Instituted to promote the awareness of business excellence by CII in conjunction with EXIM Bank 1994 the award is based on a comprehensive model focussing on the organisations practices and performance under nine different criteria viz, leadership, policy and strategy, people management, processes, customer results, people results, society results and key performance results.

L&T: Better luck next time
Guess who missed meeting the CII's exacting standards? Surprisingly, Larsen & Toubro. Instead, it was a field day for the Indian promoter companies, with the CII-EXIM Business Excellence commendation certificates going to the four homegrown companies in the list of the five finalists. Of these, Nuclear Power Corporation had the distinction of being the first public sector unit to be recognised thus -- and won thunderous applause.

Indebted to Dad
It's a beginner's bummer. Most start-ups run into a cash-flow problem in the early days simply because the organisation focus is on fighting competition, ensuring credibility, and plain ol' survival. So when the issue came up before the panel on ``Building global Indian stars'', all the panelists ruefully admitted to having struggled with the cash-flow ogre. Everyone except Sandeep Maini, that is. Said the director of the Maini Group, piously: ``We didn't have a problem. We managed it.'' Refusing to let that go unchallenged, chairperson Suresh Rajpal immediately pounced: ``Everybody is not as lucky as you are. Probably your Dad bailed you out!''

Sleeping partners?
Referring to employee partnership in an organisation in the context of grooming a global CEO, Anand Sudarshan, president, Planet Asia emphasised that partnership did not necessarily mean equal partnership. For example, he quipped, ``My wife and I have been partners for a dozen years. But let me tell you we are not equal.'' We can guess what that means-and exactly who is the majority stakeholder!

Ribbing Hamara Bajaj
It was just as well that Rahul Bajaj, president CII had to leave the Quality Summit venue early to attend a high-level closed-door meeting with government officials. For immediately after Bajaj's address ended, member planning commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia took to the dias to deliver the inaugural address-and had plenty to say about how Indian companies need to press for more liberalisation, stop carping about global competition and in general wake up to the WTO reality. While that might have had the pro-Swadeshi Bajaj shifting uncomfortably, he was also lucky to miss a direct dig.

Talking about competition being good for product development, a tongue-in-cheek Ahluwalia took a direct dig at Bajaj Auto, saying that the company came up with an improved version -- `Hamara Bajaj' -- only in the post-liberalisation scenario. ``During 1980-1990, not as many product innovations took place as between 1990-1995,'' said Ahluwalia. Grist to the World Bank's mill, no doubt.