The Thought Leader Interview: Vineet Nayar
The CEO of HCL Technologies describes how he focused his company on growth by engaging staff in unprecedented ways.
by Art Kleiner and Vikas Sehgal

http://www.strategy-business.com/article/10410?pg=all

This is an exceptional article on how leadership focus can define the nature of a company to drive growth. I included a few abstracts to encourage you to go to the original article.

"The idea of putting employees first and customers second might seem counterintuitive, especially when it is advocated by the CEO of a large global high-tech enterprise. But to Vineet Nayar, customers and employees are more directly linked than conventional wisdom would suggest. Nayar is the chief executive of HCL Technologies, a US$2.6 billion business and information technology services company based near New Delhi, India, with operations in 26 countries. (HCL originally stood for Hindustan Computers Ltd.) He argues that the aptitude, ingenuity, and enthusiasm of HCL’s more than 65,000 employees leads directly to greater value for customers, and thus to better performance. This is, of course, common management rhetoric, but Nayar is one of the few chief executives who has built a major company by putting it into practice....
...For example, detailed financial performance data broken out by business unit is delivered regularly to employees’ desktops. This has stimulated employees to ask more questions, volunteer more ideas, and challenge their managers more often. In turn, everyone is making better decisions — the kind of decisions that directly affect the customer’s experience. Nayar calls the customer–employee interface the “value zone.” Similarly, in a bold twist on the 360-degree employee appraisal tool, all appraisals are posted on the company’s intranet, and anyone at any level can give feedback on anybody else, including the CEO. As Nayar says, “Good or bad, we all learn from the results.”...
...The idea of engaging employees resonates with the company’s innovation strategy as well. HCL is a behind-the-scenes technology-services company with a brand that appears on few nameplates, but it profits when its customers’ devices succeed. Thus, much of Nayar’s attention is focused on meeting the challenges of convergence: figuring out what types of innovation will be necessary as content producers, telecom companies, and device manufacturers move into their next phase of interdependent business models. HCL’s revenue-sharing approach, and its ongoing efforts to learn from customers and other outsiders as well as from employees, represents an ingrained awareness that the most important insights can come from anywhere — if you know how to recognize and absorb them....
....We also discovered that technology development needs intellect more than it needs investment in dollars. But marketing needs dollars more than intellect. We are a very engineering-oriented company; our core competence is on the technology side. We have never been good at marketing. We still aren’t today. That’s why being a product company was the wrong positioning for us.
So we developed a different business model, involving revenue sharing: We co-designed products with our customers, then shared the revenue with them. Over time, we used this approach more and more, instead of more conventional fee-based and cost-based contracts. In effect, just as our customers use our technological knowledge for their expansion, we use their marketing talent and branding to help fuel our growth. Everybody shares."