MindTree Case Study Report

Ghlam Ahmadi
Peng Wang
Kai Jie Lee
Ashley Wekare

MGMT 2311 Learning and Innovation

University of Western Australia
Business school
Unit Co-Ordinator: Christine Soo

Purpose and Scope

The purpose of this report is to showcase the different problems that Mindtree may have according to
the case provided. The research was based mainly on the case and other sources from the internet.
The problems are identified and the recommendations given are based on research or basic instinct of
how Mindtree could fix their issues.

Introduction

MindTree is a global information technology and Research and development services Company that
is founded in 1999. Mindtree has a history of success in competitive market. MindTree has two
headquarters, one in Bengaluru, India and one in New Jersey U.S.A. Based on what MindTree has set
up into the Indian IT industry, MindTree provides different kind of IT support to their customers such
as digital transformation, infrastructure management, Research and Development services, testing,
data analytics, infrastructure management, software product engineering including Bluetooth and
Cloud enablement.
In April 2010, the executive chairman of MindTree proposed the “5*50” initiative as one of the major
strategy to achieve $1 billion revenue by 2014. To achieve their target, MindTree will be facing with a
lot of issues and challenges.
For Mindtree to remain competitive they need to have a proactive approach to each issues challenges.
To do this Mindtree will have to capitalise more on the business than their people, addressing the
deeper (involving more employees), the wider (involving outsiders) and the richer (generating new
knowledge rather than sharing existing knowledge). This report will review key issues/ challenges for
Mindtree, weak business focus, an incomplete SECI cycle, US and India culture conflict and
continuity of practice community. Each issue will be reviewed and recommendation for mitigating
issues will be discussed.

Key Issues and Problems

Mindtree as mentioned above is an IT services and consulting company. Just like any other
digital company they rely a lot on technology and in order for these systems to keep evolving
and more innovation to be brought to the table, Mindtree has to always ensure that the
knowledge system is strong. The knowledge system of Mindtree has over the years been
strengthened by ensuring the company's staff are comfortable and that they are in a safe
environment to bring out ideas without feeling threatened by the other workers. Due to this mere
fact, Mindtree from the case's point of view has been focussing a lot on ensuring that the people
in the organisation are comfortable. Thus the strong culture. However they have also showed that
the focus on the business has been drowned by issues like knowledge sharing and a good culture.
Which can be very detrimental for the running of the business in the long-term.

Weak Business Focus

Since the evolution of business, or simple barter trade the main goal of any entity was to make
profit. Mindtree as a business also need to make a profit or to grow in order to survive just like
any other business. There is no issue with being focused on the people of the organisation
because the organisation is the people who work there. The problem comes if there seems to be
over allocation of resources given to improvement of the employees and ensuring the
organisational culture is the best. This is because those resources could partly be used to make
Mindtree better in the sense of creating innovations in the system and innovations in the way
they run the business. For example the role of the Gardener in the case. The Gardener was Raj
Datta whose role was to ensure that the top management had a confidant, which is a person who
is solely there to talk to about their problems and also to learn from as a mentor. There would be
nothing wrong from having the senior management having a mentor or a person who is focused
solely on them, but what about the rest of the workforce? This would bring unnecessary
demotivation because of unfair incentives such as these. Which could possibly lead to the
collapse of Mindtree. Mindtree's Knowledge Management (KM) has been said to affect 95% of
the people but only 50% of the business ( Garvin & Tahilyan 2011).
From this statistic we see that KM is focused on too much and even though the returns are
noticed it could be decreased and other items such as enriching people's work and allowing
people to think more about the business side of it. For example, production of new systems and
ways to provide better services than to spend more time of knowledge sharing. This has been
shown to be the reason why so far KM has been successful but should change to accommodate
quantitative goals, as business is largely in the numbers (Garvin & Tahilyani 2011). The business
focus weakness is a problem for Mindtree because a lot of resources are being used and results as
shown on exhibit 1 may state otherwise but if the business continues in that route it will fail
(Garvin & Tahilyani 2011) Thus failure to achieve long term effectiveness. Not only that but to
understand that the business needs the products and services to work on in order to merely
survive.

Completing the SECI Cycle

Mindtree management has aversion to implement formalised IT structure into company processes.
This is fundamental issue hindering the success of knowledge creation and innovation within the
company and adversely affects the company’s ability to compete in a fast-paced market. Nonaka
(1994) introduced the concept of fostering knowledge creation through processes and shared context
(Ba). Using this framework, IT systems are critical component in creating, and sharing knowledge
throughout the company.
The SECI model has four processes, each with shared context (Ba) required. The first phase is
socialization, the process where tacit knowledge is exchanged. This is achieved through sharing
experiences between individuals, through creation of common perspectives, sharing mental models
and mutual trust. This is strength of Mindtree’s management place emphasis on creating shared
contexts for socialization to occur in their communities of practice. This is defined as place where
people share experiences, stories, success and failures.

The informal relaxed setting of Mindtree’s Communities of practice encourages a safe environment
where people can exchange knowledge and collaborate. For example the TechWorks, community
meeting provide people the opportunity to interact face to face and offers a venue for brainstorming,
solving problems, sharing techniques, comparing success and failure, and keeping abreast of market
and technological trends (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2011).

Externalization is the second process, where the tacit knowledge is transferred into explicit
knowledge through articulation of experience. This requires the interactive Ba, a shared context
where people’s experiences can be converted into key terms and concepts. Mindtree has multiple
initiatives to facilitate externalization, including the communities of practice. For example the role of
the ‘gardener’ turns the tacit knowledge of people into explicit knowledge. However, a limitation of
this is availability to the wider organization. If you were not one of the employees at this event, you
would not have access to this. Further, this externalization is limited by attendance. If an employee
does not attends the communities practice event, they would have no access to this tool. Furthermore
the ‘gardener’ his job is to nature the top 100 people at Mindtree (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2011). There is
no other employee to take his position as gardener if he retires. In this way, the effectiveness of
Mindtree’s externalization process is limited.
Combination is the third process, where explicit knowledge is combined to create different sources of
explicit knowledge to create more concrete explicit knowledge. This process requires systemizing Ba,
where organizational knowledge is dispersed through information technologies (Nonaka, 1994).
Mindtree does not have a shared platform for systemising to occur. Past attempts to to introduce
formal IT systems have had limited access and as such been abandoned. For example KnowledgeNet
and Connect Minds was introduced. These examples illustrated anti-IT mentality in Mindtree, where
all the idea formal system is seen as a control mechanism that stifles their entrepreneurial culture.
As a result of lack of formal IT systems, the fourth process of SECI model cannot be achieved.
Internalising looks at turning explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge through experimentation and
creative challenges. This process is crucial in being a learning organization, as it is where knowledge
is applied to create new leanings, thus ‘closing the loop’ of knowledge creation. This requires
exercising Ba, where people can come together to collaborate and innovate through applying learned
knowledge.

Conflict between India and U.S. Culture

An organisation’s culture is the value and special social environment that are happened in the
workplace, which may influence the people in the organisation on how they act, dress and how they
perform their jobs. U.S and India are former departed British colonies, but their cultures and
traditions are totally different. In India, the mix of Muslim and Hindu religions makes India different
from other British colonies. However, U.S culture is more likely an English tradition of democracy,
capitalism, and Christianity. When operate a business in two countries that have such a huge different
in culture, lots of misunderstanding and miscommunication will occur when doing the business
transaction. MindTree culture equivalent to its “CLASS value system (caring, learning, achieving,
sharing and social responsibility)”. Transparency and rich, frequent communication were the
foundation of MindTree culture (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2011).
Collaborative culture required three important factors. Firstly, people in the organisation must willing
to share their knowledge. Secondly, there must be a forum for the employees to communicate,
transfer and share their knowledge. Thirdly, It infrastructure has to be efficient to support the
collaboration, for example using “Connected Mind” or “Neuron”. MindTree culture is all about the
way they interact, collaborate and socialize. The manager of mindTree believe that if they want to
start innovating, the organisation has to have a social process in their organisation, then only they can
be collaborative. Transfer of the culture between the employees in the same office building is hard,
let alone across countries. There are a lot of circumstances which are in action to influence or shape
in the transfer of knowledge management within countries. Most of the practices required an
individual’s creativity, personal ownership and control. Hence, to manage these conflict between
culture differences, MindTree may need to make a new set of policies. Without figuring out the
solution, MindTree will not be able to continue the same kind of prospect and transform into a truly
innovative organisation.

Risk and barriers of employee exchange

Without or short of Psychological Safety, employees may not speak out their opinion or concerns as
they may feel unsafe. Without employees giving feedback to Bagchi, he may not able to guild or
carry out the problem-solving transfer technique with the U.S. manager. Furthermore, lack of
psychological safety will also become a barriers to the workers when they doing collaboration within
the workplace.
Trust, flexibility and interdependence within the U.S. workplace are quite low because of their
individualistic culture. People are less likely to make friends in the workplace due to the
individualism and autonomy of the U.S culture. Hence, U.S. employee may not willing to share their
opinions with Bagchi while doing the exchange.
As a gardener in MindTree, no doubt that Bagchi has a lot of experience in his role. However,
basically all of his knowledge and experiences was set in the Indian background. As what the report
has mentioned earlier, there is a huge differences between U.S. culture and Indian culture.

Continuity of Practice Community

Another point will be discussed thereinafter is community of practice. On the one hand, communities
of practice have played a critical role in Mindtree. It embodies the Mindtree’s method of Knowledge
Management, and effectively promotes the development and dissemination of technical skills (Garvin
& Tahilyani, 2011). In addition, community meetings offer chances to communicate face to face and
create a comfortable context to encourage people to brainstorm, find solutions of problems, share
technologies, compare successes and failures, and keep pace with market and technological trends
(Garvin & Tahilyani, 2011). However, on the other hand, communities in Mindtree also have some
problems that affect their long-term development. They are: method of forming communities and
lacking of incentives.

Method of forming Communities

It is a simple thing for employees in Mindtree to form a community. If people have a common
passion to learn and share knowledge, and develop business, they can establish a community.
Moreover, for fear of excess reliance on the same person, all communities in the company should be
obliged to have multiple champions (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2011). It cannot be denied that this way to
stimulate people to learn and share knowledges in a short term is efficient. Nevertheless, the
motivation that employees initially create the community is the common passion, after a long time,
when passion goes away, staffs may not have initiative to participate in community of practice.
Furthermore, employees may have some conflicts and divergences which will be even more serious if
the champions in a same community yet have different cultural backgrounds. These divergences will
be a hindrance to the development of community practice in a long term. Because the success of
knowledge exchanges depend to some extent on the relationship between sender and receiver (cf.
Marsden, 1990). An estranged relationship may not be conducive to the spread of knowledge.

Lacking of incentives

Although building a community in Mindtree is easy, creating and sustaining a positive community is
hard because members of community are usually dragged down by their daily work (Garvin &
Tahilyani, 2011). Moreover, employees easily set up communities which are aimed at knowledge
sharing and learning because of common enthusiasm at first. However, after a long term, when
fervour fades away, the sustainability of community of practice will become a critical element and the
second issue of community will be exposed at the same time--lacking of incentives. The communities
of practice could be negative and dissolution at the end without an appropriate excitation mechanism.
In other words, incentive mechanism actually has a tremendous effect on the dissemination of
knowledge and the generation of ideas. For example, the Smart Grid Contest, which is an internal
contest in Siemens, attracts more than two thousand community members to participate and then
contributes 448 ideas, more than seven thousand evaluations, and 2197 detailed comments. In
addition, a total of 15000 euros are awarded to the five most prospecting conceptions which are
belonged to the external specialists (Lakhani, Hutter, Pokrywa &Fuller, 2015). Siemens also has a
series of other competitions, like Sustainability Contest and “Urban India” Idea Contest, and these
contests have acquired remarkable achievements, greatly promoting the dissemination of knowledge
and generation of thoughts. However, what is contrast with this is that Mindtree does not have similar
events to motivate employees, and it does not establish a reward-punishment system to push the
sustainable development of communities of practice.

Recommendations and Limitations

Recommendation One: Weak Business Focus

There is never one solid solution to long term effectiveness of a business. The effectiveness of
Mindtree is determined by the goals that they would have set as a business and how they are
going to achieve them. We can say to an extent KM was a goal for Mindtree to achieve but it
became a problem when the focus shifted completely to KM and not to ensuring the sales of the
company are doing well and also making a profit which is the biggest goal of any business. The
different systems provided such as Neuron were all for the purpose of ensuring that the
communication was always fast and effective. Mindtree should invest more into giving the
workers more training to improve on the quality of their products and services. This is because
the customers are not going to worry about the route of how the products were created or offered
but the final product. This can be done through seminars and having shadowing opportunities
and working in groups. Yes, Communities of Practice are part of Mindtree on a large scale but
what about the new products and making profits which keep the business afloat.

According to Figure 1, the best chance of being effective is having strategy effectiveness and
organisational effectiveness. The only way that Mindtree can be successful in the long term is to
possess strategy, purpose and organisational capabilities. Not forgetting that the main reason they
are in business is to ensure that they make a profit and survive. This recommendation will
provide a solution because it will insure there is a balance between all the focus points at
Mindtree which ultimately leads to success. Thus achieving long-term effectiveness.

Figure 1
Recommendation Two: Commitment to a Formalised IT System

Formalised IT systems are required to capture the knowledge that is being shared through
socialisation and externalisation. However, IT systems are not only a recommendation for facilitating
the SECI cycle. Commitment to a system addresses issues resulting from missing key dimensions to
success, adoption of best practice and increasing Mindtree’s absorptive capacity. However, the way IT
system is implemented need to be addressed. Giving people are resistant to processes being enforced
from senior leaders, solution should be developed from the bottom up. Being an innovative company
that places pride on social interactions, there competition run within the company that asks the
employees to come up with the best IT solution.

This has multiple benefits: firstly, it will capture the IT requirements of each department, so solution
can be developed that are actually needed. Secondly, it would allow ownership of process. As such,
people are more likely to want to see succeed and willing to assist in the implementation of system.
Thirdly, it requires department to collaborate to design an idea, which would capitalise Mindtree’s
social networking culture. Employees have suggested that incentives to participate in the networking
attitude initiatives would encourage more participants across the company. By offering a prize for the
winning idea, this would give teams incentives to engage.

Recommendation Three: The Conflict between two Cultures

Firstly, to overcome the culture conflict, MindTree can exchange their managerial employee between
India and U.S. headquarters. This will help to get more understanding the difference between the
organisation’s cultures and the employee culture in the U.S. The 3 to 6 months exchange for
managerial employees may help MindTree to exactly figure out U.S. culture so that they can link
back to their value system. The U.S. based manager should send to MindTree’s headquarter in India
for a guided observation. Guided observation is a transfer technique that will help the U.S. manager
to discover the value of the organisation. In consideration of deep smarts are actually based on pattern
recognition and it is highly contextual, the guided observation will be an active learning process that
helps to transfer the deep smarts to the observer.

Bagchi is the gardener of MindTree and the U.S. manager should follow him on a daily basis. Bagchi
can demonstrate the U.S manager about his behavior and attitude when dealing with the employees so
that the U.S manager can learn and study from him. The manager and Bagchi can have a debrief
meeting afterward to discuss about what they had observed or learned for the day. This system will
not only help the manager to understand India’s culture in behavior and attitude, but it also help to
improve the manager learning skills. The exchange system will allow the manager to develop a better
understanding of MindTree culture value instead of going through a passive learning process such as
by giving a presentation. Bagchi should also follow the manager back to U.S. for 3 to 6 months and
experience the U.S. culture. Bagchi will be the coach of the U.S. manager and guide them with his
experiences. When using the guided problem solving transfer technique, Bagchi will be able to find
out the problem by teaching the manager on how to solve the situation. As the gardener of MindTree,
Bagchi’s duty is sit down with the worker and have a one to one discussion about their issues. He has
to listen to the worker and help them to work out the problem that they are facing. Since the manager
is working side by side with Bagchi, this may help the manager to copy Bagchi’s attitude and
behavior in the workplace. This will also help the manager to develop deep smarts and get a better
understanding of MindTree’s culture and value system.
The leaders of MindTree must be patient enough and never try to force MindTree cultural value onto
their employees. The manager should let the employees learn and try on their own to understand the
organisation’s value system instead of forcing them. Only if you give enough respect the employees,
then they will respect the culture.

Recommendations For The method of forming community and lacking of incentives

It should be given enough attention when employees choose their own community members at the
beginning. In addition to common enthusiasm, employees need to consider different aspects of
interests, lifestyles, personality, and so on. Before establish of community, Mindtree could build an
employee personal assessment system where staffs could have a brief introduction to themselves and
then give a buffer time to enhance mutual understanding among employees. This will be easier to find
someone who has similar experience and interests with community members, and therefore,
community of practice will have less hindrance.
Moreover, for the sake of longer development of community, it is necessary for Mindtree to establish
and perfect corresponding motivation mechanism. Lacking of incentives or inappropriate excitation
mechanism may have a negative effect on the enthusiasm of community members. In addition to the
regular feedback, Mindtree could reward communities with outstanding contributions on a regular
period. Those who have a less contribution will not be punished and will be encouraged to get reward
next time. Because the punishment would scare people no longer participate in community of
practice. In addition, corporation could regularly organize knowledge contests to promote generation
of new thoughts and sharing of technical skills. The employees who receive an award will have
stronger sense of achievement that will push them to accomplish higher objectives. Only in these
ways, could community of practice in Mindtree have a longer and sustainable development.

Conclusion
In conclusion, there is no controversy that Mindtree has acquired a remarkable result in creating a
comfortable context of sharing and learning knowledge. However, it still have many deficiencies.
Firstly, in the area of knowledge management, Mindtree over emphasizes the impact on employees,
while ignoring the impact on the business and external of the enterprise. Furthermore, due to the lack
of perfect IT system, knowledge is transformed from explicit to tacit, and the internal and external
dissemination can not be completed, and therefore, the SECI model can not be completed in the
knowledge management system of Mindtree. Moreover, as a result of different cultural background
caused by the increasingly significant differences, which also needs to pay attention to the problem.
In the forming of community of practice, Mindtree also needs to take some measures to enhance
mutual understanding among employees. In addition, it is necessary for Mindtree to have
a complete and perfect incentives system, which is conducive to the continuation of the community.
Therefore, Mindtree must address these issues immediately in order to move forward and remain
competitive in an environment that constantly demands improvement and innovation.
References

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Lakhani, K. R. &Hutter, K. &Pokrywa, S. H. & Fuller, J.( 2015). Open Innovation at Siemens. HBS
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Marsden, P. V. (1990). ‘Network data and measurement’, Annual Review of Sociology, 16, pp. 435-
463.

Nonaka, I, Toyama, R, & Konno, N 2000, SECI, Ba and leadership: a Unified Model of Dynamic
Knowledge Creation, Long Range Planning, vol. 33, pp. 4-34

Harvard Business Review 2016, A Simple Way to Test Your Company’s Strategic Alignment .
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