AIMA – All India Management Association is a centre for management excellence and a forum to develop national managerial ethos, facilitating furtherance of the management profession in the country. The 34th National Competition for Young Managers (NCYM 08) which was jointly conducted by AIMA & Bosch Ltd witnessed young managers from various corporate houses presenting on the theme “Managing Diversity – the challenges for India”.  Hindustan University at OMR Chennai sponsored the venue for the event which was spread over 2 days (1st and 2nd of August 08).
I was invited as the Chairman of the Jury and had to evaluate the winner and runner up from southern region to compete at the national level for the coveted NCYM 2008 competition.  It was a big challenge going through about fifty odd written presentations and the subsequent oral presentations.  Frankly speaking I was marveled at the various aspects of diversity that the young managers brought to the fore and debated on how they bring opportunity to India Inc. Having gone through the two days long deliberations , all other members of Jury ( comprising  Dr P T Srinivasan , HoD, Department of Management Studies, University of Madras, Lt Col Jayakumar , Dy Registrar ,IIT Madras , Prof Ramalingam HoD of Management Studies , Hindustan College of Engineering , Ms Lalitha Subramanian, General Manager,TCS) would also agree ,we grasped a much better understanding of the issue than before.

Many original thoughts and models  emerged during these presentations ,  some of them being -  a house for  Giraffe may not be suitable for an  elephant  to live in or the example of a salad bowl where all the items maintain their individual identity but together  make a complete dish were thought provoking. Some spoke about psychological diversity.

At the end of 2 days, we were almost unanimous to select Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions Ltd represented by Lokesh Pyaik, Sampatkumar Aratti, Kavita Rao to be the winners and Larsen & Toubro Ltd represented by Tojin T eapen, Nowfal A Khader and Deepak Seth to be the runners up. NTPC contrary to idea of being a public sector came very close and several teams were nominated by the organization. I personally   felt very happy that many organizations came forward to either support the event or sending their teams to the competition. I also felt ( my personal opinion ) managers in core industry  enjoy  a much  better  understanding of the subject  with  greater clarity.

I shared my impressions with the audience, which were as follows:

1 .We cannot solve the issues of diversity as long as we see the differences across groups; rather we need to identify the similarities across groups

2. Given the population of young managers in India below the age of 35 years and the rising average age in developed countries, young managers of India today are definitely going to leave a very strong signature in the global market tomorrow.

3. As the world becomes flat, knowing and appreciating diversity will be a great strength for our managers since we are moving from cost arbitrage to value arbitrage and going into more of product and consulting services not only in the case of IT but also in industries like power. This requires working with divergent groups with the attitude of world is my home.

4. Managing diversity is in our DNA as Indians – we are therefore at an advantage – we can better the Chinese/Japanese competition in this respect.

5. Managing Diversity is not a choice, it is must to survive.

It was good to share thoughts in front of management stalwart like Mr V Balaraman, Chairman and CEO of Boardroom Advantage and Ex CEO of Ponds HLL and I was glad to receive a memento from him.