HCL's CEO to discuss latest strategies for business success at WEF

Meeting the employee challenge and use of collaborative partnerships key factors in securing success throughout challenging global economic conditions

Vineet Nayar, CEO at HCL Technologies Ltd. (HCL), a leading global IT services provider, is using the opportunity of his attendance at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, 28 January – 1 February 2009, to highlight the key strategies he believes businesses should implement to help them meet the challenges presented by the worsening global economy. At events taking place in and around the forum, Vineet will discuss how organizations can survive and be competitive in a challenging environment. He will highlight the importance of “Reverse Accountability”; highlighting the potential of collaborative partnerships between organizations and their outsourcing partners; and ways that organizations can foster sustainable and competitive businesses citing examples from his experience of transforming HCL by its ground-breaking ‘Employee First’ strategy.

HCL is hosting an event at Davos at which it will focus attention on the importance of building collaborative partnerships between clients and their service providers. HCL will highlight the goals it believes are most important to businesses naturally concerned with driving success at this time: aligning technology and employees to the business, unlocking and monetizing innovation, creating a lean business and taking advantage of opportunities within emerging markets. HCL will discuss the vital role that a truly collaborative partnership has in optimizing the ability of the central organization to attain these goals. For other discussions in this area, visit www.unstructure.org.

Says Vineet Nayar, “The global business community is witnessing the most challenging and uncertain economic period. To succeed in the future and possibly even survive, companies in every industry will need to radically adapt their business models. The autocratic way of command and control in all engagements will have to go. This recession is throwing up living examples of organisations that are badly run and opaque in their functioning folding up. Unless organisations adopt a culture of “Reverse Accountability”, they cannot innovate, be competitive and be sustainable. One crucial area of innovation is the approach to partnerships. In today’s environment, partnership and collaboration as a strategic necessity, potentially allowing access to essential resources, capabilities and talent, reducing costs and risk, enhancing revenue, and supporting long-term, sustainable growth. A new collaborative partnership model is already taking hold under which deep relationships are being formed not only with suppliers, distributors and other complementary producers, but with competitors and clients as well. The financial crisis, and its impact on the global marketplace, is likely to accelerate these new forms of collaboration.”

Vineet Nayar will also appear on the panel of a public session exploring the ‘Employment Challenge’. The International Labour Organization is predicting that the world's unemployed will total 210 million by the end of 2008, the highest level in over a decade. The session will discuss how governments, labour unions and employers can work together to ensure that entrepreneurial growth is promoted when responding to this challenge and that social safety nets are deployed. Alongside Vineet on the Employee Challenge panel will be David Arkless, executive board member of Manpower UK and the co-chair of the Skills Gap Global Agenda Council, Xavier Bertrand, Minister of Labour, Social Relations and Solidarity of France, Philip J. Jennings, general secretary, UNI Global Union, Switzerland, James H. Quigley, Global CEO, Deloitte, USA, and Nguyen Thien Nhan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education and Training of Vietnam. and moderated by Dr. Rafael Rangel, President, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico.

Nayar believes that it is only through a motivated workforce that any company can be successful. It is imperative that organisations be competitive so they can create jobs and more importantly create and sustain an environment for employees that will help them innovate thereby making the company profitable and sustainable. Vineet will talk about HCL’s Employee First strategy and how its creating success and helping HCL become sustainable. He will also highlight how today, organizations have to structure themselves to address the particular needs today’s generation.  Vineet believes that employees prefer to work on collaborative models rather than hierarchical ones. With a growing number of such employees, Vineet will stress how some companies will need to transform to make management more transparent and accountable to employees, and responsible for creating sustainable business. To read about Vineet’s views visit http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/nayar, and www.hcltech.com/vineet.