 | | Vijay Govindarajan |
Vijay Govindarajan is one of the top executive coaches advising some of the leading CEOs in the US on strategy issues for their companies. He is the Earl C Daum 1924 professor of international business at the Tuck School and was in India last week to speak on his new book, co-authored with Chris Trimble, Ten Rules For Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution. Excerpts from his conversation with Business Standard
Indian strategy coaches to CEOs in the US have truly pierced the glass ceiling. How did it happen?
There are two reasons why Indians have done so well. In terms of our training and development, we are left brain thinkers. We typically go to the US for studies, not work. So we get the right brain thinking in the US. That’s a deadly combination.
In the US, there is too much critical thinking and too little emphasis on facts. The second reason is, during the 1960s and 1970s, when the MBA programmes took off in the US — that is, job prospects for MBAs were phenomenal — most of them didn’t want to do a PhD.
So when the strong MBA programmes were growing and needed teachers Americans weren’t enrolling for PhD programmes, Indians filled that gap.
It is often said that little quality research is done in Indian business schools and this affects the quality of academics.
I taught at IIM Ahmedabad for two years before I went back. Frankly, it was a highly frustrating experience because on the one hand you had students who were as good as anywhere in the world, simply because of the selection process, and you had faculty who were considerably weaker. I don’t think the situation has changed a lot in 25 years.
When you don’t do research, two things happen to you. One, you keep teaching the same thing because since you haven’t done research, your knowledge base hasn’t advanced. Two, when you don’t do research you don’t read other people’s research.
In Indian management schools we don’t have a research culture. To create a research culture you need a whole ecosystem — journals, frequent seminars, a lot of academics doing research work …
What are the few things we should be doing in that area?
First, have better quality academic journals in India that demand high and rigorous academic standards. IIM or other management school faculty should not be writing papers for American journals. I want them to be researching about issues in India, as India’s research issues are different from the US’.
That means we create our own journals. Second, our promotion system does not necessarily demand extremely high levels of academic research. If you put that as a requirement, the faculty is immediately going to demand the infrastructure needed to do high quality research.
There is currently a controversy over whether IIMs should open campuses overseas.
Every organisation should be given a free hand in developing a global strategy. That doesn’t mean you have to go abroad. There should be no restrictions on going abroad, whether you are a business or a business school. It is almost stupid to put any restrictions on business schools and say, you cannot go abroad.
Because the world is a global village. I am not saying every IIM should be establishing operations abroad, but they should be given the flexibility to do so if it makes sense. The best way India can move forward is by accessing knowledge and ideas in every part of the world.
Your work dwells on the fact that most companies try to maximise the current bottomline and revenue but the big thing is to prepare for changes that are ahead and continue to grow.
This book is a direct outcome of that kind of thinking. I try to put everything that an organisation does, into three boxes. Manage the present — box one; selectively abandon the past — box two; and create the future — box three.
The way you engage in box one, compete for the present, is very different from the way you engage in box two and three, which is about competition for the future. Competition for the present is in response to continuous changes, and competition for the future is in response to discontinuous changes.
My pitch with companies has always been, in terms of initiatives, what are you doing in 2006 across the three boxes so that you remain relevant in 2020? The fundamental forces of change are going to be far more in the next 50 years than in the previous 50 years.
That’s why the need for box two and box three is even more important. Indian corporations have addressed box one issues but fail in comparison to the issues in box two and three, which they need to be focused on.
Are there a few simple guidelines an Indian company can adopt to ensure that it allows ideas to travel to the top before they get dated?
In India, we have too much top-down strategic thinking. Whenever we have strategic planning meetings, we should create a forum for everybody to come forward with ideas. Then we will take all the ideas and see which ones make sense.
Second, structurally we must make some resources available at the lower levels of organisation so that they can experiment there. That’s what Silicon Valley venture capitalists do. They give them a little money so that they can experiment.
What’s the next stage for Indian companies from where they are today?
Every Indian company faces a performance and innovation gap. I think we have done well so far in closing the performance gap. The challenge is how to close the innovation gap. That means, we must reward people differently, have different performance measures, allow risk taking in organisations, empower lower level employees and allocate resources differently for these projects. We need a paradigm shift in the way we organise and manage these companies. | 
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