Running a Successful Global Capability Center (GCC)

Running a successful Remote or Global Capability Center (GCC) is no ordinary task. Here are a few things that worked for me as I ran successful India Development Centers (IDC) for several MNCs. The principles and ideas can be as easily used outside of India. 

While technologies, projects, priorities change all the time, the HQ always expects the GCC to be:

• Aligned with the overall mission of the larger organisation and change gracefully
• Flawlessly execute on the commitments
• Maintain the cost-structure and continuously improve

As the center matures few additional expectations would come:

• Increase in innovation and technical leadership
• Become autonomous, own entire product lines end-to-end
• Contribute to overall strategy by introducing local eco-system (Universities, Start-ups, specialised vendors)

... and do all these while

• Maintaining hiring and retention goals
• Being compliant to all the local and international regulatory needs
• Represent the organisation in the local geography 

Companies use sophisticated metrics (financial, project management metrics etc) and processes (Site Maturity Matrix, for example) and these are well documented. The focus of this post though is to specifically what the site leadership has to do grow the center and become a critical part of the organisation. 

We will not get into standard project/program/product management processes, HR methodologies and the like. There are a few things that the center leadership ought to carefully do and here's a list:

• Positioning the center
• Understanding and Navigating the internal power dynamics
• Picking fights - Balancing alignment and site vision
• Cultural sensitivity
• Higher level metrics
• Communicating "Cost vs Value"
• Growing Technical Leadership
• Sustaining for Long term success

In the next set of articles we will dive deep into each of these and discuss some actionable ideas.

What RamP's Reading: Apr'21

 

How Innovation Works
Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, involving trial and error, not a matter of lonely genius. It still cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
The bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals examines the critical art of rethinking: learning to question your opinions and open other people's minds, which can position you for excellence at work and wisdom in life

The Psychology of Money
Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. How to manage money, invest it, and make business decisions are typically considered to involve a lot of mathematical calculations, where data and formulae tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world, people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In the psychology of money, the author shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important matters.