Mumbai played an important role in my career and professional development. The city and the opportunities it provided shaped my perspectives, thought streams, and aspirations.
My first taste of the city was a 12-week residency program at the National Institute of Training in Industrial Engineering (NITIE) in 1976. The magnificent hilltop structure by the side of Powai Lake was a prestigious centre for training and development in productivity sciences. The institution has since morphed into the IIM, Mumbai in recent years.
I never imagined my relationship with the Urbs Prima of India would be long and highly impactful. At that time, the short-term view was that I would attend the program, get certified in Organization and Methods practice and leave back to Bhilai to settle down to my job routine and get lost in the sea of people, events and projects.
We never know what is in store for us and it is wise to take things as they come. Success is a very personalised outcome. Apart from our response to the unfolding challenges and opportunities, success in career, academics and life depends a lot on luck, chance, providence -whatever you call the X-factor in life.
The program at NITIE was my first opportunity to interact closely with people from other organisations. Most of them were from Government and Public Sectors. Very few participants were from the private sector. The public and private corporate sectors were two different worlds. The former was characterised by iron-clad job security, low or lack of work pressure, little performance-linked rewards or recognition and procedural rigidity blunting customer focus.
The cultural chasm between the public and private sector organisations was a ground reality hard to ignore. Promotions and other rewards, outside the assumed conveyer-belt system of seniority-chain, were unheard of. Since the first set of managers in the Public Sector units were mostly from the civil services, the service rules and regulations were framed along bureaucratic practices.
Accountability was practically non-existent in the Public Sector. Your job was at risk only if you indulged in gross misconduct, fraud or criminal negligence at work. Nobody ever lost a job because of inefficiency, non-performance or malingering. It was quite easy to get lost in the PSU ecosystem, not do anything solid and still your pay would get credited to the bank on the first of the coming month.
Code of Conduct and Discipline set out the do’s and don’ts for employees. There was little scope for discretion or creativity. Decision-making was hardly aligned with the customer's requirements.
Most managers refrained from making decisions. Because they feared that if their judgement went wrong, they could be pulled up for indiscretion and even could be attributed malafide motives. The safest and most enduring public sector executives were those who just floated around and pushed the decision-making up the ladder.
I would call the predominant management approach in the Public Sector the ‘duck’ style. Nothing much seems to have changed even now. Most managers duck the ball and let it pass. Like the floating duck, they are unmindful of the rain that pours because they know that not a drop of water will stick on them. Ducking is a time-tested survival technique in PSU management.
The joke goes that in a massive PSU head office, a tiger from the neighbouring zoo entered and hid in one of the dingy corners, unnoticed by anyone. The beast would get hungry and come out of hiding, mostly at the peak of office hours and find a loitering employee. The tiger would eat the poor guy and return to the afternoon siesta in its hideout.
No one ever noticed a colleague or two missing from their midst day after day. Then one day, the tiger felt hungry earlier than the usual time and, in its indiscretion, in the blinding hunger, it ate the tea boy who was passing by. When the teaboy was not sighted for an hour and more the staff got restless and started searching for him everywhere in the office, amidst heaps of files buried in dust and in vague corners too. Then they chanced upon the tiger still in sleep, unmindful of the unusual briskness around. They caught and handed over the tiger back to the zoo thus ending his free-of-hassles days in the office lobby!
The story tells about the indifference, malingering and lethargy in many public sectors.
Whenever there is an outstanding CEO - competent, confident, ethically upright and not willing to dance to the tune of political masters and bureaucratic chieftains - the organisation makes a bid for rejuvenation. However, retaining the top slot is difficult for the public sector bosses.
I remember KC Khanna, who was Chairman, SAIL, telling us in one of the dinner meetings that he carried his resignation letter, typed and ready to deliver, in his pocket. Perhaps, he was dramatising a bit to drive home the point that the CEO’s tenure was transitory and depended on the whims of the political bosses! As if he was talking in premonition, Khanna was unceremoniously removed even before a month passed from that get-together! That is another story and we shall return to it in a subsequent chapter.
My early exposure to cohorts from the private sector, my experiences in the wonderland of PSUs and my academic foray into doing the Master's in Management all gave me enough input to convince me that it wasn’t the job of governments to do business.
Today’s concept of organisation is vastly different from four decades ago. At that time organisations were rigidly structured and had inflexible procedures and controls. Discretionary, customised solutions to meet specific market and consumer needs were considered deviations from the standard and as bad practices.
Now, the management process is considered behavioural, emotional and social and much less routine and standardised. The IT revolution has transformed organizations, systems and processes in multiple ways, with subjectivity and human errors being contained significantly. Data-driven and outcome-focused management, with stress on customer experience and user interface, is critical for organizational effectiveness.
In the age of disruption that we live in, everything including ideas, processes and strategies has changed drastically from the time I started my executive career journey.
Organisation and Methods Practitioners were in the 1970s the productivity doctors. Organizations expected that we would bring quantifiable improvement in efficiency, cost reduction and process resilience.
Since computerised information systems were in the early stages of development, designing and implementing manual forms and management reporting systems was a key function of O&M. I liked designing forms and developing procedures and workflows based on critical analysis of existing systems and organizational needs. Interview-based identification of client perspectives and functional needs was something which enthused me. I delved deep into the work processes and operating procedures of different functional verticals. Slowly and surely my ability to do organizational analysis and refinement of processes and procedures grew and so did my professional confidence.
The two quasi-technical aspects of O&M practice to which I took a liking were Work Study, which focussed on simplifying, eliminating and modifying workflows, procedures and processes and Work Measurement which provided a quantitative assessment of manpower requirements for various jobs and departments.
Whatever could not be measured and evaluated was not worth considering as jobs, tasks or projects! That was the basis of the O&M approach. O&M and its parent function of Industrial Engineering were considered effective tools for implementing the Scientific Management approach.
As part of our training, we had a few external visits to reputed private corporates and attended talks and presentations by their managers. We learned how those organizations applied a scientific and rational approach to staffing, grading and workflow improvement. Though productivity, incentivization and manpower rationalization attracted my attention, I was quite sceptical as to whether these ideas would be acceptable and work out in the PSU culture.
The stay in Mumbai allowed me to visit a few important landmarks in the city and around. It was my first opportunity to visit the famed Siddhi Vinayak Temple, which became my favourite place to seek inner peace and to express gratitude, once I returned to Mumbai much later for a truly enriching tenure.
One of our training participants, Guptaji worked as an Administrative Officer at IIT, Kanpur. He arranged for some of us to witness a film shoot on the sets of a leading studio in Bollywood. The producer, Devendra Goel, was Guptaji's relative and that facilitated our entry to the floor of the studio.
We saw Shatrughan Sinha and Neetu Singh, the leading pair of the movie, in action. Later, we also went to see the Yash Chopra film Kabhi Kabhi, which was just released and went on to become a trendsetter and an all-time classic of Indian cinema. I remember crowding into the Metro Cinema auditorium for the very first show of the movie. Amitabh Bachan with his romantic hero image and impressive voice was the main attraction of the movie. Sahir Ludhianvi’s lyrics and Khayyam’s music made me a lifetime fan of these two giants of Bollywood music.
The sights and sounds of India’s premier city were quite an experience for me and the nostalgia lingered on for years. When I finished my training at NITIE and returned to Bhilai, I never thought that one day not too far I would come back to Mumbai for a stint that would last for years. More of that later.
Back in Bhilai, we were treated with a new-found recognition and acceptability, having graduated from novices to professional analysts.
I was allotted a few Departments as internal clients whose proposals for manpower, process reviews and productivity enhancements I was expected to analyse and recommend along with cost implications and savings.
Though I saw the job as a routine and mundane one, in retrospect I appreciate the value of being able to question proposals critically and analyse alternatives before coming down to the most preferred options.
Without a doubt, my O&M years helped me to develop holistic perspectives, cost consciousness, openness to change and the ability to build consensus through discussions and collective thinking.
Very few people of my generation got such a wonderful opportunity where one could sharpen critical thinking and creative solution development. To be able to do that in the context of a complex and diverse canvas of processes, procedures and cost implications was a boon in sharpening my objective management abilities. The Steel Plant with its massive infrastructure and complex processes provided me with the ideal environment to develop the big-picture perspective of the workplace.
In Bhilai, I found many Russian faces at the office and the club. Being a Russia-supported project, there was a small Russian contingent of Managers especially in the design and project functions. The presence of many Russian women in the organization puzzled me. I was told that some were the wives of Russian expatriate experts on secondment to the project and were employed as translators and office support staff. Interestingly some of the Russian ladies were the spouses of Indian engineers who were deputed for training in Russia as part of the technology transfer and capacity building. Seemingly, many Russian women developed romantic relationships with Indians and chose to marry and settle down in India. The cynics among us said that the ladies were desperate to get out of the suffocating and regimented life in the USSR and were relieved to be able to breathe freely in an open environment away from the prying gaze of the KGB agents.
A Senior Consultant who visited Russia frequently for technical discussions during the days of the plant establishment confided in me that the USSR then was a many-layered society where the privileged Party bigwigs had clubs and resorts that were not accessible to the lesser mortals. He told me that on a couple of occasions, the powerful Party officials took him to such superior places of relaxation and fun while otherwise, he had to settle for lesser facilities because his hosts were not among the big shots of the party who could access the privileged campuses. So much for socialism and all the song and dance of equality, fraternity and solidarity across the ranks!!
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