World class in India

If one wants to build a ship, it isn't enough to drum up men to go to the forest and gather wood, saw it and nail the planks together, wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Instead, one has to awaken in them a desire for the sea. World Class in India presents the stories of some Indian companies that have been able to generate among their managers this 'desire for the sea'-to overcome their resistance to change and begin the journey to becoming world class.

The cases in this book have been carefully chosen from a cross-section of industries in different sectors, and range from family run to multinational corporations to government enterprises. They are drawn from extensive research done by the authors over several years and show how companies have transformed themselves bottom up, revamping their strategies, organisation and management. The cases are open ended, in that the readers are free to create their own interpretations and take from each story whatever appeals the most to them. The book does not offer any suggestions or analysis of the cases. The analyses are available in a companion volume, Managing Radical Change: What Indian Companies Must Do to Become World-Class.

The cases are presented in four sections:

• The Challenge of Change Almost every company in India is struggling with the issue of how much and what to change. Examples include Bajaj Auto and Life Insurance Corporation of India, two corporate behe moths who were faced with a situation of change or perish.

*Building the Future-Vision has an important role to play in the process of transformation. The cases in this section present companies such as Reliance, NIIT and Wipro who saw the bigger picture and didn't forget to manage the details.

• Revitalising People, Organisations and Relationships Success depends on people's ability to change and renewing businesses requires that not only people but the workplace change as well. The cases of Rashtriya Ispat, Hindustan Lever and Hero Honda reveal the challenges of such behav ioural and attitudinal changes.

*Transforming Leadership Philosophy-To build a truly entrepreneurial, world class organisation, management will have to change its basic philosophy and take on new roles and tasks. This is exactly what companies like HDFC and Infosys have done, and how they did it is the content of this last section.

The book will appeal to two audiences: MBA students and reflective managers. For MBA students, these detailed and current cases of some of India's most admired companies will enrich their course and class discussions and thereby make management courses more relevant to the Indian corporate context. For practising managers, the stories will serve as mirrors in which they can see their own situations reflected, helping them address their own opportunities and chal lenges. But, above all, the authors hope that these case studies will provide the impetus to managers in other companies to give up the addiction to the era of assured markets and embrace the vagaries of a market in flux.