Recalling his visits to Kolkata in summer, Sumantra Ghoshal would say, “Imagine the heat, the humidity, the noise, the dirt. It sucks up all your energy, drains your brain, and exhausts your imagination.” And then he would talk about the forest of Fontainebleau, near INSEAD, where he was a professor at that time, and point to “the smell of the trees, the crispness in the air, the flowers, and the grass underfoot. How one's heart lifts up, how the energy and creativity bubble away. Go through the door of any business, and you can tell whether it is Kolkata or Fontainebleau.”
The challenge to Growth or Organisational Management does not lie in the lack of explicit knowledge but in tacit knowledge. Organisations today are gigantic warehouses of explicit knowledge but the art of leading and managing the techie, the knowledgeable professional or the functional technologist does not lie in the explicit domain.
The ask from Management is to manage great, difficult, knowledgeable people who are relatively well paid, are not easy throwaways and have their own firm ideas, beliefs, goals and frustrations but less time. One needs reflection time, vision and wisdom on their side to pre-empt...
If you feel your organisation smells like the forest in springtime Fontainebleau, you do not need me. But, if it is getting more like Kolkata in summer...
