After the Welch era, a new crop of leaders are coming into their own

MUMBAI: Shamed by the dotcom excess and knocked out cold by the ‘vision thing’ of fanciful CEOs, strategy and leadership are stirring back to life in corporate boardrooms after six years.

Thomas Stewart, editor, Harvard Business Review, says, “The two bestselling books of last six years have been: Execution and Who Moved my Cheese. But now things are changing. We see a new bunch of management thinkers dealing with these issues come into their own.”

In Mumbai to launch the South Asia edition of the Boston-based management magazine, Stewart insists that business will see a new wave of management ideas that will address the challenges companies face in a globalised business environment.

It is easy to believe from the lull in the management ideas market that the pipeline has probably run dry. Mr Stewart disagrees. He cites Pankaj Ghemawat, who’s looking at strategy in emerging markets, David Nadler on leadership, and Linda Hill on organisational behaviour. “It follows what’s happening in the real world of practitioners where CEOs like P&G’s AG Lafley and Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy are coming into their own after the era of Jack Welch. The issue of where are the next Gods, is on our radar,” he says.

The change that has happened over the last half a decade or so is the emergence of China and India as a sourcing base as well as a marketplace. Many people in academia and even corporations haven’t worked that out. “It’s very challenging to become fully fluent in the business language of countries other than your own. I would bet that you could go to the faculty of HBS and if you asked them to name the top five banks in the US, they will get all five right.

But if you asked them to name the top five banks in Europe, maybe they’ll get just three right,” says Mr Stewart. That needs to change and more on-ground knowledge will be needed to leverage the opportunity in such markets.

Many leading companies are already taking steps in this direction. “As you see more and more companies investing in R&D facilities in emerging markets, you see a change in what they’re doing about the deployment of knowledge assets,” says Mr Stewart. “By next year, IBM plans to have 20% of its total employees in India alone. It’s going to change the nature of what IBM sells. How long before 15% of its executive committee will be here? It will take a while but it will happen,” he says.

That should increase the contribution of India and China to the world of management ideas, as most management ideas have so far been US-oriented. Mr Stewart agrees. His reasoning is that management theory and education have been centred in the US, and that’s been true for a very long time. “The centre of mass in demand has been in North America.”

That is changing with the world looking eastward. And with Indian companies becoming significant to global business, Stewart concedes that many management ideas are coming from here. “There are already important contributions of Indian companies to management.”