Lee Iacocaa, the celebrated former President of Ford Motors and then later, Chrysler Motors in the USA, exclaimed why top CEOs need to retire at 60 years or above, when at that age they have tremendous knowledge capital in them gained over decades of handling multifarious functions in major corporations.
Retired or otherwise, such knowledge capital and wisdom should find use and expression for others to benefit. And the best way to do that, like quite a few leading retired Indian CEOs are doing is to write books based on their vast experience.
R G Rajan has precisely done that in his maiden book ‘Life Lessons for Managers’, which was released recently at the hands of Maharashtra Energy Minister, Dr Nitin Raut in Nagpur.
Chemical Engineer, Rajan with a career spanning 36 years, all with leading public sector companies, out of which more than a decade was in Directorial positions and later as Chairman & Managing Director, has penned this book chronicling his life’s experiences. Like the song Do-Re-Mi in the film Sound of Music, Rajan starts at the very beginning: From his experiences in school and then in Institute of Technology, BHU for his chemical engineering and later his first job experiences as a Management Trainee with Engineers India Ltd. He goes on to recount his life’s learnings in his subsequent career journeys through stints at GAIL – where he was also selected for an MBA course at Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow in UK – later rising to be Executive Director at GAIL and then moving on to be Chairman & Managing Director (CMD) with National Fertilizers Ltd, then as CMD of Rashtriya Chemicals & Fertilizers Ltd.
The book is written in a racy style, in simple but impressive English, very autobiographical with about twenty three chapters. Though various anecdotes in the chapters, he elaborates on the various facets of leadership and the values and character traits for success while leading. The beauty is every chapter is brief, to the point, well written and easy to read. Each chapter emphasises on the importance of various components and human behavioural aspects needed to make for an effective manager through story telling personal experiences.
Such as on: attitudes & habits, the importance of good communication and the art of listening, never to compromise on ethics, how leadership can be learnt, the importance of delegating work, how to cope with stress, managing change successfully, importance of learning from failures and how each person has to build his personality and hold oneself responsible for failures, success as well as happiness. Therefore, the book is very motivational too.
This book, a narrative of life’s learnings with interesting experiences, would be of great value to young, aspiring industry managers, management students, as well as experienced managers at work today, to help them face their career challenges as well as in their personal lives too.
The book is available on Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart & Google.
Responses can be sent to:
chemindigest@gmail.com and/or rgrajan1957@gmail.com
– Vinoo Mathews
