‘dharma, the very path to sustainable profit and growth’

You have straddled the management world across continents and have gathered insights into its various facets. How strong is culture vis-a-vis an organization’s well-being? Culture is the, relatively, most important of the three factors that are needed for the effectiveness of an organization, including its well-being. The other two factors are organizational structure and organizational processes. In the early decades of management education, training and consulting, the focus was almost exclusively on ‘structure’. It was a mechanistic concept, typified by an hierarchical chart. Unsatisfactory experiences such as low productivity, poor quality, absenteeism, and low engagement of workers on the one hand, and research by behavioural scientists, on the other hand, brought out the human, psychological, and social factors impacting the organization. In the late 1960s, IIM Calcutta had India’s strongest behavioral science group. I was fortunate to be there from 1967-72.