Corporate sense: cricketer as motivator

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">PUNE: First it was John Buchanan. Then Ricky Ponting and now Kapil Dev. Corporate houses have discovered a new mantra to motivate their employees — that of roping in cricketers.<br /><br />Corporate managements have increasingly begun to recognise the co-relation between team performance in sports and that of business.<br /><br />The attributes that influence better performance in a team are common to any field where teamwork exists.<br /><br />As part of a human resource exercise, Alfa Laval (India) on Thursday invited former India captain Kapil Dev to visit its Pune plant and interact with employees and managers separately.<br /><br />Ajay Joshi, an executive at Alfa Laval, said Kapil basically talked about how he set goals and achieved success in spite of having language problems when he was young.<br /><br />Kapil himself expressed happiness over the exercise."If even one person gets motivated from my talk here, my day is made. It was also a learning process for me."<br /><br />A few months ago, Mahindra British Telecom (MBT) had organised such an exercise with Australian cricket coach Buchanan, where he spent one week each in MBT offices in Mumbai, Pune and the UK to impart training and coaching lessons to managers, team leaders and top performers.<br /><br />Meena Gagvani, a project leader at MBT, said she discovered that Buchanan''s management thoughts had relevance in software too. "In motivational perspective, the mental state of a player and a software programmer or an executive could be similar — it''s co-relating."<br /><br />Last week, Aussie skipper Ponting was invited by the Indira Group of Institutes to deliver a talk on management studies.<br /><br />But why are only cricketers being invited? Said Satish Tandon, managing director of Alfa Laval, "Cricketers are our brand ambassadors and a lot of people relate them with success. We want to show our employees that successful people are mortals like us, but their winning attitude and focussed approach to life and business makes them special."<br /><br /><formid=526372></formid=526372></div> </div>