Some months ago, I met Vinita Bali, managing director of Britannia Industries, and asked her the stock question she and other women CEOs must have been asked a thousand times before. Did she not face prejudice as a woman in a male-dominated corporate world? One of the points she made in her longish answer stood out. “Sometimes I feel that we talk about it so much we make it bigger than what it is.”
Too true — and nothing illustrates the point better than the publication of this book in which Ms Bali’s is the first profile. The tone and tenor of the book suggests that it is meant to inspire other ambitious people to rise in the workplace: “They broke untouched barriers. They created footprints where there were none,” the cover gushes.
Here’s my first problem with this book. Its sole basis is gender. Why should this be an issue? Well, because women in India are struggling for equal treatment in the corporate workplace. Most of them want to be treated and judged like normal employees rather than singled out for their gender — for better or for worse. It is worth noting that most senior women executives have strongly rejected the suggestion that board positions be reserved for women to encourage gender diversity in the workplace — they’d rather get there on their own merit.
Indeed, the 18 women here are successful but I suspect they would like to be remembered as successful CEOs rather than as successful women or even prima donnas, as the term divas suggests.
Now, if you read through the essays you will discover that although the individual stories are interesting, if they were transposed on to men, they would not be so remarkable as to constitute the contents of a book. It is unlikely that Penguin would consider publishing a book called, say Corporate Supermen, profiling 18 men executives with similar stories.
Consider, as a random example, the essay on Dipali Goenka, executive director of Welspun Retail. She’s been called an “iconoclast”. What’s her story? She married at 18, right after her schooling and at a time when her father was critically ill. Then she had two children and took a correspondence course to acquire a graduate degree. Then she joined her husband’s family business, and was given charge of administration because no one took her seriously. Then she started learning the nitty-gritty of the business, eventually setting up a chain of retail stores which, according to the author, are “household names” (they’re called Spaces and Welhome).
The author also tells us Dipali transformed Welspun from a wholesale and export-driven company into a domestic retail giant. But she does not provide the basic information to back this up. What percentage of sales or profits does the retail business account for?
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Ms Goenka tells the author her inspiration is her mother, a traditional woman who covered her head but ran the family business and the home with consummate success when her husband was ill. She sounds an altogether much more interesting subject for this book than does her privileged daughter.
The essay ends, as all of them do, with cryptic quotes, presumably from the subject. Ms Goenka’s runs thus: “If a woman sets her heart and mind to doing something, she will overcome all obstacles and make it happen.” It is news to me that men can’t achieve this.
The other problem with the book is the proforma and indiscriminate way in which the subject has been organised and approached. Most of the women profiled here are what we would call the usual suspects — apart from Bali, Naina Lal Kidwai, Chanda Kochhar, Rajshri Pathy, Shikha Sharma and Zia Mody, to name a familiar few (only Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is missing from this collection). Also, little of the information is so startlingly new as to merit the destruction of trees for what is largely available on the Net.
Nor has Ms Golani, an entrepreneur and CEO herself, chosen to distinguish between those who’ve made it on their own steam and those who had the backing of their family businesses — the experiences of either group can be quite different. For instance, Ms Goenka’s husband is chairman and MD of the group but Ms Golani doesn’t explore the issue of whether this gave Ms Goenka a head start that few other women would get.
As it is, with its cutesy prose – Manisha Girotra of UBS shares her “magic mantra”, various “bundles of joy” arrive for others and so on – the book reads like the dewy-eyed efforts of a novice business reporter. The issue of women in the corporate workplace is surely too critical to be subjected to such treatment.
CORPORATE DIVAS
Sonia Golani
Portfolio/Penguin
229 pages; Rs 250