The presentation told “The Tale of Two Businesses” to illustrate the ‘Key Differentiator between Winning and Losing’, taking the case studies of Overseas Sanmar Finance Limited (OSFL) and Sanmar Engineering Corporation (SEC). OSFL was the most visible Sanmar company in the 1980s, enjoying a large fixed deposit base and strong investor confidence.
Its vision was to become an all India one-stop shop for financial services. Post economic liberalization begun in 1991, reduction in duties, global recession, the South East Asian crisis, falling interest rates and political uncertainty changed the scenario dramatically. OSFL’s dream run began to turn sour when RBI introduced stringent norms for Non Productive Assets for non banking finance companies.
With corporate loans going wrong, the high overheads and cost of debts, the company began to post losses, leading to increasing loss of morale and staff turnover. It finally had to exit the business—which, it must be said, it did in style, honourably discharging its financial obligations with integrity and efficiency. The panel described OSFL’s failure as a disconnect between its vision for tomorrow and what it could achieve today. It was unprepared for rapidly changing circumstances, and it failed to execute.
The presenters then took up the success story of SEC, faced as it was with a similar dilemma—of how it dealt with declining projects in India, a slowdown in the replacement market, changes in collaborators’ ownership and increasing overheads. Through threadbare SWOT analyses, debates on growth and return parameters and action plans drawn up based on consultation and agreement with the people who would execute them, SEC arrived at the new direction it wanted to take: To become the preferred supplier to its JV partners and to become a world class manufacturing organisation.
A Climate for Fostering Performance Culture: The Sanmar Landscape
Mentor: V R Venkataraman
Team: (clockwise from top right) Deepak Dave,
C N Purnananda, R Padmanabhan, C V Subba Rao, K Mohan In their presentation, the panellists sought to find answers to the questions: Why is a performance culture important? Where are we today as a group? Where do we want to go?
How do we create the climate for a performance culture? The team explained in detail the initiatives of the group that will usher in the performance culture—the people policies of uniformity, transparency, appraisal systems, training programmes and reward systems, etc.
The roles played in developing such a culture by the Sanmar policies on ethics, the group’s total cash-based compensation philosophy, the administrative support available in the group, the policies on decision making and accountability were also explained. The panellists stressed the key attributes required to create a performance climate. These, according to them are: discipline, passion, creativity and innovation, team work, leadership, feedback and counselling and work-life balance.
The panel made some interesting suggestions for consideration by the Sanmar group. In brief, some of these are: Recognise the best knowledge sharer. Recognise performing teams by featuring them in Matrix and during Group Annual Days. Increase intra group awareness. Facilitate reading Performance Culture literature. Conduct Ethics Workshops for all employees.The final session included a presentation by the HR mentors S Gopal, V Ramesh and C G Sethuram on the actions taken or proposed in their businesses for building a performance culture, and a wrapping up of the proceedings.
S Gopal .
C G Sethuram
V Ramesh
Vijay Sankar, P S Jayaraman, N Sankar,
M N Radhakrishnan and M S Sekhar.
Employees of the Year receiving their awards from N Sankar
P S Raman, A Ravikumar, Lavanya Venkatesh
K.S.Venkiteswaran,J.NirmalBabu,M.Jeya murugaprakash.
S Chakrapani , V S Ramesh , K Sattanathan.
Dr Bhuvaneswari Sridhar, R Madan Kumar,
S Sunderraman, R Venkatasubramani
J Sridhar , M Chandrasekar , G Hari
K Shankar , S Ramesh Babu, Dr T Devanathan, V Arumugam.