I am just sharing an internal talk that I gave to emerging
leaders in my organization on the topic of Leading Change and fostering
Innovation.
Just sharing the contents of my speech as below-
Standing in front of the talented set of people like all of
you, one of the first thoughts that run into my mind is that almost all of us are
emerging leaders for most part of our careers- probably at different stages of
emergence. I would like to count myself as an emerging leader too. My belief is that when we think that we have
become accomplished leaders, we stop growing. I love sports- play a few of them
and follow a lot of them. I can quote example from the world of Cricket.
When the Australian team was winning almost everything in
the Cricket field from mid-90s through most of 2000s, their captain during the
initial stages of its transformation Steve Waugh shared a secret of their
success. I remember him once saying that internally the Australian team used to
consider themselves as world no. 2 (though they were undisputed #1). This feel
of them not being #1, even though artificial one but deeply internalized one,
helped them get better even when they won. If they won by 10 runs, they did
make sure to celebrate but more than that set themselves the goal to do win by
a bigger margin in the next match. So this team remained emerging and
constantly strived towards reaching great heights.
There is another opposing example, again from the world of
sport. There was an England bowler named Monty Panesar, who was bowling in one
of the Ashes tests. Commentating in the match and seeing Monty bowl, Australian
legend Shane Warne said
“Is Monty bowling in
his 33rd test or the 1st test for the 33rd time?”
Monty probably stopped growing and probably he started to
think of himself as having been an accomplished bowler after getting a break
into England playing 11 and didn't improve as much as the situation demanded.
I fully embrace this thinking I shared so here's an emerging
leader talking to a group of emerging
leaders.
Further to kind introduction HR gave, one thing I want to
tell about myself is that inside office, I try to lean myself towards achieving
expertise in the area of my choice- and outside of office, on a lighter note- I
try to become the best "Jack-of-all trades". I do try to indulge
myself in newer areas/hobbies as I believe this helps you learn a lot about
life at a broader level and a lot more about self at a narrow level. Among the
things that I have indulged myself in and that has surprisingly stayed with me
consistently over the years is the hobby of Technology journalism. I do write on
technology areas frequently and this indulgence, more than anything has made me
a student of various events that happen in our industry. And my intention is to decipher the events, finding meanings and relevant learnings that could be applied at the workplace.
I have been an apprentice about the subject of leading
change. As much as I have thought in the past that I have mastered learning
about the change, I have always fallen short as newer and unknown situations
keep emerging. Having observed our industry quite closely for a considerable
time, I can safely vouch that we live in a very dynamic industry in which no
two days are the same. In this little talk, I would like my focus to be
narrow. And I would just try and focus
on 3 core points-
Point#1. Anticipating
change and adapting to it is a skill…
…and if we don't treat it as a skill we leave a gap open to
become victims of change. And one of the things that I often tell myself and my
team is that we should not let ourselves be labeled as victims. Being a victim
is not one of the nicest and positive feelings at all. Our attitude should make
us accountable to ourselves and own-up things.
A couple of years back, Facebook brought WhatApp for a
whopping $21 billion dollars. There was a lot of analysis done on why Facebook
would have spent so much for just an App. I mean one could buy multiple steel
companies for that sum. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easier to
tell Facebook anticipated the disruption caused by Messaging apps much earlier
before they even became a threat. They realized that amount of time average
users were spending on WhatsApp was the time they were b spending on Facebook.
Even though they haven’t possibly earned a dollar from WhatsApp in all these
years, this acquisition helped them prevent cannibalization and stay relevant.
Bottom line- they had mechanisms to anticipate these changes before they caused
disruption.
“When you’re a large
company with significant market share, it’s tempting to view market disruptions
as a threat, but we view them as an opportunity. When a market isn’t in
transition, gaining market share is hard—you’re fighting to take one or two
points of share from competitors. That’s why we’re transforming our entire
business, expanding to capture growth, and thinking very differently about the
future of information technology.”
While describing how Chambers saw leading change as a skill,
he considers listening to the customers are one of the key ways to gain
insights about the trends. He further says-
"The best
indication of when to make the jump frequently comes from our customers. That’s
been true in nearly every market transition. Many years ago, before the market
moved from routing to switching, I visited Ford Motor Company, a key customer.
Executives there told me they were exploring a new networking technology called
Fast Ethernet. I’d never heard of it before. A week later I called on some
Boeing managers, and I asked them about Fast Ethernet. “Yeah, we think that
might be the way to go,” they said. They told me about a company called
Crescendo Communications that was making advances in that area. We ended up
buying Crescendo to help us make this transition.
To generalize the
view which Chambers and Zuckerberg’s actions presented, in my thinking, as a
leaders we should keep our eyes and ears open and build systems that can help
us sniff change and formulate the ways to connect the dots and make sense of
what trends and happenings in our industry means to us, to our products, to our
teams and to our careers.
If we just look at our work home, i feel Citrix as an
organization is a great example of how the technology and market changes are
anticipated and our response are planned. Citrix started in 1989 and has
successfully weathered the storm created by many technology changes that has
happened from the pre-Internet days of 1989 and today's times when we are doing
all the work that we need to do on miniature devices. Not many companies, which
started as long back as Citrix did, are still around and thriving as we are. We
should be proud of this.
So summarizing my first point-
Anticipating change and adapting to it is a skill and if we
don't treat it as a skill we leave a gap open to become victims of change.
Point#2: As much as
we try, it's not possible to anticipate change every time
The second point that I present here is in a way
contradicting with the point I just presented and it is that- As much as we try
and want, it's not possible to anticipate and predict the change every time
accurately. And when we cannot predict it, we should do the next best thing-
respond to the situation like the best in the world.
Prior to joining Citrix, I was working at McAfee- which is a
well-known company dealing with security software products. When I was there
more than a decade back, its product and selling proposition used to be an
anti-virus (AV) software. AV software, by definition, works on the premise of
preventing the known threats. It creates a layer of security that prevents all
the known threats from happening. Over the last decade, the security landscape
has changed drastically as much as that it is no longer possible to predict all
the threats from happening. The best thing that could be sometimes is the
faster detection of vulnerabilities and swifter response to minimize the damage
when the security is found to be compromised. Another security product vendor,
FireEye- recently acquired a company called Mandiant which essentially deals
with faster response after the security has been breached.
The companies that survived the aftermath of 9/11 attacks
weren't experts in dealing with such situations. But they were the companies
that were most responsive to change, they were the ones who were willing to
work on the ground, they were the ones who changed their plans by every hour
and do all that was need to get back on feet despite numerous odds. Southwest
Airlines was one example which survived post 9/11 situation when most airlines
just couldn't cope up with the gravity of the situation.
In the similar way, even the great economists couldn't
predict the banking disaster of 2008 that lead to wide-spread recession. The
companies that were most responsive to the change came our victorious during
this time. I remember having been a part of Citrix in 2009 and one of the
decisions we made then was to make our core platform product- XenServer free.
Whether this move was successful or not is a debate for a different time, but
the fact is that we didn't shy away from making a bold move. The intent here
was to help our customers who were cash-strapped to try any new technology and
pay for it, thereby helping us build a good footprint of the platform, which
would have later helped us sell the management applications on top of it.
In 2000, The semiconductor chip manufacturing facility of
Philips caught fire after a lightning strike created electrical surges across
the state of New Mexico. They had automated sprinklers and a trained staff, as
a result of which, the fire was put off in 10 minutes. At the first glance, the
damaged seemed minimal. Semi-conductor industry has a concept called as
"Clean Room" where silicon wafers are produced. Due to the
requirements, this room is kept a thousand times cleaner than operating
theaters in hospitals. Philips estimated around a week's delay in production as
the water from sprinkler and the smoke itself had done some damage to Clean
room.
Philips semiconductors had 2 major competitors as its
customers at that time (who sourced the chips from Philips)- let’s say it-
Company A and Company B for the time being. Company B, upon receiving the news
about the fire and shipment delay; quickly checked its inventory. It determined
that it had enough chips in stock to tide over the week's delay. Thus, they
waited for the Philip's factory to be restored.
Company A, on the other hand, went into classic firefighting
mode. It took some steps-
1. Setup a team to monitor the progress of the repairs to
the factory. It figured out that the problem was bigger than was originally
thoughts.
2. As a result of this knowledge, they went fast and
contacted other supplier who could help them fill the void.
3. CEOs got engaged and Philips got into action to rearrange
production in its factories in Asia.
4. It redesigned portions of the critical chip so that the
chop could be manufactured in other plans.
By the time Company B woke up to this situation, it was too
late and Company A took the lead. Company B, not surprisingly, incurred
amounting to more than 100s of millions. Company B was Ericsson. Company A was
Nokia.
Nokia rode on such thinking and agility to win more than 50%
of market by 2007.
What happened after 2007 to Nokia is also widely known and
written about. Though operationally, it had the best brains to take them past
the fire-like situations with suppliers but strategically, it probably lacked
the anticipation machinery that could help them assess the impact of disruption
iPhone and Android were about to cause.
Another aspect in this case is that Nokia failed to part
ways with Symbian OS when Android seem to be becoming a de-facto standard.
Instead of engaging in the futile exercise of predicting
inflections, companies and individuals should develop capabilities that will
allow them to deal with the inflections as and when they occur.
Point#3. During the
early days of change, focus more on people who accept change fast than the ones
who don’t
I have been quite inspired with former HCL CEO Vineet
Nayar's book- Employees first Customers second and the management philosophy
that he shares. During his tenure as a CEO, he brought about a massive change
in HCL while keeping key focus on what he calls as true value zone for any
knowledge based company True value he says, is not generated by the top
management or middle management but it is the people who are closest to the
product and the customers. In a way, the change he brought, turned the
traditional management paradigms upside down.
As Vineet says, a change initiative can’t be termed as
successful if affected people are not onboard. Itis generally not possible to have everyone onboard right from the day the change was introduced. When he first began to drive the changes in his organization, Vineer Nayar understood that not all people would come on board immediately and in fact there are three different groups of people depending largely on the way they embrace change-
Transformers: Transformers are the people who were just
waiting for someone to initiate the change and they join the bandwagon almost
immediately. They are the ones who are usually aware of shortcomings in the
current environment but probably were not the influential enough to drive the
change themselves earlier on. They are the people who not only embrace change
but also are ready with suggestions, ideas and raise their hand to implement
some to completion.
Lost Souls: They are the people who would never support any
kind of change. They always have this negativity surrounding them and they
somehow are never able to lift themselves from their hopeless state. They
somehow believe that every new initiative is an eye wash from the management or
the organization. Whenever the new idea is suggested they would simply go ahead
and dismiss that not only in their minds but also knowingly and unknowingly try
to spread their negativity by airing their views.
Fence sitters: These are the third bunch of people, who
generally are reluctant to share their views, rarely would ask the questions
and would rather play a wait and watch game. They may not openly criticize the
change but won’t either embrace it with wholeheartedness. When asked their
opinions, they are likely to say nice things rather than be upfront honest.
They would closely watch "Transformers" and the "Lost
Souls" and may even change their opinions in short time. In any change
initiatives, such people are usually in the majority. They get easily
influenced in either direction.
During my early years as a leader, while driving any change
initiative I used to focus too much on getting a buy-in from the Lost Souls as
a measure for success. As I learned from Vineet's experience here, I figured
out the leader should focus more on Transformers at the start of change
initiative and empower these set of people to show positive examples of
adopting the change to the Fence sitters and Lost Souls and use Transformer's
energy to help get buy-in from Fence sitters first.
In my experience, in any hierarchical organization, any
mid-level leader plays the role of a leader to his/her team and at the same
time- plays a role of a follower to his or her boss. Thus, we get to play the
role of initiator and a leader of the change in some cases and in some, it is
aptly following the change and ensuring the alignment of the teams. Both these
situations requires different skills to get the buy-in from the team and from
the management upwards and leaders should be willing to think of these
differently.
Bonus point: Have a
beginner's mindset
Years ago, the original product of Intel was D-RAM which is
basically memory for computers and they had just started to invent the
micro-processor. They had a real business problem, the Japanese were killing
them in the D-RAM market, just destroying their market share.
So Andy Grove and Robert Noyce were at the office late one
night and they were talking to each other.
· Andy says to
Robert: Wow we got a problem!
· Robert says we
sure do.
· Andy asks- If
Board says we would get the new guys to solve this problem, what would the new
guys do.
· Robert says Oh
that’s easy, they will get us out of the D-RAM business.
So Andy Grove says, Yes why don't we do that before these
other guys get in.
To me, Andy’s question about “what would new guys do” is
quite profound because it reflects that Andy was more willing to be a beginner
again. And to me that is what is needed the most when we drive the change
efforts.
Most of the organizations fail to cannibalize the stuff at
the right time.
As John Chambers also said-
"For Cisco, each transition required a decision about
when to jump from selling a profitable product to a new technology—often one
that would cannibalize our existing product line. These jumps were critical,
though, if we wanted to stay ahead of the curve."
Even when we attempt to reinvent our careers, most of the
people tend to focus a lot of learning new stuff but in reality the harder
thing in any reinvention efforts is to unlearn what we already know that will
not be needed in the future. As a leaders, we should help our teams unlearn
stuff that’s hampering the growth to drive the positive change.
The Book “One Thing” narrates this story about Steve Jobs
that reflects further on adopting beginner’s mindset.
"No one knew how to go small better than Steve Jobs. He
was famously as proud of the products he didn't pursue as he was of the
transformative products Apple created. In the two years after his return in
1999, he took the company from 350 products to ten. That's 340 nos, not
counting anything else during that period. At the 1997 MacWorld Developers
Conference, he explained, "When you think about focusing, you think,
'Well, focusing is saying "yes", No! Focusing is about saying no.
Jobs was after extraordinary results and he knew there was only one way to get
there. Jobs was a "no" man."
As a key learning, we should be ready to cannibalize
something that's working for the sake of something better that you foresee coming.
Closing thoughts:
I will close the talk with the words of our CEO, Mark
Templeton that he shared after one of our difficult change initiatives-
“Truth is people don't like change. And the older you get,
the less you like it.
Change has to start here (pointing towards mind). You have
to move mind before you move your bodies. Change is an intellectual process
that you have to work to see it for what it is. It’s about staying relevant and
not becoming a dinosaur.”
Thank you.
Images sources:
https://www.saddahaq.com/leander-paes-the-indian-tennis-superstar
https://www.newpaltz.edu/saus/emergingleaders.html
http://thelegacyproject.co.za/quotes-from-john-chambers-executive-chairman-at-cisco-systems/
https://chintanmanthan.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/quotes-respond-to-change.jpg
http://quotesgram.com/famous-quotes-about-accepting-people/
http://www.azquotes.com/author/5968-Andy_Grove
Images sources:
https://www.saddahaq.com/leander-paes-the-indian-tennis-superstar
https://www.newpaltz.edu/saus/emergingleaders.html
http://thelegacyproject.co.za/quotes-from-john-chambers-executive-chairman-at-cisco-systems/
https://chintanmanthan.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/quotes-respond-to-change.jpg
http://quotesgram.com/famous-quotes-about-accepting-people/
http://www.azquotes.com/author/5968-Andy_Grove
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