Sanjaya Baru | India the global home of cross-cultural managers

Every time that a person of Indian origin becomes the head of a global corporation there is much celebratory reporting in the media in this country and much hand-wringing about the costs and benefits of talent migration. If more middle-class Indians are going up the managerial ranks internationally than they are at home, it is because most Indian companies are still largely family dominated at the top.

Apart from the one odd Natarajan Chandrasekaran heading the Tata empire or a Suresh Narayanan heading Nestle India, there are not many professionals at the top of corporate pyramids in India. Even when such managers play important roles within firms, they remain below the radar and allow members of the business family all the glory of corporate success. So, for example, many may know the names of Mukesh Ambani’s children, but how many would have heard of P.M.S. Prasad, a graduate of Vivek Vardhini College, Hyderabad, who is among the elder Ambani’s top managers, providing significant leadership at Reliance Industries?

There is, however, an important reason why Indians are doing so well running global firms and this does not get enough attention at business schools and in the business media.

Within a few months after the Indian economy opened up to the world in 1991, I had a chance encounter with the head of Henley Management College, located at Henley-upon-Thames in Britain. He held forth about how he would like Indian managers to participate in their management development programmes that would prepare them for roles in global firms. India is going global, Indians will have to learn to deal with non-Indians in different business and managerial circumstances, he said, and added that “cross-cultural management” is the key to success.

We in Britain, he told me loftily, have centuries of experience managing global business and understand cross-cultural management issues better than anyone else. From the Chinese in the East to Indians in South Asia to Africans across the continent, the British business elite have managed the most diverse cultures and so can teach a thing or two to Indians now seeking global careers.

While appreciating his point, I reminded him that India already had long experience in cross-cultural management because we have firms in Kolkata run by Marwaris, in Mumbai run by South Indians and in South India run by Punjabis. India is itself a multi-cultural nation and large Indian firms are populated from the managerial top to the working-class ground level with people from across the sub-continent. The Indian civil service, I told him, is the best pool of talent of cross-cultural managers with a young Punjabi officer posted as a district collector in Kerala and suchlike, dealing with the millions around him. Clearly, I was not very impressed by his pitch.

The Henley College, originally the Administrative Staff College and set up in 1945 to train public sector managers, was the inspiration for the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), at Bella Vista in Hyderabad. The ASCI was founded as the Indian equivalent and was meant to train middle management. India had an extremely large public sector where managers would have to have experience in cross-cultural management. A Tamilian or a Maharashtrian head of Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd, running a huge firm with thousands of employees from across the sub-continent, could only succeed if he knew the art of cross-cultural management.

After my chat with the Henley head, I suggested to the then principal of ASCI, Hyderabad, that the college should offer the kind of course that Henley was offering and it may well attract managers from across Asia and Africa and not just from within India. If the head of a British institution could claim better understanding of cross-cultural issues in management merely because Britain once had an empire on which the sun had never set, India could claim with equal pride that it has always been the original home of cross-cultural management. I have no idea what happened to that suggestion, and whether the ASCI has kept in step with the changing times.

Middle class India, from which the corporate sector draws most of its managers, is largely bilingual, often tri- and multi-lingual. Most urban Indians growing up in a cosmopolitan social environment learn to deal with different cultures from childhood onwards. This instils in Indian managers a much higher emotional quotient (EQ) that contributes to their success in cross-cultural management.

Management experts identify the key elements of “emotional intelligence” as “self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills”. Middle class urban life offers a good environment for developing such sensitivities. That is the crucible in which the Chandrasekarans, Suresh Narayanans and P.M.S. Prasads are schooled to then become top managers in large multicultural managerial environments.

So, while it is true that the rise to the top of a corporate pyramid by a Satya Nadella, an Indira Nooyi and a Sundar Pichai may be on account of the open and supportive corporate environment offered by the United States and its global firms, one must also recognise that their success in a global multicultural corporate environment also owes to their roots in the multiculturalism of our urban middle class life.

I have no idea if Henley College still runs that course. Britain has become far too insular and distant from a fast-changing world to have retained the skills of imperial management to be a relevant home for cross-cultural management education.

India is in fact a better place for managers from mono-cultural societies to learn to deal with multicultural organisations. When the Japanese and South Korean firms first set up a manufacturing base in India, they found their own nationals socially ill-equipped and lacking the EQ required to run their India operations. Many had to hire Indian CEOs.

It was perhaps no accident that Osamu Suzuki, chairman, Suzuki Motor Corporation, was pleased with his two Indian CEOs, R.C. Bhargava and Jagdish Khattar, both drawn from a great pool of experience in cross-cultural management — the Indian Administrative Service.

If more family-owned Indian firms hand over their top management to professionals, then India too would have its Nooyis and Nadellas staying home.