Latashia Spears
Unit Assignment 1
3/3/13

HCLT commitment to transparency and their efforts in inverting the pyramid were making a great difference for the company. The blueprint meetings, planning and implementation process has allowed HCLT to successfully compete with the best global players in the IT industry.

Even though HCLT was still a small company, they saw their business growing. They began to hire hundreds of new employees and with worldwide revenue; they were quite diversified with operations in eighteen countries. One of Nayars primary focus was keeping the employees first and customers second, but with the massive growth and gain of new employees, Nayar wasn’t sure how to sustain that focus. “How would new people coming on board understand the importance of trust and transparency”, Nayar asked. This question is what brought about the Starfish and the Spider leadership organizational concept by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom.
Most companies, they argue, function like eight-legged spiders. “Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead spider”. “But cut off the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. Not only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body. Starfish can achieve this feat because, unlike spiders, they are decentralized; every major organ is replicated across each arm”, (Nayar, V. (2010). Recasting the Role of CEO: Transferring the responsibility for change), The Starfish and the Spider: Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. In this reading, Nayar realized that HCLT was operating more like the spider rather than the starfish and seeing that they were operating more like a highly centralized organization. With this information a revelation was revealed to Nayar, and this will begin the start of the structural and leadership changes for HCLT.
Nayar set in motion certain trends to start the processes for the new and improved way of building, branding and structuring the company to keep it moving forward now and in the future. The first approach to this is the forecasting of the scenario analysis. Nayar has to look at a series of disciplines and interests with a discussion with the upper management his thoughts on ways this decision may affect the societal, economical, political and technological issues that the company has set in place. With this information in hand, this would be the beginning of the scenario planning phase which would bring about the introduction of the Business-Aligned IT or BAIT project.
The BAIT project was put into place to focus on the specific business processes of the company. Although this was suppose to be a pilot project that were to be shared with only a few members of the Company, the word spread throughout the company, giving one department in particular (Technical Team ) the opportunity to put the pilot in motion and come up with three most critical business processes. This information from CIO was shocking to Nayar, although he was a little concerned about the process being used before it was introduced, he was also excited about the information that he was given through the presentation from the team lead Tarika. Nayar realized that there was a shift in responsibility for changes were being transferred without any involvement from the office of the CEO. With all of the information that he had gathered from the BAIT presentation by Tarika and the technical team, began the introduction with a new section within the U&I called My Problems.
The My Problems section in the U&I, focused strictly on the problems to questions as the CEO that Nayar couldn’t answer or solve. This allowed the employees to get in on some of the opinions on topics that were brought by Nayar. By allowing his employees to participate in this project, this brought about interesting points, ideas and suggestions that would help Nayar understand the problems better while developing his thinking. Nayar engaged in questions with his employees/contributors such as:
What is the fundamental nature of the problem?
How does it really affect us?
Do we really need to do something about it?
Who is the right person or team to think more about this?
What timeline makes sense?
How will we evaluate the process and the solutions?
With these answer and questions conversations, started the SWOT analysis phase of the new structuring and strategy process. The shift in the responsibility of actions created change away from Nayar to other people throughout the organization. Opinion polls were created about the various issues for all to see. Although met with some diversity, the leadership team didn’t always accept the advices that were received, nor did they always follow the majority opinion expressed in the polls. This may have seemed to be a small issue, but Nayar’s ultimate goal was to get the company talking and listening to one another like a good family.
Nayar approach to sustaining the innovation to the company was growing ever so fast. He started by winning the contract with an important global 100 company that would greatly expand HCLT’s scope of engagement in their company. The CIO of the global 100 company saw the innovativeness of their solutions, the quality of their service, there responsiveness along with the facilities, locations and pricing to give the overall win of the contract, but with all of this good news, Nayar was informed that the proposal didn’t address the really important issues, such as “Such as what your people are all about. Who are they? What do they think about? What are their ethics? What are they passionate about”? With such sound advice given to Nayar from the CIO, he had to come up with a way to engage his employees, by implementing these questions and coming up with a solution. If Nayar can find a solution in addressing these questions, through engaging the people around their passions, beliefs and ethics, they would be more likely to take responsibility for change, they would even demand it. This would address both the General environment and the Demographic segments trends. Nayar would address this issue by implementing the Employee Passion Indicative Count or the EPIC initiative. This also included the creation of the employee communities called Employee First Councils. This would prove to be a great move for the company.
With the efforts to share responsibility with his employees and units of the company would show how well they would adapt to merges and acquisition. Understanding the technological, economical, and global segments of business, Nayar new that his company wasn’t as strong in the SAP consulting capabilities, therefore the partening with AXON the largest most successful independent SAP consulting companies in the world would help strengthen their offering and grow faster. This was the beginning of a global working relationship with a company based out of the UK. This merge along with allowing his employees to take part in some of the decisions, played a major role in the new direction the company was headed towards. “IT is increasingly playing an important role in organizations and in society’s ability to produce access, adapt and apply information” (Morale-Gomez and Melesse, 1998). “A number of countries especially those in the developed world and some in developing countries are putting in place policies and plans designed to transform their economies into an information and knowledge economy. This can also have a negative impact on the poor and under develop countries such as Nigeria as well”. Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, v6 no1-2 (Summer 2005)
As stated before, Nayar took many risks, faced many challenges and some opposition from upper management. He stood by his vision. Changes had to be made, and Nayar started with himself by realizing that even as the CEO, he doesn’t have the answers to all of the questions. Even he need advise. HLC saw a large growth in business with the new implementations and merge with AXON. To realize and know the importance of information and knowledge as valuable resources will continue to keep this company moving forward.

References:

Nayar, V. (2010). Recasting the Role of CEO: Transferring the responsibility for change

Leading Organizations. Perspectives for a new era, Second edition; Chapter 3 (pg 25-31).
Morales-Gomez, D. and Melesse, M. {1998}. "Utilizing Information and Communication Technologies for Development: The Social Dimensions". Information Technology for Development. 8{1}. pp. 3-14.
Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, v6 no1-2 (Summer 2005)
Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.