What about the underlying deal?

Our readings in business ethics includes a series of case-lets featuring ethical dilemmas in poor countries. What must the Western company’s manager do? Not once does the author ask, “How ethical was the deal for which the favour was being sought?”

Why can’t managers be sued for neglect?

If your dentist picks out the wrong tooth, you can take him to court. If the CEO of the company you own shares in ruins it, the most you can do is present him a golden parachute for his troubles. Strange. 

Shop-floor doctorates

Reading about the ‘alienation of labour’, etc, in economics, it suddenly struck me that I’ve never read or heard of a theory of worker motivation that was developed by a worker. These theories are all by managers.

In the egalitarian West, workers are probably workers because they cannot develop theories. However, there may still be some who may be sent to management school, trained to research and asked to come up with something.

Does it matter who does the research? I suppose it matters a great deal. How many books like A People's History of the United States  are there? Would A People’s History be the book it is if Zinn wasn’t an ex-shipyard worker? Aren’t histories of, say, the Indian Mutiny written by Indians very different from those written by Englishmen? Could Sharatchandra have written Bamuner Meye if he were a French expat?

Surely some programmes can be designed where workers are researchers and not subjects.

All you have to do is read this book

Prof Douglas Lamont’s online notes on international marketing has a longish passage on India, from which I quote (emphasis mine): “Is there a viable alternative to market capitalism that can bring forth prosperity and equity to the world’s masses? In the West, such fads as Fabian socialism, the admiration of Soviet central planning, the small-is-beautiful movement, and Third World dependency were researched, written up and offered as consulting solutions by university professors. In India, ‘tragically, they were translated into policies, with poverty-stricken peoples as guinea pigs.’

Singapore and Thailand that welcomed outside capital and developed export industries vaulted its people out of poverty into economic Tigers and middle-income countries.

India insisted on self-sufficiency, and its state-enterprises produced shoddy goods—that is, goods which could not be sold in export markets. India didn’t want its firms to make money so they could invest in jobs that would raise Indians out of poverty. Not until 1990 under the pressure of the IMF did India change its economy policies. Today, it has become a dynamic hub of software, Internet, pharmaceutical, and media firms. The Information Age is triggering the start of an economic takeoff towards long-term sustainable economic development.

Problem: Is IT another fad? If the IT and dot.com revolutions are over, should India invest in world-class manufacturing. Why cede this powerful engine of economic growth to China?”

Ok. Now the source of this wisdom. Gurcharan Das, India Unbound, (New York: Knopf, 2001).

Ah, and who’s Mr Das? A graduate in philosophy and Sanskrit from Harvard; who later ‘attended Harvard Business School (AMP), where he is featured in three case studies’; CEO of P&G India; MD, P&G Worldwide (Strategic Planning); author since taking early retirement in 1995; on the boards of a number of companies; regular speaker to the top managements of the world’s largest corporations.

Most impressive, but not omniscient.

Surely, there are others who don’t think the Indian government was quite so ruinous, and the post-IMF story has been quite so rosy.

So why not let students have a little of those views too?

If they’re not going to do business in India, one source is one too many. But if they are, one point of view is fatally dangerous.

Which reminds me. The famed Hofstede Dimensions of Culture counts all Arab countries, from Qatar to Mauritania, as one Arab World. And has some place called West Africa and another called Eastern Africa. But it dutifully takes Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland separately.  

Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting that those Scandinavian counties should be clubbed. I’m wondering how useful it may be to bunch together Arab and African nations, especially to someone who has to deal with Arabs or Africans.

 

Google, China and Arabs

Google will quit China because the Chinese government and jingoistic hackers are giving it all sorts of trouble. Fine. But a question. What about numerous Arab dictatorships? Can Google show anything it wants there?

Fighting friends

Tomorrow I have to make a short presentation on as my assignment for the Leadership course. Here is what it’ll be:

I read this story when I was eleven or twelve. I have tried to live its essence ever since.

Once, Akio Morita, founder of Sony and ‘serial disrupter’ had a roaring argument with his chairman, who was also a great opera singer. Their differences went to such an extent that the chairman said, “Mr Morita, it seems we cannot agree at all. I should resign.”

Morita’s reply represents the essence of leadership to me. “Mr Chairman,” he said, “That we disagree is why neither of us should resign. Had we agreed, the company would be paying one salary too many. One of us should then leave.”

An egomaniac can take decisions; a strong man can make others follow; a cold-blooded bean counter with a little bit of luck can please the stock market.

But it takes a true leader to create the culture where team members disagree without disrespect, defer without resentment, cooperate without agreement, and dissect without blaming.

A true leader makes friends unafraid to fight, because regardless of who loses, the team wins. And perhaps nothing spurs creativity – the fusing of two existing ideas to crate a new one – as the clash of ideas.

If we live in the Knowledge Age, then creativity is the key. The team who’ll win now is the team that’s the most creative, that is, the team of fighting friends.

(The details may be slightly wrong; I haven’t reread the piece in two and a half decades. Also, I have never led, nor will I. I have, however, always argued.)

I don’t know

Is there a management course that accepts “I don’t know” as a good answer?

Not “I don’t know because I was asleep in class” but “I don’t know because the data supplied is inadequate to even attempt an opinion.”

Why must managers always decide? Why can’t they, sometimes, defer? Why is decision good and postponement a sin?

Because your competitors will be upon you? If you decide wrong, will speed make any difference at all?

You can’t wait till every datum comes in, can you? Of course you can’t. None but the psychologically ill do that.

All I’m suggesting is that someone who insists that we can’t decide has at least as much chance of being right as someone insisting that we must.

XYZ is not a factor

Once, the famous cartoonist RK Laxman was asked what makes a good cartoonist. He mentioned several factors, like being good at drawing, having a sense of humour, having an excellent grasp of politics. I don’t remember the list.

What I do remember was that he emphasised, over and over, that you needed all these at once. Having, say, three of them, and not having the fourth, was no good.

Whenever I hear or read someone saying that this or that (character, charisma, curiosity) is (or isn’t) a factor for success in something (leadership, innovation), I remember Laxman’s interview.

Hey, factors don’t act alone, except in books where the author has decided the conclusion before he begun his investigation. Which is why he spent his entire time factoring out effects (“Everything else being equal, charisma is not a factor.”) and none in searching for interactions between between factors (“In the vast majority of cases, an effective leader had both character and charisma”).

Wouldn’t over-complicating lead to analysis paralysis?

But who’s talking about making things uselessly complex. I’m all for simplifying. Science and technology doesn’t move an inch without making simplifying approximations, and it has come a long way. That’s equally true for the arts subjects. Simplification (approximation, generalisation, etc) is indispensible for understanding and discussing anything.

However, it’s equally important to be conscious that one is simplifying, that whatever one has is, at best, an extremely crude copy of reality, and that the real world is not obliged to resemble it.

So you have to make room for things you don’t know or deliberately left out, that is, for Chance.

Why not collective security?

If you lose your job in France, and want to get a degree before going back to the workforce, the state will pay for your and your family’s upkeep.

The Americans may hate that, but an Indian like me can only wish our government did that. More so, because the state subsidised my education almost entirely before I entered the job market for the first time: It makes no sense to have me rot jobless, and pay no taxes, if I am willing to upgrade, so that I can go back to paying taxes, at a higher rate.

However, one question bothers me. Does the French government give employers easy loans or even straight aid so that they won’t have to layoff people, especially during a widespread downturn, when the employers’ altered circumstances cannot be easily blamed on their misdeeds? Or does that become communism?

Or do you have to be an American bank to have the government take you over – with a guarantee that fat bonuses will be left untouched - once you have ruined the world’s economy (yet again).

Not all employees are willing to retool, though all will have to be taken care of by the state till they get back to their own feet. So the state’s (society’s) expenses don’t (necessarily) change if they keep companies running at full-employment during recessions.

In other words, if French citizens can have social security, why not French companies?

Would that muddle economic signals? Not necessarily. There isn’t much you can learn about running your business form an universal downturn, except that perhaps you should have made more provisions for the rainy day.

(Could you have done that? Keeping aside a nest egg means lowering present spends, i.e., less investment in growth and, more importantly, lower salaries. Both are bound to hurt the present health of your business, unless all your competitors join you in doing exactly what you are doing. In which case, you only lower standards throughout your industry, and do no-one any good.)      

Sack all

In an interview with Jack & Suzy Welch, the great (greatest) manager argues that his policy of sacking the bottom 10% of his company each year was a good thing because it allowed the sacked employees to go wherever they could do better.

Further, he argues that because the feedback was continuous at GE, it wasn’t as if the sacked employee would come to know one fine morning that he was jobless. He was given plenty f opportunity to shape up before he was declared as hopeless. To put it differently, GE and the employee tried hard to work things out before GE decided that they were incompatible.

On the face of it, Welch is most convincing, though Pfeffer has argued, equally convincingly, against the policy (in general, not specifically at GE).

However, may we ask two questions, both concerned with cut-offs? Why 10%? And why one year?

Isn’t a year too long to decide that a company and an employee don’t belong together, more so when the former has the collective wisdom of its managers, codified into policies and criteria, on its side?

Does, say, an undergraduate student need to wait to the end of the year to understand he isn’t learning anything, not because he’s stupid but because he hates the subject. (He may pass the exam, but that’s a separate matter, and a sad reflection on the evaluation system.)

Of course, knowing in advance doesn’t help the student much because he can’t change courses mid-year, and has to waste till the next academic year starts. In GE’s case, however, isn’t the company needlessly prolonging the pain (and messing up the employee’s resume)? Shouldn’t the probationary period (surely they had one), whatever it is, be enough? If it isn’t, shouldn’t it be made so, by packing in enough into it for both parties to get a fair idea of whether there’s hope ahead? Was GE too kind?

Second, why sack 1 in 10? Did the 9th chap take the hint and leave anyway? If he did, what about the 8th chap? And the 7th, and so on? How were border-line cases dealt with? Were they transferred within GE?

By the way, what happened to the top 10%? Did they stay, or leave with the great taskmaster’s certificate getting them fatter paycheques from GE’s competitors?

Finally, did GE keep in touch with the sacked employees to figure out if that logic of releasing people for better things held water. That would have some implications for their recruitment system. If (most of) the sacked-employees went on to better things, it’d imply GE picked winners though it couldn’t always find the correct slots for them; on the other hand, if the sacked employees continued to do badly, one would suspect deeper flaws in the selection processes and criteria.