This month’s Harvard Business Review has an interesting article on how Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL changed the culture at HCL and thus maneuvered the company out of crisis.
Soon after he came on board in 2005, he started having serious of discussions with employees, managers and customers to get the perspective of the business and what each employee thinks about HCL and what changes they would like to see. To much of his surprise customers didn’t talk much about HCL’s products, services or technologies, but they spoke about HCL’s employees.
This led to a change process called ‘Employees First, Customers Second’
There are four keys for HCL’s transformation:
1) Mirror Mirror: Talk honestly, speak up the truth and enable people to see that a change has to be made.
2) Create trust through transparency: Find ways to build a culture of trust so that employees trust the requirement for the change. Share financial results, good or bad. Share sales pipeline, business updates. 360 feedback was implemented in the company and CEO himself started posting his 360 feedback on intranet. This prompted other managers to post their feedbacks and areas of improvements and their units performance on the intranet there by creating a transparent environment.
3) Invert the organizational pyramid: Make support functions and executives accountable to frontline workers, rather than other way around. This brings clarity and value.
4) Recast CEO’s role: Transfer the ownership of change from office of CEO to all employees. And encourage to ask questions to CEO.
Offcourse the result is for all of us to see, market capitalization has improved and share price is doing good. This has transformed HCL in to more robust player with sharp focus on the customers.
This is the change
Monday, June 21, 2010
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Business of Politics
Not much noticed news now a days is the Rajyasabha elections in India where Mr. Vijay Malya is competing and he is contesting with support of political parties.
If you look at the history, business men have been part of India politics, be it Mr. Bajaj, Mr. Anil Ambani. I do strongly support involvement of such business leaders in political debates where it is necessary.
During my stay in Singapore few years back one of the things I learnt about how Singapore government works. It is full of corporate leaders and government exactly works as a corporate office. I was told the Prime Minister himself owned a company as CEO and he bought in best practices to his government as well.
Though in India context I never heard about a business leader talks about any important national issue, however the parliament gives an opportunity and provides a medium to express such things.
I am not sure if things will change in near future with Indian politics, but we can hope that a corporate government style of functioning comes to India where everything becomes efficient.
If you look at the history, business men have been part of India politics, be it Mr. Bajaj, Mr. Anil Ambani. I do strongly support involvement of such business leaders in political debates where it is necessary.
During my stay in Singapore few years back one of the things I learnt about how Singapore government works. It is full of corporate leaders and government exactly works as a corporate office. I was told the Prime Minister himself owned a company as CEO and he bought in best practices to his government as well.
Though in India context I never heard about a business leader talks about any important national issue, however the parliament gives an opportunity and provides a medium to express such things.
I am not sure if things will change in near future with Indian politics, but we can hope that a corporate government style of functioning comes to India where everything becomes efficient.
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