The Hindu Business Line : Our leadership pipelines are broken

AFTER the storm comes the calm and sobriety. "Our leadership pipelines are broken", and we need to do urgent plumbing. Enough leaders have cheated, so we need new ones who can win trust. "Today's business leaders must fight to win the renewed support of a sceptical public — not through new products, fads, or other manipulations — but with foundations of ethical absolutes the world can trust," says the back cover of The Ethical Challenge, edited by Noel M. Tichy and Andrew R. McGill. A sampler:

Independence is no good unless the outside directors know what they are doing. In fact, it could be bad if you didn't know what you were doing.

While professional qualifications may differ from case to case, being a good director always demands education, experience and maturity. It also demands courage — perhaps most important of all. (James A. Baker III)

The Dutch East India Company got a 100-year charter from the king. It had a built-in end game. So merchants were extraordinarily successful for the first 60 or 70 years, and then they spent all the money building their palaces in Amsterdam. (C. K. Prahalad)

The most important thing I learned in two years of business school is that there are 24 hours in a day — and you can use all of them when you must. I can spot in an instant, within our company, the givers and the takers. And, I think the givers are the ones who will succeed in the next decade.

The givers are the ones who will succeed in your lifetime. People who do great work, who give back to the workplace, who make a difference in their communities. (Jeffrey Immelt)

All systems regress to the mean. If we choose to live by a higher principle, any higher principle, the system will work to drive us back to mediocrity.

Excellence is a function of living in the transformational and not the transactional mindset. In the transformational mindset, the important thing is the ability to unleash potential. In the transactional mindset, we are attempting to preserve equilibrium. We are seeking to stay inside our own comfort zone. We are even willing to distort reality to fool ourselves into believing that we are in control. (Robert Quinn)

To make ethics sustainable, you must make it a regular part of the corporate conversation — with people actually raising the issues. That takes guts. But there's no other way it's going to happen. You can have all the policies in the world, all the plans, wonderful codes of conduct, but it still takes human beings to say, "I think this is important." (Tim Fort)

Meet the challenge.

Development talk

POLITICS, corruption, violence, crime and so on are what you find in the front pages of most newspapers. Yet, silently the economy keeps grinding on to grow and develop, and that makes the subject matter of A. Vaidyanathan's India's Economic Reforms and Development. Most ignore words such as reforms and development, India and economics, as too sleepy, but for those interested in tracing the strategy metamorphosis, understanding poverty, and assessing the effectiveness of our policies, the book offers a lot of material. Read on:

Foodgrain consumption per capita has remained nearly stagnant though per capita incomes have been growing by more than 3 per cent a year. And at current levels of food consumption, the calorie intake of the majority of the Indian population falls short of the norms considered by nutritionists to be necessary for active and healthy life.

If the trend of the last five years is allowed to continue, the magnitude of unrecovered costs will reach Rs 3,50,000 crore a year by the end of the Ninth Plan. On top of it the Central and State exchequers have to find an extra Rs 35,000-40,000 crore per annum by way of increased salaries.

For the economist, `production' is production for exchange. The process of `development' typically involves a shift in the way production is organised: from processing for own use to making processed products for exchange. The volume of manufacturing activity as defined by the economists can, therefore, increase without any increase in the total volume of processing or transformation activity.

It would be wise to so choose investments in the backward areas as will increase their productive potential and leave behind a permanent increase in employment and incomes. To rely solely on works, without bothering about their productivity, means that the State has to maintain a relatively high level of construction activity year after year in the poor areas so that the employment and incomes of the poor can be maintained at the desired level.

The extreme case of severe and persistent shortage of food tends to famine and starvation death. But more commonly, low food intake reduces immuno-competence and thereby increases the risk of infection. A significant proportion of nutrition-deficiency diseases occurring in poor nations have communicable diseases as their underlying causes.

A book for the big picture.

Ginger tale

HE INVENTED the portable dialysis machine and a wheelchair that climbs stairs. Also the `human transporter' called Segway, that had as its codename `ginger'. Meet Dean Kamen, the millionaire who wanted to invent a new world, in Steve Kemper's Code Name Ginger. A few glimpses:

The marketing team had been doing some theoretical frog-kissing of its own and had identified three broad categories for Ginger use: i) pure recreation; ii) a fun way to get from A to B (target audiences would include college students, hip commuters, golfers, tourists, and shoppers); and iii) an efficient way to get from A to B (target audiences would include commercial customers such as delivery services, the police and the military, people in airports, and workers in gargantuan warehouses or factories).

Ginger did need a serious name, something suitable for invoices and stationery. There was a long list of possible names, including such clunkers as Baltrans, Cogitrans, Edept, GRV, and Gyroporter. There were other dancing names: Tango, Jitterbug, Arabesque, Cha-Cha. Dean didn't like any of these, but as a stopgap he had chosen a suggestion from his thesaurus: Acros.

Ginger's user interface was the dashboard on the handlebar. The design called for a small module containing an electronics board to fit into the hole on top of the control shaft. That would allow the connecting wires to run down the shaft to the machine's control centre in the chassis. For aesthetics, Scott wanted the dashboard module to be elliptical. That meant that the top of the shaft had to be elliptical, which presented problems of casting, sealing and connectivity. Engineers prefer right angles and don't mind circles, but ellipticals are one of those industrial design notions that make them shudder.

Dean had marvelled at Amazon's easy Web interface and customer service. He once grumbled that every time he logged on to Amazon, he spent more money than he intended because the experience was so pleasant.

A clock with elliptical gears: the first such device ever made. The leisure time between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. spend in by two hours, while the work time between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. dragged on for nearly twenty hours. The design also stretched lunch into almost three hours, but crushed 11.30 to 12.30 into thirty minutes.

Grab it if you are among the `ideas' people.

(Books courtesy: Fountainhead, Chennai. E-mail: fhbooks@satyam.net.in)

Tailpiece

"Can you make up some extra deductions in the e-return?"

"How?"

"By speeding up the modem."

ReadingRoom@TheHindu.co.in

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Our leadership pipelines are broken