Management Philosophy

Vineet Nayar

Vineet Nayar is the vice chairman and CEO of HCL Technologies, a global information technology services

company based in India.

Nayar Joined HCL TECHNOLOGY

• Nayar studied for a first degree in engineering, and then an MBA. He joined HCL in 1985, and was appointed president of HCL Technologies in 2005, CEO in 2007 and vice chairman in 2010.

VINEET NAYAR’S MANAGEMENTPHILOSOPHY

1. On the employees first philosophyI fully believe that the trust between the employees and the management is at its poorest. The only way you can bring innovation to the centre stage of the company to grow faster in the economic turbulent time is to get innovation going at the bottom of the pyramid to employees.

• If employees are the true value, you are creating for the customers. And employees are the true answers. So the bottom of the pyramid innovation, which you need to grow faster. What choice you have other than putting employees first. You actually have no choice.

3. On whether companies can balance an employees first approach without sacrificing customer centricity

• Every customer tells me that, whichever company says customer first, those are the companies they disbelieve first. Because, today customer first has become a slogan. And the customer ask this of everybody as to how are you going to deliver the customer first experience. So I don't know if you had the opportunity of travelling American Airlines and Singapore Airlines. They both have Boeing 777. But one has a motivated set of employees and another has not so motivated set of employees. And the experience in both case differed dramatically. Therefore, say that American Airlines never say that customers don't come first. It is hard to say that they don't take customers first.

5. On two major trends that are transforming the world

• Major trend number one is Gen Y in the workforce. And mega trend number two is the impact of social media on your business. So, Gen Y is all about openness, transparency and lack of command and control and collaborative work style. And social media is exactly the Gen Y architecture. So if your organisational structures are in pyramids, you will die. Your organisational structure has to be thought about as digital neural network. Even if you take a human body it is neural network which is many to many communication. So, you have no choice, but to rearchitect your organisation which looks more like Facebook, which is not hierarchical pyramid, so that it can get the best out of Gen Y.

6.On the impacts of employee first within HCL

• If you see, my management team has remained the same, and today we are growing twice as fast as the industry average. So the people are the same. What we do is the same. You have not heard of an apple kind of idea coming from HCL. By just changing the culture of the organisation, the social architecture of the organisation, and inverted the pyramid of the organisation and implementing employees first. We are growing at twice the rate of twice the growth as industry average. And we are number one in customer satisfaction. We are number one in employee satisfaction. We are the only Indian company in the Thinkers 50 or Fortune dream list. In both these cases, we are the only non-product company. Everybody else is a product company. So for a non product company to be known for innovation, it also contributes to the brand.

Thankyou