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

What is the brain's email id? BRIM, says Mr 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 int o 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 op posite, the 'explicit' memory, holds facts, that is, things that 'you know that you know'.

Mr Gopalakrishnan assures that you can develop a strong intuition if you can access this email id 'for messages stored there'. Enrich the BRIM, he exhorts. "You can think of it as 'flashbulb' memory. This is the part of the memory that the brain refers t o in the jiffy just prior to responding to the situation on hand. Instinct works on this accumulated memory."

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'. Intuition is the key differentiator for excellence in the future, he declares, through the pages that are filled to the brim with anecdotes.

Such as this one, in a chapter titled 'birth of the butterfly', where 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 cleri cal 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 dir ector 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 rec ords! 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 Mr Gopalakr ishnan.

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 combina tion 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."

Aggressiveness, however, continues to get associated with the Tata group, going by recent media reports. Corus, for instance, is seen as an aggressive acquisition; Voltas with 'a target of achieving 20 per cent market share,' has 'put in place an aggress ive distribution strategy'; TCS, 'has become aggressive in demanding higher and better billing rates'; and Tata Motors is 'getting more aggressive in the segment with refurbished cars'...

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

Packed with insights.

D.Murali

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in

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