The graying hair on my head no longer bothered me as I got ready to face the camera. Though I still rehearse each of my presentation or speech in front of a mirror.....
A series of written exams and interviews (and a lengthy correspondence) got me the job in 1966 as a new joiner in the India operations of the Corporation. With its offices spread over the world, it was a matter of time I would enjoy a stint in almost all countries in the world.
The Corporation was founded in 1946, at New York, right after the WWII. The founders decided that it was the right time to make a new beginning. Many countries were coming to terms with their newfound independence while the economies of erstwhile powers of Western Europe lay shattered by the impact of the war. The fear of the rise another Hitler or a despotic figure led the founders to create a revolution, starting with making the top management in the Corporation a seven member Council. One of the Council members was a CEO, figurative head with a veto power but otherwise having the authority of any other member of the Council.
I was born in 1941. There were no celebrations on my birth. My grand mother had lamented '..on top of being a girl, she is mad...'. My mother had refused to see my face for ten days. I had brought her nothing but humiliation. The family had expected a male heir after my mother bore three daughters. Had I been a boy I would have been loved and cared for, in spite of the 'madness', as I was to marry and produce more male heirs to carry on the upper caste family name. In a society divided on caste my grand mother considered it an added insult when our servant, a lower caste impure 'untouchable', bore a healthy boy just a week after I was born. I was disposed to my maternal grand parents, as it was considered my mother's fault that I was born such. It was just lucky that I survived, for female infanticide was not unheard of in our community.
My maternal grandfather loved me. When I was 10 he would patiently help me read the daily newspapers, it was filled with the reports of bonfires of Indian cotton fabric in London. Living in Chandigarh, capital of the Punjab state of the Northern India, the brewing anger of the cloth merchants from Gujarat in Western India, was inconsequential. Our household gossip was made of attacks on unskilled farm workers from around Chandigarh, who sought work on the farms of western USA. They still did not comprehend completely that these two incidents of 1951 were a direct result of acts of the Corporation. The CEO, John Norman, had campaigned for and won, free movement of capital, resources and manpower between nations. Neo classical economists accused Norman of being a propagator of 'free market', while Annie Higgins, a member of the Council speculated on his being a Socialist in an interview in The New York Times. Citizens were so used to seeing the decisions of the politicians being made in an arcane way that few could see that the front page coverage of Norman's policies for the Corporation were in fact the results of labour of the Corporate Planning department. Headed jointly by Takeru Akazawa and Raymond Miller, the Corporate Planning department in 1948 was said to have consisted of 50 odd top economists and former academicians, headquartered in Washington. When, in 1949, they proposed the 'boundary less economy', Norman wanted all the regional managers to 'buy in' to the policy instead of imposing it from the center. The final policy had been drafted with inputs from all regions in which the Corporation operated.
Workshops and presentation were made to all those who mattered. An 'Internal Selling' exercise at such a large scale had never being undertaken. The policy was implement in 1951 and triggered the incident at London as cheaper cotton cloth from Gujarat flooded the European market. The cloth made with cheap raw material and cheap labour, though inferior in quality, was one-fifth the price of the cloth produced in the mills of England with imported cotton. The non-land owning tenant farm laborers of Punjab, with its vagrant rain-dependant uncertain farming practices, who migrated to western USA had also 'flooded' the farming economy and were ready to work on a fourth of the wages. A revolt form the natives was expected and it looked inevitable that the local governments would bow to their demands. It took the resolve of a person like Normal and the Council, Higgins included, to stand by the policy and see it through.
In 1956 the Corporations' sleepy Corporate Environment department was nudged into wakefulness with the growing Green Pace movement. The chemical spewing factories of the Corporation were harnessed. In 1958 Chekov Huteri gave the historic speech in the GBM presenting the first natural resources balance sheet. In the subsequent years the Corporation declared various wild life reserves in the geographies covered under its operations, especially the tropical rainforest of South America and Africa as 'No Commerce' zones. These efforts were lauded by all the nations but the regional offices of the Corporation were faced with protest demonstrations in Argentina, Brazil, Uganda and many other nations. I still remember the hilarious cartoon appearing in a vernacular newspaper of southern India showing Huteri seated on a human chair, which on closer examination had a close resemblance to the skinny vociferous timber merchant Rajan Ramayya.
By the time I completed my post-graduation, I was used to facing resistance in all form from all quarters. Getting admitted in a college had been difficult but compared to my fight to get a job it seemed like a cakewalk. Being a girl was the least of my sins. Thus it was with unbelieving joy that I received the letter of offer of employment from the regional office of the Corporation. A closer examination of the letter dissolved my pleasure. The appointment was for a position much below the one I had applied for. The offer had all the appearances of an alm doled out of sympathy. After many a sleepless nights, I slowly typed a letter to head office of the Corporation enclosing details of my qualifications and the offer letter. Many letters flew back and forth between Chandigarh and Washington. It took four months for an affirmative reply to arrive from Washington and another two months for the office to be suitably furnished for me in the Chandigarh branch of the Corporation. This was my first hand experience of the slow moving, and by now bureaucratic Corporation.
The processes which were well documented by now, led to a slow moving machinery with rules in thick official acting as hurdles. It was much later after much toil and hard work to prove myself and make those who matter in the higher echelons of power recognize my contribution that I could become a part of the process reengineering exercise at the Corporate in 1975, where the processes were streamlined to allow for faster reactions to the environment. And yet I could not ignore the changes taking place with in and with out the Corporation. Norman at 78, was well past the retirement age and still sticking on the CEOs mantle, or may be it was because the stakeholders who could not imagine the Council with out him. In truth the best part of his tenor seemed to be past him just as his slogan of 'boundryless world' had become stale. The forces of demand and supply had reached equilibrium in the early 1960s and there was a blissful period of heavy growth in the Corporation. That was the Golden period for the Corporation with showing the maximum profit, maximum return for the stakeholder, and optimal utilization of all resources. But in 1975 some much-touted factories and regional operations showed losses. Costs were high and profits were decreasing. Employee morale was low and there were talk of racist practices. More than anything else the stakeholders' trust seemed to be waning, especially with reports of corruption in some regions especially in Eastern Europe, to the extent that there were talks of possible competition for the Corporation.
The beginning of 1976 saw the accession of Akio Lim to the position of CEO. The stock price of the Corporation could not have been lower, but from then it rose slowly and before anyone could realize it, Lim's soft treads had turned around the Corporation. Best Quality practices were embraced in all departments. Regions were now profit centers and were set compete with each others in achieving the target profit and yet being the part of the same organization were expected to cooperate in all matters. It looked like a paradox situation, but it was the impetus required to close ailing industries, releasing labour, capital and other resources and also cutting losses. Lim embraced the information age at a marathon pace and soon all the processes were automated. Outsourcing to other specialized service companies reached such a level that Lim's erst-while department of corporate planning had competition in the form of consulting organizations which other departments were free to hire. Lim encouraged cross-cultural experience and that is what prompted me to learn all about American architecture as I found myself heading the Department of Corporate Planning from Washington in 2000. I was seeing a snow fall for the first time as I stood looking up at the White House and marveled at scale and reach of preservation work on national monuments undertaken by the Corporation. Looking at myself, I saw an equal magnitude of gadgets fitted in, some to make me speak well, others to make me look good. Was I a showcase for some of Corporation's increasing amount of marketing efforts? I sighed. What if I was, it was a newfound pleasure for me to address a large audience with out faltering even once. I slowly moved to newspaper kiosk and settled down on my chair to read the front page.
Washington Post - 30 March 2000
Ms Anuja Chawla of the Department of Corporate Planning today presented the balance sheet of the Corporation Earth at its 54th GBM, held in Washington this year. After WWII the leaders of all the states had decided to form an entity to run the planet earth as a global corporate. From 1944 to 1945 Roosevelt, Churchilland Stalin had met and convinced all the world leaders to be a part of the organization called Corporation Earth. Though the states retained their national entity their governance was through regional offices of the Corporation, manned by local managers. It allowed for efficient running of he infrastructural machinery and resources of these nations.
The high point of Ms Chawla's presentation was when she used economic projections using CASEBUILD feature of the latest in the information technology to present the hypothetical scenario of planet Earth minus Corporation Earth. The scenerio speaks of political nations as sperate economic states competition and fighting on all issues, be it trade related or geographical disputes. Some snapshots of the scenario which could have been have been compared to today's situation, as presented by Ms Chawla are:
· Of the world's 6 billion people, more than 1.2 billion would have lived on less than $1 a day. Two billion more people would have been only marginally better off.* At the same rate of inflation, cost of living index and currency exchange rates, today the average income per day of a citizen is $50. The differences in income are such as would exist in any free market economy with opportunity for education, healthcare and employment.
· About 60 percent of the people living on less than $1 a day would have lived in live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.* Today such a wide contrast in levels of development in different parts of the world is absent. Infrastructural development in most regions is at par with even the remotest regions been connected by road, telephone connectivity electricity and water supply.
· The world per capita GDP would have risen from $680 in 1900 to only $6,500 by 2000.* It has risen to $15,000 today. This scenario has been obtained by facilitating free movement of technology, capital, labour and goods.
The hypothetical scenario seems to have been more to silence groups, which were questioning the Corporations role and 'monopoly'.
Predicably the detractors also had a field day out side the venue for the GBM. Their leader Mr John Wright demands the formation a rival organization to Corporation Earth, to allow for by healthy competition. He states that the Corporation claims that its all for a healthy competition in all fields and against monopoly, as charity begins at home Mr Wright demanded that to form a competing worldwide organization was his right. He also pointed out that for all the back patting going on in the GBM, the Corporation had let down the citizens, as it was rife with corruption.
A group of demonstrators outside the Head Quarters of the Corporate in New York, were accusing the Corporation of being imperialist. Their leader Mr Qausim forcefully indicated that several countries of Africa, South America and Asia were included in the Corporation by their imperialist rules in 1946, at a time when these were colonies with little say in their destinies. Mr Qausim said that though all the colonies were awarded 'freedom' in 1946, it was matter of changing hands form one ruler to another since a majority of the first batch of managers of the regional offices of the Corporation were from various former imperialist states. He said that Corporation was still 'pushing around' these states by measures like locking up a major portion of their natural resources in the name of conservation and by forced industrialization and globalisation up on the states, killing their ethnic culture.
The GBM ended on the positive with all the stakeholders and citizens applauding the 40% growth in profit after taxes posted by the Corporation in the financial year. The stock price of the Corporation jumped by 20 points when CEO announced the much expected accession of Ms Chawla to Council. Ms Chawla joined the Corporation in the India regional office in 1966. She is the first council member with cerebral palsy, and she herself hopes she is the last as one of the many achievements of medical sciences in the past 64 years has been the complete cure on early detection of the once mysterious illness.
*The data for hypothetical scenario have not been generated by CASEBUILD but have been taken from World Bank....
Puja Karki is a management consultant with diverse experience in IT and business process outsourcing domains, with special focus on BFSI and FMCG verticals. Additionally she is a prolific writer and speaker about outsourcing, IPR and contemporary global issues.
email: puja.karki@gmail.com
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