The ocean of business management is churned by two strong currents: first, the evolution of modern management thinking; second, the multicultural fabric of lessons emerging from the task of managing structured organisations spread across so many countries. As an operating manager in an international environment, I have observed very many approaches. In particular, the modem Indian manager represents a unique confluence. While his cultural moorings are strong, rooted in an ancient and proud society, his intellectual exposure is almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon management literature in the English language. This is not so among other Eastern managers.

Management thinking
One of the earliest thinkers was Henri Fayol, a Frenchman who headed a very large but also disorganised coal mining company. Around 1900, he said that there was one right way to organise an enterprise and that was a functional structure, coming together at the level of the chief executive. Fayol's friend, Georg Siemens, used the same idea in organising a rapidly foundering Siemens Electric Company about the same time. In the US too, practising managers like John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie held similar views.

In the 1920s, Pierre du Font and Alfred Sloan in the US developed the idea of decentralisation, which soon became a management mantra. Thus, the management world accepted a different solution from the Fayol model, but it once again assumed that there was only one single right form of organisation. In the 1950s, during the massive reorganisation of the US General Electric Company, the same principle was implicitly accepted — that there was only one way to organise its work. Thus, a small unit of researchers working on US Air Force projects was organised exactly like a huge division manufacturing electric generators.

For many decades, it was believed that people did not want to work, so they must be coerced and controlled. Initially, Peter Drucker and, later in 1960, Douglas McGregor argued that this was wrong. McGregor said that people did really want to work and required only proper motivation. He called it Theory Y. Suddenly, the world of management was gripped by Theory Y fever as the panacea for several ills.

The point to be noted is that modem management thought is strongly influenced by the US. Much of management literature is in English. And it is to these stimuli that the Indian manager is almost wholly exposed. The literature overwhelmingly seems to have either evolved, or been received, in a prescriptive way, whereby an existing ‘right’ way is replaced by a new ‘right’ way.

Cultural overlay
The challenge of managing large organisations spread to the East effectively only after the Second World War. This brought in a cultural overlay on management thinking in the West. The surge of books on Japanese management, and the sensitive writings during the last 30 years of authors like Maslow, Pascal and Senge amplify this point. However, these learnings did not require any change in the behaviour of Western managers in their own social contexts. At best, they provided yet another right way for Westerners to operate successfully in Eastern contexts!

So, while for the Western manager there is an Eastern cultural overlay on his management thinking, for the Eastern manager there emerges a Western intellectual tradition as an overlay on his Eastern social context. This gives rise to attitudinal and behavioural patterns that are vastly different, like a rich kaleidoscope of very different colours and patterns.

One concrete example: Anglo-Saxon cultures over the years tended to view a company as a system, whereas Eastern cultures tend to see them as a social group. No wonder that Anglo-Saxon thinking has strongly influenced advancements in productivity management through time and motion study, system dynamics, etc.

Eastern thinking, on the other hand, has strongly influenced advancements in human motivation management. In the traditional Anglo-Saxon view, the organisation is governed by ‘engineering’. In the traditional Eastern view, the organisation is governed by ‘biology’. The machine metaphor is so powerful, it shapes the character of Western organisations. The living being metaphor is so powerful, it shapes the character of Eastern organisations.

Arie de Geus relates an interesting parable about the Chilean potato. At some stage, Chile could no longer produce its own food. The US offered to help by despatching a team of agronomists. These US agronomists found the potato fields clinging precipitously to mountainsides. They had irregular shapes and were interspersed with boulders. Within each field, there were several varieties. Their calculations showed that with a more careful selection of seed potatoes, systematic weeding and cropping, yields could be raised significantly. But the advice turned out to be wrong. Over the years, taking into account the disasters encountered, the Chilean farmers had built diversity into their everyday practice. This diversity allowed them to meet unforeseen disasters. They were willing to accept inefficiency in the interest of robustness.

The Indian manager thinks in the Western idiom but behaves in the Eastern pattern. It is this duality that is being severely challenged in the corridors of Indian business houses as deregulation and liberalisation continue.

West-East mixture
Due to the influence of rationalists, Western thinking abhors ambiguity. A manager must be adept at quickly sorting out issues into black and white. The zone of ambiguity must be minimised. For Indians, ambiguity is accepted as an inevitable fact of life. One can try to reduce it, but the real skill lies in managing the ambiguous. For example, in MNCs, job descriptions, reporting lines and organograms are an absolute fetish. In many local companies, these are loose and flexible, and it is actually seen as beneficial to keep them that way.

* Mr Gopalakrishnan wrote this article for the April 2002 issue of Indian Management

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