‘Human skills more important than high IQ to run organisation’
MG Arun: Nov 25 2012, 01:37 IST
The title of R Gopalakrishnan's new book What the CEO Really Wants From You – The 4As of Managerial Success, a book on tips to be a good subordinate, comes as a surprise at a time when books on leadership and how to lead abound. What should an employee do to make the boss a partner rather than perceive her as an extractor of work or an adversary? That sets the book apart from his other best selling books, The Case of the Bonsai Manager: Lessons for Managers on Intuition (2007) and When the Penny Drops: Learning What is Not Taught (2010). The business environment is one of change and ambiguity, says Gopalakrishnan, and it is no easy task for any manager to negotiate the journey to success. As Paul Polman, Unilever's CEO, points out in his foreword to the book, partnerships with others, but above all your direct boss and organisation, are more important than before. Gopalakrishnan, backed by 45 years of corporate experience—31 in Unilever and 14 in Tata (he's now a director with Tata Sons)—summarises the wisdom in the four As, Accomplishment, Affability, Advocacy and Authenticity, and illustrates them with real-life examples in a talk with MG Arun. Excerpts:
Accepting to follow a middle path forms an underlying tone of your new book – like, how to get a work done without upsetting the employees much, or how to speak the truth without offending your senior and so on. How challenging is it to put this into
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