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Quartered!

B. S. Raghavan

T. S. ELIOT wrote of life being measured in coffee-spoons, or something to that effect. (Eliot is passe, and no body quotes him these days!) Well, our corporates have found a better way: They live by the quarters and for the quarters. Business ne ws is full of results of Q1s to Q4s, and ebbs and flows of bourses are determined by them. Companies injudicious enough to give out optimistic advance projections are hoist on their own petard if their claims do not measure up, and the fall of t heir stock is all the steeper.

Making definitive judgments on quarterly performance seems to me to be a quaint way of doing business. For three reasons. One, it is too short a period for any financial, investment, product development or marketing decision to make an impact. Second, it puts everybody from the CEO down to the shop floor managers to the mental and operational straitjacket of a suffocating time-frame, and ends up demoralising them if they fall short on any account. The managers are metaphorically drawn and quartered by a n unrealistic concept.

The third, which is the inevitable corollary of the other two, is that, thus finding themselves quarter by quarter subjected to a kind of Chinese water torture, they lose their ability to see the big picture, to keep themselves abreast of developments in science and technology, and to find time for procuring and evaluating business intelligence on new products and services and rivals' plans and strategies. In short, they fail in the one single, core of the core, raison d'tre of management itself: Vision , without which setting long-range goals for themselves will remain a far cry.

I found corroborative evidence of these dismal propositions when I recently met two country managers. They belonged to firms with pretensions of global operations and ambitions of setting themselves up as benchmarks, and so should, in my judgment, be nor mally expected to be sharp as a knife, with their mental radar up and active, and spinning, all the 24 hours scanning the horizons for opportunities.

When I asked them how they were gearing up for grabbing business resulting from the opening up of insurance in India, each of them told me in so many words, believe me or not, that all they could do was to have each quarter behind them as fast as possibl e, and devil take the vision thing!

When I pressed on mentioning the need to tailor their products and services to suit the new demands and `evangelise' to India's newly liberated prospective clientele and players of the insurance sector, they said if it was that important for the denizens of that sector to have their help, they would no doubt approach them at the appropriate time. Seizing the initiative, taking time by the forelock, being on the go and on the ball -- were all not in their vocabulary or even dictionary!

I further tested them with the degree of their awareness of ideas with which the entire developed world was abuzz, such as P2P, the Rule of Three, Mind Map, electronic spirituality and so on, and they seemed as dumb as any stale bureaucrat in a cobweb-ri dden government office. What a woeful picture of the private sector that we are all glorifying!