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intregity
| commitment | passion
| seamlessness | speed
Mr.
Kumar Mangalam Birla
"Over the last few years, the Aditya
Birla Group has been building critical infrastructure
on the human resource front to realise its
leadership aspirations in the global business
arena. Gyanodaya, our management learning
institute; Aditya Disha, our intranet; Aditya
Birla awards, our salutation to our committed
achievers —- are all milestones of
this purposeful journey. And very recently,
a new and significant initiative has been
launched across the group wherein we have
more sharply defined our values framework.
The
values of any organisation define its character
and personality. Values guide, shape and
influence our behaviour and actions. The
external world perceives and responds to
an organisation based on the way that it
goes about conducting its business. The
world of business today is going through
a crisis of trust, where the credibility
of business leaders and the legitimacy of
business organisations are subjected to
questioning. This scrutiny from the government,
media, analysts, investors and action groups,
is becoming more stringent everyday. In
such an environment of skepticism and cynicism
our actions alone can inspire confidence.
Once again, people are searching for the
soul of the corporation, its values.
In
the Aditya Birla Group we are becoming more
heterogeneous as we globalise. Also, 30
per cent of our people have been with the
group for less than five years and 48 per
cent are below the age of 38 years. With
every acquisition, we add a significant
number of new colleagues with diverse backgrounds,
and experience and most importantly, with
different expectations from us. While these
developments are exciting, I firmly believe
that we need a stronger organisational glue
to hold us together, apart from the time-tested
bonds of our legacy, heritage, a shared
set of systems, processes and best practices,
an activist corporate centre, our logo and
our name.
People
contribute when they relate to an organisation
and they relate, when they understand the
organisation. And people understand an organisation
through its values, by experiencing the
culture that the values create and by using
the systems and processes that the values
define. In large organisations, such shared
understanding cannot be created through
the leadership of individuals alone, it
requires leadership of principles, of beliefs,
of conviction — these together constitute
what we call the "values".
The
articulation of a common set of values,
I believe, enables organisations to pull
in a common direction, gives employees something
they can easily identify with, helps them
to find common cause with each other and
creates a common sense of purpose. It also
takes the assimilation of new employees
and cultures easier and faster in periods
of rapid growth. With these objectives,
and also a view of the future in mind, I
had articulated and proposed a set of values
for the group about six years ago.
However
in this period, we as an organisation have
confronted many moments of truth and one
thing became very clear to me. We needed
a values framework for the group as the
foundation for our future, which must have
wide ownership, deeper understanding across,
larger application, stronger implementation
and most critically, be backed by the active
personal sponsorship and role modeling of
us all.
An
exercise for identifying values is never
easy. One has scores of values and values-related
practices to choose from. An emotional attachment
with the past and multiple views of the
future complicate the task. Nonetheless,
supported by a presentation by corporate
HR, all our directors and business heads
worked through a common session to take
a view and we agreed on the five of: "integrity,
commitment, passion, seamlessness and speed".
Let
me say a few words on how we view each of
these values and our future plans for disseminating
our values framework through the organisation.
Integrity
We
define integrity as honesty in every action.
We shall act and take decisions in a manner
that these are fair, honest and follow the
highest standards of professionalism. Integrity
shall be the cornerstone for all our dealings,
be it with our customers, our employees, suppliers,
our partners, shareholders, the communities
we serve or the government.
Commitment
On
the foundation of integrity, we see commitment
as doing whatever it takes to deliver as promised.
Each one of us shall take ownership for our
own work, teams and the part of the organisation
we are responsible for. Through this value,
we shall build an even sharper results-oriented
culture that is high on reliability and accountability.
Our commitment is likely to make us a formidable
leader and competitor in every market that
we are in.
Passion
We
define passion as a missionary zeal arising
out of an emotional engagement with work which
inspires each one to give his or her best.
All of us are expected to be enthusiastic
in the pursuit of our goals and objectives.
We shall recruit and actively encourage employees
with a 'fire in the belly'. With this value,
we hope to build a culture of innovation and
breakthrough thinking, leading to superior
customer satisfaction and value creation.
Seamlessness
We
understand seamlessness as thinking and working
together across functional silos, hierarchy
levels, across business lines and geographies.
Each one of us shall demonstrate high level
of teamwork through sharing and collaborative
efforts and garner the synergy benefits from
working together. Before we can truly benefit
from a borderless world, we need to build
a borderless organisation. We visualise free
flow of knowledge and information across the
group.
I am reminded of the words of my father, the
late Aditya Vikram Birla: "Our search
for knowledge is not limited to within the
group. We seek knowledge from every nook and
corner, from our competitors, suppliers, customers
et al. Even the worst run units in India would
have something to teach us. It is with this
humility that we seek knowledge."
Speed
We
look upon speed as responding to internal
and external customers with a sense of urgency.
We shall continuously seek to crash timelines
and ensure expeditious completion of our tasks.
Through this value, we hope to build an agile
and proactive organisation that is prompt
to respond to the present and future needs
of our customers.
All these values together form our core ideology.
They are all equally important and no value
will take precedence at the cost of the other.
It is in the harmonisation of the five that
we see the prospect of greater value creation
for all our stakeholders.
Let
me conclude by saying that great businesses
are never built on the quick sands of opportunism.
I reiterate that, if living by our values
means, perhaps growing at a pace slower
than we would otherwise have liked, so be
it. For us, leadership lies at the heart
of knowing what we stand for."
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