William Bissell
The Man: The MD of Fabindia transformed the export-focussed textile company that his expat father founded into a big domestic brand, and changed the way the upwardly mobile Indian male dressed during functions and festivals. Fabindia has now hit the accelerator with private equity funding. He says we need to examine our assumptions of how narrowly we want to define performance.
The Oeuvre: Started artisans co-operative in Rajasthan in 1988. His book, Making India Work, is a collection of his ideas that can solve some
of India’s pressing problems.
X-Factor: Imaginative, idealism combined with business acumen and tough negotiating skills.
The Message: We need to examine more closely the environment that encourages widespread corporate fraud, and look at more encompassing ways of assessing the worth of a company and its leadership.
The Hypothesis
While CEOs certainly need to have a strong moral compass to withstand pressures, they alone ought not be left to shoulder the burden and bear the blame.
So What?
Boards and investors can support CEOs develop long-term goals rather than focus relentlessly on quarter-on-quarter growth. A large corporation is very simply a repository of public trust. It has been demonstrated time and again that those who do not have integrity do not have good judgement. In which case, they should not be at the helm of any enterprise.
At the heart of all conventional interventions undertaken by governments in the endeavour to prevent fraud lies the tendency to add layer upon layer of regulation. This is tantamount to punishing the innocent (the majority) for the sins of the guilty (the minority).
Having worked in a number of countries in various capacities, I am a firm believer in the 1:9:1 ratio, with the 1 on either side representing the saints and the sinners. It is the folk in the middle who carry the burden of every increase in regulation as the price of being entrepreneurs.
While in most cultures across the world, running a business is still considered ‘distasteful’, most of us unquestioningly accept the idea that it has merely to do with making money. The regulator, armed with the latest instance of corporate fraud and full of the sanctimonious virtue of the good guy catching the bad guy, drops another tonne of bricks.
(This story appears in the 25 May, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)