Ashok has been involved with large corporations such as Caisses d'Epargne, Canal +, L’Oreal, Lafarge, LVMH, Renault, Vodafone, Philips, Faurecia, France Telecom on topics related to International Strategy, Organization Design, International HR, Post-Merger Integration, Cross-cultural management issues and doing business in emerging Asian markets. He has intervened in programs like "International and Cross-cultural Management" for middle-management executives of Norwegian Business School, speaking on "French Management Elites: The Indian Perspective". Recently he has intervened with senior executives from Renault that discussed on specificities on the Indian business environment and focused on managing JVs in India.

CONSULTING

Ashok specializes in strategic and organizational design issues in firms and has worked on managing across culture and strategic human resource issues in firms. His work has been mostly during organizational restructuring process in firms and ways to implement change processes for superior performance. Most recently, he has been working with a group of senior management on creating business awareness in emerging markets. He has consulted a wide array of firms on these topics on both short and long term assignments.

EXECUTIVE LECTURES

Ashok regularly lectures diverse audiences in France, Japan, China, Taiwan and India. Through executive seminars and open lectures, Ashok creates a forum for the development and implementation of business and HR strategies for emerging markets. Each lecture is customized to fit the audience and their circumstances.

Some of the topics that Ashok regularly lectures on include:

• Managing Business in Asia (focusing on India, China and Japan)
• Re-designing Organizations
• Value-creation during Post-Merger Integration process
• Leading and Managing Organizational Transformation
• Redesigning Strategic HRM for sustainable competitive advantage
• Managing International Human Resource
• Managing Across Cultures

Methodology: Ashok provides an environment and a wonderful opportunity to focus on the immediate relevance of the issues discussed in class from day-to-day experience. The methodology is therefore designed to provide room for discussion, interaction, and feedback. The more the willingness to take some risks in sharing examples, insights, hunches, confusion and questions, the more successful it becomes in making the concepts immediately useful. In addition to formal lectures, cases, case discussions, focused simulations, interactive exercises, role plays, group discussions, team presentations, video materials, Ashok uses concepts from action learning. The learning style tends to be interactive with experiential activities to reinforce the classwork.

Topics/modules that ashok lectures on:

Managing Business in Asia (focusing on India, China and Japan)

The world economy has changed a lot over the past 50 years. Over the next 50, the changes could be at least as dramatic. With globalization and necessity for a double-digit growth, a key interest for firms has been in Asian emerging markets and there importance from a long-term investment perspective. A major theme of this module is that, over the next few decades, the growth generated by the large emerging countries, such as India and China could become a much larger force in the world economy than it is now. A Goldman Sachs report states that India’s economy, for instance, could be larger than Japan’s by 2032, and China’s larger than the US by 2041 (and larger than everyone else as early as 2016). Looking back 30 or 50 years illustrates that point. Fifty years ago, Japan and Germany were struggling to emerge from reconstruction. Thirty years ago, Korea was just beginning to emerge from its position as a low-income nation. And even over the last decade, China’s importance to the world economy has increased substantially. With this as an introduction the module “Managing Business in Asia” would discuss the following topics:

• Macro-environment and business climate in India, China and Japan
• Specificities of these markets: Comparing India and China as markets (Learning from Japan)
• Managing business in these markets – how they are similar and different from developed markets
• Managing culture and people across these markets
• Managing success in these markets – a suggested roadmap from examples of successes and failures of firms in these markets.
• Managing innovations in India and China

Re-designing Organizations

Organization design involves explicit efforts to improve organizations. With globalization, continuous changes in the external environment and unprecedented change in industry structures, organizations are forced to seriously reconsider the design as well as the deployment of the organisation itself. Confronted with market deregulation, privatization, global competition, adoption of innovative practices, benchmarking rapidly changing technologies and fundamental shifts in culture, organizations are rethinking and re-evaluating their steep hierarchies, powerful centralized bureaucracies, and narrowly defined people policies. In the present context, firms are struggling with finding ways to reduce costs while also trying to be on the cutting edge of innovation. They want to create flat and fast organizations structures yet cling to the command and control policies. They do not want to forget their administrative heritages yet build adaptive cross-cultural teams. How do organizations deal with these seemingly competing sets of demands? This module would discuss the following topics:

• Linking the vision, mission, goals with the strategy, structure, systems of the organization
• Creating the architecture of the new organization that fits the properties of the environment
• Balancing dichotomies – differentiation Vs integration
• Building adaptive work cultures – creating organizational selection, training, socialization and reward systems that foster reliability and effectiveness
• Implementing seemingly flexible and efficient business processes that learn and improve over time
• Leadership challenge that guide the re-design process to new organizational forms

Value-creation during Post-Merger Integration (PMI) process

This topic is like an old wine always being served in a new bottle. It is commonplace that mergers regularly fail to deliver the promised benefits and most actually destroy value. And yet the potential prize of a successful operation is great, so how do we make them work? Most consultants have a recipe of how to solve this seemingly unsolvable problem. This module goes a step further and discusses interactively the pros and cons of different M&A cases, their failure and successes and tries to reveal the key variables from empirical research data that might give a direction to the underlying theme of "value creation", "synergy" or "market power". The topics that are dealt here are:

• PMI processes – Recipes, models and pitfalls
• Role of national and corporate cultures during PMI process
• Human Vs Task Integration
• Speed Vs Level of Integration
• Exploration Vs exploitation vis-à-vis coordination Vs autonomy
• Leadership and role of HR during M&A

Leading and Managing Organizational Transformation

In order to make sense of the new frontier of business, which entails rapid and unpredictable transformations, strategic discontinuities, economic uncertainties and hyper-competition, new forms of managerial thinking are required. The new thinking required to lead and manage organizational transformations need to be global in orientation and allow strategic and structural flexibility in an integrated way. A major part of staying ahead in the new business climate will depend on organizations having the capability to re-create, re-align, re-deploy and re-implement strategic and structural changes that entail continuous improvisations. Moreover, as a vast majority of both major and minor change initiatives in enterprises fail, it becomes evident that this redeployment of organizations goes far beyond their simple reconfiguration. It requires leaders and managers of these organisations develop specific competencies concerning the implementation of major changes. These changes often have significant social and political effects, which they must be able to ascertain and handle. This module tries to understand the processes involved in organisational transformation and examine why most organizations fail while a few succeed. It looks at different models of transformations and considers both the role of leaders and also of followers in initiating and managing the successful transformation inside organizations. The topics discussed will include:

• Analysis of the requirement of the transformation process and role of different stakeholders
• Defining a change strategy
• Co-ordination and integration of strategy within the organization – top down and bottom up approaches
• Implementing and executing the strategy
• Overcoming Roadblocks during transformation
• Leadership and people issues during transformation process

Redesigning Strategic HRM for sustainable competitive advantage

While most researchers and practioners agree that HR strategy should be related to the overall business strategy, few organizations have done it as a clear, and well-understood strategy. In that context, this module integrates strategic issues and discusses HR implementation issues in organizations where HR strategies are in line with their overall business strategy. The module reinforces that an integrated and aligned approach towards:

• recruitment, selection, induction programs
• retraining and redeployment
• performance appraisal system
• compensation and reward mechanism and
• rightsizing & HR governance

are required to achieve this goal and is critically important and relevant to firms' success in the changing global competitive landscape. The 'softer' aspects of redesigning such as changing behaviours, nurturing new skills and competencies, gaining buy-in of the staff, managing transfers into and out of organisations and providing training at the right time, are critical to achieving the desired outcomes. This module also reinforces that the foundation of a value-added HR function is a business strategy that relies on people as a source of competitive advantage.

Managing International Human Resource

Firms are now operating in a world of business in which they have to operate in a network of interconnected organizations around the globe. In this business environment, international experience for top-management is of critical importance. The specific area of inquiry in gaining this international experience is in the increasingly diverse and complex environment of internationalisation. As an integrating perspective, this module analyse how different employment systems shape organisations’ international HR strategies and policies specifically international recruitment, international training, international compensation and benefits and issues in expatriation and repatriation. This module is designed to build upon prior knowledge of the principles of human resource management in a domestic setting. It tries to focus and understand the impact of human resource management within a global business context and to build awareness from the perspective of global leaders of the specificities of the HR policies and practices that are required within an international arena. This session deals with:

• Managing international people development and ensuring that appropriate skills are developed
• Attracting, motivating, and retaining high potential employees
• Global work force mobility and expatriate planning
  

This module help shape innovative people strategies within organisations, presents a roadmap of the stages of internationalization through which firms evolve as they build on the demands of managing cultural diversity in both international and domestic settings and is hands-on practioner focused.

Managing Across Cultures

The world of work is changing. Managers are working more and more across cultures, be it dealing with outsourcing, international mobility, cross-functional teams, and key experts. Where, how, and for whom, people work is, in turn, transforming company structures and cultures. To achieve success in this volatile economy – a key skillset is to manage diversity across cultures. Leveraging cultural diversity and adaptability is a necessity along with leveraging traditional assets. This module discusses different behaviours that are linked to specific professional, corporate and national culture from a theoretical research-grounded knowledge and from an experiential standpoint. It focuses on creative approaches to leverage strategies to overcome parochial mindsets and become more multi-culturally effective as an individual and as a senior manager. This module will let the participants analyze their own national cultures, corporate culture, and professional culture under the framework of case studies (from a host of nations), discussions, role plays and to identify where and how key strategic decisions has to be made keeping in mind cultural differences and stereotypes. The topics discussed will include:

• Framework classifying national cultures
• Interaction and positioning the organisation's culture and the professional culture to ensure positive attitudes towards change
• Become aware of parochial and stereotypes through different examples
• Investigate and cultivate an understanding to leverage cultural diversity through mini-case studies
• Build a roadmap of the stages through which a firm evolves in dealing with managing business across cultures