The executives of the Standard Co. used to refer to their distribution department sarcastically as an “elephant’s graveyard.

” It appeared
equivalent to little more than just taking orders from the customers and mixing papers and making employees depressed all the time. But
that was before Anubha Patel, 34, came along.

After a brief stint as a trader with Anees Inc., Patel set out for one of the premier business schools in India. She graduated in the top 10%
of her class. In 2004, she headed a taskforce to deal with the communication crisis that surrounded the soft-drink industry. In May 2007,
she became Standard’s first woman marketing director. Anubha Patel lives in Ahmadabad with her husband and an 18- month-old
daughter.

Anubha Patel ensures that she is not one of the “number game players,” unlike a few of her classmates at the management school.
She visualizes herself as a person with a human touch, an outcome of the strong familial bonds with which she was brought up in a small
town in the western part of India. When enquired about her corporate responsibilities, her reaction is, “You should make it possible for
your employees to feel so committed to their jobs and organizations that they never ever dream of leaving the company at all.

Patel gives credit for her success to her innate “people” management skills-something that makes her different from her
contemporaries.”She believes in taking care of her people first and then everything takes care of itself,” says her husband, Anubhav. The
vice president of Standard says. “Anubha has the ability to get the maximum from her people; she can make them develop faith in
themselves, which otherwise might be lacking. And she proved it at the beginning of her stint at standard.

She started a programme in the company where peers had to identify the best employee in a situation and nominate them for special
recognition. Employees were given citations, and this proved to be a great morale booster. After a certain period, employees with
maximum number of such citations were designated as “King” or “Queen” for a day by the human resources department and were entitled
to princely treatment for the day.

Patel also attempted to break age-old practices followed in Standard Co. She started defining distribution not merely as freight
expending but also as a sales-support function for stores and distributors. She found that 25%-30% of sales could be tied to decisions by
customers based on such things as timely and correct shipments. So she formulated new objectives that emphasized service and led to a
gain in sales.

She is also able to create a balance between her 60- hour work week and the demands of marriage and motherhood. She and her
husband alternately try to take time out to take care of the needs of their growing child. They both believe that they are the anchors of
their home as well as their financial life.

Still, she acknowledges that trade-offs are sometimes necessary. After all, as she says, “there are glass balls and rubber balls in life.”
The trick is in knowing which is which. “Family, friends, and health are the glass balls,” she says. “Those you just can’t drop.”

Questions

1 Would you like to work for someone like Anubha Patel? Why or why not?

2. What is the key to Anubha Patel’s success at Standard?

3. Which are the managerial roles that Patel has played? Which role has she played most effectively? Cite specific evidence.

4. Is it possible that Patel’s management style would not work so well in other cultures? Explain.