CEO: Chess Master or Gardener?
| Author | Mamkoottam, Kuriakose |
CEO: Chess Master or Gardener? By Anil K. Khandelwal Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 2018 pp. xxvi + 358 (Hard Cover)
Industrial relations do not receive as much attention as it should, both among scholars as well as practitioners of management. The book under review by Dr. Anil Khandelwal is a refreshingly welcome and scholarly endeavor by a practitioner. The author is a career banker, who joined the Bank of Baroda as a young junior officer and retired as its CEO. Dr. Khandelwal also spent time as a researcher. The book is based on personal and inside experiences of the author, as well as insights gained from his research to understand the dynamics of industrial relations strategies pursued by the top management of a leading public sector bank. The ethnographic details and the reflective analysis by the author remind us of William Foote Whyte's classic "Street Corner Society", describing the inner life of an Italian American Slum.
The book is methodologically rich; Part-I of the book is based on the author's longitudinal study of the Bank of Baroda (BoB) during 1956-1988, while Part-II and Part-Ill are based largely on his personal experiences in different senior management roles. The book uses an interesting combination of insider-outsider approach. While the first part is an analysis of strategies and policies of six chief executive officers of BoB, the latter part is based on his personal experiences and initiatives undertaken in the top leadership positions of executive director and later as CEO of the Bank. While the author may have had access to privileged data and information, he should be applauded for using very effectively the powerful method of participant observation often used by ethnographic researchers. The author has surmounted the danger of subjectivity as a practitioner and an insider in the interpretation and analysis of data by distancing himself as a critique of industrial relations and human resource management.
The 340 pages of the book are divided into three parts and 14 chapters. The first eight chapters constituting Part-I of the book describes in detail the strategies and styles of the various CEOs in dealing with trade unions and officers' associations and the ensuing nature of industrial relations during the period between 1956 and 2000. Chapters 9 and 10 which constitute Part-II of the book is a description of the author's experiences as business head of two geographical zones of BoB and how the IR...
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