MINDTREE INITIATIVE

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In the first session, Bagchi listens while the participant talks. Sometimes, even they are surprised by their own answers. In the second session, Bagchi gives his perspective on the participant's reflections and "works towards building a shared understanding of who the participant is".

The third session deals with, "Where do we go from here?" Together, the Gardener and the Plant may decide that the latter needs more EQ, or more analytical skills, or a special project (sometimes, it is just a field visit) to enhance his self-awareness.

The fourth and final session becomes a platform for other engagements. "These four sessions, and the subsequent engagements, help me build a leadership of one," says Bagchi.

But they are alsIn future, Bagchi hopes to create many roles that would have nothing to do with seniority, title, power, or entitlement, but focus on long-standing issues and make an impact without depending on structural sanctions.

MindTree has committed to support this endeavor for five years. However, there will be a "stock-taking" in February next year.

Apart from leadership, the other key thing for an organisation is size. This requires what Bagchi terms "active deconstruction". How do you make an organisation all the while effectively smaller, even as it becomes larger?
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," explains Bagchi.

The idea of working with the communities of practice, which, again, are voluntary, is to "deconstruct the largeness of the enterprise".

In the organisation of tomorrow, structure and non-structure will co-exist. Hierarchy will not go away; it will learn to work with the hetroarchy. That is why Procter & Gamble is engaging with FaceBook 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 colour though. That is how we can engage with people who visit you at Second Life (the website where you can live a virtual life) even before they send you their r鳵m頩n real life," Bagchi explains

therefore meets the 45 Community Champions every quarter for half a day. "I represent a non-structural role, hence I'm welcome," he explains. The MindTree management provides the physical infrastructure, digital content management system to feed data, collaboration tools, "and then gets out of the way".

Bagchi gives two days to individual communities "for what they want me to do for them". He visits campuses so that they begin to think differently. "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".

It is important for an organisation to have distributed leadership 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 organisation. 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 organisation that is larger than the sum of its parts.