American product, ayurvedic twist

I HAD BECOME CEO of Richardson Hindustan Ltd, the company where I had started at the bottom…. I wasn’t sitting pretty. The company was in serious trouble. I didn’t know to which port we were sailing; no wind was favourable. The socialist government had instituted severe price controls on medicines, threatening to bankrupt us. Our labour force was hostile, coming out of a seventy-seven-day strike. The chemists’ association had just announced a boycott of our products to force higher trade margins. With sales plunging to zero, we might go bust. I called a meeting of the management committee….

The brainstorming was a disaster. I chalked it to our differing mindsets. Theirs was more traditional, hierarchical style; mine was consultative, participative, maybe because I had grown up in democratic America. Nevertheless, I wasn’t deterred and called for a second brainstorming session. This time, I did a better job. They had also begun to trust me a bit more. I guided the discussion more confidently, focusing sharply on the key issues. Ideas began to flow. At one point in the flowing stream, the Gujarati head of marketing said almost absent-mindedly, ‘What if Vicks VapoRub had been an Ayurvedic medicine, not a Western drug?’ Someone snickered, thinking it a joke. But behind the ‘what-if’ was a hope—Ayurvedic products did not fall under price control.