Leaders are born or leadership can be learned is something we discussed at the beginning of our interview with Mark Lines. He says people grow into leadership with experience. He also highlights what is Disciplined Agile and why should people care about it.
Interviewee: Mark Lines (Co-creator of the Disciplined Agile framework)
Mark Lines is Managing Partner at Scott Ambler + Associates. He is an Agile Coach and co-creator of the Disciplined Agile Delivery framework. Mark is co-author with Scott Ambler of Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner’s Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise. Mark is a “disciplined” agile coach, helping organizations all over the world transform from traditional to agile methods. He writes for many publications including the Cutter Consortium and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. Mark blogs about DAD at DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com. Mark is also a Founding Member of the Disciplined Agile Consortium (DAC), the certification body for disciplined Agile.
Interviewer: Noopur Pathak (Chief Media Editor, INNOVATION ROOTS)
Most of us speak about Change Management these days and some of us wonder about the need for it. In this edition, we discussed the same with Mr. L C Singh (Executive Vice-Chairman, Nihilent).
Mr. Singh also held senior leadership positions at Tata Consultancy Services – as Senior Vice President, and Zensar – President & CEO, prior to founding Nihilent. He is a distinguished alumnus of the Institute of Technology, BHU, and a valedictorian of the Harvard Business School, a Certified Management Consultant, and a Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants of India and the Computer Society of India. Among other professional accomplishments, he is also a Certified Due Diligence Professional.
Let’s read about his journey and his thoughts on Change Management.
Q1. Briefly share your journey from a Sr. Vice-President at TCS to Executive Vice-Chairman of Nihilent. One thing that always kept you moving forward?
L C Singh: It’s been a very rewarding journey and my early days with TCS gave me enough room to nurture my entrepreneurial spirit all the way to the year 1998. I started Nihilent, to create a distinct value to the Indian and Global IT industry using Design Thinking. I spent almost 2 decades at TCS and during that time, I oversaw various functions ranging from operations to marketing to corporate communications. It was more of an entrepreneurial role that gave me enough headroom to broaden TCS’ footprints to newer markets, foray into new geographies and to add new service lines.
I left TCS in 1998 and joined International Computers India Ltd ( ICIL) as the President & CEO. ICIL subsequently became Zenzar Technologies in 1999 and headed their global operations until the time I founded Nihilent in 2000. It is worth mentioning that during my stint at Zenzar, it achieved the unique distinction of being adjudged at SEI-CMM Level 5, the highest Capability Maturity Model and the first Indian IT company to be apprised at Level 5 for its enterprise-wide delivery capabilities.
One thing that kept me moving forward is my dream to create a differentiation in the IT industry. And I found out that design thinking as the game changer that can usher in the much-needed panacea for enterprise IT pain points and align IT with business goals. If I look back at the evolution of IT over the years, the 1980s, IT was about back-office automation. During the 1990’s IT became a strategic tool for achieving a competitive advantage. From 2000, IT has become the real instrument of change.
Today, computing and communications have merged together to create a powerful range of service capabilities, and what has fundamentally changed in the new school of IT is that the consumer rules and IT is all about enabling the aspirations of the consumer and manifesting it into different services and products, and companies like us handhold the enterprise in this transformation with an array of solutions and services and here is where our integrated change management powered by design thinking comes into play.
Q2. You have contributed greatly in building the Indian IT brand worldwide. What do you wish for it’s future?
L C Singh: As I said earlier, today the consumers wield an all-pervasive power over the enterprise. We need to be grounded to consumers and get their pulse and come out with the right products and services. At a broader level, the enterprises need to arrive at the big picture and understand what the consumer needs, wants and aspirations. This is a baseline picture on which one needs to build the business blocks and power it with IT. This is where players like us make an entry and our design thinking approach to problem-solving brings a systemic approach to IT services delivery.
If I look ahead, I believe that the much-needed regeneration of the IT industry is around the bend. Approaches like design thinking will completely change enterprise computing by fostering customer-centricity and hasten collaborative partnerships not seen before. By propagating design thinking, what we are saying is that IT is not a one-time deployment process, rather a continuous evolutionary process, engaging the customers and other stakeholders continuously for the efficient business outcome.
APPROACHES LIKE DESIGN THINKING WILL COMPLETELY CHANGE ENTERPRISE COMPUTING BY FOSTERING CUSTOMER CENTRICITY
Q3. Change Management is a much talked about topic today. How do you define ‘Change Management’? Why is the dire need of it in organisations?
L C Singh: Change management according to me is to cope with the new breed of consumer demands and who exactly know what they want. To deal with that at the enterprise side, we need a change in the processes, change in the way we create products and redefining the overall business strategy.
We need to go deep down the consumer demands and understand their needs and pain points and build solutions using appropriate technologies to solve consumer problems. And how does one seamlessly manifest all these? As an integrated change management vendor, we take all the parameters under Sense, Immerse, Define, Ideate, Build and Validate through the design thinking approach.
Q4. Mention one thing you feel is missing in the current generation of entrepreneurs and one thing which is worth appreciating about them.
L C Singh: Let me narrate the positive things. It’s amazing to see the overall enthusiasm levels among entrepreneurs. But having said that, I am disappointed to see that such enthusiasm was primarily rooted in making only money, rather than creating value and differentiation in whatever they do. If I compare this with the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the thinking and approach are completely different. The emphasis there revolves around, how can I be a world-beater and create something new and completely different rather than being a copycat? To me entrepreneurship is not just about VC funding and making money, it is about having a broader vision of value creation, that I think is missing in the Indian context.
If I have to wear a hat of a mentor, my advice to budding entrepreneurs is to ask them to learn from our own IT industry and from its humble beginnings and how companies invested in the early days and reaped the dividends after several years. New entrepreneurs need to have patience and create something tangible that’s worth talking about. The second bit of important advice I would give to them is to be humble and shy away from intellectual arrogance, which will completely alienate them from the consumers and remember the consumers always have the power of choice and walk away from you anytime.
Q5. What are your three tips to organisations to survive the digital disruption?
L C Singh: Irrespective of what business you are in, the basic starting premise is to create an abstraction of your business. For instance, at Nihilent, we breakdown the industry and find out the real business dynamics and map a whole lot of parameters to granulate the many forces that shape the business. Moreover, until we get a grip on who our competitors are, it is impossible to create a successful service delivery. Digital disruption is a double-edged sword and sometimes we do not even know who our real competitors are. I can cite examples like Apple becoming the competitor for Sony or a Walmart competing with Amazon. There are numerous such examples. What I am saying is that in this age of digital disruption, you need to have a ring-side view of your business and be able to granulate elements like: What is the industry environment? Where is the competition coming from? Do I understand the competition well? Am I just fulfilling the need? Or Do I have an idea about their aspirations? Asking yourself these questions will help to find you a sweet-spot and tame and survive disruption.
In sum my three tips would be:
Understand the consumer aspirations and the competition.
Do not always go by best practices, what worked in the past might not work now and in the future.
Have empathy conversations with your consumers in order to map their needs and aspirations.
Q6. One questions you think I should have asked you. Please answer that question as well.
L C Singh: On creating new innovation benchmarks
One thing here I would like to drive home is innovation. In my opinion real innovation has to happen. We suffer from innovation myopia and often times not able to define what are we innovating? Are we just copy cats or creators of something new? My question here is: Do we (entrepreneurs) have the ability to create something new and pathbreaking?
LC Singh, is the founder and executive Vice Chairman of Nihilent Ltd., a global consulting and solutions integration company with a holistic approach to problem solving. A pioneer of IT, Mr. Singh has contributed extensively to the development of Indian IT and consulting industry worldwide. Mr. Singh has a rich and varied experience of nearly five decades in development, marketing and general management in the IT industry. He has been the driving force in the growth and expansion of Nihilent worldwide. He is an internationally recognized thought leader on design & systems thinking and is an invited speaker at global conferences on Design Thinking, Change Management, and Digital Disruption. He is the author of MC3, Nihilent’s patented change management framework, Customer Loyalty Index (14 Signals), a framework for calibrating customer satisfaction, and Prolicy – D, a design-thinking enabled framework for creating products and services.
