Straighten your shoulders SEO – Economics – Kommersant

Russian top managers are severely limited in their decisions and do not participate in the most important business development issues. Only business owners are perceived as decision makers. The managerial class, so necessary in the context of the transformation of the economy, should receive greater freedom of action, an independent economist states in a column for Kommersant Alexander Zotin.

For more than 30 years of economic transformations in Russia, there has not been a class of top managers in the Western sense. This is one of the problems with our economy, where it is still only shareholders and founders who are perceived as decision makers. The state and regulators are accustomed to dialogue only with them, and managers are, at best, managers dressed in straitjackets, and at worst, scapegoats. The current system does not allow them to straighten their shoulders.

The entrepreneurial history of the West is full of biographies of outstanding managers. Jack Welch 20 years of business management General Electric. And it was under him that GE became one of the most valuable companies in the world. Welch was the first to understand that the main profit can be earned not on the sale of a product, but on after-sales service.

Another example of a talented CEO is Apple. Steve Jobs was able to come up with a revolutionary product, copied by a mass of followers, transforming the modern economy and practically changing our entire daily life – a smartphone. But his successor and CEO of Apple Tim Cook has held the bar for over a decade. Tim Cook has managed to build the company’s most sophisticated logistics and manufacturing empire to add value to the company – with armies of American and European research centers, Taiwanese and Chinese subcontractors, Irish offshore companies to minimize taxation, and retailers and service centers around the world.

There are also many talented managers in emerging markets. For example, the long-term head of the Saudi giant, one of the largest companies in the world, Saudi Aramco, Ali an-Naimidespite his humble origins (his family belonged to the Shia version of Islam in a country dominated by Sunnism), became a market maker of the oil market not only in Saudi Arabia, but throughout the world.

However, in Russia since 1991, no really bright top managers have appeared, although there was not so little time for this.

If you look top 200 SEO 2022 from CEOWORLD Magazine, we will see a lot of influential managers not only from developed countries, but also from China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan. The only representative of Russia – Alexey Miller from “Gazprom”. But the compilers of the rating do not estimate his influence very high either – only 145th place out of 200 (compare, for example, with the CEO of the Taiwanese TSMS Chun Chin Wei – 9th place).

Why it happens? As noted earlier by some foreign CEOs, Russian top managers are smart, ambitious, aimed at high earnings, but at the same time they are often characterized by lack of independence. “What disappoints me so far and what I initially struggled with in my team is sometimes the lack of initiative on the part of managers,” Philippe Delpal, the former head of Cetelem Bank in Russia, noted at the time. “To a greater extent than in the West, Russian specialists they are more likely to expect detailed instructions from you, try to predict your opinion on what and how to do, rather than seek to prove the correctness of their decision.

As a result, in Russia, the same “Varangians” became the most striking managers. Such as, Lennart Dahlgrenwho built the Swedish business from scratch IKEA and who described his adventures in a book that was complimentary to our country, but critical of its management system, “How I Conquered Russia, and She Conquered Me.”

Well, it was not possible to nurture their own “conquerors of Russia”. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule.

There are managers in Russia who have always been influential, like German Gref or Andrey Kostin, but they can hardly be called hired managers in the usual sense.

However, given this reservation, alas, Russian top managers are actually insignificant characters.

An indirect confirmation of this thesis was the exodus of Russian managers after the announcement of the NWO in February in 2022. For example, Aeroflot CEO Mikhail Poluboyarinov, Pobeda CEO Andrei Kalmykov, SIBUR Holding CEO Dmitry Konov, Polyus CEO Pavel Grachev, SUEK CEO Stepan Solzhenitsyn, OZON CEO Alexander Shulgin, Yandex CEO in Russia Elena Bunina. Some of them were considered the elite of Russian business, star managers.

However, in reality, their actions were limited by the established rules of the game, in which there were few degrees of freedom. Within this rigid framework, they succeeded for their companies and shareholders in spite of rather than thanks.

But after they left, even though the sky grew dimmer, the momentum built into the overall status quo allowed the system to move on.

Although the long-term departure of many of them is a loss, as they were the hope that someday the situation would change. That bright leaders will appear instead of decorative boards of directors and supervisory boards.

If you follow the traditional corporate theory, management is based on meritocratic principles, when subordinates understand that CEOs act in the interests of all the company’s stakeholders – shareholders, government, customers, staff. And they are an active link between business owners and employees. But in Russia, management is built mainly on a rigid vertical. All this, by the way, equally applies to the civil service. Through the “revolving door” principle between the civil service and the private sector, all this is replicated at the level of corporate governance. Rigid hierarchy instead of flexible network principle.

At the same time, it cannot be said that we have not made attempts to somehow institutionalize the cultivation of top managers.

For example, the same competition “Leaders of Russia”, although not without flaws, was still a prototype of an “incubator” of intelligent managers. But the effect has so far been modest.

“As long as there is no demand for such people, the lists have been drawn up, and no one knows what to do next: there is neither a digital economy, nor social elevators,” said Oleg Vyugin, a well-known Russian financier and manager. Can we expect in this situation that the problems of the development of the largest companies are solved not on the basis of a long-term growth strategy, but by a superficial assessment of the issues on the agenda and focus on short-term results?

Unlikely. Development requires not only structural reforms in the economy (radical restructuring of monetary and monetary policy), but also the transformation of the attitude of power and society towards the management class, providing it with greater initiative and freedom. Without this, neither the great responsibility of top managers nor their involvement in the fate of the company they lead is possible. Unfortunately, so far the economic crisis has been accompanied by an equally acute crisis of the managerial class, which is long overdue for straightening its shoulders.