Page 93 - DMGT520_ORGANIZATION_CHANGE_AND_DEVELOPMENT

Organization Change and Development

Notes
According to Vipin Bagchi
“Months after, as I look back at the events and the emotional low we faced in the aftermath
of September 11, the recession, the war and whatever else, I am grateful that we survived
them as a team and emerged intact. I am sure, though, that we all grew up by a few years.
It was Anil Jha who helped most of us stay sane as we sorted through issues and helped us
continuously to remain in the middle of the road. All around us, companies of all sizes just
evaporated Anil was never ruffled with the events around but was always confident of a
positive, fair outcome. One day in the middle of all this, a leading financial analyst came
to see me. He saw pervasive gloom and doom all around his industry and wanted to ask
me about my perspective on Gold Smith future. I told him something that has since
become part of me in a deep, personal sense. Think of the farmer. He tills the land, sows
the seed, replants the saplings, removes the weeds, irrigates, fertilizes, guards the crop
now standing tall with the harvest ready to go home. Then one night, a hurricane comes
and uproots everything. What does the farmer do? He moves on. He waits for the monsoon
to come again and goes back to till the land. Enterprise builders need to learn from the
humble farmer. We need to look at enterprise as a piece of land God has given us and not
as a slot machine that has just broken down. When we take the former view, a lot of things
fall in place and we develop the inner strength to move on to the task we see as our
destiny.
The Turnaround & The Repositioning of Gold Smith …..

Gold Smith had to reposition itself for the future. On one hand, they had many great
customer wins and large complex projects were getting delivered but on the other hand,
they needed to start building depth in both our lines of offering. The leadership team
along with the middle management sat down and decided that the time had come to think
of the organisation as a set of horizontals and verticals as opposed to the two monoliths of
enterprise and technology business.
It was a major move that meant taking risks and pushing down leadership and
accountability. The enterprise business was restructured to focus on Healthcare, High-
Tech, Manufacturing and Supply Chain as verticals. Data warehousing, Business
Intelligence, e-business and EAI became horizontals. On the technology side of the house,
it was decided to structure the organisation with verticals that focused on Industrial
Automation, Storage, Semi-Conductor, Consumer Appliances and Networking. Hardware
design and software engineering became horizontals.
Each began to work on their go-to-market strategy and fanned out to look at the making
of the new Gold Smith. It began by taking an “outside-in” view.

While all this was happening, the biggest achievement was the progressive shift of the
company’s initial positioning as an e-business integrator on the enterprise side. Gold
Smith began morphing into a full service software player.

 Volvo, looking for a strategic outsourcing partner, signed up for a multi-year,
multimillion-dollar contract.

 They also survived a massive changing of the guard at Avis and continued to work
on Avis.com after its release in December 2001.
 Franklin Templeton went ahead and asked Gold Smith to do multiple new
assignments after the successful completion of their first large project that effectively
collapsed 36 different sites and connected them to their customer service
representatives, who in turn, served their end customers. At its peak, this massive
Contd...

88 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY