Number of words: 540

That was the period when I began to develop an aversion to young men called “Product Managers”. They usually came with a degree in English or economics, and the more recent ones had done engineering but had abandoned the technical career to do an MBA at one of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). They were, indeed, bright young men, At the IIM, they had been exposed to the case-study method of teaching which gave them opportunities to act the role of a chief executive. As the number of cases increased, many of them began to forget the difference between acting and reality and began to feel that they were actually the chief executives. When they finished the MBA and joined HLL at the age of about twenty-three, as management trainees, the preoccupation of most of them was how to become senior managers by the age of thirty, get on the Board by thirty-five and become chairmen at forty.

Although this was not openly discussed, they had such targets in mind. As a result, they were not interested in mundane things like selling soap or soup. Instead, they were interested only in the key functions in the head office, where all the important decisions were made. The central figure, as they saw it, involved all such decisions about what and how much to produce, how to price it, etc., was the Marketing Director. He was surrounded by a group of young acolytes called product managers who were made to believe that they were in charge of different brands. They liked the power, at their tender age, of ordering around the advertising agency, the Purchasing department, and the sales people in the branches and, of course, those cavemen (as they saw them) at the factories. They revelled in market research statistics, computer print-outs and information systems. Anything that came from at market research study was studied in great detail and formed the most reliable basis for their decisions. The only other toy they respected and related to was research, which they felt was sophisticated and modern and could therefore be relied upon to provide the new products. So there was a strong nexus between the Product Managers and the research scientists.

As the seemingly less sophisticated and less articulate technical people, we felt ignored by both these groups. We were the sloggers who were expected to turn out what Research conceived and product management demanded. We had very little part in the key decision-making processes. The factories and technical management were actually placed under the Marketing Managers in the case of the foods business. In the case of the detergents business, the factories were under my control, as I was the Technical Director, but attempts were made by some of the more enthusiastic Product Managers, with silent encouragement from their Marketing Director, to bypass the system of factory management and tell departmental Production Managers what they should he doing. In one or two cases we had to prohibit the entry of Product Managers into the manufacturing area. It only goes to show how grossly distorted the product management system had become at that point in time in HLL. 

Excerpted from Page 120-121 of ‘To Challenge and To Change’ by T. Thomas