Pulling companies out of the rut

Two write-ups recently came to my notice, purporting to set out new, and even game-changing, approaches to management of organisations, with the aim of pulling them out of the ruts into which they may have fallen.

The first was the interview with the Chief Belief Officer (CBO), Dr Devdutt Pattanaik, of the Future Group, published in Business Line on July 30.

In this, he describes the exact functions of the CBO as that of “creating new rules in business management”, expounds “his philosophy of staying away from tried-and-tested management techniques… (and finding) an alternative way to do business and not just following the standard concepts taught at management schools.”

(Incidentally, while surfing the web, I chanced upon another intriguing post called the Chief Meaning Officer (CMO), whose job is to unravel the full meaning of the uniqueness of a product or a service, so as to take it to the status of an irresistible brand and embed it in the psyche of the customer. So, what are the next ones around the corner? Chief Word-coining Officer, for starters?)

Nobody will quarrel with Dr Pattanaik's repeated assertion of the need to explore new ways of thinking and not merely cut and paste management ideas from America and Europe without checking out their relevance and applicability in the Indian context.

DELVING INTO MYTHOLOGY

But Dr Pattanaik himself does not come up with anything that is conspicuously path-breaking, other than invoking the ancient Indian concept of karta to emphasise that a leader should behave like the head of the household, forming emotional bonds with the team and making everyone happy.

This means, he says, looking at the ‘customised' needs of every individual, rather than settling for the ‘standardised.' There's nothing new there, is there?

The Future Group apparently believes in delving into mythology which, according to Dr Pattanaik, “holds the secrets of our ancestors that we have ignored for a long time” in terms of unknown frameworks and levers which could then be applied to business. Here again, there is no clue as to what precisely are the areas of Indian mythology which could help organisations scale new heights of innovation and creativity.

The second write-up is the review of a book Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself by William C. Taylor, a former editor of Harvard Business Review published in Strategy+Business on May 24.

The title itself makes an extravagant claim to turn management of organisations on its head, by the application of radically practical truths (for improving companies), rules (for creating successful new ventures), and habits (for rethinking one's leadership style and becoming a more effective leader).

“Don't be afraid of rocking the boat, if that is the only way of bringing about radical shifts that represent a direct challenge to convention and a break with the status quo,” he says, while remaining realistic about one's ability to make change happen. Got it?

ETERNAL CRAVING

Some of the other quotations from the book are equally inane.

A few examples: “Real business geniuses don't pretend to know everything.” “Long-term success is about more than thinking harder than the competition. It's also about caring more than the competition.” “Most organisations in most fields suffer from a kind of tunnel vision, which makes it hard to envision a better future.”

These are just some vignettes in the inexhaustible list of examples of the eternal and unshakeable craving of exponents and practitioners of the art and science of management for distinguishing themselves by propounding something totally new and different from the terminologies in vogue. Alas, most of them end up with churning out the same old stuff but in words and phrases strung differently to create, most of the time unsuccessfully, an illusion of a conceptual and functional revolution.

With the result, the study of practical aspects relating to decision-making, project management, conflict resolution, getting the best out of negotiation and environmental protection goes by default.

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