Thursday, December 27, 2012

You've Come A Long Way, Baby!

YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY!

By Ajit Chaudhuri – December 2012


Returning to management school after 22 years offers opportunities for longitudinal comparisons. What has changed from the late 1980s? The short answer is – two things! One, communications! Computers, cell phones and the Internet have revolutionized research, assignment writing, and people to people interaction. And two; there are more women students on campus (to those ascribing my return to this factor, let me quote the statistical adage ‘correlation is not causation’)! In fact, 2012 is an inflexion year for IRMA – the first time that an incoming batch of prospective MBAs has more women than men. The proportions can only partially be attributed to IRMA’s policy of positive discrimination (yes, the admission criteria for women is lower), this trend is seen in most institutions of professional education and is more a testament to women’s increased access to education, their intelligence and concentration levels, and their capacity for hard work (but don’t worry, my dear male readers, we will always reign supreme in class 8 mathematics).


IRMA is coping admirably with this change. Men’s hostel blocks have been converted into women’s ones (I wonder what happens to the piss-pots and graffiti), north Indian type behaviour in common spaces (comment-passing, testicle-scratching, et al) has been clamped down upon, and courses on gender attitudes introduced. Even the evening football game welcomes women participants. But will the world that these highly qualified women (HQWs for short – caused by my reluctance to type and not my eagerness to typify – and by HQW I mean only the achievers among them, and not those passing time between college and marriage) enter upon graduating be as kind? This paper looks at this world, at the difficulties these young women will face in converting their potential into achievement, and offers some advice.


HQWs entering the job market today have much to thank previous generations of HQWs. Many battles have been fought (and won); glass ceilings smashed, and stereotypes broken. Critical decisions and discussions now happen in office (and not in golf courses and bars), and most modern recruiters are gender blind. But some remain! The first is the conflict between getting ahead and raising a family? The fact is that most achievers follow a similar career path; they are identified in their late 20s and early 30s, and are provided with serious opportunity soon after – usually a position in which all functions converge, like a cost or profit centre, or managing country operations in Kazakhstan or somewhere, where the buck stops at their desks. This is a 24/7 position, with little scope for distraction or a full night’s sleep. But this is also when their career paths deviate from that of their peers, leading to senior management, directorship, and even top management – while others languish in the middle and contemplate early retirement and organic farming or whatever. HQWs with young families tend to refuse this opportunity for obvious reasons, possibly expecting that it will knock again when they are better able to manage the strain. By doing so, however, they wave goodbye to the corner office – forever. Another trap is that of flexi-time, tele-commuting, and part-time work – no matter how attractive they are, and how much a woman needs them to balance demands on her time, taking these options in most organizations is an effective way of communicating one’s unsuitability for the trials and tribulations of senior management.


If you do manage to negotiate these traps, or if you don’t have children and can afford to give your career everything, you will find that the fast track is more than about being brilliant, hard working and strategic. You also have to be ruthless – a trait that cannot be acquired or learnt – and you have to build relationships with mentors and mentees to give yourself an edge. Unfortunately, HQWs are at a disadvantage here; the socialization of girls in India as participatory, care giving and communitarian is difficult to rub off (despite management school’s best efforts), and mentor-mentee relationships are close and intense ones that discourage the crossing of gender lines (and lead to all sorts of rumours, and often the real thing as well, when they do).


The other battle is that of finding suitable life partners; men who will be a positive factor in one’s career and its advancement. At one level, this is easy – most men are similar, and one merely has to avoid the future wife beaters and the mentally ill (easily said, but they are ten percent of all men and these traits only show up about a year after marriage), and see that he is fed on time, that there is no conversation when sports is on TV, and that one doesn’t shout at him in front of his friends, for marital relations to be clement. This, however, does require the management of expectations – and HQWs often go wrong here, there is this vision of the perfect man waiting for them; high income, handsome, educated, sensitive, supportive, blah, blah, blah, a vision that is played up to by the genre of films known as chick flicks (in real life, if such men do exist they usually already have boyfriends). Coupled with this are the facts that the office, where HQWs spend most of their time, is not a good place to hunt, the Internet is full of perverts, and the combination of intelligence and a fast track career is not exactly an aphrodisiac to most men.


What is the likely outcome? Well, by their mid-30s they become desperate (it is now or never regarding having children), they find that the laws of supply and demand are not in their favour (there are few single straight men in their age group, and they are invariably having such a good time that they are loath to change their status), and they end up as fodder for otherwise unsuitable men. How can the coming generation of HQWs circumvent such a scenario? One, be a little nicer to your admirers in management school, and accept a few flaws (male students, I want a kickback for this nugget of advice) – the known devil is often better than the deep blue sea! Two, if you have to run around with older (married) men, they should drive a Ferrari. And three, if two converts into marriage, have a kid quickly – this is actually an unwritten rule for all second/third/etc. wives, it locks the guy in and makes treating you like he did your predecessor an expensive (and, to you, lucrative) proposition.


To conclude, welcome to the world, ladies! May your battles be different from those of earlier generations, may you find an appropriate balance, and may you change the world! And yes, may you stay, as Dylan said, forever young.


Some additional reading for those particularly interested in HQW issues:

Slaughter, Anne-Marie; Why Women Still Can’t Have It All; The Atlantic; July/August 2012 (available on-line)

Hewlett, Sylvia Ann and Carolyn Buck Luce; Off Ramps and On Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success; Harvard Business Review; March 2005


Friday, December 7, 2012

The Proximity of Greatness

THE PROXIMITY OF GREATNESS

Ajit Chaudhuri – November 2012

‘Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them!’






My first tryst with greatness was in 1978! I was watching Brazil play at the World Cup (in those days, one did that on a small black and white TV a few days after the game was played), when Roberto Rivelino came on as a substitute and was referred to as ‘the great Rivelino’ by the commentator whenever he touched the ball. Wow, I remember thinking, and what must one do to earn that sort of respect? I got an answer at a discussion about the Indian footballer Inder Singh in the early 1980s – this was among spectators in the cheap seats during a football game at Ambedkar Stadium in Delhi, long after Inder had retired, when a guy said – ‘Maine Inder ko jeet-tey dekha, maine Inder ko haartey dekha, lekin maine Inder ko kabhi bey-imaani kartey nahin dekha’ (roughly translated as ‘I have seen Inder win, I have seen Inder lose, but I have never seen Inder do something dishonest’). And that, I thought at the time, is how I would like to be remembered – assuming that people are willing to overlook the matter of a missing ashtray from the Maurya Sheraton Hotel that somehow turned up in my hostel room back in college days.


But, I digress! This paper is not about either honesty or football – it is about ‘being great’! There is something pathetic about monarchs who have ‘the great’ appended to their names (Peter, Catherine, Frederick, et al), it being unlikely that their subjects had much choice on the matter – a mere ‘His/Her Majesty’ or ‘Royal Highness’ would no doubt have ensured that their heads faced a separate existence from the rest of their bodies; in that respect, I always preferred Ivan the Terrible on his choice of moniker. Modern day greatness is a little different in that it is conferred by hagiographic biographers upon anyone with money and a penchant for PR , and there is a veritable raucousness all around from the multitudes clamouring for the title. I’m not sure how many people actually merit ‘greatness’, more so in their own lifetimes, when time has yet to put their achievements into perspective and smoothen memories of the chaos they have caused. The living great are few in number and, except possibly for Nelson Mandela, difficult to recognize.


Dr. Verghese Kurien was already great when I entered IRMA in 1987 – Operation Flood had happened, and the enormity of the achievement, that households across the country had reliable access to that most basic of products, and the subsequent recognition of it, had set in. One got the occasional glimpse of him in the two years that I was there, mostly as a chief guest to IRMA functions, and one saw the unbridled power that he held, as also his ruthlessness, charm and sense of humour. An occasion I remember was some function in the IRMA auditorium that the students were invited to, presumably to put bums on seats, and Dr. K introduced the chief guest (the then central minister Margaret Alva) by saying that they had met before and that she had called him a male chauvinist pig. So when Ms. Alva came on to speak, we were spared the usual politician monologue about how much the government was spending on this, that and the other and how grateful we should be to it for our existence; she devoted all her time to communicating that she had in fact not called Dr. K an MCP, she had merely wondered why the National Dairy Development Board’s emblem was a bull (and not a cow).


The difficulty for young students at the time was that Dr. K’s achievements were not up for question – which was fine – but neither were the cooperative principles that enabled them. There was no space for dissent or scepticism, (Dr. K didn’t share Sir Karl Popper’s belief that something is best proved by focusing on disproving it and succeeding by not succeeding), and there was an Orwellian bombardment of the ‘Anand Pattern’ down our throats. Needless to add, we grew allergic to the word ‘cooperatives’ while we were there, and those who saw value in them did so in spite of, rather than because of, IRMA. It was only later that one grasped the enormity of his achievements and the possibilities for poverty alleviation that cooperation provided; when one had a better understanding of the scale at which Dr. K worked and of the barriers he faced in a country that incentivizes inactivity, obsequiousness and slime.


What can the wannabe ‘greats’ of today learn from Dr. K about greatness? In this paper, I hazard to venture some simple guesses.

One, the great give meaning to the terms ‘values’, ‘vision’ and ‘mission’ – they are not mere buzzwords ticked off on some strategic plan – and they communicate this successfully to others. This trait separates the ‘great’ from other competent leaders, institution builders and administrators. And it is this that is missed most when they go, when a vision vacuum sets in in their wake.

Two, all good leaders share the traits of brilliance, self-belief, drive, attention to detail, the ability to work extremely hard and to communicate well, and ruthlessness. The great, in addition, use these traits for public benefit and the larger good – personal pecuniary matters tend not to have obsessive allure.

Three, the great are scrupulously honest and they ensure that the institutions they set up share that characteristic. Dr. K had no shades of grey regarding integrity – he used to say that it was like pregnancy and virginity in that you either were or you weren’t, and if you weren’t you were not going to survive with him. New entrants to NDDB were told that the institution did not pay bribes, and also that it did not accept not paying bribes as an excuse for work not getting done – one had to get the work done without paying off anyone.

Four, the great recognise greatness in others. Visitors to his home in his later years were invariably shown his proudest possession, a large photograph of Mount Everest (or was it a painting?) that had been personally signed, at different times, by Tenzing and Hillary. This had the pride of place on his wall, and was given far more prominence than his own respective Padma awards.

Five, greatness rarely ends well; the great have an innate inability to fade quietly into the sunset. Those that don’t get assassinated or taken away by more natural means early enough tend to stay on their thrones until they are prised away, finger-by-finger, kicking and screaming all the way.

And six, and to conclude, the great live on in the people they have touched – more so than the institutions they have created. My father visited Anand earlier this year and dragged me off, against my will (irreverence and scepticism being somewhat ingrained in my character), to meet him. I was surprised later by how sentimental I was during this visit, when the enormity of what I (and so many others) owed this old man and how much we are what we are because of him kicked in. So thanks, Dad, for forcing that visit!




Acronyms
IRMA Institute of Rural Management, Anand
MCP Male Chauvinist Pig
NDDB National Dairy Development Board
PR Public Relations