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Last updated as of March 2016
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true ~ Gore Vidal
"For much of his professional life, Srinivas decried his colleague's fondness for quantitative research based on large-scale surveys conducted by their poorly trained minions. He didn't think one understood India any more deeply simply because one had a larger data set, and it troubled him that civil servants of Nehru's India were uninterested in any fact that couldn't be captured in numbers. In the face of changing academic fashion, he never stopped insisting that his students do intensive fieldwork in a single place. He feared that social scientists too easily assumed, in arrogance, that they understood a way of life better than those living it. Fieldwork taught patience, humility and constant attentiveness to the human facts that numbers do not show. Fieldwork taught the social scientist to see a world in a single village.
Srinivas's periods of fieldwork were the making of him. They took the underweight Brahmin boy out of his cosseted existence into the welter of Indian life. They put him in conditions of physical and pyschological hardship just intense enough to sharpen his perceptions, both of the world and of himself. Most of all, they taught him never to presume that he knew better. So many serious men of Srinivas's generation, fancying themselves rather modern, headed out into the villages of India with a dogma and a mission, convinced they had everything to teach and nothing to learn. Srinivas went to Rampura with a cook, medicine for diarrhoea, and a bundle of empty notebooks. Once there, he followed his nose, although unsure where it would lead him. In sociology, as in life, it doesn't do to force it."
--- Last two paragraphs from the article 'Seeing Like a Sociologist: The making of MN Srinivas' by Nakul Krishna in The Caravan, March 2016
What applies to social science and a social scientist of the eminence of MN Srinivas, applies most certainly to the management profession and the ordinary mortals within it. For all its pretensions to glory, management is essentially a member (an unwelcome one at that) of the community of social sciences. The management consultant should, at all times, avoid the temptation to confuse his craft (some call it witch-craft) with 'fine art'.
Kushagra Merchant is an independent management consultant. He is practising in this capacity since July 2012. Prior to that he was a Senior Consultant at Monitor Inclusive Markets, a division housed within the Mumbai office of erstwhile Monitor Group, which worked on inclusive business models. Before joining Monitor, he worked as a management consultant/analyst at Accenture's Mumbai office. Kushagra has been in management consulting industry for past 9 years and has also spent 2 years in IT Enabled Services sector.
At Accenture Kushagra worked on projects involving a mix of strategy and long-term, large-scale organization transformation initiatives. The experience covered the sectors of chemical manufacturing, FMCG, organized retail and airline. A formative engagement for him was being part of the Program Management Office set-up to co-ordinate the merger of Air India and Indian Airlines. As part of this set-up, the work involved working closely with several departments and across the organizational hierarchy at both the organizations. From May 2009 to November 2009 he was also involved in development of a strategic & financial turnaround plan (the latter in collaboration with SBI Capital Markets) to be tabled before the Ministry of Civil Aviation.
Subsequently he joined Monitor Inclusive Markets (MIM) to gain an exposure to inclusive business models. At MIM he worked on the themes of affordable housing and clean drinking water in an urban context. This work involved participating in industry-wide stakeholder consultation process, development of business models, documentation, and providing organization development support to start-ups or pilot initiatives.
The experiences at Accenture and MIM helped Kushagra develop the skill of being able to structure and execute long-term consulting engagements that cover all phases from conceptualization, strategic planning, operational & financial planning and execution. These experiences, in particular drawn from the engagement of merger of Air India/Indian Airlines and conversations with stakeholders in the development sector, impressed on him four considerations that have greatly influenced his subsequent approach with clients:
1. "Institutional capital" needs to be accorded the same level of conscious significance as strategic and financial capital.
2. It is preferable that introduction and improvisation of management systems happen through a graduated, participative and bottom-up process of consultation with all relevant stakeholders (especially employees) rather than be designed and directed from top downwards.
3. The critical role of a consultant is to help develop an organization-wide clarity and mindfulness of the purpose and ensure strategic, operational and people-related decisions are consistent with the purpose. In other words, within the limited space granted to an outsider, a consultant's job is to reconcile the purpose as stated on power-points and in fund-raising conversations with practice in real-time.
4. Instead of trying to unconsciously deploy a pre-meditated approach that relies on established frameworks, tools, narrative techniques and influences (biases) accrued from previous engagements, it is more productive to consciously treat each engagement as a blank slate and give enough lead time to understand the organization inside-out.
Consequently his engagements focus on aspects of organization development through close collaboration with leadership in a regular and sustained manner over a period of time. In addition, Kushagra also participates in research-led projects in the capacity of providing documentation and report-writing support.
Independent of the nature and type of organization, his typical engagements comprise of following 8 steps in the order listed. Of these, steps 1 to 4 are applied to all engagements and steps 5 to 8 may be applied selectively depending on requirement at hand.
1. Developing a mindfulness of purpose, history, leadership temperament and overall culture of the organization.
2. Developing an institutional view and a plan-of-action to align strategic priorities with purpose & culture; and capabilities with strategic priorities. The plan-of-action is grounded in three principles: 1) non-disruptiveness, 2) non-intrusiveness and 3) non-resource-intensiveness.
3. Aligning organization structure with the institutional view.
4. Continuous use of KRAs and process-improvements to align roles, responsibilities and execution with the institutional view.
5. If required, a more frequent and involved dialogue with specific individuals on helping them integrate strategic thinking into their day-to-day execution.
6. If required, a more active and persistent role in recruitment and induction processes.
7. If required, a review of and re-organization of information management systems.
8. If required, taking up a more hands-on engagement in finance and operations including capacity building of relevant individuals, and in smaller set-ups, playing the role of part-time COO-cum-CFO for a predefined period of time.
Kushagra holds a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management (P.G.D.M.) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a Bachelor in Engineering (B.E.) in Electronics & Telecommunications from K. J. Somaiya College of Engineering, Mumbai University. He completed his higher secondary education from Jai Hind College, Mumbai University, and schooling from The New Era School, Kemps Corner, Bombay (sic).
Presently, he operates out of Ahmedabad. Outside of work, he prefers to invest his time in family and in writing. Temperamentally, Kushagra prefers to develop his own stubbornly independent position on most matters. As an important aside, his wife prefers to characterize him with the phrase "Still waters run very deep. The depth is an unfortunate bugbear of the stillness." Kushagra, on the other hand, would prefer to characterize himself thus: "He appears calm in most situations. But that is because he is quite slow (to understand things)."
To the rare confused reader the following additional factoid may help make up her mind as to which of the two descriptions is closer to the truth: Kushagra was awarded the "Ranting Rascal Award" (for cribbing all the time) on the 10th Day of December, 2011, at the "Wine & Bhelpuri Awards" sponsored by Monitor Group.
If the reader still remains perplexed, then the answer to her quandry can be captured in the simple question-and-answer: "Why is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it."
Hope this resolves all the doubts of the reader and helps her make-up her mind on whether to hire or to not hire the professional services of Kushagra. The rational advice would be: for Kushagra's betterment, the answer should, preferably, be a yes. For the reader's well-being, it should be a thorough-bred no.
A list of associations / engagements can be accessed here.
A short-form profile can be accessed here.
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