Arindam Chaudhuri Books

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THE GREAT INDIAN DREAM

- A 14% GROWTH RATE FOR INDIA, AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT.
-A VISION TO CATCH UP WITH THE DEVELOPED WORLD IN 25 YEARS.
-A COUNTRY FREE OF POVERTY AND ITS RELATED ILLS.
-A GLOBALLY APPLICABLE PHILOSOPHY CALLED "HAPPY CAPITALISM" FOR A BETTER WORLD.

As the authors put it 'The Great Indian Dream' is about making India a developed nation where people live with dignity. In 25 years from today children should be taken to poverty museums like they are taken to the science museums. They should shiver at the sight of the way people used to live today because poverty should be a concept alien to them".

Its "The Great Indian Dream". Come share the dream.

Malay Chaudhuri & Arindam Chaudhuri for years now have been working together on presenting an alternative budget to the government of India each year. Their efforts now take the shape of a book in "The Great Indian Dream". "The Great Indian Dream" is an effort by the authors to take economics to the layman. The authors believe that while economics and economic policies effect the lives of the layman, the study and understanding of the same has deliberately been complicated, mathematised and kept restricted to a limited few.
The book is divided into three parts. In the first chapter, called 'India Betrayed - Looking Local' the book traces the Indian economic development in comparison with the rest of the world over the last 50 years and more. In a forthright and academically justified manner the authors analyse and critically tear apart the entire process of Indian development and the lack of political will which has kept the majority of the masses in a state of abject poverty comparable to sub Saharan African standards.
In the second chapter, called 'Happy Capitalism - Thinking Global' the book propagates Arindam's concept of Happy Capitalism. This path breaking effort tries to talk about an ideal economic system in order to achieve "The Great Indian Dream". It compares the inhuman aspects of the modern day market oriented capitalist system non conducive to human happiness with the ideal system that the global economies should thrive for. It calls for the adoption of absolutely original and iconoclastic concepts of Survival of the Weakest, Trickle-up Theory and the Law of Increasing Marginal Utility in an attempt to propagate limits to growth for a happier society.
It is the third chapter, called 'The Great Indian Dream' where the book comes out as an entirely different experience from many other books which have analysed the state of the Indian economy due to the fact that it also gives possible solutions to the identified problems. This is where Malay Chaudhuri's years of research and experience shows up along with his passion for the masses. The authors have almost worked like a mini planning commission giving alternate resource mobilization techniques as well as their uses and tried to show how a 14% growth rate is feasible. This is where the book really scores. It ends with "The Great Indian Dream"… a vision for a great Indian revival.

Content Details of the Chapters:

Chapter - I : India Betrayed - Looking Local

A rich nation ramains poor
- From the ideology of running the nation as a family
- To the reality of running the nation as a department store
India under lens
- Land of dying destitutes
- Mass illiteracy & Mafia Raj
- The withering repressive state
- Indian Jails a veritable hell: criminals outside innocent inside
- Disinvestment or abdication of macro responsibility?
The Betrayers
- Our Insensitive, shameless, communal politicians
- Dysfunctional judiciary & corrupt law enforcers
- Gaurdians of status quo: the media and academia

Chapter - 2 : Happy Capitalism - Thinking Global

The quest for a better world : From dictatorial communism to dictatorial capitalism
- The democratic revolution to end all exploitation
- The dictatorial return of the smoke ‘em out Cowboy
The wild west believes in the survival of the fittest
- Market capitalism never satisfied anybody
- Illusion of democracy: Individual masters of life or slaves to the system?
Happy Capitalism : The most urgent humane agenda
- Survival of the weakest & Trickle up theory: Redefining some rules
- The law of increasing marginal utility: Redefining satisfaction

Chapter - 3 : The Great Indian Dream

Restoring pride: Alternatives for a journey towards dignity
- Philosophical & economic basis for the India of our dreams
- An employed, well read, Biryani eating & AIDS free India
- Courts which are not on strike
- Igniting the sprit of entrepreneurship & patriotism
- Voting without being embarrassed
- India After 25 Years: A Vision

'COUNT YOUR CHICKENS BEFORE THEY HATCH'

Extracts from the Book

If you think you can, you are right :

Just be passionate about what you think - is how the mgmt. guru Arindam Chaudhuri urges us to delve deeper and make headway into what the title of the book has in store for us.
They say “don’t count your chickens before they hatch”. They are correct. Every time you are about to sign a big contract in life, expect to meet with a fatal accident while getting out of the car on your way to signing the contract. In fact, every time you are about to start the greatest speech or concert of your life, expect to fall flat on the stage and break your nose. Or rather when your aircraft has landed safely don’t start thanking God, but expect to die due to a fall from the stairs while climbing down the aircraft. So what if you have written your exams to your utter satisfaction; don’t rejoice, but anticipate that your paper will get exchanged with that of the worst student of your class. Have you worked very hard on the most important project of your life? Stay put. On the day of submission, your computer will be attacked by the latest virus which will eat up your whole project without a burp.

Believe me this is how every Tom, Dick and our very own Hari think. That is why they are called Tom, Dick and Hari and not Gandhi, Lincoln and Gates.

Life has its extremes and there are so many things which are beyond our control. Life itself, accidents, government policies… and taxes of course. But do we live expecting extremes to take control of our life? And then, expect success to be with us too?

I don’t.

Most successful men and women don’t.

Success is a matter of attitude. It is a matter of what you think you are capable of. It is a matter of futuristic thinking and planning. It is about doing things carefully. Instead of getting out of your car without looking at the speeding car zooming towards you, you can be more careful. You can also, climb down a little carefully so that you don’t fall off the aircraft stairs. In fact, it is also about taking a couple of backups in your computer in case it is the most important project of your life.

And then it is about counting your chickens before they hatch... and about a positive attitude... and about believing that: “if you think you can, you are right”.

All stories of success have one common element: passion. Passion for what they want to achieve. Enough passion to keep their eyes from wandering away from the goal. Passionate passion to finally see them through.
I advise my clients to take people based upon PQ (Passion Quotient)

Passion works wonders and all examples mentioned in the book from Henry Ford to John F. Kennedy from Gautam Buddha to Swami Vivekananda, From J. R. D. Tata to Dhirubhai Ambani, from Beethoven to Helen Keller, from Aung San Suu Kyi to Mao Tse Tung, from Ed Roberts to Stephen Hawking, from Albert Einstein to Thomas Edison all must have had a very high passion quotient.

Che Guevara, the world’s greatest ever revolutionary always felt “that you fail does not necessarily mean that the cause you were fighting for was not worth it”. He dared to have a Utopian dream…and chase it. That’s what counting your chickens before they hatch is all about. Che dared to dream of bringing independence with the help of a new and brave army just the way Subash Chandra Bose did. Both of them failed in their respective missions, yet are counted amongst the greatest success stories. They were successful in moving the thought processes of an entire generation—the ideology and vision they were passionately committed to.

The next two chapters add a new flavour to success...it is all about winning friends and motivating people and developing good communication skills. No prize for guessing that these are essentially human relation skills but rarely would you find success stories associated with individuals who do not possess these skills
Hell is where most of us reach at the end of this journey and that’s where best friends seem to unite again! But let me tell you it’s not easy to make such lasting impressions so as to carry your friendship to hell. It requires a lot of talent and carefully practiced human relations skills.One after another of my students, now my friends, left the option of opting for a corporate career in order to join me on the basis of a future made up of only words (when I started Planman with no credentials to boast of, the only thing I could promise then were distant dreams). Most of them have never thought of leaving and are contributing to my firm’s ambitious growth targets. My firm is today made up of seven of my past friends and about a hundred and ten of my students.

Money, I would like to say, only denotes the price of an employee. It is not just money but recognition which is the basic requirement for creating a motivating work culture. It is recognition which enthuses an employee providing the functional tension thereby leading to increased efforts. And by mentioning the money-significance, I just want to emphasise that there are other ways to recognise individuals and their performance. One such powerful and effective motivator is strokes. Let us now get some perspective on this.

Every individual, irrespective of whether he is working with a large organisation or with a small one, has three levels of hunger—status hunger, structure hunger and stroke hunger. These levels of hunger meet their psycho-social needs and hence provide the drive to put in efforts, extra efforts rather. Stroke hunger results from the need to be recognised, the need to feel that one exists, the need to feel that one is important. The reader by now must be wondering what strokes actually mean. A stroke, for simplicity, can be defined as an unit of existence. It tells somebody that he exists, that he is needed, that he is being noticed. Stroke is something that we all look forward to from others around us, especially from our leaders, our managers, our mentors. But believe me, it is in an unbelievably short supply in this world. We tend to ignore this immensely potent means of motivation by taking people for granted and taking their efforts for granted. What I want you to realise is that small tokens of appreciation for your people can change the way they look at you, your organisation, or should I say their organisation, the work that they do and the purpose that you both together strive for. All of us need to take such initiatives and make others feel that they exist, that they are important. This would go a long way in creating all the functional tension that I have been talking about, creating a workplace with more Sergei Bubkas and all such people with fire in their bellies...

People are your most important resource and if the people you work with can become your friends they would be with you even in hell... helping you taste success.
-you can do this by the “genie ‘ of communication

Anthropologists would have made us believe that there is less than a 2% difference (what they say is DNA) between us and the ‘Chimpanzees’. Like it or not, they prove this with research. Well, it’s just that we decided to make the best of this difference and went ahead to conceive civilisations and cultures with our “genie” of communication. We went beyond the restrictive hoots and grunts to evolve a system of communication by harnessing the ability to express complex human ideas and develop a far higher level of synergy. From the primitive wheel, to the pyramids, the epics, man’s first step on moon and to the genome engineering, mankind has made the best of the 2% bestowed upon us by nature.

Today, however, because of its common place nature, communication more often than not gets scant attention and at it best enjoys an ‘Oh, Well Yes, Its Important!’ status. If organisations are all about people and what drives them is people power, then communication should be seen as the powerhouse that generates this people power, so very essential to propel the organisation to its peak performance. Successful leaders have all been great communicators. I remember reading some where that Lincoln due to his poverty owned only a few books. Yet, he used to read and reread them till the language of the books became his. And later of course his communication skills made him one of the greatest leaders and communicators of our times.

In fact the only work that we do the entire day, each day of our lives is to communicate. We communicate verbally and we communicate nonverbally, we communicate within and without and we also communicate with people and with inanimate things around us. In the earlier chapter, we have looked at ways of motivating those around us and the only way to do so is by communicating to them and communicating effectively.
“It’s only words. And words are all I have to take your heart away” Boy Zone thankfully reminds us of the power within us to be able to become the king of hearts.
more so by bringing in the humorous human touch

As one of my students whom I met recently during a marriage ceremony put it when I enquired how his work was “Sir, one thing I learnt at IIPM was take the skin out of the other person but humor them and they won’t even feel bad!”.

After a lot of examples and insights into personal experiences bringing to the fore the values and skills he believes in and has worked hard to inculcate Prof. Chaudhuri inthe next two chapters blends it all with his research and findings in his famous Theory ‘i’ Management

How often has one heard of an American organisation adopting the Japanese management style to surge ahead? How often has one heard of the reverse? Probably never. However, I do remember reading somewhere that when IBM-USA was making losses while IBM-Japan was making profits, IBM-USA tried to adopt the Japanese management style to turn around. The result was increased losses.

Predictable? Should be.

People are different, the cultures are different and so is the life-style. So management styles also need to be different.
That is the reason why Japan has developed its own management style and the US its own.
THIS HAS BEEN THE Basics of “Theory ‘i’ Management”

Inspite of India having some of the best management schools of the world and the best reservoir of skilled human talent, our organisations have not been able to do well. Amongst other reasons one of the most important reasons, for the failure of Indian management has been our failure to develop an indigenous management style, which revolves around our cultural roots and upbringing. Well known Indian management institutes have not been able to come out of the tremendous nationwide inferiority complex that we suffer from. They are proud that their faculty got trained from an American institute and so on. Nobody says that their faculty has done a research on Indian management and is trying to find out what is good for Indian corporates.

Theory ‘I’ is an attempt to understand and define the Indian worker just like the Japanese had tried to do with their Theory “Z”
A recent research done on successful Indians in America goes on to prove that successful Indians in America are not necessarily the happiest people. The job insecurities are too high and so are the pressures. The 40,000 odd people who have been forced to come back to India after the IT melt down is a case in point. Thanks to the Dot com era many Indians today would identify easily with what I am trying to say. In the middle of your career you get lured away by a big package and you wake up a few mornings later to realise that the job is not there. You have got children to support, loans to pay... and your organisation doesn’t care!

The other extreme is the life time employment ideology followed by the public sector... Not because of any culture centric ideas but because of socialist ethics of the Nehru era. Though I mentioned in the last paragraph about Indians loving bonds, yet, we are different from the Japanese. They love bonds and they are hard working. When they got lifetime employment, they were finding out ways to repay the company back: in terms of commitment and hardwork. We are different. We love bonds but are complacent (refer to the principles of “Theory ‘i’ Management”). So, life time employment gives us the opportunity to get paid without working. The environment is just not motivating enough to drive people to higher levels of efforts since it is not backed up by any patriotic instinct or a leader driven vision.

The third situation - the rare one is where a few small and a handful of big companies have tried to strike a balance. These are the organisations which have Indianised their practices (I know of some public sector initiatives too, in this direction) to suit the Indian psyche. They knowingly or unknowingly already do the things which make “Theory ‘i’ Management”. The sad part is that sitting in India I know so well about the way Intel, Microsoft, IBM etc. are managed ; since the Americans have written about them... they love “theoritising their practices.” Thus, we have records of the best practices in America. In India we don’t write. There are no best practices manuals. So, unless and until one actually works with the Tata’s or the Sahara India Pariwar, one does not realise their values and India centric management practices. Yet, these organisations are a boon for Indians. Amongst other things in my mind is also the urge to take out a best practices manual very soon. I am a firm believer of theoritising practical practices for the benefit of masses. I hate to hear the phrase “Oh! that’s in theory” because I believe that there is nothing more practical than a good theory. And if your theory is not practical you need to change it and theoritise what is practical. I try to constantly do that.

If we were to ignore the last case, being of rare nature then what we find is a situation of cultural mis match. The Indian worker is not able to adjust productively to this cultural mis-match and thus, very often, fails to be as productive as his Japanese or American counterpart.

An Indian worker is perhaps looking at a system without ruthless management practices even if the job security is a little less. Instead of the system (specially in PSUs) giving them near 100% job security, it could give them some fear of job security, since Indians culturally like to take life easy and tend to become complacent in such situations. While the job security aspect could be reduced, the human touch in managing them could be increased. They should be made to feel that the company cares for them through regular training programmes, family welfare schemes, etc. They should be made to feel that they matter in the organisation through programmes which involve them directly or indirectly into various decision making processes. This would increase their level of commitment for the organsiations and perhaps tomorrow we would also see people telling that “I am a Bajaj man” instead of “I am working for Bajaj scooters”.
Everytime I go abroad to take a workshop or a seminar... I conduct an exercise. I ask the international participants about how many of them like the Japanese, and hardly any hands go up. I ask them about how many of them like the Americans and I find many hands going up (Americans are traditionally supposed to be the friendly guys). Then I ask them about how many of them like Indians and not to my surprise again many hands go up. Upon being asked the reason for their liking, they have many to state. Some has had an experience with an Indian subordinate while somebody came to India and found Indians very hospitable. Someone else finds Indians warm, friendly and open... the reasons go on.
I reverse the question, and ask them about how many like the Japanese products, the American products and the Indian products. For the first two a lot of hands go up as expected but for the last one, rarely I find any hands going up!
When faced with the fact that everything Indian is so cool outside India, Bhangra and Indipop find place in the US pop charts, the global IT revolution has been fuelled by homegrown geeks, in Ohio the Wright State University College of Business and Administration gets renamed after an NRI businessman, our B-school graduates are becoming global leaders, NASA has top Indian scientists, yet Indians have time and again failed to perform in India; Indians like to blame it on complacency, a characteristic that they like attributing to our culture! It seems Indian’s look for the first opportunity to become complacent; something that they are unable to become in the Western world of competition and hire and fire system. Complacency in my opinion is the biggest problem in India.

Sleepy Cows to Galloping Horses is the final chapter - the success mantra to put to practice the principles of theory “ I”
Lord Krishna, Mahatma Gandhi & globally relevant Indian management mantras

The problem is to turn sleepy cows into galloping horses. How do we do it? For this I have taken a look into the whole problem at two levels. I firmly believe that there are two ways of making people work. The best way, of course, is to make them work through self-realisation and motivation. But at times when that fails you need to have the right kind of laws and regulations. For example, it’s important to educate people about the need to respect women, yet when someone doesn’t, it’s equally important to have a punishment system (which functions, unlike in India) which would immediately take the person to task. The point is to be moral by choice else be moral due to the fear of punishment.
Thus Theory ‘i’ Management prescribes solutions at two levels: The Macro & The Micro.
Very few countries can boast of having leadership traits and theories ingrained in their culture like the Indians can
This is what “Leadership Success Multiplier” is all about. And this is what Lord Krishna was a master of.
Lord Krishna...

A man standing on one leg with the other crossed over it ; A flute in his hand; Long locks of hair and a mysterious look in his eyes. Everytime I close my eyes and try to think of him, this is the picture that keeps coming back. The picture doesn’t remind you of a dynamic corporate leader, nor does it remind you of a tough task master. Yet, he happens to be the greatest of all leaders that I can think of. And as my professor:

Dr. N.R.Chatterjee (my Guru and inspiration behind Theory i Management) used to jokingly say “this man had two great qualities which leaders in general don’t - he knew how to dance and how to make others dance!” Everytime invariably, whatever the situation this man used to be a winner.

Lord Krishna knew how to be effective. He knew when to use management by direction with Arjun (Bhagawat Gita!!) and when to delegate him the complete responsibility (during the war). He knew exactly how to make even Yudhisthir mis-lead Dronacharya and he knew exactly how to handle the other extreme ideas of Duryodhan. Like a specialist conductor he orchestrated the whole war of Mahabharat, from managing Bhishma’s temper to Bhim’s lack of intelligence, from managing the illusion of the sun being still there to managing the end of Karna, from managing the guile of Shakuni to managing the anger of Dhritrashtra. He did it all with amazing smoothness. When it was required he used Dand/Leadership by direction/negative psychological KITA to manage some one like Shishupal. When Gandhari called upon Duryodhan and there was a fear that he might become immortal, Lord Krishna used his intelligence through leadership by seduction and saw to it that it was not to be.

Mahatma Gandhi...
In a different age another great leader a true devout of Lord Ram (Hey Ram!) actually put the leanings from Lord Krishna to practice to lead a nation from the shackles of the British Raj towards independence – Mahatma Gandhi. He is said to have the habit of reading the Gita regularly. Having been ruled for so many years by one foreign power or the other, the Indian populace had been accustomed and acclimatized to exploitation. There were a few raised voices here and there, a few bombs hurled around but never did a revolt of the types of 1857 end up having a nationwide impact like it happened all over the world viz France, Scottland, USA, Russia, China, etc. India was a different nation which needed “Lord Krishna’s Leadership”.
What succeeded every where else failed in India and what was never tried any where else succeeded with the Indians. The success of this nonviolent revolution is perhaps, thus, the biggest lesson for the Indian managers. It should make them realise the importance of coming out with unique management concepts for Indians... because it seems we are actually an unique combination of values, cultures and lethargy (if am permitted to use this word!).

World over bloody revolutions have led to independence but we attained it through “ahimsa (non-violence movement)”. Whether it was more by default than choice could be another story, though! (If Mike Tyson were to challenge me for a boxing about I would tell him straight that I belonged to the land of Gandhi and ahimsa is what I believed in!)
Mahatma Gandhi’s example to me is a perfect case of adopting styles to suit the culture. The country today stands divided on whether what he did was good or bad... I just know one thing. There was never a leader before him or never one after him who could unite us all and bring us out in the streets to demand for what was rightfully ours. To me he is the greatest leader our land has ever seen. And to me it is “Theory ‘i’ Management” at its practical best - productively and intelligently utilizing what ever the resource you are endowed with.

Yes! You can count your chickens before they hatch if you have the determination, the ability to work successfully with people and the flexible attitude of theory ‘i’ management with you!!

Lord Krishna and Mahatma Gandhi have already shown how to make galloping horses out of sleepy cows, its our turn now.
If you think you can you are right.
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