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.