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Pradip Khandwala
and eventually over 2000 were identified. Many of the identified change agents were sent to a 13-week exposure in the US to pick up the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture. About 400 were given entrepreneurship training. In the meanwhile Schulmeyer created 2000 profit centers and 250 strategic business units (SBUs), and most of the trained change agents were appointed as their heads. A potent intranet facility was provided, which led to the formation of several 'virtual teams drawn from various parts of the world in which the company operated, to tackle complex tasks. Twice monthly, transformation program developments were discussed company-wide, and all new developments were flashed via email to the employees. Relatively autonomous teams implemented many initiatives. For example, the corporate head office staff on its own found a way to cut its strength from 1400 to 256. The upshot of all these innovative actions was that the company broke even in 1995, and made a profit of about DM 550 million on sales of DM 15400 million in 1996. The case shows how even in a large organization, a huge mindset change can be brought about in a short time that unleashes numberless innovations by the top management, if the top management taps the large talent pool available in any large organization and vests the talented with executing powers. Models of Creative Management
Over the years several models of creative management have emerged. Let me briefly review them. Gary Steiner thought that a creative organization should mimic a creative individual (Steiner, 1965). He therefore suggested extensive use of brainstorming to generate creative ideas, special nurturance of creative people, meritocracy, investment in discovery, decentralization and autonomy for the staff but with accountability, and an attempt at becoming a unique organization. Burns and Stalker, based on research on 20 British organizations, distinguished between an 'organic' (fluid) and a 'mechanistic' (rigid) style of management (Burns and Stalker, 1961). They concluded that the organic mode of management was much more suitable for bringing in innovations than the mechanistic mode. Teresa Amabile and associates, based on the study of a large number of American projects, emphasized establishing a workforce climate that encouraged creativity; supportive supervision; induction of diverse skills in groups; sufficient resources; autonomy to work group; and 'optimal pressure (Amabile et al, 1995). The Japanese have advocated a style of management called kaizen that taps the creative ideas of workers (McMillan, 1996). In 1980, when the Japanese economy was undergoing a crisis, the Government and the industry called out to the workers for help, and the workers responded with 25 million suggestions for improvement that benefited the economy by billions of dollars. My work in India on business organization led me to identify a policy framework that yielded superior growth and profitability to those that adopted it
