FIRST principle of philosophy, according to Rene Descartes, was: ‘I think therefore I am.’ So sure of it he was that “all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were unable to shake it”. For Murli Manohar Joshi, however, the line has to be adapted a bit: “I think therefore IIM.”

It used to be said when philanderers ruled the earth, commoners rushed to hide their pretty wives when the royalty passed by the street, you know why. Now, they are doing something similar with institutions that enjoyed autonomy thus far, only these bodies are too big to hide behind walls. Frantic efforts are on, such as industry captains meeting with top powers, suits filed to nullify interference, and articles filling up newspapers and magazines.

Among the myriad reports, there is one that is titled, “Keep off: Kurien,” talking about the views of the father of the white revolution in India, Dr Verghese Kurien. His 1991 report to the Centre on IIMs had suggested independence from the government, establishment of a corpus fund, block contributions from the government and so on.

In the wake of the current controversy, his recent views have predictably been pro-autonomy and anti-meddling.

Kurien is no mincer of words and if you want to know his views on IIM, a good place to look at is a book by S.N.Chary, an IIM-B prof. Titled, “Business Gurus Speak”, and published by Macmillan in 2002, it features interviews with ‘extraordinary personalities’ such as Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Azim Premji, N.R.Narayana Murthy, Venu Srinivasan, Deepak Parekh, and Mukesh Ambani, apart from Kurien. “You at IIM are using public funds to provide managers for Hindustan Lever and Nestle,” he says, and Joshi may please note.

Kurien was on the IIM’s Board. “So, I spoke in the Board,” narrates the nation’s milkman. “The raison d’etre of this Institute is to provide managers for the under-managed sector, which means NGOs, co-operatives and the public sector, but not multinationals.” Not a popular thought, you muse. Which is what the Board too felt. “One person sitting next to me with a cigar in his mouth said, ‘You mean to say that the graduates of our Institute are to be taught how to milk cows?’ Everybody giggled at that and he put his cigar back.” Is that the end of the story? No. “So, I said, ‘No. You teach them how to suck cigars. I don’t want to work on this Board.’”

Then, Kurien went on to build IRMA, the Institute of Rural Management Anand, with inputs from his cousin Ravi Mathai, who was the Director in IIM, Ahmedabad. Avoid mistakes that happened in IIM, Mathai instructed: “So cousin, when you build IRMA, please build a bigger house for the director than for the professors so that they will know that there is a boss.” Next, don’t give too much powers to professors; this is not Harvard. For this, Kurien recounts Mathai told him: “I told a professor whom I had appointed, ‘You are free to go ahead and fill all the lower posts in your department.’ That person went to his village, brought all his relations and appointed them. That was a terrible mistake which I made.”

And, there’s one more: “The third point cousin, is that you should cut down on the number of people you employ. We have so many people, and therefore, labour union problems, courts, and so on. I am tired of it all. You are a dictator, so run it as a dictator. If anyone steps out of line, sack him. I can’t do that; I am not made that way.’”

Now, this is Kurienspeak: “I said, ‘Ravi Mathai, neither you nor any of your professors have ever managed anything.” Keep off Kurienspeak on IIMs, shall we say?

Infosys Technologies, Chief Mentor N.R. Narayana Murthy, was for the third Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award for Excellence in Public Administration and Management Sciences for the year 2001 for its excellence in the field of institution-building.
The prize carries a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh, a citation and a table and would by President APJ Abdul Kalam, on 1 October in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mr. Anil Shastri, president of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management journalists here today. Mr. Imputation Narayana Murthy for the construction of one of the most precious in the world, “said Shastri, it is an icon of the computer industry and the country proud. “The price supports, in the year 1999 by LBSIM, was the management guru CK Pralhad Profiles in the years 1999 and Mr. Sam Pitroda, World-Tel in 2000.

Abir Pal, Shailesh Dobhal, Brian Carvalho, Roshni Jayakar, Priya Srinivasan, Sahad P.V., Venkatesha Babu, Kushan Mitra, Nitya Varadarajan

She has a first, maybe several firsts to her credit.

She has helped change the way her company works.

She has helped create an industry.

She has helped her company explore uncharted waters.

She has changed the way her industry works.

She is the role model for other women in business.

She is in a position to change the lives of countless individuals.

She may satisfy any of these conditions.

She may satisfy all.

She is one of the most powerful women in Indian business.

She is one of the 25 most powerful women in Indian business.

Stateswoman #1

Arnavaj ‘Anu’ Aga

62 Chairperson Thermax

Aga gives up one source of power and, not surprisingly, taps into another.

India Inc. Has enough male industrialists and CEOs who have grown into the position of elder statesman-Ratan Tata, Rahul Bajaj, N. R. Narayana Murthy-but Anu Aga is the first woman who qualifies for that distinction. With her patrician features and striking cropped silver mane, the lady is a regular at industry fora, and when she talks, people listen. That’s not just because Aga built the Pune-based Thermax Group into a Rs 830-crore energy and environmental engineering major. It is not because of her stated objective of “doubling turnover and trebling profits in the next three years”. It is because she speaks (and acts) from the heart (one reason why this magazine dubbed her India Inc.’s Ms Conscience in last year’s listing of powerful women). This is evident in Thermax’s practice of putting aside 1 per cent of its profits for social causes and its generous contributions towards efforts to beautify Pune. And it is evident in Aga’s own association with Akanksha, a non-governmental organisation that strives to provide education to children who live in slums and on the streets.

Last year, one of this magazine’s writers wrote “… Aga will definitely not feature in the next listing… She turns 62 in September 2004 and will hand over charge as Chairperson…”. Now, with the date of her retirement drawing close, it emerges that Aga’s power was never positional (arising from the post she held); it was always personal-arising from truth, fairness, transparency and corporate ethics. That could explain why the economics graduate (she also has a post-graduate degree from Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences) was motivated by a letter from a concerned shareholder to put aside her grief at the death of her husband and Thermax’s founder Rohinton, and focus on the ailing company. As it could, her outspoken criticism of the way the government of Gujarat handled the sectarian violence that broke out in the state in early 2002.

Byline: Swati Prasad, Brian Carvalho, Shailesh Dobhal, Roshni Jayakar, Moinak Mitra, Priya Srinivasan, Nitya Varadarajan, Kushan Mitra

Mammon may be the deity of choice of the corporate world but there is one higher authority to which he must pay obeisance. This is power itself. It is the ability to shape and change organisations, careers, markets, entire industries, sometimes, the lives of an entire nation. It is the deafening silence that falls upon a meeting when someone with enough of the commodity to spare raises his or her voice to make a point. It is the raw envy an individual’s achievements provoke in people around. It is, in equal parts admiration, respect, influence, and it is more.

Definitions are important, for they delineate who we are and what we do. When we at Business Today set out to identify the 25 most powerful women in Indian business, we started off by looking for a largely-objective quantifiable methodology (confession: we are partial to numbers) that could accomplish the task. Power, unfortunately, confounds most available metrics. So, we decided to do the next best thing: define our universe and the criteria we would use to identify the most powerful women in business.

The universe we decided on was, simply, women in business. Entrepreneurs, executives, wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters inducted into the family business, everyone would be considered. That left out women who weren’t actively involved in business, but who exerted considerable influence (sometimes more than those in business) simply by being close to those in power. Infosys’ N.R. Narayana Murthy, Reliance’s Mukesh Ambani, and Godrej’s Adi Godrej are all powerful men and they are married to strong women (Sudha, Nita, and Parmeshwar, respectively) who serve, more often than not, as muse, confidant, and sounding board rolled into one. Does that make them powerful? You bet, but the fact that they aren’t actively in business disqualifies them from this listing.

The criteria we used was equally straightforward: to qualify for the listing a woman needed to have done one of several things. She had to have achieved something really of note such as becoming the country’s first woman Revenue Secretary, like Vineeta Rai did. She should have helped change her company, much like Mallika Srinivasan changed, and is changing, TAFE. She must have created an industry like Shahnaz Husain did the beauty one. She could have pushed at the frontiers of commercial science like Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Villoo Morawala Patell did and continue to do. She had to have helped her company chart unexplored waters (and successfully at that), much like Shikha Sharma and Chanda Kochhar helped ICICI Bank do. She could be at the vanguard of change in her industry, like Meenakshi Madhvani has always been. She should have pioneered good business practices like Anu Aga did. Or she might be in charge of a company that through money-power, innovations, products and services, or a combination of all changes the direction of other companies and of individuals. Put simply, merely being a senior woman executive wasn’t enough.

Armed with these definitions Business Today’s correspondents and editors fanned out meeting consultants, analysts, executives, the women themselves, and just about anyone else who could provide a perspective of power. The result is the first ever listing of The 25 Most Powerful Women in Indian Business.

India Inc’s

NEW DELHI, April 18 Asia Pulse - Following Friday’s stock market crash after Infosys’ (BSE:632238) guidance of a flat growth in first quarter, the company’s Chairman and Chief Mentor N R Narayana Murthy today said he did not understand market behaviour.