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| Sunday, February 22, 2004 |
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| Sunday, February 22, 2004 |
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Sack the CEO
About all that the boss needed to do in a creative and profit-making organisation was to enable a healthy atmosphere for work and monitor others regularly. The formula for that has always been simple. Be fair. Avoid excesses. Punish wrongdoers. Reward those who work well. Have your ears to the ground. Listen to subordinates for they may know more than you and might actually be giving good advice. Be careful in choosing advisers. Avoid giving preferential treatment to kith and kin, howsoever beloved, in organisational matters. Do not indulge in party politics with those who work for you. Avoid the two Ps of pusillanimity and perfidy. While the formula is simple, many CEOs have had great difficulty in following it. In a government organisation an inept CEO really does not matter. Everyone merely waits for him to finish his term and till then no significant work gets done. But in a private organisation this immediately results in monetary losses and depreciation of brand value. The owners as also the employees lose. While the owners can handle their problems at their own level, the issue is far more serious for the other employees since they get hurt far more in their pockets and in terms of future prospects if their company does badly. So an important issue is for these employees, subordinate as they are, to ensure probity and good conduct of their boss. At the serious and educational level this book contains detailed guidelines for the conscientious employees. At a lighter level it is the story about an apocryphal firm called Twist in the Tale Ltd. and the wrong doings of its CEO named Topgun. Three employees Messrs. Small Fry, Fastrack and Takeiteasy observe his activities, suffer because of them and then find a way out to save themselves as also their company. Lessons from the adventures of these three persons would be important not only for people working in the corporate sector but also in the government, for in both we could do with a little bit of cleanliness and truthfulness. |
JEETENDRA Jain writes well, with a light touch, on an
issue which concerns each and every employee of a large organisation
which has a boss. It’s just that he does not call the boss a boss but,
in keeping with the times, uses a more fancy term, CEO. Actually the
distinction is not just ornamental, it is significant. When they began
calling the boss and master the CEO it was not merely a homage to
greater democracy in the workplace but also a reference to the fact that
in a modern organisation many of the subordinates actually were more
skilled than the boss, knew more than him about the services that the
organisation rendered or the products that it manufactured. Above all,
the profits of the organisation depended more on the skills and
capacities of the subordinates and their ability to perform
independently rather than that of the boss. The abilities of the
subordinates in a modern organisation were best harnessed for profit by
allowing the subordinates the freedom to decide how to work best.