VALUES MAKE EFFECTIVE MANAGER

The term good manager is not an acceptable jargon in management literature as both practitioners and researchers alike talk only about effective and ineffective managers. You are an effective manager if you deliver results and an ineffective one if you can’t. There is a catch, though — even the best of effective managers find themselves in situations that prove their undoing.

But still there are some theories of management that have started taking into account that effectiveness is only acceptable if it comes through the right means. So, ends are not enough means too are important. In fact, Gandhi was of the view that means and ends are interchangeable. The difficulty is that not many will be fancied by this means and ends debate as in these competitive times, in which the winner takes all, the ultimate test is the end result.

How then to identify the qualities of a good manager? Almost impossible to enumerate but one way out is to take a recourse to Plato whose advocacy was that kings should be philosophers and philosophers should be kings. The meaning was that should be guided by larger interests adopting means that are fair and square.

Taking a cue then we can well prophesy that managers should be philosophers. But the difficulty is that philosophy is not a part of the curriculum in any of the B-Schools, and their number may be rather astronomical globally. There may be that occasional paper or section in the syllabus in the name of values and ethics. This is not to advocate restructuring the course curriculum of a typical B-School programme, but certainly the idea needs to be explored that we need to make good managers who are concerned about results but with the eye on means that are fair and square.

Where to find such a curriculum? And then rejecting an over 100-year-old revolution that began with pig iron workers trying to raise their productivity in a steel plant under the guidance of an industrial engineer may not be accepted by many.

Well the pig iron workers did revolutionise the method of loading the iron bars to meet the demand sparked by the Spanish American war, but over the years, we have created a new education system altogether that treats pupils like the experimental guinea pigs. Anything and everything is being taught to them in the name of management education with the very paradigm that began in the US around a century ago being questioned in its own land, it is time to look for a different model. Can the Indian ethos provide some insights?

Ethos is the characteristic spirit of a culture, era or community as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations. Though identifying a standalone Indian ethos may not be a hundred per cent valid proposition yet, we can certainly claim that there was an ethos that we identified as Indian. It was based on a value system that could be copyrighted as the Indian ethos.

It was this ethos that noted Indologists and internationally acclaimed writers like AL Basham, Fa-Hien, and Max Muller had written about in their accounts of India. It is this value system that our present President of India keeps harping on while emphasising the need for resetting the moral compass. Managers must stand on a high moral ground.