CHAPTER ONE
Mirror Mirror
Creating the Need for Change
To begin at the beginning.
In early 2005, the employees of HCLT were in a celebratory mood. The company had surpassed $700 million in annual revenue. It had a good track record of growth. Employees had plenty of stories to tell about themselves, the company, our innovative products, and their long-standing relationships with customers. Most people in the company were feeling good.
A few, however, were looking at the flip side of the coin. HCLT was growing, yes, but not nearly as fast as the leaders in the IT services industry. And, despite its revenue growth, the company was actually losing market share. It was also rapidly losing mindshare outside India, because of gains other companies were making. And HCLT had a people problem, too, since some of its most talented employees were leaving to work for competitors.
While many observers thought HCLT was a race car leading the field, a few saw that the brakes could fail at any moment and the vehicle could easily crash into a wall. What was the reality of the situation? Which observation was true?
This was the fundamental question HCLT faced—the same one that many other companies had to confront in 2008 during the depths of the recession. Is the company in enough danger that it should attempt to transform itself before it’s too late? Or should it just ride out the storm and hope for things to get better?
As it happened, I became the one to ask those questions. In late 2004, when I was the CEO of HCL Comnet, an entrepreneurial unit of HCL, the president of HCL Technologies fell into poor health. Soon thereafter, I got a call from Shiv Nadar, chairman and founder of the company.
“Vineet,” he said. “I want you to consider coming on board to head HCLT.”
I was not sure I wanted the job. I was happy at Comnet, the company that I, along with my team, had built from the ground up into a global enterprise. Comnet was seen as a pioneer and a dominant leader in remote infrastructure management, a fast-growing segment of the IT services industry. We had created an entrepreneurial environment and built successful operations in eleven countries; our company was growing faster than its industry peers. I had been successful in creating a start-up, but running a large, well-established company with a legacy business would be a very different ball game. Moreover, I had always thought that small is beautiful and the energy, speed, and innovation in companies like Comnet (around $500 million in revenue today) kept my adrenalin pumping and I did not want to give that environment up.
I guess I had brought the situation on myself. I had been a vocal critic of some of the strategies being employed at HCLT and had often expressed to Shiv that the company was not at the front of the race but, in fact, rapidly losing speed. But I had never said that I wanted to climb into the driver’s seat.
I politely declined Shiv’s invitation to become president and thought that it would end there.
A few weeks later, he called and said, “Come to my house for dinner. Let’s talk it over some more.”
We had dinner, then discussed the issue well into the night. Shiv understood the changing forces driving the IT industry and the problems that HCLT faced. Having seen what we had accomplished at Comnet with a radical management style, he had concluded that HCLT could no longer operate in the traditional ways. I told him that it was just as likely that I would destroy HCLT as it was that I would help transform it. Shiv has been a mentor and a close friend since I started Comnet in 1993, and in the end, it was impossible to say no to him.
“But,” I said, “I must do it my way. I have to be free to adopt an unconventional approach.”
“Of course,” said Shiv.
And that was that. He didn’t ask me exactly what that unconventional approach might be—which was a good thing, because I didn’t know.
The Missing Starting Point
One of the joys of life is to watch your children as they learn new things.
I remember the first time my kids learned to hold a pencil. They would grab any kind of writing surface, put the point of the pencil to it, and draw a line. They were amazed by the magic of this instrument. After a lot of scribbling, they learned the art of drawing a straight line by connecting two dots. That simple action brought great pleasure and clarity to their thinking. And isn’t that how we try to live our lives? We start at a defined point A and try to get to a defined point B.
So, as I prepared to become president of HCLT, I thought a great deal about where we were and where we wanted to go and tried to simplify our situation. I realized, with some surprise, that neither a point A nor a point B had been clearly defined. People had different views on where the company was (racing ahead or about to crash?), and nobody had clearly expressed where the company was headed or should be headed. It was evident that point A remained undefined—or that the company was still hanging on to a point A that had been defined, but long ago—because we had never really slowed down. It was just that our peers had sped ahead and were growing much faster than we were.
I looked around at other companies for a model of how we might change. The majority of them were quite clear about their point B. It was articulated in their statements of vision, mission, and goals. But, to my amazement, I realized that most of them had not defined their point A with equal clarity. They neglected this vital element in a fast-changing environment that very quickly can make a company’s position obsolete. In most cases, the only definition of point A was in financial statements and other such basic data that gave only a rather limited and absolute view of the situation.
This puzzled me. Is it possible to make a plan to reach point B without understanding and agreeing on point A? I didn’t think so. Can a child draw a line without first putting the point of the pencil at a distinct spot on the paper?
This thinking clarified the first step we needed to take: we had to define our point A and see how the truth had changed.
Changes in the Environment
A company’s performance in relation to its peers is just one factor that defines its point A. It is equally important to look at the entire landscape of the industry in which you operate and to see how it is evolving. Often, the landscape has shifted so much that the original point A has fallen off the edge of the map.
For HCLT, the fundamental change in the landscape was that, over the previous five years, information technology had become more and more central to business strategy. Companies like Boeing, Dell, Amazon. com, and eBay had used technology to change the rules of the game so dramatically, they were actually playing a different game altogether, leaving their competitors to play catch-up or to drop out of the running completely.
In 2005, the influence of technology on business was exploding still further, with developments in telecommunications, Web services, and social media. Technology had become central not only to strategy within existing business models, but also to creating and sustaining entirely new models, from Li & Fung’s reinvention of the global supply chain to Google’s invention of a new online revenue model.
All of this change led to a dramatic rise in the importance of the position of chief information officer, (CIO). In the traditional hierarchy, the senior business leadership had always formulated strategy, operations people in the middle had converted strategy into a set of activities, and the IT executives at the bottom found ways to automate those activities to make them as efficient and cost-effective as possible. In this traditional model, the businesspeople rarely interacted with IT; they just directed.
Now, however, CIOs were expected to deliver faster, cheaper, and better processes that could help the companies differentiate themselves from their competitors and achieve the desired competitive advantage. The shift was so dramatic that a new career path opened, from CIO to CEO. Just a few years earlier, it would have been rare to see a CIO taking over as senior leader, but now it was becoming relatively common. David Bernauer, CIO of Walgreens, had become its CEO; Bruce Giesbrecht had moved from the CIO spot to CEO of Hollywood Entertainment; and five or six others had done the same. I believed that this phenomenon (which I like to call the “reincarnated CIO”) signaled a very different future for enterprise IT and its leaders.
In the traditional IT organization, the CIO often acted as a competent caretaker. In the new intelligent enterprises, CIOs were expected to be proactive and to become agents of change, contributors to business agility, and managers of mission-critical operations. In other words, the main customers of HCLT—the CIOs and their staffs—were changing in very dramatic ways. Most of the industry was still struggling to come to terms with the pace of this change. Most HCLT employees had not yet fathomed the impact of it.
We had to make our employees see, very clearly, the truth of this new point A for the industry and that of our own point A within it.
Looking in the Mirror
The process we followed to get employees to see our situation at point A is one that eventually came to be called Mirror Mirror.
Mirror Mirror is a communications exercise that involves talking with employees throughout the organization about the truth as they see it and getting them to acknowledge the reality, the elephant in the room, that everyone essentially knows about but which has never been publicly acknowledged. It is a matter of getting the members of the organization to look at themselves in the mirror and describe carefully and truthfully what they see.
You cannot do this by sending out a memo and telling people to face up to reality. The process must be pursued, in person, face-to-face, together. So, the day I assumed my new role as president of HCLT, I got on a plane and spent the next two weeks visiting our facilities and talking with as many people at all levels of the company as I could.
I chose my first stop carefully: the city of Chennai, in the southern part of India, and the home of the HCLT Engineering Center. Much of our past success had come about because of the engineering services team’s ability to spot emerging technology trends and to develop new products to meet them and get them to market ahead of competitors. I had worked there as a product manager earlier in my career and had been a part of many successful campaigns with the team. I knew that Chennai was the right place to start.
On the first day of my Mirror Mirror journey, I landed in Chennai, drove to the main facility, and, within a few minutes of arriving, began a session with about five hundred members of the engineering services team. I talked honestly about how I saw our current situation—my definition of our point A—and articulated the themes that I would stress over and over again during the following weeks.
- HCLT had lost its competitive edge because it had become tolerant of gradual change that did not match the rapid change of the industry, and, worse, it had come to see that pace as acceptable progress.
- The company could, however, crash any day and had a very limited amount of time to prevent such a disaster.
- The only way to prevent a disaster was to accelerate, move faster, and transform the company and the way it operated.
After my remarks, I paused for reactions. There weren’t many comments. It was as if I had spoken the unspeakable and there was too much shock and hurt to allow for conversation. The pride we take in our work and in our past can make it difficult to hear the truth, let alone accept it. There were a few questions about what we would do now and what it all meant. Many of these questions, I couldn’t answer. “I don’t have all the answers yet,” I told them. “I may never have the answers. They will have to come from you.” This confused people even more. How could I tell them we had to change, without telling them exactly how?
Years later, some members of the engineering services team who had been in that session told me that they had taken my comments very personally and had been hurt by them. I could see the hurt at the time, but I knew it was necessary to point out the elephant in the room and for them to start thinking about it. Without the participation of the employees and their agreement on point A, we would never be able to reach point B.
All Aboard?
I left Chennai wondering how this would all turn out. Within a week, I was in the United States, visiting our many offices there. Within two weeks, I had been to London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo and had returned to Bangalore and Delhi. I had talked with thousands of employees, customers, and partners. In these conversations, I made the same remarks over and over, heard many of the same questions and comments, saw the same hurt and confusion.
As I met with people throughout the company and looked out over the faces of the employees in the meetings, an image from my childhood often came to mind. When I was a boy, our family sometimes traveled by train together. We would rush to the station and wait for the carriages to arrive. When the train finally pulled in and came to a halt, the conductor would step onto the platform and call out in his booming voice, “All aboard!” There was no hesitation among the waiting crowd. They would all surge forward, hoping to get a seat. I always loved to hear the conductor’s call and to see what an immediate response it brought.
In those early meetings, I thought of myself as the conductor, calling out, “All aboard!” But the response was far less enthusiastic than it had been at the train station. I began to ask myself, Will people get on board? Does everybody need to get on board? How will I know if they are on board? The more meetings and conversations we had, the clearer it became that some people would definitely get on board, some never would, and some weren’t sure.
I gave names to the three groups: transformers, lost souls, and fence sitters.
Transformers. The transformers had been waiting for a conductor to call “All Aboard!” for a long time. When I met with them, they were aggressive and even angry with the company and its situation. They wanted change immediately, faster than we could make it. They had seen the same things I had seen in the mirror. They were frustrated that they had been unable to make the changes they thought were necessary. They felt suffocated by the organization.
Although I sympathized with them, I did not really understand their feelings of suffocation. What was preventing them from effecting change? What was getting in their way? It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the organization itself was largely responsible for their frustration. As a result, the members of this group looked at me with hope that what I was saying about change was real and also with skepticism that anything would ever really happen.
In one meeting, a transformer asked me a very telling question. “Vineet,” he said, “thanks for coming here and listening to us. But will we ever see you again?”
That one struck me hard, especially since five hundred people were in the room and listening carefully to my response. I honestly didn’t know when or if I would see that group again, but I hadn’t quite reached a point where I could be as transparent in my responses as I eventually became. I don’t remember exactly what my reply was, but the transformers told me it was unconvincing.
Lost souls. The second set of people are the ones I call lost souls. They would sit in the meetings with frowns on their faces. Whatever we were doing or whatever we proposed to do was, in their opinion, hopeless and wrong. Their negativity went beyond their views on specific plans. They were convinced that there was absolutely nothing we could do, no plan we could follow, that would ever change anything.
That view might have been tolerable if they had kept it to themselves. But lost souls tend to be vocal in their comments and expressive in their attitudes, and they defuse the energy in any meeting they attend or team they join. If I said something like, “I don’t know how we’re going to do this, but, trust me, we will get there,” the lost souls would pounce on my words. To them, admitting that I didn’t know something showed that I was incompetent. They did not see it as honesty or transparency.
Even though I call them lost souls, I do not believe that these people were intentionally obstructionist, that they meant to cause harm, or that they could never make a contribution. They may not even have realized that they came across as negative. I think they often saw themselves as realists and truth tellers, the only ones who really understood how things worked, or didn’t.
Fence sitters. The third group of employees, the largest of the three, I call the fence sitters. These people spoke up the least in meetings and rarely asked questions, but they watched the transformers and the lost souls carefully. When our eyes met, they always smiled at me. They said nice things about HCLT when it was expected. But they clearly were in “watch and wait” mode.
After I had classified these three groups, I thought about how to get as many of them on board as possible. At the time, I had not read Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point with its analysis of how people act as “connectors” and salespeople to bring social movements to an unstoppable point of change. But I was aware of the importance of getting a critical mass of people involved in a change effort and knew that as little as 10 percent of the total company population could be enough, as long as they were the right people.
So I decided to focus on the transformers. If I could get them on board, they would bring along a lot of fence sitters. And as more people boarded the train, the lost souls would either fall silent, leave the company, or perhaps even climb the steps themselves.
I found out, however, that as much as transformers want change, they are smart, observant, and not easily fooled. They listen closely to words but believe that proof is in action. So, as we’ll see, it takes much more than a passionate call of “All aboard!” and a promise of a bright future to win them over and get their support and engagement.
Another External Factor: The Excuse Culture
As these conversations were going on, I began to realize that there was another factor involved in the company’s current situation and people’s attitudes toward it. This factor had to do with the environment outside the company, but not so much with the specific IT landscape as the worldwide business scene. I call it the excuse culture.
I began thinking about this in reaction to a curious pattern of behavior I saw in some of our managers. They would look in the mirror, see the truth of the company’s situation, and yet feel no obligation to do anything about it. They had become complacent and comfortable with their reality and believed that everything and anything that was wrong was the fault of circumstances beyond their control. They had an excuse for everything:
“The economy is terrible, so nothing can be done.”
“Leaders of huge corporations are going to jail for outrageous transgressions, so why should anybody else have to perform up to a high standard?”
“Whole companies are failing and banks are exploding, so we should be happy just to still be in business.”
This reasoning drove me a bit crazy, but it made me realize even more the importance of the Mirror Mirror exercise and getting people to see reality as completely as possible. Only then could we begin to get beyond the excuses.
My Own Experience with the Mirror
Let me add here that it is not only employees who must look into the mirror, and not only employees who are good at blaming external factors for their own lack of performance. Leaders are just as likely to avoid the mirror and make all kinds of excuses for themselves.
Fortunately, I had some practice in facing up to reality on a personal level. My first experience with the mirror came soon after I joined HCL as a senior management trainee in 1985. I had just gotten my MBA from XLRI School of Business and Human Resources. I had wanted to join a small company so I could have an impact on its results sooner than I would in a larger organization and, with lots of ideas on how to improve HCL and help it grow, I felt supreme confidence that I would quickly rise up through the ranks. After only three weeks of training, however, I was approached by a senior executive who took me aside and told me that I probably did not have a future with HCL. I was shocked. “Why?” I asked. “Because you haven’t paid enough attention to our products,” he said. “You care only about strategy.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I floundered for something to say and finally turned red and said nothing.
“Look, Vineet,” the executive said. “Our business is about products. Unless you master them, you will not get very far at HCL. In fact, you won’t get beyond next week.”
I went home and spent the evening pacing my room, frustrated and angry, thinking about what I should do. I felt that the executive had a very narrow view of business and I was convinced he was all wrong about me.
Just before I went to bed, however, I looked at myself in the mirror. I did not see the world-beating MBA, the future top executive I imagined myself to be. Instead, I saw a young trainee who, in truth, had not spent enough time learning about the fine points of the company’s products and services and how they were different from those of our competitors. I conceded that the executive had a point. I realized that I could not work in a technology company and expect to become a senior executive without a complete understanding of the company’s offerings. I had not been seeing reality very clearly.
The image snapped me out of it. I decided to view the experience as an opportunity. I promised myself that I would change my outlook. I went back to training the next day and worked hard at learning the company’s products and services, and a month later I was assigned to the role of business manager in the Mumbai office, one of the company’s toughest assignments.
That was my first experience with looking in the mirror, recognizing the truth, and deciding that a change was needed. Now, it was necessary for me to do it again. I had to look into the mirror and honestly see myself and the company I was supposed to run.
Looking into the Mirror and Seeing the Past
When I saw our employees looking into the mirror, a strange thing happened. I found that many of them were actually staring into the past, as if they were looking into a rearview mirror at the landscape we had already traveled through.
At first, I didn’t understand.
I had been with Comnet for twelve years, after all, and I had become very used to its high-speed, entrepreneurial environment. A start-up, by its very nature, is about the desire to change something: a technology, a company, the world. When we looked in the mirror at Comnet, we caught a glimpse of the future.
So it took me a while to realize that far too many people at HCLT were focused on the past. They were seeing twenty-seven years of achievement. Exciting leaps of growth. National recognition and pride. No wonder the company was steeped in nostalgia for the landscape of yesterday. That may have been the only view that provided much pleasure and comfort. The present was too frustrating. The future was too unknown.
Isn’t this true of many companies today? Perhaps your own?
We at HCLT had to stop looking into the past.
But how would I stop it? Should I be brutal and yank away the mirror? Should I say, “You look in the mirror and think that HCLT is still the leader. But, in reality, HCLT is no longer the front-runner it once was”?
No. That would simply be behaving like a traditional, authoritarian CEO. Besides, that approach would only depress people, hurt them, shock them into inaction rather than action.
I had to strike a delicate balance. On the one hand, people had to see that HCLT was no longer the leader it had once been. On the other hand, I did not want to damage the great pride that employees felt in the company and its past glories, as pride can be a great source of strength when coupled with a desire to change.
The only solution I could think of was to create a vision that our people could look forward to, an image much more attractive than what they saw when looking backward, and so appealing they would get excited about what was to come.
But what would that image be? What should our future look like?
Surprising Conversations with Customers
During the Mirror Mirror period, in addition to my meetings with employees around the world, I also met and spoke with many customers.
I vividly remember one of these meetings; it was with the CIO of a global corporation. HCLT had just completed a major, time-critical project for the company, which had gone extremely well. I entered the conference room where the HCLT team and the CIO were waiting. I was expecting to get a big smile and a handshake from him, to accept a pat on the back, and to hear champagne corks popping.
On the contrary, the CIO barely said a brief hello to me and then focused his attention on the HCLT team. “I want to thank all of you for the excellent work you have done on our project,” he said. “Not only have you fulfilled our requirements, but you have gone far beyond our expectations. And it has been a joy to work with you.” He gave each of them a hug. Then he turned to me. “Vineet,” he said, “you have just come on board. You don’t know how lucky you are to have such wonderful people working for you.” I was surprised and touched by the emotion in his voice.
The scene made a lasting impression on me.
Not long after that, I attended a very different meeting with a customer. This time, the project had been a disaster. We had failed to execute on time, and we had not met the project specifications. I walked into the room where the project team was waiting, ready to explain to the customer how we would correct our mistakes.
Before I could say a word, he looked me in the eye. “Vineet, your people did everything they could,” he said. “The problem was that your organization didn’t support them properly. If it had, I’m sure they would have been able to meet our objectives.” He was angry at me, not at the team.
Again, I was surprised and struck by the comment.
Neither customer had said a word about our services or products. They had talked only about the team members, the employees they had worked with. Could it be that they saw more value in the individual employees who delivered the services than they did in the services and supporting technologies themselves?
Gen Y
The review of the IT landscape, along with the conversations with employees and customers, made me look more closely at the employees who were creating the most value for our customers. I saw that one group in particular behaved differently from the rest and was most likely to be made up of transformers: the Gen Y employees.
Unlike the longer-serving employees who had become used to the traditional organization, these younger people weren’t impressed that I was president. They didn’t care so much about titles and positions; they didn’t look upward for direction. They asked pointed questions of me. But they didn’t expect perfect answers, or any solution at all. They believed in collaboration. They loved to learn. They shared everything—information, music, ideas, feelings. They spent many hours (not all on work time, I hope) on Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, and a lot of them wrote their own blogs to share their ideas with the world.
These people had been the key members of the teams that my conversations with customers had been about. They were the ones who did the real work. The ones who met with customers. Who delivered our products and services. Who worked through problems. Who deserved support and praise.
I realized that they themselves were the value we offered customers. Taken together, they created the value zone within the company’s organization. Without them, without that zone of value, HCLT was nothing but a shell, layers and layers of management or aggregators with controls and processes that had nothing to offer to the customers.
That was why that first customer had hugged every one of the team members, but not me. And why the second customer had blamed me, not the team, for the company’s failure. They saw that management did not live in the value zone or anywhere near it. They recognized that, in fact, management at times got in the way of creating value. Management did not say to the employees in the value zone, “What can we do to help you?” Instead, we wasted their precious time and energy by requiring them to make endless presentations to us about irrelevant things and write reports about what they had or had not done.
Not only did we have to stop wasting their time, but we also had to find a way to put the value zone at the center of the organization.
The Age-Old Pyramid
These observations made me realize that we needed to hold up the mirror to the organization itself, not just to the employees. What was the reality of the HCLT organizational structure?
It did not take a great deal of effort to determine that it was a traditional hierarchy—the age-old pyramid, with the few on the top, most on the bottom, and the many in between. The value zone, the place where the essential work of the company was accomplished, had long been considered the R&D and manufacturing departments, where products were created and produced. That’s where the faster chips had been developed, new technologies devised, and smarter features added.
But as my conversations with customers and my observations of the Gen Y transformers proved, the new knowledge economy had changed all that. The value zone no longer lay in the technology itself and certainly not in any specific piece of hardware or software. Customers could choose among many technologies, from a variety of suppliers, all of which would probably enable them to achieve their goals.
The value zone now lay in the way the technologies were brought together and implemented—the how of our offering, more than the what. But those people were not properly respected or supported within the archaic pyramid that had been designed to exalt those with hierarchical power rather than those who created customer value.
Serving the Value Zone
I mulled over this problem. How could we strengthen the value zone? How could we move the focus away from the what of our offering to the how of delivering value? What could management do differently?
A radical image came into my mind: an inverted pyramid. What if we could turn the traditional organization upside down? What if management was accountable to the value zone and the people in it, not just the other way around? What if the organizational pyramid could be inverted? The bottom would become the top, the top would be at the bottom.
Employees first.
Customers second.
Management … third?
If we could do that, wouldn’t we have something very powerful? Wouldn’t it enable us to transform the way we deliver value to our customers and make the zone between our customers and our employees into something special?
After all, not every company can create an innovative new product or service; not every company can be a Google or a Facebook. We have to find other ways to differentiate ourselves, to create real and distinct value for our customers. But wouldn’t this kind of transformation set us apart from our competitors and help us throw off the baggage of long ago? Wouldn’t it help us become more engaged with our employees and fire their imaginations? Wouldn’t such a transformation, made from the ground up, be more sustainable? Was this the way to build the competitive advantage we so desperately needed?
I knew the answer was yes.
Aspiring to Point B: The Romance of Tomorrow
The inverted pyramid was the germ of the idea that eventually, after much discussion with my management team and people throughout the company, was expressed in the phrase Employees First, Customers Second (EFCS).
It is one thing, however, for a leader to have an idea and quite another thing for an organization to embrace it. I knew it would not be enough for me to make speeches to our employees about organizational structures, value zones, competitive differentiators, and EFCS. I had to make everyone see the future image of point B that would replace the image of the past that they liked so much.
And it had to be attractive. When a teenage girl or boy looks in the mirror, what does he or she see? Barack Obama. Oprah Winfrey. Steve Jobs. Or A.R. Rahman, the composer who won two Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire? The teenagers fall into the romance of tomorrow, into the aspiration of point B. I wanted our employees to be like teenagers again, with visions of endless possibilities ahead.
So, all that spring, I spent hundreds of hours talking to people throughout the company, exploring this idea of the inverted pyramid and how it related to the idea of Employees First, Customers Second. I wanted them to understand that we needed to shake things up, put management in service to the employees in the value zone, and bring more of the characteristics of Gen Y into the workplace. I also wanted them to know that change did not mean we would devalue the good things that HCLT had accomplished over the years or the great people we had in the workforce.
I used stories and metaphors to help get my meaning across, as I continue to do, and as I do throughout this book. “Think about the diamond cutter,” I said. “He starts with a rough stone and uses his skills to make it beautiful. Or think of the potter. She takes raw clay and shapes it into a wonderful vase. If there were no imperfections in the world, we would not need the diamond cutter or the potter. The same is true of business. Would you rather work in a company where everything was perfect and nothing needed to be changed? Or would you rather be in a company that needs to be transformed?”
Just as with our discussions of point A, as we discussed point B we found that groups fell into the now-expected categories: transformers, lost souls, and fence sitters. Although the stories and metaphors fired up our transformers, it seemed that there would never be enough of them to reach a tipping point. As time went along, however, and as people asked better and more pointed questions and as our conversations grew deeper and increasingly genuine, more and more employees began to get excited about the image of the inverted pyramid. They understood that the reason the company was going to be a better place to work was that management was depending on them to bring about a change. Not only did more and more people within the company climb on board, many of the frustrated transformers who had left the company started to return.
Walking the Roads of Three Heroes
As we went about this process at HCLT, I thought about my three heroes—Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr.—and how they had created transformation in their societies. I realized that although they had made many speeches and taken many stands, these three leaders were known for far more than their specific actions. They had also transformed the mind-set of their people, and the new way of thinking had lasted long beyond their lifetimes.
These great leaders did not formulate strategy by retreating with their top people to a private place and then emerging to make a pronouncement to the masses. No, they walked the roads of their countries, met their people, and talked with them ceaselessly. During that process, they held up the mirror to their societies and helped their people see and articulate what was wrong. The leaders were able to make people intrinsically unhappy with the current state of affairs without demeaning their accomplishments or dishonoring their past in any way. Gandhi, Mandela, and King helped their countrymen to see point A. They also worked with their people to create an idea of the future, the point B that made people aspire to change. The resulting combination of dissatisfaction, continued pride, and excitement was a very, very heady potion and difficult to reject.
I do not claim, of course, that we at HCLT were the only ones who followed this transformation path. Many other companies created their own versions of our Mirror Mirror exercise and developed their own processes for identifying points A and B.
Moreover, although this book is focused on how we used the Mirror Mirror exercise to start our own transformation in 2005, we relied on it again during the worldwide economic troubles of 2008. We held up the mirror to ourselves then to see where we were and how we were reacting to the situation. In other words, the Mirror Mirror process is just one element in a continuous cycle. It helped us change in 2005. We brought out the mirror again in 2007 so that we could clearly see the progress we had made and celebrate it. We looked into it again in 2008, when the challenges facing the company had changed. It is important to understand that the Mirror Mirror concept happens periodically throughout a company’s life, not just once.
I didn’t completely understand where we were headed in those spring days of 2005. I saw that people had looked in the mirror and that many were seeing the reality of our point A. This had created the necessary aspiration for change. I also believed that the Employees First, Customers Second concept was beginning to catch on. But, now that we had gotten the company to understand the present and look toward the possibilities of the future, I saw that there was no path connecting the two dots. I realized that we had taken only the very first step in our journey of transformation.