Interview Questions

Full Interview with Subroto Bagchi

Subroto Bagchi:

I'm very surprised that other organizations have never thought of it and that we ourselves took this much time to come around to the idea. In New Zealand, when people want to color wool, they dip hundreds of sheep in a vat of colored water. It's called sheep dipping. But leadership, self-awareness and 'capacity expansion' can't happen like that. You can't send a 100 people to a training session or a motivational workshop and make them leaders. You need to work with them in an intense manner.

So, I decided to take the top 100 people at MindTree and work with them in an intense one-on-one manner to unlock their hidden potential. When I am engaging with a leader, prior to and after the engagement, we have intense moments of preparation and reflection of what I call 'sense making', which helps leaders focus on the critical amid the clutter of thoughts in their heads. I have moved from looking at transactions to looking for patterns. We are looking at a pattern which is of interest from the organization's future standpoint. We're looking at a pattern created by a 100 individuals and in that collage, a blueprint of organizational transformation emerges. It is not the other way round. It is a fundamental paradigm shift in thinking.

 

 

Subroto Bagchi:

We wanted openness that's why we made the role non-structural. Nobody reports to me and I don't report to anybody. I am under no obligation to share any of my findings with anyone. This makes my relationship with these leaders sacrosanct. It's created an atmosphere of openness and fostered communication, besides inspiring trust. Also, I don't influence the talent review system. My knowledge of people's fears, dreams, aspirations, and weaknesses is not available to that system. I do not sit on the talent review process. The system may lose some, but that's acceptable. It's reflective of the greatness of Ashok Soota that he agreed that I wouldn't report to him and that nobody would report to me. It also demonstrates the collective greatness of the organization.

 

Subroto Bagchi:

Essentially, we observed how in nine years MindTree established a multinational business presence. But now incrementalism will not help the company realize its vision. Exponential growth is the only way forward. Grooming MindTree's top 100 leaders will give us the best shot at that. Also, we have solved what's needed to be a million-dollar company. In one stroke, we have solved a succession planning problem. We need substitutes for the 10 people who are at the helm of the decision machinery today. By making people aware of their mission, visions and values, I awaken them to their DNA and the organization's DNA. If we want to be a long-term player, human capital is pivotal.

 

Subroto Bagchi:

When we started the company, we decided that we would build a company in which human capital was at the core. Structural capital would be a second-phase activity. And with human and structural capital we would build customer capital. After a point, an organization's value is a combination of all three. And over time, an organization's success is a combination of these three. Human capital is about individuals - not the organization. As much an organization tries, it can only convert a limited amount of human capital into structural capital. People have a misconception that it's an organization's job to suck out their brains and put it in jars so that even when they've left, their organizations can monetize on their capital. In comparison to physical and intellectual infrastructure, emotional infrastructure is the most difficult to build. Yet the factors that create emotional infrastructure are not visible to outsiders, making it most difficult to copy and therefore yielding a sizable and sustainable competitive advantage. We want to develop an ideal place for people to build their careers. We built the organization to be like a rain forest; we want to create the fertile conditions where talent can grow and be nurtured.

 

Subroto Bagchi:

A postmodern organization has to look at its people as co-creators. Co-creators of both value and a collective vision of the organization's future. That is why we decided not to call our people 'employees'. Everybody here is a MindTree mind. The more an organization can look at people as co-creators of a collective future, the more it will see sustainable value creation. This helps an organization achieve shared goals and create a compelling vision for the future.

 

Subroto Bagchi:

I worked on a project with Prof. Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck's University (he is also director of Tuck's Center for Global Leadership) to study the attributes of emotionally-bonded organizations. We found that what binds organizations emotionally are also the eight attributes that make successful families. Successful families invariably have a shared vision. This is fundamental to emotional infrastructure. The day a baby arrives, parents start envisioning a child's future. History is replete with examples of greatness sowed in the vision for a child when a family could ill afford basic necessities. The act of such visioning is future-backward and disregards the scarcity of the present.

In an organization with strong emotional infrastructure, there is an articulated vision that is often bold and ambitious. The style of thinking changes from present-forward to future-backward. Successful organizations imagine the future in bold terms. Take the dream of Tata Motors in 2004: "Our intent is to create a high-quality four-passenger car priced at $2,000 (about Rs 1 lakh) that meets all emission requirements." Why does a statement like this provoke an emotional response? Because people are drawn to a bold, challenging, and unrealistic goal. Deep inside, we feel uplifted by the thought of climbing a mountain.

But many people blame their inability to think longer term on the need to deliver quarterly results. They have forgotten how their parents had to pay bills, meet mortgage commitments, wash laundry and throw out the garbage and still imagine a distant future. We cannot blame externalities for our incapacity to envision. Vision is never a constraint-forward thing. It is an opportunity backward thing. I ask my leaders not to see a connection between organizational immediacy and the power of vision. It is time that we outgrew that lazy view of visioning.

 

Subroto Bagchi:

I don't want to be called a mentor. Soon MindTree will be in various lines of business and each will have a vertical focus. It is difficult to be a mentor for people in so many areas. That kind of mentorship becomes superficial. Mentors should be twice removed from their charges, not ten times removed. My role is more of a sense maker. Every life has a story, a pattern and a possibility. I connect the pattern to the possibility. For this, I need to decide what should be underplayed and what to step up. A mentor must commit to investing time and effort to fuel his mentoree's aspirations. He should try his utmost to put an employee on a high performance track. He should be a patient listener and must have an eye for spotting talent.

A good mentor inspires trust. The challenge is to combine nurturing and direction setting. A mentor has to be capable of unquestioned giving and through that build a relationship in which he can be tough, and through that, build an employee's sense of direction, and their ability to make choices and face consequences.

 

Subroto Bagchi:

The most critical attribute is the power to listen and receive. Most people don't have that. As we climb the professional ladder, we experience success and our power to receive begins to recede. Look at a tall mountain. No matter how much it rains, the peak can't hold water. To be able to hold water you have to be able to make a valley out of your mind. Listening is a multi-layered process. When you are listening to a mentor, you are listening to his thoughts, at another level you are listening to the idea behind a thought, and at another level you are listening to the voice of the idea itself and suddenly you find that ideas are building on ideas. This ability to listen and receive makes people mentor-ready. If a potential leader develops a demeanor that suggests receptivity, the whole universe will conspire to make him succeed.

 

Subroto Bagchi:

Succession planning is becoming an increasingly complex issue for postmodern organizations. Old world succession planning assumed that people live in reasonably predictable times but today our environment is unpredictable and the time between two predictable situations is continually collapsing. We need to marry succession planning with 'what if' scenarios. And we need to build succession planning at the top based on different eventualities. We need to build the ability to engage with the external world so that in any eventuality, we have multiple choices.

 

Subroto Bagchi:

Organizations land in this situation because they are tactical. They hired indiscriminately because they thought the environment was moving at a certain speed. They have a short-sighted view of the business landscape, so they find short-term solutions. An emotionally-enriched organization would not do that. They would not get carried away during the good times. When an organization takes a headcount view, it does not understand that when it takes this seemingly easy way out - like asking five percent or 10 percent of its staff to leave - it fills the organization with toxicity. It is not about someone going away, it is about what that person leaves behind. The people left inside begin to develop survival syndrome.

We need to build a more sensitive and realistic view of the future. Learn to develop a long term view and take decisions that won't be questioned every quarter. The other choice is to look like a smart manager who can lower costs as every quarter unfolds, but neglect to build emotional infrastructure.