Administrators, Managers and Leadership

Summary

Delivered as the Lalit Doshi Memorial Lecture in Mumbai on 4th August 1997 and reprinted by the Forum of Free Enterprise, Deepak Parekh — then Chairman of HDFC — uses the occasion to argue that India’s bureaucratic cadre must consciously evolve from administrators into managers and finally into leaders. He sketches the three roles as a developmental arc: the administrator ensures that decisions are executed and rules followed; the manager organises and reacts to information and external stimuli; the leader overlays both with risk-taking, vision, and the charisma to inspire willing followers. The lecture is anchored in the contention that the ICS legacy inherited from the British, while disciplined, produced a rule-bound and at times elitist civil service whose attitudes must now be re-engineered in step with India’s liberalisation.

The core argument unfolds through a discussion of the emerging environment. With governments rightly retreating from breadmaking and bicycles, Parekh insists that bureaucracy must shift from patron, licenser and enforcer to facilitator and partner — a transition he illustrates with Singapore Inc., where the head of state delivers an annual chairman-style report and the civil services work in tandem with private enterprise. He maps the same arc on to career progression: an IAS probationer should hone administrative skills until the level of director, develop managerial skills up to joint secretary, and be groomed for leadership thereafter, much as a corporate Vice-President is prepared for a CEO role. Examples from the central, state and PSU cadres convince him that the talent exists; the problem is that too few make the full transition, and that top slots are too often filled with officers carrying only a few months of residual tenure — a structural design that makes vision and judgement calls almost impossible.

The second half turns to governance. Corporate governance in family-run private firms needs strengthening, but Parekh reserves his sharpest critique for public-sector corporate governance, where PSU boards are subservient to ministries, government nominees crowd out independent representation, and managements are encouraged to maintain the status quo. He extends the same diagnostic to the state itself: a peculiarly complex legal, fiscal and regulatory environment that regulates rather than supervises and complicates rather than clarifies, producing what he memorably calls a ‘corruption tax’. The remedy is a concerted re-engineering of government procedures — the famous file-noting system, he argues, suits rule-based administration but breaks down under public-private partnership where judgement calls are routine — together with the development of specialists inside the civil service and a willingness to draw talent from the private sector. The rendered chunk closes as Parekh begins his final section on what constitutes a good leader, naming customers and employees as the two constituencies that emerging leaders must serve.

Key points

• Parekh posits a three-tier developmental arc — administrator (rule-executor), manager (process-organiser and information-handler), and leader (risk-taker with vision and the charisma to inspire willing followers).

• He attributes the rule-bound, sometimes elitist character of the Indian bureaucracy to its ICS inheritance and argues that liberalisation now demands a shift in approach and a segmentation of roles.

• Career segmentation should mirror corporate grooming: administrative skill at probationer-to-director level, managerial skill from joint secretary onward, and conscious leadership development at the top.

• The role of the state must move from patron, licenser and enforcer to partner, facilitator and regulator — illustrated through the Singapore Inc. model and through India’s own creation of bodies like NHAI and TRAI.

• Public-sector corporate governance is the weakest link: PSU boards are subservient to ministries, lack independent representation, and managements are pushed toward inertia rather than risk.

• A peculiarly complex Indian regulatory environment regulates rather than supervises and complicates rather than clarifies, producing what Parekh terms a ‘corruption tax’ that accrues to others rather than the exchequer.

• Filling the highest bureaucratic slots with officers who have only months of residual service makes leadership impossible, since no CEO can lead within a horizon of a few months.

• Civil services need to cultivate specialists alongside generalists and should be opened more systematically to talent from the private sector, as Parekh has done at IL&FS.