The Hindu Business Line : Every company has its code of change

What is the brain's e-mail id? BRIM, says R. Gopalakrishnan in The Case of the Bonsai Manager, from Penguin (www.penguinbooksindia.com) . He explains the acronym as `brain's remote implicit memory'.

Remote, because it can stretch `very deep into your psyche and childhood - your village, your grandfather's house, the smells of mother's cooking, and the stories that granny told you'. Remote memory is durable, which is why you can often `recall early life events with great clarity'.

In the `implicit' memory you hold processes, such as skills and habits. "When you have practised over and over again, then the `routine' gets encoded in this implicit memory. After that, you access from this memory without even being aware of it." The opposite, the `explicit' memory, holds facts, that is, things that `you know that you know'.

Gopalakrishnan assures that you can develop a strong intuition if you can access this e-mail id `for messages stored there'. Enrich the BRIM, he exhorts. The author, as you may know, is the executive director of Tata Sons, and the book is based on his career as a professional manager spanning four decades. Gopalakrishnan argues that managers' growth can get stunted, like bonsai, because of `their own acts of omission and commission'. In a chapter titled `birth of the butterfly' the author talks about the innovation of `outsourcing' in HLL in the 1970s. "The sales invoicing and accounting was done in the four metro cities at branch offices by highly paid clerical staff using comptometers and other manual methods prevalent in those days. There was a fire in the LIC building where the HLL Chennai branch office was located... " The dejected office staff, with no office, `sat on the Marina beach with marketing director Jagdish Chopra discussing how to restore operations... '

Someone remembered that though all the records of distributors and invoices at the office had been destroyed, `a large part of the same data existed at the depots spread out over the southern region' - documents that could be used to reconstruct past records! Crisis verily turned out to be the mother of invention; `they hit upon the idea of outsourcing the task of invoicing and cash collection to the company's third party depots'. Outsourcing was not a word invented in those days, reminisces Gopalakrishnan.

Today's leadership skill-set has moved `away from the coldly analytical, aggressive and thrusting, towards the humane, inclusive and intuitive,' writes Ratan Tata in his foreword to the book. "Every company has its code of change, a little like a combination lock which protects the company culture. The effectiveness of any change agenda is governed by the ability of the leadership to understand that code, crack it, and leverage it."

Perhaps, the secret of a leader is to appear aggressive, even while being driven by values, as Gopalakrishnan says in conclusion. "When you seek power and control over other people, you waste energy. When your actions are motivated by values, your energy multiples and accumulates."

Packed with insights.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in