Vieira - The Impatient Manager

My grateful thanks to the following highly eminent personalities of India, who are role models for the new generation of entrepreneurs and corporate managers, for sharing their experiences and thoughts and taking out time to write messages to the young Impatient Managers. This is greatly appreciated.

TIME OF GREAT CHANGE

It is a time of great change. Of course, every century has been a period of change. But last fifty years, that has been the period of my working life, has shocked all of us with the speed of change. Earlier, it was the printing press that had a great impact on the world. The next landmarks were the chip and computer. Now the digital media has taken knowledge and information to some of the remotest areas of the world. In India, many people, even in villages which do not have road access or do not have sanitation and safe drinking water, have a mobile. They are connected; they know what is going on in the rest of the world, which creates both inspiration and aspirations. Many of them also want to get to the world that they see on the smartphone and on the television.

UP boy hopes to live his Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) dream with sister's old laptop was a headline in a newspaper of July 24, 2015. It was accompanied by a photograph of Anshu Ahirwar and his father, sitting on the steps of the IIT-B. Anshu belongs to a very poor family in Uttar Pradesh. His father is a daily wage mason in the small town of Orai and is the sole bread winner for a family of four children. Anshu scored 91.2 percent in Class XII and got admission into IIT-B, where he had to pay 78,000 (approx. $1,300) for college admission and accommodation fees. He was trying for loans and scholarships, and hoped he would succeed.

He wanted to do Computer Science, and was sure he would succeed. His only weapon then was an old computer which he had borrowed from his sister, who got it as a prize when she excelled in her own examination some years ago.

There is so much of inspiration and aspirations in the new economy and new environment.

GENERATION Y PREFERS NEW-AGE CAREERS

Another news report in August 2015 stated that at least seventy-five percent of students prefer to go in for new-age careers over traditional careers. Apparently, the survey was done among 5,000 students in the age group of fifteen to twenty-one across seventy-five different cities by CareerGuide.com and shared with Economics Times, India.

Now the question is: what are the new age careers? Strangely, some of them are content writing, psychology, travel and tourism, biotechnology, digital marketing, and graphic designing. In the metro cities, careers such as social work and nonprofits are emerging as popular segments. On the other hand, teaching, civil services, medical, and information technology are more popular among rural youth, while management and marketing, economics, travel and tourism are more popular among the urban youth. In tier 2 and tier 3 cities, B.Com. and B.A. courses are popular, whereas in the metros, people seek industry-oriented training.

ARRIVE THE IMPATIENT MANAGER

Now, we see the impatient manager, whether a corporate executive or an entrepreneur, a young man or woman belonging to the post-2010 era, who is a person in a hurryin a hurry to get to the finish and to get there fast. He wants to run the 100-meter race and finish it; then run the next 100 meters, and perhaps repeat the run, again and again. The days of running the long marathon are over.

Those were the days when I started out in the mid-1960s, to join as a management trainee in a large multinational, Glaxo, with dreams of heading it as CEO, after perhaps twenty years and, thus, spending a period of thirty years in the company. In those days, one only dreamt about the marathon.

I am reminded of the new-gen sprint king, Usain Bolt, who is now preparing himself for his fourth successive world title in the 200 meters. Bolt is the winner of an astonishing ten of the last eleven individual Olympic and world sprint titles since shooting to fame at the 2008 Beijing Olympic games. Bolt is a new-gen phenomenon!

YOUNG IN YEARS, HIGH IN REMUNERATION

A report in the Times of India on July 20, 2015, about Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL), headlined, HUL Fast Minting Crorepatis Group. The report talks about HUL's million dollar salary club. It offers eight-digit salaries to 169 managers, with eighty-eight managers below forty years of age and thirty-one managers below thirty-five years.

These 169 managers, who represent just one percent of HULs total workforce, take home a combined salary of 310 crores (over $54 million). It is way more than the total employee spend of midsize companies like Marico, Godrej Consumer, and P&G Hygiene and Healthcare.