The Management Guru

Harshvardhan Bhatkuly caught up with one of India’s pioneering management and marketing thinkers. A profile on Walter Vieira’s journey from a pharma-salesman to an acclaimed author; whose 15 books have been translated in Indian languages besides Chinese, Indonesian and even Polish!

- Harshvardhan Bhatkuly

WALTER VIEIRA HAS learned the ropes of marketing the old fashioned way – by interacting with the customer. As a young management trainee, he had the good fortune of being mentored by Ernest Woods at Glaxo. Woods, who Vieira refers to as a “crusty old Englishman’’, ingrained in Vieira the essentials of pharmaceutical marketing. It is an art that Vieira mastered over the years to start India’s first full-service marketing consultancy, the Marketing Advisory Services (MAS) Group, way back in 1975.

PHARMA DAYS

Having roots in the village of Cuncolim, Goa, where his family still has a house and cousins who live there, Vieira is proud of his Goan ancestry. “Haanv Cuncolkar muray,” he proclaimed to one and all at a function marking the release of his latest book, The Impatient Manager.

Born and brought up in Bombay, Vieira is a Xavierite who graduated from the famous LM College of Pharmacy, Ahmedabad. As a pharmaceutical technologist, who “also spoke good English”, his first employer, Glaxo hired him in 1961 as their first management trainee from India!

In 1967, frustrated by the fact that he would not be made senior manager until he attained the age of 35, Vieira, then 28, jumped over to Warner Lambert – an American pharma giant which had ‘no age limit rules’ – as a senior marketing manager. The company was known for its brands like Waterbury’s Compound, Listerine, Gelusil and the chewing gum Chiclets.

Having impressed his global bossess with his marketing acumen, Vieira was pulled to Boots Pharma in 1969, when the Managing Director of Warner, UK was made the global head of Boots International. Vieira was made the marketing manager of India and was later appointed as general manager of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, concurrently.