There is a report that Godrej has decided to setup a Junior Board of Directors called "The Young Executive Board" comprising of managers below the age of 30 (Business Line - 27th July, 2001) . It will be an extra-statutory shadow Board of eight members, the papers say.

Alongside, the company is reported to have launched upon a team approach to chalk out a three-year strategy plan, with the labels Blue and Red possibly to induce a competitive spirit. Both these moves may have interesting logic and it may be good to count the potential "blessings", even if on a speculative basis.

The Junior Board has been a rare experiment in all countries and mostly limited to the objective of management development or career planning process for the "fast track executives" or a one-off simulated experience for the management trainees.

They did not seek to support the corporate governance nor the strategy process. They were mainly a training method to enable executives to "think company" and develop a holistic view beyond the functional silos. In the current context, such a Board can possibly contribute to good Corporate Governance practice as well.

India has adopted the Anglo-Saxon model of a single-tier board and the company law reflects this. In some countries such as Germany, there are two boards - the Supervisory, mostly comprising of non-executive Directors and the Management Board of whole-time Directors. Both are as per law and have separate structures, authorities/responsibilities, duties and liabilities.

Some Indian companies have started to experiment with a two-tier structure within the framework of law by having a senior advisory board. The Senior Board in India is not a supervising one as it does not have any statutory sanctity but hopefully acts as a counsel or mentor than as an "invisible hand". The two-tier structure in India is a rarity and a Junior Board is certainly path breaking. What purpose does it serve?

The developmental outcome is obvious as it can be a good training ground for the members. The members can gain a "helicopter view" and also get "mentored". Yet this would be limited and localized unless it is of the Godrej variety. The Junior Board of Godrej can strengthen the Corporate Governance mechanism even without any legal support. In fact, Junior Boards on a voluntary basis will have better possibilities of enhancing Corporate Governance for the very reasons implicit in the commitment behind voluntarism.

The advantage for corporate governance can arise from three possibilities. Firstly, the Junior Board can be an effective channel for generating, filtering and prioritizing agenda. It can act as a good mechanism for generating a pro-active agenda for the main board enabling the latter to be more than a mere legal necessity. The Junior Board can filter the routine managerial issues from those of strategic importance. Governance begins where management stops and if the latter doesn't stop, then Governance will be crowded out from the deliberations. Sequencing and prioritization is equally important so as to apportion the scarce time of the Main Board in line with the complexity and criticality of the agenda.

Secondly, the Junior Board can provide validation for the main board's decisions. The Main Board has to make several assumptions - quantitative and qualitative - whenever a decision is being made. Some assumptions can even relate to HR aspects such as acceptability of the decisions by the employees, the intangible cost and benefits and the workability of decisions in operational terms. The Junior Board may have lesser competencies of wisdom and judgment than the Main Board but should have better quality of information, particularly at the ground level, of employee and customer preferences and behaviours. Consequently, the Main Board can use the Junior Board for "Beta-testing" of critical decisions before committing resources.

A third advantage can be the learning possibilities for the Main Board. My experience with Boards indicates that they are mostly in "teaching" mode than "learning". Worse is that many members advise and teach without "fear or favour" - without fear of being questioned or held accountable and without favour to anyone else than self! No wonder that Bob Garratt has been pleading for a "learning board" (The Fish Rots from the Head, Harper Collins, 2001). A direct interface of the Junior Board with the Main Board will also help the latter in its learning. Given the common weaknesses in our governance structures, systems, and processes due to historical neglect, the board obviously needs far more learning and capacity building than the managerial class - the Junior Boards may help in this, albeit, indirectly.

What about the Red and Blue teams? The Junior Board will obviously have some connectivity with the proposed teams for developing the strategy plan. In fact, the strategy proposals and environmental analysis generated by teams may be put through the Junior Board to act as a processing machine before throwing them up to the Main Board. The creation of the teams and the advent of the Junior Board in the Indian corporate world signal an important strategic HR effort in the face of growing disaffection with the traditional planning systems.

Henry Mintzberg had discussed the failure of strategic planning particularly from the organizational perspective ("The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning", 1994). In the main, the traditional corporate/strategic planning typifies a "top down culture" and "budget fixation". Both have reeked of power and the desire to control and command. With the result, companies, which have been practicing the traditional methods, have made a ritual of such a process.

Such companies continue to function in the hope that the external conditions of growing markets would keep them all afloat and moving - answering the prayer of Adnan Sami for thidi si lift! The mid - 80`s have shattered this belief for many with several big companies fading away and even the weakest among competitors deriving competitive advantage from hitherto unknown sources.

It is at this point that progressive companies had started appreciating the importance of simultaneous actions of strategy formulation, implementation, evaluation and monitoring. At the conceptual level, it was hoped that the strategic management model would function like a cybernetic system - a self-managing loop of information and action. This realization has made strategy climb down from above the "glass flooring" and move among those who implement them.

The unsung doyen of this approach to strategy, in my view, is Prof Ikujiro Nonaka whose research and writings are the inspiration for the several later year heroes, as well as masqueraders, in the strategy business. As a thought swells into a movement, I guess, the source is often forgotten.

The first time I had met Prof Nonaka was at Oxford in 1989 at the first ever Strategy Colloquium, which was a unique event. By that time, he had published his major research on the Japanese approach to strategy making and its pitfalls (Strategic Vs Evolutionary Management - A US-Japan Comparison of Strategy and Organisation, 1985). He called this as "value based incrementalism" which was highly people driven than the contrasting "portfolio based approach" which was finance-centric. The exposition of Prof Nonaka looked too abstract to be meaningful at that time.

He discussed of "middle up-down management" as being central to successful strategy. He underscored information generation and validation as important to successful strategy. In fact, he was the first from whom I had gathered the importance of Tacit Knowledge - years before Knowledge Management became serious business. These thoughts had been well captured subsequently in his path-breaking article in the Sloan Management Review ("Towards Middle-Up Down Management - Accelerating Information Generation", Spring 1998).

The central argument advanced is that in a highly changing environment, middle management would be the key for both strategy formulation as well as its implementation dynamically. The middle managers have the ability to interpret corporate strategies in their operational implications, test them for their workability and also be in a position to explain and coach the employees below.

Being close to the customer as well as to the production system, the middle managers can gather semantic and syntactic information, which can be the feed for formulating strategies. Thus, letting middle management involved in strategy, especially competitive strategy has generated new product designs and new market segments for corporations. The middle-up-down management denotes the hype to be given to the middle management in strategy - it is neither top down nor bottom up management.

Most of our companies have been rather listless, as far as strategy goes and are still romancing with the old Corporate Planning, with a cosmetic face-lift or part grafting. Most of those claiming modern approaches to strategy appear to be more of sophistry. The Godrej move certainly is new thinking and the Teams approach is obviously an interesting foray into people driven strategy planning. Combined with the move for a Junior Board it presents a potential case study.

Will these be successful? As I see it, these moves have little down side except the possible occasional crib expected from any initiative involving people. The upside can be huge. The challenge can only be the company's ability to integrate its other systems/processes and structures of communications, power distribution, and relationships with these initiatives. Hopefully, this experiment will push human resources from being a mere function of rules and regulations to be the fuel for strategy.