Once completed, the work is submitted to Paris or London for a local creative director to review and send back for improvements, if needed. All the work activities in the hub related to every project are tracked (including the time spent in creative activities).
Employees at this central hub are encouraged to build their knowledge base on the global markets they are working on. Senior executives of Lenovo and O&M periodically visit this central hub to facilitate in building this knowledge. Account executives from the hub are also expected to travel across geographies and bring in their collective learning on various markets and activities to the hub.
The conclusions from the foregoing trends are clear: The search for talent has gone well beyond cost arbitrage. Lowering cost is still a concern, but it is coupled with the need for better quality, innovation, and speed. Therefore, firms will engage in pulling together teams of people based on their skills, attitudes, and experiences to work on specific projects. What we see here is the breakdown of the traditional hierarchical systems in which, business, functional, and geographic groups "owned" people.
Talent used to be trapped in boxes in the organizational charts. In contrast, we are moving to a system of project management in which projects are temporary organizational systems. The transition is critical to recognize.
The messages is this: "I, as a skilled associate, do not belong to the India or the US operations even though I may live in one of those countries and be managed administratively by the country manager. I belong to a global practice group, and I can be called upon to work on specific projects based on my unique skills and experiences." Thus each employee starts to belong to multiple systems:
- A member of a business functional unit (for example, financial markets business group and/or human resources function)
- A member of a country team (for example, US, Chinese, or Indian operations)
- A member of a project team of the moment (for example, Indian programmers in IMB's Texas Center Point Energy utility project)
- A member of a vendor's firm who works as a member of the team of the ABC firm (for example, the TCS team in Ferrari race car electronics project)
The majority of the employees may not have this somewhat ambiguous and shifting organizational affiliation. However, for the highly skilled and the most coveted people, this will increasingly be the reality.
The New Age of Innovation
Authors: C K Prahalad and M S Krishnan
Publisher: McGraw-Hill; Pages: 304
Price: Rs 695
Reproduced with permission
Image: A worker ties an Indian and a Chinese flag on an electricity pole near the India Gate in New Delhi. | Photograph: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images
Also read: Success mantras from a world champion
Advertisement
