PRESENT IMPERFECT. India’s voiceless managers

Like most of you, I too am part of several WhatsApp groups — family, friends from the past, present and future, neighbours, dog lovers, the works. The group that I lurk around and watch as some kind of a sociological study though is the one comprising my batchmates from business school. We graduated in 1999, and so by now most members in the group are heads of businesses, successful entrepreneurs, investment gurus, partners at consulting firms and whatever else qualifies as corporate triumph. The WhatsApp exchanges in this group usually fall into three categories — birthday wishes, forwarded jokes and stock tips.

I scan through the dozens of messages exchanged every day and what has surprised me most is in the last 12 months, when there has been so much public discourse about the country, elections, the agenda for development, the debates over land rights, and net neutrality, the group maintained absolute silence on all of these. It merrily chugged on, with people posting photographs of fancy motorbikes and fancier vacations. So far, there hasn’t even been an acknowledgment of the presence of the world outside and the issues it’s grappling with. This is not to suggest that people who went to business school with me aren’t smart or that they don’t have any views on matters of a larger import. My theory is that as far as allowing people to have a personality and an opinion are concerned, Corporate India is still behind an iron curtain and nobody wants to risk their substantial pay packages by uttering something which, although honest, might be inconvenient. I even know of people who have alternative, closed Twitter handles and Facebook pages, just so they can post their thoughts on movies, music and books. The more I watch the group and speak to other friends in Corporate India, the more I’m convinced that in no other part of urban India is it more dangerous to speak your mind than it is behind the glass-and-chrome edifice of an office building.

This virtual gag order is not reserved to individual employees at lower levels, but one that cloaks the organisation entirely. Over the last decade-and-a-half, the public relations’ person has become an essential chaperone to any communication with the company. I understand that when a CXO talks to a journalist, there is a risk that he might say something that could get the company into some kind of trouble with a regulator. But as the profession of public relations has flourished, it has essentially killed all conversations. The desire to scrub clean and make sterile every sentence that anyone in the organisation speaks is so high that it has created its own bubble of paranoia.

A couple of years ago I interviewed a 70-year-old chairman of a company. He had a stellar record — having served the first leg of his career as an efficient bureaucrat and the second in heading billion-dollar IT companies. Sitting in at the meeting was a 24-year-old PR executive. I couldn’t for the life of me fathom what value the PR executive brought to the meeting. He neither knew the business nor the client well. Yet, his was a mandatory presence, a physical warning, as it were. In another instance, last May, for the day the Lok Sabha elections were being announced, BL

ink ran a special issue called Where Was I . To jog your memory, William Dalrymple wrote about where he was when Arundhati Roy won the Booker, cricketer Anil Kumble spoke about where he was when India won the 1983 World Cup, etc. We asked the founder of an online travel portal to tell us where he was when internet came to India. By the time the PR-sanitised version reached us, it was nothing but a small collection of meaningless words — paradigm shifts, client leverage, value proposition and leadership advantage. What we want is a story, I wrote back, like an anecdote, something that you saw or heard that struck a chord. A second version arrived, the words had merely been swapped around and rearranged. There was nothing to do but kill the copy.

It isn’t merely appalling that companies and employees are so terrified of possibly saying the ‘wrong’ thing that they would much rather say nothing at all, it is also a strategic mistake. In January this year, TCS was embroiled in a controversy over laying off 25,000 people. In a newspaper story which detailed how the issue snowballed — through Twitter messages and Facebook groups — I read this quote by CEO N Chandrasekaran, “We have to understand how this social media works when somebody puts up a message, that’s some action point we should take as we go forward.” That an IT company is grappling with trying to understand how social media works is not a reflection of how little they know technology, it is a reflection of how successfully Corporate India had intimidated its employees into silence.

For a long time now, India Inc has managed to live in a convenient world where a few designated spokespeople, tutored in the art of speaking many words without saying anything at all, were the only ones who faced an audience. Social media has now democratised access. Everyone is a potential spokesperson. And while people of my vintage may be cautious enough to stick to Santa Banta jokes, there is a younger, braver wave of employees now. With them, the PR machinations and gag orders won’t last very long. Corporate India will need to learn new words, those that have meaning. And impact.

( Veena Venugopal is editor BL ink and author of The Mother-in-Law )

Follow Veena on Twitter @veenavenugopal|