“Our people are our best asset” often look as empty slogans displayed on companies front office.

The Indian IT company HCL Technologies (55.000 people, 3.6 billions US$ turnover) has made it real. To the extend that the CEO of the group, Vineet Nayar, proudly state : “Employees first, customer second” (E1C2).

First implemented in 2006, the E1C2 model has strenghtened since then at HCL Technologies, with success. The company is one of the most succesful IT services organisation in the world.

Management reversed accountability

The key principle of the E1C2 model is defined as “reversed accountability” and is described in the following way :

“The value generated by an organisation if created by its employees, mostly those in contact with the customers. The managers are not creating the value. Managers should be their to listen and support the employees. Not the opposite”, says Vineet Nayar.

For HCL Technologies, it’s in the interest of the company to understand that the employees create the value, not the CEO or management. If the staff members feels good about their job, it they get enough autonomy, support and transparency from the top, the impact for the customer will be positive.

A 360° evaluation system is put in place. Anyone in the organisation can comment the work of a colleague, no matter what’s his/her position otr department. A transparent online questioning system is available for all the company members. More actions are explained in the herebellow slideshow.

Employee First Customer Second

“With Geny Y, we are digitalizing the corporation. This change who is in power, really. Where will the solutions be found ?”, observes Vineet Nayar, interviewed by the Harvard Business Review.

Bring the human back to business

But how to convince traditional managers to endorse this new management values ?

“Good question, says the CEO of HCL Technologies. There is a number of beliefs that have to be accepted by today’s anagers. First, believe that you don’t have all the answers. Believe that it’s ok for brighter people to exist in the world. Believe that the future answers you need to make the right decision for your company will come from manager and CEO but from the rest of the organisation or from the outside. Believe that the command and control way of runninging an organisation will not work if you believe democracy value  is the best way to run a country. And believe that by opening yourself to accounbility to evaluation, you will unleashed a new potential for your company”.

“Bring human back to business !“

We were asked to explain the rise of the coworking movement and what were the mainest differences with the more traditional innovation incubators in Europe. We also tried to demonstrate that some coworking spaces were shifting toward more structured innovation and entrepreneurship engines.

Anthony Poncier, a French consultant working for Useo, has recognised skills and experience in the implementation of enterprise 2.0 projects within big corporations.

According to Anthony, the implentation of social communication and collaboration tools within a company would better start with small pilot project. But after some (positive) experimentation, the company should speed up the process.

“At Auchan, a major French retail group, for instance, the fishmonger departement set a collaborative/information sharing platform with photos and videos, says Anthony Poncier. Thanks to this social tool, supermarkets had the capability to share best pratices in shelves management, fish storing, etc. Accordingly, Auchan supermarkets’ fish departments improved their presentation and arrangement. Eventually, fish sales have increased…”

Pilot projects will make the proof of concept. So, the management will be able to sell more easily the Enterprise 2.0 tools and principles to the rest of the organisation. Although the management should build a long term vision of where the company needs to go in terms of collaboration and 2.0 spirit, it’s better to move step by step and to seek for the support of early adopters and community leaders at all levels of the hierarchy.

“You need to find community leaders, tells Anthony. These leaders can be early social tools adopters [...] You can find roles for other members. In the meantime, you should spot the communities within the company, find their common goals and topics of interest. Highlight the benefits, for them, of social communication, information sharing and collaboration [...] You should organise events to facilitate integration, relationships, trust and exchange…”

Here bellow, the video interview of Anthony Poncier (in French)

Top management involvement

Though, stresses Tobias Brenner, another attendee at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, you need the involvement of the top of the company in order to have 2.0 trickle down :

“Surely it would be wonderful, if the whole implementation process of Enterprise 2.0 would be a kind of grassroot development. But to be honest, without any top-down strategy, there will be no implementation. Especially if you prefer a holistic idea of Enterprise 2.0, you need the top-management on board. It is necessary that there is support from the top-management and help of the leadership. The whole process must be supported and maintenance of the implementing process should be secured. And if this is accomplished, I’m sure that there will emerge a kind of grassroot development. People will recognise the will of management, making enterprise 2.0 work. This will motivate them to be part of this development and as more and more people discover the arising opportunities of enterprise 2.0, the more people will join this development.”

“Nokia said it would delay again its flagship smartphone N8 model, hitting its shares on the day new chief executive Stephen Elop started at the helm of the world’s top cellphone maker”, wrote Reuters, a few weeks ago.

The year 2010 sounds like a hell story for Nokia.

The world number one mobile handsets manufacturer is still financially very sound. Though, the global market position of the Finnish company is eroding (30% in Q3, coming from 34% year on year).

In the end of this summer, Nokia’s management top has been reshuflled.
The company, once the most admired and profitable in the industry, laid off 1.800 people. It encounters very annoying delays in design and commercialisation.

Nokia missed a number of critical steps, during the last couple of years, especially :

• the move to the new generation of smartphones
• the open applications service plateform
• tactile screen handsets

Surprising enough, though, all those ideas, today making the succes of Apple, HTC or even Samsung, had been investigated and discussed within Nokia’s teams, years before.

So, what happened ?

A lack of collaborative/open culture, a too tech focused approach

Juhani Risku, a former Nokia executive, responsible for Symbian’s design user experience, wrote a recent best-seller in Finland : Uusi Nokia (New Nokia).

“Altough Nokia remains one of the best companis on Earth for its logistics, manufacturing, sourcing and R&D, a risk-averse bureaucracy has grown up that stifles innovation – it makes progress slow or non-existent, writes Risku, in the book. The company is the obsessed with data gathering. Turn to almost any page on the website, and you’re invited to fill in an questionnaire”

“I had about 5,000 innovations in front of me – a huge portfolio. And many, about 500, were very good. But there’s a huge approval process. When the people and designers and product specialists get their own strategy it’s first of all, a bit old. There’s a four month delay, so the strategy reflects the business situation four months ago”

“Nokia’s product portfolio is made of phones, each with minuscule differences to other similar units, that wouldn’t look out of place in a phone catalog from 1997″, writes Fast Company magazine, commenting Risku’s book.

“This strategy, adds the magazine, has served Nokia well in delivering cheap low-power phones to the world’s poorer nations. But its lack of innovative, game-changing phones at the high-end of the market. Nokia is bogged down, suffocated, and squashed by its many layers of management.”

So, how can you fix Nokia ?

“Gut the management structure, injecting some vitality and speed to the way new projects proceed from concept to reality”, seems to think Juhani Risku.

Would enterprise 2.0 be one solution for Nokia ?

Back from the E20 Summit in Frankfurt, we can definitely think so.

1. Information and idea management

The issue at Nokia is not data collection. The company, according to Risku, funds and buy a lot of studies in many fields (anthropology, marketing, etc.). However, the Finnish company is struggling with its ability to digest information and use it in a proper context. The collected datas should support the idea generation and idea killing process within the organisation, not (only) be used for months-long validation procedures…

Social tools, information sharing culture and communities, some key aspects of the Enterprise 2.0, could help Nokia better to filter and to let the relevant information find the right persons in the organisation, at a proper timing.

2. Speed up decision process

Furthermore, Nokia is trapped in its own organigram.  The decision process is far to long in an industry where changes happen in months.

Enterprise 2.0 flattens the pyramid, bringing quicker decisions and more reactivity, though with a double check brought by the collective intelligence embed in the company.

3. More disruptive innovation

Nokia was, sometimes, stuck in an engeneering mindset. Technology had the first word, rather than having a more diverse set of inputs driving the group’s actions. Nevertheless, unless Nokia’s engineers achieve a real technological breaktrough, dribbling the competition with a two year advance, strategic moves remain expectable.

Again, the Enterprise 2.0 approach could balance the “hardware” focused culture thanks to the transversal discussions and collaboration initiated between people with different backgrounds across the whole the company. This increased diversity should ignite more original ideas and disruptive innovation.

As we heard at the E20 Summit, companies such as Renault, BMW, Hypoport, Telecom Italia, Danone, Auchan,… are slowly embracing this shift. Thanks to new social platform,

Why not Nokia ? But maybe is it already the case ?

After a few months of trials, the company made the official launch for the whole BASF group. Three months later, 11.000 employees registered their profile. More than 750 communities started.

Some communities can support the management of a specific project. Others gather experts in a given domain who discuss hot topics of the day in their field…

“The variety of communities that came up could never been expected”, told CheeChin Liew, enterprise community manager of BASF, during the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, in Frankfurt.

Connect.BASF helps employees to develop their personal brand within the company. The platform increases the sharing of informations, makes the process more fluid. Eventually, thanks to this set of social tools (made out of profiles, wikis, blogs, chats, …), the collaboration between people should increase, no matter who they are or what is their hierarchical position in the company.

The experience led at BASF seems very promissing for other multinationals of that scale, as a way to bypass inner hyper-bureaucracy

After all, who said elephants can’t dance ?