Sustainable Business Transformation

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Case Study in Social Entrepreneurship: Grassroutes

Posted by Hemant Puthli on March 15, 2010

[Content sourced from Inir Pinheiro, the social entrepreneur behind Grassroutes, and edited by Hemant Puthli]

India’s remote villages are now attracting city dwellers who are eager to step away from the stress zones of their office cubes and the complexities of urban life, in search of clean air and a simpler, earthier way of life – if only for a few days.

The village of Purushwadi is 140 miles (220 km) away from Mumbai city, the hub of international business and the financial and entertainment capital of India – a hot, grimy, polluted, noisy and crowded metropolis of at least 20 million people living in the greater metropolitan area. But in a few short hours, inhabitants of the “Maximum City” can reach a different world, where they can swim in the crystal clear waters of a river, help farmers thresh wheat, chop wood with a long handled axe, and eat home–cooked meals with peasants in the dim light of their rustic homes. Purushwadi is perched high above mean sea level, in the jagged hills of Maharashtra. Life for the locals has hardly changed for several centuries. These simple farmers live in mud-brick houses with dried cow-dung floors and earn their income from the cultivation of rice, wheat, millet and pulses. There is no electricity or running water and the day revolves around hard work in the fields under the harsh rays of an unforgiving sun. As a tourism destination, this is not exactly a beach resort with plenty of five-star properties to choose from, each with a world-class spa to rejuvenate yourself. Villages like Purushwadi offer you rejuvenation of a different kind — deep hands-on contact with raw, authentic rural Indian life in its natural habitat. Tourists to Purushwadi say that their journey has been worth it, just for getting a refreshingly different perspective on life away from the daily routine of making money and climbing the career ladder.

About 70% of India’s population of 1.1 billion lives in the villages. As mega-cities like Mumbai expand, fuelled by the country’s economic boom, the gap between the urban rich and the rural poor widens as never before. It is not difficult to see how this could result in the making of a socio-economic time-bomb. Responsible rural tourism is one of the most effective ways in bridging this gap and bringing these disparate communities together. Responsible rural tourism involves, for example, bringing city slickers and urban youth groups from places like Mumbai to villages like Purushwadi for a weekend. These tourists are keen to experience the poetry of the earthy life in rural India, of being in touch with nature and of spending a couple of days with people who live by modest means through simple farming. Grassroutes is a responsible rural tourism movement that is building a network of village tourism destinations across India, wherein the tourism model is owned, managed and run by local village communities. Grassroutes has made it possible for people to get into such villages and realize the true beauty of rural India. Their idea is to get communities to connect. The revenue generated through tourists trips is used to supplement the income of the villagers – and more importantly, encouraging and enabling them to stay back and continue with their lifestyle instead of heading to the city to look for work. According to Grassroutes, the poor and marginalized do not need charity or sympathy — they need opportunities to provide for themselves. And Grassroutes’ mission is to provide them with precisely those opportunities, while also providing urban dwellers a chance to experience something unique and special.

Grassroutes’ vision entails the conservation and promotion of local lifestyles, knowledge systems, environments, economies and traditions by enabling and empowering local communities to access sustainable opportunities. Grassroutes recognizes that lack of access to opportunities is one of the greatest challenges facing rural India. And this in turn leads to exploitation of already over-stretched natural resources, migration to larger towns and cities, which in turn leads to congestion in those urban centres. At a more intangible level, this also results in erosion of local culture, traditions, lifestyles and sense of community. The Grassroutes model has three key aspects to it: (1) facilitating the development of the village as a tourism destination (2) marketing and product development of tourism in the village and (3) quality control and monitoring of tourism in the village.

Grassroutes selected responsible rural tourism as a means of creating sustainable opportunities keeping in mind the fact that tourism is one industry that represents the greatest multiplier effect in economic development. Tourism also provides a platform for interaction that facilitates cultural osmosis and exchange of thought and understanding. These factors, coupled with the fact that entry costs are relatively low, make responsible tourism a very attractive opportunity for social entrepreneurs looking to engage in sustainable development. Historically, tourism has also been the greatest exploiter of local communities and responsible rural tourism is a model that reverses that trend. Responsible rural tourism places the local community at the epicentre of the tourists’ journey while also giving a great experience to the tourist, thereby mitigating the down-side of tourism. The ultimate aspiration of Grassroutes is to create sustainable opportunities in rural India which would give local communities the impetus needed to maintain and celebrate their unique way of life, leading to conservation of local lifestyles, traditions, knowledge systems, biodiversities and local economies.

For more information please visit http://grassroutes.co.in or drop them a note in the comment box below.

[Disclosure: HPA is assisting Grassroutes through mentoring and advisory on strategy and general management issues]

Posted in Economics, Environment, Society | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

Posted by Hemant Puthli on February 24, 2010

(source: TED)

At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world’s energy future, describing the need for “miracles” to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he’s backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor.

The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050.

Posted in Environment, Strategy, Technology | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

HPA Perspective on Sustainability: FAQs – 3

Posted by Hemant Puthli on February 1, 2010

This is the third in a series of 6 posts on our perspective on sustainability, and deals with the notion of ‘Common Good’ in contrast to ‘Self-Interest’, and why the pursuit of the Common Good leads to better sustainability. Our first post focused on our definition of sustainability while the second went in details on what exactly we mean by ’social relevance’, ‘environmental responsiveness’ and ‘economic viability’.

Why should anyone want to focus on the so-called ‘Common Good’? What is wrong with plain old ‘Self-interest’? Is one approach sustainable and not the other?

Interesting question, because it helps get to the very root of the matter. Self-interest is a very interesting principle. It is the most natural, the most Darwinian if you like, principle that you see in nature. Seen in the context of humans, it has the potential to evolve from its more primitive and instinctive version i.e., seeking to derive benefit to self by directly accessing value, to a more mature and rational version i.e., seeking to derive benefit to self through value returned by contribution to the ecosystem around self. Animals are not sapient beings and cannot possibly behave in a manner that reflects the latter version, but humans have an opportunity to transcend instinct, act rationally and move towards a better world. In its more evolved form, the principle of Self-interest becomes synonymous with the principle of Common Good – so it is no different, in essence. Do bear in mind that nowhere have we touched upon the concept of charity or philanthropy. Self-interest alone is good enough and will support sustainability, provided it sublimates into its more evolved form. This line of thinking is consistent with age-old homilies such as: ‘You reap what you sow’ or ‘As you give, so you get’ or ‘What goes around comes around’, which are simplified versions of similar thoughts.

In order to test whether a strategy or policy or an approach or a principle, let’s call it X, is sustainable, one may simply ask the question: ‘If everyone were to follow or practise X would it lead to a more prosperous, harmonious and better world?’ and if the answer is in the affirmative, then we may conclude that X is a sustainable idea. While on old aphorisms here’s another adage that resonates with this test: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’. If everyone were to act in the interest of common good it is likely to result in abundance in the long run, whereas if everyone acted out of primitive self-interest it is likely to result in scarcity, given the same wealth.


Sustainability Continuum


Apply the sustainability test to other impulses such as Greed or Cheating, and verify the results for yourself. Greed is not a sustainable strategy, and neither is Cheating – the global economic crisis bears testimony to that. It is possible that a few have benefited from it in the short run, and we are not passing moral judgement on them here. All we’re saying is that it is not sustainable. Again, let’s be clear that this is about the plain and simple economics of longevity, not about morality or religion!

The next post in this series will discuss the challenge of sustainability in a competitive situation and will elaborate upon the difference between partnerships and competitive relationships.

Posted in Economics, Environment, Society, Strategy | Tagged: , , , , | 5 Comments »

Does Your Start-up Need to Grow Up?

Posted by Hemant Puthli on January 21, 2010

Over the last decade or so, the heady blend of technological innovativeness and entrepreneurial drive has resulted in a widespread burgeoning of technology-centric start-ups. This was mostly fueled by quantum leaps in the price/performance of technology products in a climate of de-regulation and liberalization, especially in the telecom industry. At the turn of the century, the spike in Y2K business and the concurrent boom in dot-com opportunism were the most highly visible phenomena that marked this trend. Soon after, the predictable post-Y2K void and the inevitable dot-com bust saw a lot of bankruptcies and sell-outs, and, as one might have expected, very few new launches. A few years since then, however, Web 2.0 — the second wave of web technologies coupled with mobile computing and other trends that have collectively been dubbed ’social media’ — has brought a groundswell of economic activity around technology-centric start-ups. This has been further spurred on by the success of Facebook and Twitter, which have emerged as role models that many Web 2.0 / social media start-ups emulate. Simultaneously, in the post-Y2K world of global sourcing and off-shore IT and IT enabled services (ITeS), there has been a spate of IT / ITeS start-ups that are all aspiring in some way or other to become the ‘next Infosys’ in their respective markets.

However, not all technology start-ups become mega-corporations (though the reverse may be true: several giants in the technology industry were small boot-strap start-ups in their infancy). Not just that, many don’t even scale up to the mid-market level (defined by, say, annual revenues to the tune of tens of millions of US $ and/or multiple hundreds of employees) and continue to remain at the ‘Small’ end of the ‘Small & Medium Enterprise’ (SME) categorization till they are either acquired by larger and stronger players or are just simply driven out of business. Founders and promoters of such ventures are often puzzled and frustrated by the inability of their start-up, now in its adolescence, to break through seemingly invisible barriers that appear to be limiting its growth, in spite of being in business for several years and having built a respectable brand with a proven track record. What they don’t realize is that a lot of the answers to their conundrum lie within the organization itself and in the mindset of the leaders that define and propagate its culture. In many cases, promoters get rid of the problem altogether by selling off the business, but the organization continues to carry the seeds of the problem which then poses a challenge to the new owner. In any case, the inability to grow beyond the invisible barrier continues to be a confounding mystery. Why does this happen? Quite simply, they have started-up and they have grown but they haven’t grown up. Let’s take a deeper and harder look under the hood and try and understand the anatomy of an average start-up culture.

The “Forever Young” mindset has everybody “Living In The Past”

First, let’s focus on the main malaise that afflicts most start-ups, illustrated by the following near-verbatim quote from a recent interview of Facebook’s Co-founder CEO & President, 26 year-old Mark Zuckerberg: “It is really important to always keep a beginner’s mind and think what we would do if we were starting the company now”. This may have been relevant in the context of Zuckerberg’s responses to questions he was being asked in that interview, but it’s a pleonasm to say that every start-up must have a “beginner’s mind”. The more important question is: must they always keep it? Common sense suggests that as a start-up grows it should develop the “beginner’s mind” further and move on to the next stage in its growth, which usually calls for a shift in mindset. It is always a good thing to go back and revisit the time and the space where the “beginner’s mind” was nurtured, but it would be a big mistake to continue to live in that mental space-time. Like humans, start-ups must learn to leave their childhood and adolescence behind as they start to deal with the complexities of corporate adulthood, if they want to grow beyond a point. (Even for humans who seek personal growth, reminiscence of halcyon days as teenagers does not constitute a vision for the future.) Utterances like the one above by Zuckerberg, pulled out of context, acquire their own life as viral memes of start-up wisdom in the highly impressionable social cyberspace, because they resonate very well with the “Forever Young” sentiment of entrepreneurs who simply don’t want to grow up. On the other hand, entrepreneurs who show a hunger for evolution and who are only too eager to embark on a journey towards maturity and sophistication, at the personal as well as the business level, are more likely to make that very important transition through which they will learn to take on and live out a C-level role on par with leaders of other industry majors.

The myth of the “Hands-on CxO” — portrait of the technician as a businessman

In many ways, the “Hands-on CxO” is a corollary of the “Forever Young” mindset. Beyond doubt, at start-up stage it is crucial for CxOs to be highly hands-on, roll up their sleeves and be exemplars of the ‘Do It Yourself’ (DIY) culture. But at some point along the road to growth and maturity, the business leader needs to grow up and actually become a CEO instead of behaving like an overgrown program manager or a sales rep, just as the technology leader needs to grow up and actually become a CTO instead of behaving like an overgrown code-cutter. That journey is as much a personal metamorphosis for the concerned leader as it is for the organization as a whole. Key focus areas for ‘growing up’, in this context, include learning to appreciate the importance of strategy and tactics on the one hand and structure and process on the other, learning to let go of preoccupations with production and delivery issues, and learning to delegate large chunks of the day-to-day operational routine to other team members (who in all likelihood are only too eager to step up and take charge). Not only does delegation release precious bandwidth of key leaders so that they can focus on understanding and embracing their new responsibilities as C-level executives, but also, delegation provides growth opportunities to the team members who get work assigned to them that they were not doing before. This kind of role transformation represents a major career shift for leaders of a start-up and many who aren’t quite ready for that shift tend to resist it with all they’ve got — they would insist on continuing to be hands-on / DIY specialists and would either refuse to delegate or agree to delegate but compulsively continue to micro-manage through remote control. This is partly because they love working on the technology too much, partly because they loathe and fear their new (‘management’) responsibilities too much, partly because they fear losing control over the start-up’s core technical competencies (and risk being challenged by internal upstarts who might grab the opportunity to get a better handle on the secret sauce) and partly because they fear losing touch with technology per se over the years (which would be a handicap should they have to go back to industry for a job, in case the start-up fails).

Cultivating a culture of gods and rock-stars may be good but could also erode value

In almost every technology start-up, there’s a small group of ‘gurus’ who are revered as the gods of that particular domain. The Hands-on CEO and the Hands-on CTO are at the apex of the hierarchy but others in this coterie are almost equally powerful. Younger team members and fresh recruits who show a lot of promise are encouraged to earn ‘rock-star’ status through their first few achievements, and are then invited to join this elite clique. The symbiosis is quite clearly understood but always tacit, never overtly spoken about — the gods preen themselves, drawing on the idolatry of the rock-stars, while the rock-stars enjoy being mollycoddled as special employees and gloat over the privilege of on-line and off-line proximity and access bestowed upon them by the gods. This caucus of gods and rock-starts drives the start-up’s agenda and scripts its future. They have the power to lift the start-up to great heights, as also to bring it down with a crash. They determine what platforms, what tools and what methodologies the firm will use, what they will create (or won’t) and what kind of work they will do (or won’t), who they will partner with and how they will go to market. They shape the talent acquisition strategy and process. It doesn’t stop there, in many cases: they also go on to influence (if not directly determine) strategic and tactical choices dealing with which business opportunities in which markets to chase and how to play to win. The power acquired by this core group could result in several side-effects that have the potential to subvert growth and end up hurting the start-up. For example, it could give birth to cultural xenophobia against lateral hires from the industry, especially if the new entrants also have stellar resumes and come highly recommended. It could trigger a ‘not invented here’ syndrome against new tools, methods, platforms and even new ways of thinking about the business. It could lead to a clinging-on to technologies or methodologies or ideas (or even operating locations and lifestyles) in which the caucus has deep emotional investments, but which are not aligned to market imperatives or do not support growth targets.

‘My Way or the Highway’ could lead to a dead-end either way

The most difficult challenges that a start-up faces in dealing with the winds of change brought by growth and scale, is the letting-go of points of control and the stepping-away from the comfort zones of the past. Growth and expansion usually involve the inorganic inclusion of new people, new ideas, new tools and new methods. Whether it is parting with equity to a new investor (or a new senior recruit) or having to bring in external talent (that internal old-timers may see as a threat) or having to re-shape the organization (resulting in a redefinition of power centers and personal alignments), start-ups must learn to open their minds and their hearts to change. Rejecting or strongly resisting change can mean stagnancy which eventually leads to failure. On the other hand, embracing change may not always guarantee results and in any case, change is never easy. That said, it is historically evident that start-ups that successfully break through the invisible barriers to growth are the ones whose leaders, gods and rock-stars have seen the need to change well ahead of time and have been pro-active in anticipating and meeting that change, thereby opening themselves up to the opportunities that come with maturity.

Posted in Organization, Strategy | Tagged: , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Key Business Technology Trends and Themes

Posted by Hemant Puthli on December 18, 2009

It’s that time of the year again — as the holiday season approaches and the calendar year draws to a close, everybody is out there, trying to assess the year that was and trying to forecast the year that will be. In keeping with that tradition we have put together a list of trends and themes that emerge prominently out of our assessment of important developments that have shaped the growth of the business technology market in the recent past, and which will carry over their impact and momentum into the near future. Some of these trends and themes are at the ascent of their curve and approaching their peak, some have reached steady-state where they will continue for a while, while the others have run through their course and are beginning to enter the last leg of their life-cycle before they fade away (only to morph into new avatars of themselves — technology seems to do that thing quite often — the ‘back to the future’ thing).

We present two lists here: a list of 6 trends and a list of 6 themes, in no particular order. Trends pertain to the supply side of the market and are characteristics of products and services that are produced and delivered by vendors and providers. Themes pertain to the demand side of the market and emerge from major pre-occupations of most CIOs and their teams — their key concerns and the stuff that keeps them awake at night. A good way of reading these lists would be for vendors and providers to ask themselves how they can innovate and continue to develop products and services that leverage these 6 trends and help address their customers’ needs and concerns in those 6 thematic areas. Similarly, a good way of reading these lists would be for CIOs to ask themselves how they can stay focused on these 6 themes and deliver results by effectively deploying products and services emerging out of those 6 trends.

Trends (Supply-side)

  • Mobility and Mobile Computing
  • Web 2.0 / Social Networking and Social Media
  • Outsourcing / Off-shoring / Globalization of services
  • Virtualization and Cloud Computing
  • Analytics and Business Intelligence
  • Content and Knowledge Management

Themes (Demand-side)

  • Business Alignment: IT Strategy & Governance, support organizational / operational innovation and business transformation
  • Stakeholder Relationship Management: accountability to end-users, staff, suppliers, corporate leadership
  • Enterprise Architecture: simplification, standardization, consolidation
  • ‘Green IT’ and Corporate Responsibility: supporting social and environmental causes championed by the business
  • Cost Management: real-estate footprint, power consumption, procurement, licensing, maintenance, salaries and wages
  • Security & Risk Management: data security, customer privacy, access control, disaster management, business continuity

We recognize that there may be many trends as well as themes, other than those we have identified here above, that may be equally (or more) important within specific pockets or niches of the business technology market world-wide. By not including more trends and themes we are not suggesting that they are unimportant — we just wanted to keep our lists reasonably short and so decided to pick around half-a-dozen points for each (again, it was not a pre-defined number). Our lists only seek to represent the top few trends and themes aggregated across all industry verticals (such as banking, manufacturing, etc.) and functional horizontals (such as supply chain, customer relationship management, etc.) that the business technology market covers, across all geographies.

Do write in with your comments, especially if you feel we’ve missed out on something really important that needs to be captured in a high-level scan.

Posted in Governance, Strategy, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

HPA Perspective on Sustainability: FAQs – 2

Posted by Hemant Puthli on December 1, 2009

This is the second in a series of 6 posts on our perspective on sustainability, and deals with a set of questions around what we mean by ’social relevance’, ‘environmental responsiveness’ and ‘economic viability’, and how vital it is for businesses seeking a path to prosperity to aim at these goals. (The first post in this series dealt with questions about our definition of sustainability and how it may be similar to, yet different from, other connotations associated with the term.)

You talk about ‘being socially relevant, environmentally responsive and economically viable’. What do these terms mean? How is this any different from Corporate Social Responsible (CSR) plus Green IT plus traditional profitability, all rolled into one? Isn’t it simpler to talk about concepts that are already known, using words that people already understand?

We’d love to use words that people already understand. After all, making ourselves understood is the first thing we need to do, if we are to be successful in our business goals as Trusted Advisers to our clients. Trouble is, the ideas we are talking about have not established their own vocabulary yet, and in many cases, are just slightly different from similar sounding concepts, and so we made up our own terminology as we thought-through issues around sustainability. We hope our terminology sticks! Let’s take these three terms one by one and then get to the other related questions.

First let’s set the context by mapping all stakeholder communities that make up the ecosystem of a business enterprise. We use the term stakeholder here in the same sense as the ‘Stakeholder Theory’ propounded by R. Edward Freeman in the 1980s and it is useful to clarify this because sometimes people confuse stakeholders to mean (only) shareholders. In our context, a stakeholder is any entity (could be a legal entity such as a business, a not-for-profit organization, an institution, a cooperative, or just a community or group of people) touched or impacted by the business. Increasing globalization of the creation and delivery of goods and services is adding to the diversity and complexity of the types of entities in the stakeholder ecosystem. As you can see from the diagram (below), the stakeholder ecosystem of a business enterprise has a core and a periphery, surrounded by the society in which the enterprise functions and the world at large.


Enterprise Stakeholder Ecosystem

Enterprise Stakeholder Ecosystem

Being socially relevant means constantly striving to anticipate and fulfil specific needs of all stakeholder communities in the ecosystem — including first, the customer community, followed by other stakeholders in the core ecosystem of the business: its stockholders, its alliance partners and suppliers and its employees. Being socially relevant also means constantly striving to meaningfully engage, partner with and contribute to participants in the peripheral ecosystem within which the business functions — comprising industry associations, market institutions, the media, special interest groups or collectives formed by communities that its operations involve or impact, and the various institutions that form part of the legal and regulatory framework within which the business conducts its affairs. For a large globalized business, this could represent a much wider scope in terms of size, scale, diversity and complexity.

Being environmentally responsive means constantly striving to increase the level of awareness within the business ecosystem concerning environmental issues such as climate change, energy conservation, waste management, etc., so as to lead to a commitment of resources by the business towards improving conditions in the locations where it operates (or has other interests) or at the very least, neutralizing the impact of the business on the environmental conditions at those locations.

Being economically viable means constantly striving to remain profitable in the short as well as the long run. It is obvious that economic viability is vital for success, since a business cannot effectively achieve its goals while its survival is constantly threatened by financial problems. However, businesses that narrowly focus only on their own profitability in purely ‘single bottom line’ terms, to the exclusion of the other goals, or, worse still, to the actual detriment of their host society (or societies, as in the case of globalized businesses) are unlikely to prosper in the long run.

Social relevance and CSR do appear to be similar, and to a large extent the activities of a business that strives to stay socially relevant may not appear to be very different from what they might have been doing by way of CSR. The important thing is the attitude of the business: while CSR is essentially based on some kind of altruistic or charitable notion, social relevance is based on the belief that pursuing the common good of the stakeholder ecosystem will drive sustainable profitability. The roots of CSR type of thinking go back to the feudal concept of noblesse oblige. In the post-Industrialization era this has translated to the notion that prosperous businesses – the ‘new nobility’ of free market economics, are morally obliged to help underprivileged communities. We are not saying this is wrong, or even that it is not sustainable: we are only saying that it is a comparatively less sustainable approach than one where businesses see themselves as partners of, and not as patrons of / donors to, communities in their ecosystem for mutual benefit. (For more on this please see earlier HPA posts — one on Charity 2.0 and another containing an embedded video clip of a TED talk by Jacqueline Novogratz.)

Green initiatives have typically put environmental issues ahead of everything else, and Green IT, as the name implies, tends to focus on how to make the IT function as a whole more eco-friendly. While this is not a bad thing as such we believe that the emphasis should be on a holistic, three-dimensional approach to sustainability rather than a one-dimensional one. There is a lot of learning that could be borrowed from Green IT and we are not suggesting that Green IT initiatives must be abandoned, just that they be re-aligned to the broader and more holistic idea of ‘Sustainable Business Technology’.

As to why X is not the sum of A+B+C, I would say that the new definition of profitability (and please do look up the Wikipedia entry for triple bottom line for more on this) is a function of the lasting impact of the business on its ecosystem and the economic benefits accrued to the societies that host the business. There continue to be discussions and debates on quantification and measurement of economic impact of social and environmental efforts even today and a large part of the body of knowledge in this area is still evolving as we speak, but there is little doubt that it is an idea whose time has come and is here to stay. A silo-ed approach does not produce the same results.

The next post in this series will deal with the notion of ‘Common Good’ in contrast to ‘Self-Interest’, and why the pursuit of the Common Good leads to better sustainability.


Posted in Economics, Environment, Society, Strategy | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

A World Without Oil?

Posted by Hemant Puthli on November 24, 2009

From TED: a talk by Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition movement – a community-driven approach to eliminate dependence on fossil fuel, on how to prepare ourselves for life without oil.

We need to start thinking along these lines – worst-case scenarios have a tendency to manifest themselves in reality, more often than not!

Posted in Environment, Strategy | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Change Management Q&A

Posted by Hemant Puthli on November 13, 2009

Over the last month or so, I answered a few questions on the LinkedIn network on the subject of ‘Change Management’. The questions and my answers are reproduced below:

What is successful change management?

To evaluate the end, we must go to the beginning.

Good practices in change management require that the criteria for success be established before kicking-off the change program. Things change, of course, and when they do, those criteria need to be reviewed and ‘tweaked’ if (and as) necessary. If this is done diligently, the answer to your question will be self-evident at the end of the change program.

And as to who should spell out the criteria – well, it has to be those who are initiating and sponsoring the change (weighted towards the latter, in case they are different entities / individuals).

This may not always be as easy as it sounds, and the services of a skilled (external?) ‘change agent’ would be required to extract the success criteria out of the minds of those driving the change.

Please share what you believe to be the three most important attributes of a good change management strategy.

A good change management strategy is characterized by:
(1) Clarity of vision and strength of purpose
(2) Inclusion of all relevant stakeholders; alignment of goals; communication
(3) Effectiveness of mechanisms that deal with planning and governance

There could be others, but these would be the top 3 most critical ones, in my opinion.

Today’s challenges for Change Management?

There could be several triggers to the need for change, such as: regulatory imperatives, stakeholder demands, environmental / competitive forces, new leadership / outlook, etc. Each brings with it its own mix of issues and opportunities, but regardless of that, in each case, the organization would be better off building a consensus for change (or at least, a business case) and anticipating and planning for the change well in advance of commencing the journey.

That said, the most common dimensions of impact in any given change programme include:
1. Stakeholders – customers, suppliers / partners, employees
2. Operations – processes, systems, technology / infrastructure

Most challenges could be found in these two areas. People generally do not like change and carrying them along is perhaps the biggest challenge. I don’t think the current economic climate has significantly changed this fact. On the contrary, it has probably magnified the criticality of inclusiveness and communication with key stakeholders.

P.S.

Two things come to mind, which are perhaps unique to our current ‘zeitgeist’ and they are: (1) cultural diversity and (2) economic (job) uncertainty. These two factors make it all the more difficult to bring people on-board toward a change agenda.

The body of knowledge on Change Management is quite vast, but in many ways, these three questions are key to “getting it right”: What is success? What is a good strategy? What are the big challenges? I hope that my answers, though brief, offer a helpful perspective.

Posted in Governance, Operations, Organization, Politics, Strategy | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Off-shoring Destinations: LatAm gets Muy Caliente!

Posted by Hemant Puthli on November 8, 2009

Research reports released in the recent past by two top-tier global consulting firms — one by A T Kearney prepared on behalf of ‘Invest Chile / CORFO’ (the Chilean Economic Development Agency), and the other by KPMG , indicate that Latin America is rapidly becoming a preferred region for outsourcing / off-shoring.

According to both reports, the main factors that are driving this trend are:

  • Geographical proximity of Central and South American countries to North America (impact: reduced travel time for client and service provider personnel)
  • Compatible time-zones (impact: overlapping business hours leading to less disruptions of daily routine for client and service provider personnel)
  • Common languages and cultural affinity with North America (impact: promotes quicker and stronger team cohesion between client teams and service provider teams, and smoother communications on an on-going basis)
  • Lower attrition rates (impact: reduced ‘leakage’ of knowledge and expertise, resulting in better cost / benefit ratio for investments in knowledge transfer and training, and better response time)
  • Improved telecommunications and other technology infrastructure (impact: reduced infrastructure risks, resulting in greater business continuity)
  • Favorable business environment including political stability and tax incentives in several countries (such as the ones mentioned below) (impact: financial attractiveness, reduced geo-political risk)

Top Locations in Latin America (source: A T Kearney)

As we had noted in an earlier post in this blog, these are more or less the same factors that underpin the weaknesses of destinations like India (as also China and other Asian countries), and the more aggressive players in the Central and South American region are clearly positioning their advantages in these areas as complementary to India and China. However, there continue to be concerns in a few key areas — particularly with regard to team size and scalability. In order to overcome this drawback, several countries in the region are actively working towards improving the quality and quantity of their resource pools, by focusing on education and training in technical as well as soft skills. Clearly, the more aggressive players have recognized the criticality of growing a scalable, highly skilled workforce that is adept at innovation. Other challenges include the need to change client perceptions about countries in the region as being politically unstable and their main cities as unsafe or even dangerous. In that respect, it is useful to note that recent terrorists attacks in India and the authoritarian regime in China have rendered the latter destinations less attractive.

Service providers with a global vision will benefit significantly by investing in expansion in key Latin America destinations. As regards Indian ITO and BPO shops, the future will reward those who think beyond their domestic boundaries, venture into the global arena, embrace new cultures, learn to leverage the advantages of these destinations and learn to share their knowledge and expertise. Conversely, the ones who are less open and flexible, or who are too strongly rooted in the Indian geography and/or ethos, will be relegated to the position of helpless bystanders, as they watch their market share dwindle and see their survival threatened as the domestic competition for a diminishing slice of the pie becomes even more fierce.

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HPA Perspective on Sustainability: FAQs – 1

Posted by Hemant Puthli on November 7, 2009

Several pertinent questions often come up in discussions on the closely related subjects of ‘Sustainable Business Transformation’ and ‘Sustainable Business Technology’, which form the main theme of our work. What follows below is an attempt to consolidate them into sets of related questions, which have been answered in an interview format so as to capture the spirit of the live (and lively) discussions that we have had with clients and interested parties.

This is the first of 6 posts and deals with a set of questions about HPA’s perspective on sustainability and how it may be similar to, yet different from, other connotations associated with the term.

The concept of sustainability has been around for many decades, so why are you talking about it now as though it is something new? What’s new in what you’re talking about? What’s different about what you’re calling Sustainable Business Transformation through Sustainable Business Technology? Is this something you’ve invented?

‘Sustainability’ has been around for a long time, agreed. Neither have we coined the word nor have we been the first to talk about it in terms of business management (and won’t be the last either). Michael Porter introduced the concept of sustainable competitive advantage in the 1980s along with several other ideas that have dominated management thinking over the last couple of decades. We are not suggesting that those ideas are obsolete and need to be replaced with the apparently new ideas that we are putting forward — on the contrary, we are building on the theme and adapting traditional management thinking around sustainability to reflect current priorities. In a way, we are ‘marking-to-market’ the legacy of ideas around sustainable business and infusing into them some current thinking from other streams, which we shall talk about in a moment. So, in a sense we are saying that those concepts need to be updated and refreshed, but not replaced. Refreshment keeps good ideas alive, relevant and vibrant!

The current thinking mentioned a moment ago is, again, not all that new either and nor is it all our own work, but has its roots in studies on sustainability carried out by socio-economists way back in the 1970s. Environmentalists and economists have been talking about sustainable development for almost as long as management thinkers have been talking about sustainable business, perhaps even longer. As an aside, I would encourage you to look up the Wikipedia portal on sustainable development (the Wikipedia page on sustainable development would be a good starting point) which traces the history of sustainable development and outlines its scope and approach.

So, as you have correctly pointed out, sustainability is not a new thing in either business management or socio-economic or environmental conservation circles. But for a long time these have been like parallel tracks running in parallel universes. In more recent times, pressure from environmentalists and others, exerted on countries and businesses to get smart about the other definitions of ‘sustainability’, has compelled contemporary management thinkers — academicians, consultants and practitioners alike, to see things from a different perspective. So much so that some harsh critics unfairly accuse these pressure groups of having hijacked the meaning of sustainability to serve their own ideological pursuits. It is almost as though the word means different things to different people, which is ironic because it is not at all difficult to synthesize these apparently diverse notions into a single set of concepts and principles.

Ideas like the ‘people-planet-profit’ approach and the ‘triple bottom line’ try to bring all those seemingly disparate views of sustainability together into an integrated and, if you like, holistic definition, which we believe will gain traction with businesses as those ideas crystallize on one hand and businesses become more aware on the other.

The three great crises the world is dealing with as we speak: the great economic crisis (manifesting in the slowdown / recession over the last year or two), the great environmental crisis (manifesting in significant climatic change and unprecedented natural calamities in recent years) and the great socio-political crisis (manifesting in the ‘conflict of civilizations’ and the threat of terror strikes), have underscored the need to meld economic, environmental and social / political perspectives into a new definition of sustainable business. Each of these three crises reflects a fault line in each of the ‘three pillars’ respectively i.e., economic, environmental and social. On the plus side, there are tremendously important lessons to be learned from these crises and we aspire to distill some of them and pass the benefit of our learning to our clients.

Now, if you were to leave this aside for a moment and look at the history of Business Technology, you will observe that it has always quickly adapted itself to serve emerging business imperatives. When management thinkers talked about BPR, for instance, Business Technology moved quickly to support that trend. Some may even argue that packaged ERP software is what drove the genesis of BPR, but that’s a moot point. So this is nothing new either — the fact that technology trends support and drive business trends. That’s technology’s job!

To summarize, what we’re saying is: (a) businesses will start thinking about sustainability in terms of a more holistic and multi-dimensional definition as compared to traditional management thinking, and (b) technology will do its job, as it always does, which is to support business in envisioning and planning its future: in this case, a sustainable future. This is somewhat new stuff … in the sense that we don’t know of too many management professionals out there today addressing the issue of Sustainable Business Technology as an enabler to, if not the driver of, the Sustainable Business Transformation journey. It is new but not all invented by us, as you can see from the number of references we make to other sources on this topic. We are only bringing our unique perspective on this, through our own ideation.

Long answer, but hopefully it clarifies the issue regarding what’s new and what’s not and why what we’re talking about here is a bit different.

The next post in this series will deal with what we mean by being ’social relevant, environmentally responsive and economically viable’ and why these are important goals for businesses seeking a path to prosperity.

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