The Hindu Business Line : Prakash Lal Tandon: Man of many parts

"THE essence of management is the ability to sort out the relevant from the irrelevant." So the moral of the story was that if you have to plough through reams of case material and exhibits for tomorrow's classes, you must train yourself to read selectively and fast - take what is strictly worth remembering, and discard the rest.

The year was 1964 and the speaker Prakash Tandon, Chairman of IIM Ahmedabad's founding Board of Governors. The wide-eyed, hero-worshipping audience of some thirty first-batch students, looked on in awe, at one of the informal buffet lunches with the good and the great of industry, thrown to coincide with Board meetings. The loudest noise you had heard on campus till then from the student body was whining about the vast tracts of obscure material that one had to read, and come prepared to discuss in class, day after day. Few students of any background had any prior experience of such voluminous reading, and one had hoped to get the ear of the Chairman to complain. He simply brushed us aside pointing out that the previous weekend he had read some hundreds of appraisals of his senior managers, and kept track in particular of the performance of HLL's potential future leaders. So not only did he tell us we had to get used to sifting the wheat from the chaff, but also added the reason, another gem of a quote that I have used on countless occasions, "because developing one's top management succession is the one non-delegatable task of the CEO!"

That was typical of Mr Prakash Lal Tandon (PLT as he was to most people at Hindustan Lever) who passed away two days ago at the ripe old age of 93. Born in June 1911, here was a truly mercurial Gemini, man of many parts - administrator, leader, social-historian, author, public speaker, educator, reformer - ready and willing to throw himself into whatever he did with zest. He attended an AIMA convention in Delhi even into his late eighties and was willing to stay on for a cocktail party after, and then (believe it or not) drove himself home. All his life he was an enthusiast for learning about management (he used to visit us in the early days of IIMA and sit in the back of the class listening intently to everything) and as a writer he had a facility with pithy description, which is truly a delight. Here was a man about whom words like doyen and legendary sprang naturally, and fittingly, to mind. He was easily the forerunner to thousands of aspiring professional managers, much before the field was even recognised as a profession - and `management by chromosomes rather than competence' (another Tandon phrase) was much more the norm.

Born to an engineer father, and trained as a chartered accountant in the UK, he was the quintessential first generation business leader of India, who led HLL to many firsts, not the least being the ability to foresee a trend in every area from advertising to agri-business. Tandon was very much a product of the rising urban middle class, and from a sturdy, virile and proud Punjabi stock that took to English education and city-bred careers even in the early 20th Century. That he rose to be the first amongst a line of distinguished Indian Chairmen of a blue-chip multinational is now well known but few know how great a break it must have been for him riding the crest of success in the corporate world, to move to the public sector STC, one of the earliest to make the unpopular shift. His good friend TTK wired him: Prakash, do not commit suicide!

PLT was a stickler for punctuality, attention to detail and standards of excellence. One of his many secretaries who later became a sales manager told me how he used to take a typed letter sent in for his signature, turn it around and hold it against the light. The erasures always left a slight mark that told him the story of how accurate the typing was. In his trilogy of books there are a number of anecdotes, especially in the second and third volumes - Beyond Punjab and Return to Punjab, that are illustrative of how thoughtful and detailed the training of young managers in business had been in those days. A tour of duty took nearly seven months and meant staying at railway retiring rooms and recruiting India's first-ever woman supervisor to inaugurate field work for Lever's market research. Tandon and his British senior actually stood on the pavements and sold Dalda by directly sampling it amongst consumers.

Tandon never failed to encourage the younger members of the team to speak their minds. He once asked me, when I was the junior most in a meeting of sales managers, to tell him about how much the profit the HLL stockist actually made. When I gave him the unvarnished truth, which was that it was not as that much as we had always thought, there was a hushed silence, until someone tried to enter some qualifying phrases; then the Chairman cut in by asking the senior most manager whether he would be happy with that level of return if he invested in the stockistship. The point was made.

Few Indians have written about managerial matters as insightfully or as lucidly as Tandon has, and the books quoted here would be useful as readings for students of management in any developing country. One hopes the management community and HLL would find a fitting way to remember him.