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Before the Second World War, most managers in the Indian private sector were Europeans or the owner's family. Middle-class professionals were assistants and clerks. When people such as Prakash Tandon began their careers, the idea of the Indian manager started to take shape. The first Indian management school was the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management, established in 1953 in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Many eponymous firms were headquartered in Kolkata, nurturing the proverbial boxwallahs: tea companies such as Lipton, Brooke Bond and James Finlay; fast-moving consumer goods companies such as Imperial Tobacco and Union Carbide; industrial companies such as Imperial Chemicals and Metal Box.
My daughter, now a manager in a prominent company, recently asked me what it was like in the early days of my management career in 1967. At that time, general offices were usually not air-conditioned; only the cubicles of the big chiefs were. In some workplaces such as Glaxo's Worli Office and Tata's Bombay House, there was a separate elevator called "Chairman's Lift". Chief executives drove in a non-air-conditioned Ambassador car.
There was not a single female management trainee during my days; I think the first of them was an Avanti Dutt, recruited in the early 1970s. Even female managers were very few. After serving for two years as a management trainee at Hindustan Lever, I was summoned to meet then chairman Vasant Rajadhyaksha to "sign my covenant". It was bit of an event. As a confirmed manager, I could share a small cubicle with a peer, use the managers' toilet, access a towel hanging against my name, and eat in the managers' lunch room. There were other status symbols - they were hugely important then but look silly by modern standards.
What was the influence of technology on young officers? There were barely a dozen IBM 1401s in the country - huge computers that filled a whole room and which were operated by people who looked like geniuses (disclosure: I started life as a computer analyst and programmer). For the most part, managers had to familiarise themselves with the Facit calculating machine, tele-printers and rota-plate copiers. To talk business with a colleague in another city, we had to book a trunk call through a telephone operator and shout at the top of our voice to be heard.
"How cute! Is that why your friends still shout into the cellphone?" was my daughter's reaction.
Management as a profession was neither well-known nor greatly sought after. 1972 was when it came of age: in that year, Peter Drucker's book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices dislodged the then number one on the New York Times best-seller list, The Joys of Sex by Alex Comfort. That was the moment when, even in my youthful mind, the joys of management seemed to promise more than what was definitely uppermost in my mind!
In today's context, it may seem unbelievable how companies were run. Donald Peterson joined Ford Motor Company soon after the war. He rose to become the chief executive officer. He has described the atmosphere in the company when he joined. It was a top-down approach with a lot of emphasis on giving orders and exercising control. There are still companies operating in this mode, but it is generally regarded as old-fashioned.
The management world of those early days was preoccupied with control rather than freedom, with tightness rather than looseness, with direction rather than participation, and with productivity rather than creativity. The management books of that time exemplify this - notably, Peter Drucker's The Practice of Management, William Whyte's The Organization Man, Alfred Sloan's My Years with General Motors and Jay Forrester's Systems Dynamics.
Around 1960, John Kennedy became president of the US. He assembled an intellectual powerhouse in his office by recruiting brain-boxes such as Robert McNamara from Ford. Perhaps influenced by this visible team, management everywhere started to acquire hues of a Brahminical activity - intellectual and strategic, rather than a doing and executing exercise. Operations research and computers were developing as potential panaceas for forecasting and for reducing the uncertainties of business through engineering and mathematical methods. Managers used to be taught logical thinking and analytical techniques in management courses. By mastering these, it was thought that they could tell their people what to do and lead them successfully. Leaders needed to know more than their people and demonstrate that they knew more than them.
The world has changed in an incredibly dramatic way. The future manager will face a totally different set of challenges. Today, the centre of gravity of growth has shifted from the West to Asia; billions of people have entered the market economy and have experienced some degree of democracy and free speech. Companies and people across borders are interconnected through information, entertainment and employment in ways that could not be imagined earlier.
For example, we used to spend more time preparing flip charts than thinking about the insights they provided. Today's PowerPoint has sharpened individual thinking - and also protected lazy thinkers who can articulate well! Another example: while the old, hierarchical companies had to work very hard to promote teamwork and team rewards, the new technology companies have culturally evolved with the mantra of collaborative working, often across borders. Managers in these technology companies don't know anything different.
Developments over the decades have changed the fulcrum of leadership skills from the thrusting, the dominantly analytical and the logical towards the inclusive, the intuitive and the humane. As I have watched the shift from the analytical and the directive style to the intuitive and the participative style, the outcomes have been fascinating. The reason managers lean towards the analytical rather than the intuitive is that the analytical can be taught. Besides, patterns of career progression within companies also encourage this trend; people advance in their careers most often for being analytical, not for being intuitive!
However, there is a limit, as well as a limitation, to analysis because of time, costs or techniques; that point is loosely referred to as the point of "analysis-paralysis". Where human factors are involved, rather than technical factors, neither the problem nor the solution is clearly known. The adoption of an earlier successful model may or may not work unless the context and circumstance of the two problem situations have been taken into account.
Successes in one human context do not necessarily transfer well to another context. Modern managers need to comprehend this change and what it means to their leadership of organisations. Profound changes in the world have redefined managerial leadership. Now leaders are required to lead differently - with intuition and with humanity.
The writer is Director, Tata Sons
