The Hindu Business Line : Guru watching

SOME watch stars, some wild life, some birds, some jailbirds. I avidly watch the management gurus whose gaggle provides humankind with no end of entertainment. The concoction made out of their cerebral fermentation comes out in a steady and sumptuous flow, as frothing beer does in German pubs. Nowhere is the phenomenon more pronounced than in sanctuaries of gurus such as Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg and Wharton which have somehow to run fast to stand still in order to maintain their reputation for out-of-the-box thinking. They have also become publishing empires, with the Harvard Business Review as their flagship. I have never tired of watching with stunned disbelief the stupendous intellectual prestidigitation, which enables them to juggle a limited number of balls and create the illusion of a Niagara of novation. On the one theme of leadership alone they have been unfailingly spewing out any number of theories. Management of change is another of their obsessions that has triggered an avalanche of abracadabra.

OK, I take it you want to be on top of change. Here are some prescriptions I culled out of the writings for your enlightenment: Pay systematic attention to the human side (People matter, understand?); speak to the individual if you wish to transform the mass; involve every layer and create a sense of ownership of stakes; but start at the top, for if the top is resistant to change, the bottom will fall off the organisation; communicate the message, preferably in a written vision statement; fit it all into a compatible cultural setting; and, yes, be prepared for the unexpected. Did I hear you ask what is new? You may swoon if you see the number of pages, which can be written on each of these making for a neat treatise of 400 pages.

The management gurudom has also an unbeatable capacity to float colourful balloons filled with gas. The current craze is importing psychology to interpret managerial persona. No wonder. After all, did not Dr. Daniel Kahneman get the Nobel Prize for ascribing consumer behaviour more to psychology than to logic, and the exercise of the economic choices of their daily lives by householders to emotional considerations? Well, all pretty harmless, I suppose. But two things hurt: These nostrums are peddled in our own imitative management institutions at an astronomical cost of anywhere between Rs 2 and Rs 20 lakh a year per student; and there has been no definitive evaluation of their practical application to ground realities by eminent doers with hands-on-experience of managing organisations.