At the end of the induction training, I was all set to join the functional specialisation assigned to me. Though I had already started my on-site training, I was still on an extended academic lifestyle. With classes, case studies, presentations and project assignments, we felt more like students than budding executives. I had very little idea of what formal work-life experience would offer as learning opportunities, challenges and prospects for growth.
We had a sketchy idea of the tasks and projects in the department based on the series of lectures that YG Chouksey, the head of the department gave us. He was one of the star managers of Bhilai Steel Plant. In the training sessions, he painted an overall picture of a career that was still nascent and nebulous. Organisation and Methods (O&M) was a basic and evolving version of internal consulting. Later, Management Consulting would blossom into one of the most sought-after, high-paying professions that the alumni of our prestigious Management Institutes vie for.
Back then, management meant ‘getting things done’. The world was still obsessed with scientific management, the concept propounded by Frederic Taylor. Factory structure and assembly line workflow made workers automatons who would busy themselves through shift schedules in churning out products and components. Getting workers on the shop floor to produce results as per assigned tasks and specifications was all that management meant.
Management as a specialisation was just getting recognized. Many of us may not know that India had established a Management Institute even before the UK had one. Indian Institute in Kolkata and (in quick succession at Ahmedabad) came up in 1961 as autonomous institutes of ‘national importance’ funded by the Government of India with the support of the industry.
Jamanalal Bajaj Institute in Mumbai was founded with the financial support of the Bajaj family and academic collaboration from Stanford University School of Business in 1965. It became the first in India to offer a two-year post-graduate program in Management. I got the opportunity to pursue my Master’s in Management at Bajaj in the early 1980s. Located in India's commercial capital, the Institute got the patronage and intellectual rub-off from the crème of practising managers.
Logically, one of the first IIMs should have been established in Mumbai along with Kolkata, these two being the prime cities of India then. But a smart and philanthropic initiative on the part of Vikram Sarabhai, the scientist-administrator-entrepreneur from Ahmedabad’s famous business family clinched the privilege to host one of the first IIMs for the textile city. Vikram, the multidimensional genius, went on to become the father of India’s space odyssey.
In retrospect, I feel privileged to have been taken into a futuristic career domain that offered a holistic and strategic perspective on management. I remember many of my batchmates making comments, half out of ignorance and half out of cynicism, about my landing in a career that was vague, still evolving and not considered operationally critical.
In any organisation, those at the forefront of operations are the key staff; advisory or analytical roles are at best supporting personnel but not key contributors who would attract the limelight. Like the Infantry vs Support Staff in the Army, there is always a conflict, uneasy truce and outright intolerance between operational and advisory functions. At least that was the scenario in my early career days.
As management became more data-driven, outcome-focused and comprehensive in approach, not only the legendary line vs staff dichotomy, but even functional compartmentalisation lost its relevance. Cross-functional mobility, secondments and project-based collaborations have become contemporary ‘best practices’ now. But back then, functional rivalries, one-upmanship and tactical jockeying for credit-taking were the order of the day.
A war is not won just by the foot soldier on the frontline. Victory is an outcome of comprehensive strategies, thorough preparations and exemplary teamwork. To say that operational staff win for the organization is as hazy and half-baked as saying that the forward shooters win the football match for a team. Getting the big picture right is critical to building your corporate career.
Those days we had no internet to Google for best practices. Being in Bhilai, deep in the heartland of North India where newspapers and post arrived with a lag of a day or two, with even the patchy Doordarshan not widely available, our windows to the outside were practically closed or just half open.
Chouksey was an avid reader, supportive mentor and open to ideas and opinions. He had built up a well-stocked departmental library and subscribed to leading journals and publications on business, economics and commerce.
He had just returned from a corporate study visit to Japan and he shared anecdotes, examples and experiences of his visit and interactions with the global participants of the advanced management program. He opened our eyes and ears to efficiency, excellence, accountability and ambition. When talking about Japan and Japanese management, one could not overlook the fetish that they had for detailed planning, scheduling, feedback and on-the-go corrective actions. The devil lies in the details, the saying goes. In India, many managers thought of getting things done and were not bothered much about meticulous planning, minute scheduling and constant feedback for corrective action. In the public sector culture speed was not the essence and accountability was scanty. No wonder many of us saw our employment not as careers but as jobs pure and simple. Now, after decades, things have improved. Still, the public sector is way behind the private corporate sector in fixing responsibility and rewarding performance.
I am convinced that the first boss and the first couple of years of workplace experience shape the behaviour, emotional resilience, career orientation and work-life balance of young executives.
A loose, liberal, less assertive boss can ruin your career and dampen your enthusiasm, throwing cold water on the fire for performance, recognition and rewards.
From our entire batch, Chouksey had selected two of us to join his team. Apart from me, the other was a batchmate of mine, NK Raveendran, from Salem District of Tamil Nadu. Both of us were briefed by the boss and introduced to his team on the first day. We were then assigned as understudies to two senior Managers in the team. The department was a very small one, with a handful of Senior Staff and even fewer junior employees to support documentation and analysis.
One of the first lessons I picked up on the job was that we were more like independent contributors, advisors and consultants. There was no secretary and no one to assist in the chores of office routines. Everything from end-to-end was to be our responsibility. This was a practice way ahead of the contemporary style then, especially in public sector organisations. The idea of an officer in those days was that you would push the pen and order people. All the filing, documentation support and routine logistics were to be taken care of by paraphernalia of support personnel.
Though as freshers on the job, we would have cribbed about the lack of support, the effect of this modern approach of office management made us independent and helped us to focus on doing a holistic and comprehensive job of whatever had to be done. This early learning helped me tremendously when I subsequently moved to private sector and multinational work environments.
The best thing one can get in a career is a headstart with role clarity, ownership, cross-functional perspectives and pressure to deliver. Project-based work schedule is a good beginning and you can build your workplace behaviours that are productive and self-motivating.
A few things stood out in the way our team was organised and assignments were handled. The department reviewed, analysed and reported on the feasibility and financial implications of proposals from a variety of departments for capital deployment, organizational re-structuring and process refinements. Productivity, efficiency, cost optimisation and process resilience were the key result areas for us as internal consultants.
The following famous lines penned in 1902 by Rudyard Kipling, the Bombay-born acclaimed English writer, aptly describe the approach of organizational review and enhancement that formed the crux of my job content in the O&M function.
I keep six honest serving men
They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
Asking questions and critically reviewing the responses can lead us to discover creative solutions to most problems. While asking, one should be not constrained by inhibitions, pre-conceived notions and presumptive rationalisations.
We were the equivalent of Industrial Engineering, the Technical function of studying and improving processes, procedures, resource deployment and cost optimisation. Our department was thus a quasi-technical function. Rationality, logic and scientific temper were qualities required to be effective in handling our assignments. Knowingly or unknowingly, the seeds of consultative management were ingrained in us.
Hardly anything in an organisation can be seen in isolation. Linkages and a cause-and-effect relationship in most processes, events and decisions, the common thread being the contribution made to the larger organizational purpose.
As I delved deeper into the Organization and Methods as a function, I developed an intense desire to grow my consulting skills. While my colleagues in narrower functional domains were largely caught within silos of corporate opacity, I was lucky to learn to appreciate openness, inquisitiveness and analytical approach from the start of my career.
In my training days, I came across many interesting people. With a few of them, I developed a long-term affinity. Some of the ties were strong, some nebulous and many feeble and submerged in the deadpool of time.
Pareto’s law applies to most things that we do or come across in life. The universality of Pareto’s Principle has surprised me. Even in the relationships we forge with those we chance upon in life, only around 20%, roughly a fifth, endure and stay with us for long. The bulk of interfaces are fleeting, superficial and largely artificial. The pursuit of true and enduring friendship is a life-long journey through anonymity and unexpectedness!
In Bhilai, I shared the accommodation, a two-roomed apartment, crude and functional, with my friend Augustine. Though from Pala in Kerala, he was educated in Kolkata’s famed St. Xavier’s College. Augustine was a self-made individual, pursuing his college studies part-time along with his work in a retail outlet in the famed New Market of Kolkata. He came across as extremely ambitious, focused on what he wanted in life and was hard-working and meticulous. These traits took him to high places in the Accounting and Finance profession. He pursued and completed his Costs & Works (currently rechristened as Management Accounting) qualification while being extremely busy at work.
His outstanding performance and dedication to tasks made him a favourite of his bosses. Being in the Cost Management field, he worked closely with many senior managers and departmental heads. No wonder, one of the top Managers took him along when he moved from SAIL to Mittal Steel, the precursor to the multinational Steel Corporate House of ArcelorMittal. Augustine climbed up to the higher echelons in the Mittal Empire and retired as the Chief Executive Officer of a key vertical of Mittal Steel in East Europe. Though our interfaces decreased over the years, since both of us left SAIL, his unrelenting pursuit of career goals and his exemplary loyalty and devotion to the organization he served marked him as a role model.
What a long, arduous, unpredictable and pathbreaking journey Augustine made from the mundane beginning in Bhilai where we shared the accommodation, heat, dust and day-to-day hassles of our early executive life!
YG Chouksey was every inch a builder of careers, people and institutions. He enrolled me and Raveendran for a 12-week residential program in Organization and Methods at the prestigious National Institute of Training in Industrial Engineering (NITIE) in Powai, Mumbai in 1976.
It is a different story that both of us moved along away from the O&M domain over the years. Raveendran served as Company Secretary in a prestigious multinational company, Texas Instruments and made a mark as a top-notch professional in his field.
Destiny gave me opportunities to interact with and work alongside many people in diverse organisations, functions and geographies. Our acquaintances are our lifelong acquisitions. Some of them enrich and impact us in multiple ways. What is life without the variety and influence of friends, colleagues and peers?
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