The Centre for Ethical Leadership, inaugurated in Bangalore, India, last week is the second project launched by the Asia/Pacific/Australia Group of the Caux Initiative for Business

R. Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director, Tata Sons, inaugurated The Centre for Ethical Leadership (CENTREL), in Bangalore, India, last week. CENTREL is the second initiative to be born out of the Asia Pacific Australia Group of the Caux Initiative for Business (CIB-APARG). The earlier one, Centre for Governance (CfG) was launched last December by the former chief Justice of India, Mr. Venkatachaliah.

Inauguration of the Centre for Ethical Leadership (CENTREL) in Bangalore. From left to right: Leni Mathews, R.M. Lala, Gopalakrishnan, Dr R.K. Anand and Rajmohan Gandhi

Dr. R.K. Anand welcoming the over 150 guest who included Bangalore’s leading citizens - company executives, the city’s active NGO leaders, professors, trainers, educationists and civil servants. Several associated with Caux Initiatives of Business and CfG came from Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Jamshedpur and Pune.

Mr. Gopalakrishnan said that good leadership should constitute a positive intent, sustainability and the development of successors. “When it comes to our offspring we are proud to see them do better than us. Good leadership entails having the same attitude to our colleagues”, he said. “Only 40% of the Fortune 500 companies are found in the list for longer than 50 years”; those which survive are the ones with the kind of leadership where people’s leadership skills are constantly being developed. In fact the companies that last long also have CEOs who last long in them. He gave Tatas as an example of a company which has been successful for over 50 years and has had only a handful of CEOs during that period. The media, he said, was being judgemental and yet not appreciative of positive and good leadership.

Prof. Rajmohan Gandhi, speaking as the Guest of Honour, said, “For many of us, leadership has some essential ingredients: a stage, a central seat, a large garland, the presence of video cameras and security personnel, media headlines, a title. But I have a suspicion that CENTREL will focus on some other aspects of leadership… The plan is to learn together, to strengthen one another, to commit as a body of persons to certain standards, to share examples and experiences of effective leadership, to provide an active learning centre to all interested, whether in the public or the private domain, and to say to any willing to listen that ethical leadership is both necessary and possible…Let me here add my hope that both CENTREL and Centre for Governance may in due course serve, along with other institutions, as channels for Indian assistance to needy parts of the world outside India.”
Introducing CENTREL, the coordinator, Mr. Sarosh Gandhy, former Executive Director of India’s largest truck maker, Tata Motors, spoke of the thinking behind CENTREL and its objectives. He addressed the challenge facing India in joining the world community, as an equal, in the process of globalization – economically, technologically, socially and politically. “Our greatest obstacles to this” he said, “are principally, a lack of ethical leadership and good governance and the corrupt practices that prevail at all levels and in each part of our society. The Centre for Training in Ethical Leadership is yet one more step in helping our country achieve its goals. Ethical Leadership cannot be taught; it has to be experienced. And it is here where we feel we will be different from the scores of other training programs on Ethical Leadership. We believe that if you want to change the environment around you, you first have to change yourself. We hope to show that honesty, purity, unselfishness and love can be used in an organization or institution to make it competitive, efficient and to enable it to grow. We hope to demonstrate that the individual is the most powerful agent of change and that he can bring about this change by applying the four standards mentioned above.”

The noted author and biographer of J R D Tata, Mr Rusi Lala, launched the book “Initiatives of Change in India”, which is an assessment of IofC’s work of the last six decades in the country.

Management and training consultants Arun Wakhlu and Leni Mathews conducted a workshop after the inauguration for which fifty participants stayed behind. It made very good contribution to the content of the proposed CENTREL training programmes for top management.

Leni Mathews and Ravindra Rao