If Only India Knew What Indians Know

THINKPAD

Executive Director, Tata Sons

The ocean of business management is churned by two strong currents: first, the evolution of modern management thinking; second, the multi-cultural fabric of lessons emerging from the task of managing structured organisations spread across so many countries. As an operating manager in an international environment, I have observed very many approaches. In particular, the modern Indian manager represents a unique confluence. While his cultural moorings are strong, rooted in an ancient and proud society, the intellectual exposure is almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon management literature in the English language. This is not so among other Eastern managers.

MANAGEMENT THINKING

One of the earliest thinkers was Henri Fayol, a Frenchman, who headed a very large but also disorganised coal mining company. Around 1900, he said that there was one right way to organise an enterprise and that was a functional structure, coming together at the level of the chief executive. Fayol's friend, Georg Siemens, used the same idea in organising a rapidly foundering Siemens Electric Company about the same time. In the US too, practising managers like John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie held similar views.

In the 1920s, Pierre du Pont and Alfred Sloan in the US developed the idea of decentralisation which soon became a management mantra. Thus, the management world accepted a different solution from the Fayol model, but it once again assumed that there was only one single right form of organisation.

In the 1950s, during the massive reorganisation of the US General Electric Company, the same principle was implicitly accepted - that there was only one way to organise its work. Thus, a small unit of researchers working on US Air Force projects was organised exactly like a huge division manufacturing electric generators.

For many decades, it was believed that people did not want to work, so they must be coerced and controlled. Initially, Peter Drucker, and later in 1960, Douglas McGregor, argued that this was wrong. McGregor said that people did really want to work and required only proper motivation. He called it Theory Y. Suddenly, the world of management was gripped with Theory Y fever as the panacea for several ills.

The point to be noted is that modern management thought is strongly influenced by the US. Much of management literature is in English. And it is to these stimuli that the Indian manager is almost wholly exposed. The literature overwhelmingly seems to have either evolved, or been received, in a prescriptive way whereby an existing "right" way is replaced by a new "right" way.

CULTURAL OVERLAYA

The challenge of managing large organisations spread to the East effectively only after the Second World War. This brought in a cultural overlay on management thinking in the West. The surge of books on Japanese management and the sensitive writings during the last 30 years of authors like Maslow, Pascal and Senge amplify this point. However, these learnings did not require any change in the behaviour of Western managers in their own social contexts. At best, they provided yet another right way for Westerners to operate successfully in Eastern contexts!

So, while for the Western manager there is an Eastern cultural overlay on his management thinking, for the Eastern manager there emerges a Western intellectual tradition as an overlay on his Eastern social context. This gives rise to attitudinal and behavioural patterns that are vastly different, like a rich kaleidoscope of very different colours and patterns.

One concrete example: Anglo-Saxon cultures over the years tended to view a company as a system whereas Eastern cultures tend to see them as a social group. No wonder that Anglo-Saxon thinking has strongly influenced advancements in productivity management through time and motion study, system dynamics, etc.

Eastern thinking, on the other hand, has strongly influenced advancements in human motivation management. In the traditional Anglo-Saxon view, the organisation is governed by "engineering". In the traditional Eastern view, the organisation is governed by "biology". The machine metaphor is so powerful, it shapes the character of Western organisations. The living being metaphor is so powerful, it shapes the character of Eastern organisations.

Arie de Geus relates an interesting parable about the Chilean potato. At some stage, Chile could no longer produce its own food. The US offered to help by despatching a team of agronomists. These US agronomists found the potato fields clinging precipitously to mountain sides. They had irregular shapes and were interspersed with boulders.

Within each field, there were several varieties. Their calculations showed that with a more careful selection of seed potatoes, systematic weeding and cropping, yields could be raised significantly. But the advice turned out to be wrong. Over the years, taking into account the disasters encountered, the Chilean farmers had built diversity into their everyday practice. This diversity allowed them to meet unforeseen disasters. They were willing to accept inefficiency in the interest of robustness.

The Indian manager thinks in the Western idiom but behaves in the Eastern pattern. It is this duality that is being severely challenged in the corridors of Indian business houses as deregulation and liberalisation continue.

WEST-EAST MIXTURE

Due to the influence of rationalists, Western thinking abhors ambiguity. A manager must be adept at quickly sorting out issues into black and white. The zone of ambiguity must be minimised. For Indians, ambiguity is accepted as a inevitable fact of life. One can try to reduce it, but the real skill lies in managing the ambiguous. For example, in MNCs, job descriptions, reporting lines and organograms are an absolute fetish. In many local companies, these are loose and flexible, and it is actually seen as beneficial to keep them that way.

DECISSION-MAKING

In MNCs, decision-making and conflict resolution follow a straight line. With the empowerment mantra picking up speed, MNCs try very hard to delegate by explicit specification of authority schedules and aggressive goal setting. If decisions are held up due to conflicting viewpoints, the issue is expected to speedily traverse up the line for a resolution.

In our context, two possibilities exist. Sometimes there is no empowerment. Thus many decisions are taken by the owner, achieving speed. Or, there is a form of delegation which requires consensus to be built, thus sacrificing speed, and sometimes even motion itself! The inter-ministerial form of consultation practised in government is the best example of this.

LEADERSHIP

Western companies largely practice leadership by system. They institutionalise succession planning though their systems, admittedly with varying levels of efficiency. They like their managers to be valuable and skilled cogs in a well-oiled wheel of systems (information, budgets, reviews). If a top manager changes, he would be missed, but only temporarily, as the new cog gets operational. The word "cog" is misleading insofar as it suggests little or no value addition by the manager; this is not an intended insinuation. It arises inevitably out of the machine metaphor!

In the Indian milieu, leadership is by personality. It is the magnetism and personal charisma of the top man that is believed to make the difference. The systems surrounding him are not thought to be that important, though systems are perceived to have some value.

STATUS

Fons Trompenaars points out in his book that many Anglo-Saxons believe that ascribing status for reasons other than achievement is quite archaic and inappropriate to business. The Indian mind accords status not purely by achievement but also by age, class, education and so on.

It is an ascribed status. So, he quotes the example of a Swedish manager who had to make a choice between two Indian managers, both excellent for the job. He did his best to be objective and chose Mr A. Mr B was very upset and the Swedish manager found to his great surprise that what really rankled in Mr B's mind was that "he was senior by two years in the same college compared to Mr A. I have observed such fixation with ascribed status in several cases during my own work experience. It is precisely this fixation that leads to a proliferation of bewildering designations - manager, senior manager, assistant general manager, deputy general manager, senior deputy general manager and so on.

DOING THINGS

In Western companies, there is a great deal of emphasis on getting things done by analysis, logic and intellect, sometimes even to a fault. There is a constant drive to get the most important facts and analysis on the table to take the right decision among many alternatives.

In local companies, there is a desire to have more facts, but the means to get facts are often lacking because a system has not been institutionalised. Partly for this reason and partly, I believe, for cultural reasons things get done subjectively, intuitively and through connections (Guanxi in China, Waastha is Arabia).

OPENNESS

Being frank and open is a strong feature of Western companies. The Dutch culture is an extreme one, where if you ask a Dutch audience for criticism after a speech, you can experience the closest to being machine-gunned!

But in India, being open is no virtue. It is more important to be nice about it. "If you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey," says an Arab proverb. May be this is the reason why Indians are thought by some Westerners to be speaking with forked tongues - unfairly, of course!

THE INDIAN PARADIGM

In stating the above differences, I have taken license in two ways - firstly some generalisations about Western/Indian positions and, secondly, some caricaturing as two polar opposites. I plead guilty. I have done so to allude to "tendencies" rather than typecasts. Neither do I have a judgment on right and wrong. I only seek to share a few perspectives based on my experience of working with many nationalities.

The important thing is that there has to be, and will be, some convergence over time, but not congruence. The convergence will occur by some Easternisation of Western behaviour and some Westernisation of Eastern behaviour. This will probably evolve and may be it cannot be mandated.

Westerners are often surprised that Easterners don't implement what is so obvious to them. Many Westerners marvel at Indians, whose minds they find scintillating both here and overseas. Indians know perfectly well what is required to be done for their company to prosper, or even for their country to progress. Our clarity is stunning, our articulation of ideas is gripping. Where we fail is in doing what we know has to be done.

QUO VADIS?

Nobel prize winner Douglas North explained that countries which emulate best practices from other nations are not always successful because those best practices are not matched with the heritage and values of the host country. I postulate that in India there is cultural transformation in play, a fitment of a Western intellectual tradition to an Indian social context. I am not clear how we can devise a programme to accelerate this fitment. It has to happen naturally.