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Leadership Lessons from India

by Peter Cappelli, Harbir Singh, Jitendra V. Singh,

and Michael Useem

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Harvard Business Review

article:

Idea in Brief—the core idea

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Article Summary

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Leadership Lessons from India

How the best Indian companies drive performance by investing in people.

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Leadership Lessons from India

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Idea in Brief

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The leaders of India’s biggest and fastest- growing companies take an internally fo- cused, long-term view and put motivating and developing employees higher on the priority list than short-term shareholder interests.

To engage employees, these leaders create a sense of social mission that is central to company culture, encourage openness by developing and personally modeling sys- tems that provide transparency, empower employees by enabling communication and pushing decision making down through the ranks, and invest heavily in training.

These individual practices aren’t new, but Indian leaders combine them in a coherent package and give them consistent empha- sis. The authors advise that Western leaders adapt this managerial approach to their own circumstances, pursuing in particular two readily achievable goals: investing in training, and strengthening social mission.

Leadership Lessons from India

by Peter Cappelli, Harbir Singh, Jitendra V. Singh,

and Michael Useem

harvard business review • march 2010 page 2

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How the best Indian companies drive performance by investing in people.

Vineet Nayar, CEO of the Indian IT services giant HCL, likes to rock the boat. Asked what he wished his greatest legacy to be in five years, Nayar responded without missing a beat: “That I have destroyed the office of the CEO.” He led the charge that gave rise to the company’s bracing motto, “Employee first, cus- tomer second”—an idea that would give many managers hives. And he invited employees to evaluate their bosses and their bosses’ bosses; then he posted his own review on the firm’s intranet for all to see, and urged others to fol- low his lead.

What’s Nayar up to? Pressed to explain, he told us that he sought enough “transparency” and “empowerment” in the company that “de- cisions would be made at the points where the decisions should be made”—that is, by employ- ees, where the company meets the client. Ide- ally, he said, “the organization would be in- verted, where the top is accountable to the bottom, and therefore the CEO’s office will be- come irrelevant.”

Nayar might be dismissed as a loosely teth-

ered idealist except that his company, with nearly 55,000 employees and a market cap of $24 billion, is growing even faster than India’s red-hot economy. He’s doing something right, and, as we found in a yearlong study of Indian executives, his leadership approach is closer than not to the norm among India’s biggest and fastest-growing companies.

To discover how Indian leaders drive their organizations to high performance, our re- search team interviewed senior executives at 98 of the largest India-based companies. (See the sidebar “How We Did Our Study.”) In con- versations with leaders at Infosys, Reliance In- dustries, Tata, Mahindra & Mahindra, Aventis Pharma, and many others, a picture emerged of a distinctive Indian model. None of the peo- ple we interviewed suggested that their com- panies had succeeded because of their own cleverness at strategy or even because of the ef- forts of a top team. They didn’t mention skill in financial markets, mergers and acquisitions, or deal making—talents that Western CEOs often claim underpin their companies’ perfor-

Leadership Lessons from India

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mance. Almost without exception, these lead- ers, like Nayar, said their source of competitive advantage lay deep inside their companies, in their people.

That may sound like posturing, but our re- search puts hard numbers on the characteristic ways Indian leaders invest in people. Far more than their Western counterparts, these leaders and their organizations take a long-term, inter- nally focused view. They work to create a sense of social mission that is served when the busi- ness succeeds. They make aggressive invest- ments in employee development, despite tight labor markets and widespread job-hopping. And they strive for a high level of employee en- gagement and openness.

This is not to say that Indian firms and their leaders are inordinately virtuous. Corruption and malfeasance can be found in the Indian business community as surely as in any other. (Note, for instance, the scandal involving Sa- tyam Computer and its chairman and founder, Ramalinga Raju, who was jailed on charges of misleading investors.) Not all Indian execu- tives are saints or sages, just as not all U.S. CEOs single-mindedly pursue shareholder value while ignoring social concerns. Still, the leaders of the most successful Indian compa- nies do engage with their country, culture, and employees in a characteristic way, and this is an important factor in their performance. Their approach is used often enough that, we believe, it constitutes the centerpiece of a clear model—one from which Western leaders can learn.

Although India’s competitive environment is relatively new, company leaders have brought to it a long-standing tradition of busi- ness largesse—a commitment to social goals fueled by enlightened self-interest. That mind-set is embedded in Hindustan Unilever’s Project Shakti, for example, which applied microfinance principles to create a sales force in some of the subcontinent’s most remote and economically challenged regions. And it’s revealed in hospitals, grade schools, and vir- tual universities built across the country by leading businesses.

Leading the India Way

Our survey revealed an important difference between Indian and Western company leaders in how they focus their energy. When we asked Indian leaders to prioritize their key re-

sponsibilities, this is how they ranked the top four:

1. Chief input for business strategy 2. Keeper of organizational culture 3. Guide, teacher, or role model for

employees 4. Representative of owner and investor

interests It’s striking that they put shareholders in

fourth place, since U.S. executives are all but required to say that shareholder interests are their number one concern. This low ranking held for even the most global of the companies we studied, which are exposed to international capital markets and in some cases listed on U.S. stock exchanges. And it held for leaders such as Anand Mahindra, Sunil Bharti Mittal, and Azim Premji, who are huge shareholders in their own companies.

The higher priority these executives place on keeping the culture and guiding and teaching employees underscores their focus on human capital development. As the exhibit “Skills In- dian Leaders Value Most” shows, this focus also emerged in their responses to our ques- tion “What are the top two leadership capaci- ties most critical to your exercise of leadership over the past five years?”

Given their intense focus on culture and human capital, it may be surprising that the Indian leaders cited strategy as their top pri- ority. But strategy also emerged as important in another of our surveys, which explored changes in U.S. and Indian top executives’ al- location of time over the past five years. As the exhibit “A Stark Difference in Focus” shows, U.S. executives became increasingly at- tentive to external demands—regulatory con- cerns, the board, and shareholders—whereas fewer than half of the Indian executives gave additional attention to these, and the over- whelming majority said they spent more time on setting strategy.

It’s important to understand how Indian leaders see their role in strategy development. Whereas Western leaders often leave it to profit-center heads, Indian leaders are likely to own the strategy function, setting the agenda and taking a visible role in shaping the strate- gies their managers bring to them. They tend to focus less on Western-style planning and analysis and more on creating the incentives, organizational structures, and culture that will enable an improvisational approach to strat-

Peter Cappelli

(cappelli@wharton .upenn.edu) is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management and the director of the Center for Human Re- sources at the Wharton School. Harbir Singh ([email protected]) is the William and Phyllis Mack Profes- sor of Management and a codirector of the Mack Center for Technological In- novation at Wharton. Jitendra V. Singh ([email protected]) is the Saul P. Steinberg Professor of Man- agement at Wharton. Michael Useem ([email protected]) is the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management and director of the Cen- ter for Leadership and Change Man- agement at Wharton. They are the authors of The India Way: How India’s Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management (Harvard Business Press, 2010), from which this article was de- veloped.

Leadership Lessons from India

harvard business review • march 2010 page 4

egy. They view strategy as a set of enduring general principles for competing, such as de- veloping competencies, embracing social purpose, and taking the long view—an ap- proach to business that they personally en- code in the company’s culture. This model both enhances a company’s agility in the marketplace and allows Indian leaders to de- velop their top managers. Thus strategy and “guiding and teaching” are complementary priorities.

Ratan Tata set a new strategic course for the Tata Group when he took it over, in 1991. At the time, it was doing virtually no business out- side India. Against some internal opposition, he asserted that the company had to go global, in part to reduce the risk of dependence on a single country’s economy. Beginning in 2000, he led the conglomerate’s 96 companies on a wave of acquisitions, using a case-by-case, trial- and-error approach to acquire, for example, the Tetley Group, the Daewoo Commercial Ve- hicle Company, and Boston’s Ritz-Carlton hotel (now the Taj Boston). Half the Tata Group’s revenue comes from other countries. This globalization was accomplished not by an explicit, careful strategy but by Ratan Tata’s personal vision for how to compete across in- ternational markets.

Consider the development of the Nano. For this affordable car, the decision about pricing and, therefore, market positioning (a typical focus of Western strategy) came about by acci- dent: A reporter asked about price, and Tata’s

off-the-cuff guesstimate that the Nano might cost 100,000 rupees ($2,000) made headlines the next day. So Tata decided that 100,000 ru- pees might as well be the goal, and the com- pany’s managers and engineers set to work, unsure exactly how they’d meet the target. Per- sistently improvising around obstacles, an ap- proach captured by the Hindi word jugaad, they cut costs at every turn—for example, by repurposing scooter parts and eliminating ex- tras such as power windows.

Motivating Employees

To get some hard data on Indian leaders’ style, we asked the directors of human resources at our executives’ companies to assess their top bosses using the Multifactor Leadership Ques- tionnaire (MLQ), the most widely applied such tool in the United States. Perhaps not surprisingly, the executives scored high on “transformational” or charismatic leadership designed to encourage employees to care about the goals of the leader and the organiza- tion. When we compared these data with MLQ data for U.S. CEOs, we found that the latter were more likely to use “transactional” styles—motivating employees to act in the in- terests of the business by striking deals with them (If you want a promotion, meet these sales targets).

The leaders we surveyed typically attributed the success of their companies to employees’ positive attitudes, persistence, and sense of rec- iprocity, which the executives inspire in four

How We Did Our Study

Our project began with the National Human Re- source Development Network, arguably the most influential business group in India. The network helped arrange interviews with the leaders of In- dia’s largest publicly listed companies by market capitalization.

We conducted structured interviews with 105 leaders from 98 companies. Relatively few of these companies use the CEO model. At 71 of them the top executive is called the managing director. Leadership is shared at seven of them, so there we interviewed two leaders. We asked what qualities these executives saw as most vital to their success, how they worked with their boards, and where they perceived convergence and divergence with

Western practices. We asked how they recruited talent and managed teams, and what legacies they hoped to leave behind.

We also gathered survey data from the heads of HR at these companies. We compared the re- sponses with those in a series of surveys of U.S. CEOs and HR executives. The most important data on U.S. CEOs come from a New York Stock Ex- change survey, and most of the comparative data on HR practices come from surveys conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management.

We supplemented these data with information from previous studies and descriptive informa- tion and case studies about the practices in these companies.

Skills Indian Leaders Value Most

When asked which qualities had been most critical to their exercise of leadership over the past five years:

61%

of Indian leaders said envision- ing and articulating a path to the fu- ture; strategic thinking; guiding change.

57%

said being inspirational, ac- countable, and entrepreneurial.

52%

said supporting careful talent selection, grooming, and practices that advance business goals.

43%

said optimizing organizational structure and articulating core values.

22%

said understanding competi- tors and markets; managing outside relations.

Leadership Lessons from India

harvard business review • march 2010 page 5

specific ways.

Creating a sense of mission.

As we’ve ob- served, Indian leaders have long been in- volved in societal issues, preemptively invest- ing in community services and infrastructure. Mallika Srinivasan, the director of Tractors & Farm Equipment, told us that almost every- where companies operate in India they are encircled by throngs of destitute people, needs are stark, and government interven- tion is inadequate. Like Infosys and many other big companies, Tractors & Farm Equip- ment maintains a first-world, campuslike fa- cility within sight of third-world slums. “Cor- porate social responsibility and good governance are related to the state of the de- velopment of the country,” she told us. “We are all seeing these islands of prosperity sur- rounded by so much poverty.” Echoing a sen- timent we heard from many executives, Srin- ivasan explained that her company feels duty bound to step forward.

Some of this CSR is driven by necessity, of course; national well-being and investment in social goals and human capital are essential to companies’ competitiveness. The rapid growth of the Indian market and the inadequate scale of health and education systems have forced companies to develop and help care for their own talent.

Social investment pays off in other ways, too. For B. Muthuraman, the managing direc- tor of Tata Steel, CSR is a reputational asset. “Our history in corporate social responsibility,” he acknowledges, “has enhanced the group brand.” And for some, acting responsibly in the eyes of regulators is essential: Obtaining indus- trial licenses and environmental clearance in the United States can be a straightforward, if technical, process, whereas in India it can de- pend on being known for public responsibility.

Unlike the feel-good statements that West- ern companies make about, say, improving cus- tomers’ lives, the social missions of Indian companies are integral to their strategy and often the route to profits. A case in point: The hospital group Narayana Hrudayalaya was founded by Devi Shetty to help the thousands of Indian children who need cardiac surgery but can’t afford it. The group soon discovered that the only way to provide quality operations cheaply was to standardize them, so it set about learning to perform them at scale. It now performs more than twice as many car- diac surgeries as the biggest U.S. hospital, with outcomes at least as good and at about one- tenth the cost, and its profit margins are slightly above those of its U.S. peers. Prathap Reddy, the founder of Apollo Hospitals, a lead- ing private health care provider, conveys a sim- ilar mission-as-means orientation in his com- ment “Our first responsibility is to our patients; second, to people who work for us; and then to our lenders and investors.”

Other Indian companies similarly inter- weave strategy and social mission. The tele- communications provider Bharti Airtel sees its mission as getting cell phones into the hands of the hundreds of millions of people in India who otherwise have no way to communicate with one another. Max India’s new insurance product, Max Vijay, combines life insurance with savings in a model that allows people with erratic incomes to pay whatever they can, whenever they can. IT companies such as Cog- nizant and Infosys describe their social mission

A Stark Difference in Focus

Over the past five years, Indian leaders began spending more time on internal issues, while U.S. CEOs spent more time on external affairs.

CEOS WHO ARE DEVOTING

LESS TIME

CEOS WHO ARE DEVOTING MORE TIME

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%

%

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%

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U.S. CEOS INDIAN CEOS

D TO DAY MANAGEMENT

MEDIA RELATIONS

SETTING STRATEGY

SHAREHOLDER RELATIONS

REPORTING TO THE BOARD

REGULATORY ISSUES

Leadership Lessons from India

harvard business review • march 2010 page 6

in part as showing the world that India and In- dian companies can compete and win on the international stage.

Finally, more so than most Western compa- nies, the best Indian companies have a social mission and a sense of national purpose be- cause that helps employees find meaning in their work. Missions motivate by tapping into what organizational psychologists call task sig- nificance—a satisfying feeling that small tasks link to the bigger goal. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson loved to tell a story about asking a truck driver who worked at NASA in the 1960s what his job was. The driver’s response: “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.”

Engaging through transparency and ac- countability. Indian leaders also build em- ployee commitment by encouraging openness and reciprocity. They look after the interests of employees and their families, and implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) ask employees to look after the company’s interests in return. HCL’s “Employee first, customer second” pol- icy, supported by initiatives designed to make employees feel more personally responsible for the company’s offerings and give them a voice with upper management, does exactly this. Vineet Nayar’s public 360-degree reviews for managers is another example.

The software company MindTree posts ac- counts of its employees’ ethical failures and vi- olations of company policy on the internet and discusses the resulting lessons. The company’s executive chairman, Ashok Soota, tells em- ployees in an introduction to the company’s booklet All About Integrity: “This book is placed in your hands as a rite of passage....adherence to the Integrity Policy becomes the basic social contract of our mutual existence.” There they can read about “some of the dark, difficult mo- ments that were created by people who breached Integrity”: the lying accountant, the inside trader, the senior executive who mis- used his company cell phone, and the dozens of employees caught falsifying prior work ex- perience—all of whom were asked to leave. The motivational message is clear: Employees are accountable to management, and manage- ment is equally accountable to them.

Empowering through communication. So that engagement will translate into action, In- dian leaders go to considerable lengths to em- power employees, although this challenges the traditional Indian deference to hierarchy.

At HCL, for example, an online system allows employees to create quality-control “tickets,” much like those on an assembly line. These can flag product-quality problems or even per- sonal issues related to management, such as “I have a problem with my bonus” or “My boss sucks.” Employees can also post comments and questions on the company’s “U and I” website; Nayar himself publicly answers some 50 ques- tions a month. Tata Consultancy Services has a similar system whereby employees can submit grievances about management, which may be settled through arbitration.

In his comments about empowering em- ployees by helping them find their own solu- tions, Jagdish Khattar, the former managing di- rector of the automaker Maruti Udyog, echoes a sentiment common among Indian leaders: “Throw issues to them, let them examine and come back to you with solutions. I have done it again and again....85% of their solution would be what you have in mind....Let them go back with the impression that 100% of the solution is theirs. The implementation would be quick and smooth, and they will feel very proud of it, but it serves your purpose.” This management strategy helped revitalize Bank of Baroda, one of the oldest government-controlled banks, which was increasingly seen as a socialist relic in postreform India. Well-paid, longtime em- ployees were highly resistant to change, and the bank found itself eclipsed by nimbler pri- vate-sector competitors. Enter Anil K. Khandel- wal, who took over as chief executive in 2005 and immediately created a sense of mission. He met with branch managers, showed them financial analysts’ reports advising investors to avoid the bank’s stock, and then appealed both to their pride (it should be embarrassing to work in an organization of which experts think so little) and to the broader goal of India’s well- being, to which the bank was not contributing enough.

To better meet customers’ needs, manage- ment decided that the bank must stay open longer. Khandelwal called all the employees of the branches involved in a pilot program to headquarters for a meeting—“from manager to messenger,” as he put it—and asked for their help, letting them determine how to execute the new program. They agreed to staff their branches from 8:00

AM

to 8:00

PM

without overtime pay and designed their own market- ing events to announce the new schedule.

Achieving CSR Targets

Our research revealed striking differences between Indian and U.S. companies in attention paid to this goal.

ROUTINELY MONITOR PROGRESS

INDIAN COMPANIES

% U.S. COMPANIES

%

RARELY MONITOR PROGRESS

%

INDIAN COMPANIES

%

U.S. COMPANIES

Leadership Lessons from India

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Khandelwal wrote letters to the employees every week, explaining goals and describing progress, and often met with them at local branches to make the case for change. The pro- gram was a huge success. The bank has since added around-the-clock staffing at several loca- tions. Along the way, Khandelwal introduced such empowering innovations as a direct line to his office for employees seeking his input on problems.

Investing in training. Finally, both our qual- itative and our quantitative data show that In- dian companies invest heavily in employee de- velopment—often more so than Western companies. This is partly to ensure that em- ployees have the tools to do their best work, but it’s also designed to strengthen their com- mitment to the company.

When we asked Indian leaders an open- ended question about their human resources development, their responses consistently touched on four themes: managing and devel- oping talent, shaping employee attitudes, man- aging organizational culture, and internation- alization. By far the majority of responses fell into the first category. The most commonly used term in this context was “employee reten- tion,” followed by “recruiting.” These execu- tives, by and large, see no trade-off between re- cruiting and development, and they expect their firms to pay attention to both.

U.S. companies have largely abandoned in- vestment in employees, especially in develop- ing managers, for fear that it will be lost if they leave. Statistics suggest that about a quarter of new hires in the United States received no

training of any kind in their first two years of employment. In contrast, Indian companies take an aggressive approach to training, de- spite—or perhaps because of—a competitive labor market in which employee turnover is es- timated at close to 30%. Skilled workers are in short supply in India; major investment in em- ployee development pays off because it helps ensure the quality of the workforce that re- mains. Consistent with this starkly different at- titude toward training, three times as many In- dian as U.S. companies measure and track their skill-development efforts.

A recent Kauffman Foundation study indi- cates that the Indian IT industry provides new hires with about 60 days of formal training. Some companies do even more: Tata Consul- tancy Services has a seven-month training pro- gram for science grads who are being groomed for business consulting roles. In addition, all TCS employees receive 14 days of formal train- ing each year. Even relatively low-skill indus- tries, such as business-process outsourcing and call centers, typically provide 30 days of train- ing, and retail companies require about 20 days. Programs like these are not limited to entry-level workers. India’s second-largest pharmaceutical company, Dr. Reddy’s Labora- tories, puts outside hires through a one-year training program that includes 10 weeks of as- signments abroad and culminates in a cross- functional project presented to top executives. Infosys managers are assessed on the basis of how many of their groups’ recent hires achieve an “A” on tests of their new knowledge, how many achieve various competency certifica- tions, and how many outside or lateral hires are rated as “good” in their first review. In addi- tion, senior managers are evaluated on their employees’ job satisfaction and the percentage of leadership positions that have an identified internal successor.

Employee investment continues with leader- ship development; almost twice as many com- panies in India as in the U.S. formally track leadership training. In Wipro’s sophisticated program, each of roughly 1,000 managers and executives is scored on 12 leadership measures, and individual scores are compared with com- pany averages. The top 300 leaders are re- viewed by Wipro’s chairman, Azim Premji, in a process that extends over five days. Following those reviews, the company draws up a devel- opment plan for each candidate that includes

Taking HR Seriously

Twice as many Indian leaders as U.S. leaders think that human capital drives business success.

Consequently, the HR function in India has high visibility with senior man- agement, and its strategy is closely inte- grated with the firm’s overall strategy. The HR departments of Indian compa- nies do more measurement than U.S. HR departments on virtually every aspect of their field, while outsourcing basic tasks such as benefits and employee adminis- tration. They also have more sophisti-

cated systems—such as workforce plan- ning and succession management—than are common in the United States.

Among the Indian firms we studied,

81%

of the heads of HR reported that the learning function (training and employee development) was essential to building competitive organizational capabilities, whereas, according to a 2006 survey by the American Society for Training and Development, an astonishing

4%

of U.S. chief learning officers held that view of their own operations.

Leadership Lessons from India

harvard business review • march 2010 page 8

coaching, training, and rotational assign- ments. The process creates a pool of candi- dates to fill anticipated vacancies. This may sound similar to some U.S. “academy compa- nies,” but Wipro adds other features, such as tracking possible hires outside the firm with an eye to when vacancies at Wipro will create an opportunity to recruit them.

MindTree’s cofounder Subroto Bagchi, whose title is vice chairman and gardener, spends much of his time coaching the com- pany’s top 100 leaders. Dr. Reddy’s managers all receive training in coaching and are re- quired to coach as well as evaluate employees. As S. Ramadorai, the former head of Tata Con- sultancy Services, said of his company’s suc- cess, “It’s all about human capital at the end of the day.”

Is the India Way Transferable?

Just how much leadership practices contribute to the overall success of these large Indian companies is not easy to sort out. Does the focus on employees reflect the limitations of context? In other words, must these firms in- vest heavily in human capital in order to cope with heavy turnover? Are Indian firms success- ful not only because their leaders personally drive strategy but because they’re sailing on the Indian economy’s rising tide? Is their em-

phasis on social mission as important to greas- ing the wheels as it is to motivating employ- ees? The answer in each case may be yes, in part; nevertheless, these practices confer ad- vantage in and of themselves by enhancing the value of human capital.

The Indian leadership approach arose from the unique circumstances of the Indian econ- omy and society (see the sidebar “Roots of a New Approach”), but unique roots do not mean that lessons cannot translate, as we know from management practices that started in the United States or Japan and have spread globally. The practices that define Indian lead- ership are not new; individually, they’ve been seen as effective in a range of circumstances. Indian leaders simply combine them in a co- herent package and consistently give them high priority.

That said, it would be well nigh impossible for U.S. CEOs in particular to announce that shareholder value was no longer a top priority, given expectations in the investment commu- nity. And it would be difficult for them to sus- tain these practices over the long term—to spend time and attention on managing culture and developing employees while the siren call of mergers and acquisitions beckoned or the fi- nancial community tempted them with short- term restructuring deals. But some practices,

Roots of a New Approach

The explosion of the Indian economy following the economic reforms of the early 1990s is well known. Liberated from a stifling regulatory envi- ronment and exposed to international competi- tion, Indian firms were forced to rapidly develop world-class capabilities. Companies that had built their advantage on low-cost labor abruptly found they had to compete on quality. Although at first Indian companies imported technologies, for- eign managers, and global consultants to take ad- vantage of the new opportunities, many learned in time how to do so on their own.

“After having been shackled for a couple of decades

by overly suppressive and retrograde government poli-

cies, our businessmen had their first real shot at com-

peting on the basis of relatively free-market princi-

ples.” Amit Chandra, managing director of Bain

Capital Advisors in India

Indian leaders’ approaches often grew out of their long experience with surmounting obstruc- tionist bureaucracies; crumbling, antiquated in- frastructure; and inadequate schools, health clin- ics, and other social services. Growing up in hardship and uncertainty gave many an ability to persistently improvise around obstacles.

“Indian leaders ... have been trained or groomed in

extremely fluid, dynamic, uncertain environments.

[Thus they have] a much greater ability to cope with

uncertainty, they don’t get disturbed by uncertain

events, they keep an even keel....They also tend to be

more creative as a result, because they have to face

these sorts of untoward situations almost on a daily

basis.” Hindustan Unilever’s former CEO Manvinder

Singh Banga

Leadership Lessons from India

harvard business review • march 2010 page 9

such as measuring and tracking training and development, are straightforward. Creating a real sense of social mission, whereby employ- ees can feel that their work has impact, is a harder but achievable goal—as is becoming a role model for employees. Western leaders would do well to understand the managerial

approaches that have fueled the rise of India’s largest companies, and mindfully adapt them.

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