Page 91 - DMGT520_ORGANIZATION_CHANGE_AND_DEVELOPMENT

Organization Change and Development

Notes
In the U.S., salaries were cut across the board by 10%. In India, senior managers volunteered
for an additional 2% cut to keep certain people whom they would rather have retrained
than let go.
A full-blown recession (The US Bombing of Afghanistan and worsening of India Pakistan
Relationship)…

Following September 11, the US bombed Afghanistan. The economic slow down became
a full-blown recession and the world scaled back on all fronts. India and Pakistan ended up
having a serious border dispute and the world was concerned that the two nuclear rivals
would end up going to a full-scale war. The western countries began pulling out citizens
from the two countries and there was a travel advisory prohibiting U.S. citizens to go to
India.
All across the United States as well as the IT sector, there was anxiety. There was a pall of
gloom, uncertainty and insecurity.
The Anxieties and how the management tackled them…
Project Mindful Mirror – The Methodology and Implications

The management all along realized that they needed to talk and that they needed to get
people to talk. They needed to do some serious introspection at a personal level and at a
collective level so that we could move forward.

At this point of time, Vipin Bagchi requested Professors Raghu Garud and Roger Dunbar
of the Stern School at New York to help the leadership team do some “sense making” of
both internal and external events outside and inside. Both Raghu and Roger had a long
association with Gold Smith because of an on-going project they had with the Stern School.

The project was called “Mindful Mirror”. In this unique collaboration, these researchers
used Professors Raghu Garud and Roger Dunbar periodic dipsticks in Gold Smith and try
to see how an organisation is raised from the ground up, as a study of “potential success in
the making”. Their approach to the study was not interventional, meaning they are not
“consultants”. They used to take the inputs, put them in a relational database, did periodic
sense making of the data and let us have the benefit of their reflections. When Raghu and
Roger came to facilitate the exercise with the leaders in Gold Smith’s US operation, they
uncovered an emotional low of a magnitude.
As a leader, Vipin Bagchi had asked each person/employee to raise issues that bothered
him or her. We collated the entire set before we went into huddle. The issues and questions
that came forth were straight from people’s hearts and were indicative of how deeply
uncertain people feel in times of upheaval. And these were the people who led employees
in the trenches. It became critical to detoxify the workplace and the only way to deal with
it is to face each question squarely, honestly and interactively.
Some of the questions that emerged in this research the management team undertook
were:
“How long can the company survive as it is presently organized?”
“Obviously, the uncertainty surrounding continued employment is extremely stressful as
it represents the single source of income for my family”
“I feel tremendous uncertainty about meeting our revenue and profitability targets. The
numbers were ambitious 1 year ago, but with the nosedive our industry has taken since

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