Please the owners' representatives (the Minister, the concerned bureaucrats and the Parliamentarians on Committees that evaluate the Bank's performance. That seemed to be the only justification for the existence of the management of a nationalized Bank. The Bank did not have to have a long-term vision, mission, goal, strategy and plan of its own, although most individuals had their own long-range plan and in most cases these plans assumed that the Bank as the life-long employer will grow from strength to strength. I had my own long-term vision and goals for myself as would most human beings have. As part of that personal long-term plan, I got the job in the Bank, explored potential partner whom I could fall in love with, marry her and raise children. We fell in love sometime after we first met in 1971 and went through lot of romantic encounters during which the senior colleagues deliberately played occasional mischief to make me fail appointments with my love while she kept waiting for me for hours at the pre-specified restaurant or fair: they had overheard of our plan to meet after the office hours and cooked up some urgent work just before the closing hours and there being no mobile phones those days I had no opportunity to communicate my inability to meet her as per agreed schedule ( I would have opportunity to get compensated later).
We got married in 1973 after successfully managing through appropriate strategies and tactics, the initial hurdles arising out of reluctance of parents on both sides to allow an inter-caste marriage. We had full enjoyment of just being together for two years and a half to welcome the arrival of our first child, Sowmdeb in 1975. At the same time, I worked hard enough drafting various chapters of my PhD dissertation, meeting and discussing, on ten successive Saturday afternoons, my thesis adviser- supervisor, Dr. Deb Kumar Bose at his residence while enjoying the tea and snacks arranged by Mrs Bose along with her affection. Mrs. Bose provided good support my decision to marry when I did despite Dr. Bose's concern that marrying before completing the dissertation could be a distracting disturbance: she pointed out that they themselves had got married before Dr. Bose completed his PhD. Over the ten weeks, I spent considerable time revising the draft chapters a number of times based on Dr. Bose's comments and suggestions and also meeting and discussing the drafts with another Professor Dr. Sanjit Bose who provided very interesting inputs for embellishment of the dissertation and finally getting their approval for submission. I was up against time running out fast: I had conceived my PhD dissertation before I had joined the Bank while my wife Pramita (Topu) conceived our elder son much later and was about to deliver. I rushed through the proof reading and finally delivered my PhD dissertation to the Indian Statistical Institute virtually at the same time as my wife delivered her first child..
No one had any idea of the long-term vision that I were implementing. But if one would have tracked my behaviour and actions over time, one would have got some rough idea of my long-range plan and strategies, I had the opportunity to decipher the long run vision, mission, goals, strategies and plans, if any, of United Bank of India in the early 1970s by analysing the Banks actions and behavior. This opportunity came primarily by way of my involvement in the preparation of Annual Director's Report for six successive years. In the first year of my service at the Bank, my involvement was marginal: draft the first five/ six paragraphs of the small sections of economic, monetary policy and banking sector environment for the year under report, and proof reading of entire report including the tables and the accounts statements, This gave an insight into what the Directors' Annual Report & Accounts document sought to cover and convey. The major sections of the Directors report contained the performance of the Bank in aggregate terms of deposits, bank advances, branch expansion and profits and fairly detailed presentation on the Banks achievement in the areas of farm finance, small, cottage and tiny industries credit, credit to artisans and handicapped people and small businesses, advances to major industrial sectors and infrastructure, realisation of targets in credit deployment in the priority sectors, extension of coverage of hitherto unbanked rural and urban areas and of course launching of new and innovative schemes of financing priority sectors and weaker sections. Besides, there would be paragraphs on employment creation within the Bank and through extension of credit, development and promotional efforts undertaken to promote economic development in the areas of operation of the Bank. There would be appropriately placed photographs of important events in the banks premises during the year. There would be a designer consultant to assist us in deciding the layout, the use of different fronts and colours, etc. Pretty interesting publishing work with boring proof reading and correction and working late hours in the office as well as at the printer's office just before the final print order is given.
Detailed drafts of material would come from various departments like the farm finance department, small scale industries department, the publicity and public relations department, the credit department, the branch expansion department, the personnel department, the accounts department, the Management Development Department, the Staff Training College, and etc. Besides, we had all the Statistical MIS information readily available. The job was now to sift through the available material and prepare a running first draft and then edit and re-edit before the bosses make their fine touch editing and provides guidance on what additional items of important developments that got missed out. Being involved in the preparation of the Annual Report provided considerable insights to what was going on in the Bank's mind. The interactions with the officers in various departments provided an window to what was going on in their minds and what they were trying to achieve, besides establishing wonderful friendships (I had quite a few affectionate senior colleagues in Farm Finance Department like Dr. SN Ghoshal, Dr. A Roy who took me around in one of his visits to branch offices in North 24-Parganas for a day-long experience with farm credit officers in branches, and Dr. BV Jha. The interaction with the bosses and the top management on the draft reports revealed how they were looking at the present and the future.
On one occasion, I was sent to discuss the draft approved by the Board with the Government's nominee on the Board of the Bank. He was at that time a Joint Secretary in the Department of Banking in the Ministry of Finance, became Additional Secretary soon and later became the Chairman of the country's largest bank, the State Bank of India. He had a few small suggestions to make on the draft Annual Report, but I felt that he had got discouraged to see a less than 30 year old bank officer being responsible for the Bank's Director's report because when I went to meet him he wanted to confirm that if I were the bank officer dealing with the Directors' Report. More than three decades later I had a chance to meet him: he was still very agile and active with keen interest in Indian economics.
One year during the period of Emergency declared by the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi's Government, the Chairman of the Bank carried a few advance print copies of the Annual Report to present them to the Minister of State for Finance (Banking) and joint/ additional secretaries of the Govt.'s banking department. Even as more copies of the Annual Report were being bound by the printer's binders, call came from New Delhi that led to stop the process. It was around noon on a Saturday. Chairman conveyed what the Minister had suggested: (a) have the cover of the Annual Report re-designed and printed so that the inside back cover has a kangaroo-pocket hold, and (b) produce an attractive small booklet showing how the Bank was implementing the 20-point socio-economic development programme announced by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and insert that booklet in the kangaroo-pocket on the inside back cover of the Annual report. Chairman instructed that the Annual Report along with its kangaroo pocket booklet should be available in three days. I was given the task to prepare the booklet. The problem was that on the major parts of Indira Gandhi's 20-point program that were relevant to banking were already covered in the Annual Report. So, we needed both rewording, rephrasing of existing material already used plus additional material and photographs. It was decided that we would work the whole of Sunday to finalise the booklet and send to the printers Sunday evening. I went home, searched out from my table a three page document of the Government that contained the 20 point programme. With the quotations from that document I made a rough layout and draft of our kangaroo-pocket booklet with about 16/ 17 points that could be considered relevant to baking by some stretched imagination. It would roughly be a 24 page booklet. On Sunday, the farm finance and small industry finance departments provided additional material to help me put flesh into my basic structure of the booklet. Bosses edited my drafts and suggested inclusion of some more information that they had considered relevant. The artist- designer was called in and we sent the material to the printers. Monday and Tuesday we worked on proof-reading and further editing. By Wednesday evening, adequate number of printed copies of the Annual Report with the booklet in its kangaroo-pocket were available for sending to Delhi so that the Minister and his officials could get pleased with the great work done by the United Bank, even if that meant some wasteful expenditure on document printing.
It was not just a case of pleasing the King and his men during an Emergency Rule and suspension of democracy: public sector had to be instruments of government publicity as well. Public sector must also be for the benefit of politicians adoring the Parliament as representatives of the common people. They would be on Bharat Darshan tour to review the performance of the public sector undertakings and visit all cities where these companies were headquartered, enjoying there hospitality and the banks and other companies they would review would be highly obliged if these great persons accepted valuable gifts and city tours organized by these public sector units. Some of the Parliament Committee members would need special escorts, besides a car to roam around the city (Kolkata in the case of United Bank of India) for shopping and enquiring. One driver reported later that he had been asked about the location of the red light areas. The costs did not matter, the managements thought: after all, the visitors were the owners' representatives. It is a small expenditure once in a while: much more was being spent on questions asked by the Parliamentarians on banking as information would be sought from banks that they would have to collect from far flung branches through telexes and telegrams, compile them for further compilation at the Banking Department of the Government and based on that appropriate written or oral reply would be given by the Minister in the Parliament. Dealing with material to be sent to government in response to Parliamentary questions would bore me also much later in life: one of the most wasteful activity that the public sector and the Nation would continue to bear for unimaginative design of Parliamentary democratic procedures!
Friday, April 8, 2011
Business Forecasting to Planning & Budgetting: My Unfolding Voyage 60
Mihir joined the Bank about two years after I did. He was a brilliant student and had just got his Masters from The Dibrugarh University in Assam. He was a very docile and lovable colleague. One of his first assignment was to be with me in the annual exercises of forecasting the Indian bank deposits over the next year and arrive at a reasonable forecast of the Bank's deposits. Providing credible forecast of business activity levels had been a key traditional responsibility of business economists. This job at the Bank was done by our bosses earlier and now they had assigned the task to the new recruits. The methodologies were established by the bosses earlier: run a simple time series regression on total bank deposits and extrapolate by a year; then, apply the bank's share in total bank deposits to arrive at the forecast of deposits for United Bank. In the Board Note just add some paragraphs on macro-economic trends and outlook to justify that the projections were reasonable.
Mihir and I had to embellish the Board Note on the subject this time. We also ran time series regression of total bank deposits but we tried several models of curve filling and arrive at alternate projections. The time series regression was rather easy to handle computationally with Facit machines. But trying multiple regression models relating bank deposits to macro-economic variables like GDP, Savings rate and money supply was rather difficult not only because the bank did not have a mainframe computer (the workmen unions were violently against computerisation of bank work for the false threat of loss of existing and potential employment - a perception cultivated by the communist trade union leaders in West Bengal in particular) and the personal computers were yet to reach India at that time, but also because the macro-economic data were available those days with considerable time delay to enable projection of those variable in the future. Still we did try simple three variable models of linear regression. As for the Bank's deposit forecast we ran both time series regression and model of shares of the Bank in incremental deposits having regard to the expansion of branch network. Form the plethora of projections, judgement was applied to arrive a small interval estimate of the Banking system's and the Banks deposit levels. This was then broken down into fixed, current and savings deposits based on past patterns adjusted for banks special deposit mobilisation efforts and the locations of the new branches in terms of potential for deposits. Once the deposit levels were available, it was easy to arrive at the credit or advances forecast given the statutory liquidity ratio, the cash reserve ratio, the desired credit deposit ratio. Once these were done, along with net interest margins and known fixed costs and variable costs, it was a small computation step to arrive at projections of the Bank's before tax profits.
Mihir did bulk of the computational work, I just wrote out the Note containing our findings and projections (being an M.Sc in statistics Mihir had more experience in handling facit machines for statistical calculations including standard errors of estimates, while despite having descriptive statistics at the undergraduate level and Mathematical Statistics and Econometrics at the graduate level, I was the most reluctant computational hand). The Note duly edited and approved by the Board finally reached the General Manager (the number two in the bank) who called me up to get briefed. He ended the briefing session by exclaiming: 'Your forecast seems OK: but I had arrived at similar figures without doing such a whole lot of statistical work that you people did.' I replied with part diplomacy:' Yes, Sir. You got the forecast based on your intuition based on long tears' of experience: we just provided a scientific rationale'. He appreciated my reply with a smile and let me go. I went back to give the feedback to my boss and Mihir who had just fallen in love with a girl and protested against my advise that hold your brain above your heart of love to tread carefully along the path of love. Eighteen months later, when we reached office in the morning we found Mihir's lifeless body on the roads: he had leapt out of the 10th floor window under the burden of a heavy heart. We are all very saddened with this tragic incident.
Given the forecast deposit and credit levels the Bank's chief accountant would now work out branch wise targets of deposits and credit and the priority sector credit chief would communicate the priority sector wise credit targets. This system however would change soon. Business Planning and Budgeting would be arrived at through a two way communication. The National Institute of Bank Management had just started its campaign for introduction of Performance Budgeting. They were holding workshops on the subject in different banks. About 15 of my colleagues from different departments and offices participated in the workshop arranged exclusively for United Bank. After the workshop, I along with one of my colleagues in my department were given the task of implementing performance budgeting. The entire process of budgeting from the initial headquarter communication on goal setting to formulation of budgets at the branch level and deliberations over them at the district development and regional offices to final two day deliberations and finalisation of the budgets at the central office with regional managers: also, the formats for budgeting and guidelines on environment scanning for identification of business potential and translating them into performance budgets covering all business aspects including manpower, costs and profits were required to be explained to all. We therefore prepared a performance buget manual/ guideline document. The printed copies of this document was sent to all branch. district development and regional offices and all departments. We organised special training programs at various centres to explain the performance budgeting philosophy and techniques with examples. It was a great experience dealing with so many people from so many places and then compiling the aggregate performance budget of the Bank. At last the exercise in business forecasting got related to the exercise of evolving branch wise performance budgets through a two way communication process (top-down and bottoms-up).
But something more on planning was yet to be initiated. Business Plans and Performance Budgets were essentially for one yaer period at a time with quarterly or monthly pasing wherever necessary for effective monitoring of the realisation of the performance budgets and business plans. There was not articulated and documeted and deliberated medium- and long-range business plan as yet. So even as performance budgeting system got introduced we got initiated the process of long-range planning with the consultancy assistance of the National Instiute of Bank Management. In the first round they were interviewing and discussing with the bank's top officials. I had heard that the Chairman of the Bank confronted them with a question:' Since I am going to retire in two years from now, how do you expect me to answer how I expect the Bank to look like five tear hence?' I had left the services of United Bank of India soon thereafter to pursue long-term planning exposure elsewhere.
Mihir and I had to embellish the Board Note on the subject this time. We also ran time series regression of total bank deposits but we tried several models of curve filling and arrive at alternate projections. The time series regression was rather easy to handle computationally with Facit machines. But trying multiple regression models relating bank deposits to macro-economic variables like GDP, Savings rate and money supply was rather difficult not only because the bank did not have a mainframe computer (the workmen unions were violently against computerisation of bank work for the false threat of loss of existing and potential employment - a perception cultivated by the communist trade union leaders in West Bengal in particular) and the personal computers were yet to reach India at that time, but also because the macro-economic data were available those days with considerable time delay to enable projection of those variable in the future. Still we did try simple three variable models of linear regression. As for the Bank's deposit forecast we ran both time series regression and model of shares of the Bank in incremental deposits having regard to the expansion of branch network. Form the plethora of projections, judgement was applied to arrive a small interval estimate of the Banking system's and the Banks deposit levels. This was then broken down into fixed, current and savings deposits based on past patterns adjusted for banks special deposit mobilisation efforts and the locations of the new branches in terms of potential for deposits. Once the deposit levels were available, it was easy to arrive at the credit or advances forecast given the statutory liquidity ratio, the cash reserve ratio, the desired credit deposit ratio. Once these were done, along with net interest margins and known fixed costs and variable costs, it was a small computation step to arrive at projections of the Bank's before tax profits.
Mihir did bulk of the computational work, I just wrote out the Note containing our findings and projections (being an M.Sc in statistics Mihir had more experience in handling facit machines for statistical calculations including standard errors of estimates, while despite having descriptive statistics at the undergraduate level and Mathematical Statistics and Econometrics at the graduate level, I was the most reluctant computational hand). The Note duly edited and approved by the Board finally reached the General Manager (the number two in the bank) who called me up to get briefed. He ended the briefing session by exclaiming: 'Your forecast seems OK: but I had arrived at similar figures without doing such a whole lot of statistical work that you people did.' I replied with part diplomacy:' Yes, Sir. You got the forecast based on your intuition based on long tears' of experience: we just provided a scientific rationale'. He appreciated my reply with a smile and let me go. I went back to give the feedback to my boss and Mihir who had just fallen in love with a girl and protested against my advise that hold your brain above your heart of love to tread carefully along the path of love. Eighteen months later, when we reached office in the morning we found Mihir's lifeless body on the roads: he had leapt out of the 10th floor window under the burden of a heavy heart. We are all very saddened with this tragic incident.
Given the forecast deposit and credit levels the Bank's chief accountant would now work out branch wise targets of deposits and credit and the priority sector credit chief would communicate the priority sector wise credit targets. This system however would change soon. Business Planning and Budgeting would be arrived at through a two way communication. The National Institute of Bank Management had just started its campaign for introduction of Performance Budgeting. They were holding workshops on the subject in different banks. About 15 of my colleagues from different departments and offices participated in the workshop arranged exclusively for United Bank. After the workshop, I along with one of my colleagues in my department were given the task of implementing performance budgeting. The entire process of budgeting from the initial headquarter communication on goal setting to formulation of budgets at the branch level and deliberations over them at the district development and regional offices to final two day deliberations and finalisation of the budgets at the central office with regional managers: also, the formats for budgeting and guidelines on environment scanning for identification of business potential and translating them into performance budgets covering all business aspects including manpower, costs and profits were required to be explained to all. We therefore prepared a performance buget manual/ guideline document. The printed copies of this document was sent to all branch. district development and regional offices and all departments. We organised special training programs at various centres to explain the performance budgeting philosophy and techniques with examples. It was a great experience dealing with so many people from so many places and then compiling the aggregate performance budget of the Bank. At last the exercise in business forecasting got related to the exercise of evolving branch wise performance budgets through a two way communication process (top-down and bottoms-up).
But something more on planning was yet to be initiated. Business Plans and Performance Budgets were essentially for one yaer period at a time with quarterly or monthly pasing wherever necessary for effective monitoring of the realisation of the performance budgets and business plans. There was not articulated and documeted and deliberated medium- and long-range business plan as yet. So even as performance budgeting system got introduced we got initiated the process of long-range planning with the consultancy assistance of the National Instiute of Bank Management. In the first round they were interviewing and discussing with the bank's top officials. I had heard that the Chairman of the Bank confronted them with a question:' Since I am going to retire in two years from now, how do you expect me to answer how I expect the Bank to look like five tear hence?' I had left the services of United Bank of India soon thereafter to pursue long-term planning exposure elsewhere.
Getting Trained & Training Collagues: My Unfloding Voyage 59
United Bank of India had its own staff training college at a two-storied old Bungalow-type building on the Rashbehari Avenue between Triangular Park and Gariahat Crossing in the southern part of Kolkata. I understand that the Training College moved to a new location later. At that time, a retired State Bank senior official was the Principal of the College. The college was primarily for technical training in different operational work areas for the Bank's own employees but also just started providing induction training to new recruit specialised officers like economists, statisticians, farm credit managers, engineers, chartered and cost accountants and officers promoted from the ranks. Since there were not enough new recruits available for induction training, I had to wait for about a year to go to the college for the seven or 10 day programme. In the meanwhile, the Bank's headquarters had moved from its old premises at Clive Ghat Street, a lane parallel to the Fairlie Place lane to the north, connecting the Netaji Subhas Chandra Road and the Strand Road on the banks of the Ganges (Hooghly) river that separated Kolkata from the district of Howrah. We shifted to the Ban's new 16-storied building (the tallest building in Kolkata at that time) at 10, Old Court House Street on the south-east corner of the Dalhousie Square (renamed later as Binay Badal Dinesh or BBD Bagh) and very close to the state Governor's House. The building was state of the art at that time with honey-comb louver roofing in each floor, multiple spacious automatic lifts, wide lobbies and a sprawling terace garden on the third floor where the top four officials of the Bank had their offices along with the Board Room. We were located on the 10th floor.
I had undergone two programs at the College. Both the induction training and the subsequent executive development program at the college were very interesting. Besides good launch and snacks, the program covered all aspects of banking from Banking Regulation and Development Act, Reserve Bank of India Act, Negotiable Instrument Act and Bank Nationalisation Act and other laws relevant to banking to deposit mobilisation, credit appraisal and disbursement, from deposit and borrower account operation to bank accounting, and from foreign exchange operations to staff rules as also elements of bank management like inter-personal relationship, delegation of powers, bank marketing and leadership. Most speakers were from the senior bank officials and training officers, but external specialists also covered some aspects. Bank's Deputy General Manage, PL Sen talked on bank marketing at a pre-dinner session: Indian bankers those days were not exposed to concepts of marketing management as applied to banking. The program induced me to become a regular reader of the content page and select articles in the Harvard Business Review issues available at the Bank's Library. Harvard Business School would be on my voyage two decades later.
Soon the level of activity of the Training College would increase manifold with the large step up in recruitment of staff and officers required for both the headquarters, regional offices and new district development offices and the fast expanding network of branch offices, especially in rural and semi-urban areas. Even junior officers like me had to be deployed as part-time visiting faculty in areas like economic and banking business environment. I had become a regular speaker at the Training College since my bosses did not have time to act as part-time faculty. And, given the huge load of training new recruits, we had not been spared for further training, except once after the first promotion. The Bank was reluctant to send new recruits for training in executive development programs at management institutes of at the RBI staff training college in Mumbai.
Yet, I was fortunate enough to be at the RBI Staff Training College in Prabhadevi, Mumbai within 30 months of joining the Bank. The Reserve Bank had organized an Workshop on the implementation of the New Basic Statistical Returns (BSR) for banks and their branches. My senior colleague, Rajat Gupta, a First Class First M.Sc in Statistics of the University of Calcutta and in-charge of United Bank of India's statistical management information operations and I were deputed to attend the program: i did not know at that time that I was destined not to attend any regular training program at RBI Staff Training College in my life but would be guest speaker at its programs decades later. But the trip to Mumbai for the first time for attending the BSR workshop turned out to be a great personal event. Rajat-da told me that we were eligible to travel only by train to Mumbai (roughly 36-hours journey each way) but reserved tickets were not available because of the short notice that we had got, we need bosses' approval to go by air (two and a half hour flight each way). We got approval from the bosses, applied for three days leave to stay back at Mumbai and bought an extra return ticket at the cost of Rs.800 or so (about 75% of my monthly remuneration at that time) and flew off for honeymoon to Mumbai with my partner whom I married three months back: stayed in a small hotel for two nights before an elder cousin and her husband forced us to shift to their residence at Mazagaon Dock, visited all sight-seeing places in Mumbai from South Bombay to the North Bombay and suburbs with a car at our disposal, courtesy Mr. Adya, Head of the Bank's branch at the Oberoi Towers Complex (now called Trident Hotel), moving through the rows of the coconut trees in the Juhu Beach (it was still at that time as it had been pictured in the Hindi Movies of the 1950s and 1960s, making some purchases here and there including at the Crawford market. Ten years later we would come back to Mumbai and live there for the next two decades.
United Bank of India would soon give me another opportunity soon. The Staff training college would organise a training program in a hotel at Digha, one of the best holidaying centre in West Bengal on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. I was invited to give a guest lecture. My wife and I had enjoyed the two nights trip to Digha for the first time, just a few months after our trip to Mumbai.
I had undergone two programs at the College. Both the induction training and the subsequent executive development program at the college were very interesting. Besides good launch and snacks, the program covered all aspects of banking from Banking Regulation and Development Act, Reserve Bank of India Act, Negotiable Instrument Act and Bank Nationalisation Act and other laws relevant to banking to deposit mobilisation, credit appraisal and disbursement, from deposit and borrower account operation to bank accounting, and from foreign exchange operations to staff rules as also elements of bank management like inter-personal relationship, delegation of powers, bank marketing and leadership. Most speakers were from the senior bank officials and training officers, but external specialists also covered some aspects. Bank's Deputy General Manage, PL Sen talked on bank marketing at a pre-dinner session: Indian bankers those days were not exposed to concepts of marketing management as applied to banking. The program induced me to become a regular reader of the content page and select articles in the Harvard Business Review issues available at the Bank's Library. Harvard Business School would be on my voyage two decades later.
Soon the level of activity of the Training College would increase manifold with the large step up in recruitment of staff and officers required for both the headquarters, regional offices and new district development offices and the fast expanding network of branch offices, especially in rural and semi-urban areas. Even junior officers like me had to be deployed as part-time visiting faculty in areas like economic and banking business environment. I had become a regular speaker at the Training College since my bosses did not have time to act as part-time faculty. And, given the huge load of training new recruits, we had not been spared for further training, except once after the first promotion. The Bank was reluctant to send new recruits for training in executive development programs at management institutes of at the RBI staff training college in Mumbai.
Yet, I was fortunate enough to be at the RBI Staff Training College in Prabhadevi, Mumbai within 30 months of joining the Bank. The Reserve Bank had organized an Workshop on the implementation of the New Basic Statistical Returns (BSR) for banks and their branches. My senior colleague, Rajat Gupta, a First Class First M.Sc in Statistics of the University of Calcutta and in-charge of United Bank of India's statistical management information operations and I were deputed to attend the program: i did not know at that time that I was destined not to attend any regular training program at RBI Staff Training College in my life but would be guest speaker at its programs decades later. But the trip to Mumbai for the first time for attending the BSR workshop turned out to be a great personal event. Rajat-da told me that we were eligible to travel only by train to Mumbai (roughly 36-hours journey each way) but reserved tickets were not available because of the short notice that we had got, we need bosses' approval to go by air (two and a half hour flight each way). We got approval from the bosses, applied for three days leave to stay back at Mumbai and bought an extra return ticket at the cost of Rs.800 or so (about 75% of my monthly remuneration at that time) and flew off for honeymoon to Mumbai with my partner whom I married three months back: stayed in a small hotel for two nights before an elder cousin and her husband forced us to shift to their residence at Mazagaon Dock, visited all sight-seeing places in Mumbai from South Bombay to the North Bombay and suburbs with a car at our disposal, courtesy Mr. Adya, Head of the Bank's branch at the Oberoi Towers Complex (now called Trident Hotel), moving through the rows of the coconut trees in the Juhu Beach (it was still at that time as it had been pictured in the Hindi Movies of the 1950s and 1960s, making some purchases here and there including at the Crawford market. Ten years later we would come back to Mumbai and live there for the next two decades.
United Bank of India would soon give me another opportunity soon. The Staff training college would organise a training program in a hotel at Digha, one of the best holidaying centre in West Bengal on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. I was invited to give a guest lecture. My wife and I had enjoyed the two nights trip to Digha for the first time, just a few months after our trip to Mumbai.
Of Meeting Briefs and Speeches: My Unfolding Voyage 58
Senior bankers were generally very busy with routine work of considering and approving decisions, conducting and attending business meetings, and meeting important clientele and dignitaries in office or elsewhere: as is true of top and senior management outside banking industry, they could afford and little time to read long notes and lot of materials on relevant to their work and decision-making. So, they insisted on short, brief office notes as well as briefing by their juniors on the content of the notes and other meeting information briefs given to them. They generally had little to time to prepare their own speeches / articles to be delivered at meetings, inaugural functions or published in business journals or business books. Economists traditionally provided this help to the top management. But there were two categories among the top managers. The first group consisted very few who would dictate their articles and ask the economists to edit the draft for improvement and comment and based on the feedback would themselves finalise the speech or article, or discuss on the various points relevant on the issue at hand, ask the economist to arrange the points in a small piece of paper and then dictate the article or deliver the speech extempore. Most top managers were however in the second group: they basically depended on the draft prepared by the economist, would seldom change a word or a sentence there and read out their prepared speeches or send the article for publication. It was rather easy to deal with the second group and the economist would have lot of freedom in composition. The better speech writers would put themselves into the shoes of the senior banker and compose the speeches and articles from the perspective of that level of management.
Fortunately, I had opportunity work with both categories in the United Bank of India. Since the first set of exposures in this area were with the first category of independent and articulate top bankers, it was easy to get a hang of their preferences and strong views. United Bank of India Chairman B K Dutta used to dictate his articles / speeches himself. Once I had edited his first draft but he was extremely disappointed and angry about my :removing the words 'ludicurous' and 'ridiculous' as adjective to certain actions/ ideas of certain sections of the society: he was very particular about which words expressed his thoughts adequately. Once after reading the copy of one of the issues of the journal of the National Institute of Bank Management, he sent it to us with an attached slip with his note: 'This is not only a wastage of national resources but a drag on clear thinking'. I had thought then that the nature of topics covered in the journal and the highly mathematical content of the articles in that issue had failed to meet the expectations he had on the Bank Management Institute.
Mr. Dutta was a member of the State Planning Board of West Bengal. One late afternoon he called me and gave my a 300+page-document prepared by the Board. It was the State's plan approach paper setting out the priorities and major development programmes. He asked to give him a short brief next morning as he had to attend the Planning Board's meeting later in the afternoon that day. I went home, worked for three-hours the same evening and prepared a 10-page executive summary of the document in my own handwriting and gave him the manuscript. He glanced at that and told his secretary to get it typed. Next day morning, he called me to give back these documents and appreciated my effort in quickly producing an useful executive summary.
Mr. PK Sen, the deputy General Manager of the Bank, was the third senior most top official of the Bank, after the Chairman and the General Manager (those days deputy general managers and general managers were very few in banks unlike today when you have hundreds of them: deputy general managers in those days were roughly equivalent to deputy managing directors or executive directors of nationalised banks today). He always spoke extempore and seldom signed an article. He was a good speaker. But he would discuss on varying subjects whenever there was any chance: once he discussed with me about inflation and in the course of discussion asked how I had been adjusting my family expenditure in the face of high inflation in the early 1970s after the first oil shock. I told him that I was trying to shift to lower priced substitutes wherever possible like shifting from milk-based butter to soya-based margarine. He sarcastically commented that the soyabean product was not at all tasty to go with the breakfast toast. On another occasion he called me and asked me to give hum on just one side of a single sheet of paper all relevant information on a small European country's economy to help him prepare for a meeting he had on the next day with a trade minister of that country. He emphasised that my brief should on a single quarto-size paper and I need not write long sentences. I asked for a favour: I would write the brief on one side of a quarto-size paper but would not get it typed as this would leave lot of space blank because of margins on both sides and between the lines. He agreed. I picked up a couple of reference books available at the bank's library and prepared my one page brief before long and sent him. Next day after his meeting was over, he called me returned my manuscript with thanks and commented 'you hardly left any blank space on the sheet to put in as much information as you could - that was a trick to make brevity a bit embellished'.
But another Chairman of the Bank had difficulty in dealing with aid-memoirs for his meeting with the Reserve Bank of India. He demand for various data tabulated in all sorts of permutation and combinations and had extensive briefing sessions with his deputies, chief economist and statisticians. Once he remarked after returning from RBI Credit Policy meeting " You people give me so much of information that I could hardly use any of them. But the State Bank of India Chairman did not carry any paper with him and yet reeled of information as if they were in his finger tips'. A remarkable observation on a qualities of the chief of the largest bank in India! Freeing oneself from the jungle of details to key macro-indicators and from numbers to orders of magnitudes is what managers need to learn as they travel towards the top.
Fortunately, I had opportunity work with both categories in the United Bank of India. Since the first set of exposures in this area were with the first category of independent and articulate top bankers, it was easy to get a hang of their preferences and strong views. United Bank of India Chairman B K Dutta used to dictate his articles / speeches himself. Once I had edited his first draft but he was extremely disappointed and angry about my :removing the words 'ludicurous' and 'ridiculous' as adjective to certain actions/ ideas of certain sections of the society: he was very particular about which words expressed his thoughts adequately. Once after reading the copy of one of the issues of the journal of the National Institute of Bank Management, he sent it to us with an attached slip with his note: 'This is not only a wastage of national resources but a drag on clear thinking'. I had thought then that the nature of topics covered in the journal and the highly mathematical content of the articles in that issue had failed to meet the expectations he had on the Bank Management Institute.
Mr. Dutta was a member of the State Planning Board of West Bengal. One late afternoon he called me and gave my a 300+page-document prepared by the Board. It was the State's plan approach paper setting out the priorities and major development programmes. He asked to give him a short brief next morning as he had to attend the Planning Board's meeting later in the afternoon that day. I went home, worked for three-hours the same evening and prepared a 10-page executive summary of the document in my own handwriting and gave him the manuscript. He glanced at that and told his secretary to get it typed. Next day morning, he called me to give back these documents and appreciated my effort in quickly producing an useful executive summary.
Mr. PK Sen, the deputy General Manager of the Bank, was the third senior most top official of the Bank, after the Chairman and the General Manager (those days deputy general managers and general managers were very few in banks unlike today when you have hundreds of them: deputy general managers in those days were roughly equivalent to deputy managing directors or executive directors of nationalised banks today). He always spoke extempore and seldom signed an article. He was a good speaker. But he would discuss on varying subjects whenever there was any chance: once he discussed with me about inflation and in the course of discussion asked how I had been adjusting my family expenditure in the face of high inflation in the early 1970s after the first oil shock. I told him that I was trying to shift to lower priced substitutes wherever possible like shifting from milk-based butter to soya-based margarine. He sarcastically commented that the soyabean product was not at all tasty to go with the breakfast toast. On another occasion he called me and asked me to give hum on just one side of a single sheet of paper all relevant information on a small European country's economy to help him prepare for a meeting he had on the next day with a trade minister of that country. He emphasised that my brief should on a single quarto-size paper and I need not write long sentences. I asked for a favour: I would write the brief on one side of a quarto-size paper but would not get it typed as this would leave lot of space blank because of margins on both sides and between the lines. He agreed. I picked up a couple of reference books available at the bank's library and prepared my one page brief before long and sent him. Next day after his meeting was over, he called me returned my manuscript with thanks and commented 'you hardly left any blank space on the sheet to put in as much information as you could - that was a trick to make brevity a bit embellished'.
But another Chairman of the Bank had difficulty in dealing with aid-memoirs for his meeting with the Reserve Bank of India. He demand for various data tabulated in all sorts of permutation and combinations and had extensive briefing sessions with his deputies, chief economist and statisticians. Once he remarked after returning from RBI Credit Policy meeting " You people give me so much of information that I could hardly use any of them. But the State Bank of India Chairman did not carry any paper with him and yet reeled of information as if they were in his finger tips'. A remarkable observation on a qualities of the chief of the largest bank in India! Freeing oneself from the jungle of details to key macro-indicators and from numbers to orders of magnitudes is what managers need to learn as they travel towards the top.
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