The Art of Corporate Living: Published articles/The Economic Times 3

Article in The Economic Times, Feb 27, 07

The Art of Corporate Living :
PR, HR and CSR come together for Corporate Branding


“Enter a world where profits and morals work hand in glove,” said the ad. If your remote had paused on CNBC one Saturday evening, you may have caught Venugopal Dhoot talking with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. While CEOs and business leaders flocking to Bhagavad Gita lectures, visiting temples or meeting religious leaders has always made news; this conversation on a business media channel seemed a milestone of sorts. A clear statement that corporate life is not just corporate anymore. When you join the dots between many little trends, you find that the lines between PR, HR and CSR are blurring and companies are clearly on a search for “let’s do something different”.

It’s one thing to read that Vijay Mallya contributed to the gold plating of the Sabarimala temple. But quite something else when Kerala-based Maitri Advertising talks of group pilgrimage to Sabarimala as a team building effort sans partying and says that it leads to better productivity. A step up from the outbound adventure tours that we saw a couple of years ago.

Groups of people from a company have always occasionally gone for a movie together. Then came the trend of picking movies that have themes of team building, motivation and the like. But now there’s Sasken, screening a movie every Friday for employees and their families in office premises, with popcorn. And Microsoft has a movie library of their own so that employees can take the one they want home for the weekend.

It used to be said that in India, you don’t marry a person you marry the family. Well, now it looks like you don’t hire a person, you hire the family. Many companies, specially IT, clearly see parents as a target for their recruitment campaigns. Inviting parents to visit the office, wives to participate in cookery contests and children to attend personality development courses in the summer holidays are all now par for the course.

Sponsoring art and theater? Holding yoga/breathing/salsa workshops? Inviting outside speakers at your annual conference? Sorry, all been done before! What is your percentage of cross-industry recruitment? Of challenged people? Of women in senior positions? Did Kottler drop in to workshop with your marketing team? Do you have a company blog? Do you sponsor further education? Quick, think of something for your company to do that will make news, and get your employees talking proudly about the company as well.

And as if it was not enough to compare profits, growth rates and holiday destinations, it looks like CEOs are now under pressure to scuba dive, trek to Tibet, play musical instruments, and find passions that they can then say teaches them new lessons in leadership and team spirit. All of these, in any case, now look like child’s play in the light of a chieftain who strikes the largest Indian acquisition one day and flies an F16 fighter jet the next.

The most beneficial fallout of this new unboxing of corporate life is surely the heightened sense of Corporate Social (read Karma) Responsibility. Certainly a far cry from sponsoring the occasional green traffic roundels. While many companies have done enormous work even in the past with schools, hospitals, improving lives of factory workers, farmers and the like, it is the complete corporatisation of philanthropy, and understanding the PR opportunities therein, that makes the difference. That said, one must admit that Indian business leaders really do us proud. Beyond chequebook charity, it is indeed heartening to read of Azim Premji’s genuine personal passion to address systemic issues. And that Mahindra and Mahindra has something called an Employees Social Options Plan - not just allotting a percentage of profits but actually encouraging employees to give their time, energy and emotion. Soon jobs in CSR projects will become as sought after as pure commercial ventures.

So what’s next? If corporate draws from everywhere, will vice versa happen too? Playing in Houston is a musical on the Enron fraud, which has adapted famous songs - How Do You Solve A Problem Like Jeff Skilling, Ya Got Trouble In Bayou City and Get Me To The Court On Time - to tell the story. While movies like Corporate or programmes like Business Baazigar are not big hits, surely there is room here for some inspiration and innovation?

With many companies beginning to recruit foreigners, being heterocultural and managing diversity is already showing up as a new experience. Always known for its high sense of ethics, the Murugappa Group’s whistle blower policy caught some media attention recently. Will this set off transparency as the next idea?
The other trend in the West is to have an academic guru on your board. Will Indian companies follow suit? Dipak Jain, Vijay Govindarajan, Jagdish Sheth, Tarun Khanna… who do you have? Or maybe we’ll do a one up? Drop the academic – maybe soon, we will have spiritual gurus on Indian boards. The Art of Corporate Living, as it were!