Employee First, Customer Second.

I've been especially interested in what I've seen at HCL Technologies, an Indian information technology company, which has been described as having the world's most modern management.

The first tenet of HCL's change strategy is called, somewhat provocatively, Employee First, Customer Second. The aim is to attract the very best talent - a tall order in the competitive Indian labor market but crucial for the company's growth - and empower employees to take the lead in coming up with innovative ways to create value for customers. This distributed leadership model is based on communities of interest: tight-knit groups that pull together people from various functions and locations. Each community comes up with new ideas and then competes with the other groups for funding in HCL's internal market.

According to HCL president Vineet Nayar, the strategy - which is supported by the savvy use of social-networking technology - will have succeeded when it "destroys the office of the president." That is, as the communities of interest evolve, the leaders of the groups will begin to share leadership of the company with Vineet.

From a HBR article in January 2008