“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.

He is a specialist of creativity. According to him, Japanese companies have always been good to procuced very nice technological state of the art products. Nevertheless, they integrated too seldom the creativity, design and cultural inputs which give, today more than ever, the value to new items.

Toyota, once the champion of innovation in the world, is now facing a huge crisis due, for a part, for its inability to start from the customer’s taste and cultural sensitivity instead of giving the key of innovation mainly to engineers, who draw very efficient cars but too light in terms of emotional attraction.
Nowadays, however, Japanese cultural productions are becoming very popular all around Asia.

Will the economy of Japan rely more, soon, on cultural soft products than industrials outputs ?