New Book Review: "Employees First, Customers Second"
New book review for Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down, by Vineet Nayar, Harvard Business Press, 2010, reposted here:
Putting employees first is an idea with which most are probably already familiar, the idea that putting employees first will bring benefits to customers. Putting customers first is not necessarily going to move a company in the right direction. As Roger L. Martin stated in "The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking" (see my review), "customers are not always right…customers lie or they are wrong". But just how will putting employees first bring benefits to a firm? In trade-off scenarios between employees and customers, does putting employees first mean that they will always win?
In this book, Vineet Nayar discusses the transformation of HCL Technologies (HCLT) since he became CEO of the firm in 2005. As it became apparent that other Indian firms in the technology services space started to outpace HCLT, Nayar started seeking solutions. While contemplating the traditional hierarchical corporate pyramid (where a few managers sit at the top and the bulk of the organization sits at the bottom) and the traditional value zone where products are created and produced, and conversing with customers and observing the younger generation of workers, Nayar came to the conclusion that the value zone lay in the "how" of their offerings (the way technologies are brought together and implemented) more than the "what", but that the employees working at this level of the pyramid were not respected or supported by management.
Nayar began to contemplate whether a solution might lay in making management accountable to the value zone and the people in it. In other words, putting employees first might help the end goal of HCLT, which was to provide technology services. Some of the methods used to achieve this aim were the "Mirror Mirror" exercise (to help see the reality of the situation, to create dissatisfaction with the status quo, and to build a hunger for change), the "Blueprint Meeting" (to draw a path from point A to point B, and to create trust through transparency), the "Smart Service Desk" (to enable employees in the value zone to open tickets for management to resolve), and the "Open 360-degree Review" combined with an initiative called "Happy Feet" (to open the performance review process to all employees whom a manager might affect or influence, and to allow anyone who provides feedback to a manager to see the results of that manager's review).
The author provides a well-worded explanation of the customer-management-employee relationship, something lacking in other texts of this genre. And Nayar succeeds in his goal of explaining the "how" rather than the "what" while other business texts such as Ric Merrifield's "Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation" (see my review) that specifically set out to explain the "what" rather than the "how" often change course. This reviewer also enjoyed Nayar's incorporation of the four elements of trust (see my review of "The Trusted Advisor", by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, Robert M. Galford). Recommended text for anyone looking to other firms for ideas on how to take an alternative look at the value zone.