I was recently asked to give a kick-off talk around the
theme of “Leading change and Innovation” to a great team of Emerging leaders in
my organization. Having been involved in delivering these talks in conferences
before, one of things that I was always looking to improve was to share the
transcript of my speeches and presentation either in video or text form in my
blog. This time I am trying to share the stuff more or less in the same flow as
I spoke. I took sometime write it post the talk- that's when the thoughts are ripe in the mind. Though it looks like a bit longer
(for a 20 min talk), I would appreciate your comments. Here we go-
Starting thoughts:
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 (including myself) remain emerging leaders throughout 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, which proves what happens if we believe that we
have reached a level of accomplishment and expertise and we are devoid of any
challenge. 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.
A little about myself:
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.
Ben Horowitz in his book "The
Hard things about Hard things" describe the legendary Netscape
founder- Marc Andreessen as someone who is not only a genius in technology but
also a master of history of computer science profession. This sense of history,
Ben says, is quite important to have as such knowledge often helps give perspective on
handling current problems, as much as it does to help to pave way for the
future.
I have been a student of learning about
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 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 some things that I have
learned in my journey around managing change and in doing so, I will try and lean
a lot on the learnings that I have had in the field of technology journalism as
well as my personal experience.
Key points that I shared
about leading change...
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 (and sometimes pretending to be one) is not one of the
nicest and positive feelings at all. Our attitude should make us accountable to
ourselves and own-up things.
One the key events
that we saw happen in our industry was the stepping down of John Chambers as
Cisco CEO. I call it as a key event because he was at the helm of Cisco for
considerable period, around 2 decades. We live in the times when companies find
it hard to even survive for even 1/4th that tenure he spent as
CEO. In our career times, we have seen some legendary companies like Sun
Microsystems, Compaq, Digital Equipment etc. either merge with bigger companies
or bite the dust altogether. What makes some companies and CEO tick? Recently,
Chambers wrote a piece in Harvard Business
Review on
his/Cisco’s longevity and associated the same with his ability to stay ahead of
technology shifts. Did Chambers view the technology shifts and changes as a
“threat”? He says-
“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 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 don't look too far ahead, 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.
Referring the text from Citrix’s journey-
Citrix's transition: From our humble beginnings as a small start-up, we’ve always
envisioned a different and simpler way of computing. Our goal was to centralize applications,
virtualize them, and optimize their delivery over any connection available. This
core thinking continues to be the essence of our vision for application
delivery, and how we imagine a
world where people can work or play from anywhere.
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.
Taking a cue from this experience of
mine and use this as analogy, it is not always possible to anticipate change as
we don't live in predictable world anymore. In those situations, it's better
for us to gear us up for a faster response. Sharing some more examples-
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.
I would like to quite another case
study that I adapted from the book- Nimble: How Intelligences Can
In 2000, Philips N.V faced an
"Act of God" disaster. 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.
The author of same book- Nimble:
How Intelligences Can Create Agile Companies and Wise Leaders further argues that 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
As Vineet says, a change initiative can’t be termed as
successful if affected people are not onboard. It is 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.
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.
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.”
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 source:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-My-Comfort-Zone-Autobiography/dp/0718148339
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/03/the-hard-thing-about-hard-things-ben-horowitzs-honest-and-real-take-on-entrepreneurship/
https://marcus3877.wordpress.com/
http://thenamopatrika.com/pm-narendra-modi-asked-us-to-make-india-our-home-cisco-head-john-chambers/MarkT- take it from mobile
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mcafee.png
http://www.amazon.in/Nimble-Intelligences-Create-Companies-Leaders/dp/8184005733
http://www.technochilly.com/2013/09/see-first-mobile-nokia-museum-gallery/
http://www.amazon.com/Employees-First-Customers-Second-Conventional/dp/1422139069
http://cc.ee.ntu.edu.tw/~ywchang/Courses/Pic/3people.jpg
https://www.citrix.com/go/25.html
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-One-Thing-Surprisingly-Extraordinary/dp/1848549245
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