Reference no: EM133050764

Mr Ajay Gupta, Vice-President, Operations at Clarity Business Solutions (CBS) shifted uneasily in his seat when he heard the first few lines of his CEO Rakesh Menon's speech at the AGM in the online mode. Rakesh was reputed to be a tough leader who had guided CBS through the disruptive pandemic with a firm, unyielding stance as their competitors struggled and fell on the wayside in an unforgiving market. Ajay was trying to process what Rakesh was saying at that moment:

"In the current corporate environment, running a large enterprise involves massive challenges. To respond to this dynamic environment, it is imperative for us to be very agile, responsive, consistent, cost-effective and sustainable for the future. With a practitioner's approach experience, CBS is uniquely poised to help customers effectively map and harmonize business processes".

What increased Ajay's discomfort was the fact that CBS was not really poised well to deliver the goods in the present financial quarter. As a company that supplied business retail solutions to an impressive clientele in the retail sector, it had seen better times before the pandemic, and Rakesh had pulled it through with a few unpopular strategies such as downsizing, slashing budgets and reallocating resources. No longer did departments enjoy the luxury of multiple teams working simultaneously on one customer account; after they had let go at least 20% of the workforce, the operations were controlled by smaller, but more nimble teams who were given relentless deadlines. However, merely adapting to the "new normal" with agility was not helping much. Ajay knew where the problem lay; if he could summarize it in a few words, it was a people problem and not a business one.

The current decision-makers chiefly comprised senior leaders who were overwhelmed by the ongoing rapid digital change in the last two years. Most of them also subscribed to a cultural mind-set that hampered rather than aided innovative approaches to business. They did realize the fact that the company needed to accelerate its migration to digital technologies at a stunning scale and speed within a few months as against a few years. They also needed to set an ambitious digital agenda and recalibrate the use of data and analytics to create a seamless e-commerce experience for their clients. Unfortunately, they were so entrenched in the traditional ways of doing business that they dragged their feet and proved wanting when it came to taking certain decisions to adapt to digital technologies.

Most of the senior leaders were not digital natives but digital immigrants, whereas members of Generation Y and Z were born into the digital age, growing up and getting comfortable with digital technologies. There had been at least four instances in the last one year when the senior team had found it difficult to adapt to the disruptive changes in technology and had not really learnt fast enough. It had also refused to decommission the *legacy infrastructure and bring cloud operations on premise. As a result, decision-making had been delayed, precious time was lost - and this reflected in the negative growth in the last quarter.

Ajay had often toyed with the idea of creating a reverse mentoring team with the millennials who would mentor the digital immigrants to cope with the overwhelming changes ushered in by digitization. As Rakesh continued with his speech, Ajay was suddenly reminded of a book he had read in his B-School days: "Straight from the Gut" by Jack Welch. It was Welch, former CEO of General Electric, who popularized the concept of reverse mentoring in the late 1990s. His focus was on what junior employees could teach their elders about new technology and tools. A pilot project paired 500 senior and junior employees, 'tipping the organization upside down' with 'the youngest and brightest teaching the oldest'. It worked. The senior workers learned about the latest tech; the juniors met people who could champion and sponsor them, gaining a sense that they had a direct line into top management.

Ajay was also conscious of the fact that it would not be easy to implement this program. In companies that had tried to emulate GE, there had been friction and ego-clashes between mentors and mentees, fears that the young mentors would give out confidential information about their seniors, and unwillingness on the part of mentees to learn from people twenty years their junior. In many cases, the momentum of the program had quickly dwindled after a few sessions.

Can we? Should we?

Ajay travelled to the swanky CBS office two days later to have an in-person meeting with his boss. He had been mulling over the idea of reverse mentoring since the day of the AGM and felt it would be a good idea to sound his boss out. Rakesh was sceptical at first but did not reject the idea outright. After all, leading HR consultants all over the world were recommending the idea of reverse mentoring to create new learning possibilities. After a few probing questions, he instructed Ajay to submit a feasibility report on whether it would be viable to create a reverse mentoring program in CBS.

*Legacy infrastructure: (Non-Converged): Customers place separate orders for compute, network storage and virtualization software and perform all necessary installation and integration.

QUESTION:

Draft a report analyzing the viability of a reverse mentoring program for CBS.