During our work for several years with business houses helping them implement strategy and strategy management frameworks; we could see that a substantial number of breakthroughs and successes happen by altering the way organizations were managed. The impact of effective leadership and management in an organization was profound. It face-lifted the organization, altered its culture, and at times even changed its entire identity. Many of them had great visions, but failed miserably in execution, but yet, with the strategy management frameworks which we helped them implement, they could bridge the gap between what they wanted to achieve (vision) and what they were actually doing (execution) and accomplish phenomenal results. These frameworks were the leading edge management tools developed by some of the greatest management gurus globally.
Living in India and constantly observing the resigned mindset that so many Indians have towards Government and Social Organizations even after 65 years of independence constantly bothered us. Here was a big machinery, large number and volume of resources, and yet only limited in effectiveness. In so many social areas including Education, Healthcare, Town Planning, Infrastructure, and other Public Services, we ourselves and our social contacts as citizens often had experienced exasperating service levels, a complete lack of professionalism, extremely rudimentary levels of processes, zero customer orientation. So many leaders – social and political had grand visions about India in the 21st century, but it all seemed to be only on paper. The ground level experience only changed incrementally with a poor execution. We were bothered even more since these were exactly the areas which we were helping our clients for several years, and had helped them to achieve significant breakthroughs. We strongly felt the need of making a noteworthy contribution to the Government, Social and Public Sector organizations in terms of helping them manage and execute their strategy effectively. We had seen social organizations worldwide adopt some of the management frameworks we were using and there was no reason why it could not be also done in India.
Our work in strategy also was complemented by helping organizations innovate, as strategy is never the same. It is dynamic, evolves, needs differentiation, and needs to be constantly innovated to account for the fast changing environment and tight resource constraints. Over the years, we had started to drive Diversity led Innovations in organizations which further helped them come up with and execute on ground breaking ideas and game changer strategies. The fundamental principles here were 2 fold – first is that innovation can happen and is required everywhere, and secondly, diversity fuels innovation like nothing else can.
Again, in the Indian context, there was so much diversity that ideally, a lot of innovations should have happened. However this wasn’t the case. Things move and change very slowly. Furthermore, very few new ideas actually materialize. There is a strong tendency to copy the west even in several situations the context is a complete misfit. Clearly, there was a lot of scope and opportunity for innovation to happen in the social sector in India.
With this thinking, the Medici Institute was formed. The idea is to bring about social change by helping social organizations manage themselves effectively, and make them more innovative and hence effective through a diversity led innovation. That is the purpose of “The Medici Institute”. We aspire to see a completely transformed India by deploying the globally established management tools in Government and Social organizations. Whatever be the object of the organization, our mission is to co-create the change along with them by enabling them with the right management tools.