Vineet Nayar's Scrapbook

Make no mistake: The fear of making mistakes is deeply ingrained in our psyche.

All through school, a mistake indicates the prospect of lower grades. Good students don’t make mistakes. At home, mistakes lead to admonishments. Good children follow the rules. At work, mistakes have serious repercussions. Good workers get it right the first time.

But, in those very schools and organizations where we are marked down for making mistakes, we also learn that people often stumble upon great inventions. There’s growing evidence to suggest that innovation flourishes when people are given the space to make mistakes. Even Mahatma Gandhi attached value to experimentation; he believed that “freedom isn’t worth having if it doesn’t include the freedom to make mistakes.”

Why then don’t we allow, much less encourage, making mistakes? Most of us, particularly in business, fight shy of them. We believe that people will see a faux pas as incompetence. We also feel that success is driven by our image as experts rather than as learners. And the measures of our performance are numbers such as sales, profits, total returns to shareholders, and so on.

Are these really the best measures of success? Consider an alternative. What if we were to ask employees what mistakes they committed because they did something differently? What did they learn?

Does that sound a little crazy? It may, but we have to bring the human element back in business; we can’t function as extensions of computer programs. Some mission-critical and life-threatening tasks may have zero tolerance for failure, but not the rest of our work and lives. I’m not suggesting breaking every rule; I feel we should institutionalize the art of making mistakes; introduce a method for the madness; and innovate the innovation process.

Imagine encouraging an employee to keep trying to solve a problem until he or she makes, say, five mistakes. Imagine asking team members whether they have made their five mistakes yet! Trust me, if you aren’t making mistakes, you’re not learning — or, at least, you’re not learning enough.

Do you remember the first time you rode a bicycle? Can you relive the exhilaration of riding free, the sense of triumph as you broke free of the crutches of support? Now step back. How many times did you fall off the bike before that first ride?

I remember my first class in engineering school during which our professor asked us to dismantle an engine. We did that. Then he asked us to put it together and walked away. We messed that up big time and had to work at it for days. I learned more about engineering in that short time than I did in the next four years. Why don’t you ask your employees to dismantle something and then, give them the time but not the help to put it together?

Do you have the nerve to encourage the mistakes that people will inevitably make on the path of discovery?

Originally posted on Vineet Nayar’s Blog site on Harvard Business Review.com
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/nayar/2010/07/the-miracle-of-making-mistakes.html

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Comments

Ravi at 09:22 on 27 July 2010

Great Blog .............................. it is true scenario no one is prefect. You always learn from your mistake.

Ram at 09:39 on 27 July 2010

Dear Vineet, In total agreement with your blog. When I interact with freshers and I ask them what inhibits their performance ...

You can smell the fresh paint as companies the world over complete their post-recession overhauls. Few business organizations, functions, and processes have escaped this rethink, which is meant to fortify organizations before the next downturn comes.

At the risk of stirring a hornet’s nest, I’d like to ask one question: How many of us CEOs included, as part of the rethink, changes to the CEO’s role and responsibilities?

In the manufacturing era, the control zone — which comprises the CEO and senior executives who set corporate strategy, policies, and quality control processes — added the most value to the business. However, value-creation has now shifted, from the control zone to the bottom of the organizational pyramid. At a time of virtually limitless competition between finely differentiated products, what you sell has become less important than how you do so.

The value zone has naturally shifted to the frontier where front-line employees and the customer interact. That has made existing organizational structures outmoded.

What then is the role of the new CEO? Is it to personally add the most value to the business? Or is it to enable those at the heart of this new value zone? If, as I believe, the latter is the case, we need to rethink our leadership styles and adopt one that is aligned better with current realities.

The CEO’s new role, I’m convinced, is to help employees see themselves as empowered leaders — as those who influence and drive change. The new CEO can’t play chieftain; he must be a team player obsessed with enabling value, someone who is willing to collaborate. Someone able to discover new grass roots leaders and nurture them.

Gone are the days when the CEO’s role was to lead from the front or direct the march forward. Granted, you can’t escape the hype that surrounds a leader. But the onus is on us to find the balance between hype and responsibility; between leading with the power of position and that of ideas; between being the external voice of the company and being the value zone’s voice within the organization.

The time has come for chief executive officers to transform themselves into chief enabling officers who enable, encourage, and enthuse employees that are toiling in the value zone.

Would you agree?

Originally posted on Vineet Nayar’s Blog site on Harvard Business Review.com
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/nayar/2010/07/who-is-the-new-ceo.html

(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Comments

Amy Radin at 04:45 on 13 July 2010

I could not agree more with your definition of the "new" CEO. I've seen two types of CEOs -- ...

Joseph Mullin at 08:40 on 13 July 2010

Vineet, Are you confusing the managers we have had for years with leaders who we have been lacking. You seem to ...

Imagine you’re a BP employee. Most people, especially in the US, now hate the company for which you work. Talkshow hosts constantly make fun of your CEO, Tony Hayward. Some consumers even boycott your employer’s gas stations. In fact, when you meet people, you no longer want to admit you work for BP.

Around 80,000 people in 100 countries work for BP. Most don’t cause oil wells to fail and gush into oceans; wildlife to die; or people to suffer physically, emotionally, and economically. Quite the opposite. The Obama administration has deliberately not ordered a government takeover of the containment and cleanup after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, because it realizes that by itself, it may not be able to pull that off.

BP’s employees are the best bet to finding a solution. They have already scrambled to find ways of tackling the numerous problems associated with the disaster. The solution to the central problem of ending the gush of oil from the well will mostly likely originate from frontline employees — not those in the corner office or people in government.

The effects of the disaster are so complex and widespread that people throughout the BP organization will have to work to mitigate the consequences. Not only those in the boats and on the beaches but also, BP’s engineers, marketers, salespeople, gas pumpers — almost everybody who collects a pay check from the company — will be called upon to do so.

The people who work for BP are fighting a battle and we need them — and should encourage them — to do their best and win. Think of the Iraq war. Even those who opposed it supported the military women and men who fought there.

Let committees grill the CEO and news anchors shake their heads at every mention of BP, but don’t sneer at the company’s employees. They’ve been attending to their duties and responsibilities through a string of problems and managerial shakeups in recent years. They prayed for colleagues and friends who died in March 2005 when a BP refinery exploded in Texas. They rooted for their colleagues who fixed the pipeline that ruptured in Alaska in 2006. They cringed when BP and its subsidiaries paid $370 million in 2007 to settle several criminal charges against the company.

BP’s employees deserve our support because they are the ones who can, and will, resolve this crisis.

Originally posted on Vineet Nayar’s Blog site on Harvard Business Review.com
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/nayar/2010/06/im-thinking-about-bps-employee.html

(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Comments

KVR Rao at 10:29 on 6 July 2010

This is called positive way of handling the crisis. I also share the same feelings about BP employees. Disasters are ...

Dan at 00:27 on 7 July 2010

What is making people mad is that the only reason to drill for oil today is to make corporate profit. ...

Wouldn’t you consider it an invasion of your privacy if marketers could rummage through your closet to check your brand preferences? What if potential employers could disguise themselves and enter your social life in order to evaluate you for a job?

These things can’t happen, of course. We live secure in the knowledge that they are against the law.

Now consider Gen Y, whose members live in an open environment, and embrace social networking that breaks through the divide between their online and offline worlds. Their Facebook pages are a natural extension of their social lives, and they feel secure in the knowledge that they hold the keys to their personal spaces. As long as they play by the rules, they can choose whom to invite and whom to exclude.

Then, the rules are altered. Social network operators begin unlocking the doors to people’s personal worlds. The recentdebate about Facebook is only the tip of the iceberg; frequent changes in privacy settings in social media are resulting in an entire generation becoming increasingly wary and guarded about their private lives.

Conventional wisdom holds that Millennials are, in general, willing to share intimate details of their private lives with an online audience. However, recent research by the Pew Internet Project found that although 75% of Millennials in the US have a profile on a social network, most place boundaries on it. In fact, the study found that members of Gen Y were more likely to monitor privacy settings than are older people, and more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they can’t be identified. In another survey by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, 88% of a sample of Gen Y-ers voiced support for a law that would require websites to delete captured information. Sixty-two percent of them wanted the right to know everything a website knows about them.

Operators of social networks argue that relatively loose privacy restrictions improve the user experience and allow customization of the platform for each user. For instance, they can track likes and dislikes to provide each person with more relevant information. But isn’t this a kind of cyber-stalking?

It’s common knowledge that HR professionals take advantage of lax privacy settings to screen candidates based on their Facebook content. A Melbourne-based recruitment consultant believes that the practice of winnowing candidates based on personal information online is little different from excluding someone because of gender, sexual preference, marital status, or age. In a recent comment on an article in The New York Times, “Neville J.” called on legislators to outlaw the practice. Judging by the large number of endorsements he received, many others share his sense of alarm.

Look at the broader issue. I believe that collaboration through social networks is an important way of building trust. Trust is built on transparency. If you are in the business of enabling collaboration through social networks, you have to demonstrate that you can be trusted. So, I ask, can you afford to change the rules midway? Or do frequent changes corrode the very foundations of trust?

Originally posted on Vineet Nayar’s Blog site on Harvard Business Review.com
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/nayar/2010/06/do-you-trust-your-social-netwo.html

(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Comments

Hiranya at 23:59 on 1 July 2010

This is a very relevant post especially with all the controversy on privacy settings on Facebook. My take on changing rules ...

Syamant at 00:30 on 2 July 2010

@Hiranya Agree with your points. These changes will alter user behavior. While a lot of people may point out that ...

This blog is about my journey of self discovery of a few blind spots I had, and people who helped me in this. The beautiful stories of Vani, Roopa and Rahul.

The questions I asked myself about these three employees was: Is 100 per cent of the employee working for us or is it only 20 per cent as is true in most companies.

When I launched into this self discovery, I found brilliant stories behind these three so-called ordinary employees. I discovered that they had so much to offer to the company and we were actually leveraging very little.

They had entrepreneurship to offer, they had a spirit of enterprise to offer, they had ideas on CSR. Their background was so interesting. But we were consuming or engaging with them only on one dimension whereas they could be engaged with the company on at least five dimensions.

And that journey of discovery of these three stories which I will share with you over the next three weeks led me to one conclusion: Why are all our companies so obsessed with measuring employee satisfaction when they should be measuring how many dimensions of people like Vani, Roopa and Rahul are really engaged with the company.

Employee satisfaction, employee enthusiasm and employee passion can only be created if multiple dimensions of these people are engaged. That’s because people, human beings, have multiple interests and not uni-dimensional interests.

That journey of self discovery led me to believe that we should actually create organization structures which are spheres in concentric circles so that a person can engage within an organization on multiple dimensions. And with that engagement across multiple dimensions you can engage the employee more, but most importantly, the company would get more from the employee than it gets today.

So I will share with you the brilliant stories of three employees. When you look at these three stories, the question you need to ask yourself is: Are there employees in your company who have stories like this, which you do not know because you are not engaging the full employee? Are you actually engaging only 20% per cent because you look at him or her in one dimension as I used to do only a few weeks back?

(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Comments

Radhakrishnan KG at 06:49 on 10 June 2010

Can't agree more, Vineet! Whenever i hire an employee, i make sure to ask their interests, and their aspirations as a ...

Ashok at 20:15 on 10 June 2010

It will be better if you open yourself on formal communication channel. Read all mails from hcl employees sent to ...