Leading New Age Businesses: Mindset Shifts Required in Leaders

By: Divya Amarnath, Senior Director & Head, HR New Businesses, Flipkart

Divya Amarnath is a dynamic leader with diverse experience in HR, IR/ER, Sales, Marketing, and Product management. She has a proven track record of rapid growth and recipient of the prestigious Economic Times Young Leader Title in 2017.

“Change is the only constant”- This is the cliched statement we all keep hearing. However, the rate at which the change is happening in the world around us is only accelerating with each passing day. For Millennials like me, I think the rate of change has been the highest over the last decade as compared to any other time preceding that. We live in the world of apps- Food, ride-hailing, and social media today and it makes me wonder how I survived without these till 2010 when most of these were not available. This makes me think that for future generations this RoC (Rate of change) is only going to increase. When as individuals we can feel this change, imagine the implications of this to the overall macro-economic, social, and industrial landscape.

The Scholars have already described that the world is moving from VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) to BANI (Brittle, Anxious. Non-Linear, Incomprehensible). For the unversed VUCA was the term coined in the 1990s and BANI in 2020. The VUCA concept has long been used to describe the volatility that has become the norm in the business world. However, the BANI model goes a step further and helps companies consider the chaotic and completely unpredictable impacts that can have a major impact on their operations. This shift testifies to the increase in entropy in the world around us thereby calling for a shift in leadership mindsets.

In the VUCA world, over the past 30 years, the organizations focussed on creating structures, and systems to be agile and responsive to external changes/volatility. The focus was very strongly laid on structure, process, and systems. However, events like COVID completely disrupted this and brought the focus on something more fundamental: The humans.

Human resilience surpassed the fragility of structure; Human adaptability surpassed agile processes and systems; Human native intelligence and life skills helped find solutions to combat one of the biggest crises our generation has ever seen. Similarly, the organizations with leadership who imbibed these qualities thrived much better than the others. Leaders who could demonstrate empathy, resilience, and creativity to solve unprecedented problems emerged as winners.

To build truly resilient organizations, the new age leadership must demonstrate hands-on problem solving, learn new skills, and be ready to fail without being worried about the public perceptions /image. Only then, will they be able to inspire everyone in the organization to explore, take risks, and pursue indigenous problem-solving that will generate access to collective intelligence to combat the non-linearity. A few leadership practices that can come in handy while enabling this shift are as below:

• Operating in short cycles of decision, action, and learning
• Failing fast, Iterating and Pivoting
• Engaging and leading people, taking them along, and creating excitement around the ongoing change.

If we look at this, this is exactly what successful entrepreneurs do. In summary, we can say that with the changing macro-dynamics, the entrepreneurial DNA will no longer just be good to have for business leaders. Gone are the days when the leadership could sustain their titles through rank and file on the back of well-established systems and processes. The world we live in today, calls for the entrepreneurial characteristics in the leadership to build sustainable thriving businesses. We have a live example of how a tech giant like Microsoft achieved this by “hitting refresh”. On that note, I would like to conclude with a quote by Satya Nadella from his book “Hit Refresh”: “Our industry does not respect tradition. What it respects is innovation.”