Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  Some of the new friends I became closest to were owners of other large Indian companies. I had first met many of them while working for the World Economic Forum, but it was in India that we became friends. When they shared with me their triumphs as well as woes about life and business, my mind would automatically extract significant lessons for my own self. As a friend, I would offer my affection, and as an apprentice, I would learn about why and how they made decisions, the manner in which they reacted to a crisis or challenge, and their motivation to work.

  When I travelled out of Delhi to visit schools and universities that I managed on behalf of the Jindals, and at the ones in Delhi where I occasionally lectured, I would meet and speak to as many young Indians as possible. I was curious to know their interests and aspirations, and I wondered if I could help them in any way. I wanted to know how they felt about the future of their locality, city and country. Their challenges were, I discovered, a reflection of my own in the past, but their future was to shape our country’s fortunes.

  The economist Amartya Sen has pointed out that in India, there is indeed an emphasis on primary education for children, even in the poorest of families. He has written that the common assumption that Indian parents are often uninterested in the schooling of their girl child is not true. He substantiates this by mentioning one of the main findings of the Public Report on Basic Education, published in 1999, and also those of more recent investigations by the Pratichi Trust—that there was no serious reluctance of parents to send their children, daughters or sons, to school, provided that affordable, effective and safe schooling opportunities were available in their neighbourhood.6

  I differ from Sen’s observation on two counts.

  First, the measurement of the gender gap in education—or, for that matter, at the workplace—needs to be redefined as this cannot be conclusively assessed only by data related to the headcount of those going to school. There are many other variables that need to be considered. For example, in India today, everyone is indeed likely to be enrolled for primary education, but boys are more likely than girls to be enrolled in private schools, and more likely to have more money spent on their education.7 Further, surveys do not measure what boys and girls do with their education. Are they equally empowered to understand the same life choices, effectively evaluate those choices, and implement the choice that works best for them? I do not think so!

  Second, the good news lies only in primary education data. According to UNICEF data from 2013, while the enrolment ratio of girls as a percentage of boys8 for primary education is a fantastic 99.9 per cent; this drops to 91.8 per cent for secondary education. Thereafter, there is no guarantee that the girls who have been enrolled will complete their education. The survival rate at secondary school for girls is 48.7 per cent, as compared to 58.5 per cent for boys.9 Consequently, fewer women have jobs in cities, compared to women who work in farms in rural India. According to a Catalyst report, a meagre 16.2 per cent of urban workers are women (2015–16)!10 In contrast, a whopping 30 per cent of India’s adolescent girls are already married, as compared to 4.6 per cent married adolescent boys.11 Clearly, the primary role of girls in urban and rural India is perceived to be at home.

  During board meetings in the early days of my tenure at the Jindals’, the office pantry boys would skip serving me a cup of tea. This was because they were not habituated to seeing a young girl taking a seat in the boardroom. They thought I was an assistant to one of the board members, and therefore undeserving of tea.

  A number of general practices were not even recognized by employees as gender-insensitive, but were inconvenient for women employees. Some of these practices would be considered terribly odd in most other parts of the world. General electronic communication to the company’s men and women employees usually went out with the greeting ‘Dear Sir’. My boarding pass on our company aeroplane had me titled as ‘Mister’—they were not used to women passengers in a private jet. Some of our offices had the customary two toilets standing side by side—both for men.

  There is also a peculiar practice in many Indian companies to celebrate employee birthdays inside an office meeting room with a cake, Coke, potato chips and a bouquet of flowers. Colleagues awkwardly line up at the designated time, the more enthusiastic ones start to sing the birthday song, and the cake is cut and subsequently smeared on the face of the employee whose birthday it is. Then comes the moment when it must be decided who will slice and serve the cake to everyone. All eyes turn to the women in the room. Even if there is one woman in a room full of men, and even if all the men are in greater proximity to the cake than the woman, the role of slicing and serving must be hers.

  ‘But this is not about gender, it is about the skill set!’ the company’s baffled head of human resources explained to me after I sent out company-wide instructions that whoever—man or woman—happened to be closest to the cake must slice it.

  So do we capture these biases in our data on the workplace gender gap? We do not. And so my view is that, really, it is not just all about the headcount.

  We know that 24 per cent of entry-level employees in India today are women, and 14 per cent women make it to considerable levels of seniority.12 To me, these numbers are inconclusive. They tell me nothing about the experience of these women at work. Is their role in line with their aspirations? Do they get equal access as the men to leadership opportunities? Can they be their authentic selves at work—no matter how feminine or geeky that might be? Or do they need to coerce themselves into becoming a clone of the majority personality type at work (as in most parts of the world) so as to ‘fit in’ and get the job done?

  I have found that what men and women actually do and get at the workplace can be traced back to our education system.

  Boxing young children of varying aptitudes and interests into a classroom of forty to teach them all the same content in the same manner is a sure-shot recipe for producing adults who are devoid of authenticity and programmed to wear blinders at the workplace.

  When a four-year-old is told to fill the colour of his crayons within the boundary lines of the drawing in his colouring book, or that he needs to wear a uniform, walk in a queue, and greet his teacher ‘good morning’ without quite knowing the meaning of it, he is learning important lessons for life. A few years later, he is asked to learn by rote answers to questions, whereas he should have been taught to ask questions for the answers he seeks. Everywhere in the world—except in the Scandinavian countries, where some of the traditional subjects and teaching methods are being abandoned—education is designed to create an army of clones. It probably worked in the industrial era when we needed like-minded, hard-working employees who would obey orders without question. But in the knowledge era, especially in a country like India which wants to establish itself as a knowledge economy, furnishing the economy with zombies who work all day and night will not work.

  One of the first things we are taught as young adults is the concept of ‘work culture’. We are made to understand that we need to spend a large chunk of our day on earning our living. We are told that the socially accepted way to do so is by getting a ‘job’ (rather than being a sportsperson or an artist, for instance), and dedicating our life towards adding one line at a time to our curriculum vitae. We give the entire process a name—‘career’.

  When star employees switch jobs, they are applauded at their stellar ability to unlearn all behaviour patterns imbibed in their previous organization, and observe and correctly mimic the dominant mannerisms of colleagues in their new environment.

  And hence, a herd mentality develops. Employees start to display similar behaviour patterns, and make similar choices at the workplace.

  Since the early part of the millennium, well-educated Indians with degrees from India and abroad have been less enthusiastic about working for the government or in academia, and have chosen to ride the wave of business and commerce instead. Social mobilization has also raised aspirations,13 and economic development has incre
ased the capacity of society to satisfy those aspirations. At the corporations that these educated Indians create or join, they bring with them their habits of hard work and rigour, as well as stamina and ambition to build their career.

  Resources are few, however, and the claimants are many. Indeed, in a country where one million people will turn eighteen every month for the next several years, job openings in corporations don’t yet match up to the demand, and the leadership pipeline is clogged.14 In the long run, economic development produces a more equitable distribution of income. In the short run, however, the immediate impact of economic growth often exacerbates the difference between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.

  Those lucky enough to get these coveted corporate jobs work harder to keep their livelihood and to ensure professional growth. They multitask at work and adapt to gruelling work hours. As a result, while we are yet to excel at the Olympics, some domestic Indian companies which had modest beginnings about fifty years ago, such as the Tata Group, Bharti Airtel, the Jindal Group, Reliance, have thrived, provided value and employment to millions, and expanded globally.

  Many of these large business houses in India are family-owned, which means that the founding family owns the largest stock among shareholders in the market. Majority shareholding, coupled with weaknesses in the implementation of labour laws, governance structures, reporting practices and government regulations in India gives these corporations vast powers to hire, fire and almost always do whatever they please.

  As far as the employees at some of these organizations are concerned, the fragile nature of their fate at the hands of the company owner breeds a culture of fear, creating a ‘motivation vacuum’, often turning them into sycophants who seemingly work hard and long, but only when the boss is around. On the other hand, few Indian large business owners would be able to hold a candle to the vision, grit and patience of the founder, who is often the current owner’s father or ancestor.

  Pooja Jain is the forty-year-old heiress of the $80 million Luxor writing instruments company, whose crayons have coloured the lives of children across India, and whose pens can be found in almost every literate household. The company was founded in 1963 by her deceased father, Davinder Kumar Jain, with five employees and an initial investment of Rs 5000.

  Pooja’s father was known to be humble, polite and patient. He was methodical in his ways and caring towards his employees.

  ‘He only looked at the balance sheet and took the larger decisions,’ says Iyer, D.K. Jain’s former assistant.15

  In contrast, this was how international business magazine Forbes described Pooja in 2014:

  Pooja likes to micromanage and is demanding of her employees. She is known to work almost twenty-four hours a day, even on Sundays . . . Her colleagues say they can expect calls from her at any time of the day or night, even on weekends . . . It’s not unusual for Pooja to call them at 1 a.m. to talk about the business or brainstorm for new ideas.16

  I had known Pooja well for half a decade, but we became closer after I moved to India to join the Jindals in 2014, the same year that her father passed away. At that time, D.K. Jain’s last will had instructed that the company be passed on to his wife, Pooja’s mother. Pooja used to run a part of the business with her father, and after he was gone, her role expanded to overseeing the entire group.

  Pooja and I met often. I noticed that for the a few months after her father’s death, she would go about her day in a perpetual daze, without registering much of what was being said to her. Clearly distraught, she sought to rely on the company’s old guards at work for a while. Gradually, she regained her strength and her character. Emotional and affectionate in private, she was hardworking, boisterous and impatient when it came to getting things done at work.

  ‘Why are second-generation family business owners so erratic in their decisions at the company?’ I asked her while we were driving in Delhi’s Mehrauli area.

  ‘We are disruptors,’ she replied. ‘We shake up the company and make it open to constant change.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The company has to get used to quick decisions and action. Employees can expect a call at any time from me—it keeps them on their toes.’

  ‘But is that fair? To call employees at all hours?’

  ‘Of course—they get paid for it,’ she said, surprised.

  Let us take another example. On 11 June 2008, Daiichi Sankyo, the third largest pharmaceutical company in Japan, made an offer to buy a controlling stake in Ranbaxy, the largest drug maker by revenue at that time in India.17 Daiichi’s purchase price of Rs 737 per share represented an enormous premium of 53.5 per cent over Ranbaxy’s average daily closing price on the National Stock Exchange for the three months ending 10 June 2008. The Japanese company was clearly excited about the deal.18

  By November 2008, Daiichi ended up acquiring 63.92 per cent shares of Ranbaxy.19 Daiichi hoped that this acquisition would help the company establish itself in the fast-moving emerging markets as well as in the generic drugs sector of the pharmaceutical value chain. The acquisition also gave Daiichi access to Ranbaxy’s basket of thirty drugs, for which the company had approvals in the US.

  Trouble began to brew in this deal—which had initially seemed to be an incredible win-win for both companies—when, in September 2008, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent Ranbaxy warning letters regarding manufacturing practice violations at two of its plants, Paonta Sahib and Dewas. The FDA put restrictions on the import of drugs manufactured at these plants. In February 2009, the FDA also invoked its Application Integrity Policy against the Paonta Sahib facility. According to the FDA report, Ranbaxy’s quality control scientists took short-cuts on stability tests for at least two major drugs.20 They found that Ranbaxy conducted these tests on the same day or within a few days of each other, not over nine months, as claimed by the company. The FDA also alleged that Ranbaxy had submitted manipulated data as part of its application to market new generic drugs in the US, as well as kept hundreds of improperly stored samples in its factories in Paonta Sahib and Dewas.21 At the time the deal between Ranbaxy and Daiichi was signed, the inquiry did not come as a surprise to either of the two companies, since the FDA had started it in 2006.

  At this point, the question being asked by everyone, from trade analysts to the media and the general public, was ‘Did Daiichi Sankyo get sold a lemon?’ No such ruckus was made over the question: ‘How did Ranbaxy get away with selling allegedly inferior quality medicines in India?’

  Why did we need the US FDA to reveal the possibility of errors made in our own backyard? I wonder how Indian regulators never got wind of these alleged malpractices.

  Ranbaxy, founded by Ranbir Singh and Gurbax Singh in 1937, had grown rapidly amid a weak corporate and government regulatory environment in India. Three generations later, in January 2006, Delhi-based Malvinder Singh—whom I have known as a good friend for some years now—took over as Ranbaxy’s managing director and CEO. While his grandfather was a visionary and patient with employees, Malvinder had earned a reputation in the company for being different.

  In 2013, Fortune magazine profiled Malvinder in this manner:

  Singh was brash and competitive. The Indian business press dubbed him the Pharaoh of Pharma. Others viewed Singh as petulant and immature.22

  Malvinder’s profile in Fortune was part of the magazine’s nearly 10,000-word sensational investigative essay on Ranbaxy by Katherine Eban titled ‘Dirty Medicine’, which revealed the company’s failure to conduct safety and quality tests on several drugs.23

  Eban quoted whistle-blower and former Ranbaxy employee Dinesh Thakur in her essay, writing:

  Thakur says that the company culture was for management to dictate the results it wanted and for those beneath to bend the process to achieve it. He described how Ranbaxy took its greatest liberties in markets where regulation was weakest and the risk of discovery was lowest. He acknowledged there was no data supporting some of Ranbaxy’s drug ap
plications in those regions and that management knew that.

  Malvinder is one of the warmest, most generous, ethical and perennially optimistic people I have known. Yet, he is an astute businessman at work. There is nothing that gladdens his heart more than being terribly busy with work. He discusses business with his closest ally, his younger brother Shivender, and trusts no one else more. In 2008, when the brothers sold their 34.82 per cent stake in the family company to Daiichi Sankyo, they together announced the sale even to their own family only a night before the actual transaction. They had kept the results of this crucial deal close to their chests until it was fully realized.

  After the FDA accusations, Malvinder refuted any claims of fraud. ‘The kind of malignment, or whatever is the right word, the kind of perception getting created that the data was falsified, is not correct. Secondly, if Daiichi Sankyo is saying they were not aware of whatever was linked to the FDA, that is not correct,’ he said.24

  ‘They (Daiichi Sankyo) have mismanaged it. They have not been able to deal with it. And now they are trying to put a blame for things of the past. For what? They did their due diligence. They bought a company but have not been able to run it,’25 he added.