Organization Culture & Strategy

This is one topic which catches my eyes and attention pretty fast. These 2 factors – Culture & Strategy have always been, in my opinion, the critical factors for success in any organization. They become all the more important if a company is under crisis and is looking for a turnover or for a successful acquisition. Here is my story of an organization that reported to have taken major steps around 2005 to turn-around the company and bring it on a success-path – HCL Technologies.

It is pretty interesting to note that as I am writing this, many investors & analysts are opining that HCL Technologies is the company to be invested in, atleast amongst the top 5 Indian IT players – TCS, Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro and HCLT.  Through my MBA, or probably before that too, turnaround strategies have always enticed me, and when I was selected to HCLT fresh from my college, I wanted to know about this revolutionary concept called – Employees First, Customer Second. There is something special (read catchy) in the name itself.

I was curious and genuinely interested to read this book before I join the company and so did I. Not everyone who joins would do so. In all honesty, that book had all the ingredients to actually turn-around a company, and the references made to historical companies are also interesting to know. Companies like Southwest airlines, who hired people based on attitudes, are proof to the point that employees are the differentiators for most companies in the service space. There have been anecdotes that pilots of Southwest airlines assisted the on-board staff so that they could reduce turn-around time and in-turn increase efficiency. 

Coming back to my previous point – there is something special (read catchy) in the name itself. What makes it so? Clearly, if it was called Employee First, it would not have caught much attention, almost every company knows the employees are key (though treatment & implementation is a different topic altogether), it is the “Customer Second” which caught the attention. People around started wondering about the guts of a company which told Customers are Second in an industry which was ruled by philosophies like – Customers is the king; Customers are always right; Customers come first. This makes the name special.

I am sure, most of you reading would also be wondering that how is it possible for a company which banks on customers, say they are second and yet make an impact and grow. So here is the key difference – EFCS (Employee First Customer Second) is not really a philosophy; I would put it across as a strategy for a company. This is a very well thought off strategy. For any sales guy, a dream run of a client meet would be to get the maximum attention to what he says – and this is exactly what EFCS facilitates – When you say your customer that he is second – you have grabbed his attention, now how you utilize this is on your capability. So in this sense, this makes a great tool and strategy to crack conversations.

But EFCS at the core signifies something more than a strategy. It is essentially empowering an employee without any fears of hierarchy to contribute to customer’s growth and development. It ideally creates an ecosystem for an employee where one can focus only on the value addition for client, and not about the peripheral activities. So an employee’s support system is to be more effective and efficient in order to fully realize the effectiveness of this concept.

With so much about EFCS and high aspirations, I stepped into this organization, to really be part of its success story. In the initial days itself, I realized that EFCS was known merely as a name and not many people in the lower and middle management were actually able to confidently address the topic, and explain its importance in the company’s strategy and how it has been able to grow based on it. This put me in a fix. What are company strategies for? Are they limited to only senior management and the key decision makers? Isn’t important for people working at the grass-root level to be aware of them and realize the value of the same.  But one thing was very clear – the top management was putting in all the efforts to actually spread the word of EFCS and its benefits, key pillars of the strategy through various communication media internally.

This was the point when my focus shifted to another element called the culture of an organization. If this company deserves applause for one thing, my first choice would be the fact that it has actually survived for 36 yrs. Companies with such a history would definitely have developed a long standing unique culture for itself. In the first few days of me joining and interaction with people, I predominantly found only 2 types of people – either they are company veterans (like 8 -15yrs exp in the company) or just fresh in the system (like 0-3 yrs exp in the company). Seldom had I found someone in the mid-range. That made me realize that there is a strong force within the company who are highly experienced and seen the company grow through the times. These folks would probably form the core of the culture in this company. These guys have had the mentality of the erstwhile Indian industry where bosses were made from predominantly experience, and sub-ordinates were expected to do what the boss says (atleast in most scenarios). I could now see how tough was the job of actually fitting the strategy of EFCS into this culture and actually make it work. Invariably top-down approach was the better choice to get this down to the bottom. And the management chose so. There were only minor changes that was made in the culture, for e.g for any IT issue, instead of calling the support team, we were supposed to raise a request online, which made tracking lot more easier.

This is probably the best thing that the management has done right - They did not force a cultural change in order to ingrain the strategy. They made minor tweaks here and there, but even today it is essentially the company of yester years. They leveraged the fact the managers are made of experience and chose high- experienced managers to actually propagate the concept downstream (how many were good is another aspect).

Even today, this strategy still remains to me as an exceptional one only on 100% implementation. It is upon individual companies to understand the culture and fit the strategy with minor tweaks.

For me the biggest lesson was – Never estimate a company based on its strategy, because invariably, culture trumps strategy every time!!!

P.S: All the information written above is purely opinionated, and cannot be held for any discrepancies of perception and/or understanding. This post is my own and don't necessarily represent HCL/any other individual's positions, strategies or opinions.

Intense Passion in Hindsight

October 5 – Probably the day which most of us would not want to remember – the death of a magician called “Steve Jobs”. This is definitely not another obit. I was totally depressed the whole day, for the same reason, thinking of one of the two people whom I have admired.  The whole media was ushering the same news over n over again, making me all the more depressed. Oct 6^th was a holiday for Newspapers, thanks to “Ayudha Pooja” festival. On Oct 7^th, as I received the newspaper, I knew what the front page news was, but what I didn’t know was the article which came on the page 4. Now I needed this bit to pull me off my depression and provide some food for thought.

Steven.P.Jobs (1955 - 2011)

Yes – Mathoor Krishnamurthi, a Sanskrit scholar who probably did more than what life would have expected him to do. If my grandfather would have been alive, he would have definitely been depressed; probably more than what I was for Jobs. I remember seeing his programs explaining the essence of Bhagavat Gita, every morning in a Kannada channel.

This must be a story around a few years ago (might be during engineering; though not sure) – when I used stay at my granny’s place if I was late from college or was just lazy to drive back home. I used to sleep in the hall watching TV. At around 6:30am, my grandfather used to come down and switch on the T.V for this program, where Mathoor Krishnamurthi used to explain verses of Gita. I used to get irritated initially; but what caught my attention was – this person had tears in his eyes whenever he was explaining few intense lines of Gita. I am generally not awed at people without testing them thoroughly (that’s probably one reason, I have had only 2 persons whom I admired intensely); but frankly this person had absolutely no reason to create a drama of crying on-screen, when his audience were few (imagine at 6:30 am – should be only grandparents like mine); had established credibility in the subject; TRP is out of question totally. Now this is what comes closest to intense passion – quality which Steve also exhibited. I could see truth in Mathoor’s eyes – it was just drops of true tears n not buckets of glycerine. I later asked my grandparents about his credibility and stuff, and he turned out to be absolutely spectacular – His life was a worthy one.

Mathoor Krishnamurthi

Now there was Jobs who was an excellent marketer, who had amazing negotiation skills, probably the best the world has ever seen; and here was Krishnamurthi, who grew from strength to strength in this life, but later dedicated himself for spreading the essence of our culture across the world, effectively he marketed our culture, spread the knowledge to alleviate poverty, made Sanskrit an attractive form of poetry.

Offcourse, this news would have died under the Job’s one. Nevertheless, here is a hats-off to the person who proved that you don’t need to be a multi-millionaire to show off what you have achieved – you can just prove to yourself that you are worth the space which you are consuming on this earth – How many of us are really worth...??? Think about it...

P.S. Do read Sudha Murthy’s comments here...

Innovation = creativity * implementation

"Innovation is not creativity" - A statement made by Vijay Govindarajan, in one of the recent HBR blog. He has tried to quantify things in terms of a simple formula, which says an organization's capacity to innovate is the product of creativity and execution.

Just as I read this article, I came across an update on Google wave.  This was an update saying that it is withdrawing the Google wave product, by this year-end. When Google wave was first introduced, it literally waved across the user community, but it failed to increase the user-adoption. Does that mean, it was not user friendly - Not at all, it was infact very impressive. Then what failed ..??

One reason which I can recognize, for this failure is lack of a great business model. It just re-instated the perspective, that innovation is not just creativity, but also a strong implementation strategy (or a sustainable business model). One cant expect a mediocre business model to propagate a great product. If you give say 9 points (out of 10) to Google wave product per se, and there exists no business model to sell the product, implementation gets 0 points, the multiplication (9 x 0) of which gives 0. So net innovative quotient of that product is zero, even though it was a creative one. If the business model even propagates by 1 point, the overall score increases by 9. This is the splendor of a great business model.

As I skimmed through the humble submission of Google, my fascination for that company actually increased. We say that people don’t learn from their mistakes, how about organizations like Google?  This is the not the first product failure which the company has faced (some of the previous failures being Dodgeball, Jaiku, etc..  apologies for my bad memory), but still it thrives, and continue to be creative and (sometimes) innovative.  Google chandelled with a innovative search engine concept, and has leveraged that growth in expanding into various products.  But Google has never repudiated any legitimate failures, rather has accepted  them graciously and got motivation from each of the them, to succeed. I remember people saying, learn from your failures - and not every person can do so, only great persons can do so. It takes a lot of courage to accept your mistake and get motivation from the same.

Isn't it amazing to find out how organization and humans are analogous? Any maxim applied on humans almost applies to organizations. One great man said - "If you never failed; you never lived" , I bet Google would be the present Google, had it not failed.