Winning on Uneven Playing Fields

Speaking at the IBM CEOs Forum in Mumbai, Dr Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard
professor, consultant and trainer extraordinaire, gave us her favorite metaphor
of today's business challenges by recounting the famous Alice in Wonderland
story of the crazy game of croquet. This game is normally played very similar to
golf with a heavy mallet that sends balls into hoops. Except that in the game
that Alice plays and which Dr Kanter translated into modern business, the mallet
(read technology) turns out to be a live flamingo that raises its head when it
approaches the ball, the ball itself (read customer) is actually a hedgehog
which scurries away just as the mallet comes down to strike and the hoops (read
business targets) are actually packs of cards that keep moving this way and the
other following the orders of the mad Queen. Quite a challenge, both for Alice
and for leaders of IT and BPO businesses, trying to win over new customers and
retain old ones.

In her brief talk Dr Kanter provided many invaluable tips to business and
unit leaders of an industry beset with new challenges like technology
disruptions, acquisitions and leadership changes on a weekly basis:

• Switch to a flexible planning process with teams that are not glued to a
  fixed script, but instead become experts in an improvisational theater.
• Don't waste time on detailed documentation of strategies because
  inevitably what is needed for success is not your last idea or even your
  present idea but your next idea.
• Encourage your people to think team, not turf, where it is the power of
  collaboration that will win the major war while turf skirmishes expend
  internal energies without making any impact on the customer.
• Stop building fancy organization charts and presenting new structures to
  customers-they don't care who does what in your company so long as their
  job is done.
• Learn to manage people by culture, not command, and manage their
  motivation and morale, not their tasks. Culture is the only sustainable
  competitive advantage and in cross border organizations, transmission of
  values is the most difficult and yet the most essential task.
• Realize that the three M's that matter are no longer machines, materials
  and money but mastery, membership and meaning. In an industry full of gory
  attrition stories, this is the only way to give knowledge nomads a real need
  to settle rather than wander.
• Create a collective definition of success that the teams all buy into and
  give confidence to every member that it is attainable.

What does this bunch of seemingly new world ideas mean for
the thousands of leaders among you who are managing teams, projects, functions,
and even organizations? The old concept of strong leadership, external
benchmarking and replication of external best practices within the firm has to
be replaced by identification and encouragement of "positive deviants"
from within the community, with the CEO playing the role of chief discoverer-of
opportunities, talent and capabilities and letting the power of the community
drive innovation. Is that too radical for some of you? Well you can always go
back to Kotler and Porter!

At a recent workshop conducted as part of the Nasscom
Innovation initiative, a young strategy thinker, Abhishek Breja of HCL
Technologies spoke passionately about creating a Starbucks like trend buster to
avoid increasing commoditisation and said that while invention could well happen
at the top of the industry pyramid by big companies, innovation must emerge at
the bottom of the pyramid, born out of the hunger to create new ways to succeed
in a highly discerning and competitive industry. How many of the three thousand
odd software and BPO companies in the industry would rise to the occasion and
succeed in this new playing field? We will know that in this decade!

Is Deputy Chairman & MD of Zensar Technologies and
Chairman of the NASSCOM Innovation Initiative Ganesh
Natarajan