Making mincemeat of management mumbo jumbo, pre-baby boomers have struck it rich in multifarious Multinational businesses. Often, they had nothing to lose but their borrowed capital. That was, then. Post Silicon Valley, they don’t trust luck any more. They invest in training, in the scholarship that sponsored surveys unravel. In this phase, management guys re-re-discovered that all work and no play did make every Jack not only dull, but a dangerous nervous wreck. That’s when the West came spirituality -shopping to the East, more aggressively than ever.

Mr. Madhav Mohan, management guru, based in Kochi, apparently discovered that rather early in his career. With the result that he’s imparting the mentoring needed for folks in top places to stay in one piece and yet brim with new ideas, whether 26 or 62. He lays stress on the ‘softer areas of management’, laced with spirituality. And he does this not for agile greenhorns, but for the top guns, because, ‘change must begin from the top’.

Mentoring. New term this, (in this part of the world, that is) in management parlance. To be specific, it’s called corporate mentoring programme. It’s akin to what Krishna did to Arjun in the Mahabharatha, he explains.

“I have developed this method, using the experience of working for over 20 years in different capacities,” the Master of International Management from the American Graduate School of International Management, Arizona, tells you.

He’s been doing it for the last couple of years. Says Mr Babu Mathew of Mathewsons, who  did the mentoring programme under him a few years ago, “It actually gave me a proper focus to work on.I had been thinking of doing too many things, but I realized what I had to do was to make my company control costs, detect the problems etc. Often, people think the employees are to blame if a company does badly, but the problem could very well lie at the very top,” he speaks from experience.

That company directors and owners need mentoring is a little hard to digest in God’s Own Country, perhaps, for Mr Madhav Mohan says people from outside the State seek his services more than people within. He has advised Apple computers Inc. regarding India. Saudi Arabia’s largest bank, the National Commercial Bank, sought his services last year to conduct an advanced management programme.

Mr Madhav Mohan’s association with banks has a curious side to it. While he was working in the SBI, he got a scholarship to study international management in the States. He opted to come back to India, but as the bank put him back in the same place from where he went, he quit on principle. But in 1996 he was appointed to the Board of the Directors of the State Bank of Travancore!

A certified practitioner of Neurolinguistics programming, Mr. Madhav was into computers way back in the late eighties, when he became a franchise of NIIT in Kochi. Tennis is one of his loves and he was the Gujarat State Junior champion in his student days. A black belt in Karate (why should a management mentor need that, you may wonder, unless he is dealing with trade unions!!), Mr. Madhav Mohan says in these tough days, one has to create one’s own future and not simply wait for things to happen.

Once you have a vision, the battle is half won, he advises. The Upanishads have given him much, he admits - An unlikely source for a management - geek that he is. Not surprisingly, he is on to more things than one, for he is the son of Mali, kids’ story teller, writer and administrator, he reveled in doing several things at the same time.