The India Way — How India’s Top Business Leaders are Revolutionising Management by Peter Cappelli, Harbir Singh, Jitendra Singh, Michael Useem; Harvard Business Press; Price: Rs.695; 332 pp
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If one were to conduct a word association test for ‘Indian business’ or ‘private sector business’ within a representative sample of Indian society, an overwhelming majority of respondents are likely to associate India Inc with words like “corrupt”, “greedy”, “selfish”, “uncaring” etc rather than with “people manage-ment”, “leaders”, “competitive” or “innovative”. This negative majority response could be explained away as the country’s hangover from socialism when for several decades the evil that India Inc did — ruthless cost-plus pricing, black marketing, corrupting public officials, pushing shoddy goods upon the public from behind high tariff walls — has lived after it, while the good — persistence, tenacity, improvisation, adaptability and capacity building in the teeth of government hostility and discouragement — has been interred with the ashes of licence-permit- quota raj.
Undoubtedly there is something admirable about the manner in which Indian industry has responded to post-liberalisation winds of change and international competition, taking on all-conquering western multinationals on their global stomping grounds and home turf. Within two decades of the dismantling of industrial controls in July 1991, the annual growth rate of the Indian economy has transformed into the second highest worldwide.
However while it’s fair to appreciate India’s strong economic performance post 1991, it’s an altogether different proposition to discern an ‘India Way’ of corporate management brilliance from which business managers and leaders worldwide can learn valuable lessons and profit. But that’s exactly what the eminent writers of this work — Peter Cappelli, Harbir Singh, Jitendra Singh and Michael Useem — academics of the blue-chip Wharton School of Business and well-informed and familiar with Indian industry, argue.
According to the learned authors the core propositions of the India Way are: holistic engagement with employees; developing improvisation and adaptability into a fine art; delivering creative value propositions to “value-conscious customers, most of modest means”; and providing corporate governance conscious of serving broader socio-economic development purposes. By innovating all of the above, Indian companies and entrepreneurs are redefining business leadership, pronounce the authors. High praise indeed. And from high authority as well.
Yet learned as they are, the authors of TIW are academics, not journalists. If they were journalists, they would have taken the elementary precaution of audi alteram partem (hearing the other side). While they have conducted a wide range of interviews with the wunderkind of Indian industry and given them ample opportunity to explain the mechanics of the wonders they have performed, there are some monitors of Indian business and industry who might question — and will question given the chance — whether the new icons of Indian industry — Mukesh Ambani, Anand Mahindra, Azim Premji, Malvinder Singh, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Kalpana Morparia et al — are the supermen and women the authors believe they are.
For instance, the authors of TIW believe that leaders of India Inc are extraordinarily sensitive about human resource development and consciously view employees as “assets to be developed, not costs to be reduced”. If so, how does one explain the huge wage disparities which cause much heartburn within India’s corporates? The difference between the highest and lowest remuneration packages is routinely 100:1 against the ideal of 20:1. Moreover why is nepotism under which an Ambani an Ambani succeeds with tedious regularity so prevalent in India Inc? Hardly indicative of commitment towards human resource development.
Likewise, it’s arguable that the improvisation and adaptability qualities of Indian business leaders which enamours the learned authors, is heavily responsible for the official venality for which India has attained global notoriety. India Inc’s penchant for the amoral jugaad (any which way)-style of management has corrupted public administration to an extent that even people living below the poverty line had to ante up over Rs.800 crore by way of bribes to government bureaucrats in 2009, according to Transparency International (India).
Nor is the ability to deliver creative value propositions, i.e “inventing new products and service concepts to satisfy the needs of demanding customers” of Indian business much to write home about. Research and development has been consistently neglected and it’s difficult to recall any revolutionary invention credited to the marvelous leaders of Indian industry. Until recently when the Tata Nano was engineered within a set price range, Indian industry has never been particularly price sensitive, content to cater to the middle class without much concern to raise India’s 700 million other citizens from the base of the social pyramid.
The last of the principal practices which constitutes the laudable India Way of doing business is the penchant of India Inc’s leaders to “stress the broader societal purpose”. Yet it’s a hard fact that the charity and philanthropy record of Indian business is abysmal. On the contrary by indulging in flagrant conspicuous consumption, captains of Indian industry have endangered capitalism and democracy in the subcontinent. And the vast hoard India Inc has deposited in Swiss and other banks abroad is hardly indicative of pride and commitment to the nation.
Although TIW is an engaging and well-researched book with important insights on the new Indian way of doing business in the post-liberalisation era, unfortunately it’s too one-sided and blind to the myopia and warts of India Inc whose leaders are self-centred, greedy and uncaring about the societies in which they prosper. In the process they have alienated the mass of the people they claim to serve. The plain truth is that Indian industry — cabined, cribbed and confined by the licence-permit-quota raj for 40 years — was liberated by Indian media, particularly the business press which exposed the infirmities of, and persistently ridiculed the State-dominated socialist development model.
Curiously the learned authors seem oblivious to this reality. In the copious reference notes and bibliography of 43 pages, the American business media is cited, but not one of India’s three pioneer business magazines (Business India, Businessworld or Business Today) which first revealed the suppressed potential of India Inc to the public, finds mention. Hopefully The India Way — characterised by sycophantic partiality and contempt for the media — is not the Wharton Way.
Dilip Thakore
Quiet revolution
Velvet Jihad — Muslim Women’s Quiet Resistance to Islamic Fundamentalism by Faegheh Shirazi; University of Florida Press; Price: Rs.1,347; 277 pp
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The spread of Islamic fundamentalism throughout Muslim communities has had seriously negative consequences for Muslim women’s rights and status. Not surprisingly, groups of Muslim women around the world are galvanising support against Islamic fundamentalism, some using secular human rights arguments, others, working within a broadly-defined Islamic tradition, employing Islamic arguments for achieving gender equality and challenging misogyny practiced in the name of Islam.
This fascinating book is an in-depth look at the status and condition of women in Muslim countries linked by a common faith, and confronted with the challenge of narrow Islamic scripturalist interpretation. While admitting that patriarchy and gender discrimination is not an Islam-specific phenomenon, the author Faegheh Shirazi, an Iran-born professor in the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, argues that the forms it assumes in Muslim communities and Muslim-majority countries makes it particularly problematic and difficult to oppose, because it is usually legitimised in the name of religion. Hence, challenging patriarchy is an uphill task because it is interpreted as a challenge to the Quran and Islam.
The book catalogues a litany of burdens and restrictions in which millions of voiceless Muslim women are enmeshed, and unable to express their discontent. A medieval, patriarchal code restricts their physical mobility, education, employment choices, mate selection, decisions in matters of dress and deportment and even thinking for themselves. Family laws in most Muslim countries enforced by the state endow Muslim men the right to arbitrarily divorce their wives, take additional wives at will, almost completely control their lives, and subject them to physical violence or even kill them on grounds of suspected infidelity.
Poorly educated and heavily dependent on their menfolk who impose absolute authority, the majority of Muslim women simply have no choice but to accept their lot. Many even accept their inferior status as mandated by Islam itself. Yet, according to the author, a ‘velvet jihad’ is stirring in numerous Muslim communities spearheaded by bold and intrepid women who are beginning to stridently challenge oppression and discrimination in the name of Islam. Shirazi likens it to the ‘velvet revolution’, a peaceful movement of resistance that brought down the communist dictatorships of eastern Europe in the late 1980s.
A culturally-rooted, and, therefore, a more effective strategy to press for gender equality, says Shirazi is ‘Islamic feminism’. Islamic feminists argue that ‘true Islam’ is based on compassion, equality and justice for all — including, most crucially, women and non-Muslims. Currently their focus is on critiquing certain fiqh or juridical rules, developed by medieval jurists which harshly discriminate against women. Islamic feminists contend that they are a later development, a human invention, and not ordained by shariah or divine law.
In particular, spokeswomen of the crystallising velvet jihad within Islam tend to differentiate between the Quran and Hadith (statements about or attributed to Prophet Muhammad). They maintain that the corpus of Hadith is replete with fabricated traditions wrongly attributed to the Prophet by Muslim clerics to sanctify patriarchy and the subjugation of women, making them unreliable. Other more moderate feminists reckon that the patriarchal prescriptions contained in the Quran and the Hadith need to be viewed in the historical context of their revelation in seventh century Arabia, and are neither binding nor normative for all time.
Citing the work — both literary as well as practical — of a large number of Muslim women scholars and activists, Shirazi concludes that their resolute efforts are heralding a ‘velvet jihad’ with a growing number of women standing up to the authoritarian, patriarchal mullahs and Islamists who claim to represent Islamic authenticity. For those despairing about the spread of violent Islamic fundamentalism, this is an objective and inspiring book.
Yoginder Sikand