Ericsson India

Speaker A Good morning and welcome to this session and I'm so happy to be here and just like the speaker's been saying this morning, jose Luis and Ken and Tat, thank you so much for yesterday. That was an absolutely fantastic session. I'm going to tell my story about implementing Requisite organization in India. And I'll actually start from the earlier years of this century and some anecdotes which gave me the background of issues which you can have if you live in a world of nonrequisite organization, moving to what we did to implement it, the effects, the results, and then some of the learnings. So this is my story. I did this drawing. It's a self portrait. This is Christopher Anderson in the early parts of this century or millennia. And you can see what I have in my hand, which I usually have all the time, is my mobile phone, because that's pretty much what I've been working with the last ten years. What are we going to do with our mobile phones beyond talking? So multimedia is really about that. Movies, email, all sorts of Twittering and stuff that you do with your mobile, but that's not important why Christopher is a little bit agitated here because it's actually a situation that I was in several situations. For instance, being in a situation where one day I was working with a colleague who was fantastic. Great experience, very strategic, very knowledgeable. I learned so much from this person. A couple of months later, that person got moved to Role, promoted, became evil. Evil in the sense that harassing people, humiliating people publicly in meetings. This is not an evil person. It was the wrong person in the wrong place. How come? How come that I was in a role where I had a budget of $100 million for development of solutions, but actually most of the critical decisions and dialogue and feedback I didn't have with my manager, nor with my manager's manager, but with my manager's manager's manager. That's complicated. And how come that we have organizations where like some where I was where you have this feeling that on Sunday night you don't want to go to work on Monday, that you feel like, I don't want to go to these meetings where people are fighting or that somebody's actually crying because of the unclarity, because it's not defined who? There are three people has the same job description for some weird reason and maybe not even qualified, two of them to be doing that level of work. So those kind of pain points made me think a lot. What does it require to fix this? Don't get me wrong. I've been very fortunate to have a lot of lovely years and doing very, very interesting work with great managers as well. But it's learning from these pain points that make us grow. So what I did is I looked quite a lot for knowledge and experience and I was fortunate to run into a person called Robin Rotili, who was the CEO of Mobile Hits, a small startup. And when Robin and I became friends, we started discussing our work life. And he had an excellent way of explaining a lot of the issues I saw in this framework and explaining about his meetings with Elliot Jackson, how a lot of those work levels and time span actually explained the issues. And I have to say that for me, it wasn't my analytical mind that understood this. It was more of my whole entire human being resonating with it, because I believe what we're talking about here is inherent human nature. Having said that, I think it's also critical to make sure that we don't become too rigid about this because it's an excellent framework, but you got to start somewhere. And I think what my story tells is about pragmatisms and making it work in practice. And I've actually also looking for knowledge. I found many other good sources of experience. Take a book like Good to Great, Jim Collins, absolutely Fabulous good framework, and you can use a lot of that. Or The Seven Habits first Things First around really how to prioritize work, or Dale Carnegie's frameworks around communications between human beings. A lot of these hugely valuable. We'll hear about Six Sigma later tonight. But what I found is that this is really the difference between building your house on a swamp or on concrete. So all the other things actually rely on this base. So what happened then is I got a good advice from a mentor of mine, christopher, don't pick the job, pick the manager. So that's what I did. I actually did a lot of thinking, and I found that probably the best manager I could see in the company. He was the president of Ericsson India, and I was extremely fortunate that he actually had an opening and was looking for a vice president for multimedia and system integration. Ericsson India is today the biggest out of the 24 markets for Ericsson. And, well, the business unit I run is around $200 million. And that's also one of the things that I immediately reacted to when I got the job. This is going to be very demanding. And while I felt that this is what a great break, this is really, really what I'm meant to do, I really felt also that I better watch out because I knew how much the pressure would be on the quarterly results, on making sure that knowing the numbers and executing on the strategy. And my first feeling was, here's something that's been more of a product unit selling products. And if you look at the task, if you look at what the work is that I'm set to do, it's really about a transformation from a product led company to a solution systems integration company similar to what IBM did. An interesting twist is that we are here, since you're talking about the experiences on the Mobile you actually have to start from the consumer experience, and that adds to the complexity. So I felt that in order to succeed in this job, I needed to make sure that I had an unbeatable management team and a very clear view what was needed to be done and how to do it. So this is what we did. First of all, we defined exactly what the president, my boss, wanted me to do, what task, and then matched the complex tasks, the longest tasks that we had for all the people in my management team. So my task was a level five task, and we had to find people then with a level four capability, but level four applied capability. So that's what we did together with the human resources, finding a plan for getting the people on board. And the next picture is actually an authentic slide, what I showed when I presented the result of the work that I did with Earl Flimberry and the guys at Enhancer, in order to map the team, who would be on it, who would be not on it, where did we have the Vacancies? This slide I showed to the whole organization very openly, we need to have a higher capability of the management team. I mean, some would say that that's a little bit controversial, but it resonated very well because people feel this and being honest many times most oftenly pays off. So explain it in this way, taking it from what we know as the capability concept from Elliott into Lehman, terms that people understand, and the same with competence, because it's not enough to have people with current potential capability level four, you need to have them operating at an applied capability. And that is so important. So, for instance, if we're going to do a transformation, like I said to a solutions company, and the world we had before was telecoms, the world I have now and tomorrow is an intersection between telecom, It and media. Well, of course, then I need different competences. I couldn't possibly set the TV strategy for India. I didn't have that competence, knowing the market understanding. So I needed to find somebody who has that competence at the right capability. So that is extremely important, and diversity as well. So you actually cover that whole marketplace that we're moving into. Finally, commitment. Commitment in terms of the work ethics. And I think that's very critical in emerging markets. And also what we said, end trend responsibility. This was critical in the transformation before. Maybe it was okay to be responsible just if you are having a level three task as a solution architect to just look at your product. But as part of this transition, transformation now, each solution architect needs to understand the whole solution and own that and drive that. And actually, I tell you, being this crisp with the requirements in all areas, there was a natural process that some people, you know, that's not really for me, that's not really my job. I want to do something else. I want to have an easier life than this. That's not an easy life because we're lifting the whole organization. And that to me sometimes is much more powerful than telling everybody you're not good enough, you're not good enough. Many times you have that happening naturally. So we needed a competent, committed management team at Stratton four. Here is just an illustration that we did in terms of seeing that we had an enormous amount of very qualified level three people project managers, architects, product managers, experts. But there were too few people in the layer above and it was very intuitive for people to understand this, okay, we need stronger people in the management team to get the most out of the whole organization. Some were at the right level, but we needed much more strength at level four. What were the effects? I could dwell on the financials. We have had over 30% annual growth and gone from minus double digit operating income to plus double digit operating income. But you will know that that's part hard work and part also circumstances. We're fortunate to be in a growth market and I therefore wanted to be a little bit more specific about the measurable effects that are directly correlated to the changes we did. It's clear how the whole management team is perceived in a different way and that you can sense in many areas, for instance, that customers now ask to meet us where they didn't before. They see us credible, and leaders. In other areas we haven't done much, but they just have to meet that right guy who maybe was a CTO at a TV company, at a very high capability when he's there, well, I think you're good and we haven't done the work. It's sort of like Obama getting the Peace Prize. I mean, they listen to him. They know he's going to do well. It's intuitive. So we actually counter for these effects before they happen. And if you also look, one of the analysis that we made is that a lot of the deals are actually struck in the two to five year time span for this and even five to ten years. Because if you're going to, for instance, Telephonica, if Telephonica would launch a new music services, it's actually very complex to implement it and it's also affecting the whole tariffing. It's affecting also the brand and the strategy. So that means the decisions in this area are very at a very high work level. So it meant that my management team had to be very involved with the customers and build that credibility to close the deals. Another thing that happened, we had a very complex project. We took on a guy with the right competence and did some renegotiations and saved millions of dollars in that, which is very concrete and easy to prove. Another aspect is if you get people with a broader span and a longer time span is you can use them in more ways. And what we see now is we are systematically taking on assignments and functions on behalf of the Global Ericsson Group, whether it be innovation, whether it's consumer research, whether it's building a global pool of system integration resources or business analysis teams. And that is a direct function of the seniority of the team. And finally, great people hire great people. There are some sources of Stratum Three people that we were looking for so badly before. The best architects of product managers from the top It companies. It was very hard to get them, but just hiring one person at director level, then people say, whoa, he's gone to Ericsson. Oh, they are now doing this and this. He's driving this program. I want to work with him. He's the kind of guy I want to work with because there are other people than me that choose the manager rather than the job. And the last thought on the effects, I am certain about what Jim Collins is saying in Good To. You know, first you get the right people on the bus and then you decide where you're going to be driving that bus. And the interesting thing, if you look at that whole framework of Good to great and if you just plug in a lot of the methodologies of Elliot Jacks, you have a lot more of fundamental. How? How are you going to do that? So we did a lot of this work in defining down to even the bottom level of the organization, what the tasks were. We mapped them to the role descriptions. And the word also on recruiting, actually, is that if you present a work description, if you present an ad for a job and talk about what needs to get done in a very precise way where you're talking about, the time span and the level of complexity. Again, it resonates with a human nature. And it's so much easier to get people on board if you have that description. Many times that is what's selling the job, plus that recruiting manager. This is a quote which I won't read, but you read it. I was so happy to see this. And I mean, it's always obviously great to get good feedback, but do you know who wrote this? This was written because we did a mapping of not just the existing people in the organization, in the management team, but also all the top talent and some of the potential candidates. This was written by one of those who were not selected for the management team, who was deemed to be at Stratum Three and still had a couple of years to go before being ready for the management team and still feeling that this was handled in the right way. It was very fair, it was very honest. And that leads me to my final conclusions and learnings. First of all, people are okay to take sometimes even a smaller role. We've done that in a couple of cases where we've actually chopped one organization in two and make the role a little bit smaller, more focus, more adapted to that capability. But also it gave a possibility to get more people on board in the management team going from four or five people in the management team to 1011, because you can't really do a complete revamp like this if you have an ongoing business with operations and support and everything. And this was very clear. People told me from surroundings, oh, you can't do that, that person will leave. But in the other hand, that person's morale went up if you explained it the proper way. The other thing is connected to not being selected. That's okay. If I'm not selected, I'm okay with it as long as I'm told right away. I think this is one of the most tormenting things that I've seen in the past, is where everybody else around in the organization, oh, he's doomed. That new manager is going to just kick him or her out. But it drags on for six months, nine months, and then it happens. It's not good for anybody. It's not easy. I'm not saying it's easy, but I felt that it's better to take that pain right up away and be honest to people, because straight feedback is basic human right. And I'm not just talking about the appraises. I'm talking about every day when there's a small task. How was this done? How was that perceived by me as a manager in implementing a requisite organization? That is one of the most fundamental parts of the backbone of understanding, how am I doing and how was that perceived, how are we on track to accomplishing the tasks that we have handshaked? And this, I think, is not a new thing for you, that for employees, bosses, customers. Everybody can intuitively feel the strength of your management team and they will judge you based on that. And I think that that's understandable if you see the whole requisite organization science. But this is actually one of the best ways to explain it to people that haven't worked with it before. Because you see some people still building an empire saying, well, I'm the big boss and I get 100 servants and I'll look good, and that's going to be enough for me to progress. But it only takes us so far. It is actually the strong general with a number of strong lieutenants that's going to be prevailing because people feel it and be opportunistic about great people. This is just me and tense that it is very hard. And you find that, oh, I need now to have a general manager director at this level with this competence, with this commitment. It's kind of hard to then in two, three months be lucky enough that that person is available. So I tried to always have that little bit of slack so I can always take in, well, here comes a great person, which is inside the vision and the transformation of the task that I'm responsible for. Well, we figure it out and more often than not the people get actually excited just from where we're heading and accept a position like head of special Projects. That's one of my favorite empty boxes that's there. If somebody comes around, go into that and within three months oftentimes something comes up, boom. We didn't think that we're going to do this. This is excellent, you go do it. Look at all the three C's capability, competence, commitment and for other audience where I've talked about this inside the organization, it's a lot of selling around capability. Why that's important? Well, I might say here it is. I think for all of us, at least those who have bought into these concepts, that capability yes, but applied capability is so key you have to have the other two C's as well. And I think it's seldom black or white and I think it's all up to us. I don't think that they're ever going to be sort of a black box machine where you throw in all the facts about where we're heading and then pops out an.org chart roll descriptions and then I just sit back in my desk and enroll. I mean it's always going to be us as the one running the business and running the operations that are going to be accountable. So I might choose to well, I'm going to have this person who is a high level three because this and this reason that's my responsibility and might be the best I can do for accomplishing the task right now. Because maybe that person has that customer relationship that even if I take a strong four in it's going to take six to twelve months to build that up. But that's the kind of juggler that you have to be responsible for and if you don't have the right people in the right places I'm a firm believer that a lot of the optimizations on processes and strategy are waste of time. It's kind of direct but sometimes I feel that people are too afraid of making changes because they think oh, that person will be sad. Or it's so difficult because this and this reason it is very difficult in some cases but it is much more difficult in the long term if you don't make those changes. I'd also say that if you put the right people in the right place, it's a nice place to be but it's not an excuse not to be diligent about all the other aspects of the strategies of the processes. For instance, my VP of HR, I tell him that I feel like sometimes that I'm cheating because I have so much stronger management team than everybody else. Of course it's easier to do the job then, but I never want to make that an excuse to not to be diligent about every day going in and optimizing, taking away the barriers. Because if you read the book, first things first, you have these quadrants what's urgent and what's important. And if you know that many people focus on what's urgent rather than what's important. And the key insight is to always focus on what is not so urgent but very important. And if you translate that and put the layer and the foundational requisite organization under, it means that you have the insight. You have the insight being at the right level to know what are the key things that you need to pull, change, optimize and oftentimes very tough decisions in order to make life easier for people down in the organization. And that leads me to the that leads me to the final point that I tend to sometimes think about why do we do all of this? Because I look at my brother, he is studied medical, has been in an ambulance, he's been in emergency care. He helps people and today helping people with the joints and hips and of course improving quality of life. And many times I've struggled to understand what am I doing that's so important with mobile applications and so on. Communication is important, no doubt. But I found in leadership that actually this is like we say, that social power of the CEO is one of most important things that we can do. And if we can at least help some of those guys on on the Sunday afternoon to have 1020 percent, 30% higher feelings about what they're going to do on Monday morning, I think we're all doing a pretty good job.