Recently, Thomas Friedman – the man who fired the imagination of world business with his book The World is Flat– wrote in his New York Times column: “We don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics, and regulations.”

The very next day, while announcing his nominee for head of the SEC, president-elect Barack Obama noted that there needed to be a shift in ethics in business and that “everybody from CEOs to shareholders to investors are going to have to be asking themselves not only, ‘Is this profitable?’ not only whether this will boost my bonus, but is ‘Is it right?’”

Much as we would have wanted to move beyond these sentiments and focus on navigating our ships through an already challenging environment, the disclosures made by Satyam have brought this issue from the US and Wall Street to much closer home. And yet, it only confirms a trend we have been witnessing among organizations to select partners with a track record of performance, innovation, and — above all — a robust corporate governance structure.

Credentials today run far beyond turnover, growth and profits. They extend deep into ethics, integrity, credibility, track record, domain experience, creativity, professionalism and corporate governance.

In other words, in addition to “what a company does,” it is equally important to focus on “how it does it.”

Looking ahead, sustainable business can only be built on a culture of trusted partnerships with each and every stakeholder group – including employees, customers, shareholders, vendors, regulators. Trust through transparency will finally gain its due recognition as the only way forward.

As customers move out of the economic turbulence of the recent past, there will be a clear shift towards companies that can create the highest business value while maintaining the highest ethical and governance standards. For the financial health of business can only be anchored in trust.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Thomas Friedman – the man who fired the imagination of world business with his book The World is Flat - wrote in his New York Times column: “We don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics, and regulations.”

The very next day, while announcing his nominee for head of the SEC, president-elect Barack Obama noted that there needed to be a shift in ethics in business and that “everybody from CEOs to shareholders to investors are going to have to be asking themselves not only is this profitable, not only whether this will boost my bonus, but is it right?

Much as we would have wanted to move beyond these sentiments and focus on navigating our ships through an already challenging environment, the disclosures made by Satyam have brought this issue from the US and Wall Street to much closer home. And yet, it only confirms a trend we have been witnessing among organizations to select partners with a track record of performance, innovation, and above all – a robust corporate governance structure. Credentials today run far beyond turnover, growth and profits. They extend deep into ethics, integrity, credibility, track record, domain experience, creativity, professionalism and corporate governance.

In other words, in addition to ‘what a company does,’ it is equally important to focus on ‘how it does it.” Looking ahead, sustainable business can only be built on a culture of trusted partnerships with each and every stakeholder group – including employees, customers, shareholders, vendors, regulators. Trust through Transparency – a core value at HCL for long – will finally gain its due recognition as the only way forward. As customers move out of the economic turbulence of the recent past, there will be a clear shift towards service providers that can create the highest business value while maintaining the highest ethical and governance standards. For the financial health of business can only be anchored in trust.

The professors of doom are pitching their tents once again on the pegs of a “leadership crisis.” This is nothing new. In fact, each time the world heads into an economic downturn we see soul-searching begin on the quality of leadership.

These drums have begun to sound in the past weeks, louderin the US and a little softer in India, yet clearly audible. So, what’s new about the recession this time? Sure, the magnitude of the downturn is far greater now than it has been seen in recent times. But leadership is not something you seek to drum up or find afresh at the time of a crisis. You nurture it on a continuing basis. We need to switch the lens. Change from a short-sighted vision to 20:20 far-sightedness. And we need to break the mold of our pre-existing mindsets about where to look for leaders.

But we have always focused on our people, right? Geoff Colvin, senior editor at Fortune, after he attended one of the innumerable conferences on talent, made a telling comment:“CEOs always say that,” he wrote, “But they almost never mean it. Most companies maintain their office copiers better than they build the capabilities of their people, especially the ones who are supposed to be future leaders, and for decades they’ve gotten away with it.”

People have been and are our greatest asset. We just need to look at these assets differently.

In The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C K Prahalad revolutionized the way we thought of the bottom of the pyramid as he championed the concept of “co-creation.” The key was breaking the mold of the existing thinking about the base of the pyramid.

We need to do something very similar on leadership. We need to look at the bottom of the pyramid. Not the man who occupies the cabin next to the C-suite, but the young man or woman representing your firm at the customer site is the leader waiting to be discovered.

My question to those ringing the alarm bells is simple: Are you looking at the right places to find the future leaders, the torch bearers who will lead the way ahead? Where is the leadership fortune?

It is staring at us from the front lines. To see it, we have to get out of the ‘grooming caterpillars to become butterfly’ mindset. The next generation does not respond to autocratic signals such as these. They belong to an era of collaboration and co-creation of value.

They look and work differently but are effective in today’s world. They collaborate and work across hierarchy, are more in tune with data and distant signals. Generation Y comprises ‘digital natives.’ Few of us can deny that they are far more comfortable with — even hungry for — technology and adept at using it to their advantage than most of their seniors (in both age and hierarchy).

These young Millenials have been multitasking since they were kids. It comes naturally to them — to listen to music, do their homework, text a friend and catch up with their social networks on the web simultaneously. They like being connected 24-7 and cruise through multiple mediums and applications without batting an eyelid.

They’ve grown up in the fast lanes of change and deal with disruptive influences like business as usual. They are open-minded and take their time to form an opinion or pass judgment. I have no doubts that they possess much more resilience and maturity than their managers or helicopter parents credit them with.

So if you want to respond to the current crisis, you need fresh thinking and fearlessness that dares to dream of tomorrow even when there is a fire raging today.

Those leaders are at the bottom and you need to go looking for them. It’s not true that an organization does not have leaders — it is just that most management is afraid to look at them and recognize them. They may think it is a big risk to take. I do believe, however, not taking that risk is a bigger risk.

Over the last few posts, I have redirected the search for new leaders to the front lines of the organization and established a need for change bottom up. However to be able to stimulate this spark and sustain its momentum, it needs a careful cultivation of the right environment – a culture of trust.

Despite a renewed focus, corporate culture still continues to be one of the most misunderstood words of our time. It is not merely a set of passive statements spoken passionately. The culture of a company is simply the ‘way individuals, managers and teams act’ on a daily basis aggregated on a macro level. And “trust” should be the cornerstone of these actions.

To build leadership bottom up, employees need to know that they hold immense value in the organization. The Employee First, Customer Second philosophy that was adopted at HCL is built on this very foundation. The employees must know that trust is non-negotiable, and one of the most uncomplicated ways of seeding trust is by ‘stretching the envelope of transparency’.

This fabric of trust can be woven with simple but very effective tools like direct and open employee-CEO/manager dialogues, live or on an interactive platform like a blog, employee polls with live results available to all, or knowledge access sans gate keepers.

Generation Y has grown up in an age of information overload. They have learned to sift through multiple layers very quickly to cut through the fluff and get to the heart of the issue. Transparency is the only way to deal with this young talent pool. They live in a world of open communication and that is the only manner they trust.

Generation Y is also a collaborative group. Be it on the internet or the real world, they work well in teams unlike their predecessors who grew up in a far more individualistic manner. They share knowledge, opinion, suggestions far more easily and are more open to receiving the same. Communication is the fulcrum around which they build their personal and professional lives. And in the dynamic business environment that we operate in today, this requires trust. It is easier to work with a team in still waters as you have the luxury of time to overcome misgivings or misunderstandings. However while rafting in choppy waters with constantly changing landscape, the only way teams can succeed is by trusting each other’s abilities, action and intent.

There is no choice other than building leadership for tomorrow ground up on the pillars of honest evaluation catalysing change within an environment of trust and transparency. There is no other way but taking a step at a time as there is no elevator going up.