Minister PTR Palanivel Thiagarajan emphasises on empathy at the Foundation Day celebration at PSGIM
Honourable Minister PTR called for empathy and institutionalising the management process in the politics and governance. He was speaking at the Foundation Day celebrations held at the PSG Institute of Management, which also honoured 4 of its distinguished Alumni.
Shri. PTR Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, Hon’ble Minister for Information Technology and Digital Services, Government of Tamil Nadu was the chief guest of the program and recognised the distinguished alumni of PSGIM for their achievements with the distinguished Alumni Awards 2024.
The recipients of the Distinguished Alumni Awards are
Dr. Krishnan Dandapani, Graduated MBA in 1977, Professor of Finance, Florida
International University
Mr. K Gunasegharan, Graduated MBA in 1998. Co Founder & Director, eCAPS Computers
India Pvt. Ltd.
Mr. J Jayabalaji, Graduated MBA in 2000, Deputy Financial Advisor & Chief Accounts
Officer/Traffic, Southern Western Railway
Ms. Veena Sethuraman, Graduated MPIB in 2003, Author, Vice President & HeadLearning and Organizational Development, InMobi
Earlier Dr. Srividya, the Director of the PSG IM welcomed the gathering.
Managing Trustee, Shri L Gopalakrishnan presided over the event and felicitated the alumni.
Speech of Honourable Minister Thiru PTR Palanivel Thiagarajan, Minister for IT Services, Govt of Tamin Nadu:
Chairman, Thiru GR Karthikeyan, Managing Trustee, Thiru L Gopalakrishnan, Principal Dr. Srividya, Distinguished Alumni awardees for today, the many faculty friends of this institution, staff students, and the young people from the home and of course all the many who have worked to put this event together. this momentous evening, marking a milestone in both the revolution and achievements of the Trust, the Centenary Year, and of the Institute, the Diamond Jubilee the 60 years. I’m profoundly happy to be here for many reasons.
First, my family from my grandfather’s side, from my grandfather’s mother’s side, is from Coimbatore. We celebrated long relationships, multi-generation relationships with many friends in Coimbatore, including the founders of this institution and the PSG family.
I myself have fond memories of traveling through Coimbatore to Ooty where I went to boarding school from the age of five, and every time I’d go up or down it stopped by here. Also I have many friends and colleagues in my professional career who benefited from the education, in fact relatives who benefited from the education at PSG institutions, PSG Tech, PSG Institute of Management, PSG Medical and so on behalf of all of them I feel like I’m adding my thanks to this great institution by being here to celebrate with you today. In the Dravidian movement, we have always thought of education as the primary tool to achieve the goal of social justice and equality that all people are born equal and that all people should have access or opportunity to achieve their full potential I am an example of somebody who has spent many years in education and I hope to some extent made my own mark in the world irrespective of my own family history and legacy for which I’m very thankful. But I want to talk today a little bit about the importance of management as a profession and management education.
My own experience with management came relatively late in life. I started out as a chemical engineer, I did a master’s in operations research, I did a PhD in applied psychology. I had a successful consulting practice, industrial consulting, then better management consulting. And somewhere along the line I realized that for all the technical things I was doing, there was a couple of components in the puzzle that I was somehow missing. Part of it was to do with finance. I had no idea how things were funded and what decisions were made. But part of it had to do with the notion that while I was instinctively figuring out how things should fit and how they should work better and what kind of information should be required and so forth, surely I couldn’t be the first one to be thinking about this. There must be a discipline that actually teaches people to manage processes, to manage organizations.
And so I started kind of when I went on consulting assignments trying to see how different companies had set up this function. And I remember a very stark example in those days, I think it was the early 90s, one of the biggest tech companies in the world was IBM. We were still in the era of mainframes. We had not yet moved to the kind of localized processing and networks that we have now. And at IBM, they had a very clear distinction. Engineers were engineers and managers were managers. Very few engineers ever made managers. You could go all the way from trainee engineer to, there was some senior designation like advisory engineer or something like that, which was like paid better than most managers and then there was a separate track for management and they would get people out of MBA programs, out of good schools.
They’d run their own training. And they would have 30, 35-year-old MBAs managing processes that had 40, 50, 60-year-old engineers who had decades of experience, because the role of actually managing a team, of putting together the efforts of many to achieve the objectives that the senior management had set up for the shareholders was an independent function in itself.
And so I started reading a little bit about it and the two or three things that stand out in my mind, I’ll tell you because most of you are MBA students. The notion of the theory of the firm, why should a firm exist as a firm? Where should it draw its boundaries? Why should it not be bigger than it is or smaller than it is? What level of vertical integration? What level of breadth? What all lines of business?
These are not simple questions and though we see them in practice every day, we can see both models that work and models that fail and I’ll give you some examples in a minute. But really if you think about the modern art of management probably the greatest pioneer of the last at least of the last hundred years was a gentleman called Alfred P Sloan and Alfred P Sloan was the gentleman who integrated what were then some of the biggest car companies in the world obviously American into what became General Motors and he had this theory that having efficient administration platforms processes and the notion of
management could actually deliver superior results irrespective of the product irrespective of the technology because there was a particular science or a particular approach called management.
At its time, General Motors was such a big behemoth in the American economy that there is an old adage that at a hearing in Congress, the response from the General Motors executive was, what’s good for GM is good for America. That’s how important General Motors was and that’s how big it had become. Alfred B. Sloan went on to do many things in his life but one of the things he did was fund the Sloan School of Management where I got my MBA at the Massachusetts University of Technology, then considered one of the best engineering schools from which he had graduated as an engineering graduate.
We’ll fast forward another 30-40 years and the second kind of great icon of the notion of management that I recall or had some overlap with electricity should be through alternating current or AC as we see and they won the battle as opposed to Westinghouse Corporation which with the backing of Nikola Tesla was arguing that the platform or the backbone of electricity distribution should be direct current or DC. of DC. But by the time Jack Welch came around to managing it, he again created this notion
that having the capacity to manage enterprises of people or align incentives or line up productivity was itself a skill and so he created this vast conglomerate, though it started out as General Electric. By the time I became a professional, let’s say in the late 90s, the biggest source of revenue for General Electric was financing. and one of them was called GE Capital, one of them was an aircraft leasing company, and they had diversified into entertainment, into manufacturing, into defense, you name the product, they were there. of General Electric, then you are on track to be the CEO of some big multi-billion dollar
Fortune 10 or Fortune 20 or Fortune 50 company. In fact, most of the people who reported to Jack Welch went on to run huge companies like Boeing and I think even many others, but I don’t remember right now. So that was the second kind of, I would say, example of the importance of management as a science or management as a special tool, as a specialization, rather than just anybody can do this. In Europe, the big example was a Swedish gentleman who was actually a professor who was pulled out by the board of two companies, a Swiss company systems, turbines, whatever you name it, program where from around the world he would go and select about 50 to 60 young people of all nationalities, put them into a one year or 18 month training program in this place called Westeros outside Stockholm and then he would rotate them through businesses and he would plan their careers or the company would rather plan their careers, for 10 or 15 years, so that they ended up becoming such well-rounded executives that they were building bench strength that no one person was that mighty, but every person was so well-rounded in management.
And they felt that that was a competitive advantage in a global economy, just to have capacity. that capacity. I left the world of commercial interests about 8 years ago and came and DMK IT wing, I realized that actually the need for good management talent, for understanding of the principles of management, of alignment of incentives, of human psychology, of systems, of analysis was universal. It was almost exactly, if not more needed in the field of politics than it was in the corporate world. I’m happy to say that when I set up the IT wing, I felt like I set up a platform that basically rejuvenated the party’s infrastructure, its approach to electoral politics from the mechanics of facing polling day, counting, validation, analysis and then of course things like communication, social media and all that came second. But the platform to manage the system was my main ambition when I was interacting pensions, planning, development, personal administrative reforms, pretty much all of the administration of the government. improve that and I would say externally whenever anybody asked me I’d say the two qualities of a good government of a good politician of a good chief minister of a good minister first empathy and compassion and second doesn’t mean I can get things done. I actually need to be able to execute and transform a vision into reality and make sure that the programs I announce run properly. meeting state is not adequate is not high enough an ambition my ambition is that I want to set in place a platform set in place an institutional model or systems where you don’t need to be an MBA from a
top school you don’t need to be a former banker to actually do things right in finance because till then we were doing it manually and ad-hoc and whoever said so. And so my ambition is now institutionalization of professionalism or of management, Institutional memory and capacity than one started but perhaps the greatest contribution of all would be something like an institute of management where you are creating generations and generations of talent and in the case of this trust and this institution where they’ve been doing it for almost hundred years in various fields and 60 years in this field one year as we were talking earlier before the inception of IIM so the thought process was that far advanced about the need for management.
As individuals, I would say we all aim for excellence, we strive for excellence, but if I were to give a word of advice to those of you, because I was once an MBA student, I would say take the to high quality institutions have already passed the kind of filter. Do we have capability? That’s already behind us. how much short-term volatility or downside are you willing to risk for the fact that 5 years, 10 years, 15 years from now you will be much better equipped to see the big picture and deal with great outcomes. And I think that will make the distinction or make the separation between those with good careers and those with stellar ones. I’d like to think that at every opportunity, I reset myself. When I thought I’d learned a lot of engineering, I went to optimization. When I thought I’d learned enough optimization, I went to the human element. When I thought I’d learned enough about the human element, I went to finance. When I thought I’d learnt all of it, I went to the world of Wall Street and derivatives and saw something I’d never seen.
When volatility in the markets drove kind of change, I went to commercial banking, mundane products like foreign exchange and kind of money markets which I never worked in, I’ve been a derivative banker most of my career and I would say for the whole of it, I am much much better equipped and qualified now than if I had taken a very narrow short term view of where I would get the highest return or the highest bonus or the highest PNL of that year. So I want to conclude by congratulating and praising the many generations, three generations of the PSC family for their remarkable contributions in many fields, in training, in education, in medicine, to Coimbatore, to Tamil Nadu, to India, to the world.
Many of my friends who were hugely successful, bankers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, startup founders who have sold out at high prices, many of them are PSG graduates. And I think it’s a testament to the value that these institutions have added to society of humankind rather than one place. I want to congratulate the distinguished alumni awardees for their stellar careers and for being shining examples for those of you still as students to follow. I wish all of you a very great future, and I hope the institution continues to expand and raise the level of its impact and we all as a society will benefit from it. Thank you very much for the invitation.
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Post the presentation there was a panel discussion with all the alumni on how to navigate the present market conditions which was moderated by Shivakumar, a noted national realty player and executive member of Alumni Association
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