Rarely does politician-speak offer insights into how management processes actually work, be it in a Government or a commercial enterprise. But this is only to be expected as politics is more often than not, just a lot of adversarial ‘hot air’ involving leaders of competing political parties. The talk is usually quite high on rhetoric and extremely low on substance. But, occasionally, they do offer some grist for the proverbial managerial mill. Like the remarks of Arun Shourie, the former IT and Communications minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee Cabinet of 1999-04 period, made while he was part of a panel discussion that followed the launch of a book on the Indian economy by a former editor.
Arun Shourie, it is fair to say, is less a politician than a thinker. He drifted into politics if not quite accidentally (a description that was used to explain former PM Dr Manmohan Singh’s entry into politics) but at least somewhat reluctantly. In that sense he doesn’t quite disprove the old adage that politicians are rarely able to go beyond the rhetoric and keep away from mouthing political shibboleths.
He made two comments, one of which was about the present BJP Government as nothing more than a Congress plus the ‘cow’. Newspapers and television channels were quick to latch on to this statement. Though he was speaking of the ‘cow’ in both a metaphorical and physical sense, he would not have been unaware of the irony in his description. The fact of the matter is, far from the BJP being the Congress with the ‘cow’, it was the Indira Gandhi faction of the old Congress (the predecessor to the present-day Congress) that was at one point in time considered to be the ‘cow’ (the symbol on which it fought the 1971 general elections). But that is not overly relevant to us.
His observation about the state of affairs at the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is something else. For students of management his comments on the role of the PM and his office are of utmost importance. He said that, in his view, there never was a weaker PMO and that there has never been as great a centralisation of functions as opposed to the way the PMO functions at present. He further went on to say that people manning positions of authority in the PMO lack the domain expertise officials of an earlier era had.
Subjective but legitimate
We need not go into the specifics of whether Shourie is right in his contention about the current state of affairs at the PMO, as that would take the discussion into the political aspects of the case, and in any case, such observations are by their very nature subjective and hence hard to contest.
But his observations are quite legitimately the starting point of a broader enquiry into the structure of the Government and the role of the PM and that of his office. If he is indeed the chief executive and if he expresses himself through his office then the latter must act in accordance with his authority and viewed thus, it is meaningless to talk of whether the PMO has been stronger earlier.
Equally, if the Prime Minister is not seen as the Chief Executive, in the sense of having the last word on matters of governance, as was the perception in the last few years of the previous UPA Government, the discussion then too, becomes an academic exercise.
So, where does the PM and his office fit into the larger constitutional scheme of things?
At first sight, this might seem a no-brainer. Without doubt, one would say, the PM is the CEO of the nation and his office is the administrative arm through which he exercises the authority of a CEO. But then, we are accustomed to seeing organisations as having a hierarchy and all powers ultimately coalesce in the authority of a CEO. It is, therefore, difficult to accept as a possibility an alternative model of organisation where there is no hierarchy but only a belief in collective leadership. When you think of it, even Shourie seems to imply that this is as it should be although his complaint is specific to the manner in which such authority is exercised or the calibre of the individuals manning the PMO.
First amongst equals
It is interesting to note that in the political arrangement under the Indian Constitution, the Prime Minister is not seen as the CEO in the classical sense of the term. He is merely the first among a set of equals who constitute the Council of Ministers. The question then is, whether such an organisational structure can at all be effective in delivering certain outcomes such as growth, elimination of poverty, inequality in the society and so on.
While we can concede that structure is an important ingredient to the successful achievement of organisational outcomes, it does not follow that a hierarchal structure is the solution in each and every situation. Even within rigidly hierarchy-bound organisations, there have been times or specific situations where they have found merit in a horizontal structure, as in there being no leader, as when the organisation sets up a task force for fulfilling a mission. Similarly when the organisation is gripped by crisis of such monumental proportion that its very existence is at risk, it has seen merit in adopting a loose hierarchical structure, wherein authority passes from one individual to the other depending on skill sets that the situation demands and the individual who happens to possess it in great measure.
Life imitates art
This principle was beautifully captured in the Hollywood movie The Flight of the Phoenix about a motley group of passengers and flight crew whose plane crash lands in the middle of the Saharan desert and their eventual rescue. They are confronted with crises after crises and different individuals step up to the plate to assume the leadership role because the nature of the crisis each time was such that it demanded a different type of response and there was no single individual possessing all the requisite skills.
The movie is at once an affirmation of the principle of hierarchal structure (unification of authority) and its negation, in the sense that there is no one CEO (horizontal) for organisations.
As a general rule, the horizontal structure works very well when organisations’ goals cannot be either quantified or the path to reach those goals are not easily laid down.
An educational institution is a perfect example of an organisation where there is no quantifiable output to assess whether a graduating student is well-educated in his academic discipline. In such a situation the principal or the director of the institution is not a CEO in the classical sense of the term because the successful outcome (education) doesn’t depend on him alone but on the efforts of the cohort of teaching-staff constituting the educational institution. Yet, when the output of the institution gets crystallised in a measurable outcome, such as pass percentage in the examination, the structure can easily transform into a hierarchal one with the principal as the CEO.
If we see the nation as an entity with a goal of 8 per cent annual growth rate in GDP then the PM is the CEO and the PMO, a useful instrument in the achievement of that objective. If on the other hand, we define the output as merely a better life for every citizen and there is no clear linkages between activity and outcome then the PM is only first among the equals in the council of ministers and the character of the governance structure thus becomes horizontal.