Kalyan Ganguly and leadership

 

I met Kalyan the other day at the Bangalore club. We discussed Upanishads, literature and the future of AI. In the night, as I walked out of the colonial building, I thought with a little budget I could change the face of the earth. You get it. That's what I always felt after meeting him. Therein lies his best trick I suppose. He is the biggest leader I have really met and worked with. He and Joe hired me to help them with their strategy when Kalyan was the CEO of  United Breweries and Joe his SVP HR. Philosophers and happiness books keep saying we should feel gratitude. Well.. I have tried. It doesn't come easy. You work with people like Kalyan, it comes to you naturally. You really want to thank them. Great leaders in my opinion, bring the best in you. When you have done your best, you want to thank them, thank God.  Generally you meet a great leader and say, wow, what a great leader. That's great, no doubt. But…Kalyan can take leadership to the next level. He takes two steps forward. He makes you feel great about yourself. You will like yourself. At least I did. I am sure most do. Remember William Blake's poem?

Sustaining the scorecard

Sustaining the Scorecard from Sheshagiri Hegde

What is stategy - webcast 18 minutes

Strategy Execution at United Breweries - Video

Strategy execution method, balanced scorecard, implemented at United Breweries Ltd, top performing billion dollar beer division of UB group - remains one of the most successful corporate transformation stories in India.  UB continues its onslaught on its competition, outperforms them by miles in almost every key business measures- sales, EBITDA, innovation, leadership, new products, quality of beer, consumer delight and brand experience , to name few.

Ten years ago, Kalyan Ganguly, the CEO of the division, a Harvard Business School Alumni and his leadership team Shekhar Ramamurthy, Joe Naronha and others initiated balanced scorecard as one of the key strategic initiatives for energizing then perfectly nice looking enterprise to drive it off its comfort zones, inviting the non-existent problem to solve it for reinventing and revitalizing the organization, which in retrospect appears to have paid off phenomenally well.

Here is an interview with Shekhar Ramamurthy, Joint President United Breweries, who is all set to take the enterprise to the next level, sharing his thoughts on how the strategizing, thinking-through and dialoguing on strategic objectives, BSC tools at al – helped the UB leaders create one of the most formidable global enterprise both in its financials and in its management sophistication.

http://euseden.com/sg/bsc_shekhar_interview.php

My Book - Strategy & Leadership

Dear friends, Here is my book on management, Strategy & Leadership (310 pages of standard size book), collection of articles and white papers, I wrote over last ten years of my consulting and training.  Many of these are more like brief case studies of some of my consulting projects with few of the leading organizations in India.  Charles Handy, one of the most prominent thinkers of management, freelance consultant, author of best sellers like – Age of unreason etc., and former professor of London Business School said “I came to study organization and behavioural science expecting certainty, but I was disillusioned. …  I found too often ponderous confirmation of obvious and weighty investigation of trivia”. Then he reconciles with why such study as management would be worth. On a more reasonable plain he concluded that study of management is insightful; help predict trends when organizational phenomena are given contextual interpretations much like the historians do. I am not too sure if my articles are any less disillusioning, especially if you are looking for precise how-to-dos; No these won’t tell you how to exactly implement strategy and make an organizational strategy plan.

Nor will these tell you, how to become a great leader by reading these or produce great leaders in an organization. But these can certainly provide insightful information about what did my clients do when they were faced with a myriad web of strategic choices such as those, how did they wade through those to pick the right ones, or create an action plan, how the top leaders arrived at way to communicate something which was hitherto only mist of knowledge thrown about loosely with vagueness sufficient enough to scare any action on that by any leader at any level.

As generally the case with most of such writings, and you should pardon the authors for that, and hence pardon me too - due to sensitivity attached to such, as much is disclosed to provide insights as is hidden to conceal the sensitivity of the data which can certainly make significant part untold and hence lesson incomplete enough to make it dangerous to try on your own without a proper counsel.

I can only hope you will find it useful.

With Shekhar

Caught up with Shekhar, Jt.President UB, on Big idea, strategy, balanced scorecard ... and so on ... Will shortly publish this interview first on euseden website .. ..

Improving Sales through Balanced scorecard

Head of US sales, Michael Hickey of Astra Zeneca had a clear sales strategy which helped 6000 people strong US sales force achieve break through performance in the US region. Astra Zeneca, which is a global pharmaceutical major with over USD 12 billion in sales, later adopted such a strategy process across other major geographies. Strategy was one of the major components of successful transformation of IBM (Louis Gerstener 2003). Among others, Gerstener pursued creating focus on services, adopting open standards, moved product lines and above all changed the culture of the company.

Read on