Other articles by Dale Dauten:

The Corporate Curmudgeon: 'Law of attraction' just a distractionThe Corporate Curmudgeon: Pressure plays a major role in leading people to greatnessThe Corporate Curmudgeon: Been there, done that won't cut itCorporate Curmudgeon: Bad times could offer best time to take chancesCorporate Curmudgeon: Excellent boss helps underling excel in job The Corporate Curmudgeon : For boomers, bromides may be best medicine Corporate Curmudgeon: Forgive the cliché, but 'Make yourself useful'Corporate Curmudgeon: Top leaders get creative at crunch timeThe Corporate Curmudgeon: Leadership can utilize recession as an assetThe Corporate Curmudgeon: Piglet's profundity: Forget about fright

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RANCHO RESORT
MAINTANANCE POSITION

Picture this: You're at a conference, meeting in a standard hotel ballroom with a couple hundred uneager businesspeople, and this is the opening speaker's opening sentence: "I'm not going to tell you anything today that you haven't heard before; I promise."

It was that little dangler at the end that got me — the "promise." I slid glances left and right. No reaction. When I asked around later, almost no one had heard the remark, and one who had shrugged and said, "There isn't anything new."

Because I've probably told that story before, I won't throw stones; I mention it to point out how difficult it is to write about new management ideas . . . they are the snow leopard of business. So you can imagine my simultaneous delight and suspicion when Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School opined that an Indian information-technology-services company, HCL Technologies, might be "the beginnings of a new model of management."

That got me doing some research and, ultimately, speaking with the company's charismatic leader, Vineet Nayar. Well, I say "spoke with," but mostly I listened, grinning at his energy and insight, and imagining how his heretical views would go over with a typical executive audience. For instance, he once shook up his employees by saying: "Right now, we are poodles. Is that what you want to be?" Poodles. You have to love that kind of guy.

Nayar told me, "Everything else in our lives has evolved; management has not." What he's doing to evolve his management is a new model that starts with: "Employee first. Customer second." He argues, "The scarce resource is not customers, but great employees." OK, so that philosophy is not altogether new — there was a book in 1992 called "The Customer Comes Second" that made a similar point. (See how hard it is to come up with something new in management?) But, having made the employee-first assertion, Nayar then said that his goal is: "Management is as accountable to the employee as the employee is to management." That takes Nayar to a new type of logic and to a new management model.

For instance, HCL doesn't just do 360-degree performance evaluations; Nayar posted his evaluations on the company's intranet and urged other managers to do so. And the company doesn't just have an employee grievance committee; it has a resolution system in which anyone can open a "ticket" with any department's "service desk," and the management is expected to respond — and respond quickly. You can open a ticket on any topic, from a malfunction in a restroom to the suspicion that your raise was chintzy. Only the employee who opened the ticket can close it.

And the service desks are evaluated on how efficiently they resolve the employee concerns. Thus, accountability has been reversed, and the employees have evidence to support the assertion that the management really does believe in "employee first."

Further, to put meat into the second half of the equation, "customer second," Nayar once announced that the company was walking away from some accounts, amounting to $35 million in revenues. He described the effect on his employees' view of management: "That one single move created the conviction that these guys mean it; it isn't just a slogan."

Nayar summed up the effects of this new management model by saying, "We are the fastest-growing IT-services company out of India and among the best-performing stocks."

As for the customers, the folks who got knocked out of first place in the company's culture, Nayar said: "They love it. The customers buy services from us because of the quality of the employees we have and the passion they exhibit."

Which brings us to an interesting question: Can an unhappy employee make a customer happy? Think of all the times you've encountered care-worn, world-weary employees glumly going about their jobs. You, not wanting to let the beam of your gaze fall upon their indifference, look away from their lifeless faces and see a little sign tucked on a computer or cash register that says "Smile!"

There's always something sad about that — isn't there — that reminder to smile? And if the worker tries, and gives you the faux glow of enthusiasm, does that make you feel like you're No. 1? No. So give me second place any day if that means I encounter a winner across the counter. That's the only way we both win.