Winning at Work Against All Odds

By Ashwani Lohani

This book is based on the firm belief that all you have to do to win at work is to manage the 3 Ms—men, money and material in a time-bound manner with a clear objective in mind and value systems unflinchingly in place. Once this happens, no odds are big enough to stop you from emerging as a winner. Going beyond management jargon, Ashwani Lohani, one of India’s most accomplished bureaucrats credited with turning around organisations like India Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC) and Madhya Pradesh Tourism shares his inspiring tale of grit and determination in his inimitable passionate and forthright style. A must read for all managers from the corporate world and PSUs, this book reveals the inside story of working in the government.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wisdom Tree Publishers
• Release date: Jun 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9788183284127

Ashwani Lohani

Ashwani Lohani, a 1980-batch officer of the Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers, with the unique distinction of earning four degrees and a gold medal, is currently posted as Managing Director & Commissioner of Tourism, Government of Madhya Pradesh. Lohani's successes, wherever he has worked, be it the ITDC, Madhya Pradesh Tourism, National Rail Museum or as Divisional Railway Manager (DRM) of Delhi, have earned him the tag of a successful turnaround manager in the Indian government.

Book preview

© Ashwani Lohani, 2006

First published 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the author and the publisher.

ISBN: 978-81-8328-412-7

Published by

Wisdom Tree

4779/23, Ansari Road

Darya Ganj

New Delhi-110002

Ph.: 23247966/67/68

[e-mail]

Printed in India

This book is dedicated to my friend, philosopher and guide

Mr Romesh Chandra Sethi,

under whom I spent the crucial formative years of my career and who has been instrumental in shaping my beliefs and style of management.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Question the System

Deliverance is the Core Issue

Pick Up Speed

Swift Justice is the Key

Esteem — Yours and Mine

Integrity Above Doubt

Passion at Work

Be Prepared to Pay the Price

Money is Never a Constraint

Love Your Men

Declutter Your Mind and Your Desk

Hard Work Never Killed Anybody

Accept Challenges to Out-perform Yourself

Take the Bull by the Horns

Media Matters

Decide, not Deliberate

Lateral Thinking

Impossible Means I-M Possible

No Regrets!

Index

FOREWORD

Ashwani writes from the heart. He writes about the moments of joy and the hours of frustration experienced over a quarter century. He writes in first-person singular, yet stays out of the realm of arrogance. He became known as a hero in management when customers actually began saying nice things about ITDC. I know this first-hand because as a public sector manager, I was often compelled to stay in ITDC hotels in pre-Ashwani days (and nights)!

Let me say upfront that I empathise with Ashwani when he tells the stories of good men neutralised by the ‘system’. Yet, I do not agree with his sweeping conclusions on the state of the Republic. In this country of more than a billion people, there are ten thousands of heroes like Ashwani, unknown and unsung. That’s why India works. India can work much better and that is the essence of Ashwani’s case.

In all mature organisations, leadership becomes a victim of designation. Too often, by force of time and circumstances, men of straw sit on plush chairs, desperately insecure and annoyingly arrogant. Leadership demands confidence, and a scared person is fit only to be a camp-follower. The tragedy of incompetence is compounded by corruption. Giving and taking bribe is simple corruption. The real corruption is in compromising objectivity, whether for money or promotion or simply, as the easy way out. The designation gives authority to make decisions, and the ‘system’ requires that the decisions are made objectively. Sadly, the corrupt blames the ‘system’ for his corruption!

Why do administrators and managers like Ashwani go on? Perhaps, it’s the exhilaration of achievement, whether in tracing ‘lost’ railway wagons or in reviving a sick organisation. Perhaps it’s the sense of self-actualisation since there are no special rewards in the ‘system’ for genuine contribution. Perhaps, it’s the undying hope that if all of us change, things will change. Perhaps, it’s because the Ashwanis cannot imagine falling in line, i.e. accept corruption as a way of life. Perhaps it's just cussedness!

Ashwani writes about many facets of professional management. He talks of physical courage as well as courage of conviction. He talks of internal communications and media interface. He talks about clean offices and clear decisions. Of all these, I personally like his focus on passion at work. Winning comes only from passion. Indifference kills.

Subir Raha

C & MD, ONGC

PREFACE

I consider myself fairly lucky, having had a plethora of diverse postings in my career spanning over twenty-five years. After passing out from Jamalpur, the premier institute for training mechanical engineers for the Railways, I started my career in the South-Central Railway in Andhra Pradesh, then moved over to Eastern Railway where, first at Calcutta, I handled diverse MIS projects and then other postings at the headquarters and subsequently at Patratu in Bihar. From there I moved to the Diesel Locomotive Workshop at Varanasi from where I plunged into matters relating to heritage and museology at the National Rail Museum at New Delhi. Subsequent postings took me to the Ministry of Tourism at the Centre, then to the India Tourism Development Corporation and subsequently to the Madhya Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation. In between, I had short stints with the Northern Railway and also the Minister of State for Railways.

The diversity in these postings gave me a rich insight in many aspects of the working of governmental systems in the country and a valuable managerial experience. Of particular interest were the postings with the tourism corporations where despite having inherited bankrupt organisations, I was lucky in being able to turn them around. The posting at Patratu was also unique as it grounded me in the art of handling men, that is so vital for achieving success in any sector, be it governmental or private. The landmark stint at the Rail Museum that culminated in the setting of a Guinness World Record and encryption of Darjeeling Himalayan Railway as a World Heritage Site was also a tremendous experience, albeit in an entirely different field.

This book, that is an attempt at sharing my beliefs and managerial experiences, is dedicated to Mr Romesh Chandra Sethi, who retired as the General Manager of the Diesel Locomotive Works at Varanasi and under whom I spent the formative years of my career. It is he who has been instrumental in shaping my beliefs and toning my style of management. My lovely wife Arunima and my daughters Ankur and Arushi have been the source of inspiration behind this book as well as for all my successes. Shobit, my publisher, has also been extremely supportive of this effort.

INTRODUCTION

This is a book on management. This is the story of my life —a life which could be yours or of anyone who is not willing to take things lying down. The frequent use of ‘I’ may disturb the tenor of the story but the ‘I’ could be you, he, they or anyone in any organisation.

This is a book based on my real life experiences. Having led a fulfilling, varied, unusual, stressful yet a fairly successful official life so far, in my career spanning over two-and-a-half decades, I felt it necessary to pen down my experiences for two reasons — one, to put them on record lest I forget them, although going by what you will read in the pages, chances of this are remote and two, to share these with you all. While the thought had been in my mind since long, the urge became rather uncontroll-able after the release of my first book, titled Smoking Beauties in March 2004 by Shri Jagmohan, India’s former Minister for Tourism & Culture. Smoking Beauties is a book on steam loco-motives, on the black monsters that used to traverse the subcontinent on rails till a few years back and now, in my eyes, have become an object of desire, passion and nostalgia. Steam locomotives are my passion and official work is my life. With passion having been put on paper, I felt it equally necessary and relevant to record my thoughts and experiences of my working life.

My decision to pen this book was borne out of a desire to share my experiences, basically events, that I rate as successful and fulfilling and which everyone else treated as impossible till I made them happen. That one can be successful and do things even within the stifling and hazy government machinery is something that I have painstakingly learnt in my career of twenty-five years and that is what I want others to also believe in. I feel it is necessary to shake the zombies, the bureaucrats, from their sleepy inaction to active deliverance, for, in the State-controlled economy that we live in, deliverance in the real sense can flow only from their pens. My desire to pen my experiences was also fuelled by the inaction of my colleagues, my batch-mates and even officers much junior and younger than I am, almost all whom had given up on life and were just drifting with the current. I decided to pen this book the day I was prematurely shunted from the India Tourism Development Corporation and the Department of Tourism, Government of India despite having won tremendous praise for deliverance and maintaining very high standards of personal integrity. Deliverance in the public sector is a strange pheno-menon. Subordinates love you for it only when deliverance is acclaimed; but it can become a road-block for your superiors who may find it as an antithesis to their scheme of things. However, I am convinced that such isolated incidents should not form the basis for judging life, which should be viewed only in its entirety.

I joined the railways at the age of seventeen as an apprentice at the railway institute at Jamalpur and having developed a passion for railway objects, starting with the smoke-belching black monsters, I consider myself a true-blooded railwayman. The Indian Railways by themselves is a great organisation, perhaps the greatest of all in the country. It is also easily the most visible symbol of dynamic delivery in a nation that even after almost six decades of existence as a free country, has failed in providing even the basic sanitation facilities to a large chunk of its population. Unfortunately, despite its very strong systems, the railways has started showing signs of decay basically because of an overbearing bureaucracy and lack of adequate commercial sense. Still the Indian Railways is one of the finest organisations in the country. With its vast operations, large staff and wide reach, it is almost a State within a State. The kind of varied experiences that it provides to its officers, who have to adhere to strict time-bound delivery schedules, is unparalleled. Commanding a large number of men, handling large budgets, tough operational duties and a likelihood of a posting anywhere in India, are typical working requirements of a railway officer’s life. Delivery in its most basic form is mandatory. A train scheduled to leave at, say, five in the evening has to leave at five, come what may, and excuses are generally not tolerated. Fixing responsibility for lapses is the rule of the game. A railway officer is trained in this discipline and this way of life continues almost uninterrupted, as railway officers in their exclusive colonies, with almost no dependence on the civic authorities, remain almost isolated from the decaying systems elsewhere. But times are changing. Indian Railways is finding it difficult to adhere to the exacting standards of the past and, having generally lacked a visionary approach so necessary for growth, now find themselves unable to handle even the traffic that is on offer. Too much emphasis on rules and procedures and a system, which hardly leaves any room for innovative practices or a different way of thinking or doing things, rules the roost. Such a situation tends to produce an officer who does not go that extra mile in order to make the difference. This does not augur well in the present era of liberalisation, wherein a different kind of thought process has to emerge — a thought process which believes in the superiority of the individual over the system. A mindset, which is achievement oriented, has to percolate the entire bureaucratic system. A visionary approach and the desirability for change should engulf the system and its processes. And finally, a belief in the theory that sooner or later the man who wins is the man who thinks he can.

This book is based on my beliefs, thoughts, experiences and working systems acquired over twenty-five years of service life. Winning at Work is a culmination of the variety of experiences that have seen me going through the ups and downs of my official life with generally a fair amount of success, and some rare exceptions, of course. This book is also based on the firm belief that all a man has to do to win at work is to manage the 3 M’s —men, money and material in a time-bound manner with a clear objective in mind. With this philosophy in the background, for me all jobs are almost alike. The only difference lies in the proportion in which the three M’s are distributed, the time frame and the objective. The basic job is the same, whether it is in the business of roads, airlines, water supply, sewage disposal, construction activity, transport, running hotels or even civic governance. It is also my firm belief that to achieve a reasonable level of success, and that reasonable level if achieved by all in the society, is adequate to propel India into the big league; specialisation is not really of essence. How can specialisation be of immediate help, when what we really lack is basic in nature? While almost everyone in the bureaucratic sector invariably harps on specialisation, what is true is that specialisation will not be of help and may prove counter-productive if the basics are not firmly in place beforehand. Computer system analysts face a similar dilemma, when asked to computerise a chaotic manual system that lacks even the basic ground rules that are so essential for organised delivery. Like computer systems, specialisation improves one’s efficiency that is so vital for achieving a quantum jump, yet, it would be a futile exercise to attempt to inject specialisation in a system or an activity that lacks in basics. However, I feel it is rather unfortunate that in the system we live in, mere announcement of a big intention that may have no chance of materialising, taking one farther than actually doing something smaller, still happens.

I strongly feel that a man should hold firm beliefs and convictions, in which he believes from the core of his existence and for which

Reviews for Winning at Work Against All Odds

[Dcosta Anthony Agnelo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

simple easy to understand, difficult concepts simplified in an easy to understand style