Speeches

LEADING CORPORATE TRANSFORMATIONS
IN THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

Dr Madhav Mehra

Distance is dead. Long live the screen. The marriage of prodigious computing power with telecommunications is altering our world hour by hour and making all of us rapidly deteriorating assets. From living in Marshall McLuhan's global village we have been transported to the Burra Bazar of Calcutta where our every movement and each nuance is causing ripples that effect everyone else. Change- economic, social or political - has been the biggest threat to business. But today it provides the only grist to business's mill. Ignored or unanticipated it can be devastating. But tapped properly it can offer the greatest opportunity and act as the most powerful engine for growth even to the most fledgling business. The greatest challenge for transformational leaders lies in anticipating and adapting to change, using it to spark innovation and generating creative ideas to exploit change.

For the past decade or so, companies have been excessively focussing on tools and techniques to manage the supply side i.e. from manufacturing to distribution. They have practised Quality Circles, Quality Management, TQM, BPR, Japanese Management and the lot. All this has resulted in significant increases in productivity, but now the law of diminishing returns has set in. As the nineties draw to a close, one thing is becoming certain that their competitive strength will not come from what others are doing but what they can do differently. Business transformations in the 21st century shall not be through quality but innovation and innovation alone. The wealth in the 21st century will flow directly from innovation not optimisation. In the words of Kevin Kelly, Editor of "Wired" it will not be gained by perfecting the known but by imperfectly seizing the unknown.

Quality is no longer conformance to requirement. Nor does it provide t