The Times of India - March 09, 2013
My 27-year-old niece works flexi time at a big business technology consulting firm. “I don’t see why I need to go into office at all, except once in a while when it is really necessary,” she reasoned, shrugging her shoulders. “In any case, my boss comes into work once a quarter, I have a colleague in another office who is rated to be a top performer who hardly ever gets to work, and there is the hot-desking system in my office, so I don’t even have a permanent place.” (Hot desking is an office organisation system which involves multiple workers using a single physical work station or surface during different time periods. ) SMART OFFICES How do you connect with other people and work collaboratively, I asked her. With state-of-the-art communication systems, it turned out. “The other day, my boss asked me if I got what she was trying to […]
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The Economic Times - October 29, 2012
More prattle on independent directors cannot fix governance, the chairman’s role remains terra incognita While decision-making in most boardrooms continues to be governed by “come on, let’s be reasonable” rather than “this is the right thing to do”, the good news is that there has been a quantum jump in public discussions on improving corporate governance (CG), not to mention the predictable increase in the number of awards instituted for the same! Board evaluation and performance improvement and director search and training are emerging as high-demand, new consulting areas. Hopefully, all this focus will soon raise the bar on governance quality. But for that to happen, the discourse needs to be broadened beyond its single-point focus today on independent directors. Discussion on how shareholder directors and executive directors can improve the levels of CG must also happen. But the biggest omission by far that needs to be fixed is around […]
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The Economic Times - February 27, 2012
It would help to reduce the familiarity quotient on boards and factor in business health beyond profits. Corporate India has been calling attention to two issues: one, in the context of the proposed Companies Bill, is reasonableness in non-executive director liability and penalty for misdemeanours pertaining to day-to-day operational management of the company. The other is the call for better public governance. Suddenly, there is more open complaining to ministers in public meetings about extortion by government agencies and blatant rent-seeking behaviour. This is probably a good time for corporate India to also look inward and improve its own corporate governance, moving it beyond regulatory compliances to better oversight (an unfortunate corporate governance term that means the exact opposite in the English language). There is enough low-hanging fruit to be taken advantage of in the form of improvements that can be quickly implemented. The first area to improve is board […]
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By Rama Bijapurkar - May 21, 2011
I read the most brilliant article in the April 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review titled “Ethical Breakdown” that resonated a great deal with me, and I want to share it, because I suspect that many of us are thinking a lot about the “difficulty of being good” – that lovely phrase which has become my touchstone ever since I read it on the cover of Gurcharan Das’ book. The article deals with the question of why good people do unacceptable things, and why it doesn’t get spotted and stopped early on. Think board dynamics; where we sometimes unthinkingly classify asking questions or insisting on more analysis as disruptive or demoralising behaviour, when the sense of the house is that it is a good decision and there is a time-bound pressure to it so why not go ahead; or in not being appreciative enough of good outcomes that have been […]
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Business Standard - December 18, 2010
We certainly have been a chaotic, noisy democracy this last year, with lots of societal churning. As mythology tells us, any churning done jointly by the good guys and the bad guys, yields both poison and nectar, and so we have had good, bad, ugly and funny incidents. This year’s award for constructive disruption goes to the insurance regulator, who issued a fiat that insurance companies must diversify into insurance. It was a “shock and awe” regulation, as a foreign analyst dubbed it, but it ensured that the insurance industry applied its mind to moving beyond the comfortable value space of wealth management and mutual fund-like offerings with a garnish of insurance sprinkled on top. Of course, parts of India Inc shook their heads disapprovingly, as business models fell apart, at the “value destructive” behaviour of the regulator. The “who pulled the trigger” root cause award for this goes to […]
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