What does an Indian company, which seeks to be different, do in the post Enron-Satyam era when the world is dangerously close to a depression after nearly eighty years? How does it look at the future, visualise a role for itself in it and put down signposts that will help it traverse the territory ahead?
Here is a case study, of MindTree which was founded ten years ago by a group of IT professionals who wanted to chart a somewhat distinctive path. Today, it has a topline of $269 million and is rated as one of the most promising mid-sized IT services companies. Creditable as that is, MindTree does not want to be just that.
There is an element of serendipity about what it has been doing over the last year. A year ago it designated one of its founders Subroto Bagchi ‘Gardener’, a gimmicky signal, if you like, intended to declare that he was moving out of the day-to-day running of the company to nurture talent which would run the company in the future. He has now a report card ready on a year as Gardener.
During this one year, he has also spent around 45 days travelling round the world talking to clients and prospective ones which has yielded remarkable insights into what firms are doing in these traumatic times. Lastly, MindTree as a whole has spent the last year going through the exercise of redefining its mission statement and vision for the next five years. Quite fortuitously these three processes have come together with a unifying thread, presenting a coherent big picture.
MindTree wants to seed the future while still young, and executive chairman Ashok Soota has declared that by 2020, it will be led by a non-founder. So a year ago the Gardener Bagchi set out to “touch” 100 top people in the organisation, with a goal of doing 50 in a year so as to eventually identify the top 20 by 2015. From among them will emerge not just the leader but a team of ten who would eventually, as group heads, deliver $200 million of turnover each. That will give a turnover of $2 billion. To put it in perspective, only one VC-funded company, which has not closed or been bought over, has been able to get to $2 billion and that is Google.
But to get there it has to periodically redefine its mission (why we exist) and its vision — measurable goals for the next five years. Its redefined mission is built around “successful customers, happy people, innovative solutions”. Its new vision targets a turnover of $1 billion by 2014. It wants to be among the globally 20 most profitable IT services companies and also among the 20 globally most admired ones. Admired in terms of customer satisfaction (par for the course), people practices (creditable), knowledge management (exciting) and corporate governance (the Enron-Satyam effect).
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The really interesting bit about MindTree in the last one year is what Bagchi has been up to. He has been embedding himself in the 50 lives, working in a personal private continuum, making it a rich learning process “which has helped connect so many dots.” Of the hundred who will be engaged, maybe 50 will leave, of them 25 may better themselves only marginally, and from the remaining 25 ten will emerge who will carry the company forward.
At the end of the year those engaged were taken to a retreat where Soota was “dissected” to “deconstruct” his leadership. Then they were shown a play which dramatised the public exchanges over three decades between Gandhi and Tagore — a historic exercise that was part of the nation’s discovery of itself. The aim was to demonstrate how, more than seeking harmony, they enriched themselves through differences. “We could relate it, page by page, to corporate life. Managers are overburdened by the need to seek harmony and definitive outcomes. We are looking for debate ahead of dialogue. In debate you look for victory, but in dialogue you look for queries.”
Then they were taken to a room where was revealed, minute by minute, the unfolding Satyam saga and they were asked: What if this happened to your company? They were thereafter introduced to group thinking, shown a film called The Abilene Paradox. Designers of the Titanic knew it would sink; the US chief of staff had private doubts over whether the Bay of Pigs exercise would succeed. The issue was: why don’t people speak up when the need arises? It is fear of ridicule and the desire to seek false harmony.
The point that emerged was that the only way to grow without imploding like Enron is through growing self-regulation. The takeways were the porosity between the personal and professional. Leadership development programmes are good upto a point but capacity expansion needs shaping one leader at a time. Hence the Gardener’s painstaking year-long exercise.
To find out where the industry is, Bagchi met 17 customers and prospective ones in the US, Europe and East Asia — two had halved operations, eight were maintaining spending levels and seven were talking of big things. One wanted to build applications for the real estate industry even in its hour of gloom: a startup in the auto industry visualised a product which will combine navigation, streaming and rescue. The big takeaway was there are two kinds of people. One group asks, when will the recession end, the other is working on seeding the future, to be ready when the next round of growth comes.
“We want to build a post-capitalism company for the future, for which the 100 people to be helped in capacity expansion will be the key. They will deliver a cascade,” says Bagchi.