For decades serious studies have been done on Management and leadership styles. Management experts or gurus painstakingly observed and analysed results based on consolidated qualitative and quantitative studies and provided us with theories and facts that underly modern management philosophies.
Today however there is a threat of all these studies and analysis going to waste in the Indian IT industry. This industry which sprung from the capitalistic west's outsourcing mania is just under two decades old. This means a large proportion of today's indian IT managers, are a newly evolved species yet to undergo an in-depth analysis. Sadly today's brand ambassadors of India are not very hard to study in-depth for their defining characteristics are as limited and shallow as their work ethics. In this highly competitive era that we live in, the pressure to keep one's bank account high is more than having good work ethics.
Gone are the days when a manager is someone that one looks upto for guidance and mentoring. Managers held a team together for years becoming a part of not just their livelihoods but also their lives. This enabled a manager or a leader to know every aspect of his employee - his weaknesses, strengths, capabilities, idiosyncracies - creating a mutual trust that inexplicably maintained a positive bond between the manager and his employee. In today's transient IT world, managers are either feared or hated for they are taught to care about numbers and figures that drive the business - often forgetting that these numbers and figures can be made better if the people behind these are well taken care of. Toady the lust for power and control, uninhibited financial greed, lack of ethics and misuse of control for self interest has started to unsettle the foundations of a good corporate culture that pioneers of Indian IT industry, built two decades ago.
An average Indian IT manager is someone who is irresponsible, money minded, conniving and most importantly a self respect lacking individual. Corporate greed forces organisations to put in practise some very employee unfriendly policies and claim them to be in the best interests of employees. In the larger sense it actually affects not just the employees but also the organisation itself. However since the policymakers themselves belong to the unstudied species of modern day Indian IT management -the question arises- will this failure really bother them? The answer is most certainly not. In reality, the policymakers gain financially as much as the organisation has lost, and by the time the damage is done, they have either retired early or moved on to other companies. One very obvious example of bad policy making is the largely unregulated and unstructured salary and grading policies of Indian IT companies. This directly paves way for greed fueled managers to float across organisations demanding higher than average salaries. This undeserving career growth is also aided by the presence of inside help during the hiring process, a practise that the modern management monsters have put into place by encouraging incompetent and unqualified people that they can exert control over to be placed in their reporting structure.
An outsourced project to the Indian IT world today showcases to the client, a beautiful structure and process from the outside. Customers unwittingly then pay millions and in some case billions of dollars in the hopes of a good long term IT service. Little are they aware of (or in some cases - care about) the chaotic insides of the IT industry in India. The huge gap between what is marketed to the client before the deal is signed and the reality of operations is seen eventually over a period of time by which time, the client has already paid the vendor quite a huge deal of money and will now try to spend more to simply get rid of them and find a replacement to 'fix' the damage. One such gap between what is marketed and what happens in reality is the utter disrespect most Indian IT companies have towards quality assurance practices - including compliance and security. A step motherly treatment towards following processes to avoid compliance issues grips Indian IT companies like a plague and the very management that should discourage this practice does the opposite - so as to reap short term financial benefits. Most of these stories go untold and uncorrected.
However few of them make headlines. Recent Indian IT stories where management has willing put client's confidential data at risk are on the rise in the mainstream media and the internet. Some stories are regularly showcased by the Western media to alert the outsourcing industries the real state of Indian IT operations. Much of the blame for such chaos has to be shouldered by the Indian IT companies that fed by greed and fueled by bureacracy have grown into an arena for one of the biggest corporate rat races in the world. A race where of all the rats that run in the race, the ones that trample others, backbite and prove to be the most disloyal claim the victory of becoming a manager. Sadly most of the other rats want the same victory - and the battle continues...
