In their early stages, companies are essentially innovators, either from the product, service or delivery point of view. As the organization evolves, getting the management in place, building the culture and creating systems and processes takes importance at different stages. While these stages are required to build a foundation for sustainable business operation, organizations with mature processes run the risk of forgetting their innovative roots; thus becoming incapable of changing themselves, running of ideas and eventually disappearing.

Companies born in the last decade in India have a great advantage in the process of becoming ‘Intelligent Organizations’ - where people, culture and processes do not become a burden for innovation. These young companies started off in the backdrop of an internet revolution and have seen the benefits of capital and ideas gushing into the country. And, over the last 2 years, they have been through (and hopefully, survived) the worst recession in fifty years. All this in less than ten years.

In any other day and age, companies would have taken a few decades at the least to acquire this kind of exposure and seasoning! With such an induction, this young and seasoned generation of Indian entrepreneurs may well be equipped to become some of the more successful companies globally. They will be able to innovate the fastest, they will be able to sniff new opportunities and constantly transform themselves to capture new opportunities.

With this context, we have looked into three young and innovative Indian companies as the lead story of this issue of People Matters. In less than ten years, they are today challenging the traditional and global players in their space. We look at how they started, how they built their teams and their culture, and the challenges they face in evolving into more process-driven organizations without losing their capacity to innovate.

We have covered in this issue, a variety of topics related to people strategy and its execution, compensation trends, the importance of culture and values as the base to build the organization of the future and many more. We have also covered the journey of successful organizations from different sectors: Tata Consultancy Services, Mahindra Group and RK Swamy BBDO.

Our special supplement in this issue is on HR Technology. We start the supplement with a pan-India survey of HR professionals and senior managers. This survey provides an up-to-date benchmark on current usage of HR technology and benefits accrued to companies. We have complemented this with a buyer’s guide and directory of technology products and services covering recruitment, talent management, compensation, performance management and employee services. Professionals looking to adopt HR technology in their organizatons will find such information extremely useful.

We hope our efforts to deliver diverse concepts and ideas from a wide spectrum of industry leaders will contribute to your development and your organization’s success.