Creating visionary leaders

THE QUALITY CONUNDRUM

How Indian Industry is managing quality?

Industry in India is undergoing phenomenal change. It is growing at an unprecedentedly fast rate. But to sustain this growth, manufacturing needs transformation "" not only through policy changes and in terms of improving infrastructure, but also through a stronger thrust on building competitiveness.

An important aspect of building competitiveness in manufacturing is to create visionary leaders who can transform the manufacturing culture in the country to create a "uniqueness" about Indian companies that puts them ahead of others; who are capable of innovation and breakthrough thinking to envision future concepts and become trend-setters in their business; and who can sense the weak signals of opportunity being offered by the fast-changing environment.

In the past few articles, I discussed the principles that visionary leaders need to follow in order to be successful in taking breakthrough ideas to fruition. To be able to perform the visionary tasks expected of them, CEOs need to be trained to think like visionary leaders.

They need to be trained to follow these principles to the advantage of the organisation, the manufacturing sector and the nation as a whole. According to Shoji Shiba, an authority on breakthrough management, they need to have the three eyes of the Budhha "" the eye of control, the eye of incremental improvement and the eye for foreseeing the future.

With this backdrop, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) under the aegis of the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council (NMCC) decided to develop a programme targeted at building 200-250 visionary leaders for the manufacturing sector over the next three years.

This programme, scheduled to be launched on September 23 at the CII Godrej Centre of Excellence, has been developed under the guidance of Shiba, and is designed to be an highly advanced and innovative management education system to create future leadership. It brings together Shiba's experience along with that of industry and the leading academic institutions of the country, the IITs and IIMs.

According to Shiba, India is going through a 10X change, or simply, a period of drastic change. To survive, a culture of innovative thinking and implementation needs to be built. Such a programme would help in building visionary thinking through interventions and use of thinking tools. To understand the emphasis, consider some of the modules of the programme.

The first module, titled "Orientation and Breakthrough", is about leadership in transforming companies, developing the ability to perceive change and creating a future direction.

Recognising the fact that such abilities can be acquired only through practice each module will devote 70 per cent of the time to practice through plant visits, group work, application to own company and so on.

The uniqueness of the programme lies in it enabling the participants to bring value to their organisations each time they go back after completing a module. In fact, the participants have agreed to identify the possible areas for improvement before the first module in order to derive maximum benefit from the programme.

The various modules have been arrived at keeping in view the pace of change in Indian manufacturing as well as the need for industry players to look for something new with in the current practices being followed by them.

Driven by this need, the second module, titled "Contemporary Manufacturing Systems" focuses on enabling the participants to gain skills to implement synchronised manufacturing flow, get a systemic view of operations and create a future plan for action.

Given the global business environment, it is but obvious that high value-add manufacturing will grow significantly in India. To remain competitive, manufacturing will have to create breakthroughs and continuous innovations in products and processes, and thus the third module "Product and Process Design" will help develop competencies in these areas.

A visionary leader, while having the capability to foresee the future, must also be able to read some basic aspects of the balance sheet, apply some basic accounting tools and analysis.

Moreover, a visionary leader needs to have a strategic mindset and be able to build a strategy for product/business evolution under a competitive environment. Therefore, the fourth module, Manufacturing Strategy/Accounting and Finance, is a critical element of the programme.

Finally, to enable the participants to learn from real examples, the last module comprises plant visits in India and Japan. The idea is to learn best practices being followed by leading companies and develop personal skills.

While doing this, the participants will also attempt to give a benefit back to the host companies through a report using the tools taught by Shiba. The participants will be expected to observe the "big M", that is, the BIG Manufacturing concept, see the invisible and unknown about the companies and bring outside information into own company.

The attempt is to create a learning community at the national level to bring the best of talent together to meet the challenges facing the Indian manufacturing sector.

Dr Surinder Kapur is chairman, CII Mission for Manufacturing Innovation, and chairman and managing director, Sona Koyo Steering Systems