The Hindu Business Line : The cosmopolitan manager

An all-India character prevailed in the corporate world so that even the typically Maharashtrian or Tamil salesperson, staff or officer felt he was part of a larger, modern and inclusive culture.

Travelling on business was both a pleasure and a chore some 40 years ago or more. For a start there seems to have been a lot more of short distance travelling than long hauls, involving hours of flying to all corners of the globe. And this is not just a reflection of one's seniority in that one was a junior sales manager with responsibility for a smaller, regional territory. Going to the US or UK for a three-day visit or even to Singapore just for a weekend conference was a very rare event. On one occasion, the British chief of an international firm in Bombay took a long weekend off at Christmas and made a trip to London just for five days — and people actually remarked on it in awe. Non-stop flights had just started and my first experience of a transcontinental long hop was from the Philippines to Australia in 1971.

It was an all-night journey rather like boarding the Bangalore Mail from Chennai after dinner and getting there just in time for a steaming cup of coffee. But such an adventure was the stuff of dreams for most of us, and being called upon to `do Madurai and Trichy' on a two-day trip by train and road more frequent and likely.

Preparations were seldom very elaborate as one could get first-class tickets by train reasonably easily. But packing for the trip had to be done with care. One could not assume that even the minimum amenities such as clean sheets and towels would be available in a traveller's bungalow out in the sticks while staying at smaller towns. As a sales manager or a trainee, of course, one had to do this regularly because it was considered more expensive to return to a base town too often, even if it was only 100 km away! A popular version of the route plan was to start with the farthest point on day one and work your way back bit by bit until on the sixth day you came to a short home-stretch before landing back at the headquarters.

One recalls with some fascination that seasoned supervisors at Lever's had worked out fixed journey plans for all territories as far back as the 1950s, which were followed with little revision for decades. These not only gave a sense of predictability and planning to the salesperson's schedule, but also ensured that the stockist at the other end was not caught unawares with no stocks to distribute when the company representative turned up. On the contrary, he was eagerly waiting and prepared to receive the man on the third Tuesday in every four-week cycle.

Interestingly, the men who supervised and trained the sales force (there has seldom been a woman in such positions even to this day) were the supervisors who had evolved their methods over years of experience in good companies, and did not possess any particular qualifications beyond matriculation. Yet there were devices that they had developed which were found to be scientific on later examination. For example, the ideal route plan, one followed by a salesman in charge of a territory, was meant to look like a `figure of eight' drawn over the territory map.

You started somewhere near the crossover of the two loops at the centre. And went, say, clockwise from there over the top oval stopping and working markets along the way, returning to the centre (usually a big town or your own HQ) for a day or two around the half-way mark. Then started the lower loop ending back where you began, after another 10 or 12 days — so altogether a four-week tour plan. Traversing the contours of this figure of eight, month after month, gave both the salesman and the supervisor an idea of the whereabouts of the former, which after all was the essence of good planning. While there were, of course, deviations for a number of the usual reasons (holidays, festivals, illness) it was amazing how steady the system remained, refusing stubbornly to give in to any maverick senior manager toying with it. And often the impatient young manager who took charge of a State, comprising a dozen such territories, started by thinking that he could modernise it and improve upon what had taken decades to evolve. Yet he soon realised that there was much sense, even if not so well articulated, in the existing systems.

One thing that struck me in my early days as a manager was how cosmopolitan the foreign firms were. As one ran the eye down the list of managers one would not only come across the inevitable Srinivasans and the Narayanans, but also the Menons, Malhotras and Mazumdars, Patels, Bhides and Daruwallas. This was regardless of which part of the country you were looking at. A manager was apt to be posted as part of a deliberate plan in a State far from his origins. And it was a challenge for many a Punjabi to learn Tamil and Tamilian ways just as it was for the Madrasi (as all born south of the Vindhyas were called) to operate as a sales manager in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Yet most managers of that generation did take to such challenges sportingly, so that as they grew in the hierarchy they were particularly well suited to handle senior assignments out of the head office, which required a national outlook and a cosmopolitan perspective.

Someone once observed in a semi-jocular vein that India as a country could easily become fragmented but for the Hindi movies and the Indian Railways! So all pervasive was the binding influence of these pan-Indian institutions and so predictably uniform their performance, that one could sense a natural kinship with them and knew instinctively that one belonged wherever one went!

Such an all-India character seemed to be more taken for granted and prevalent in the circles of the corporate world so that even the typically Maharashtrian or Tamil salesperson, staff or officer felt he was part of a larger, modern and inclusive culture. Through these institutions (and this includes the Railways in particular) one dropped some of the narrowness of mind and local ethos - and opened oneself to national and even international influences. A few did put on the airs and habits of their British bosses and feigned total ignorance of the `native's ways', especially while dealing with the trade but the system, by and large, managed to spot them and found subtle ways to send messages that discouraged such behaviour. An officer simply had to be on his best appropriate behaviour not merely with the sahibs but with those `who stand and wait' as well! Such were the norms of the era. The damning verdict, "He's capable but a bit of a stuck up ass - doesn't mix well!" when delivered in the manager's dining room, could take care of an errant case.

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