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Winning on Uneven Playing Fields

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DQI Bureau
New Update

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.

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Ganesh Natarajan
A company is a collaborative, connected community, and not the traditional functions and departments that many of us have created in the past

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.
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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

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