An experiment in light expression

The Economist has an interested piece on Mao and management. In the same spirit as Machiavelli, Chanakya and others, this article describes Mao as a management role model of sorts. It outlines four strategies from Mao’s turbulent political lifetime for executives who are finding it difficult to get their message across and be considered ’successful’ managers.

1. Have a powerful, mendacious slogan (”Serve the people”) - how many modern corporations can claim to have a 3 word slogan?

2. Do ruthless media manipulation - A clear message, hammered relentlessly often overrides inconvenient truths
3. Sacrifice your friends and colleagues - the objective evaluation of performance

4. Substitute activity for achievement - Do more things (more emails, project plans, visions, groups and committees….) and bail out before the results of these random activities start manifesting

On Friday, I attended a Siliconindia summit on Leadership. Since the 199os Siliconindia has been an inspirational magazine profiling Indian American and more recently, Indian success stories in the technology marketplace. I fondly remember reading the magazine back in grad school.

In this post, I cover highlights of a few talks at the event and my takeaways.

Sharad Sharma, who heads Yahoo R&D in India gave an excellent keynote on the journey from offshoring to in market incubation. He described some mega trends that characterize the new problem for multinational corporations – product clutter, aggressive and nimble international and local competitors coming out of nowhere, the emergence of overnight new technology innovations and unpredictable network/viral effects (He cited Facebook’s book application having 7000 Harry Potter reviews, the largest anywhere).

His viewpoint was that captive product development (such as the India Development Centers or IDCs of Microsoft, Symantec, or Oracle) and Outsourced Product Development (OPD) firms (such as GlobalLogic and Symphony Services) is already a fading story. Rising wage costs, talent crunch, and the tapering of Operating Margin gains means only one thing – it is harder to extract more business benefits from passive captive outfits.

The solution to this new MNC problem? In market incubation. Meaning the development of innovative products and platforms for local consumers, for small medium businesses, and the reorganization of captive units and OPD working arrangements to wards a multi-hub, autonomous, and risk sharing model (Sharad cited the Airbus/Boeing component responsibility model where landing gears are made in France and wings are made in Japan as self contained units!).

Sharad ended his talk suggesting that this new incubation model would mean the emergence of 3 key positions within the Indian product ecosystem:

1. Leader of a Global Center of Excellence with ownership for global or local products

2. Intrapreneurs – who seed inhouse innovation with access to go to market channels

3. Product entrepreneurs who develop new products or support the ecosystem

The subsequent panel discussion on Leadership traits included Dr. Anil Gupta from Sun’s India Engineering Center, and Vijay Anand from Oracle.

Vijay used famous CEO/Leader quotes to bullet his views on what makes leaders tick - including CEO views on newness, on opportunity, and on value systems.

Anil chose to go back to the basics of what makes a good leader tick – having a clear conscience, a human bond with employees, a healthy body, and a strong sense of values.

He ended with a lovely poem from the ex Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Touche!

“..Mere prabhu Itni Oonchai mat dena..

Gairon ko gale na laga sakoon..

Itni Rukhai mat dena”

The leadership panel was peppered with references to some very interesting books on the subject of leaderhip including Straight & Crooked Thinking, Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Fooled by Randomness, and The Whole New Mind.

All the panelists agreed about the need to have more ‘Integrative thinking’ leaders than reductionist/conventional thinking ones – and made references to a recent July HBR article on ‘How do Leaders think’.

..Other interesting talks at the event are archived here. I enjoyed most of the afternoon talks particularly the ones by Sanjay Singh from Akamai, Ramesh Srinivasan from Bally Systems, Santanu Paul from Virtusa, Alexius Collette from Phillips, and C Mahalingam from Symphony Services.

Alexander Kjerulf ’s blog has several interesting posts on innovative workplaces, work related happiness, and such. This post on ‘Top 5 reasons why the Customer is Always Right is Wrong’ should be read by those IT-entrepreneurs and large multinational companies laying out miles and miles of cube farms across Bangalore and other places in India. Could there be a corelation between the IT industry’s 15% attrition rate and the BPO industry’s over 50% attrition rate to the manner in which most Indian organizations care for their employees? Very seriously, very few Indian workplaces (with exceptions i’m sure - design houses, movie studies, MTV offices) would be considered as cool, hip, and happening. Or at the very least, inspiring.
If you are in Indian IT professional or manager, take a look at some of the cool workplaces in this post. The images suggest (doh!) that there is a lot more that goes into employee satisfaction, motivation and capacity for innovation than simply paying people 15% more money every year…If most of the drab, soulless, and cold Indian workplaces reflect the state of the innovation quotient of their people, then most workplaces are doing a great job of hiding their innovations or simply had none in the first place :)

Where have all the great workplace designers gone from India? Did they never exist?

I have a hard time explaining to people how ‘design management’ is different from project/program/people management, and yet inclusive of all of them. I think design management and design leadership cannot be considered separately - if design managers are not empowered to construct and execute design ideas with great thought leadership, they can easily become execution machines.

Erin Malone’s post on ‘So you think you want to be a manager’ is a good reminder of all the trade-offs of being a design  manager, including the heart burns and the sacrifices and the moments of joy. I recommend you read it along with an earlier post of hers ‘Modeling  the Creative Organization’.  And if you’re still with me here, I strongly recommend The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley, one of the IDEO brothers (David is the venerable professor at Stanford).
In my two and half years doing design and user experience and project and people management first at PeopleSoft and then at Oracle, I find my job to constantly juggle between people issues (designers are a sensitive, creative, fun, demanding, idiosyncratic lot!), project issues (balancing the formal choking of project management practices with the million opportunities for improvisation), design issues (should we do a user interview or talk to Strategy/Pre Sales hacks?), and all sorts of shit that hits the ceiling when you have 8 interesting, fun, young designers working directly with you. Did I mention the notion of ‘managing your managers and your managers’s super bosses’. That one’s reserved for another post : )