As I went into engineering and I learnt the art of learning through unlearning and building through first opening I understood that my experiences of making mistakes at home and getting scolded for that, helped in the process of my thinking and helped me in the process of my thinking differently. I wonder if what we are trying to do today is right by asking people not to make mistakes, by judging them on the mistakes they make. And is there a miracle we will find in people if we allow them to make the mistakes which we are most scared of.

I am not talking about making mistakes in operations environment, or airport or a pilot making mistakes. I am talking about young little kids or adults in colleges, asking them to discover by breaking things open, asking them not to give instant answers and just to try and help them to make mistakes so that they don’t come to instant conclusions and they take a little longer time to discover. The beauty of discovery will only come through experimentation and experimentation creates innovation. We have seen that with what Gandhi has said, we have seen that with what Einstein has said. Most discoveries and innovations are by accident and how would accidents happen if we do not realize that there is a miracle waiting to happen if we allow the mistakes. So the way I look at life is take charge of your life and allow yourself to make mistakes and allow others to make mistakes and miracles will happen.

A mistake is as an error in action or calculation caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, or insufficient knowledge. Risk is the exposure to the chance of injury or loss, the chance that the actual return might be different than the one expected. Thus, a risktake is an error — but not one caused by carelessness or insufficient knowledge. Its possibility has been foreseen, calculated, and accepted.

A simple test will help you differentiate a risktake from a mistake. Ask yourself: Did I account for the possibility of failure before it happened — or did the mistake catch me by surprise? We are not promoting carelessness, but genuine, well-intended mistakes, as Dawna pointed out.

Every new company and new product launch, every new service and new discovery has the potential of being a risktake. In fact, every strategic decision has the potential of proving to be just that. We usually take them with the joy experimentation brings, enhanced by the courage to fail and stand up again. Doing everything “perfectly” breeds stagnation and laziness, argued Brett.

I am all for taking risks as long as the process is supported by conviction, persistence, and discipline, and it is based on knowledge. During the recent worldwide recession, the decision by HCL to acquire Axon — the biggest overseas acquisition by an Indian IT company — had the potential of becoming a risktake. There were many critics of the deal, but so far, the takeover hasn’t given them the occasion to say: I told you so. Would I do it again? Sure, as long as the possibility of short-term losses is less than the potential of long-term gains.

Lemuel Morrison shared a potential best practice with us: Maintain a mea culpa list and update it regularly with new risktakes along with what, if anything, was learned. My new book, Employees First, Customers Second, provides an account of several risktakes at HCL. For instance, we made a risktake while measuring the success of a new “Smart Service Desk” set up to address employee problems. There was a need to get employees to believe in the process and to induce those on the desk to respond quickly. We therefore started out by measuring the number of tickets that the latter closed, signifying the resolution of employee problems, as an indicator of success. That was a risktake because it skewed the picture: The larger the number of complaints, the larger was the possibility of success! We eventually amended the metric so the service desk today aims for zero tickets.

Understandably, executives fear the unknown and crave the security of the comfort zone even though that’s a prescription for predictable and controlled performance. Moreover, today’s environmental volatility won’t allow the comfort zone to stay comfortable for long. That’s why I would suggest that we should create discomfort with the present situation. Then draw the path, which will be littered with risktakes, to where we would like to be in the future. Keep your sights focused far ahead and stay undeterred.

Mark Twain once wrote, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ”

Are you ready to sail away on the winds of your risktakes?

Originally posted on Vineet Nayar’s Blog site on Harvard Business Review.com
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/nayar/2010/08/the-power-of-ristakes.html

We saw Bill Gates, even in our generation we saw Steve Jobs, spin out of college and innovate at a very young age. And that innovation led to material change in our life time.

Then this whole word called ‘experience’ for innovation came in – I have the experience and therefore I can lead. While innovators and entrepreneurs were still coming at a young age, making it ageless, but management and leadership had associated age with it – which was called experience.

Today I wish to question that experience. Is experience really required for leadership? Is experience really required to lead? If innovation can be done at such a young age – and we have seen a lot of young innovators – is leadership also possible at a young age? We see that in sports – quite a lot, whether it’s Dhoni or whether it is some of these football players in the World Cup.

We see the ability of leadership is intuitive. It is about getting your mind right, and it is about getting your teams faced in a uni-direction. It’s not necessary that it comes from experience. It actually could come from intuition.

We will hear some blogs from some very young leaders (ahead). I would encourage you as I encourage myself to think about leadership as ageless and not consider experience as a necessary condition to lead.

I love Brazil and I supported Brazil throughout the World Cup. Unfortunately they lost, but my emotions were with Maradona. This is the man who single handedly won the World Cup for Argentina and that goal we remember. But in this World Cup he was standing on the sideline. He was the new manager, he was the CEO, he was the coach. One thing he could not do for his team was score a goal. A lot of us, managers, CEOs, new young leaders in different departments, in different countries, in different business are like Maradona today.

We are standing on sideline because it is impossible to continue scoring goals. Our teams have to score the goals. How many leaders, how many CEOs realize that they are no more Maradonas but they are coaches, the managers, or the Maradona’s of today.

Once that realization really comes into a CEO’s mind or young manager’s mind then the question we need to ask is: Does Maradona as a player and Maradona as a coach need two different aspects to be successful? Maradona as a coach within us, needs to enable, enthuse, encourage and bring the spirit to the skills of our teams to deliver the World Cup to us.

How many of us really think like that? How many of us are actually in command and control and still believe we are the players? How many of us do not believe in enabling, enthusing, encouraging? How many of us do not see ourselves as coaches but as players?

And that is a big mistake happening across corporates around the world. The CEO and managers refuse to give up control because they still think they are Maradonas. It is important for us to pause for a minute as young managers and think about two critical questions:

What business are we in?
We are in business of creating value and scoring goals.

Who is creating the value and scoring the goals?
The players and not you.

If those answers are very clear then what it takes for you as a coach to be successful is very different than what it takes for you as a player to be successful.

When you think about that clearly I’m sure you will find the answers as I discovered the answers over five years by making many many mistakes, being Maradona as a player. Once I realized that I’m not Maradona as a player, but a coach not as good as Maradona, I think things started falling into place. Think about it and I’m sure things will start falling in place.

Some of them we have got right, a lot of them we have got wrong, but the very fact that a few we got right have created huge value for HCL. The reason I’m talking to you is because I believe we are only ten percent done and ninety percent still needs to be discovered. I’m hoping that through this communication, I will be able to reach out to many many bright minds out there who would learn from what HCL has done, and also contribute to the thinking within HCL.

I’m very happy for HCL to be the base for the experiments and for your ideas because we are looking for new ideas where we can continue our experiments going forward. At HCL we came up with a philosophy five years ago called Employees First, Customers Second. Yes Employees First, Customers Second. The philosophy is the same as I explained; that the employees are in the value zone. They are the people who are creating the true value for our customers. By the management holding itself accountable to the employees, we actually create higher value for our customers compared to organizations where the CEO is playing golf with another CEO.

That resulted in our articulation with our customers that employees come first for the management and the organization and customers come second. By that we mean that if you follow this philosophy the customers will automatically come first.

Now before I talk about what we did, let me talk about the results. We are the fastest growing IT services company based in India. In recession we grew twenty one percent year on year, that is in calendar year 2009 over 2008 when everybody was actually de-growing and demonstrating negative growth both in revenues and income. Our customer satisfaction went up by 43 percent during the recession. We were declared number one in employee satisfaction across various surveys in various countries, Business week lists us in the five most emerging companies to watch out for, and our management style of Employees First, Customers Second is taught across the world. Those are the results.

But how did we get there? What are the experiments which you could potentially learn from? Remember I talked about a catalyst action. The first catalyst action is a story of an ant. An ant is an ant is an ant. It can’t be a fast walking ant, a rich ant, an ant with a Mercedes or a flying ant – an ant is an ant. It is very important for organizations, as a starting step, to want to be a butterfly. If you want to be a butterfly, not only do you have to be willing to be a butterfly, but you have to stop being an ant. Therefore the first catalyst thought for you to think about is that there are no half-baked measures. So when you execute any of the catalyst actions which I talked about, you need to try and create conviction within yourself that yes that’s what I want to do and take it to the extreme. If you don’t push the envelope and take it to the extreme, but instead do half-baked actions, I don’t think transformation will happen. When you decide you want to be a butterfly, stop being an ant. That’s my first catalyst advice.

The second is the most difficult part of transformation ‘How do you make the reverse accountability happen?’ I think there is an understanding that there are power centers and value centers. If you understand power centers, these are largely based around enabling functions; HR, Finance, Administration, not because they want to be, but because the controls are so important that they create power centers in those organizations. And to get anything done in these organization from the power center is a long exercise. So our catalyst action in HCL was to create what we call a Smart Service Desk, a trouble ticketing system where any employee can open a trouble ticket on any of the enabling functions or even me as a CEO, and there is a limited time in which we have to close the ticket. It’s the employee who actually closes the ticket. That’s one catalyst action which inverted the pyramid of the power centers and suddenly power centers became what I call service centers.

Let’s talk about the managers, as I call it, the Hand of God, what do I mean by Hand of God? It is the Hand of God because the manager has all the financial information, and the manager can make this powerful phone call to the enabling functions to make the magic happen for you. Because the manager has so much power in his hands he is the Hand of God, which will help you move up your career. That’s the accepted norm within a lot of organizations. Unfortunately, true.

So how do you destroy that? You destroy that by first making the information available at every desktop. So you destroy what I call the information power center by a huge amount of automation of financial information data that is honestly exhibited in the organizational communication channels.It is transparant and open. The second thing you do is making the management as accountable to employees. We experimented with the 360 degree tool, and I say this is an experiment because this is only a five year old experiment and I think we need to do a lot more to declare success.

We said that instead of discovering leaders, leaders should emerge. And the way leaders could emerge is by their influence on the influence zone, which is the employees. So if we ask the employees to do the 360 degree of the managers, we find that employees are not interested in doing it because they think what is in it for me? So we said, what happens if we, the managers are asked to show the results of the 360 degree survey to the employees who gave the survey? Suddenly we made the connection, we made the collaboration happen.

So I started this exercise in 2005, and for the first time in 2005 there were 30,000 employees in HCL. Today we are 57,000 employees. I made my 360 degree available to all employees – the people who gave me feedback and the people who did not give me feedback. And I said that that feedback is so important for me that it will bring about a change in the way I manage, because that is my constituency, that is the place I want to create value. When the managers saw me doing it, they gained trust, and started saying that “Hey why don’t we do it, that is a great way of communicating with my employees and getting their feedback as more and more people do it”.

Today in HCL there are 3,500 managers who participate in the 360 degree survey and they share their results with all the employees who gave them feedback. What does that mean? That means two things, first, as a CEO and as a Manager, when you are sharing your 360 degree you started the process of reverse accountability. Once the feedback comes and it is out in open, you clearly know who are man managers, and who are not man managers, who are supposed to be good as individual contributors like the technical functions. Now because the result is public, you do not use it for evaluation, you use it only for development purposes. The leaders will automatically move towards higher man management roles or higher individual contributor roles depending on the feedback they are getting.

I do not believe that in HCL, we could have found any other way of inverting this pyramid so effectively, discover emerging leaders and get the leaders to automatically gravitate towards their area of strength. That is another catalyst we used which is very effective.

Let’s talk about how we do transition catalyst and experiments we did of handing over the charge or control to the employees and giving the charge to them to bring about a change. I think the first important experiment which I did, and I don’t know whether you want to do that or not, was to demolish the concept of this corner office.

So, in 2006, I went in front of all our employees in groups of 4000 and 5000 and danced in front of them. Now I can tell you that I can’t dance for nuts, the reason I did that is, there is so much perception gap, there is so much halo around the CEO that you really cannot have a decent conversation with the CEO. That is true with the managers too, so don’t say that this is a CEO conversation and it is not relevant to you as a Manager. There is so much halo around even a manager that the employee doesn’t have a decent conversation with you. And to level the field, you can dance, you can do whatever it is, but it is important that before you have a conversation, you level the field and that’s one of the catalysts which I used.

The second catalyst I used very effectively is what I call the ‘You and I conversation’ where I not only have a conversation with the employees on an open blog, it is so open that anybody who is asking the question, his name is shown to all the employees and when I answer the question that is also shown to all the employees. Not one question is positive on the blog, every single question is negative, and if you read it you will believe that HCL is in a mess. But the very fact that we wash the dirty linen in public gives so much confidence to the employees, that this company means business, the CEO and the management of the company is standing accountable and there is a reverse accountability automatically set. There are many many other such catalysts we have employed in HCL and, as I said, some have worked but I think this experimentation journey in Employees First, Customers Second has to continue.

I don’t think we have all the answers, I don’t think we even have all the questions. Through this mixed channel, I’m looking forward to an ability to be able to tap into your bright thinking, your bright ideas to help me transform HCL, to make it faster, grow better for the employees to feel happy, for all of us to be able to create value which we so so need in the world today.