Gagan Kaul Blog

Sustainable competitive advantages are back as the key paradigms of business growth and success. After exhausting the best practices guidelines preached by diverse groups of management thinkers, the tide is turning back to “smart-enable” the most talented workers in an organization for more productivity and efficiency.

For the last few decades, organizations have undertaken various approaches to boost their internal targets and productivity matrix parameters. From internal restructuring to process outsourcing, automation initiatives to reengineering, each process has been minutely studied and refined. All this amalgamation of ideas and best practices has brought about a level of saturation for an organization to further its process and business related initiatives. So the thought-process is shifting back to the old paradigms of empowering its employees with real-time information and introducing new knowledge-sharing platforms resulting in better informed employees.

I shall be writing on the various innovations and improvements that are being discussed and studied on this front in my next post. But cultural issues still remain one of the biggest enemies of transitioning to any new style of working. Even though corporations try to bring about a paradigm shift in the ways employees interact with one another and across the organization, there is a huge cultural gap that needs to be covered. The traditional ways of running processes and transactions have created a habitual mindset amongst employees, so much so that adherence to any new methodology usually results in a lot of negative feedback. Introduction of these new ideas undeniably faces a lot of resistance from the employees. What is desired is a leap to a new cultural mindset, which is ready to embrace new ideas and try out new ways of doing things. The culture shift, an inherent ingredient of such introductions, is rightly captured by Lou Gerstner’s statement in Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance – “I came to see in my time at IBM that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.”