With a view to nurture talent and develop the next generation of leaders in the Murugappa Group, training programmes have been introduced to develop the skills needed to ensure the Group's dominant position in times to come.The Management Development Centre (MDC) focuses on developing executives from middle and senior management, spends time honing and developing ideas and skills that make them amongst the best in the world, and ensures the Group's competitiveness and dominance in the markets it operates.

Management Development Centre
The Management Development Centre, set up in 2004, builds leadership capabilities at the senior management level across the Murugappa Group's 29 companies. Its programmes employ world class proven tools and techniques for dealing with key leadership challenges in a rapidly globalising world. The centre conducts several types of programmes and interventions, with particular focus on Band I personnel.

Every month, one or two day-long sessions are held, based on business themes that have been identified as critical to the Group. Brand management, customer focus, organisational culture, project management are a few of the themes covered.

Eminent faculty from leading global universities and institutions, such as Wharton, INSEAD, Harvard and so on conduct these sessions. They share their teaching and research experience and knowledge distilled from consulting and industry practice with the employees.

The MDC also organises practitioner sessions by bringing in industry stalwarts and functional experts from various sectors.

MDC's focus
To continuously develop and hone leadership capabilities amongst senior executives of the group such as:

	Business understanding and business acumen
	Global perspective with regard to scale, scope and complexity of managing business
	People management with a multicultural, multi-locational perspective
	Understanding of self - to move towards inside-out leadership

Main target group: Band I - top management teams of businesses, also high potential individuals of Band II - middle management team. MDC's initiatives directly impact about 250 people and indirectly another 750 people

MDC's programme offerings

	Theme-based programmes for general business awareness to gain insights from top faculty and practitioners
	::	Half to one-day sessions based on business themes identified as critical to the Group. Ex: Brand management, customer focus, organisational culture, project management etc.
	::	Faculty from academic institutions overseas like Harvard, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS, IMD, Stern School etc.
	::	Practitioner sessions with industry leaders in various fields like Raghu Pillai of Reliance Retail and former RPG retail expert; Hema Ravichander, the former Head at Infosys HR and presently strategic HR consultant at Infosys; Gopalakrishnan from Tata Sons etc.
	Fasttrack programmes to create a talent pool across levels and innovatively combine various modes of adult learning. Recognised as one-of-its-kind by faculty and participants, the programme has a rigorous selection process and is rich in content. Specially designed for minimum disruption from work, the programme has a run-in partnership with reputed Indian and global institutions
	::	Business leadership programme for high potential middle managers moving into general management
	::	Emerging leaders programme for operational level managers
	Orientation and induction programmes are conducted regularly for summer interns, graduate engineer trainees and management trainees. The programme consists of an initial round, year-long monitoring and periodic sessions to add value in the first year
	Knowledge platforms and learning and information portals with online learning access for continuing education, industry databases and leadership forums
	Programmes on demand: Long and short-term programmes customised to specific groups within a business with need-driven content and structure
	Coaching and counselling for overall development: Career counselling and structured coaching based on individual assessment. Other coaching programmes are also conducted based on request
	High-end programmes for senior executives: Rigorous programmes with customised content are being developed for senior executives
	Centres of excellence: These centres encourage collaborative research, case study writing and knowledge compilation and dissemination