The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new – Socrates
In the second half of the 1980s, India got an early taste of public policy and governance liberalisation. It was a precursor to the more comprehensive liberalisation foray in the 1990s. While the former was sporadic, disconcerted and largely driven by individuals at the helm, the latter was more imperative and under the pressure of compelling circumstances to avoid the sovereign debt default threat that was looming large on India. Had we taken the earlier opportunity for breakthrough leads in policy transformation we would perhaps have avoided the gaffing gap that India encountered vis-à-vis China on global trade and business landscape. Well, that is history. Let me move on to my unexpected exposure to change management.
With Krishnamurthy in the saddle as SAIL Chairman and a proactive and energetic SK Ahluwalia taking over as Director-Commercial, I woke up to the possibilities and challenges of Human Resources Management emerging as a strategic function.
Also, for the first time, I realised that Public Sector Enterprises were businesses too and must be managed like a commercial organization. The ground was shifting slowly but surely from the comfort of mediocrity and lack of pressure to an aggressive template of transformational management.
In retrospect, I feel that every company has a personality and culture that is substantially influenced by the individual at the top and the success of change management depends on the alignment of the CEO with his key CXOs.
The combination of Krishnamurthy-Ahluwalia leadership boosted the morale and motivation of young executives like me, morphing them into change champions. For the first time in my career, I felt motivated, excited, involved and itching to go!
Ahluwalia as the head of the commercial function had his plate full since the procedural, strategic, leadership and business challenges were plenty and mind-boggling. The backlog of delayed, ignored and unrealized projects presented a daunting task ahead.
I was fortunate to have caught the attention of the senior management and to be included in the change management team that was assembled. Ahluwalia was quick to chalk out a plan of action to overhaul and vitalize the marketing organization of SAIL.
From an HR perspective, he identified three action points – getting the buy-in and active cooperation of the powerful trade unions for the change agenda, pushing for rapid and comprehensive computerization, and improving productivity through redeployment of human resources to align with point of operational needs.
My training and experience in Organization and Methods enabled me to play an active role in the implementation of the identified projects. In the internal workshops on communication and deliberations on the Priorities for Action, I was quite visible as a presenter and discussion lead. Both Krishnamurthy and Ahluwalia apparently counted on me as a potential resource person for the change management program.
I must also thank SP Bhatia, our senior HR Manager who included me in the major discussions for planning and executing specific initiatives.
The situation regarding computerization was rather pathetic. The dominant Union in the marketing unit was CITU-affiliated. The Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU) was a feeder organization of the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPIM). They were bound by natal bondage to oppose automation and computers! We had a rival federation of unions of which the Congress-affiliated INTUC was the major player. They would have supported computerisation, especially since it was a key initiative of the Rajiv Gandhi government. But the dynamics of competitive trade unionism meant that they had to take an anti-computer posture!
The left Unions painted the gadgetry as an enemy of the working class and a tool at the hands of capitalists and their apologists to suck out the opportunities for employment, advancement and security of the workforce. A narrative that was, at that time, sufficiently provocative to incite agitations across the branches and yards of the marketing unit.
Now when we look around in the once-red bastion of West Bengal and the only surviving red base of Kerala, we can find many from the traditional leftist families having become successful IT professionals and entrepreneurs. Even the left-oriented press, media and party-affiliated organizations have adapted to IT and its applications like fish to water. If you now tell party zeolites that at one time, their comrades had crashed desktops and printers and even set fire to them, they might just laugh it off.
Our CITU-led union, which had a substantial following, was led by a few committed young employees. I was particularly impressed by the clarity of thoughts, conviction of ideals and commitment to the purpose that one such union activist, Tapan Sen, demonstrated. He was an alumnus of the prestigious Presidency College of Kolkata. I appreciated his intellectual honesty and greatly respected his perspectives though on the negotiation table, we had to be on opposite sides. Tapan went on to become the All-India General Secretary of the CITU in 2010, a position of strategic importance politically, which he is still holding. He has also been a Member of Parliament.
Ahluwalia called a meeting of the core strategic team for HR initiatives and told us that we must identify the issues on which we wanted the Unions’ buy-in. Negotiations should be a two-way process and the demands of both the Unions and the management should be discussed to arrive at solutions in the interest of the organization. In the public sector culture at that time, negotiations had degenerated into the unions asking and the management giving in.
We prepared a list of what we could ask for from the Unions and what we could offer in return. Computerisation, regulating the holidays, synchronizing the duty timings in technical and non-technical streams, manpower rationalization and flexibility for the management to transfer and redeploy staff to meet changing operational needs were identified as priorities.
We had several meetings with national leaders of the trade unions which were attended and facilitated by MRR Nair, our Director-Personnel who had excellent relations with the top leadership of all major unions.
On manpower rationalization and redeployment, I was asked to make a presentation highlighting the logic and organizational needs for the proposed strategies. Dr. MK Pandhe, the then CITU General Secretary, a trade unionist held in high esteem due to his impeccable track record of a value-based approach commented at the end of my presentation, “You sounded very fair, logical and transparent”. These words were a great inspiration for the young professional with the impressionable mind that I was.
The unions agreed to the redeployment plan and computerisation. The management agreed to put in place a rational and transparent policy for staff redeployment and offered promotional opportunities and lateral mobility opportunities to facilitate movement.
The freedom and flexibility I came to enjoy in this period of transformation prompted me to execute two creative ideas aligned with my passion for visual and print media. These were made possible due to the credibility and confidence I could earn with Ahluwalia and Nair. The first initiative was the publication of an in-house magazine that brought to focus the latest books, writings and trends in management and leadership. I wrote reviews on trending books and introduced the best practices from within and outside India to our executives. Though this was a small step, it gave me tremendous satisfaction as an HR Specialist.
In the bureaucratic culture of PSUs, it was unthinkable for a publication to be brought out by a functional unit because the corporate communications department would have viewed it as an encroachment on their terrain. My breakthrough in localized communication initiative showed that it was possible to do the unthinkable if we created the right credibility and confidence.
The second initiative was the making of a corporate movie on the Central Marketing Organization of SAIL, in the context of its silver jubilee. I roped in a professional with a cinematography background, wrote the script myself and had a professional commentator do the voice-over. We shot scenes at the premises of major customer organizations in Chennai including Ashok Leyland, ICF and a few small-scale industries which used mild and stainless steel from SAIL to make quality products for the market. The documentary was aired on Door Darshan, which was the only TV channel in those days before the liberalization of the Indian broadcasting industry.
When I look back, the independence and professional satisfaction I got while working in SAIL under the leadership of Krishnamurthy and Ahluwalia were exceptional and providential.
Both Krishnamurthy and Ahluwalia had to leave in not so enviable context and their exits were anti-climax to their stellar contributions to the company.
Krishnamurthy’s USP, apart from the consistent performance at the top, was his proximity to the PM and the first family. That precisely proved to be his undoing as well.
He was dragged into the vertex of the Harshad Mehta scandal and his close identification with the Rajiv aggravated the animosity of the post-Rajiv regime to him. Harshad Mehta, the meteoric stock-market investor was said to have channelled stealth wealth allegedly linked to the Congress top brass, to shady investments. Krishnamurthy was alleged to have been the go-between man. Though he eventually got cleared of the muck, the allegations dented his reputation and brought him humiliating embarrassment.
Well, life is not always fair and, in any case, the price that one pays for being too closely identified with powers can be disproportionately high. It was ironic that the man who told us in SAIL to be fearless and that he would manage the boundaries for us failed to perhaps ensure that he remained within safe boundaries of the political transgressions!
As for Ahluwalia, the rumours say that there were pressures on him to oblige a senior BJP leader in power in New Delhi and he refused to compromise on his integrity. He rather chose to leave.
This brings us to a critical and perennial woe of the public sector in India. Though the appointment letter of the top executives of these organisations says that they hold the office at the pleasure of the President of India, the key stakeholder, in actual practice it is the politicians whose pleasure determines the longevity of the PSU CEOs and directors.
By the end of 1989, I was promoted to a senior management position. And, I was excited to be chosen for an overseas training of over four months duration in the United Kingdom. In the saga of my life and career, my 1990 trip to the UK became a watershed moment, an eye-opener that exposed me to the challenges and opportunities in the world beyond the public sector.
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