A very happy new year 2010 to our readers and sponsors. The inaugural issue of this year is focused on Leadership and grooming leaders for tomorrow. With its phenomenal growth in terms of investment and business opportunities, Indian companies require leaders at all levels – to grow new business lines, ensure succession planning in a highly competitive talent market and to question the status quo.

Herein lies the biggest challenge for top management – companies need to spend considerable time and resources to define what kind of talent they need, to identify and nurture budding leaders and to ensure they are provided with the opportunities for which they have been groomed. There is a growing number of Indian companies that have managed to create this fertile ground for grooming leaders across their organization, a “Leadership Factory” of sorts.

This year, three Indian companies figure in the top 25 list of Hewitt Associates’ worldwide “Top Companies for Leaders” study, a testament to the focus from top companies in this country to nurturing quality leadership talent for the growth and challenges ahead. This issue’s cover article features the 5 top Indian companies from their study – we spoke to their CEOs and their group HR heads to understand what leadership means to them, what processes they follow to identify and train top talent, how they create internal competition and, most importantly, the amount of organizational time and resources it takes to do this in a sustained manner.

In this issue, we also bring to you interesting insights on what essentially being a Leader is all about (Dave Ulrich & Norm Smallwood), nurturing the next gen (Marcel Parker), lessons from cricket on teamwork and leadership (Tiger Tyagarajan) and followerhip (Shantanu Dhar). On popular request, Rajesh Upadhyaya is back with his thought-provoking series on leadership insights from classics.

A very conspicuous feature on most boards and top management teams of Indian companies is the relative low presence of women. We hence made it a point to discuss with all the CEOs we spoke to on how their organizations are incentivizing and grooming women to move into leadership roles. Also, in this issue, Darryl Green of Manpower talks about gender inclusion at all levels and Poonam Barua talks about redefining the paradigm of leadership in the gender context.
We would like to thank Hewitt Associates for partnering with People Matters in exploring the practises at individual companies in the “Top Companies for Leaders” list and sharing the same with our readers.

To a fabulous year ahead…