Building performance driven company

Since we are almost building our BU (business) from the scratch; one of the important things we are thinking about is to build a performance and data driven company. The idea is to encourage risk taking ability and true performance and discourage the false claims.

We have a real long long way to cover, but good part is that we have understood the need for building such organization.

In my opinion building such an organization is not simple job and it needs a lot of courage from the management to call spade as spade. The challenge is to ability to measure the performance and communicate the result to all involved, especially who are not performing. One of the fundamental things we are trying to do is to set up a data driven performance measurement system where each one’s performance will be measured quantitatively, thereby reducing the relative performance grading.

Incidentally, I was talking through some of my friends who have been discussing the recent changes in their organization which appears to be based on the performance and to reward recognition. My intention is not to debate on which is good or bad; but to highlight a corporate truth which is a bit hard to digest sometime.

The hard part of building this kind of company is to have the leadership team which is performing and pumping in the required energy to rest of the team. It’s important to underline the fact that being in management position will not take my neck out of the block. I need to walk the talk and start performing in order to build a team which is performing.

I happen to visit one of our customer’s offices recently while in Norway; it is a consulting company. What impressed me about them is the array of systems and processes which are aimed to improve the performance of the organization and ability to encourage performing. It was really amazing to see a company of little over 250 consultants having such an attention to details. I would call that as a performance driven company, where everyone is accountable for his/her part of the business. Everyone is measured by some or other results which are directly linked to performance on the organization as a whole.

However, this post being posted in the time of appraisal and salary revision cycle is just a coincidental.

The Volcano, the uncertainty, the feeling, the chaos and a friend I explored

I have come to Norway for a business trip; entire top management team is here and we are stuck because of Volcano. We don’t know when we are flying back; our CEO had some urgent meetings in North America, tried to get out of Europe, but got stuck in Munich airport. It is chaos everywhere.

But its fun, we could able to laugh on this situation and try to keep ourselves motivated.

I met someone during these days, like a friend whom I have been missing, a person whom I can talk openly and share my feelings. It’s like returning to my college days all of a sudden. A smart, emotional, energetic, simple person having lot of thoughts in mind; with whom I can laugh openly. I have mentors in life who guides me; have team members who work with me, but what I was missing is a friend who can stand beside me.

One question, can someone talk that non-stop? I thought I talk much!!!

Our discussions have been around the corporate life, business models and simple principles of life, may be ordinary topics from all the angels. But the energy my friend brings in to the discussion it truly amazing. I am feeling like why I didn’t meet this friend earlier?

I am not sure what my friend thinks about my involvement; but I guess we have quickly stuck the wavelength match and I was amazed to see another person who is so close to my thought process, in spite coming from totally different background. We could able to relate to each other very well. It’s just a great experience. Sure we have different thoughts on few topics, but we agreed to disagree which rarely happens in life.

But life is all about such green spots where you will feel ‘life is beautiful!!’

Leadership Lessons from India: A HBR Review Paper

This month’s Harvard Business Review runs a review on ‘Leadership Lessons from India’; how best Indian companies drive performance by investing in People.

This survey was conducted across all sectors like Relience, Wipro, TCS, Bharati Telecom, Infosys, Mahindra & Mahindra, Aventis Pharma and many others. Interestingly none of the companies who are interviewed suggested that their companies had succeeded because of their own cleverness at strategy or even because of the efforts of the top team. They didn’t mention skills in financial markets, merger and acquisitions or deal making talents that western CEOs often claim as important points. They put entire success is because of employees.

The leaders of Indian’s biggest and fastest growing companies take an internally focused, long –term view and put motivating and developing employees higher on the priority list than short term shareholder interest. And it appears that this is a more Indian model and which seems to be working very well for all these companies.
It is interesting to note how Indian CEOs focus more on involving employees in building the strategy and involve themselves in motivating employees. Unlike western CEOs who leave the business unit heads or cost center owners to decide on the strategy and measure the heads based on the financial performance; Indian management seems to be involved in designing the strategy and periodically check if they need any help. Also, they act as mentors to all next generation leaders there by helping them to groom up to next level.

There are couple of other things which needs worth mentioning; ability to create a sense of mission through transparency and accountability and level of communication with-in the companies. It seems amazing everyone works towards a common goal. And Indian companies seem to engage all possible technologies to communicate to employees, be it formal open houses, social network sites etc.

It reminds me one story, which U.S president Lyndon Johnson loved to tell about asking a truck driver who worked at NASA in the 1960s what his job was.

The driver’s response “I am helping to put a man on the moon”. Such is the power of empowering the employees.

I learnt a lot from this article.