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Stockholm-based K-Net Global is the ‘B-to-B’ Mobile Broadband Equipment business emerging from a prior joint venture known as MBN. The MBN legacy business model spanned multi-media/ telecom equipment, mobile broadband and managed services. Originally merged in 2006 as Malik - Bengtsson Networks, the firm would be eventually renamed after the demerger several years later. The announcement was planned for February 2007, at a cava and tapas press extravaganza at GSM Mobile World Congress in Barcelona; the Communications unit of Mumbai-based Malik Hindustan would merge with the Networking Solutions group of Bengtsson AB, known as ‘Swedish Cisco’. The Dynamic Duo was to conquer the world, East to West. However, the fanfare was eclipsed by the Apple iPhone launch just prior to the GSM event. Steve Jobs pre-emptively unveiled the phone at the January 2007 MacWorld. In response, the GSM powers-that-be pointedly snubbed the device, awarding ‘Best New 2007 Handset’ to Samsung’s D900. In fact, Apple had transformed the smartphone chessboard. The landscape was changing far quicker than anyone realised.  Mobile and broadband trends had been hotly debated that year within MBN. iPhone was one disruptor, but there were others. Netflix was another company with a vision extending well beyond the realm of fixed media as streaming arrived on the scene; this shift was best articulated by the company CEO, Reed Hastings.

 These broadband disruptors had arrived at an inopportune time: MBN integration, from the outset, was plagued with equally disruptive cultural and leadership issues.

K-NetLeadership & CultureHow did we get here

MBN was first troubled by the ‘who would be the CEO’ question: would it be a Swede? Or an Indian? Or perhaps co-CEOs? Business complexity was further compounded by an immediate acquisition of an Ethernet Transport System provider. It was as if a quarrelling pair of newlywed parents had adopted 5,000 more children before properly nesting and securing a happy home. The Malik side was loaded with capable talent, but the culture was sluggish, resistant to change and hierarchical. Cerebral debates prevailed and rigid hierarchy was a hallmark. In contrast, the Bengtsson culture valued team-playing, individual responsibility and minimal hierarchy. Swedes were known for consensus decision-making, considering scenarios from all angles and arriving at a consensus prior to any course of action.  Severe turmoil ensued with media watchers re-defining the ‘M’ in MBN as ‘Misery’. It was time for the dynamic duo to contemplate a de-merger.

CEO: Chandran Kanji

Company UpdateChapter 1

Culture is the shadow of the leader

There's a finite market for movie DVD-by-mail, and the growth over the next 10 years will be in streaming.

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 The Malik family divested its stake to Bengtsson AG in 2013. As such, a new corporate name was required. One cynic suggested that MBN should be replaced by the letters VUCA, (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous); clearly the culture was falling apart. The leadership team went on to choose Kajuko Networks, known as K-Net Global, heralding an end to all the strife and setting up a clean slate for a new beginning. A more focused and simplified K-Net vision was quickly unveiled by the new CEO, Chandran Kanji. Kanji, ironically, had eagerly defected from the Malik ranks.

 

“We at Kajuko Networks Global provide the world’s most efficient mobile networks, the intelligence to maximize network value, and services to make it all work seamlessly.”

Along with a new name and vision, the new board decided on what they termed a Value & Values Strategic House framework.

• refocus the business solely on mobile broadband, simplify the value creation model and rewire the culture through a 'Values Build Leaders' initiative;

• expand into rapidly growing, underserved BRICS- MINT markets; MINT includes Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey

• design a simpler strategic business structure to ensure that all staff were clear on how the firm would create value on a go-forward basis

• prioritize 'Right To Win' growth areas such as Small Cell Solutions [SCS] where connected users and product revenue were growing 20+% annually

Platforms & Big Bets

BRIC-MISTGeographic's

SCS Focus

Agile Process Management

Automation and AI

Lean Manufacturing

Culture, Knowledge & Competence

SCS Focus

Employee Engagement

Top Ten Customer

Service Model

Disruptive Tech

Innovation

Values Build Leaders

Strategy - Finance

ProcessesCustomer & Technology

People

maximise value through Intelligent and Seamless World Class Service

The World’s Most Efficient Mobile Networks

70-90% of data traffic was generated indoors; Long Term Evolution [LTE] / 3G frequencies provided poor macro-cell indoor coverage resulting in a reduced bandwidth 'edge' experience.

Enhanced macro-cell density wasn’t viable for Communications Services Providers [CSPs] ; distributed antenna systems were only cost-effective for the very largest venues.

Hence, the CSP interest in SCS.

Strategy

A Split and a Fresh Start

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K-Net CEO Chandran Kanji

Global Networks EVP

Raymond Tan

Global Shared Services EVP Elke Nilsson

Small Cell Solutions VP

Arni Brager

Manager Small Cell Analystics

Ajani Contee

Manager Residential SCS

Aadi Doshi

Manager Small-Medium Business

Nigel Dawson

Comp. Intell Partners Ginny Chan

Macro-Cell Antenna Solutions VP

Armando Sierro

Global Network Solutions EVP

Ian Major

Smartphone and tablet users were hungrily consuming video and apps. This sped up the transition from 3G to LTE networks. A short-term fix to cope with this demand had been offloading traffic onto unmanaged Wi-Fi networks. However, CSP’s wanted to keep subscribers on their own cellular networks. Traditional macro-cellular networks often failed in enclosed workplaces, public areas, rural locations and residential homes. K-Net Global felt that it could remedy this gap. Developing Markets broadband also lagged behind the Developed World as follows:

Key Markets

BRAZIL CHINA RUSSIA USA

SubscriberPer 100 9 13 14 28

Selected Developing and Developed Markets Comparisons

(Broadband Subscribers per 100 people)

Source: Bloomberg Business Week 2014; Note: Most RUS broadband slower than HS standard of 10MBps

The small cell unit had now become increasingly important and the restructure had seen the unit created into its own business line SCS.

At the corporate re-launch was an up-and- coming, ambitious executive. As he sat on the edge of his seat, this 'lean-forward-leader' hoped that his new remit would, in fact, be the SCS lead under the aegis of his mentor Ian Major, the EVP of Global Network Solutions.

To his delight, Arni Brager was announced as the newly appointed Vice President of SCS; Arni was a warm but steely--sometimes brash leader---self-described as ‘one part predator, one part mentor’.

He had a rapid-fire style--punctuated with LTE-speed acronyms hurtling across his desk like ‘PBBN’ and ‘MSTP’. His peers joked that Arni pronounced the word digital so quickly that the consonants collided together.

Staffing his team 90 days ago, Arni selected a diverse blend of experience and skills sets

Arni Brager

Small Cell Solutions

The Business

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Ajani Contee

The first hire, Ajani Contee had just completed 90 days in her very first management role as Manager, Small Cell Analytics. She is a Cambridge educated Nigerian national and a perfectionistic over-achiever by nature. Directly recruited from Cambridge by Human Resources, Ajani was being groomed for fast-track development and believed that her success to date was due to her drive and micro-managing approach. In her mind, there was no individual who could be trusted to do the quality of work that she, herself, could deliver. ‘The devil is in the details’ was Ajani’s motto. Ajani was known to use bright neon pink Post-It notes sporting a caricature of Marissa Meyer, the Yahoo CEO. Above the image was a megaphone icon and the motto ‘GET ON BOARD OR GET OUT OF THE WAY!’

Accordingly, Ajani would not and could not delegate due to trust issues. All initiatives required her close involvement; very little work was delegated to her staff. Ajani’s HR mentor and coach, Grace Lee, diligently checked in with Arni to remind him that Ajani was expected to flourish in SCS. Arni suspected that Ajani was leveraging this HR mentor link as insurance to squelch any interference with her work-style.

Ajani’s work ethic could not be questioned, but Arni had seen limited evidence of prioritisation or delegation. He wonders if this as much about himself as Ajani. However, in her management team meetings, he has observed Ajani tending to get too complex and suck energy out of the discussions. She seems to hold onto huge amounts of data, but has the habit when giving out bits of work following up and creating, although not aware it, a sense of micro management. In direct contact with her team members , Ajani has heard noise about her lack of self-awareness. People don’t feel she sets clear direction and is so busy in the detail, she does not have time or inclination to dedicate to find out much about her team, what makes them tick or grow them.

The Team

Aadi Doshi

Arni’s second hire was Aadi Doshi the Manager, Residential SCS Unit. Aadi had been with the firm for years; previously in a managerial role for about two years followed by return to a technical specialist role. Aadi was hyper-intelligent, a tad arrogant and prone to acts of arrogance. His first interview question [intended to disarm Arni] was ‘are you a frightening boss?’ to which Arni replied, ‘Well it depends, right? I am collegial, but quite particular about detail and execution.’ This new role offered to Aadi was, again, a front line management remit—he was hoping it would be a senior level role. There were new buzzwords in the job description: ‘employee engagement’ and ‘team member assimilation’ which perplexed Aadi.

Over the years, Aadi had seen it all. As presiding cynic, he disrespectfully rolled his eyes at K-Net Compass employee engagement videos. Arni privately reproached him, but ‘Audacious Aadi’, was up to other tricks. Aadi had embarked on his own corporate intelligence gathering: K-Net Compliance had reported that he was accessing sensitive business reports from the K-Net Global Equipment division.

 Aadi did seem to have the habit of blaming others, including members in his own team. Arni, in some ‘skip’ meetings, arranged to connect with front line personnel and had a sense that 1:1’s never really happened with his reports and minimal energy or attention was given to the development of his team. A little exasperated, Arni had privately asked himself ‘How on earth does one manage an Aadi??’ and subsequently did identify a mentor to work with Aadi 2 months ago, but Aadi has done little about it.

Arni wondered if Aadi was plotting an internal transfer---he made it clear that he had expected to be a Director-level player by now. Equally concerning was the poster of Edward Snowdon, the NSA hacker, displayed prominently in Aadi’s cubicle.

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Nigel continued to advise the Digital Business Academy (DBA), an online learning platform for digital entrepreneurs. Managing people, in Nigel’s view, seemed so old-world: he dreamt of ‘The Singularity’, a time in the future when man would merge with machine and thus render the concept of 'people management' obsolete.

To make life easier, Nigel hired in his image: when he spotted kindred spirits at DBA,

he would be sure to give those men (women simply didn’t 'get' Nigel) his card. This ensured that an ample supply of 'NiWs' (Nigels-in-Waiting) would feed his talent pipeline.

Nigel seemed to overflow with biased judgements about people and work. He hardly seemed to be conscious of these biases. Arni realized that Nigel’s mechanistic and narcissistic approach to staffing would eventually need to be addressed. Nigel was already being referred to around the office as 'The Clone Ranger'.  Arni liked Nigel and respected his directness, analytical abilities and protection of his team. He would often have lunch with Nigel and share conversations about technical nuances. During such conversations Arni had tried to use humour to circumnavigate poorly ‘masked’ feedback about Nigel’s conscious or unconscious low level interaction with peers and colleagues outside his unit. During such attempts Nigel would quickly craft conversation back to his agenda and did not hear or accept the feedback.

Nigel Dawson

Ginny Chan

The individual who exhibited the greatest promise in the recruitment phase—yet was now very much in danger of being the biggest disappointment--was Ginny [Guan-Yin] Chan. A Hong Kong-born engineer and International Business Phd who had eagerly sought out a front line management opportunity in the Stockholm HQ, Ginny had completed four months in the role of Manager, Competitive Intelligence and SCS Partners to identify and activate strategic third-party ventures.

The last few months had been a struggle for Ginny. She withdrew into her own cocoon, prone to intimidation in group settings where more experienced managers would sense weakness, disrespect her and drown out her meek observations. Ginny lacked gravitas and wore generic grey and beige pantsuits. She rarely made eye contact with colleagues.

Worst of all was Ginny’s habit of missing deadlines— her analysts worked at their own leisurely pace and endlessly fussed with their mobile devices. Ginny’s habit of playing round after round of the Angry Birds game really annoyed Arni; when confronted about it, she called it 'user-experience testing'.

Most concerning there was limited evidence of Ginny motivating others in her team and performance seemed to be flat-lining. She espouses consistency to others but in practise is seen as having clear favourites which has created a sense of inequality in the team. There tends to be over-emphasis on the capability of these favourites, Ginny spends more time with them, assigns more tasks to them, and is more aware of their personal circumstances. Arni wondered if she is perhaps a little timid of some of the longer and more mature members who she previously worked with as a peer. It was great for Arni, to promote from within, and it supported the organisation’s values along with his own, but he was beginning to wonder if an external hire would had been better.

The third SCS hire, nine months ago, was Nigel Dawson as Manager, Small-Medium Business SCS. Nigel was a gifted engineering graduate from MIT in the United States and had interned at Tech City UK in partnership with University College London.

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Arni held both hands to his temples as he pondered all of these people issues in the context of what needed to be done as part of the K-Net 120 Day Priorities: • the Strategic Value House model was to be

installed with metrics for SCS and all four People, Process, Customer & Technology pillars agreed and activated; profitable Financial performance would only be possible if the pillars were in place

• SCS emerged as a concern in the corporate K-Net Employee Engagement Survey; HR had red-circled gaps for two Values Build Leaders (VBL) dimensions:

1) Respect2) Renewal.

• SCS was unremarkable in terms of the Achievement and Challenge dimensions. There were no towering strengths in any of the four areas for SCS.

• Chandran Kanji, the CEO, knew that competitors had taken advantage of 'MBN Turmoil': all were innovating to improve broadband speed, cost and value; Huawei in China had become a threat; delegates swarmed and buzzed around their futuristic exhibit booth at GSM Barcelona 2014 as if Huawei was the queen bee of the eHive.

The resources of privately-held Huawei were awe- inspiring---they created an exact replica of their CEO’s Shenzhen office in Barcelona, resplendent with a diorama of his actual office view back home in China! And the lavish party at the Gaudi 'Casa Batllo’ completed the picture.

Such vulgar extravagance and, indeed, gaudy opulence was unseemly and contrary to the K-Net way; even so, delegates were dazzled by the garish display.

Now that K-Net Global had generated a string of positive cash flows for the last eight quarters, there was confidence to tap the war chest and attack Huawei’s SCS unit in their own backyard.Arni would be tasked to lead this charge in 2015. He realized that his current organization was not positioned to perform, much less embark on game-changing competitive assaults; some of the issues were as follows: • Competitive Intelligence, particularly about Huawei, was of huge importance; whilst Ginny was struggling,

she did have an excellent Mainland China network: her best work was with respect to Huawei. Nigel also knew quite a bit about Huawei and the Asian sector from his Tech City UK network - but Ginny and

Nigel rarely interacted

• Values Build Leaders development effort had been neglected within SCS; each of the Value categories had underlying competencies and behavioural indicators linked with each other. Combined with Arni’s delay in conducting mid-year reviews, it all added up to a primary root cause of many staff performance issues

• Internal Partnering of SCS with Armando Siero’s sister unit had varied, particularly in Asia where K-Net Global Macro, Antenna Solutions had a strong footprint.

Arni was so busy stabilizing Developed Markets that he had not allocated 'bandwidth' to seed 'renewal' growth initiatives in Developing Markets. Now he really needed to partner with Armando to implement the Huawei attack .

Arni wondered if Armando would see his sudden collegial interest as mere opportunism?

K-Net Global generatespositive cash flow

for the last eight quarters

120 Day Priorities

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The Board of Management call to action was enough to ignite an "emergency" attitude which was now very necessary to achieve their business goals.Arni was determined to seize the challenge handed to him to 'make it happen'.  As he scribbled staff notes on his Galaxy Tablet, Arni drew a line and wrote his own name with the stylus: he had fixated on his people but had not bothered to reflect on himself. Was his style situationally appropriate in the new era? After all, this 'predator-mentor' formula had served him very well to get this far in his career!  At that moment, he realized that he did not know what his own people—other than 'Audacious Aadi'-- thought of his own style. Or, for that matter, about Arni as a person. He vaguely recalled Grace Lee suggesting a '360 Degree' feedback process, but there were too many problems and MBN 'fires' raging at the time. Speaking of MBN, there were remnants of the old pre-demerger 'MALIK-driven' culture—jokingly referred to as 'MAL-ware': values and behaviours such as micro-management and dull, formulaic recipes to problem-solving. This created a shadowy 'phantom culture' poised, at any moment, to extinguish the budding K-Net 'green shoots'. Arni put the tablet aside and opened his personal journal, sketching out some SCS-specific goals for his group as follows: • To grow SCS position within the BRICS-MINT regions with the first step being a direct attack

on Huawei SCS in China to distract them and drain their resources• To build a cost-advantaged, state of the art SCS platform of the future• To build a high performance, world class SCS organization based on K-Net Global

Standards of Leadership in order to develop highly motivated, competent professionals • Arni remembered the 'last but not least' phrase his boss had used in introducing him to the

ExecComm in 2013---it felt a bit derogatory at the time. His blue pen crossed out the numerical 'three', elevating rank to number 'one' with a stroke and an arrow. He realized the need to totally 'rewire' his team, in the way an engineer might rewire a circuit board to enhance speed and performance.

Not yet satisfied, he wrote: JOB ONE in bold letters next to the people point. At that moment, he heard a light tapping on his door---Grace Lee was holding a note pad.

He thought to himself ‘Oh boy, what has Ajani complained to Grace about NOW ?'

Grace ventured tentatively into his office and leaned purposefully into Arni’s desk: 'Arni, I would really like to speak with you if you have a moment please. Ginny Chan came to see me today---we need to talk urgently.'

K-NetToday’s challenge

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