Indians at the workplace always leave me mesmerised by their capacity to deliver. The first surprise came when we introduced the computer/word processor in our office on an experimental basis about three decades ago. An assistant finished typing 25 pages in one day when assistants were generally typing up to five to six pages a day on an average on the typewriter. I thought it was perhaps an exception and an instance of individual excellence.
But when I increased the intake for the post graduate programme (PGP) in an Indian Institute of Management from 35 to 105, the non-teaching staff strength remained the same as before, while the workload in every department and section, from the duplicating room to the student affairs office and the placement office, the PGP office, the library and even the accounts office increased three-fold. On the teaching side, the number of faculty members increased marginally from 22 to 24. (It had dipped from 22 to 20 in the first year).
As if that was not enough to convince one of the unfolding phenomenon, when I reached Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, I found that there were 30 non-teaching staff when the PGP intake was 60, and that number remained the same when the intake went up to 120, then to 180 and even to 260.
Thus I found that the non-teaching staff strength of 30 could handle an incremental increase of 60 to 120 to180 to 260 in the PGP.
The same was the case with the faculty. The number of faculty members was 20 when we had an intake of 60. It increased to 24 when the student intake was 120, remained the same when the figure went up to 180 (indeed it had come down to 17 in the first year) and was only 28 when it went up to 260.
This faculty strength had also taken the load of 240 participants of online programmes, close to 10 week-long faculty development programmes (making institute leaders in both), besides conducting the usual management development programmes (MDPs) and multiple conferences. At which stage they were fully utilised, I don’t know.
The conclusion
But what I conclude from this is that Indians are great deliverers. We don’t, at times, set adequate challenge benchmarks to meet.
Are they akin to Hanuman, with his capability to deliver big results but bore a curse that left him unable to remember the extent of his own abilities unless he was reminded about them by another person? Can we ever utilise the potential of our people fully? To me, it remains a leadership and human resource development puzzle and challenge.
P rofessor Krishna Kumar is a former Director and Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode. kk661946@gmail.com
