ART OF STAYING NIMBLE
Goliaths sometimes need to act like Davids. Here's
how tech giants are rekindling their entrepreneurial zeal
Every company begins as a startup full of
enthusiasm, bursting with ideas and entrepreneurial zeal. With growth comes the
need to organ ise and professionally manage. Then come more managers,
ironically, to manage managers. Layer upon layer is added till the organisation
becomes a large Kafkaesque bureaucracy. In the end, the once nimble startup
becomes a large, rigid corporate engine that maximises profits and minimises
risk.
Can that process be reversed? Can large billion
dollar companies turn back the clock and mimic what upstarts are doing? Can
they create a culture of innovation that startups so specialise in fostering?
Apparently, yes. That's exactly what a handful of tech companies are attempting
in India. While some are building lean “two pizza teams“ to focus on
innovation, others are actively seeking entrepreneurial ideas from their
employees and stakeholders.
Intuit
Two Pizzas Only
It may be a $4.5 billion financial and tax
preparation software company, but Intuit pretty much relies on decisions by
experiment rather than by Powerpoint, or bureaucracy. The India ops of the
California-headquartered company has adopted what Intuit India VP & MD
Nikhil Arora calls `lean experimentation'. Employees are urged to come up with
a hypothesis through testing, and given six weeks to come up with results.
“We're trying to encourage experiments faster,“ says Arora. Of course, nine out
of ten experiments fail but like the other big tech firms, Arora “celebrates
failure“ as the learning curve gets lengthened.
In fact, the size of each team too strictly
mimics the startup pattern in what the company dubs the `2 pizza team'--it
cannot be larger than 6-8 people, like startups in their incubation phase. With
1,000-odd employees in India, Intuit also throws in a `brainstorm' initiative
in a casual environment, like a cafeteria, for employees to come up with ideas.
These are then posted in-house for other employees to further debate or build.
Finally, a leader challenges or sponsors the idea. The company has so far used
300 ideas via the Brainstorm sessions.
Moreover, the company regularly works and
partners with startups. Two years ago, it even hosted an event, Intuit Super
Angels, in which it engaged with a network of startups with employees mentoring
and reverse mentoring the startup community. “We constantly learn from each
other,“ says Arora. It surely fell into place last year when Intuit acquired
the Jaipur-based KDK, a tax filing software startup, as Arora admittedly spent
a lot of time with its founder.
NetApp
Flat Out
Anil Valluri, President of NetApp India proudly
declares that his company is a $6.3 billion startup with the founders still
intact. Thanks largely to the flat structure within the organisation, NetApp
has managed to remain nimble. The company has a three-layer hierarchy -global, regional
and local -enabling the entire staff to have their ear to the ground.
Valluri doesn't have a cabin and neither does
Tom Georgens, the global CEO. It allows for an open environment with people
expressing ideas freely. For instance, in the `Brown Bag' sessions, people hold
impromptu conversations to carve out ideas. Once these take root, teams of
15-20 people work on each project with the technical directors and senior
managers going through the entire process of ideation to prototype and
marketability. If ideas fail, team members owe up to the responsibility. “We
must be able to admit on messing up, otherwise it leads to fear of failure.“ He
adds that the intent is very important, and messing up with the wrong intent
can have dire consequence
Cisco
Fail Fast
With over $47 billion in revenues and 11,000
employees in India, the word nimble doesn't spring to mind when you think of
Cisco. The company's leadership begs to differ. Cisco is focusing on building
smaller, high-impact teams. Even on complex products, the company is trying to
build nimble teams that are virtually self-sufficient: comprising developers,
hardware engineers, software engineers, product managers, go-to market members
and a customer representative. Amit Phadnis, President Engineering of Cisco
India, believes it is ideal for such teams to scale up very fast, typically
mirroring the first phase of a startup's growth trajectory.
A company the size of Cisco is bound to have
large software and hardware teams. But recently, they've been merged into a
single entity. The logic is to bring software engineers, the test guys and
developers on a single platform while cracking a product. “It's all about how
quickly such teams can be brought together,“ says Phadnis.
The idea is to create structures that allow
people to fail fast. The company generates some 75-100 workable ideas every 4-6
months across the Cisco network worldwide. About 50-60% of them fail very
early. The ones that remain are evaluated for the product phase in 3-6 months.
But perhaps what takes the cake is the concept
of spin-ins, which basically empowers a team to such an extent that a separate
company can take root outside of Cisco even though the latter pumps in all the
resources. “Whenever there is a solid business case around a product, you need
an environment where you want to develop the product line at a rapid pace
unshackling it from the rest of the processes that exist in very large
companies,“ says Phadnis.
Autodesk
Inviting Partners
For the $2.5 billion Autodesk, the best way to
seek out innovation and remain agile is through partnerships. “We look for
innovation by incorporating our external environ ment,“ says Pradeep Nair, MD
of Autodesk India. Autodesk is a global leader in 3D printing, a globally
disruptive phenomenon helping consumers to do manufactur ing. The company has
set up a `Spark' innovation fund last year with a $100 million kitty for
startups to come up with breakthroughs in 3D printing, thereby acting as a
venture capitalist. It's the same in partnering with universities and labs
globally.
Autodesk has had a long partnership with the
National Institute of Design to establish three Centers of Excellence for
Innovative Design at its campuses in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Bangalore in
India. These design labs are equipped with cutting-edge 3D design software from
Autodesk. “We also work with institutions like Srishti Institute of Art, Design
and Technology on knowledge sharing and facilitating connections with top institutions
in US, like MIT,“ says Nair.
The idea of partnering with industry and
academia has also been stretched to tech networks at large. Now the company has
something called an Autodesk Lab, aligned to the office of the Chief Technology
Officer. When the product development team within Autodesk comes up with an
idea, the Autodesk Lab makes it available to the community at large. “The
products evolve around a lot of user feedback and also weeds out those which
may not have much traction,“ says Nair.
Tata
Communications Curious Case
In 2013, Tata Communications launched its `Shape
the Future' initiative, wherein employees were encouraged to take risks. The
program invited people to submit ideas that have the potential to become a
$200-million business within ten years and touch 200 million people; select the
best ones, and then coach the teams set up to imple ment them.
Again, in early 2014, Tata Communications
launched an initiative for fostering innovation and futuristic thinking called
`Moonwalk'. Five teams were assigned five different subjects (unrelated to the
company) and asked to explore each of them. “It encourages intellectual
curiosity,“ says Julie Woods-Moss, CMO & CEO of NextGen Business, Tata
Communications.
Apart from fostering a culture of innovation
akin to startups, Woods-Moss is open to innovations happening outside the
company. A hackathon is held every year with a prize purse of $50,000 thrown
open to external candidates. “The winning team can come and work for us for 90
days but we will have the right to take it (in novation) to the market,“ she
says. “Startups learn from our product managers and we learn from them.“
Interestingly, the flat structure of the company
enables fast decision-making, which has resulted in something called `virtual
board' that meets every Friday. The job of this body is to approve capital for
funding of ideas. “Elsewhere, capital boards meet in three months and it gets
stressful as projects get delayed,“ says Woods-Moss. CD
By Moinak Mitra
|
CDET1MAY15
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