Employees First, Customers Second - Turning Conventional Management Upside Down

09/06/2010

Turning Conventional Management Upside Down

By Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies

"Rumor is that Vineet Nayar has invented a whole new way of configuring and managing an enterprise. I think there's more than a grain of truth to that. I'm on the verge of the verge of declaring that Mr. Nayar could be the next Peter Drucker."
-Tom Peters

If western business leaders agree on anything, it's that the customer is (or at least, should be) king. In Japan, the world's second-largest economy, the sentiment is even stronger: o kyaku-sama wa kami-sama desu-the customer is god. But I believe that...

...these attitudes are more likely to hurt today's companies than help them-especially in highly-competitive, highly-globalized and rapidly-evolving industries.

In Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down (Harvard Business Press, June 8 2010), we argue that the best way for companies to meet their customers' needs is to stop making customers their top priority. Instead, companies should shift focus to empowering employees to solve customer problems-in part by making management accountable to employees who are the real creators of value.

For any company with more than a few hundred employees, management is too far removed to know where the true problems in the organization lie. More often, employees in what I call "the value zone"-those customer-facing areas of the company where true value is created-know better. But they either can't get management to listen, or they are afraid to try.

According to Employees First, Customers Second, it is only by turning the organization upside down and making management accountable to value-creating employees that companies can unleash their employees' creativity, energy and passion. HCLT's success implementing this working practice shows that this is a self-renewing approach to business that continues to pay dividends to employees, EFCS companies... continued on page two >

 

 

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