Vineet Nayar introduces his book, Employees First, Customers Second

Thank you so much for being with us today.

Sometimes ideas find authors and ideas through authors find books.

The idea of Employees First, Customers Second found me as an author and another 60000 of my colleagues spread across 26 countries as authors and this idea got translated into a book which is with you today. There are times when ideas are so powerful that they find a way of being expressed. The idea of Employees First, Customers Second is simple. It can actually be summarized in four questions.

Question no.1 is:What is the true business that an organization is in?

And the answer is: To create differentiated value for your customers, so that you can outgrow your competitors. It’s a competitive differentiation strategy.

The second question is If that’s what the true deliverable of the company is, then where does this value really get created?

And the answer to that question is: In the interface of the employees and the customer.

Let’s call that the “Value Zone”

And then the third question is: Then, who creates this value?

And the answer is: The employees who are in the interface of the customers and the organization. They are the people who create the value.

And hence the fourth obvious question is: Hence, what should the business of management be?

And the answer to that is quite obvious: To be in the business of encouraging, enthusing and enabling the employees to create the differentiated value, which will make the organization grow.

Thus, the idea of Employees First, Customers Second looks quite simple.

There is one other reason why this idea is very relevant for the moments of today and what we are talking about. Generation Y constitutes fifty percent of the global population today; fifty percent of the world population is less than twenty five years old.

This generation’s view on life is different than that of our generation. Actually, that view changes every ten years. This generation believes in collaboration. This generation believes in creation of value in a different way than we do. This generation believes in collaborating on multiple dimensions rather than on a uni-dimensional interest.

When this generation enters our organizations, political systems and our teams, which are hierarchal and suffocating, there is no way this generation would be able to produce solutions to the problems that we as a world face, we as a team face or we as an organization face. Therefore if there is something which we have to do, we have to destroy our organization structures, our thinking of the past and recreate organizations and make them relevant for future young generation leaders who are going try and solve some of the problems we face.

There is a third dimension to this idea, which is: Today, most of us - whether we are political leaders or team leaders or organization management - are standing on a ledge of a building which is on fire. Why is the building on fire? Because the trust between us and our employees and team members is at its lowest. That is largely because of the way we behaved during recession or the way we behaved so far. That has got to do with our leadership style. Lack of trust gets created out of lack of transparency.

If our future growth out of recession and creation of jobs lies in the hands of the employees who will create innovation and growth, then there has to be something done about this problem right now - and that is the reason that the time for this idea has come now.

One last thought on this part of the problem we are facing today. Over generations we have seen organization structures evolve. We started with an army, which was the first organization structure we copied to try and build control over organizations. The commanders of those armies were in the business of enthusing, enabling and ensuring that their armies fight with lot of passion as compared with any other army. Therefore you saw historically that a lot of small companies or armies overpowered large armies because of the passion they demonstrated. One thing was very clear in the commander’s mind; That he had one sword and his soldiers had fifty thousand swords. Therefore he was not in business of fighting, he was in the business of enthusing, encouraging, enabling and motivating his troops to fight.

When we adopted that organization structure and brought that up into the organizations, unfortunately the commander kept the entrapment and the spotlight of leadership on him, but forgot that the responsibility of leadership was enthusing, encouraging and enabling his troops to fight with a lot more passion than anybody else. Therefore they created this alternate environment called HR, it became the responsibility of HR to motivate the troops and it became my responsibility to enjoy the gains of being a leader.

Therefore the definition of a leader started changing, and slowly the disease set in into our teams, into our political systems, and into our organizations.

This idea and this book is an experimental journey to try and challenge what I believe is impacting all of us in all walks of life. How come we believe in the democratization of our countries and making leaders accountable, but we run our organizations in very autocratic styles.

In 2005 thirty thousand employees - now sixty thousand - started a journey of asking these questions. We learnt our lessons from great leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, who taught us that if you want to ask a question and transform an organization you can do it in three simple steps.

Step one is to ask (uncomfortable questions). Look into the mirror and feel extremely uncomfortable with where you are, which I hope I’m doing with you today. That today is not acceptable, today is not why I was born to be and today is not where I will end my day. Unhappiness for today. The thought that British Raj was not an acceptable position for India was what Mahatma Gandhi created in our minds.

The second step is that our leaders create a vision for tomorrow which is very compelling and very exciting: We can be free. So there is a huge urge amongst ourselves to try and break away from the where we are today and be free.

The third step is they start small catalyst actions like the Dandi March or the RTI act to move away from here to there. Three simple steps to create a revolution.

This book is a journey which thirty thousand employees started in 2005, which spread over five years. and the results were spectacular. A 3.6 times growth in five years. A 3.4 times growth in EBITDA. - Highest customer satisfaction in our history, lowest attrition, fastest growth.We have been taught as a Harvard Business Case. Fortune calls us the most modern management. And our customers love us.

So the results of Employees First, Customers Second in a commercial sense are there for everybody to see. The passion in the eyes of employees, us being the number one in employee satisfaction, is there for everybody to see.

But I think the more important lesson is this experiment has just begun. If through this book, we can influence more hearts and minds to try and walk a different experimental journey, different than ours - if our idea of Employees First, Customers Second can generate a new idea in your mind and the readers’ mind, I think we will be a better place to live.

I think we all deserve a better place to live.