NDA Story in HBR : How Workers with a Gig Mindset can help your company thrive
Posted by By nishithadmin at 31 January, at 13 : 40 PM Print
January 31, 2022
Dear Friend,
An agile learning culture that acts as a value multiplier for client is among the toughest to embed. Yet, at Nishith Desai Associates (NDA) future gazing and learning is the constant – and not the variable – assiduously developed through strategic intent and disciplined execution.
It is thus with great elation that we share another pivotal recognition of our firm’s innovative management thinking and learning initiative.
Nishith Desai Associates (NDA) has been featured as a case study in a Harvard Business Review article written by the eminent Jane McConnell, author of the seminal book, ‘The Gig Mindset Advantage’.
The HBR article on Organisational Learning titled “How Workers with a Gig Mindset can help your company thrive”, elucidates on this dynamic and compelling ‘next practice’ leading to agility, resilience, purpose, engagement and value.
As Jane Connell writes: “The pandemic has shown that companies need to be proactively resilient — to use the crisis as a learning experience and an opportunity to transform into something new and stronger. Flexible companies can assemble teams quickly, draw on collective knowledge and find expertise inside and outside of the organization, communicate strategic messages to the workforce, and collect information from employees in the field in real time. To build those capabilities, constant learning needs to be part of the company’s culture.
Large-scale change or learning programs aren’t the answer. While they’re well intentioned, they’re generally structured from the top down, and the majority of them fail because they don’t enable people to take individual initiative.
Instead, companies should enable employees to become “gig mindsetters”: what I call a bold new breed of full-time, salaried employees who think and act like freelancers. Gig mindsetters are constant learners — they self-manage, take spontaneous initiative, focus on skills more than roles, feel free to shortcut processes, and don’t hesitate to question the status quo. They share what they learn with others, take ownership of their own personal growth, and feel confident in their ability to influence people.
A gig mindset learning culture starts within individuals and grows to serve both people and the organization.”
Do read the full article (may need an HBR subscription if you are a frequent reader) to learn more about this empowering concept and a glimpse into how NDA’s trumped the gig way.
https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-workers-with-a-gig-mindset-can-help-your-company-thrive
The article presents two diverse organisations, Sanofi and Nishith Desai Associates, as cases. Illustrating NDA’s adoption of the “gig mindset” and culture steered by our transformational ‘networked leadership’ organisation model* (launched in 2016) based on self-management and self-responsibility, it goes on to highlight our high impact Client Continuing Education Program (cCep). *Do refer to our article ‘From Partnership to Networked Leadership’ pointing out the limitations of the traditional partnership model.
cCep extended our well-entrenched ‘Continuing Education’ system during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, to offer our clients and a diverse global community including legal professionals, about 300 critical and contextual learning sessions and webinars at a time of extreme distress and uncertainty.
By the time the trend of webinars became too commonplace and fatigue set in, we had established value and shifted to 1:1 education sessions with clients apart from other fresh programs.
Often referred to as a ‘law school after law school’, NDA integrated continuing education, research and knowledge sharing into its organisation model. Our open-source website – we call it our ‘knowledge-site’ – continues to be among the topmost visited websites in India and in the global legal ecosystem.
As the world is voraciously starting to embrace the ‘gig mindset’ in organisations, we are delighted to see our innovation acknowledged – but most of all, for the resilience, leadership might and exceptional client and community impact it has generated.
We thank you for your extraordinary support and inspiration to walk the ‘distinctly different’ path!
Sincerely,
Team NDA
