The Winning Manager: 51 Steps To Corporate Success

Walter Vieira (certified management consultant or CMC) was among the first to be elected a Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants of India (FIMC); and also the first to start a marketing consulting company― MAS―in 1975, in Mumbai, India, after a 14-year successful career in the pharmaceutical industry, with Glaxo, Warner and Boots. 

In a span of over 40 years, Walter has worked with many of the largest companies in India―both multinationals and Indian―which have been family-managed or corporates. MAS offers consulting in marketing strategy, and selection and training of marketing personnel in India, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

Walter has published 14 books, three of them in collaboration with C. Northcote Parkinson of Parkinson Law fame. The 5Gs of Family Business is his sixth book published by SAGE.

He has been a business journalist, having written a fortnightly column for Business World for 20 years, and for the Times of India for 10 years; has published over 900 articles in the business and general press. He was on the advisory board of the Journal for Management Consultants, USA. He is the only consultant invited to address three consecutive World Management Consultants meets in Rome, Yokohama and Berlin, and the World Marketing Summits in Dhaka and Tokyo.

He has been president of the Institute of Management Consultants of India, founder-chairman of Asia Pacific Conference of Management Consultants, and later elected chairman of the International Council of Management Consulting Institutes, the world apex body.

Walter is listed by Speakers Academy of Europe for speaking engagements worldwide. He has been a visiting professor at the Bajaj Institute of Management, Bombay University for 20 years, and he has lectured in the USA at Kellogg, Lake Forest, Rady, Drexel and Cornell, and also in Bangkok, Colombo, Singapore, Spain and Beijing.

Walter now spends considerable time in NGO work and is chairman of the Consumer Education and Research Society; trustee of MoneyLife Foundation, IDOBRO; and has been advisor to WWF for Nature for many years.

Walter is also the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award (LAA) for Consulting by IMC India in 2005, and another LAA for Marketing by Indys India in 2009.

From the Introduction:

I was inspired to write this book after reading the following paragraph in an article:

“If the universal truths are already known, then why isn’t everyone implementing them? Maybe because what isn’t discussed are the subtle distinctions, those little nuances that trip us up all the time. Where are those wrong turns located and why do we take them?”

I have been a student of management and an observer of managers for over 40 years. As a corporate executive for 14 years and a management consultant for 30 years, I have worked with governments, public sector organizations, non-profit organizations, private sector organizations, family-owned and widely held companies, transnational and local. I have interacted with executive at every level – from freshly recruited management trainees, to chairmen and board members, some filled with fresh aspirations and others, tired and disillusioned.
These experiences and interactions spurred me to cull lessons and write articles, many of which appeared in ‘Business World’ in monthly columns, for around 19 years.

This is not a standard book on management. It does not attempt to take the reader through the process of planning, forecasting, organizing, delegating, motivating, monitoring, controlling and communicating in sequential order, as in Fayol s wheel of managerial functions. Instead it goes “beneath the skin” of management, as it were, and of a manager, to discuss issues that are not normally dealt with either in speech or in writing.

An executive s career path is like a product or corporate life cycle. In present environment, with globalization and changes in technology, both have unpredictable timespans.

It begins with the pioneering period or the start, and continues with the rapid growth, the maturity stage, and finally, the decline and retirement of the executive. In this book, I have dealt with the more important formative and maturity stages.

I hope the reader will enjoy these pieces and that it will stimulate him/her to develop greater insights into occurrences and events to which generally give little thought, and, like Rudyard Kipling believed, “to see the world in a grain of sand”.