Actually, the question should be, why not? The time has come for all of us to take the idea of organization, titles, roles and everything else in between, to the next level. The so-called modern organization we created for ourselves and then became a product of is an extension of the ‘Factory-Economy’ of the last century. It does not do full justice to the needs of the Knowledge Economy – it is the rapidly unfolding world around us. So, we need to recreate many things inside the organization so that we can deal with the changes outside of it.

There is both symbolism and substance in embracing an unusual title like ‘Gardener’ in the MindTree context.

The symbolism is in the fact that at a certain level, titles do not nourish you. I am sending that message to our leaders. I am who I am, call me by whatever name. Titles are as meaningful or meaningless as the person holding it. Now, let us look at the substantive part.

My role in the years ahead would be that of nurturing our key leaders and our communities of practice at MindTree. When we were looking at alternative titles for something like that, we all liked the idea of a Gardener for many reasons.

The term best describes what I am set out to do. Think of a gardener; first of all, he is a skilled person. He is very useful to the garden. He likes his work. He has an organic
relationship with each plant in the garden. He has no ego. However pretty a garden may be, people come to see it, no one comes to see a gardener and he is OK with that. He is an extremely humble person and sees his task as something that is never ending. In the Knowledge Economy, in the organizations of tomorrow, I see the role of leadership akin to that of a Gardener tending a garden. So, here I am. Gardener.

No, I am not a ‘Chief’ anything. For a moment we did contemplate the title ‘Head Gardener’. The Board was discussing the proposed change. Then Mark Runacres, one of
the Board Members pointed out that the prefix ‘Head’ smacks of hierarchy and right that moment, we killed it. So, Gardener, it was.

I am also not a Mentor because a Mentor must be much closer to a Mentee, over a much longer period. The term Mentor is not understood well in most organizations – we have
rolled out a much larger program on Mentoring within MindTree recently.

The reason for creating this position at our current juncture is to prepare MindTree for the
next phase of its journey. In the last eight years, we went from 0 to almost 6,000 people; from an idea, we took the company all the way to IPO -we have indeed come a long way. In the process, we have been able to create a very different kind of an organization.

MindTree today is known for its intellect, culture of integrity and its people practices. Now we are saying, where are we headed from here, what would it take to get there? What would we have to do to remain new and different and relevant to all our stakeholders?

We felt that as organizations expand rapidly, top-management has to match internal leadership capacity with external opportunities. As organizations grow, top management forgets to focus on that internal capacity creation or is plain reactive. It thinks of internal
capacity creation as sending people to leadership programs and then hopes that they would be intellectually sheep-dipped (and emotionally secure!) to seek new opportunities, pursue unusual new ideas, and create alignment and lead.

The effect of this sort of thinking is random and the result is dissipated leadership. While training, mentoring, performance management and all the traditional stuff must continue, we now need newer ways to engage.

In my new role, I would create the necessary ‘white-space’ – the time to sit face-to-face with a leader, undistracted, and be available to him or her exclusively, for everything that may be in his or her ‘Personal-Professional’ space and talk, understand and question all the personal and professional paradigms. We would explore together. Read. Watch a movie. Go places. Do some sense-making that is only between that person and I which can unlock a hidden latch somewhere, resolve a difficult knot or simply get the person to see himself in new light.

I see people’s lives as a spectrum – at one end it consists of what I call ‘personal-personal’ issues – like the relationship with a spouse and at the other end are
‘ professional-professional’ issues: ‘Why should I not get a higher raise this year or how do I get my Boss to see that I get promoted’ -stuff like that. I would not engage at the two extreme ends of the spectrum.

A leader can come and work with me on all kinds of issues in between the two extremities -of the Personal-Professional continuum that bother him, concern him or
intrigue him and seek me out as a sounding board, ask me questions, dialogue with me or demand that I share what happened in my life.

To enable a free-flow, details of my interaction with the leader would not be available to MindTree. To make the leader feel at ease, I have also dropped all reporting relationships – in my new role no one reports to me, I do not report to anyone.

We are not talking about the Best 100. The Top 100 is easier to start with, they are discernable as a group, and providing them with sense-making could have huge leverage.
If each one changes the way he or she engages with five key people, as a result, we are talking about 500 key people impacted positively in a year!

I do hope that the Top 100 do have some of our best people, though. Otherwise, we have a problem right there!

You also said that you would work with Communities of Practice within MindTree?

Yes, apart from leadership capacity, the other key thing for an organization to deal with is size. This requires what I call ‘active deconstruction’. How do you make an organization all the while effectively smaller, even as it becomes larger?

One of the ways to do it is to look at the organization as a ‘community of communities’. So, people are not required to belong to or identify with a monolith. They can engage with and participate in a community of their own choice. They can define its agenda, its leadership and all that is voluntary. We have 45 such communities. They work as vehicles of innovation and serve as a powerful support organization to our people. But they are also shy of structure and management.

As Gardener, I would give time to these communities of practice in a ‘pull-push’ manner. I would work with them on the ground to question their purpose, their vision, sit with them, listen-in to their deliberations and sometimes take them outside MindTree and sometimes bring the outside world to them.

By expanding the capacity of the Top 100 leaders, we make them open to change. By working with the communities of practice, which are voluntary in nature, we can deconstruct the largeness of the enterprise.

In the short-term, the fact that I would engage with the Top 100 and touch at least 50 per cent of them in the first year itself would make them engage differently with their own people. When people look at themselves in new light, it is the organization seeing itself in new light.

Using this experience in the long-term, we should be able to create many such roles that have nothing to do with seniority, title, power, entitlement but focus on long-acting issues and make an impact without depending on structural sanctions. The best of people should
be willing to don such roles and move easily in and out of them.

No, the organization of tomorrow will have structure and the non-structure co-exist. Hierarchy will not go away; it will learn to work with the hetroarchy. That is why Procter and Gamble is engaging with Face Book and creating Capessa.

We have to extend the same rule of engagement to the internal customer, we have to redo the linkage, reinvent
ways to collaborate with, expand and impact that individual very differently than during the end of Factory Economy that stayed content with the term ‘White Collar’ – the Knowledge Economy may indeed have as many people without collars as with – forget the color though. That is how we can engage with people who visit you at Second Life even before they send you their résumé in real life.

Yes, in the first year, I would like to have four sessions each with 50 of the Top 100 MindTree Leaders – a session is defined as a four-hour slot. I would meet with the 45 Community Champions every quarter on a half-day basis and I would give two days to individual communities for what they want me to do for them. I will also visit 25 campuses in 2008 so that they begin to think differently as well. As you can see, these are input measures.

In roles like these, input measurements are more critical in the first 12 months. In addition, I want to see substantial content creation with an internal blog.

The organization must have distributed leadership at the top so that some can focus on the structure and some on the non-structure. Some can focus on the hierarchy by belonging to it, and some on the hetroarchy by working with the invisible folks in the organization.

The distributed leadership must be emotionally secure – its members must have a higher sense of purpose that they are not creating fiefdom; they are creating a living organization that is larger than the sum of its parts. It requires vision and courage to experiment and evolve. Finally, it certainly helps in being in a growth-bound
environment so that you are addressing issues before issues are addressing you.

It may, it could. But the concept would not.

I want to be able to write my third book using this experience. That would be quite
something.