Who's Next? ; As Blue-Chip Ceos Like K.V. Kamath, Deepak Parekh, and Shiv Nadar, Among Others, Near Retirement, the Biggest Challenge Their Companies Face Is to Groom Competent Successors.

Summary

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On October 24, a week before its joint Managing Director Lalita Gupte retired this year, ICICI Bank put out a matter-of-fact press release announcing some key reshuffles in the top management team. Chanda Kochhar, deputy Managing Director, who led the bank's retail business, was given Gupte's portfolio of international banking; V. Vaidyanathan, a senior General Manager who had built ICICI's retail business alongside Kochhar, was elevated to the level of Executive Director, while Nachiket Mor, another deputy Managing Director, retained his oversight of the rural banking initiative and global principal investments and trading. At ICICI Prudential, the bank's life insurance joint venture led by Shikha Sharma, another senior General Manager, Bhargav Dasgupta, was moved into the Executive Director's position, possibly as part of a plan to free up Sharma for a call of duty at the parent company-when the time comes.

No doubt, Gupte's retirement was the trigger for the changes, but was ICICI trying to realign the management structure with an eye on succession planning? After all, the giant universal bank's Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Kundapur Vaman Kamath, is pushing 58, and has just two years to go before he hits the retirement age of 60. While an extension for Kamath can't be ruled out, he seems to have made it clear who he considers as potential candidates for the bank's top job. Ask Kamath if that is indeed the case, and he laughs it off, saying, "It would be wrong for the head of any institution to say that he is grooming one person. He has to groom multiple aspirants."

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Who's Next? ; As Blue-Chip Ceos Like K.V. Kamath, Deepak Parekh, and Shiv Nadar, Among Others, Near Retirement, the Biggest Challenge Their Companies Face Is to Groom Competent Successors.

But as Kamath surely knows, succession planning is nothing to laugh about. In fact, it may be the single most important challenge facing an entire generation of CEOs and Chairmen in India Inc. Take a look around and you'll find dozens of companies and business groups where the old guard is nearing the age when it needs to hang up its boots. At HDFC, the home loans giant, Chairman of 13 years, Deepak Parekh is 62, and although the company says there is no mandatory retirement age, it's reasonable to assume that Parekh must be grappling with the issue of identifying a successor. At the Tata group, the challenge is even more daunting. Not only does the board need to find and groom a successor to Chairman Ratan Tata, who retires in 2012, but also the CEOs of Tata Steel and Tata Motors, the two biggest group companies by revenues, B. Muthuraman and Ravi Kant are 62 years old and due for retirement in another three years (see Bombay House Blues). At HCL Technologies, Shiv Nadar said recently in a med...

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