Friday April 12, 2024
Executive Briefings Business and Management: CXO Talent
Adit Jain, IMA India
April 2024
Monetise Knowledge
A survey conducted amongst our client companies, a few weeks ago, concluded that for the most part, a retirement age of between 58 and 62 has been the dominant policy adopted across corporate India. Most executives, largely by compulsion, enter retirement then. That still leaves a decade of physically and mentally active years. Some are happy with their new circumstances, which bring opportunities to travel, visit their children overseas or even lend time to social causes. Others, prefer some form of continued professional engagement as mentors, undertake courses on coaching and leadership and reach out to their former associates or friends in search of projects.
A key area, however, where professional expertise is sincerely warranted, is board appointments or advisory relationships with companies. Large publicly listed firms, fortuitously, have a universe of available talent from retired CEOs, top civil servants, leading finance professionals, lawyers and others that bring in domain expertise. These companies have the monetary muscle to offer appealing compensation, together with the stature of a seat on the board of a well recognised organisation. The greater need for expertise, is in the smaller family-owned businesses that are evolving rapidly, transforming themselves as they do, and feel compelled to professionalise their processes. These organisations typically have revenues between Rs 300 to Rs 1000 crores, are often highly profitable and have aspirations to sustain decent rates of growth. With origins and bases in smaller provincial cities, their owners do not have the networking forums available in the metropolitan centres of our country. That’s where there is a shortage of advisory talent.
And this talent requisite is across functions, including human resource management, finance, IT and digitisation, marketing, etc. In this mid-segment of industry, the ideal candidates for board and advisory positions are not those with cosmetic pedigrees of serving on boards of global multinational organisations or big Indian industrial conglomerates, which have well-articulated systems and processes that cannot really be deviated from, but rather function heads that offer technical skills on talent management; finance and capital raising, statutory compliances, manufacturing technology, consumer markets or B2B sales. In many smaller companies the baton of responsibility is handed over to the second or third generation, many of whom are highly educated at premier universities and seek to bring about newer management practices, as a prerequisite for driving future growth. Often, they are at a loss of how to take things forward and justifiably do not wish to squander vast sums on professional consultants. They require mentorship of sorts to help them along the way.
The challenge, really is to get the two together – the organisation that needs the expertise and the individual that has enough of it to offer. IMA’s network of Forum based services is positioned to reach out to individuals who might be interested to pursue another innings, post retirement in some sort of advisory work or even those that are able to lend time whilst in active employment to other boards. IMA intends to launch its forum-based offerings in the second-tier cities that increasingly constitute the base for industrial manufacturing and some services. The growth of India’s medium and small enterprises is often constraint by a lack of knowledge in doing things correctly. Going forward, IMA will seek to bring references and engagements here. The play of huge amounts of insights and talent, offered across business India, should be put to effective use in a win-win situation.