey?I was highly motivated by JRD Tata particularly in the second half of my working life. Mr. Darbari Seth who retired as chairman of Tata Chemi-cals also was the person who infl u-enced me a lot.

Xerxes Desai,

Founder and MD

Emeritus of Titan

Industries


J A G D I S H K H A T T A R

mitted to the company. A happy customer is more likely to make second time purchase from the company. Besides, if any product fails in the market then we have to put several efforts to bring back the confi dence of our customers.Recent entry of small players in the same business domain has intensifi ed competition. How do you tackle it?Neighbourhood workshops were there before our existence. And the recent entry of small players indicate the fact that a one-stop-auto solution outlet has further potential and will expand with time. We do not see these devel-opments as competition.

Jagdish Khattar joined Maruti as Director Marketing and Sales in 1993 and got elevated to Managing Director & CEO in 1999. After trans-

forming Maruti into a profi t-making company, he left the company in 2007 to chase his dreams. He then started Carnation Auto and today serves as the Chairman and Managing Director of the company. Showered with arrays of awards, Khattar is a saga in himself.If we talk about the entire jour-ney of yours, how did the idea of Carnation came in your mind?Prior to joining Maruti, I started my career as an IAS offi cer. I had served Maruti as long as 14 years. During those days, I used to do rou-tine visit to several dealers and in-teract with customers to compre-hend their needs and aspirations. I carefully observed that customers were looking for a quality alterna-tive to their authorized dealerships. But car owner had only two alter-natives available there either go to an authorized dealership or to a neighborhood workshop. I saw an opportunity of a one-stop-auto so-lution outlet for all brands of cars and translated this insight into the vision on which Carnation was es-tablished. We started new concept like mobile work shop, which is ba-sically for such customers who do not need to come into the centre and to get services in their offi ces or residential area.What kind of resistances did you face from the industry? One of the biggest challenges we face that Carnation had no com-petitor. So, there were no bench-marks in the industry with which

we could compare our perform-ances to enhance our standards and to provide better experiences to our customers. But it was our team effort to set our own targets and strived to provide better serv-ices on a continuous basis.What are the changes you are go-ing to implement in Carnation to make it as big as Maruti ? Our business model was different from others but we have to change it with time. We started with new cars and then came to realise that new cars are very expensive and are not affordable for our whole target audience. So we also decided to move with second hand or used cars. We spend lots of money and time for around two years to build up the brand. But we still have a long way to go to make Carnation an established and responsive brand not just in the automotive space in the country.What are the important aspects that you focused on to establish Maruti as a market leader in Au-tomobile in India?There are several factors where we have to focus very sincerely. At the age of cut throat competition, we have to handle a customer very carefully. As bad experience of a customer towards our brand does not only motivate him to move to our competitors but also negative word of mouth severally affects our market share. As a manufacturer, we are not in a direct contact to the end customers. Indirectly, we need to create so many values towards dealers so they become more coop-erative with customers and com-

ENTRY OF SMALL PLAYERS REEMPHASISES THE FACT THAT A ONE-STOP-AUTO SOLUTION OUTLET HAS FURTHER POTENTIAL

EX MD OF MARUTI, JAGDISH KHATTAR EXPLORES IN AN INTERVIEW WITH SRAY AGARWAL – WHAT MOTIVATED HIM TO LEAVE MARUTI AND TO START CARNATION AUTO

"OUR BIZ MODEL WAS DIFFERENT"

Jagdish Khattar, Founder – Carnation & Former Managing Director, Maruti Udyog Ltd.

PHOT

O :

MU

KUN

DA D

E

COVER STORY


COVER STORY

MK ANAND, CEO OF UTV BROADCASTING SHARES THE RECENT REBRANDING STRATEGIES ADOPTED BY UTV TO CATER TO MARKET DEMAND TO SRAY AGARWAL

“YOU HAVE TO SEE BOTH SIDES”

M K Anand is someone who aptly exempli-fi es transformation. He started his career

as a medical representative and then moved to Times Group and managed their classifi ed section. But his ever expanding appetite for continuous learning made him join Zoom as head of Sales and to-day he serves as CEO of UTV Global Broadcasting. Under his leader-ship, UTV re-launched Bindaas and came out with myriad of new offerings ranging from UTV Stars to UTV Action. You started your career as a medical representative and now you are the CEO of UTV. Why such transformation and transition?I wouldn’t say that I changed my fi rst job as it was a sales job. When we look towards the value chain, we come to know that only production can not create value to the economy until and unless what-ever has been produced or manufac-tured in factory or in premises reach to the end consumers who purchase it. Initially, I looked at the second part of the value creation in econo-my. So, I was very much clear about my future and whenever I used to prepare my plan for the next 20 years, I naturally gravitated towards sales and marketing job. And then gradually I tried to understand the in depth function of production be-

a team of intelligent people who can easily understand the market and fi gure out the widely accepted contents. What is your learning from Zoom and how have you im-plement that in case of UTV Stars?Life is full of learnings. I would say learnings from Zoom helped me a lot in the execu-tion part of UTV Stars. Ulti-mately, content and brand le-gitimacy plays a critical role towards the success of any channel.

As far as UTV Action is con-cerned, we have not done that well in India. UTV Movies is the most strongest brand of the UTV Broadcasting with close to 40% of the revenue coming

from it. It is followed by UTV Bindass where we are focusing on reality shows. UTV World Movies is for a niche audience and are expect-ed to grow strong with time. We also have UTV Action Telegu. At the end of the day, we have to diversify into languages other than hindi as 50% of the market is covered by other lan-guages as well. We are quite excited about the launch of our new channel UTV stars with the tagline – 'the of-fi cial channel of bollywood' and would cater to music and entertain-ment section. And, I believe UTV's strong presence in Bollywood would provide us with a competitive advan-tage over others. We have also launched UTV Movies in Uk in asso-ciation with Sky TV recently. How do you see resistance during such new initiatives?Internal transformation doesn’t nec-essarily need to face resistance. A clear communication about the changes reduces the chance of con-fusion and hence reduces resistance to change.

cause as CEO you have to keep your eyes in the both sides. UTV s is in every genre and fi elds. Most of the time you started with some reality shows, which were some more of a fi rst movers in the industry. So why did you move to a very modern type of shows?We are very strong in branded chan-nels. We believe that brand speciali-zation allowed us to be more creative and innovative. In order to expand the network, we always have concen-trated on two strategies. First, we always looked to provide more rele-vant initiatives within the existing target group. For instance, through UTV Stars, we have created some-thing out of nothing.

Secondly, we always targeted a segment where competition does not exist and we can enjoy the fi rst mov-ers advantages. Besides, we are con-stantly looking at an audience of 18 – 25 age group. So we have a reality channel (UTV Bindass), music chan-nel (UTV Stars) and movie channel (UTV Movies, UTV Action). We have

WE BELIEVE THAT BRAND SPECIALIZATION ALLOWED US

TO BE MORE CREATIVE AND INNOVATIVE AND IN TURN

HELPED US TO EXPAND THE NETWORK

PHOT

O :

SAN

JAY

SOLA

NKI

MK Anand, CEO of UTV Broadcasting


G A N E S H N A T A R A J A N

Vice Chairman & CEO of Zen-sar Technologies Limited of RPG Group, Ganesh Na-tarajan is one of the most

successful professionals in the coun-try's IT industry. During his stint with Aptech Limited, a global retail and corporate training company, the company's revenues increased con-siderably fi fty times was listed on both BSE and London Stock Exchange. He has also authored many books on Business Process Reengineering and Knowledge Management.Zensar featured amongst For-tune’s top 10 global Offshore out-sourcing companies from India. How had Zensar Technologies charted its density?It was in 2001 when Zensar started becoming a software vendor after shutting down our hardware assist-ance system. Now, we are ranked amongst India's top 20 software services companies by NASSCOM and are operational in more than 21 countries. What changes you have brought in Zensar over these years?The main changes that we have done are included in 'the fi ve act' - (i) The fi rst step was enabling peo-ple to think fast; (ii) very strong focus in a particular area; (iii) in-creasing fl exibility in terms of workplace, role of the employees; (iv) collaborating culture with or-ganisational hierarchy (v) fi ve point Green agenda towards creating ecological sustainability. Moreover, we have initiated an annual Vision Community exercise where select-ed employees from all levels join in after-hours brainstorming session to identify ideas that could lead to

new products or services.We are focusing on using social

media and mobility solutions and we have a major partnership with Google in this matter which would enable employees to collaborate with each other easily. Over the next one year we want to encourage 30% of our employees to spend 2-3 days in a week working from home with the same enthusiastic level. What hurdles have you faced af-ter implementing these changes in the company?Young people are always willing to change. But sometimes what might come in the way could be the mid-dle management who are used to a certain working style and might not be comfortable with every-body having access to everything. We also faced similar hurdles dur-

IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH MRINMOY DEY, VICE CHAIRMAN & CEO OF ZENSAR TECHNOLOGIES, GANESH NATARAJAN HIGHLIGHTS THE POWER OF EMPOWERMENT IN TRANSFORMATIONAL PROGRAMS AND PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT

"YOUNG PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS WILLING TO CHANGE"

ing transformation. What are the future plans of Zen-sar and are there any new tie-ups in the pipeline?We want to further strengthen our partnership with Microsoft and Google. We are also looking at the tie-ups with small business solu-tions companies which have similar kind of architecture. We have three to four new tie-up in the pipeline and we are looking at subsidiary in China and UK.

WE ARE FOCUSING ON USING SOCIAL MEDIA AND MOBILITY SOLUTIONS WHICH ENABLE EMPLOYEES TO COLLABORATE WITH EACH OTHER EASILY

Ganesh Natarajan, Vice Chairman & CEO of Zensar Technologies

EXCLUSIVE COLUMN


THE 'HOW' OF TRANSFOR-MATIONAL LEADERSHIP

TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP FOCUSES ON LEADING CHANGE AND MOTIVATES FOLLOWERS

TO WORK FOR THE LARGER GOOD

ASHOK MALHOTRACEO Spark Leadership Inc

A mother once brought her child to Mahatma Gandhi, asking him to tell the young boy not to eat sugar, as it was not good for his diet or his developing teeth. Gandhi replied, “I cannot

tell him that, but you may bring him back in a month. The mother was frustrated as she had expected the great leader to support her parenting. Four weeks later she returned, not too sure what to expect. The great Gandhi took the child’s small hand into his own hand, knelt before him, and tenderly cautioned, “Do not eat sugar, my child; it’s not good for you”. Then he embraced the child. The mother, grateful but perplexed, queried, “Why didn’t you say that a month ago?” Well, said Gan-dhi, a month ago I was still eating sugar myself.” Gandhi knew that to effectively lead others he must fi rst lead himself. Gandhi wrote “How can I control others if I cannot control myself?”

Gandhi believed that an ounce of practice is more than tons of preaching. This subject could not have started without above example, the illustration which is so simple in reading but so in depth and complex that it may take some time before some of us absorb the es-sence of transformational leadership practice which is “Be the change you want to see in the world” as well defi ned by Gandhi who gave defi nition to Transforma-tional leadership style. It will also be important to note that transformational leadership is required at its maxi-ma when you are leading volunteers and is not sup-ported by any external mechanism except to follow the principles yourself, otherwise, for example in Industry/Corporate its comparatively easier to implement this style with very high productivity because of support from external factors such as employee’s salary, perk growth and security which is absent when you are lead-ing volunteers.

In simple words, let’s defi ne transformational leader-ship as: "Leadership that motivates followers to ignore self-interests and work for the larger good of the or-ganisation to achieve signifi cant accomplishments; em-phasis is on articulating a vision that will convince sub-ordinates to make major changes." These leaders have a profound effect on their followers’ beliefs regarding

what the organisation should become and also on their subordinates’ values. Some examples of individuals who are considered transformational leaders include Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple, Michael Dell of Dell Computer Corporation, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Lou Gerstner of IBM.

It is also true that people who have the potential to become transformational leaders can easily lose this op-portunity by making serious mistakes. Indeed, President Clinton may be an example of an individual who botched the opportunity to become a highly successful transfor-mational leader, because of several mistakes. Though in between a course correction was done to some extent.

There is a signifi cant amount of evidence that trans-formational leadership is more effective than transac-tional leadership in achieving higher productivity, higher job satisfaction, and lower employee turnover rates. To explain this further, we need to reiterate here that one of the most comprehensive leadership theories of organisational transformation is the theory of trans-formational and transactional leadership as quoted by

Left to Right: Mahatma Gan-dhi, Bill Clinton

& Dalai Lama – the epitome of transformation-

al leadership

A S H O K M A L H O T R A


Eisenach in the year 1999 also by Burn in the year 1978 held that leadership could be broadly classifi ed into two forms, transactional and transformational leadership. Transactional leadership occurs when the leader takes the initiative in making contact with the teams for the exchange of valued outcomes. Transformational leader-ship on the other hand focuses purely on leading change. The transformational leader engages with others in such a way that both leader and followers raise each other to higher levels of motivation and morality. In transfor-mational leadership, it is important for the leaders to address true needs of the followers and lead the follow-ers towards fulfi llment of those needs.

Unfortunately though, as with most things that we value, transformational leadership is in short supply. We need much more of it, in every sphere, be it govern-ment, business, education, the law, or even non-profi t organisations. Our slow and halting progress seems even more conspicuous when we look at the rapid growth many less-endowed countries have achieved over the past two-three decades. Let us learn transformational leadership lessons by analysing leadership styles of two leaders Gandhiji and Dalai Lama.

Whenever we will refer to Gandhiji’s leadership style the word will be SIMPLICITY and that is the epitome of a genius. Before Gandhiji became the leader of 500 mil-lion people, who called him “The Mahatma” and before he became the Father of Nation by winning the fi ght for independence, he was a shy boy and an average person-ality. Even with this background, without holding any offi cial position in the government, had no wealth, com-manded no armies – he could mobilise millions and as a result of his example and personal character, the mass organized together to fi ght to become self reliant and Independent nation. He won the hearts of his greatest critics by practicing Interpersonal and excellent com-munication skills. Another example of leadership is

Dalai Lama. What makes the Dalai Lama so interesting and infl uential around the world care about a simple Buddhist monk who 50 years ago was forced to leave his country, and who for years has headed an unrecognised government-in-exile, a 'virtual' nation of 6 million Ti-betans is a important question and needs to be analysed in depth and clarity.

The Dalai Lama's quiet persuasion and reaching out has drawn many to the message of Buddhism. He has contemporised Buddhism and brought it into the main-stream of spiritual thought.

These leaders teach as management by self manage-ment, effective communication and information fl ow, Principles of natural justice, ethics, concept of OOMTAMP (Object Oriented Management Through Appropriate methods, Means and Practices).

This leadership style is most effective style for or-ganisational as well as social transformations. However, transformational leadership is very diffi cult to imple-ment no wonders we have rare examples to quote. Most of the corporate and social leaders as well as managers desire to implement this style wanting the results this trait can produce but most of us give up on the way, get frustrated or fail to communicate as we fail to under-stand that this style can be only be successfully imple-mented with high degree of self discipline, highest lev-els emotional intelligence, interpersonal and commu-nication skills. We have few examples of fl awed imple-mentation also though if not too much fl awed can still

be successfully implemented successfully such as Bill Clinton who once became an ambassador of peace and integrity found himself to be in the web of an integrity is-sue, though he had guts to openly accept his mistake, apologised and took a correc-tive action. Another such example is Anna Hazare and his team which is an example of fl awed implementation of transforma-tional style. The lack of interpersonal skills has delayed their goal which is much de-sired by the country and every citizen feels honoured to be part of his movement. The whole moment is turning out to be an issue of prestige, rigidity and credit taking which has delayed the achievement of the goal.

The results of Transformational leader-ship style are phenomenal and no goal is big enough for this style but, however, there is an equivalent price to be paid by the practitioner…

"PRESIDENT CLINTON MAY BE AN EXAMPLE OF AN INDIVIDUAL WHO BOTCHED THE OPPORTUNITY TO BECOME A HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADER"

PHOT

O :

MU

KUN

DA D

E



WHY IT WORKS AND HOW IT WORKS

TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP-BASED APPROACH TO LEADERSHIP, WHEREBY LEADERS FOCUS ON EMPLOYEE NEEDS

RONALD RIGGIOLeadership Professor, Claremont Institute, USA

Transformational Leadership: What it Is, Why it works, and How to develop It. If there were a form of leadership that could motivate workers to high levels of performance and commit-

ment, and also develop workers’ potential, wouldn’t you want to know about it? Or, better yet, implement it? Enter transformational leadership.

Transformational leadership is a relationship-based approach to leadership, whereby leaders focus on em-ployees’ individual needs and motivate them. Transfor-mational leadership puts the employees’ intrinsic mo-tivation at the heart of its theory.

THE ELEMENTS OF TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP Transformational leader has four unique qualities: 1) Idealized Infl uence: The transformational leader is a role model for its team. This may relate to the leader’s perseverance, abilities, or other aspirational qualities. While much of this is perception based, it is tied into the leaders’ example, such as a willingness to take risks, a desire to do the right thing, or consistency. 2) Inspirational Motivation: The transformational leader inspires his or her followers. The leader provides a compelling purpose and vision for the organization, while simultaneously fostering a sense of enthusiasm and optimism. Team members feel involved in making the vision a reality. 3) Intellectual Stimulation: Empowerment is a key aspect of transformational leadership. Followers feel like they make a difference and their contributions are valued. The transformational leader encourages follow-ers to question assumptions or reexamine paradigms. As a result, all levels of the organization foster organi-sational breakthroughs. 4) Individualised Consideration: Followers are devel-oped into leaders of their own through active coaching or mentoring by the transformational leader. Through these individualized development plans, each individ-ual’s capacity is enhanced over time. With the accumu-lated growth of individual capacities, the organisation-

al capacity is taken to new levels. These individual leadership components also inte-

grate with management, and as such transformational leadership is differentiated from transactional leader-ship. Transactional leadership is based on the exchange of rewards for expected performance. It involves iden-tifying what needs to be done by offering explicit value for one’s accomplishments. Transactional leadership emphasizes more extrinsic motivation, while transfor-mational leadership enhances the intrinsic, or inner, motivation of followers.

Transformational leadership goes well beyond trans-actional leadership. It inspires followers to buy into the shared vision and goals, encourages them to be insight-ful problem solvers, and at the same time, develops fol-lower leadership through coaching, mentoring and a balance of providing challenges and support. Neverthe-less, what can one anticipate in terms of the transfor-mational leader’s performance?

WHY IT WORKS? Many studies have found that transformational leader-ship leads to a number of extraordinary outcomes. How does it achieve these extraordinary outcomes?

Five of these changes are highlighted. First, the fol-lower’s confi dence or self-effi cacy is enhanced. This greater belief in one’s own abilities leads to stronger performance. It occurs on both the individual and group level, or in other words, the sense of being able to per-form well (what is called “self-effi cacy” is enhanced at the individual and collective levels. Secondly, followers identify with the leader. This identifi cation is bolstered both by trust and confi dence in the leader. Thirdly, en-gagement reaches new heights. The alignment of goals fosters commitment. Fourth, followers become more creative. This creativity is spurred by being intrinsi-cally motivated. This is in contrast to extrinsic motiva-tion associated with transactional leadership. Outside the box thinking is encouraged and exemplifi ed. Fifth, followers are developed into leaders of their own. Trans-formational leaders provide coaching and mentoring

R O N A L D R I G G I O


"TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP IS A LONG-TERM DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVE AND IS A KEY COMPONENT IN TAKING AN ORGANIZATION TO THE NEXT LEVEL"

more so than transactional leaders. Furthermore, fol-lowers of transformational leaders are more likely to seek feedback than transactional leaders. Overall, all of these changes positively affect performance of an indi-vidual and of the team. So, how does one become a trans-formational leader?

HOW IT WORKS? Becoming a transformational leader is a long-term com-mitment. On one hand, the development begins with early life experiences. However, some individuals have become pioneers of their past, and past experiences do not necessarily dictate the future. A few examples in-clude Pierre Cardin and Henry Ford. Pierre Cardin want-ed to get even for all the things he suffered as a young-ster with many upheavals in his family life. His drive and determination contributed to his success. Similarly, Henry Ford’s commitment launched one of the largest corporations in the world.

Leaders can nevertheless remain committed to the transformational leadership model. Six specifi c compe-tencies are developed: 1) Problem solving approaches, 2) Creating compelling visions, 3) Communicating, 4) Impression management, 5) Empowering employees, and 6) interpersonal skills development, including cul-tural differences, and building a community.

In order to develop this form of leadership, it’s sug-gested that the leader undertake an assessment via the MLQ (Multi-Factor Leadership Questionnaire), which is the most validated instrument for measuring transfor-mational leadership. This is followed by a personal de-velopment plan. The MLQ results provide a baseline to get started and provide a roadmap for development. An

executive coach can also help. It’s important that this feedback be utilized to create a new future, rather than focus on past leadership.

Again, transformational leadership is not developed overnight. It is a long-term development initiative and dedication. Establishing a plan is most important. Often is includes areas of development and may include at-tending workshops, one-on-one coaching, and develop-mental assessment centers, among others. Similar to early life development, such an approach involves scaf-folding on the leader’s current ability to function as both a transactional leader with an eye toward transforma-tional leadership. Education and skill training are key components. Follow-up may include a reassessment on one’s skills.

Transformational leadership is a key component in taking an organization to the next level. The leader enables followers to be leaders in their own right. This cannot be done through management tactics, but can only occur when followers are inspired to reach higher levels with the necessary motivation and empowerment. In the end, transformational leadership makes a differ-ence. Developing leaders in this manner is a longer-term initiative, but one well worth the effort. Great leader-ship, in the end, makes all the difference.

Left to Right: Pierre Cardin & Henry Ford

– mastered the art of

change management



TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP: WHAT WILL BE YOUR LEGACY?AN INTEGRAL ELEMENT OF CRAFTING A LEGACY OF LASTING TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP IS TO TAKE ACTION BASED ON OUR EVENTUAL LACK OF EXISTENCE

COURTNEY ANDERSONJD, MBA, The Workplace Relationship Expert

She has the degrees on the wall, the cars in the garage, the high end furnishings, lush landscap-ing, the luxurious homes, thriving business, dedicated staff and loving family. The accoutre-

ments of power and societally defi ned success surround her. Her passport is a testament to her travels and worldly experience. She is fl uent in the language of the privileged, sharing preferences for high end hotels, top restaurants and the fi ner things in life. Awards, recogni-tions, praise and fi nancial security are woven together to blanket her world and wrap her in the warmth of safety and importance. She has sacrifi ced immeasurably and worked beyond her limits for years. Pushing past sleep requirements, she has greeted the sun and the late night in her quest to reach further, to dream more elo-quently and to create business entities that could sur-vive even the harshest economic and market environ-ments. Most signifi cantly, she ached to create a life and a future with options. She wanted to have room to stretch, to grow, to explore herself and the world. As fi nancial security almost always accompanied success and power, that element was also part of the equation. Yet, the primary, and perhaps primal, drive was simply to make a mark on the world.

She had nothing to begin her life’s journey other than determination, vision, self discipline and a relentless tenacity. She was a calibrated risk taker and started a micro (or miniscule) business venture as soon as she could. Every single bit of money that came in was care-fully and deliberately stretched to cover her business costs and keep her going for just one more day. There were interminable days of anxiety while she just held on, put her head down and kept pushing forward. She had nothing but her faith in herself and absolute re-fusal to surrender and quit to keep her going.

Many others warned her that she was “doing too much” and that she should stop. She found herself wish-ing that they could understand that she had no choice. She was possessed by forces that even she did not fully understand to pursue the limits of her abilities. Yet, every time she thought she had exhausted every breath,

every idea, every plan, and was through; she encoun-tered new reservoirs and energy and set new limits. This process repeated daily, weekly, monthly and annually for decades brought her to her current gilded position. Although she received only praise for her behaviour, she was not immune to the pain that her words and behaviour caused other people. She rationalized it by telling herself that she was “toughening” them up and helping them “become leaders” one day. Yet, one ques-tion gnawed at her. What is the legacy she will leave?It is a question that haunts her, and it should.

Transformational leadership is at its simplest ele-ment, the forces of entropy (systems moving toward disorder) and homeostasis (systems maintaining stabil-ity) at war. Yes, I am fully aware that I am not a scientist and have applied a rudimentary (and debatable) inter-pretation of these concepts to the business world. Yet, the acknowledgment that there are powerful forces be-yond the control of individuals and organisations that impact (if not cause) transformational leadership, is important and useful to business leaders. This helps to guide the leader towards comprehending that they alone are not the beginning and end of all action and that the process will continue after they leave the or-ganisation. The stereotypical focus of transformational leadership is on the organisation that is stuck in the status quo and then a transformational leader emerges (or enters) who, like a magical being, utilizes their unique skill and intellect to change that entity into a dynamic and hyper-successful organisation. There are differences in individuals’ motivation, attitude, innova-tion and self discipline. Many of those changes and pre-dilections manifest themselves in business leaders, en-trepreneurs and scholars who do empirically work more hours, create higher measureable results and create a culture refl ective of those values and attributes. Yet, what price is the transformational leader charging for this process? Are they stifl ing opposition due to their strong personality? Are they missing opportunities due to their overwhelming confi dence in their own opinion? Most importantly, are they personally content?

C O U R T N E Y A N D E R S O N


Our business archetype from the start of this essay may have accumulated all of the outward manifestations of contentment; yet may still not be free of anxiety, an-ger, disappointment and pain. Being cruel to other peo-ple causes pain. Failing to accurately assess problems and craft solutions also causes pain. Where is the line between a transformational leader “inspiring people to exceed their limitations” and “pushing people until they break?” An obstacle to lasting transformational leader-ship is losing sight of the big picture. It is an easy fal-lacy to restrict the view of an individual to a world that includes them. Our very existence is at the centre of our thoughts and actions. We must ask ourselves, what is our legacy? Transformational leadership without inter-nal actualisation and joy can result in a transformed but hollow leader. To clutch the ephemeral nature of busi-ness achievement and serve as a catalyst for genera-tional, lasting legacies of transformational change, it is imperative that we engage in the following:

1. Utilize at least two “No Men” who are more cau-tious and more risk adverse than you are. They must be completely candid with you. Ideally, these should be independent individuals who have no ulterior motive for their feedback. They are the opposite of sycophantic, “Yes Men,” who due to their dependence on you will tell you whatever you want to hear. These individuals could

be relatives, mentors, friends, competitors, or even pro-fessionals. This step is to address the issues of listening skill development and idea intoxication which hinder many executives from growth into an authentic trans-formational leader.

2. Do not act out of obligation. Once you have achieved a certain level of achievement. You have more than enough, acknowledge it and embrace it. If 95% of people live on fewer resources than you do, it is time for you to enjoy the freedom that your diligence has reaped. You are not obligated to do what “other people” do and acquire what “other people” have. You do not have to behave as you always have simply because that is what other people think you should do. Do not imprison your-self in the approval of other people. You are now free to live as you please. You have proven your worth. Now, create your life of contentment. This step is to address the issue of acting out of habit and not changing the narrative and resultant behaviour which hinders many executives from growth into an authentic transforma-tional leader. This step utilizes a reactive focus to cease “old” destructive behaviours.

3. Invest in practicing the “Joyful Art of Business” as it applies to your life. This is a fundamental phi-losophy of my global practice providing solutions for business leaders and organisations around the world. You are an artist and your business activities must bring you joy. If they do not bring you joy, what is their pur-pose? This step is also to address the issue of acting out of habit and not changing the narrative (thought proc-ess of conditioning) and resultant behaviour which hin-ders many executives from growth into an authentic transformational leader. This step utilizes a proactive focus to create “new” constructive behaviours.

You also owe yourself continued growth (through continuing education) and joy (from your work, loved ones and service to others). Do not fall into the trap of the purported transformational leader who although they were successful in achieving their business goals has failed to transform their own lives. Your feelings and attitudes are a barometer for assessing your internal suc-cess. If you feel joyful, you are more likely than not, suc-ceeding. If you feel despondent, bored, anxious, afraid or any other destructive emotional states, then you are not a transformational leader, but simply pretend to be one each day. She pauses in the window and refl ects for a moment on the sunset. Perhaps tomorrow will be the day she begins to metamorphose into an actual trans-formational leader. It is her choice. What will tomorrow bring you? What will your legacy be?

"TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP WITHOUT INTERNAL ACTUALISATION AND JOY CAN RESULT IN A TRANSFORMED BUT A COMPLETELY HOLLOW LEADER"


FAIR FORWARD

“THE AMALGAMATION IS INTENDED TO BE A KEY STRATEGIC MOVE”SULAJJA FIRODIA MOTWANI IN AN INTERVIEW WITH AMIR HOSSAIN CANDIDLY REVEALS THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES OF WOMEN OVER MEN IN CORPORATE WORLD

Sulajja Firodia Motwani, vice-chairper-son and face of the Kinetic Engineer-ing Limited in the country is a lady who contributed signifi cantly in mak-

ing the fi rm reach heights of success. She is responsible for the group’s overall business strategy and development. Prior to her joining in family business, Sulajja worked for a Cali-fornia-based investment analytics company BARRA International for a period of four years. She was voted among the top 25 busi-ness leaders of the next century in a poll con-ducted by Fortune India. What factors do you attribute to the success of Kinetic Engineering? A company is only as good as its people. At Kinetic Engineering, we have a team of experienced professionals who spe-cialise in strong engineering, process planning, manufacturing and what I call, Frugal engineering — that is the ability to create technically strong solutions with a focus on cost. The other vital fac-tor is a strong sense of commitment by our stakeholders. What is the idea behind the recent merger between Kinetic Motor and Kinetic Engineering? The amalgamation is intended to be a key strategic move on part of the Ki-netic Group which will enable achieve-ment of the potential of Automotive Business including participation of in-vestors, strategic partners, lenders and other stakeholders. The rationalization of business would result in substantial synergies including enhanced fi nancial strength and fl exibility as well as fi nan-cial consolidation of operating activity, leading to better governance, reduction of cost and higher value creation for

the stakeholders.The merger also marks the culmina-

tion of restructuring taken up by the Kinetic group in recent years where the group’s manufacturing and engineer-ing entity Kinetic Engineering was re-structured and positioned to become a focused player in the Automotive Sys-tems and components business with a focus on Powertrain; while the two wheeler business in Kinetic Motor Company was hived off to a new alliance company with the formidable Mahindra and Mahindra Group. KMCL transferred its operating assets relat-ing to two wheeler business from KMCL to Mahindra Two Wheeler (MTWL) Limited in November 2008, for cash and for a 20% strategic stake in MTWL. It is expected that this strategic stake shall create signifi cant value in the fu-ture, as Mahindra group should be able to leverage its rural penetration to cre-ate a successful motorcycle business for MTWL.

Merger will result in value addition to minority shareholders of both compa-nies, by diversifi cation of value and value addition through manufacturing business as well as investment into MTWL. In all, it would enhance the shareholders value and allow focused course of action.Do you feel women have disadvantage over men as far as business manage-ment is concerned?If people around you perceive your com-mitment, sincerity and focus, other fac-tors such as gender biases will take a back seat. I also feel that women have some inherent skills, generically speaking, due


S U L A J J A F I R O D I A M O T WA N I

"WOMEN EXCEL IN ACADEMICS. BUT DESPITE TREMENDOUS TALENT, THEY DO NOT ACHIEVE THEIR PROFESSIONAL POTENTIAL"

to their upbringing and social mind-set and other skills like multitasking, sincer-ity, ability to put others before self. More-over, these advantages can be converted into a differentiated management style.How can these women truly serve as role models to other women?This century is considered as the century of women and all around us and in all spheres of life, women are making great progress and assuming important roles. We can see more and more successful women setting great examples for others to chase their dreams. I do hope this change gathers momentum.What according to you are the essential traits to become a successful and inspi-rational leader?Each person can have their own unique style of leadership and of management. But I do believe that a common trait for long-term success in being able to moti-vate your organization towards growth and excellence has to be your own positive attitude towards life and your own commitment. You are looked upon as a role model by many in India. What’s your message to the youth and budding women manag-ers of the country?Women excel in the fi eld of academics. But despite tremendous talent, many a times they do not achieve their professional po-tential and due success. This is mostly be-cause their work takes a back seat in front of other priorities. It is in those crucial years that they must stay committed, fi nd inner strength and above all seek solutions and support from their family, to balance the two.

India is at a unique crossroads. For all young and educated people, this will throw up unprecedented opportunities in all sorts of areas especially in the area of en-trepreneurship. So my message to the youth and budding entrepreneurs is that they should look ahead, stay positive, work hard and make a mark. Its time they make a dent in the universe and enhance the corporate image of India. Sulajja Firodia Motwani, vice-chairperson and face of the

Kinetic Engineering Limited


EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Pat Brans is author of the book Master The Moment: fi fty CEOs teach you the secrets of time management. Affi liate professor at the Grenoble Ecole de Manage-ment, Brans provides corporate training on time man-

agement and productivity using a unique methodology, based on exclusive tips from the world’s busiest CEOs, and grounded in psychology research. Brans has held senior positions with three large organizations (Computer Sciences Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, and Sybase)Time Management being your core area of research, how can organisations leverage the same?Each individual in a family manages his or her time well, then the family as a whole is effective. If each family in a community is effective, the community as a whole is effective. Take the same principle and apply it to work organizations. If all individuals in an enterprise are ef-fective, teams will work well. If each team works well, departments will produce more results. And if each department produces more, the company will have a better overall result.

'Master The Moment' consists of six steps to better time management: identify yourself, energize, priori-tize, optimize, head off problems early, and fi nish things. When I provide training, I like to use the acro-nym HIT (for Habits, Ideas, and Techniques) to help people remember that each of these steps consists of two habits to develop a few ideas to integrate, and a small number of techniques to learn.What kinds of leadership skills and management skills do these kind of managers need to follow?Good leaders always surround themselves with people they can trust, rely on and whose skills compliment their own. To build trust you have to be trustworthy yourself. You have to be somebody others can count on. If you say

you’re going to do something, do it. Tell people “no” when you have no intention of doing something. It may be hard to do at fi rst, but in the long run people will learn to count on your honesty. Maintain a consistent style and communicate it clearly. If you do these things, peo-ple will gravitate towards you.Can time management be taught. Do you think eve-ry leader is equipped with this important trait?I think time management can be taught. As demon-strated by the fi fty CEOs featured in my book, it’s more about attitude than talent. Experiments show that whether it be in sports, work, or intellectual pur-suits, talented individuals with performance-oriented attitudes (those who view their goals as a way of dem-onstrating they are talented) don’t do as well as less talented individuals with learning-oriented attitude (people who understand that they simply need to learn what it takes to reach their goals).What are the hurdles a company faces when it brings in changes in the style of working with respect to time management and multitasking?Rather than talk about hurdles, let’s think of some of the things we can do to make positive change. There are a few things companies can do to discourage mul-titasking. The fi rst thing is to forbid (or at least discour-age) bringing laptops and cell phones into meetings. This message has to come from the top, and upper man-agement needs to practice what they preach.

Companies should offer time management training and encourage workers to read books on the subject. If every employee picks up just one or two new ideas on how to work more effectively, think of how much of a difference that would make.How important is ethics in leadership?Think about how you assess people you fi rst meet and adjust that assessment as you get to know them. Over time you develop an opinion about how much you can trust that person. The only way to build that trust is for a leader to play by the rules and communicate hon-estly. People want leaders with principles. They want leaders who stand for something and stick to their be-lieves when things get diffi cult.

"TIME MANAGEMENT CAN BE TAUGHT"

PAT BRANS IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH NIDHI GUPTA EXPLAINS CYCBTH HOW TO BUILD TRUST

AMONG EMPLOYEES AND MASTER THE MOMENT

"THE ONLY WAY TO BUILD THAT TRUST IS FOR A LEADER TO PLAY BY THE RULES AND

COMMUNICATE HONESTLY. PEOPLE WANT LEADERS WITH PRINCIPLES"


LEADING BY READING

ANSWER TO ALL YOUR WHYS“WHY SOME PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS ARE MORE INNOVATIVE, MORE PROFITABLE, COMMAND GREATER LOYALTIES AND ARE ABLE TO REPEAT THEIR SUCCESS OVER AND OVER AGAIN” NIDHI GUPTA

Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived and he started his theories with a three letter word called “WHY”.

Footprints on the sands of the time are not made by sitting down. Lot of hardship, pain, dedication makes you to reach to the top. But why are some people and organizations more innovative, more infl uential, and more profi table than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?

This book by Simon Sinek, “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action”, answers all the above questions in the most convincing manner. The book is insightful yet often repeating the same examples many times over to make precisely the same point as the fi rst time the example was used. On the hindsight, one would be inclined to think that virtually everything Sinek wrote could have been stated in a 20-page article without leav-ing out anything important and that’s the beauty of this book. It is astoundingly powerful.

The plethora of business and leadership books indicate a desire by many to improve either themselves or their business. However, Sinek begins by saying what he has to offer does not attempt to supplant others, nor will he fi x all the things that do not work. Instead, he notes "I wrote this book as a guide to focus on and amplify the things that do work."

"Why" is the essential question in the book. His premise is that companies which do well focus on their "why" while many companies which fail are generally found to have lost that focus altogether. Sinek believes that if cus-tomers understand the why of a company, and they be-lieve in the why, they will naturally end up buying the "what". In other words, people like companies with a vi-sion which matches their own. Sinek's ideas about why customers (and employees) become loyal to certain com-panies and not others is not only fascinating but has been presented in completely new hue. He explained the same by giving example, Volkswagen has been the automotive equivalent of peace and love since the VW van ruled the

1960s. They put a vase for fl owers on their Beetle's dash-board! So when they introduced the Phaeton, a high-end luxury car, it failed. Volkswagen’s engineering is legen-dary and the critics loved the Phaeton, but it did not rep-resent the "why" of Volkswagen which has attracted so many people. Why is Southwest Airlines successful? Why did Walmart lose its way. The book explores why people buy into an organization or a leader. People do not care about what or the how. 'Start With Why' is a very practi-cal guide which explains why some companies became and some didn’t become successful. Organizations need a leader who breathes the “WHY” message. In addition, many other people in the same company work out the “HOW” of this “WHY” message. This is usually not the work of the leader. Steve Jobs at Apple was a good exam-ple of a “WHY” leader. Apple computers are more expen-sive than PCs, have less software available to use on them, and at times are even slower than the competition. So why do people buy them? Because they buy into Apple's "why". Apple has from the beginning marketed itself as the rebel, the individual, the unique voice. They market themselves that way because that is how they envision themselves. People who buy into that vision will pay more for a computer that refl ects their values. By focusing on their why, Apple has also been able to easily branch out from computers and develop the iPod and iPhones. Those products fi t their image as the rebel. Sinek says their products may not even be the best or fi rst on the market, but they quickly emerge as the leader.

Sinek explains how each of us can achieve greater suc-cess and satisfaction by inspiring others through a shared sense of purpose – as opposed to more commonly used tactics of coercion and manipulation. “If you follow your WHY,” writes Sinek, “others will follow you.” It’s a re-freshing redefi nition of what constitutes true leadership, and a great tool for re-infusing your own work with pur-pose-centered passion. This book is impressive, practical, credible, simple, clear and compelling.

y put a vase for fl owers on their Beetle's dash-a vase for fl owers on their Beetle'when they introd gh-endroduced the Phaeton a hig

E TO N”


POSTSCRIPT

Leadership is often defi ned by amalgamation of a few much-touted clichés that are in reality nothing but paraphrased thoughts of great management thinkers. Among all the

attributes a CEO needs to possess, one attribute that slips between the cup and lips is ‘integrity.’ As told in Mahabhrata, no leadership is complete without integrity. This can be corroborated with the very nomenclature of the word integrity which is derived from Latin word 'integer' that means (in arithmetic) complete. Integrity revolves around two skills sets: high ethics and high professionalism/competence. Events like Enron, WorldCom, IMF are living (or shall I say dead) illustration of how lack of integrity can bring benchmark companies to ruins. In spite of having traces of integrity, different CEOs actions reap different results. Superimposing the attributes of integrity on the BCG matrix would allow a better understanding and wide categorisation of CEOs, and the rest would automatically fall into place.The Star CEO (high on ethical integrity and high on professional integrity): This is the type of CEO who form legacy and is seen as leader not only by the employees but the corporate world at large. Steve Job’s deep rooted commitment to innovation that produced outstanding robust products, always excelled in consumer’s mind space. His integrity was impeccable too. He always valued shareholders’ interest, but never took any steps for short cuts or short term actions to maximise their value. Narayan Murthy, whose competence in a nutshell includes founding Infosys in 1981 with $250, and through the journey of waves of success, today commands over $6 billion in revenue. Another exemplar of the winning combination of performance and ethics is Ratan Tata of Tata Group. In 1991, when Ratan took over as the head of the group, its turnover was Rs.14,000crores – and today its more than 9 times with Rs.129,994 crores! Talking about integrity, no one can beat Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol episode in 1982. After death of 7 people consuming tainted Tylenol, what Johnson & Johnson did was nothing short of an incredible effort of damage control. Warnings were distributed to the hospitals, production was stalled, advertisements were all over the place, and 31 million bottles were pulled back from the market. It turned out to be an outstanding piece of promotion that touched people’s heart because of its integrity and competence.The Cash Cow CEO (low on ethical integrity and high on professional integrity): These CEOs are the riskiest CEOs. They are those who have ability to take companies to zenith but can’t be trusted. These CEOs often indulges in scams, scandals and affairs and either ruin the companies fi nancially or dents the company’s image. The impacts of these damages can range from mere jerk to complete devastation. For instance, HP’s CEO Mark Hurd pulled off an incredible feat by forcing a workaround of disjointed HP to fi ve

consecutive years of revenue and capital gains with stocks soaring 130%! However, his personal conducts were a botch in the company’s reputation. He was alleged of sexual harassment to former television actress Jodie Fisher! The indictment of his unethical business conduct was certainly inimical. Another CEO, Kenneth Lay of Enron, who kicked in with a compensation of $42.4 million in 1999, was one of the most successful CEOs in the US, but his career has been clouded by the blotch of Enron scandal! In spite of having best policies and corporate structure, it was the lack of personal integrity of the individual (Kenneth Lay) that made Enron an infamous history.

The Question Mark CEO (high on ethical integrity and low on professional integrity): A very rare breed of CEOs. They do take wrong decisions but never would damage the image of the company. These CEOs should be given more leadership role and less decision-making role. Question marks must be analysed in order to decide whether they are worth the investment and position. Robert Nardelli, the CEO of The Home Depot and later on in the same capacity at Chrysler, belongs to this category. CNBC has named him as the "Worst American CEOs of All Time". At Home Depot, his policies nosedived completely. In 2006, he was the only director to attend annual general meeting, and

more astoundingly he would allow the shareholders to speak for just one minute each! He was fi nally ousted from the company on January 2007. He was later hired for a panacea in Chrysler’s dwindling fortune, which he could not deliver. And fi nally, on April 30, 2009 Chrysler fi led bankruptcy and Nardelli was sacked again! The Dog CEO (low on both): Fire them ASAP.

John Browne, the CEO of BP, failed in all spheres! Browne was touched on the raw as more and more disasters started to line up. A major blast in the BP refi nery in Texas, and the infamous oil spill in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. That’s Browne’s professional incompetence. Simultaneously, his personal promiscuity was exposed too by a UK daily, The Mail.

In the words of Peter Drucker, “integrity means adhering to a code of ethics and doing the right thing by sticking to that code.” It’s clear then, that CEOs are a mixed bag, even though majority of them are not up to the mark in terms of competence and integrity. A survey by the Corporate Executive Board, Virginia revealed that, “having high-integrity cultures are 67 percent less likely to observe signifi cant instances of misconduct.” Integrity no doubt is the most sought-after attribute a CEO must posses, but then what's more important is the combinations of subsets that form that very skill-set. A wrong concoction can be really poisonous.

THE FORTUNE BENEATH INTEGRITY

SRAY AGARWALConsulting Editor

Question Marks Ethical but non

competence

Stars Competence and ethical

Dogs Non competence and non ethical

Cash Cows Non ethical but

competence

Pers

onal

Inte

grity

(eth

ics)

Professional Integrity (competency)Low High

High

Low

AN ICMR-IIPM THINK TANK PUBLICATION COUNT …cycbth.org/browse/IssuePdfs/CYCBTH_April.pdf · AN...

Documents

Transcript of AN ICMR-IIPM THINK TANK PUBLICATION COUNT …cycbth.org/browse/IssuePdfs/CYCBTH_April.pdf · AN...