MTI points to “Corporate Learning from India and Pakistan Cricket”

The 2007 ICC Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean saw two much hyped favorites go out very early in the tournament, much to the surprise of many and much to the delight of the so-called minnows who overpowered them. As one keeps digging deeper into the World Cup debacle faced by these two teams, the parallels in the corporate world strike you hard.

Both teams had highly paid superstars, who were institutions in their own right, had their own empires and were continuously assured of their place. They were all ‘well fed,’ suffered from chronic shortage of ‘hunger to succeed’ and took competition – as well as ‘no serious challenge’ to their positions for granted.

And just like in sports, in business too, you cannot keep young blood and competitiveness down for too long, especially if you do not sharpen your competencies.  Bangladesh and Scotland demonstrated that. So did, Google and Yahoo! As did LG and Samsung!

The key stakeholders of Indian and Pakistan Cricket were forced to take drastic steps (we call it re-structuring in the corporate world). The players were put on performance-based pay, leadership changes were made (with some past leaders being given specialist functional roles) and brave new team line-ups put forward for the Twenty-20 World Cup. The new leadership as well as the new teams did not have much to lose, seeing as they were not stifled by history or protocol.

The net result has been outstanding success for both India and Pakistan – ousting the once thought to be unshakable, Australia and South Africa. It is do-able with young, brave blood and you do not necessarily need seniority to succeed, rather it sometimes ends up getting in the way.
So what can the Corporate World take away as a lesson from this? For starters, how about ensuring that the ‘Senior Corporate Bureaucrats’ do not stifle the growth of the young, determined and promising blood.

Companies that have not discriminated based on so-called seniority have seen the results. More specifically, in the Sri Lankan context,

organizations like MAS, Brandix and Dialog are shining examples of not compromising ability on the basis of seniority, something some of our older companies that suffer from major succession issues can learn from and adopt as the best practice for organizational efficiency and excellence.