Thanks to our friend, Nilofer Merchant, founder of Rubicon Consulting in San Francisco and author of the insightful new book, The New How, for fanning this New York Times interview with Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies. HCL is a 54,000-person IT services company based outside Delhi with 2009 revenues of $2.3 billion.
Vineet Nayar Leads With Modesty
Nayar’s ‘employees first, customer second’ philosophy aligns with a basic concept of improvisation: Take care of yourself first. Mick Napier hits this hard in his book, Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out. If you wait for the other people in your scenes to have an idea, to initiate, you’re making yourself powerless, and you leave your scene partners and the audience hanging. And if the other person in your scene waits on you, you’re lost, and so is the audience. Nayar’s point is the same: HCL can only be as good to their customer/audience as its employees are to one another. These behaviors cannot be separated. You cannot be one way to your scene partners and another to the audience. It is all part of the same space-time continuum. And productive action can only begin with you.
Other quotes by Nayar that are consistent with improvisation, and my notes in italics:
“I did not know where I had to go, and I was projecting as if I knew. I assume that you expect me to know where I am going, and you will respect me for that, and the day I tell you both of us are in the same boat, we would fail. That was a very big learning for me.” Pretending is not illusion if it is a step on the path to being.
“If you see your job not as chief strategy officer and the guy who has all the ideas, but rather the guy who is obsessed with enabling employees to create value, I think you will succeed.” Support, the giving of gifts, is the most powerful tool in the improviser’s repertoire.
“How do I communicate to employees to not look up to me, but to look within, to communicate that I’m one of you, to destroy that hierarchy? So I decided I’m going to go into this big gathering of employees dancing to a very famous Bollywood song. And I can’t dance for nuts, right? I was dancing in the aisles with these employees and making lots of noises. What happened? It completely destroyed the gap.” When you want to communicate something important, use more than information to do it.
“The failures are far in excess of successes.” Failure is not defeat if it is a step on the path to understanding.
“I don’t want people who are coming here and teaching me something or teaching the organization something. I don’t want teachers. I want people who are not only charged up because they like it, but because they will learn from this experience. I’m looking for people who see experience as a continuum and not as an end in and of itself.” Improvisers are not teachers. We are builders of environments in which communication, learning and transformation can happen.
IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE!
When we tried linking to the HCL URL with Mozilla Firefox 5.0, we got this message:
We noted this ‘FAIL’ in the post. Within minutes of publishing the post, an HCL employee, Aruj Kapoor, wrote to say he was sorry they’d been down, that they’d fixed the bug and the site was restored. And not only that, he ‘yes-anded’ by asking what specific information we were seeking when the site went down. Aruj’s awareness of what my experience must’ve been when I hit the dead link–frustration, confusion, puzzlement–led him to offer his support to the scene I’d initiated with HCL. Be sensitive to your environment and it will tell you what you need to know. By yes-anding, Aruj converted a mistake into an opportunity to extend the dialogue between the HCL brand and me. Nice move. Every mistake is an opportunity to do something useful.
Tags: Delhi, Education, Employees First, HCL Technologies, Inverted Pyramid, Leadership, Learning, Mick Napier, Nilofer Merchant, The New How, Vineet Nayar
Thanks for your feedback. It was a temporary glitch. The site is up and running. However do write me a mail for your requirements with regards to the information that you seek and we shall send you the same.
Thanks, Anuj, we have noted your quick response in the above post. As far as the information we seek, we don’t seek information, we seek context, namely a gateway to the communication channel that will call the HCL internal network’s attention to this blog post, thereby adding perspective to the NY Times interview with Mr. Nayar. Namaste.
Mikey baby, I just love your reflections on this post – especially – “Pretending is not illusion if it is a step on the path to being.” Two snaps. Thanks for profiling such a sincere inquiry by Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL.
Nayar called American technology graduates inferior to grads from countries like India and China, because they are not as disciplined as their counterparts in these countries. Americans are more interested in developing “the next big thing” and getting rich than in focusing on “boring” (but important) technology and business methodologies like ITIL and Six Sigma, Nayar reportedly said. The U.S. educational system is doing a poor job in preparing tech grads for the real world, said Nayar, who apparently called American grads “unemployable.”
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/all/vineet-nayar-on-unemployable-americans-even-smart-people-say-dumb-things/?cs=33557
Your caption under Vineet’s picture says !! Vineet Nayar Leads With Modesty
After the nasty comments he made about American Graduates are inferior to graduates from India and China, do you think he is even a leader and has modesty ? He is not a Game changer IMHO.