Skip to main content

HCL Tech and Ford Motor transformation---How management system redesign brought the change


The Harvard Business School case likewise dates the transformation to April 2005, when Nayar became President, describing him as recognizing that HCL needed drastic change and then leading the first phase of the transformation.

The architecture that subsequently emerged was remarkably coherent:

1. Mirror Mirror — confront reality
Establish Point A honestly and create a compelling Point B.

2. Trust through Transparency — change information architecture
Open financial and organizational information much more widely.

3. Invert the Pyramid — change accountability architecture
Make enabling functions and management accountable to employees in the customer-facing “value zone.”

4. Recast the Office of the CEO — change power architecture
Move responsibility for transformation away from the CEO and toward employees themselves. 

That is already a fairly sophisticated OD architecture, even if Nayar didn't necessarily sit down and call it an “OD model.”

And then came concrete mechanisms: employee service tickets for support functions, open 360-degree feedback, greater transparency, reverse accountability and distributed decision-making. Nayar himself publicly shared his 360 feedback; eventually thousands of managers participated in the process.

This changes how I would describe the role of OD

The traditional formulation might be:

CEO → Strategy
CHRO/OD → Organization & culture
Business → Execution

The cases we've been discussing suggest that major transformation often doesn't work so neatly.

Nayar was simultaneously making decisions about:

Strategy + structure + power + information + accountability + leadership + culture + customer value creation.

Those aren't separate interventions. They're an interconnected organizational system.

That's OD at enterprise scale.

The CEO therefore cannot sensibly outsource it to the OD department.

But neither should the CEO personally design every mechanism.

I'd frame the respective responsibilities this way:

Transformation layerPrimary ownership
Why must we transform?CEO + Board
What must become fundamentally different?CEO + Executive Team
Business/strategic choicesCEO + Business leadership
Organization architectureCEO + CHRO/OD + Executive Team
Operating model & decision rightsCEO + Business/Functional leaders
Leadership behavioursCEO models; leadership system reinforces
Talent/reward/performance systemsCHRO + business
Intervention design/methodologyOD/HR + specialists
ImplementationLine organization
InstitutionalizationManagement system

The crucial distinction is therefore:

CEO owns the organizational thesis; OD helps turn that thesis into organizational architecture.

That's different from saying “OD owns culture change.” 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is The Hay Group Total Reward Framework

The Hay Group Total Reward Framework A new way of understanding reward Reward strategies must be anchored in business reality to be effective. Which means linking it to your business strategy – and the needs of your employees as well as your organisation. Our Total Reward Framework helps you optimise reward, no matter how challenging the conditions. The issue Remuneration tends to be one of the worst-managed parts of an organisation’s cost structure. But with 10-70 per cent of total costs wrapped up in it, reward cannot be ignored, particularly in a downturn. To be effective, reward programmes must reflect the needs of the business, now and in the future. Only if they are tied closely to company strategy, business performance and the needs of employees can reward programmes deliver the ROI that is needed in tough times[MK1] . The Hay Group Total Reward Framework takes strategy as a starting point – and it focuses on total reward: every financial measure together with no...
2 comments
Read more

Aon Hewitt Total Rewards Framework

Aon Hewitt Total Rewards Framework The Aon Hewitt model and approach believes in considering Total Rewards as a business tool and very much linked to overall business objectives! Reward as understood is a very complex mechanism and some efforts of correcting the base pay and titling in a hurry by many MNCs in India have done a bigger crime by trying to correct it by market adjustments without looking at the talent map, complexity and expectations out of role and mapping it against the benchmark. Titles in India are a big misnomer and hardly any survey on compensation ever probes and captures and calibrates the tangible outcome based bench marking! If we dive deep, we will find that the key factors of Education, Experience and Quality of Education, Quality and relevance of experience and education are not calculated granular! A diploma holder technical manager gets the salary benchmarked for the top T-school manager with top quality experience in a challenging and break-through...
Post a Comment
Read more

CORPORATE CULTURE AND FIVE STAGES OF ASSIMILATION

If the study of culture has a predominant guru, it would be Edgar H Schein , Professor Emeritus at MIT. Schein, who has studied the elements of culture for over half a century has a simple there-layer model for understanding corporate culture (Schein, 2009). The three levels are: ü   1.  Artifacts. These are made up of visible structures, processes and behavior. Easy to observe, artifacts are the outermost layer. ü   2.  Espoused values. These are the strategies and philosophies at play. They include what people focus on and ‘how things get done around here’. ü   3.  Underlying assumptions. These are the unconscious beliefs and perceptions rooted in the history of the business. This innermost layer is built through collective experiences including past successes and failures. Corporate culture is as powerful as it is multifaceted. The best way to understand it is to experience it first-hand. Be immersed in both the explicit behavior and implici...
Post a Comment
Read more