Indian organizational culture

Not long ago I participated in a panel with C-level execs from leading India-based firms, including DLF, Godrej Group, Marico, and Nokia Asia, to discuss the results of 2008 IBM worldwide CEO research. The research, centered on interviews with 1, 130 corporate and public frontrunners global, identifies just how companies tend to be innovating their business designs to handle quick business, technological, and societal changes.

While Western CEOs’ desire for food for innovation is curbed by the US recession, the Indian CEOs in my own panel felt desperate to take advantage of the twin-forces of globalization and quick technology evolution to fully capture new marketplace options.

Unlike Western CEOs obsessed with brand-new item and service innovation, Indian CEOs tend to be reinventing their entire business models…again and once more. Harsh Mariwala, Chairman of Marico Industries, explained just how Marico, which started as a veggie oil supplier, metamorphosed it self into a consumer products business, expanding later into skincare solutions, and it is presently reinventing itself as an wellness knowledge supplier.

Despite their gung-ho attitude towards business development, I sensed some insecurity among Indian CEOs: they recognize they can’t develop the global enterprise into the future — one that's innovative and transformative — unless they have a workforce that's innovative and transformative. That’s the reason why within the IBM study, Indian CEOs rated the availability of skill — or folks skills — as the utmost essential aspect that can stifle their astounding business growth.

While we trust Indian CEOs that finding innovative, entrepreneurial youthful employees is getting harder, the actual issue lies with Indian CEOs on their own, or maybe more correctly, with regards to arcane administration style. Obtained however to learn that you can’t mandate development through the top, since innovation is a natural event driven by voluntary staff member involvement.

I'd like to elaborate slightly. The Towers Perrin 2005 international Workforce research stated that, among the list of worldwide staff, Indian staff members feel the least engaged by their particular businesses. At fault? The hierarchical construction of all Indian businesses, some of which tend to be risk-averse, family-run entities. As Adi Godrej, president associated with the Godrej Group, candidly acknowledges: “In India Inc, we a bit of a (rigid) hierarchical structure that needs to be changed.”

We can’t concur much more. Indian CEOs must observe that they can’t contain it both ways: they can’t continuously innovate their particular company designs, whilst maintaining their particular anachronistic command-and-control administration style. Collaboration-minded Gen Y employees – 50 % of India’s workforce is below 26! – won’t join or remain too much time in corporations secured in pyramid-shaped organizational structures. They would rather work with a collaborative corporate culture with a flatter org chart that encourages bottom-up decision-making. You Can call-it “Corporate Customs 2.0.”

Indian-born organizations can find out lots from India-based MNCs which are trailblazing Corporate customs 2.0. Just take Nokia Asia: its a huge promoter of “community-based development, ” enlisting frontline staff members when you look at the ideation and commercialization of entire new product lines. As D. Shivakumar, managing director of Nokia India, explains it: “Once our Board approves an employee-driven initiative, we agree 100% to turning it into a commercial success.” Needless to say, Nokia Asia enjoys the most affordable employee attrition prices among Indian companies.

To facilitate innovation in this brand new fluid and powerful business context, Indian CEOs must purchase Web 2.0-enabled worker motivation technologies like forecast marketplaces, idea administration programs, and worker blogs. Armed with these personal computing tools, Indian organizations can collect and quickly work to their employees’ a few ideas for seizing promising possibilities or mitigating budding dangers. Like that, if a promising enterprize model has been hatched by an innovative number of Larsen & Toubro (L&T) employees on Twitter, that concept is quickly roped into L&T’s corporate intranet for fast execution by that exact same staff member community.

When you look at the character of social networking, I would like close this post by revealing with Indian CEOs a remark from a single of these peers, R C Bhargava, president, Maruti Suzuki India: “The onus is on Indian CEOs to build up a tradition in which all workers should make blunders and break the obstacles of a hierarchy.”