The Hindu Business Line : A recipe for managerial success

There are a million opportunities for managers in India to put their management skills to full use, says S. Ramadorai, CEO and Managing Director, Tata Consultancy Services.

Speaking at the second convocation of the Asian School of Business (ASB) in Thiruvananthapuram, he emphasises that corporate India is becoming professional and is hungry to go global. This means that Indian managers today have the opportunity to build world-class companies.

“There is a chance for professionals to actually build world-class companies and their own future, the challenge to build up from scratch, scale it up, create enduring value,” he tells the graduating students of ASB.

Simultaneously, corporate India is also recognising the value of managerial talent and is willing to pay for it. Young managers in India, therefore, have the opportunity to participate in and lead the India growth story, Ramadorai adds.

Young Indian MBAs have tended to gravitate towards sectors such as banking and financial services. However, the opportunities today go far beyond, to include industries such as power, infrastructure and steel. Sectors such as telecom, retail and manufacturing were also hungry for managerial talent.

The changing business environment has also resulted in a situation in which lateral movement across sectors is possible and even desirable. The general trend towards convergence of technologies, the widespread penetration of IT and globalisation have resulted in a new, common, broad set of skills that are in demand irrespective of sector. “Gone are the days when a ‘steel guy’ was for life,” he emphasises.

Students graduating from management institutes in India also have the option of creating completely new industry lines as was done for IT a few decades ago, Ramadorai says. “Had we chosen the safe path, the path where we had security and money and no risk, there could well have been no IT industry,” he remarks. Young MBAs thus have the opportunity to work in their dream job or be entrepreneurs and leaders and carve out new businesses.

According to Ramadorai, Indian companies aspiring to become globally competitive are looking at issues such as talent management and training. Building a global organisation involves a range of issues such as managing cultural integration, building a cadre of international managers and developing new capabilities. Young MBAs will find it useful to understand that life experiences at the grassroots level will help them build a vocabulary on which they can draw as they grow in their careers. So, many companies dispatch new MBAs into the rural destination to the see the transformation happening there, while TCS itself gets its software engineers to write code.

Rolling up one’s sleeves and getting one’s hands dirty has its merits and is equally important for managers at all levels, including CEOs.

“Hands-on experiences give you the capacity to shoulder immense responsibility from a young age, to grow as a leader among your peers, to be aware of the different forces that interact in one’s work sphere, to understand the community that one works in and to bring together the whole gamut of organisational effort to make a thing happen,” he says.

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