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Reviewer: R. Ashok
TITLE: MANAGER AT WORK
AUTHOR: S. Ramachander
PUBLISHER: Penguin books, India.
PRICE: Paperback Rs. 350/-
It is tempting to say this book is a “must-read”.
It certainly is, but it is actually more of a “must
read and re-read and reflect upon”.
‘Manager at work’ is best described as a handy
textbook; and this combination makes it very readable indeed.
It has all the hallmarks of a textbook – it is divided
into neat sections, it covers a very wide spectrum of topics,
and its language is clearly that of a teacher addressing students.
It can also be called a handbook, for it is small, easy to
carry around, and obviously reflects Prof Ramachander’s
strong personal beliefs, views, and accumulated learning.(I
am sure he would say it is ongoing learning)
Those views should carry some weight, given the author’s
standing of being someone who has seen it all and done most
of it; his experience spans industries, different levels of
management, and academics as well.
‘Manager at work’ is likely to be appreciated
best by those already into their professional lives, preferably
with a few years of work experience behind them.
The chief attraction of the book is the fact that it is very
Indian in its context. It is dotted with Indian examples (not
that there are no examples from the rest of the world), and
gives the impression very strongly of talking to an audience
of Indian managers.
It is also very “current”, in the sense that
it talks a lot about the way the Indian economic and business
climate is changing right now, and what those changes could
mean.
The book is divided into five sections – The context
for learning, The consumer, People development, Developing
the organisation, and Developing a personal agenda.
The first section offers glimpses of the professional manager’s
life and world in the 1960s and 70s. To the last few generations
of MBAs, who have come into a world of IT and venture capital
and technocratism, these glimpses should come as absolutely
fascinating.
The second section is very insightful. As a market researcher,
I found the bits relating to consumer segmentation absolutely
bang on. Consumers have indeed become a lot more homogeneous
on the traditional segmentation variables, while becoming
more fragmented in other, complex ways. As Professor Ramachander
points out, the old approaches to segmenting the Indian consumers
simply do not work. Unfortunately, there are no ready replacements.
Elsewhere in the book, he talks about the need for Indian
theory-building, in the context of people and organisation
development; this is probably equally needed in the context
of understanding the Indian consumer today.
At times the style is scathing, as in the sentence where
he talks about the average consumer family “with 1.8
children, living in a household with 2.5 rooms and in the
young MBA brand manager’s imagination”. Younger
readers may find this disagreeable, but it does get the point
across.
By far the most interesting sections are the ones on people
and organisation development. The paragraphs dealing with
the mentor and with organizational culture contain valuable
learning, and provocative ideas too. The question that he
throws up almost casually at the end of one chapter –
“is a strong culture always a good thing?” will
have many readers pondering for quite a while.
I was particularly struck with the point that the level of
dependency in decision-making, and the level of micro-managing
seems to be on the rise in large organisations. This rise
contrasts oddly with the sharp rise in the number of people
with designations of manager or executive; and even more oddly
with the constant talk about managerial “talent”.
Many readers would have experienced at first hand the crippling
effect that micro-managing has on the organisation.
There are also some thoughts on styles of functioning and
their relation to the manager’s cultural roots; this
portion definitely offers food for thought and material for
debate.
I said above that the chief attraction is the Indian-ness
of the book, but there are two other significant attractions.
The first is the author’s skill at incorporating learning
from his very wide reading into his thoughts on management.
He obviously applies the principle of “what do they
know of cricket who know only cricket?” (CLR James,
West Indian cricket writer).
The second is his impish humour that surfaces every now and
then, never more so than when he talks about how difficult
it is today to distinguish a mother from her daughter from
their part-time help by walking behind them…!
There are some negatives too.
This is a heavy book. It cannot be finished in a few sittings.
Nor can it be read once and its contents absorbed. It needs
the reader to read a paragraph or two, reflect on it awhile,
and then move on to the next idea.
The language makes it heavier. While there can be no quarrel
with the multitude of ideas, the book could have been presented
in a more direct and simple style. That way, it could have
impacted a far larger audience than it is likely to now.
The book could perhaps have benefited from having more visual
support to reduce the “heaviness”, but maybe the
author felt that this would be alien to his style?
On the whole, a book that one must buy, and read –
in small and frequent doses.
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