The spurt of social media usage across Indian companies and corporate leaders over the recent times has amused me at several occasions.
While the idea of 'communicating directly with stakeholders' sounds extremely fancy, the reality is that most of what is shared by companies and corporate biggies on social media is more like a "discourse" than "communication". In most cases it is something that has been said several times before.
I often find myself reading and re-reading tweets or blogs of some of the most socially-active corporate leaders, wondering why am I even following them? (Why would I follow the CEO of a company to read posts with endlessly long hyperlinks, titled "See what technology can do" or "New age technology breaking barriers"! I could pick up some technology-related handles to get that information!)
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As an avid blogger for nearly a decade, it was great fun reading a blog post by Vishal Sikka, the CEO-designate at Infosys on his personal blog titled Timelessness. More than anything else, it was a very pleasant respite from this morbid (mis)use of social media for 'marketing' or 'promoting business'.
The highest paid Indian IT CEO weaved technology with his personal experiences, bringing out lucid meanings of what technology buzzwords like 'disruption' or 'transformation' imply, and what corporate jargons like 'transition' mean. Giving it the most personal touch, Sikka talked about Infosys as “my new company”.
“Transitions at large companies are in many ways similar to personal ones. Perhaps this is not surprising. Doug Engelbart had compared organisations to organisms. Companies, after all, are us. No more, and no less, than us, the people within them,” Sikka wrote. “So a transformation of a company, is really about the transformation of the people within, and around it, transformation of the contexts we form, the processes we have, and of the things we do.
He also summed up the entire CEO-search process at Infosys, which had made national headlines for months, in two simply written paragraph.
“Among the tons of calls that I received in the aftermath of the news (of quiting former employer SAP), there was one that was going to be very significant in shaping, in bringing about, another transition, both in my life and in that of a large company's. This was from a recruiter leading the CEO search for Infosys, a pioneering Indian IT company,” Sikka wrote. “Within a couple of weeks I found myself being swept by another massive wave. The iconic nature of Infosys, especially in India, made it impossible to delay the decision any longer, and I was announced as the next CEO of Infosys on June 12, scarcely 6 weeks after leaving SAP.”
I am so kicked at the possibilities of the disruption that Sikka can bring about in Indian corporate leaders vis-a-vis social media. I hope each one of those who use marketing teams to update their personal blogs and twitter handles (and there identities on the other 206 social media websites) take a clue from him.
Bravo, Mr. Sikka!