Many organizations which have been around for quite a few years develop great Ability and competencies in specific areas over a period of time. Where they start stagnating or faltering is when they start becoming complacent with their past achievements, or allow bureaucracy to creep in to an extent that they lose desired internal as well as external customer responsiveness, or become excessively focused in ensuring top line growth while compromising on profitability considerations or not aligning to their core competencies. In that process they start losing the desired Agility in adapting to emerging market, technology and business trends thereby losing the Ability to ensure continuous sustainable growth of customer, stakeholder, employee, shareholder and societal satisfaction.

Often most of this is detected only after one or more of above factors have set in deeply in the organization. Course correction becomes extremely difficult because people and thereby organizational behavior has changed. People have got used to the current way of doing things, leading to a downward spiral. Any proposal to change is met with passive or active resistance at various levels, as it is too radical or too dreamy.

Managing change in such a situation is all about changing established mindsets. It demands constant communication through various channels for everyone to achieve their true potential with clear, consistent, inspiring messaging. It needs to be backed up with necessary organizational structures, organizational focus and process related changes to enable the achievement of the same. The end result should be to achieve a framework of great Ability combined with great Agility to enable continuous sustainable growth in revenues, profitability, customer, employee, stakeholder and societal satisfaction. We embarked on such a change initiative in CMC post acquisition by the TATA group, terming it C-Change – Ability to Agility, based on which we have experienced initial intended positive results, though it is still very much work in progress.

CMC 1.0

CMC has been one of the pioneering technology companies in India. Many industry veterans would remember its contribution in the computerization of Railways both on the passenger reservation system as well as freight management system which have been hailed as one the largest IT projects at a global level and a highly successful one at that.