Newsmaker: M S Ramachandran
Making the elephant dance
| At the President's At Home on the Republic Day this year, a senior bureaucrat walked up to Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) chief M S Ramachandran (MSR) to congratulate him on his "lucrative" posting at the United Nations. |
| The bureaucrat was referring to media reports of MSR leaving a year earlier than his superannuation in February 2005 as the government had decided to "reward" him for his creditable job at India's only Fortune 500 company. |
| MSR recounts the incident with great relish, and says the chairmanship of the Rs 1,20,000-crore IOC is indeed one of the most coveted posts in the country. |
| But three months after the tea party at the Rashtrapati Bhawan, the rumours have died down. And MSR has been working at a frenetic pace. Consider the flurry of big ticket announcements from the oil giant this week: the first was the $2 billion war chest that IOC has set aside for buying an exploration company abroad; the second was the board's approval for a merger with its Kolkata-based subsidiary IBP; and the third was the company submitting an expression of interest to buy an oil company in Thailand with around 90 retail stations. |
| All these have meant a few sacrifices: his passion for Hindustani and Carnatic classical music may have taken a backseat for now, and he has had to stretch a bit his 9.30-8, six-days-a-week work routine. |
| His recent moves, however, have had their fair share of criticism. Analysts say the merger with IBP will slow down the decision-making process further at a time when oil marketing companies have to be nimble-footed (IOC already has 32,000 employees) to take on the emerging competition. |
| But MSR begs to differ. The merger will bring in more operational synergy and save costs. Both the companies market identical products in similar markets and it makes sense to avoid duplication of effort, he says. |
| For MSR, the rise to the top job at IOC has been spectacular. A mechanical engineer from the College of Engineering, Guindy, in Chennai, MSR was one of the seven management trainees to join IOC under a special recruitment drive. |
| Four of this special batch of management trainees are now heading India's top four public sector firms "" IOC, ONGC, Gail and Shipping Corporation. The fifth was the celebrated management guru, Sumantra Ghoshal, who worked in IOC for 10 years. |
| His biggest challenge at IOC was to make the entire organisation take marketing as a religion. That itself was a daunting task. For example, when IOC decided to appoint world-class designers to give a new look to its logo and retail stations, some over-zealous executives went in for a tender with ridiculous terms and conditions. "The tendering mentality still persists but things are changing fast," MSR says. |
| It obviously is. The company moved up 35 notches in a year to rank 191 in the 2003 Fortune 500 list. |
| The footprints abroad have also been increasing rapidly. Apart from Mauritius and Sri Lanka (where the company already has 170 fuel stations), IOC is planning acquisitions in nine other countries. |
| One of MSR's all-time favourite books is Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? by IBM's former chief Lou Gerstner, Jr, who scripted one of history's most dramatic corporate turnarounds. IOC has not yet faced anything like what IBM did but MSR is surely drawing a lot of inspiration from Gerstner to tackle some of the company's problems. |
| Example: concerned with the freeze on the petrol and diesel prices despite the cost of crude oil jumping by more than 15 per cent, he wrote to the government last week seeking permission to increase petrol price by Rs 3,026 per kilolitre and diesel prices by Rs 5,107 per kilolitre to check the Rs 1,000 crore a month loss the PSU oil retailing firms were suffering. |