Some good recent posts

Prof. Sadagopan blogs on how the Bank of India has ambitously planned to go for the outsourced IT (hardware and software) route.

Bank of India, a pioneer in many technology introduction, decided to take
the outsourcing route; HP providing hardware, software and network solution in
an outsourced manner for 10-year period, unique amongst Indian banks. Infosys'
Finacle core banking solution powers the solution. Over ten years, it will be a
$ 100+ Million project, saving Bank of India not just the pain of running
hardware and software, (and in turn enabling the bank to focus on its core
competency), but save money as well. We expect about 100 branches to go live by
March 2005.
(As a Director of the Bank and an IT professional, I flew all the
way to Bombay to be there at the “go live” moment, a low-key event by design.
The smooth go live process (of course with minor glitches) was a satisfying
moment for me.

Dave Pollard an ex-CKO writes a note on a theory of knowledge and how it can save the world

My theory starts with learning. Learning is the process of direct and
indirect experience and observation, and knowledge is simply the personal,
collected, internalized result of learning. We learn in different ways (fig.1):
The best way is through active participation, which engages all our senses in
the learning experience. Next best is observation, where we see or hear but
where some of our senses are not engaged. The least effective way is
second-hand, through communication of reports from someone else. When a squirrel
learns, by personal trial and error, how to defeat a baffle on a bird feeder,
this is powerful knowledge, well retained and employed. When that squirrel
instead watches another squirrel show how to do it, the knowledge is less
valuable, less credible. The observing squirrel may not be able to replicate the
other squirrel's moves, and the method may not be the best one for the observing
squirrel, which may have a different body-weight or dexterity than the
demonstrating squirrel's. And if one squirrel merely tells another, unfamiliar
squirrel of the presence of food in a bird-feeder 'over there' that can be
accessed by navigating around the baffle, that knowledge is even less valuable.
The squirrel listening may doubt whether the baffle was or even can be overcome
-- perhaps this second-hand report is merely bragging or a ruse on the part of
the reporting squirrel.

(looks like Steve Denning and Dave have both discovered a soft corner for squirrels :-))

Canadian Headhunter Micheal blogs about an article that asks: Is your company a cult? and on a similar vein Madhukar blogs in his Alternative Perspective blog about how the typical corporate excutive could be a psychopath !

KM guru Denham shares his views about Knowledge Profiles, while Jack Vinson talked about the Promise of KM and the changing roles of the CKO.

the suggestion that CKO's have gone out of favor because KM in those
organizations has become a familiar-enough concept that the CKO could move on to
some other role or position. The CKO in this model is the change agent and moves
to new roles when the change has been effected. "Their goal should be to work
themselves out of a job - leaving the business with permanent benefits in
place."

jack also profiles Jamie Walters article on Dismantling a Culture of Knowledge Hoarding.

Om Malik blogs about how Tata Teleservices is helping Motorola capture markets against Nokia in India.

Motorola's turnaround efforts might be getting a helping hand from India.
The company is said to be helping rapidly build and grow Tata Telecom's wireless
networks in India. Tata uses CDMA technology to provide wireless, and local
services in most of India. The company also owns VSNL, the largest long distance
company in India. Tata is also in the running for Tyco's Global Network, a news
exclusively reported here at GigaOM a couple of
months ago. Aman Kapoor, a principal with San Francisco-based research firm
Packetology says that Tata has outsourced a chunk of its wireless network
build-out to Motorola. For Moto, that has to be good news. Nokia and Nortel are two
companies that have hogged all the attention in recent times. The two
companies got contracts worth $862 million from various operators. India despite
recent slowdown has proved to one of the fastest growing wireless markets on the
planet. As a side note, apparently a large number of RF engineers from Reliance
Infocom - a fierce competitor with Tata - might have defected to Motorola and
are helping out with Tata's networks.

Japanese employees views on employment change

A decade of restructuring and redundancies is undermining Japan's employment for life corporate culture, with top executives starting to switch jobs. Japanese managers traditionally spend their entire careers with one company, report Ginny Parker and Joann S. Lublin in The Wall Street Journal. Loyalty to an employer, the fear of losing face and family pressures often deter top managers from moving. However, Shiro Tsuda, senior executive vice president at NTT DoCoMo Inc. recently broke this taboo by accepting the top job at Vodafone Group PLC's Japanese unit. This shocking move could signal the beginning of a new executive job-switching trend, say recruiters.

Full story. Ginny Parker and Joann S. Lublin: "More Japanese May Rethink Loyalty to Jobs" in The Wall Street Journal (August 18, 2004). Search archive on title to retrieve article. Subscription required.

Change in the time of doing well....

Making improvements when a company is already performing strongly is a tough management challenge. Successful leaders achieve this by fostering internal dissatisfaction with the status quo, writes Professor of Leadership and Organizational Management Jean Francois Manzoni in the Financial Times. Manzoni identifies four factors that promote willingness to change. Gathering feedback from new recruits is a key strategy for fostering change. A major French construction company recently asked new hires to write an "astonishment report" of their first three months on the job, documenting interesting or disconcerting aspects of its operations. A fresh viewpoint can often highlight missed opportunities and hidden problems, notes Manzoni.

Facing reality can also be achieved by recruiting experienced individuals who speak their mind and can be trusted as reliable assessors. Searching for better practices is another key strategy, characterized by benchmarking internally and outside the company. Job mobility and training also promote best practice by encouraging managers to challenge established business patterns, notes the author. Overall these management concepts help to foster a sense of anticipation and pave the way for rapid changes, explains Manzoni. Without such strategies, managers risk wasting a lot of time communicating the need for change, rather than actually driving it, he warns.

Consulting News

Jay Wilson, ex-Chairman and CEO of Roper Starch Worldwide, and Simon Chadwick, until recently worldwide CEO of NOP World, announce the formation of their new management consulting company, Cambiar LLC.

BearingPoint eyes 40% revenue growth in South-East Asia while China becomes the management consulting market with the most rapid growth rate.
The latest Top-Consultant.com statistics show that recruitment activity within the management consultancy sector is at a 5 year high. That comes because the business itself is booming with double digit growth, riding primarily on outsourcing. No wonder consultants look such a happy lot.

Forrester however reports that there is no clear leader in low-cost services delivery model in the IT consulting market after comparing IBM, EDS, Accenture along with TCS, Wipro and Infosys.

TCS debut ...Bangalore vs Chennai...Domestic IT market

The country's biggest and (until now) least hyped IT firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) finally debuted in the BSE yesterday and looks like it'll have a foriegn listing in about a year. Nasdaq or NYSE?

Already with Rs. 500,000,000,000 (US $ 11 b) it is the biggest Indian IT firm by market cap and third biggest in the BSE after ONGC and Reliance.

The stock rose around 16% on the first day of trading and resulted in quite a few of the other IT firms (Infosys, Wipro, Satyam) whose shares fell due to the TCS effect. Ratan Tata also shared that TCS could look at consolidating with the other Tata group technology companies (Tata Elxsi, Tata Interactive Systems, CMC, VSNL (?))

In other news Gartner tells the IT big boys to concentrate on the increasingly lucrative domestic Indian market. That is where the Tatas have an edge after having taken over CMC.

And while Bangalore and Hyderabad were fighting over IT firms to set up shop there, looks like Chennai has silently set up huge infrastructure and is making this a three way race.

Bottom of the Pyramid, CK Prahalad's thoughts

BusinessPundit Rob blogs about CK Prahalad's Bottom of the Pyramid thoughts. To be fair, CKP has been talking about it for over two years now, but I think now is the time for the marketing push to that idea. Dr. Madhukar Shukla blogs about why three assumptions or biases in CKP's arguments jar him.

And indeed I think MS is right. Take a look at this interview by Prahalad on the venture that he consulted with the Tata Group to launch the IndiOne hotel which apparently will charge Rs. 900 per room night. Not even middle of the pyramid Mr. Prahalad. Someone like me would also have to think twice about it! $20 is definitely not the bottom of the pyramid !

I think that rethinking the mental models of MNCs to actually get them thinking to alleviate poverty is going to be very very hard ! Enterprises that actually understand the poorest of the poor's needs are going to be organizations that are started in the grassroots. Remember it took a Grameen Bank to rethink a lending model to the women in Bangladesh.
Not a MNC bank.

Mistakes top management make

Hey top management people (the CXOs as some people call them) are human too. Yeah, even if they get paid humongous amount of money. The Canadian Headhunters point to a survey conducted by Korn/Ferry (the bigwig recruitment firm) that outline the most common mistakes that senior executives make in their first 100 days.

On a related vein James Waldroop and Timothy Butler explored twelve behavior patterns of top managers that get in the way of their success. Read on, specially if you are getting a promotion to the next level anytime soon. If you have recently been promoted, then it is critical for you to read this !

Blunders by job hunters

Picked up this CareerJournal link through David Teten's Brain Food Blog who has some more pointers.

Other common goof ups and things to be aware of can be found at the Canadian Headhunters' page. So if you are a job hunter, you've been armed and warned :-)) Best of luck !

Change This! manifestos

It's out ! The Change This ! manifestos of Tom Peters who talks about what he believes in and Seth Godin who tells you to get more out of your life by doing less! Go check them out. Corporate bloggers might be interested to also check the Corporate Blogging manifesto by Robert Scoble.

Biocon, clinical deaths and Genetic Engineered drugs

The Biocon case gets curiouser and curiouser.
First newspapers reported that the Central government has admitted before the Supreme Court that some patients died during the clinical trials of genetically engineered (GE) drugs by two pharma companies without prior statutory approval but down played it saying the mortality rate was much lower than accepted norms.

The affidavit of the Ministry filed through advocate Vijay Panjwani said that
the Rs 600 crore Bangalore-based pharma company, Biocon India Ltd, had obtained
the approval of all competent authorities under the applicable rules to
undertake clinical tests of r-human insulin.Therefore, the Environment Ministry
on July 14 condoned the procedural lapse by Biocon India in not seeking approval
of GEAC before proceeding to conduct human trials of the drug.

This was followed by Biocon's denial done none other than by Kiran Mazumdar Shaw the darling of the media.

Biocon Chairman and Managing Director Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw told mediapersons
that the trials were conducted strictly in accordance with protocol based on
internationally accepted standards and with the consent of all volunteers
involved.
"We wish to categorically state that no deaths occurred during the
clinical trials conducted in relation to r-human insulin by Biocon," she said.
"Not a single death occurred," Shaw said.

Sify adds

She said the detailed information of the clinical trials for the r-human insulin
were published on the company's website and it intends to do the same for all
future trials.
Biocon had obtained approvals from the Genetic Engineering
Approval Committee (GEAC) for large-scale process optimisation of r-human
insulin for R&D purpose; approval from the Drugs Controller General of India
(DCGI) for conducting the clinical trials and approval from the Review Committee
on Genetic Manipulation (RCGM) for conducting the clinical trials, the company
said in a statement.
On the issue of not obtaining the GEAC approval for
phase III human clinical trials, Shaw said, "as per the protocol which has been
put on the Department of Biotechnology website, we were not required to get GEAC
approval, later on, there was a correction passed, where they said, you need to
take GEAC clearance for Phase III trials".
Shaw said there was some confusion in this regard.
Biocon officials said they did not want to talk about the merit of a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court filed by an NGO - Adar Destitute and Old People Home (ADOPH) - against GEAC, Biocon and Shanta Biotech for conducting human trials of genetically engineering drugs without prior approval, saying it was sub judice. Shaw said the marketing of the r-human insulin, which the company is planning to launch in October would not be affected with this case.

Sure some confusion exists. There is Shantha Biotech also in the scene. Hindu Business Line reports:

THE Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) said that there has been a
clear lapse on the part of the Hyderabad-based Shantha Biotechnics Pvt Ltd in
not obtaining clearance before conducting the Phase-III human clinical trials
using Recombinant Streptokinase for treatment of acute myocardial infarction
(heart attack).

So did the deaths occur due to the trials of r-streptokinase or r-dna Human Insulin? And what repercussions does this have for trials of drugs in India? I wonder if the media would have let the companies brush it off so easily if this were in the Western world rather than India...

Rent a CFO

Dane in the Business Opportunities blog says that small businesses are taking on CFOs as temps (or should that be temps as CFOs)

After all the corporate downsizing of the past few years, the rent-a-CFO
business is booming, with at least two dozen companies specializing in temp CFOs
scattered across the U.S. Many temps have decades of financial experience and
can help you arrange financing or credit or a budget. Just as important, he or
she can serve as a clear-headed strategic planner--something that will help
ensure that a CEO's growth plans actually make financial sense. "He's the sanity
check to the CEO's strategies," says David Gilmore, a managing director of
Atlanta-based Tatum Partners, one of the biggest providers of temp CFOs to small
and midsize companies nationwide.

Technorati, Socialtext get funding...

Om Malik at Gigaom reports that the "google of RSS feeds" Technorati has a lot of admirers not just about the blogging community but also amongst the VC community. Here's what Om says:

Venture capitalists who are falling in love with "real simple syndication."
I have learned exclusively that Technorati has/or is about to close its
first round of funding. My sources indicate that it was a mega-round, about $6.5
million at a valuation of around $12 million for the company. Draper Fisher
Jurvetson led the round. When I asked David Sifry, he declined to either confirm
or deny the news. "I'm sorry, it is our policy not to comment on questions on
funding," he wrote in an email. Next step, a quick email to Steve Jurvetson who
confirmed that his fund led the round. "We did lead the first round and I think
we are the largest investor," he wrote. Both parties declined to comment on
valuation and total funding received.
This is the second RSS related company to get big VC dollars. In June Newsgator attracted undisclosed amount of funding i from Mobius Venture Capital. "We have been aggressively exploring the universe enabled by the rapid adoption of RSS-based technologies since the beginning of the year," said Bradley
Feld, Managing Director at Mobius Venture Capital. I am guessing here but
Feedster, and Bloglines could be next in line for funding. Technorati, could use
the money, given that it is having some technical issues, normally related to
hyper-growth. Congrats to Sifry! Pssh! SocialText got some new moolah as well!
Previously, For VCs, Blogging is the Next New Thing Also on PaidContent, Feedburner gets cash and Pheedo gets fed.

While David Weinberger reports:

Socialtext, the wiki and social software company, has closed Round A financing with some investors noted for funding companies that make the world better. Cool! And I say this as a fully biased member of their advisory board.

The Collar of KM

Bijoy Goswami CEO of Aviri Inc talks about the collar of KM coat:

There’s an old Chinese saying: pick up your coat from the collar. Indeed, bad
things happen when you pick it up from the sleeve – the coat hangs clumsily, the
rest of it dangling on the floor. Holding it from the collar produces an
entirely different effect – the coat hangs nicely and behaves quite well! You
can sling it on your shoulder and walk down the street singing a happy tune.
Practitioners on the journey of Knowledge Management in organizations have been
trying to discover the collar of the KM Coat. Sadly, ten years on, we’re still
fumbling for it. We encountered a number of solutions along the way that seemed
like the collar, but learned from painful experience otherwise. Some of these
legitimately belong on the KM coat – such as the sleeve or pocket – but not the
vital collar. For the benefit of practitioners either just beginning, in the
middle of a KM project, or wondering how to make your KM initiative naturally
grow, I’d like to share three of these “pockets masquerading as collars.” I will
conclude by turning my attention to the true collar of the coat. For those
impatient to get to the conclusions, go to the section titled “What is the
Collar?”It is my sincere hope that in the spirit of KM, you will not reinvent
the lessons learned. Not only will you avoid the unnecessary pain of carrying
heavy boulders up the KM Mountain, you will instead discover that your
knowledge-sharing initiative will begin to feel more like coasting downriver.

And then he links it to The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I always knew there had to be a connection. And Bijoy articulates it so well !

In The Tipping Point, a popular book, especially in KM circles, Malcolm
Gladwell identifies three unique kinds of individuals he terms: mavens,
connectors and salespeople (evangelists). I will use the term “evangelist” when
referring to Galdwell’s “salesperson” in the rest of the article. [4] Mavens
discover and create knowledge, connectors know people and build relationships,
and evangelists combine people with knowledge they need to create action. In
Marcus Buckingham’s insightful book on management, First, Break All the Rules,
he discusses the difference between talents, skills and knowledge. Buckingham
explains in detail that while skills and knowledge can be learned, talents
cannot. Illustrating this point through the allegorical story of the scorpion
and the frog, he concludes that great managers understand the core talent
required in a particular job. They consequently hire, manage and fire
individuals based on these talents. What are the talents, according to
Buckingham? They are: analytical – working with knowledge; relating – working
with people; and results-creation – creating action in the world.
Unsurprisingly, these map directly onto mavens, connectors and evangelists. In
one the most comprehensive personality-typing works, Personality Types, Don Riso
describes the Enneagram, an ancient nine-type system. The nine types are derived
from three core types, which once again map to mavens, connectors and
evangelists [5]. The list goes on. Like the famous example of blind-men touching
the elephant, a long list of individuals in diverse fields - academia, business,
psychology, anthropology – have arrived at the same understanding through
different paths.Fine, but how is this related to KM? First, most KM efforts
focus almost entirely on mavens – those with the knowledge. We try to capture
their knowledge (section 1 above) or give them tools to discover and create
knowledge (section 2) or motivate them to “give up” their knowledge (section 3).
We have excluded two very important players integral to how knowledge is brought
into the world – specifically connectors and evangelists. If we assume an equal
breakdown of mavens, connectors and evangelists in our organizations, we have
effectively excluded two thirds of the organization!
Mavens: Knowledge + Knowledge = New Knowledge
Even with our maniacal focus on mavens, however,
we’ve missed the boat. In their groundbreaking book, Driven, Nitin Nohria and
Paul Lawrence discuss the core human drives to “acquire” and “defend.” This is
intuitively true – mavens, for example, feel a sense of ownership to their
knowledge and also, a need to defend that knowledge. The document-submission
approach completely ignores these core drives by not only asking people to
“give-up” their knowledge, but also by disassociating the knowledge-creator from
their knowledge. Furthermore, mavens feel differently about sharing their
knowledge based not only on their personalities (for example, mavens tend to
have very little patience with non-mavens), but also relative to their
reputation in the organization. If Jane, a maven, has just joined a company, her
desire to share her knowledge – even standard, mundane or trivial knowledge – is
very high because she can build her reputation and “reciprocity capital” with
that knowledge. She roams the organization advertising that, “No question is too
stupid, I’m glad to help! ” However, six months into her job, Jane’s reputation
has grown and her desire to answer those questions has dropped dramatically.
Comfortable in her place in the organization, she now wants to be able to choose
how to help others. Jane’s behavior will differ greatly from a connector or an
evangelist, who are each motivated by different drivers. Following these natural
incentive trails (much like ant colony scientists follow the pheromone trails)
is important and incredibly useful.
Connectors: People + People = New Relationships
Connectors differ from mavens in that the object of their
study is not knowledge, but people. If mavens’ function is to combine knowledge
with other knowledge to create new knowledge, then connectors’ function is to
combine individuals with other individuals to create new relationships.
Connectors spend time with people, seek to understand them and build strong
relationships. Just as mavens trade their knowledge, connectors trade their
relationships and seek to extend their reputation for knowing who knows. They
create a new connection to the knower. And just as mavens feel ownership of
their knowledge IP, connectors feel ownership of their relationships and must be
allowed to protect them. Mavens and connectors put a new twist to “it’s not what
you know, but who you know.” In fact, it’s both. The most powerful way we
develop trust in others is through our direct experience of them. Connectors
play the vital role of scaling trust – by leveraging their direct trusted
relationships between individuals so we don’t have to undergo the time-consuming
process of developing trust in others’ through our own direct experience.
Evangelists: People + Knowledge = New Actions
Evangelists are motivated by action. Evangelists, consummate storytellers, are constantly combining people with knowledge to create actions. On a continuum of people and knowledge, evangelists sit squarely in the middle. Not as interested as mavens to spend time understanding the nitty-gritty details, they’d rather know that the answer is 42 and then get as many people to believe it through their powerful persuasive skills. Indeed, rarely will mavens popularize their ideas –
evangelists will do that for them. Steve Jobs, the evangelist, brought Steve
Wozniak, the maven’s elegant PC design to the world. Malcolm Gladwell’s unique
contribution with Tipping Point, for example, has been to spread the word about
concepts that have been around for a while. Not as interested in developing as
deep an understanding of people as connectors, evangelists tend to have large,
superficial networks – if only because the message has to get out to as many
people as possible.

Malappuram drops purdah to climb up the e-learning curve

Picked this up from Ray Schroeder's Online Learning Update:

Muslim-dominated Malappuram is high on population and low in literacy. Half
of it seems to live on Gulf remittances, the other half in poverty.... It is
this district that has lifted the purdah for its first steps up the e-learning
curve. About 560 e-centres dot the hills, with 4,000 PCs and scanners.
Malappuram lays claim to being the world’s first rural district to achieve 100
per cent household e-literacy (one computer-literate person per family).

Experts on google

Dan Gillmor on Google:

Google is a media company more than anything else, a company that sells
advertising space on its own site and on its partners' (and customers') sites.
The business, built on a sturdy foundation of delivering targeted ads based on
people's actual interests, has legs.
It's also an obvious business for
competitors. If Microsoft and Yahoo weren't tough enough opponents, consider the
growing number of micro-advertising services that are springing up to serve
niche markets. In the Weblog world, for example, a small company called Blogads
has been effective for advertisers who want to target specific online journals.
Google's ad products are fine, but they're hardly a monopoly.
Google needs to
become much more of a platform, not just a collection of services. The company
has made some visible steps in that direction, but the strategy is still quite
hazy, perhaps deliberately.
Some observers have speculated that Google is
creating what amounts to an Internet operating system, an environment people and
businesses could use to effectively replace today's desktop computing services.
That's a big task, but not impossible.
If that is the aim, and even if it
isn't, Google should work harder to expand and open up its "applications
programming interfaces'' -- the instructions it offers to programmers on how to
use Google's searches to create other kinds of services. Google has a developer
ecosystem of sorts, but it's not nearly vibrant enough.

While Bob Cringely adds:

Whatever the company does will be incredibly technical because that's their
greatest strength. Remember, Google's CEO is Eric Schmidt, who used to be Chief
Scientist at Sun Microsystems, so technology doesn't scare these guys. In fact,
they prefer it because machines are more predictable than people, as Schmidt
learned when he tried to turn around Novell. THAT's why Google is cut from whole
cloth with every new hire chosen to be of the body.
The key to making money
in search is to get between people and what they are searching for, and that's
where Google is on a collision course not only with Microsoft and Yahoo, but
also with Amazon and eBay. Amazon is vulnerable to the Googlization of all the
millions of retailers who aren't running Amazon storefronts just as eBay is
vulnerable to the Googlization of auctions where localization, pricing, and
seller fees can all be improved.
But wait, there's more! What about
GoogleMedia? Find all the pictures, video, and music, then create a marketplace
for it. I'm not just talking about taking on iTunes, though that is a logical
possibility. I'm talking about new ways of buying and selling all types of
intellectual property. And given this week's court decision against the movie
studios and in favor of Grokster et al, that could even come to include
GoogleMovies. But any system for buying pictures to put in your term paper also
requires a means to pay for it. So expect either a GooglePal or more likely an
alliance with some established financial institution already convinced that
PayPal must die.

These are courtesy Rajesh Jain's Emergic Blog

Google - Post IPO...reflections

After the most watched IPO (for vaious reasons!) gets over, it's time to reflect on some points:

1. As Rob the Businesspundit points out, could going public destroy Google's culture?
   
2. Was the innovation of the Dutch auction worth it?
   
3. And the realisation, that upstarts/arrogance/innovators will always be sought to be "beaten" by the establishment (Wall Street, Big Money etc)
   

As the old Japanese saying goes "Any nail that stands up, will be hammered down"

I fervently hope not!

Listened to a talk by John Seely Brown (ex- Xerox PARC, cheif scientist) in which he talked about the need to start looking at the 'periphery' for innovation. (you can find JSB's slides here)Google was a truly peripherial start-up (in 'garage' mode like Dave & Bill) and even as they moved centrestage their outlook continued to be 'peripherial'. I hope they don't lose that in the post IPO era.

As JSB pointed out "The better you get at doing something, the more difficult it gets to see/do anything new"

Meme Experiment

A New Meme That Raises Your Blog's Google Rankings!
By Nova on Weblogs
This posting is a new, improved, second-generation meme experiment that is designed to spread faster and more broadly than the first meme experiment.
This new meme is simply better because it's more beneficial to you to participate. Why? Because by participating in this meme, you may be able to raise the Google rank and visibility of your blog. In other words, this meme rewards your blog for hosting it.
Disclaimer
This is purely an experiment and is just for fun. We are really just curious to see what will happen. Furthermore, we have no commercial intentions. We don't mean to annoy anyone. However, if you don't have much curiosity, or at least a sense of humor, you might find this experiment to be upsetting. In that case, I suggest a good strong cup of coffee every morning. If after that you are still unhappy, you must not read any further! On the other hand, if you are interested in exploring new frontiers, keep reading and we look forward to your participation in this experiment. It's totally voluntary. What's the "meme" being spread here? Well, actually there are many memes that this posting represents. And your weblog URL will be one of them, if you participate.
How It Works.
Just copy this full text of this meme and follow the instructions below to fill out your blog's answers to the survey and add your blog's URL to the "PATH LIST" at the bottom of this post. The path list is the history of all the blogs that the meme traveled through to reach you. The last URL before yours in the path list should be the URL for the blog you discovered this meme on. By adding your URL after it, your blog URL becomes part of the path for the meme. Everyone who gets the meme downstream from you will then include your URL on their blog. And by doing that, they are in effect linking to your blog from their blog, which in turn raises your blog's Google rank. By posting this meme to your blog you help raise the rankings of every blog in the path before yours, and every blog that later posts as a result of your blog then helps to raise your Google ranking. Kinda cool, huh?
By hosting a copy of this meme on your blog you are part of a worldwide network experiment to see how a blog posting spreads across social networks, geography and time. The dataset from this experiment is public, open and decentralized -- every blog that participates hosts their own data about their own blog.
Anyone can then get the whole dataset by just searching Google for this unique string: 98818912959q This code is the "global unique identifier," or GUID for this Meme -- it marks every web page that participates in this Meme so that it can later be found with all the others.
To see how this meme is growing at any time, or to join the discussion about this experiment, visit the Root Posting for this meme at http://www.mindingtheplanet.net to see trackbacks and comments there.
A Collaborative, Distributed, Emergent Blogroll
This Meme is effectively a collaborative, distributed, emergent blogroll. It is no different really than any blogroll (any list of other blogs you add to your blog) -- it just forms in a different way. Instead of you adding all the links to it, your social network adds them and then you add yours at the end and send it on to others in your social network. There's no top-down control or guidance of the process. Every blog that participates is equal. Nobody knows what the result of this experiment will be.
Can Your Blog Out-Rank the A-List Blogs?
This Meme, if it works as we hypothesize it might, could help a lot of lesser known blogs get better rankings than even the "A-List" blogs. In other words, it's kind of like unionizing to beat the big guys. There is strength in numbers, after all. Let's see if this works! If it does work, we should find lots of lesser-known blogs that participate in this experiment appearing in the "top lists" of the major blog indexes. Who knows, maybe we can even take over the top lists? You can see that this works by just looking at the results of the first meme experiment which launched the Minding The Planet weblog to the number 5 slot of the Daypop Top 40 blog posting index in just two days! Who knows, maybe it will be your blog up there next?
Why Are We Doing This?
OK, so why are we doing this? The short answer is, "Because we can!!!" But seriously, we're also doing this because it is an interesting way to generate a dataset that we and others may study to analyze how ideas move across social relationships on the Web, and how communities can emerge and self-organize. It's fun and it's research, and anyway, it's harmless and it helps bloggers get better visibility, so we figured we'd just try it and just see what happens! We hope you'll join us!
Interested in participating? Follow the instructions, below...
INSTRUCTIONS
Step 1 First, to add your blog to this experiment, copy the whole meme (the full text, including the introductory information above and these instructions and the path list at the end) to your blog.
Step 2: Fill in your answers to these REQUIRED SURVEY FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)
(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://www.apennyfor.com/movable_weblog/000508.html
(2) I found this meme on date (day/month/year):19/08/04
(3) I found this meme at time (24 hour time): 09:28:00
(4) I found it via "Newsreader Software" or "Browsing the Web" or "Searching the Web" or "An E-Mail Message": Newsreader Software
(5) I posted this Meme at my URL: http://gauteg.blogspot.com
(6) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 19/08/04
(7) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 09:32:00
(8) My posting location is (city, state, country): Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Step 3: You may also fill in these OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):
(9) My blog is hosted by: N/A
(10) My age is:30
(11) My gender is: Male
(12) My occupation is: HR and Training Professional
(13) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software:
(14) I use the following software to post to my blog:
(15) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 02/07/02
(16) My web browser is: IE 5.5
(17) My operating system is: Windows 2000

1. Step 4: Don't forget to add your URL after the last URL in the PATH LIST below:
   The Path List below shows the sequence of blogs that this meme traveled through to reach your blog. Add your blog's homepage URL to the end of this list, if you want your blog's Google rankings to be raised as others get the meme from your blog. Also note that if in your blog you post this meme in two parts -- an excerpt and an extended entry -- make sure to tell your readers to copy the whole meme into their blog, including the Path List. Also Note: If anyone has put anything inappropriate in the list -- like porn or advertising for example -- then feel free to delete it from the list. Unless you like porn and/or advertising! Then, at the end of the list, add a text link and a hotlink to your URL)
   THE PATH LIST: HOW THIS MEME GOT TO YOUR BLOG
   http://www.mindingtheplanet.net Minding The Planet
   
2. http://www.pheedo.info Pheedo
   
3. http://www.apennyfor.com A Penny For
   
4. http://gauteg.blogspot.com Gautam Ghosh on Management
5. (your URL goes here; also, please add a new line after this one, for the next person.)

You can't quantify certain things...

The Fast Company column by Mark Goulston , Vijay Govindarajan , and Chris Trimble on By the Numbers: You can't quantify Learning talks about when 'objective measures' are likely to be counter productive.

In fact, the jobs that are most effectively reduced to single quantities
are the ones that are the most one dimensional. The broader a person's
responsibilities, the more complex and subjective the evaluation. Measures
become more ambiguous. There are more stakeholders with a wider range of needs.
Evaluations come at specific points in time, but there are always short-term
versus long-term tradeoffs. In the face of such complexity, do you want to
motivate only what is measurable?
What gets measured, gets done. When you have a clear, unambiguous measure that captures most of the value of a person's work, use it. But recognize that this is a luxury. It is not the norm. In fact, there is always a heavy dose of subjectivity in evaluating managers and executives. Accept it. At best, you can tie performance to pre-negotiated predictions of what is possible. For mature businesses with plenty of consistent history on which to base predictions, this is reasonable. But as we discussed in our previous column, the innovation process is anything but predictable.

Pramath Sinha's Tribute to Sumantra Ghoshal

Businessworld has a touching article by Pramath Sinha (ex-Dean, ISB, and Principal Consultant McKinsey & Co.) where he touches about the late management guru's persona and principles:

You believed passionately that business be seen as a force of good (and not
with suspicion as it has been traditionally viewed around the world and in
India). You wrote: "This is a belief that business and, by implication, both
entrepreneurs and managers, are the key engines of both economic and social
progress. It is business that creates and distributes most of an economy's
wealth, that innovates, trades and raises the living standards of people. So
business is and must be a force of good..."You stressed a commitment to
pluralism: "Commitment to pluralism is more than either an international
orientation or a sensitivity to diversity. It is an acknowledgement that an
organisation as well as a society becomes a better place when diverse moral,
intellectual and ideological beliefs can flourish..."Above all, you believed in
the individual: "Recognition that the need for collective action and social
harmony does not in any way contradict the role of the individual and the power
of the human will in bringing about economic, social and cultural change. A
respect for and belief in the individual as the primary vehicle for initiative
and action-taking, and the accompanying need for individuals to develop the
courage to both act and take the consequences of such action, will be a core
value that ISB will aspire to inculcate."

But it was easy to love you. You were big-hearted. You made us all feel
very special. People you have taught even briefly tell me their lives changed
after attending your classes. You were a man of principle. I remember they hated
you for not budging from your demand of high fees for your teaching at ISB, a
school you helped found. But you stuck to your guns - it was a matter of
principle. When they did give in, you donated it all and more to a scholarship
for high-performing students. You were the champion of the individual. Every
time you visited you left us - workers, students, administrators, faculty -
feeling that ISB would not have been built had it not been for our individual
contributions. You were always positive - don't complain, do something about it
or shut up.

Read more about Sumantra here. The Economist's tribute to him here (paid subscription only)

Some good posts at FC Blogjam

Yeah Heath has invited a whole lot of bloggers to blog jam away at the FC Now Blog and here are some posts that caught my fancy !

Jon Strande talking about Money vs. Happiness and Beverly Kaye joins in.
Angie talks about whether its a good idea to make a business out of you hobby.
Dean revisits Organizational Learning theory of Argyris
Rob asks if too much innovation is a bad thing
Beverly Kaye talks about recruiters' frustrations on when people leave quickly
Scott references a article that talks about How to Manage Smart People

Hmm must keep visiting the FC Now site, now! (i wonder why they don't offer RSS/atom :((

Peter Block on the "new" economy

At the designedLearning site Peter Block offers some insight about the 'new' economy.

Some excerpts:

1. You will survive in the new economy as well as you survived in the old
   economy, for the core values are the same, even though the tools are different.
   
2. What is at risk in the new economy is the quality of our experience, both
   individually and collectively.
3. my sense of smell, touch and observation are being eliminated from the
   marketplace and workplace. Place now occurs electronically.
4. Coupled with the isolating effects of the technology, what the new economy
   also symbolizes is our recommitment to a new level of materialism.
5. What threatens my survival in the new economy is my romantic attachment to
   its tools and the wealth that it promises.
6. The new economy is just that…it may be somewhat new, but it is just an
   economy. It is not a way of life, a replacement for life, a creator of life or
   an answer of any magnitude. It is simply the advent of amazing tools applied to
   mostly mundane problems.

HR outsourcing - Govt sector joins the bandwagon

Now what should we make of this report ? Sure, it's a sponsored report by Accenture HR services so one should discount heavily. Even then...this presents huge opportunities to organizations like the new Hewitt/Exult combine to stave off the challenge from the erstwhile IT services firms.

From Top-Consultant.com:

"National and state governments are rapidly joining the private sector in outsourcing key human resources and other functions, according to a new Conference Board report.

The report, sponsored by Accenture HR Services, finds the outsourcing movement is taking hold in governments and government agencies, showing how countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia moved early into outsourcing. The three major drivers: cost savings, reducing capital spending, and transforming fixed costs into variable ones.
But the study notes that governments must carefully weigh negative consequences, such as job losses, skills transfers, unemployment costs and the disruption of local
services against the promised benefits.

'Through technology tools and processes that most public-sector organizations could not afford to build internally, outsourcing can provide much improved and more convenient services for employees,' says Ton Heijmen, Senior Advisor to The Conference Board on Outsourcing/ Offshoring. 'This is a particular concern for public-sector organizations, which generally cannot compete with the private sector's pay packages to attract and retain talent.'

But convenience and cost reduction are not the only attractions offered to public organizations by HR outsourcing. Outsourcing can enable public sector organizations to centralize often complicated and fragmented processes throughout their organization, helping their HR departments keep talented workers and improve service to U.S. citizens.

Some 10 to 15 states are now said to be considering HR outsourcing. The government trailblazers include the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, the State of Florida, Detroit Public Schools and the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

The study, based on in-depth interviews and case studies, identified three forces that are converging to fuel the HR outsourcing movement in U.S. government. First, IT systems are reaching the end of their life span. Legacy computer systems, which are 25 years old, need to be replaced. With growing deficits and a reluctance to increase taxes, many states are looking at capital outlays of $80 million to $100 million to replace these systems. Financing technology upgrades is too costly for many government organizations, given the rapid rate of technological change and
persistent cost-reduction pressures.
Second, the economic downturn that struck the nation in the late '90s has created severe budget shortfalls throughout the government sector, particularly in state governments. Rising deficits threaten government's ability to perform key services. Also, more government employees want to run their organizations by management principles of efficiency, optimum customer service, and performance measurement that have been long embraced by the private sector.

A number of government agencies in the UK, Europe, and Australia were early examples of public sector outsourcing of all or parts of the HR function -- a trend now growing in the U.S. HR historically has lacked organizational stature in both the private and public sectors. This has only recently begun to change as organizations slowly recognize the strategic value of human capital and other intangible assets in
today's largely service-based economy.

The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government's HR agency, is also weighing the merits of outsourcing HR. In the U.S., the trend is likely to center on the federal and state level, since scale is necessary for organizations to realize outsourcing's full benefits and justify its costs. Despite political sensitivities and union resistance, many in the industry see no abatement of interest from public-sector
organizations. As one study participant observed: "HR outsourcing in government is ready to explode."

"Our experience worldwide has been that once the perception issues about HR outsourcing have been overcome, public sector outsourcing spreads rapidly," said David Clinton, president of Accenture HR Services, an Accenture business that provides people-management services on an outsourced basis. "Governments have built-in cost restraints, limited technology budgets and, like many large organizations, difficulty finding and retaining experienced HR professionals. In many cases, HR outsourcing is the best way to get the best service for every tax dollar."

The HR processes and services that outsourcers provide to government organizations include:

* Payroll and benefits processing
* Web sites and call centers
* Vendor management
* HR process redesign
* Service delivery strategy
* Staffing and recruitment
* Data issues
* Performance benchmarking
* Designing and building IT infrastructure

Various complexities make these functions especially well suited to outsourcing. With some government workforces more than 90 percent unionized, an organization can easily have 10 different benefit packages, the terms of which must all be accurately reflected in employee databases.

Among the choices government organizations must make are deciding what processes to outsource and selecting an outsourcing vendor among "classic" outsourcing firms and "lift and shift" outsourcers, those who take client organizations' existing staff, processes, and technology approaches into their environment but customize their services to work with each client's established technology structure. "

How to do competitive intelligence gathering

David Teten's blog Brain Food points out this interesting article on How to do competitive intelligence gathering via phone are applicable to anyone who does research. This article was the 2003 Fletcher winner for original writing in Competitive Intelligence ("CI").

Steve Denning on Innovation

Discovered Steve Denning's Blog on Storytelling and he's currently taking on the innovation gurus on how to instituionalise innovation in Organizations.

On Debra Amidon's view of having a Chief Innovation Officer, he says:

The idea is interesting, and yet one has to ask: what sort of person would
be appointed to such a position? And what sort of incentives would govern their actions? What is the likelihood that the chief innovation officer would actually tackle the rest of the hierarchy? What sort of powers would be needed to force innovation on the top management?
Is it not inevitable that a chief innovation officer would be selected in the image of the existing top management and would encourage innovations that fit the mold that the hierarchy expects – namely, tame, me-too, extensions of the existing way of doing business, not than bold disruptive revolutionary changes? Isn’t likely that this big fierce hierarchical figure, who is ostensibly supporting innovation, will use the power
of the position to channel innovation in the conventional direction, and crush disruptive innovation or rather than encourage it?
Hierarchy is good for controlling and establishing order out of disorder: it’s usually not very good at sparking heterodox ideas. Asking a hierarcy to encourage innovation is like asking a fish to fly: occasionally it happens, but not very often. Thus the people who climb the hierarchy and arrive at the senior hierarchical positions in large organizations get there because they have been good at maintaining order and focus and discipline. This is good for organizational efficiency, for organizational optimization, but inimical to innovation.

I agree with Steve, in this case you can't fight water with fire :-) The system has legacy and gravity on it's side. The Wright brothers didn't make a airplane by modelling it on the image of a carriage or steam train! Steve's fad bashing is getting interesting. He calls these theories gadget theories. I have a feeling he himself wants to concentrate on the culture and systemic workings of a firm. Let's see where this Blog develops into. Wonder how people like Gary Hamel and Christensen will react to being taken to the driers so publicly in the Blogosphere ?

Avoiding Burnout

I get a newsletter from MAPP which talks this issue about career burnout. Here are some pointers:

I picked up a fork and explained that as long as I used it for eating,the
fork would last indefinitely. However, if I began to use it todrive nails
or dig trenches, it would soon break. The key was to useit for what it was
designed to do.The look in his eyes told me he got it, but I still went on to
say thatpeople are like the fork. When they do what they are not designed
to do,they eventually break.

So how do you know if you, a loved one, or someone who reports to youis
suffering from burnout? Here are the early warning signs.
1. chronic fatigue - exhaustion, tiredness, a sense of being
physically run down
2. anger at those making demands
3. self-criticism for putting up with the demands
4. cynicism, negativity, and irritability
5. a sense of being besieged
6. exploding easily at
seemingly inconsequential things
7. frequent headaches and gastrointestinal disturbances
8. weight loss or gain
9. sleeplessness and depression
10. shortness of breath
11. suspiciousness
12. feelings of helplessness
13. increased degree of risk taking

Sometimes a simple change at work can help you avoid many (if not all) of
the early warning signs of Burnout.

An XLer challenging Google

There are quite some times when I am so proud of my alma mater that I just can't puffing my chest out.

Like this news item from Businessweek:

"....The average search query contains 2.5 words, leaving plenty of room for
interpretation. As a result, searches typically turn up hundreds of links, many
of them irrelevant. A handful of startups, from Vivisimo to iXmatch
Inc., are using so-called clustering technology that organizes
several hundred search results into subject-specific folders.... As they hit the
market, the new technologies will likely make search even more indispensable to
our lives"

And as the XL Alumni blog points out iXmatch Inc. is founded and led by Prakash "P.V.R" Puram of the 1978 batch of XLRI

Davenport on Personal KM

Das e-biz Blog has a post on Tom Davenport's views on Personal Knowledge Management.

Some excerpts:

“All this time, we were looking at KM as an organizational phenomenon, but clearly it has an individual aspect that needs to be examined,” said Davenport. “If we can focus on the individual, then perhaps the organization will follow.”
Davenport said the idea of managing personal information to transform KM will take off for many reasons. First, people are swamped with information and knowledge. “Few people today believe they do not get enough information. In fact, we get plenty of information, and we need to use it more effectively,” said Davenport. Second, thanks to the Internet, Google, and other knowledge resources, there are greater expectations for information access. Third, because of self-service strategies employed by many large organizations, employees often feel they are on their own.
those that are successful at managing personal information generally use as few devices as possible. They tend to focus on one piece of software (e.g., Microsoft Outlook) and learn its capabilities well. (...) Those that are information-adept learn all these capabilities and make that piece of software their centerpiece. Finding a gadget or two and sticking with them is also effective in helping users to manage personal information.
Second, those that are sophisticated information users invest time managing personal information on a weekly basis. Whether it is during a long flight or on a Sunday morning, those that effectively manage their information invest a significant amount of time “cleaning up” and organizing their personal information environment.Vendors will also play in integral role in successfully managing personal information and knowledge. In terms of technology, vendors provide “features and functions but not reliability,” which Davenport described as “the biggest waste of our time.”

Carnival of the Capitalists

This week's carnival of the capitalists is up at the PoliBlog. Yes, you'll find my contribution there too :-)

A new take on Entrepreneurship---Existential Enterprise

I picked this from Rajesh Jain's Blog and he picked it from a post by Dave Pollard. Am posting a part of the post. Rob at BusinessPundit might find it useful !

The #1 reason entrepreneurial businesses fold is because they simply run out of cash. The #2 reason is because the owners make one or more fatal decisions, and the most common fatal decision is to produce a product that nobody wants to buy.
Here's an alternative model, based on what Charles Handy calls Existential Enterprise, and which I have called New Collaborative Enterprise. Its first two principles turn the business school formula upside down:
1. Marketing: Don't sell or market anything -- identify and produce something for which there is a substantial unmet need.
2. Financing: Don't borrow money or sell part ownership in your business -- only spend your own cash or cash you've earned.

Corporate Blogging Survey

Vasant pointed out this Corporate Blogging survey. Go check it out, some interesting answers to the questions of why corporate people blog and where it is headed.

waiting to read....

1. Small Pieces Loosely Joined written by David Weinberger, you could read the chapters online.
   
2. The future of Ideas written by Lawrence Lessig

What's common to both books? They are both refreshing new looks at the phenomenon of the Internet. Something tells me I'll love to read them !

Adversity Quotient...?

I came across something pretty interesting. Peak Learning's site showcases something called Adversity Quotient based on Dr. Paul Stoltz's work. With so many xQs (IQ, EQ, SQ) being in vogue over the last few years, my first response was, "oh no, not again"...but when I took a closer look, here is what the site said:

Adversity Quotient®, or AQ®, is the science of human resilience. People who
successfully apply AQ perform optimally in the face of adversity—the challenges,
big and small, that confront us each day. In fact, they not only learn from
these challenges, but they also respond to them better and faster. For
businesses and other organizations, a high-AQ workforce translates to increased
capacity, productivity, and innovation, as well as lower attrition and higher
morale.

AQ theory draws from award-winning science to explain in simple terms why
some people are more resilient than others—in other words, why and how they
thrive, even in the most demanding circumstance. It also tells us what it takes
to become more reslient.
AQ measures are exceptionally robust. The statistically valid and reliable (not many people can say that ! - Gautam) Adversity Response Profile™ is the exclusive online tool for screening applicants and developing greater resilience in people.
AQ methods are proven — they produce measurable, permanent gains in resilience. Our simple AQ-building process increases performance, health, tenacity, agility, innovation, accountability, entrepreneurship, focus, and effectiveness… among other attributes that help individuals thrive within an organization.

AQ is grounded in research. It can be measured and tracked against performance and other variables that affect business results. AQ leverages on our natural ability to learn and change, enhancing this vital capacity. In fact, unlike other types of learning, AQ can be permanently rewired and strengthened.

Read more about the AQ book on Amazon.

HR becoming a trusted business partner

Somebody sent me a useful checklist. Do you all (HR people and business folks) think that this is a good starting point. Of course, this is assuming one has highly developed HR skills (which contrary to public opinion is not common sense!)

Becoming literate about the business you serve - in HR we want to help our business partners succeed. As their partners it is reasonable that we understand things like,

· Their intended reason for existing,
· Their preferred markets, customers, products, and services,
· How they will operate and work together
· How they make and spend money
· How they measure success
· The boundaries and constraints must be honored
· What and where they want to be in the future.

At some point you may want to develop a profile for each of your business partners. To help get started, ask yourself questions like these…

· Who are the business partner’s customers?
· What do they want from your business partners? (Are they getting it?)
· What does the business partner offer their customer?
· Who are the competitors how are they different from the business partner?
· How do the business partners measure their success?
· What are the 3 top issues facing the business partner now?
· What are the business partners' core work processes?
· How is the business partners unit organized?
· What is my value proposition statement to the business partners?

Tracking Employment 2010 trends in India

Picked this up from the XL Alumni watch blog:

The current issue of Business India (July 19 - Aug 1, 2004) carries a 2-page coverage of an interesting future survey of the Employment Trends in India.The survey, based on Future-Search Conference methodology, was conducted by Chennai-based, Totus Consulting, and identifies 3 influencing factors and seven trends which will change the nature of employment in the country.Ganesh Chella (84PMIR batch), the Founder & CEO of Chennai-based Totus Consulting, says, "We wanted to take a hard look at future macro-trends, not at current best practices. The whole exercise was to seek, not critique..."

Read on more here( I've highlighted the main points in bold):

The seven macro-trends thrown up by the study are a "reflection of what
will be," says Mr Ganesh Chella, CEO, Totus Consulting. Some of these trends -
the increasing work-life imbalance for instance - are already evident, but
others are not so visible, he adds.
Employee rights, for instance, are a great source of concern, he says. The issue here is not just who will take care of employee rights in the future, but also what the consequences of not taking care of employee rights are, he explains. "Will this neglect result in white collar activism?" he asks.
Similarly, career longevity is likely to emerge as a major source of concern for those over 45. But the people who cope with this anxiety will be those who embark on a second or even third career in their middle years, he says. Thus, retirement in the traditional sense will soon disappear making it necessary for society to have appropriate coping mechanisms, he points out.
The study also found that women would continue to be under pressure, trying to balance their own needs and expectations with those of society. Women themselves will, however, be responsible for finding solutions to these problems with options such as `free-agency' flourishing because of this, the study adds. The growth in concepts such as `temping' and `free-agency' will also be driven by the increasing work-life imbalance, explains Mr Chella.
With organisations increasingly being driven only by performance, a `no-frills' employee value proposition will emerge, the study states. Most businesses will not invest in developing talent and will instead look at `buying' it. In many cases, organisations will increasingly turn to intermediaries such as professional employer organisations, Mr Chella says.
These intermediaries will gain in influence, he adds. The HR function too will be influenced by the persistent focus on the bottomline and on ensuring performance, he says. Traditional HR skills such as managing `employee relations' will no longer be a part of the HR vocabulary (who will do that, I wonder, the line manager? - Gautam), he adds. Similarly, the study found that education would increasingly become a prerogative of the private sector, with porous boundaries between industry and education. As part of this process, many young people will join the workforce after completing high school (10+2) and will work for a while before returning to college for a graduate degree.

On tactics and tricks of retention

I am a little sceptical always of these so-called "strategies" for things like attraction and retention of people to an organization.
I believe that the best employers are firms that build processes and policies around people and not vice versa. These are practices that view the people who work not as a faceless nameless mass of "Human Resources" but as live, real people who have live real issues.
Whether senior or junior management, blue or white collar, the best way to retain employees is to respect them and care for them. It is when HR people try to be 'extra smart' and end up being manipulative that people see through it and that breeds cynicism of the HR function.

Folks who have stuck to their organizations tell me its because they feel valued there, and the organization goes out of its way to accomodate their desires for growth and learning. They also accomodate personal needs for transfers easily and these people have also been open enough to look at cross functional moves when the company has given them an option.
Of course there have been people who have left these firms, and yet even the disengagement process has not left them with a bitter taste in the mouth.
The underlying theme for a great relationship between any employee and employer ? Mutual respect and acknowledgment of the tacit psychological contract .

Poaching returns to Silicon Valley

From Brian Caulfield's post on the Business2Blog:

An expert on Silicon Valley recruiting, John Sullivan, mentioned to me earlier this year that many recruiters, among the first to be let go during the bust, were being called back into action.
Sure enough, it looks like we're starting to see some results. Juniper, a business built on poaching Cisco talent before the bust, has just grabbed two of Cisco's key sales guys. Nice. You want to really stick it to a competitor, start with sales. Meanwhile, Google has just grabbed BEA's chief software architect, Adam Bosworth, with the ultimate recruiting tool: pre-IPO Google options.

He also points to John's article on "poaching techniques and tools"....nice, if you are a recruiter...and bad news, if you are a manager of talented people!

ASTD conference 2004 speaker handouts available online

For people interested in cutting edge Learning, Training and HRD thoughts, I suggest you take a look here.