That's why wednesday?

Oh, so THAT's the reason why the Ascent, Opportunities and other job supplements come out on Wednesdays.

On employee spaces

Just discovered an excellent blog by Anuradha.

She asks:

A lot of our interventions in HR essentially impinge on “employee spaces” –
be they temporal, physical, social, or cerebral. The key thing here is – do we
allow them to “access / manage” this space or “control” it?

And her answer:

So, is greater control over space necessarily a better thing?

I think that’s a wrong question. What would instead help is an understanding of how our interventions interact in each of these spaces and produce consequences that may be desirable or undesirable. Profit center responsibility or increase in job size, may give greater control over cerebral space, but may impinge about the employee’s physical or temporal space. Similarly, telecommuting may give the employee control over his physical and temporal spaces, but what about his social space? Sharing of ideas, working with people, leading a team? And continuing this line of thought – not all employees want control over all these spaces at all points of time. Well, obviously not – you would say. So then – what spaces do our employees want to control at what points of time in their careers? And how we provide for that? These are the questions that we need to answer.

After citizen journalism, is it citizen marketing?

Thanks to YouTube you can advertise for your favorite company ! [Hat Tip: Church of the Customer]

Not too much stuff out there on Indian organizations but I did find this video about the Reliance Jamnagar facility there ! Seems a very corporate presentation there.

Jobster and Six Apart tie-up: One year of free typepad

Jason announced this on his blog (how apt!)

jobster and typepad are teaming up to enable typepad bloggers to easily add a sidebar with relevant jobs and/or a jobster search box to their blogs.

As part of this launch, Jobster is offering 400 individuals free typepad service for a year. If you are already a typepad user, all you need to do is install a jobster widget on your typepad blog before may 25th, check a box, and you can win free typead blogging for a year. that's right, jobster will pay for your typepad subscription for a year.

I alas, am not blogging on typepad so no free blogging for me. Hey wait, I am blogging when I am free, for free ! Yeah, blogger is good too. I aint too fussy. I can customize it to get some OK AdSense US$ ;-) Wordpress doesn't even let me do that.

Coming back to the Jobster-Six Apart news...did the Cheezman read the tea leaves the other day or can he read Jason's thoughts through his blog.
Man, these SEO Bloggers are scary ;-))!

Interesting quote in that story from Jason:

"Jobster's 200-plus premium employers have found increasingly that the people they want to hire are more likely to be reading a blog on a given day than they are to be visiting a job board," said Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster. "With this partnership, Jobster is taking those employers and their jobs to the blogs like never before."

Waitaminnit, even I have Jobster ads running on my blog. Any job that interests you, oh reader? Just click away!

Indian consultants score high in world market

Interesting article from SKP Cross Border Consulting.

No comment to add on it, except for the fact that they left a few groups out. Like Everest.

First, it was in the world of academics, where the Indian guru made a mark, rising to top positions in Ivy League tech and business schools. The next logical step is into the equally knowledge-heavy world of consulting, where Indian talent is making an impact world-wide. As the world gives India monikers like ‘knowledge capital of the world,’ consulting majors — the Brahmins of global business — have realised that India has an important role to play in their industry as well.

Consultants in all hues and shades, right from blue-blooded strategy formulators like McKinsey and Bain, to mid-level firms like AT Kearney and Monitor, to IT-centric consultancies like Accenture and Sapient, are each adding an India element to their global strategies.

So while Bain puts up its knowledge centre in Gurgaon, IBM is talking about hiring thousands in India, and other firms are increasingly using Indian consultants to service overseas clients. If the number of Indians working overseas in various consulting firms is any indication, India is clearly emerging as the next big sourcing centre for consulting talent. KPMG has set up KPMG Resource Centre Private Ltd (KRCPL), which will not only provide support but will also train people in business advisory services apart from other audit functions.

Meanwhile, all pure play consultants are looking at hiring Indian talent, which often flows abroad for long and short stints. One big shift has been the growing acceptance of Indian consultants by overseas clients. In the least few years, there has been a growing realisation that Indian talent is good at consulting. McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group, AT Kearney and PwC, all made their highest number of offers across all B-schools in India this year.

The big consulting firms have resorted to a more globalised trend of staffing and, as a result, more and more Indians are filling the ranks. And a close look at the financials of consulting firms in India will reveal another secret: the money coming in from Indian consultants working for overseas clients is becoming a strong revenue stream for the firms. Many global consulting firms are changing their business models to improve their profitability, and Indian consultants working abroad are boosting the firm’s revenues.

Globally, consulting is under a lot of cost pressure, and as clients expectations are changing, they are demanding better services at more reasonable prices. Consulting firms are trying to deal with the situation by offshoring parts of their work to low-cost geographies. McKinsey took the lead and launched its Knowledge Centre in India in 1997, giving the consulting world a new way to get quality research done at lower costs. Now, others like Bain, AT Kearney and KPMG are also leveraging their India capabilities, by setting up captives in India.

Even if some consulting firms have decided not to have a captive knowledge unit in India, they are still tapping into the Indian advantage by using third party KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) firms. The low cost factor, the access to talent and the time zone play is simply a proposition that no one wants to let go.

Ghosh's Uncertainity Principle (GUP)

This started off as a joke.

We have a session in office when some of us gather together to discuss concepts and chapters from a book on Organizational Behavior (Fred Luthans' if you want to know!).

Today the topic was Personality.

Now it is believed that personality is the factor for behavior, but the fact remains that research has almost never found how much of behavior is influenced by personality and how much by the situation or the context.

So I pronounced, "The atomic unit of organizational behavior is the individual's behavior, and you can never know with any degree of certainity both the personality or the situation behind the behavior"

But on a serious note, I think that personality is a western construct. In India the focus is on role of a person with regard to time and context. I don't know of any Indian word that is a direct translation of "personality", although there are words that are the equivalents of self, identity and ego.

How to be happy?

A teacher at Harvard teaches you how.

Notice the board behind him? It's got flow on it !

Adventures of the sales chap

Sameer has the lowdown on the page 3 life of a sales guy in Eastern Uttar Pradesh. So all you MBAs with FMCG dreams, pay attention...

Story of a Sales Trainee...

Welcome to regional Office...

Landing up in the market ...

Some gems from the posts:

Here hierarchies are sacrosanct. We have people of all ages and capability, some 23 year olds, some having experience of 23 years in the company, at the same level and reporting to the same person. You can’t treat everyone equal.

‘Information is Power and; it can’t be shared with everybody, again a stark contradiction to our IT geeks where open source community is now taking over the
world.

Now you find some one cribbing his life; some one cribbing his parents for his life; some one abusing the market; some one abuing the distributors for this kind of market. Basically in the end saying “Ganda hai par Dhandha hai yeh” (It's dirty, but it's business)

The Resume as the Blog and vice versa !

Yes, we keep talking about how resumes are going forward from word documents, pdfs to video, animation and how your blog is (if you choose to be) your 'profile' that communicates your strengths to the world.

However, Zoli is taking the approach very very literally !

[Hat-tip: The Scobleizer]

Update: Interesting article on Fast Company on networks, career and related issues.

Hiring Mistakes

Around three years ago Dataquest had asked my comments on “Hiring Mistakes”, I think a lot of the ideas bear repetition in today's job market even more.

So here's a Blast from the past !

What are the options to traditional interviews?

Companies could use a lot more case studies and group hiring techniques. They could also use- "work one day on the job" so that the interviewee gets a feel of the place, his boss and subordinates.

Could you give an anecdote (not necessarily within your current company) in which a better evaluation technique could have helped avoid a hiring mistake?

Most hiring mistakes happen when both sides do not gauge the requirements of the other side. In one case a candidate with the requisite skills was hired into a fresh team of a company. Even though she had the competencies that the job demanded of her, there were two major differences that both the sides ignored putting any attention to , or to clarify. She had come in from a process oriented company where everyone knew of the field. Here she was going to be in a fresh team that was starting off and had to put processes in place. In the previous job her profile had been to interface and build business with external customers while in this job she had to interface with internal customers, which eventually led to her frustration and quitting the job in 4 months.

Could you outline some best practises that will help avoid hiring mistakes?

Both sides need to clarify the job down to the last detail. The candidate should meet and spend some time with prospective peer group and boss. The prospect should also find out how critical is the job, who did it earlier, scope for growth and learning, how will performance be evaluated etc. Remember, most hires leave on account of interpersonal problems with the team/supervisor, or because what was promised and what was delivered was not clear. Both sides need to explore and clarify their assumptions before they jump in to the joining. Costs of not doing so could be not just monetary but far worse like ill-feeling and a bad taste in the mouth.

On Knowledge Exchange

The fallibility in most of the “people process” models for Knowledge Sharing and Exchange is that they seek to address the superficial acitivities by initiatives like training and communication.

The problem lies more at a fundamental mental model level.

The mental model driving most KM initiatives in organization is “extractive” is nature (that is, KM is seen as an initiative from which the organization gains without investing too much in people) over other initiatives like Organizational and Individual Learning which have a more developmental orientation.

Some attempts at definitions

My Definition of Learning Organisation on KnowledgeBoard.com

“A Learning Organisation is one in which there exists processes, systems and
intent to continually challenge and questions one’s own mental models and
assumptions and to ask oneself “why?”, in a non-threatening manner”

My definition of Organisational Culture

“Organisational Culture is the the sum total of the image the organisation has
of itself and the identity that others give to it. It includes the mental models
that drive it and the assumptions that cloud it. This covers values, norms and
artifacts of the organization.”

A comment on definition of Communities of Practice

I think that a useful point that could be included in these definitions is the paradoxical nature of CoPs, because unlike a social community there is
an inherent ‘design’ that is included in them, and yet they are emergent as
they develop, and any attempt to craft them usually tends in stunting their
growth.

What do you think? How would you define them?

Your opinion on this new look template

A good friend from Satyam, Lakshmi, who's a Tech Writer, Designer and Graphics guru has volunteered to put together a new template for this blog.

So tell me what do you think about this template?

I'm a true blue non-geek so your opinions would be greatly appreciated !

Courses in Innovation in an MBA

Some would say that's an oxymoron, but Businessweek reports:

As more institutions set up courses stressing innovation, students are learning all sorts of techniques to help them think outside the box.
B-schools are working to get students to think outside the business box. Professors say it helps people enhance their own personal creativity, as well as their management of others', because employers in the new economy value innovative and creative thinking as much as traditional frameworks and skills.

Hmm, so MOC was ahead of its time?

The philosophical approach to sourcing

The Edge takes a philosophical look at sourcing, truth, asking and being comfortable.

Not so fashionable region for MBA?

But we're getting there.

We are the best !

No it's not just SRK who says it, but even Sukhinder Singh Cassidy.

Who's Sukhinder, you ask?

Go here and find out more.

Process problems...Structural Solutions

My ex-boss whom I greatly admire used to wistfully say (and sometimes forcefully) about organizational changes.

"there they go again, getting structural solutions to process problems" and then he would add "Take my word, instead of solving the issue, we'll be saddled with more issues."

Yeah, Doc, you were right.

And I guess you will say the same thing for this idea!

Attention elasticity

Rob has a fascinating concept. I think he may be onto something here!

Attention elasticity, which I'm not even sure is a real thing (at least, I've never heard an economist mention it) is how a change in the allocation of your attention is affected by a change in the cost of paying attention.

How cool is this?

Google base to search for jobs and Google Maps mashups to help you manage your interviews !

[Hat Tip: John Paczkowski]

BarCamp Hyderabad

There's a BarCamp being planned in Hyderabad and I didn't even know about it !

I'll try to make it ...to give a non-geek perspective !

On MyToday

What an honor to be in the company of folks like this!

Here's the MyToday blog.

Update: The MyToday folks have also updated my OPML file on their sites. So you can now see the blog feeds I follow at MY Mytoday feed page ;-)

Indian HR Thought Leader Mohinish Sinha

Mohinish Sinha is Associate Director and Head of HR consulting at PwC India. He has earlier worked with organizations like i-Flex, Cadbury's, Arthur Andersen's Human Capital Services and Ernst & Young.

Mohinish's interests are assisting clients in Large scale organization restructuring and managing change, building retention strategy as well as consulting with them for HR Function Effectiveness.

"Where do you see the future of the work and what skills should young professionals build to be ready for further challenges?"

In the ever changing world and indeed India, various trends influence the jobs - rapid advancement in technologies, rapidly changing economies, increased global influence, war for talent, just to name a few. Even if we were to consider more tangible influences, various sectors in India are posting double digit growth rates. In fact its very common to find growth rates of the some of the companies in the region of 20-30% per annum. What it means as a direct consequence of all this is that the challenges and/or the scope of work of the jobs in an organization significantly go up year on year.

Organizations, however, tend to lay emphasis on the skills that are directly relevant to the jobs at hand - they hire, reward and train for the relevant skills. This way it is able to drive process efficiencies etc all across and at the optimum cost. While the challenge posed by the same job increases year on year, the professionals managing those jobs are expected to keep themselves 'relevant' for their jobs year on year. In the light of the above, therefore what abilities will give young professionals lasting success in their careers ? I believe it is the ability to learn, (un-learn and re-learn) and self awareness as the two key abilities that will distinguish sustained successful professionals from those that are not.

Previous thought leaders featured: Abhijit Bhaduri, Shabbir Merchant and Raj Ambekar

IBM asks recruiters for refund

For people who faked their resumes, and were fired from the company.

As a headhunter do you reference check if your candidates are telling the truth on their CVs?

[Hat tip: Email by Ashish Gakrey]

Tom Davenport on Innovation

Tom Davenport ( author of Thinking for a Living) blogs about the various kinds of innovations.

He categorises innovation into :

1. Product innovation
2. Service innovation means the development and testing of new ways to deliver services
   
3. Process innovation usually involves either internal business processes, or those involved in delivering products and services to customers.
4. Managerial innovation involves the exploration and adoption of new approaches for managing people, technology, and other strategic business resources.
5. Business model innovation

Good stuff. Go read the full post!

Tribal expression and relatedness

Bill linked to my post on Why Blogging Works and I started to leave a comment which I realised later, could be a blog post itself!

In different times and ages when focus of society are skewed in favor of either expression or relatedness a product or service that seeks to counterbalance always succeeds.

In the Indian culture where the focus on relating to others is very high, mobile phones have become symbols of expression, with colors, ringtones, wallpapers that say "I am me" in addition to the basic need of relating to others (which is the utility of the cell phone in the first place)

It's actually a throwback to humankind's basic "tribal" urge.

We express ourselves and our relation to a tribe by lots of methods. Blogging is just one of them.
Desmond Morris did a lot of research or urban tribes with connection to sport.

Is this what we see in some organizations too?

Can you name some ?

IBM Innovation

Who would have thought that the Big Blue would be advertising in India for their innovation services with the following tagline:

I'm not like everyone else

Does anyone know in detail about IBM's innovation services? It's funny because none of the other big consulting firms ever say they help their clients be innovative.

Cross Cultural Mindsets

Dr. Madhukar Shukla has compiled some awesome links for people interested in Cross-Cultural management here.

On a related note it's being acknowledged that creating a "global" mindset is never possible, because our cultural mindset is very ingrained. However, it is possible to create a "worldly mindset" [pdf] by acknowledging and recognizing our own cultural biases and creating awareness of other cultures.

Indian Online Recruitment Industry in India - Need for innovation !

Today I recieved another spam mail through naukri.com. It asked me to join some egroup.

Naukri and the other job sites in India should seriously monitor how their customers data. Isn't that fair for people who give them access to their information?

Naukri itself is guilty of spamming mailboxes, after they started their matrimonial search business.

There's an urgent need for the basic job boards to move up the value chain and take a leaf out of the tricks that theladders or wetfeet have been upto.

The only question is: Will their investment in their existing business model allow them to disrupt their own businesses?

I guess not.

When you are big (and believe you, Naukri is big, it is ranked 750 as of today on Alexa) it's so much easier to innovate incrementally than to bite the bullet and take the industry to the next level.

Interestingly someone like Timesjobs is doing a much better job in innovating (of course, it helps if you have the enormous financial pockets of the Times Group behind you!) and starting things like the Virtual Job Fairs.

Update: I got a mail from Naukri.com's CEO Sanjeev Bikhchandani asking for the instance of spam. Great to see them responding so soon to a blog post (28th March)

Sanjeev clarified naukri's email policy today (29th March) in an email. So if you need to change your settings please go ahead !

He writes:

1. We do not send mail to people who have not registered with us. Those who have registered with us have privacy settings in their account (on the first page of registration actually) wherein they can choose to make their resume unsearchable (you will get no mail from our clients who search this database), in fact your CV will not even be seen by them. You can only apply to jobs on the site and you will get job alerts from us.

2. You can choose also to not get job alerts from us

3. You can choose to not get other promotional mails from us. Jeevansathi mails were in this category.

So while I was changing my settings at their site I noticed that I hadn't noticed a fair bit of innovation by Naukri, integrating RSS feeds into job searches ! They've done a fair bit of user education about RSS feeds at this site for the layman. I wonder what's the adoption of this innovation amongst their users. I've sent a mail to Sanjeev and am waiting for a response.

So I take back my harsh pronouncements that Naukri hasn't been innovating enough for user experience. I just hope that the rest of the online recruitment industry in India is also evolving at this level!

The Ambanis headhunt separately

Ever since the Ambani brothers have split up, both of them have raided the market and top performers with aggressive panache.

Mukesh Ambani has been beefing up his retail team with some high profile talent from the FMCG, Consumer goods and Life Style industry.

Anil Ambani has been poaching people from the Telecom industry (even one from MCI at new York) as well as for his insurance plans

Rumors have it that salaries the brothers are offering their CEOs are breaching the Rs. 5 crore bracket (US $ 1 million) ! Once upon a time that was the salary that Indian firms offered their managers stationed in the US (Vivek Paul, for instance).

Corporate India is waiting and watching for this is one split that seems to have benefited lots of people!

There's a feeling that more talent could follow the MNCs to the two Reliance brothers. They do have a way of doing things in a grand scale and that would attract a lot people.

Who would have thought?

That mangoes would be sold via the internet, and marketed via email?

From an email I recieved, this would technically be Spam, but I just loved their concept so am blogging about it:

This is straight to you from our mango farms in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra. It's a region that is known to produce the finest of Alphonso mangoes.

We have been growing mangoes for over 100 years now. Beginning April, we would be packing the best of the harvest and door-deliver to you directly through couriers. 4 dozens of delicious Alphonso mangoes packed in traditional wooden crates.

Sorry, if you are looking for fancy gift boxes. We don't have any of those. But if you are keen in getting some good mangoes to be enjoyed at home, we are the guys. Just Rs 1400 for 4 dozens.

I knew something like mango diplomacy was happening between Bush and Singh. But this is too much !

Hiring for Pune ? Now you have one more incentive

Pune, the erstwhile pensioners paradise is seeing a hot of growth in the IT and ITES segment.

Now recruiters and employers can dangle one more carrot to lure techies and geeks to their city.

ZDNet India reports that Pune would be India's first WiFi enabled city.

Waitaminnit, didn't Mysore claim that title already?

Will this trigger a war between Indian cities to appear more tech-friendly? When will the larger cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai tread the similar path?

Strange co-incidence?

Is it a co-incidence that a McKinsey consultant who co-authored a book called "Competing on the Edge: Strategy as strucutured chaos" now is Sr.VP of Business Operations at Google?

The book apparently introduced a new strategic model for competing in volatile markets. Have to read it now. An interesting article co-authored by her on the value of online communities

The Indian B School Alumni Database - New networking site

Some folks I know recently soft-launched a new website, Alumnidatabase. This is a unique social networking site, in my opinion. While social networking sites usually take two approaches to spreading the community (1. Invite only, like Orkut and Doostang, or 2. Anybody can sign on and then incentivise to add people into the community, like Ryze or Linkedin) , these folks have defined the limit to the members that they want to add.

That group is alumni of the "top B Schools" of India. Currently there are 18 B Schools listed there and I'm not sure if they plan to add more! However, you can search the database even, if you are not a member.

That kind of defines who would love to use the site: headhunters.

They plan (or already have) on having "institute administrators" who whet applications from the institute. So they are in essence the gatekeepers for the site and their role is critical to making this work. If they are too strict or take too much time to let in people the community might suffer. If they make mistakes and let in impersonators, then too the community would lose trust.

It's a tough role, and I can empathise as I've done that role for a egroup for the past 6-7 years and it is like walking on a razor's edge.

Oh, a similar community is 6bridges, but they don't seem to filter people.

If Greta Garbo was alive

..she would have been a brand ambassador for Isolatr.

There's always a new need when old needs become too saturated. Some days even I've felt the need to run away :-)

What's your blog influence?

Gautam Ghosh on Management

info: url atom

• Blogs linking: 123
• Post linking: 379
• Webs linking 13900
• Bloglines subscribers: 154(blogid:133328)
• Google PageRank: 6

Blog influence number

23536 [Compare]

Updated: On 28th March

Text your resume !

Who says HR folks don't evolve with technology?
Seems like it is now possible for the text-happy generation to send resumes via SMS ! (Hat tip : Charu)

Hmmm, does any one have an ATS designed to track such resumes?

Your next organization...

Fast Company has the tricks which will help you to gauge your next employer's organization. I've had a flurry of Orkut scraps from some recent MBA graduates asking about my previous employer. Information flow is really levelling out for potential employees.

Of course, it'd help if you know whether you'll suit it or not. For which you have to know yourself too!

Google Finance incorporates blogs

Google Finance apparently hasn't been a big deal, but one thing that has the blogosphere abuzz is their decision to show blog feeds regarding any company whose stocks you might track.

As Steve Rubel says, that's influence!

Indian HR thought leader Raj Ambekar

Raj currently leads the Diversity function for Monsanto globally. As a leader within the Talent Management group, he partners with Staffing and OD leaders to provide integrated solutions across various facets of people issues to the company.

Prior to this role, Raj has held both generalist and specialist roles in India, Singapore and the US.

Raj has a total of 12 years experience in industry after completing his Masters in HR from XLRI, India. He started his career with Wipro, an Indian company working in the consumer products area in both manufacturing and sales HR.

Raj has co-presented at the Annual convention of the ASTD (American Society of Training & Development) in 1998. He was part of a team that won an award from the OD Institute for the work done in building the Monsanto India Organization. He has also co-published a paper in the Journal for Applied Behavioural Sciences in March 2005.

He has a passion for travel, cooking, reading, music, movies. He enjoys cricket, baseball, football (both soccer and American football) and pool. He is married.

"Where do you see the future of the work and what skills should young professionals build to be ready for further challenges?"

In many ways, the future of work is here . A few months ago I was in a seminar, when someone started talking about what's the latest in the technology industry. Forget the technology ideas, here's some things which are already happening on the people front. People working on virtual teams meet twice a year for a week at a time in some part of the world. That is the only face to face contact they have - the rest of the time, it's all online.
Know someone who works in customer service, and they go to work in their living room if they care to. Customers call the 800 number, calls are routed to these individuals on their cell fones - so you might be in a coffee shop for all that matters - as long as you have the computers up and running to support that call. Change in work, is going to revolve around the role of technology, how much work can be done in a fixed time frame, etc - but once all that is in place, something still needs to happen. People need to make decisions, act and then manage the consequences of their actions.So, while work continues to change in terms of how it is performed, it also remains the same in terms of what needs to get done - results being delivered. In essence that raises two questions on the skills as well - what is new and what stays the same. So what's new? - Comfort with everchanging technology and rapidly changing situations? But that's already here.
To me the most critical skill required to succeed and continue to succeed is the ability to work through and with people of different kinds.Getting out of institute's with or without prior work experience, the premium is always on the technical knowledge, skills - however, those can be picked up later from books, training courses etc. What needs attention at an early stage is the focus to develop the ability to work with people from different countries, age groups, work ethics, value systems, sexual orientations - which requires a high level of emotional intelligence. An eg. Take the HR function. The world has moved to a situation where the employee has real choices - so suddenly, it's no longer acceptable to pay lip service to practices such as job sharing, telecommuting. It's taken a while for that mindset to change, but perhaps in very few places. So, faced with a situation where these 'strange' requests become issues and top performers leave - creates never before faced situations. Working with a belief, that a good day's work is 12 hours in the office or whatever is going to make that HR manager redundant.

Previous thought leaders in the series: Abhijit Bhaduri, Shabbir Merchant

Apple to open Tech Support centre in Hyderabad?

Rumors are floating around that Apple is planning to open a tech support and customer service call centre in Hyderabad.

The Naukri site lists contact center jobs in Bangalore, however.

I wonder what's the disconnect?

Soooo Honored

For getting this award for this post ! Thanks, John and Recruiting.com !

Passive Recruiting

Interesting article on CNN Money on how to use the net to manage what others see about Brand You.

Do you have a blog to showcase your talent?

How else are you managing your online presence? (Try blogs, as the Cheezhead says, "they are brand you on steroids")

Use the tools like Zoom Info, Linkedin , Ryze to get friendly with search engines. Did you know there was a thing like PageBites out there?

If you are a good widget sales guy, do I see your profile when I search "widget sales" on a search engine?

Update: And be very very careful about what you put out there: You are what you post! As the article says: "there are no erasers on the web"

Demystifying salaries

Got this from an email sent by Prof. Biju Varkkey of IIM - Ahmedabad.

Paycheck is a joint venture between Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Indian Institute of Science Bangalore and Information Technology Professionals Forum of India (ITPF), Bangalore and WageIndicator Foundation. WageIndicator Foundation is a joint initiative of FNV - Dutch Confederation of Trade Unions, the University of Amsterdam/AIAS (Institute of Labour Studies) and career website
Monsterboard.

Paycheck aims to solve the problem of lack of high quality, reliable data on wages by giving an insight into the earnings of working people.
Its focus is on answering your question: ‘am I paid what I should get?’
To get an accurate indication of salaries paid in different occupations, your participation is very important.

This salary indication service is available to every visitor of the website free of charge. It is really: “from the people for the people”. People who contribute data by completing the questionnaire do so anonymously.

Completing the online questionnaire takes between 10-20 minutes.

Paycheck website with its “salary checker”

• helps employers determine the wage levels and plan a strategy for
compensation of their workforce.
• provides individual employees with insight in wages paid in large
number of occupations in their country or region, and
• helps activists /NGOs reach stronger negotiating positions.

Looks like it's just at the starting phase, but as the number of people sharing the information grows it might begin to become more and more transparent and valuable.
Go ahead, fill the survey, you might even even an iPod!

Recruiting at Hewlett Packard

Guy Kawasaki quotes a mail from HP.

Making learning strategic

Had an interesting talk by an ex-CLO of a strategy consulting firm. The firm itself has been nominated for the best Training group by Training magazine. Go figure it out for yourself !

Back to the talk. Some of the interesting and provocative ideas that he shared were the following:

1. Do not credit a training program for an employee unless that learning has been deployed on the job. That puts the onus of the application of the learning to the employee and ensures that only relevant training gets undertaken.

2. Nominate a 'learning buddy' for all new employees, whose job it is to help and mentor the new employees to learn on the job and to help them network within the organization. The learning buddy gets a annual bonus if the employee sticks to the organization every year. This is based on Gallup's research that find that people remain with an organization longer if they have a friend. To help the friendship the learning buddies need to be matched to the employees with regard to educational qualification, skills and age.

3. Create immersive programs. Most of the training gets seen as one-off feel good events. But programs themselves should be the start of networking process where participants form sub-groups after the program to meet as small learning circles along with a senior manager to mentor them, and to strategize how to implement the learnings at their workplace (remember point 1 above?)

Naukri served court notice

Naukri.com has made "making fun/getting back at the bad boss" a key theme of it's advertising. One of its recent ads have shown a subordinate getting back at his boss by telling on phone the full form of the name Hari as "H for Hitler, A for Arrogant, R for Rascal and I for Idiot,".

Unfortunately an 11 year old does not share Naukri's sense of humor. (hat-tip Amit)

Knowledge transfer in the case of people moving up or out

Somebody mailed me asking how we could ensure that appropriate knowledge transfer takes place during succession planning.

That set me thinking (not often, but once in a while I do that ;-)) !)

People do not transfer knowledge, specially the 'tacit' high value variety, unless they have a sense of ownership of that process. To help that succession planning needs to be transparent and collaborative. The current employee and the person who is replacing him/her need to work as a team to develop a bonding.

Culture of the organization needs to be sufficiently collegial to allow time and space to nurture this relationship.

Skills shortage preventing KPO expansion

Yeah a lot of high end jobs are being outsourced, but seems like there full potential of Knowledge Process Outsourcing might not be realised. The talent pool seems to be very limited. And the quality of work needs to be improved too !

Skill shortage crunches KPO expansion in India

KPO industry needs to tone up quality: Report


What is really needed is good quality training and education to realise the potential. There are about 900 B Schools in India, but how many B School grads would you trust for doing KPO jobs like investment research, market positioning strategies, business analysis etc.

Seems to me that the other spin off of this trend would be to make a career in business teaching much more lucrative !

As a manager, you better know...

...what microinequities are, and not do them !

Part pop psychology, part human-resources jargon, the term microinequities puts a name on all the indirect offenses that can demoralize a talented employee.

Indian HR Thought Leader Shabbir Merchant

Shabbir Merchant is the Executive Vice President, Consulting Services & CEO – International Business at Grow Talent. He leads the South India office, headquartered at Bangalore.

Before Grow Talent, Shabbir was the General Manager and Head Human Resources of Wipro Infotech, responsible for the entire HR function for its India, Middle East and Asia Pacific Operations. Before Wipro, Shabbir was part of the HR function of Eicher.

Shabbir has done his Masters in Personnel Management from Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune. He is married to Shamim and has an 8 year old daughter, Sabah. He is an avid reader and enjoys music.

"Where do you see the future of the work and what skills should young professionals build to be ready for further challenges?"

Yesterday was Holi, and in Bangalore which is not a very hot spot for Holi Celebrations, I celeberated Holi by watching " Rang de Basanti". The movie got me thinking on the Youth in India and how this MTV generation is going to shape themselves and India, and this morning when i came to office, Gautam's email asking me to write for his blog, seemed to connect.

The question which Gautam has put forth to me on how do I see the future of work and what skills should young professionals build, is an interesting and deeply provoking question. In my view, there is a strong co relation between "Work" and "Ambition". Our Ambition seeks us to get in touch with Work which is meaningful to us. Let me get out of the esoteric frame and bring the logic to a dimension of reality. What Work we do, is the creation of the Ambition we have for ourselves.

Let me start with the story of my friend "AG" who was a colleague with me in Wipro. He was an engineer and had a very long and succesfull stint in Wipro. When i was the HR head, he put in his papers and was to join Reliance Infocomm at a very high salary ( these were the days when reliance infocomm was commencing operations) . I was completely puzzled. Here was a professional who i knew was a very sincere, straight forward, hardworking& values driven - how could he want to join reliance infocomm. In my counseling session with him, he told me "Shabbir, I cannot share with you why i am doing what I am doing, but there is a plan and I cannot share this plan with you now". Anyway, I did not understand his plan and he left Wipro. After a year or so, even I left Wipro and joined Grow Talent an HR Consulting Firm to set up their South India and Sri lanka operations. 2 years after AG had left Wipro to join Reliance, he called me and told me that he was quitting Reliance and starting up on his own. I thought that AG must be starting the dealership of some IT company or something in manufacturing ( after all he was an engineer and was a Sales and marketing professional ). But to my surprise, AG told me that he was starting a private investment management company. i.e. he would be managing investments for professionals. When I met AG in Chennai, he told me that doing financial research was his passion, and he had been doing a lot of reading from guru's like Warren Buffet and the like. He therefore wanted to start off on his own. I told him that passion and all was fine, but wasn;t he risking by giving up a corporate career to start up something on his own, that too in a completely different field. AG said that he was confident that he would be successful in Investment and Portfolio management, and more importantly he said he "enjoyed" doing this work. AG now has around 15 odd clients ( including yours truly ) and he manages overall a portfolio of close to Rs 2 - 3 crores.

To me AG is a metaphor for "Work - Ambition". He discovered what his passion was and made that his Ambition and he veered towards making that his Work. I think the same is true for the rest of us as well. Whatever is our Ambition and our passion, we tend to have work around that. I have known several professionals who do their MBA from premier institutes and because their ambition is to earn better income, most of them end up doing work which is uninspiring and monotonous ( I know I am generalising - but I am doing so to make a point).

Therefore, the future of Work is dependent on what Ambition we harbour for ourselves and our ability to identify our passion and the courage and will to go after our passion. I do believe that there is a larger force that connects us to Work which we truly desire. And therefore to young professionals I would say that go beyond the Chimera of good looking salaries, well sounding titles and beautiful offices. Push yourselves to discover your passion, and build your Ambition around your passion, and the work which you will do will be extremely gratifying and meaningful. Discovering your passion is not an easy task and it could take many years, however so long as you are on the right road, in the right vehcle, with the right companions, the journey is as enjoyable as the destination.

Earlier Thought Leaders featured: Abhijit Bhaduri

Happy Holi !

The ides of March this year are offset by the colourful Hindu festival of Holi.

Wish you all a lovely riot of colours !

Blogging will be light for the next 48 hours.

Barriers to Innovation: Specialization?

The Business Innovation Insider points to two articles that concludes that hyper-specialization does not lead to hyper-innovation.

Thank goodness.

Now I know that I've been blogging some sense !
(Yeah, it always helps to have external validation ;-) !

Indians in the fast50 list !

I admit it ! I am a sucker for lists !

But I just had to blog about this.

Fast Company's Fast50 list features Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria and Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Khurana is a blogger too (though an infrequent one ;-) and I've actually had a 50 min conversation with Nitin Nohria (he had no choice, we were the two guys in a cab - I was escorting him to my office ;-)) whence we discussed his HBR article on KM Strategy.

Another Indian on the list, and this is the first time I've heard about him is Arvind Palep.

On secret messages

..or on underlying reasons..

Dave Pollard has a great post in which he nails the 'real reasons' behind events...

Likewise, business 'leaders' don't get it: They tell other people what to do, tell them what they want done, and bring in consultants and experts to help them 'effect change' in their organizations. They cannot fathom that most of what happens in their organizations is workarounds developed by front-line people to make things work in the organization despite the inept and usually inappropriate advice of management and professional advisors who only think they understand what is really going on and why.

brilliant stuff !

(how does the guy manage it? He has immense intellect, and immense sensitivity and is extremely prolific )

The maths of networking

Uber-networker, Christian Mayaud has the dope !

People matter - that's a certainity !

In an ever-changing world, what doesn't change...?

The fact that people matter...and some other things that Tom Peters says are irreducibles !

The $ 193,000 salary

There are not too many bloggers for whose blog posts one waits for, but when I read this story, I merely waited for Rashmi's post, so that I could link to it !

As usual, she's spot on ! The battle for the final placements has moved. The international i-banks and consulting firms have moved the battle to the summer placements.

Just a fact to remember, when students appear for their summer internship interviews they are merely 2-3 months into the B School program. So past academic and other performance becomes critical.

When I was in B School, there were a few companies who were considered "PPO material" (if you secure a summer internship with them, then there is a good chance of such a job offer being made after the internship). The star of the PPO (pre-placement offer) process was P&G. Once you secured a P&G summers, there was a good chance of you being offered a job. P&G also used to dangle nice carrots to help you make that decision easier. Once you sign out after the offer, P&G would pay the B-School's second year fees. (On an aside, I myself was offered a PPO by Satyam which I took up!)

I don't know what the process with major consultancies and i-banks are, but you can be sure that such incentives would be offered to offered candidates so that competition does not snap them up. Remember, these people have worked in the firms for 10 weeks and have probably been exposed to confidential data and plans. If not, then the person does not get back a "good reputation" of the organization to campus and that would influence the ranking of the firm on the campus.

Update: Interesting article on how you treat interns and how that can impact the employment brand.

Kim's advice

My classmate Kim has some advice to people who are appearing for XLRI admission interviews.

Why blogging works

According to process work, there are two basic drivers for a human being.

1. Expression
2. Relatedness

Expression is the desire of all human beings to create and leave their mark on society, for the future. Some express themselves by words, some by painting, some by sculpture and most people by work. Expression is searching for how individually we impact the larger world. It's making a mark on the fabric of time and space.

Relatedness is the other great driver for human beings. As social creatures we have relationships "pre-formed", but we take effort to develop and nurture relations with others. Relatedness refers to the 'quality' of relationships.

What does this have to do with blogging?

I believe that blogging more than anything else, helps us achieve both these primary drivers of human beings. It helps us to express ourselves with pictures, words, videos and sounds. And it enables us to relate to others by sharing experiences and acknowledging their expressions.

Of course, blogging is not perfect, but the fact that it has democratised the tools to enable the larger human processes to find an outlet is the primary reason for it's success.

Indian names on theLadders.com

Marc (CEO of theLadders.com) posts the most common 1000 first names registered on theladders.com. Remember, this is the site where the job seekers pay to get access to $100 k jobs !

The most common Indian names are Amit, Ravi, Rajesh, Sanjay, Manoj, Rohan, Ashok, Anand, Vivek, Krishna, Ram, Pankaj, Nitin, Rakesh, Vishal, Mahesh, Sachin, Vinod, Rohit, Pradeep, Rajiv, Srinivas, Satish, Sanjeev, Rajeev, gaurav, Prakash, Prashant, praveen, Chandra, Arjun, Kiran, raja, Prasad, Naveen, Santosh, Abhishek, Mukesh, Arvind (but alas!) no Gautam !

On Competition

Veer points me to this post by Mayank. While Mayank brings to the post is a reasoning that strong competition is great for customers and for organizations.

I'd like to add to the fact that strong competition is beneficial to the organization when the organization is an 'open system' i.e. it senses feedback from and reacts to changes in the external environment. That means that an organization that hears and listens to negative and tough feedback from employees, vendors, customers and partners.

In these organizations there are no impediments for passing bad news from frontlines to middle and top management. These organizations do not pass the buck but take action on any sensing of change in the environment. Bureaucracy and organizational processes enable the change and learning to be embedded in the DNA of the organization.

However, if an organization is a 'closed system' where politics is played and blame-games are the norm, then strong competition only hastens the demise of the firm !

How HR can guard against outsourcing

Sanjay keeps his promise and maro's a pet pe laat, as he explains how the HR folks can stop giving him business !

Update: Sudhanshu has his views on the same topic. Provocative stuff. Can you really make your company cafeteria, strategic?

Advertising outsourcing

It had to happen...sooner rather than later.

What's next, I wonder?

Update: The answer is, Design and development of business consulting offerings !

Signs of the Times: GenNext or Millenials

Earlier I thought that Orkut was primarily a dating site, but in recent weeks my perspectives have got shaken by the following:

1. Headhunters are using Orkut's communities to advertise jobs and sometimes profiling candidates and 'scrapping' them (in Orkutspeak!) to inform them of jobs and asking them for referals. The fact that there exist organization-based communities for past, present and future employees to connect is a great way for recruiters to target passive job seekers. Of course, educational institute communities are also ripe for targetting.

2. Three of the employees for whom I am a HR Manager first connected to me through orkut, before I met them in person. That really brought the reality of managing GenNext (or Millenials) to me in person !

Update: In response to Ajit's comment below, I think Orkut should start offering RSS feeds of their community postings. That would be a good strategy to take on Yahoogroups. Even Yahoogroups offers RSS feeds but only for groups open to the public.

XLRI placement statistics are out

From the XLRI News blog:

3 students signed out with offers from McKinsey, the consulting major, which offered a package of 13 Lakhs. The highest offer was made by McKinsey, followed by Hay Group, Accenture Business Consulting and HSBC Bank. The average salary for the batch this year was 8.4 Lakhs, a significant rise as compared to the corresponding figure of the previous year, 7.4 Lakhs. Over 25 students were offered salaries of 10 lakhs or more.

IBM (23), Cognizant (15), Goldman Sachs Equity Research (12), Ernst & Young Human Capital (11), ICICI Prudential (9), Hewitt Associates (8), and Nokia (7) were among the largest recruiters this year making the maximum number of offers. Over 50 companies were a part of the process, of which 9 were participating for the first time.

21% of the batch of 180 people opted for consulting firms. That's almost 45 people. Seems like consulting is on a major upswing in India. I'm waiting for the day when Roland Berger and Bain will open their offices in the country.

The Banking, Finance and Insurance sector ranked among students’ top preferences with 26% accepted offers across companies in this sector. That shows probably the appetite in the economy to take loans and repay them? Heck, I'm no economist, but if banks are recruiting after the 3 year lull between 2001 and 2004, then that's indicative of consumer spending and (hopefully) industrial spending also.

The number of Lateral offers made was 82 - That's another reason why you should go to B-School after some work experience. You get to choose the jobs that start you off higher than your classmates, with more responsibility and better pay ;-))

Update: Kaps tells me that Bain has already opened an office at New Delhi (yep, and it's on their website too), and currently has 30 people and would be picking up 10 people more from IIM-A and B during this placement season. Hmm...I wonder why they won't go to IIM-C? Oops, was Rashmi right after all? Seems like Bain is going to follow the McKinsey Knowledge Center model, as they have set up the Bain Capability Center in New Delhi. How much longer before BCG, Monitor, Katzenbach, Roland Berger also start opening their research and development offices here?

Question from a reader

I recieved this question from a reader of this blog and am reproducing it here with the person's permission.

I am a graduate from a Library and Information Science M.S. program, and am currently working at a career services office at a University. After reading your blog, I thought I'd get in touch and ask you a favor.

I'm looking to move into a leadership/management position, but having a difficult time getting credibility as this sort of person since employers are most drawn to my obvious technical skills. After reading through your blog, I have a better idea of the concepts and key ideas of management and business professionalism. I'm still uncertain as to how I could bring my own non-technical skills to the forefront, since I'm not a graduate of a Business program.

And this is what I responded:

Management jobs in general ask for certain key competencies in addition to technical competencies.

Some are:

1. People Management competencies
2. Managing physical and e-resources
3. Time Management
4. Client Service Management

One way you can showcase your skills in the above areas is to highlight key achievements in your career in which you demonstrated these skills.

Best of luck !

WalMart doesn't "get" blogging....but Gartner does

They made the biggest mistake...they paid bloggers to blog about them while not keeping the transaction transparent and upfront !

Update: Here's another story about how blogging brought Gartner $ 1 million in revenues! As I say, blogging is a double-edged sword, and seems better suited for the professional services industry.

An eBay for loans?

I got a mail from Majal of Prosper (www.prosper.com) --they do people-to-people lending !

Think of it as an ebay for loans/borrowers.

Interesting concept. It would be interesting to see where this goes. Would this act as an alternative to borrowing money from big banks? Maybe not in the immediate future, but if the Wisdom of the Crowds is anything to go by then maybe the most needy of loans and deserving would rise to our views.

I'd personally like to see this complimenting the efforts of Microfinance institutions.

Actually a great idea would be marry this model with infrastructure like ITC's e-choupal and other initiatives like this.

KM and internal blogging

An IT services company has asked me to come and address their Project Leaders and Managers on "Knowledge Management and Blogging".

The company wants to start internal blogging as part of its internal Knowledge Management efforts.

My talk will focus on the nuts and bolts of blogging and to evangelize blogging for this group.

Do you have any first hand experience with internal blogging within your organization? What are the challenges and differences compared to blogging "externally" ?

How do you value an MBA?

This is Vasant's take on it.

When I went to do my MBA, after 2.5 years of working in hotels and sales, my focus was to learn things that the MBA program actually did not mean to teach. Later, I realised that the design of the program taught me a lot of things by experience rather than by actual content. It taught me that:

• Working with people is THE most critical skill one can learn, but, can hardly ever be taught !
• Deadlines are not the exceptions but the norm.
• You cannot manage time, only yourself !
• You can always see farther if you stand on the shoulders of giants.
• There are always some questions that would never have some answers.
• Sometimes, a "I don't know" or keeping silent is a wiser course of action.
• Life teaches you much more than classrooms.

Thankfully, my love for books stood me in good stead during B School. I spent every free minute in the library, and although the net is a wonderful thing, there are some books that taught me much more ! Like "Man's Cry for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Awesome book!

It taught me more than all those seven habit/chicken soup/cheese/fish books could ever have!

Indian sunrise - A new dawn for Human Capital people

Alan Schweyer, writes in the ERE about his visit to India and how he feels about the implications for Recruiters and Human Capital professionals.

India is already facing many of the talent challenges we've become accustomed to, but often on a larger scale. Its response will have repercussions on the U.S. talent supply and will forever change the meaning of the "War for Talent."

In the best Indian business schools and in the top companies, one seldom hears HR and recruiting discussed in their traditional sense. In a nation that has been the recipient of more HR and recruitment outsourcing business than anywhere else, India's answer to skill shortages and sky-high attrition rates is an emphasis on talent management.

Everywhere, employment-brand building, particularly through heavy investment in employee development, is a cornerstone of workforce initiatives.

Indian multinationals are nurturing relationships with talent while in school, building talent pools and enticing overseas workers, particularly those who left India and have built skills in the west.

Read the full article here. And oh, he links to this blog. Thanks Alan ! Dr. John Sullivan in a post to the article says:

I find their best (recruiters) there to be at least twice as agressive as our US corporate recruiters. They also make most other regional recruiters (AUZ, NZ and China) look like lap dogs.

A lot of the initiatives that Alan describes in his article are because employers are not relying on the government or other central institutions. In fact, many organizations are creatively trying not just to "acquire" talent, but also create talent. For example, people with high level of communication skills and also a high degree of technical hardware knowledge are limited in number. However, instead of reacting to the talent by recruiting them and then training them, few technical support organizations are reaching to the colleges and universities and training talent pools on technical knowledge. The India Today article also talks about the initiatives that ICICI Bank is taking to increasing the skilled talent pool in the smaller towns and cities of India.

India has tasted economic success after a long time, and organizations will do the best they can not to let it go! Sometimes working in a constraining atmosphere of rules and regulations can actually be useful, as it has made thinking skillfully and creatively a required competency for growth and success !

Thanks Jason

For putting up some great career advice I have recieved !

And yes, the "8 things" series will carry on also, as will the HR Thought Leaders Series, at this blog.

For the time being at least, I have decided not to shift over to wordpress completely. This blog will continue to be management focused. Let's see how I decide to develop the other blog. However, my other two blogs on blogger would be more or less stagnant going further.

Should I move to wordpress?

I've had a wordpress blog for sometime now, although I haven't used it very well :-)

The reason was that I had invested too much into this blog to move over to another blogging service. Blogger's never given me too much grief. OK, some grief. And it's free.

But so is wordpress.

And it's more functional.

Today I discovered a lovely utility that allowed me to transfer all my blog posts from my blogger blogs to my wordpress blog.

The one reason I am not shifting to wordpress is my fear of losing my readership. If you visit this blog through a browser you have to save another URL instead of this. If you read it through bloglines (that's 148 of you) or some other feed reader then you need to update another RSS feed into your reader.

Will you do this?

Am I scared needlessly?

I remember Scoble writing once on his blogging manifesto to never ever change your URL, but he shifted to Wordpress too. So, should I really bother?

I know it's easy, but it's a change. Will you like it?

Here's my wordpress blog, this is the RSS feed. Come over, and tell me what you think.

Inundated by email?

This is a new initiative from the LinkedIn Bloggers forum.

We're going to highlight a different blog on a regular basis to help bring awareness to the topic.
Check out Email Overloaded.

It offers good tips on how to manage your inbox every day. I know lots of people (yours truly included!) who could be better off managing their time and therefore their business if they knew the tips!

Indian HR Thought Leader Series: Abhijit Bhaduri

Abhijit graduated from Shriram College of Commerce, Delhi University in Economics and then went on to do his MBA in Personnel Management & Industrial Relations from XLRI, Jamshedpur and also has a LLB degree from Delhi University.

Abhijit’s career spans two decades across diverse industries and multiple countries. He worked for companies like Eicher Goodearth, Shalimar Paints, Tata Steel and Mudra Communications and in 1997 he joined Colgate Palmolive in Mumbai. In 1999 he moved to a Regional role in the Asia Pacific Shared Services Organization for Colgate and was based out of Kuala Lumpur before moving on to a global role in New York at the Corporate Headquarters for Colgate-Palmolive. Abhijit Bhaduri has joined FritoLay - the Snacks division of Pepsico International as head of Human Resources for India. Abhijit brings with him varied experiences across industries, locations and geographies and has worked with diverse cultures and has led multiple global projects with cross-functional teams.

He has also recently authored “Mediocre But Arrogant” (http://mediocrebutarrogant.blogspot.com ), a novel about love and life in a Business School in Jamshedpur, India. The book has been on several bestseller lists in India and US and finds mention in the online encyclopedia as an example of a contemporary Indian fiction. He has been a popular radio voice in India and abroad and hosted a popular radio show in US on Indian movies and film music. He has been a popular choice as a panelist on socio-economic issues concerning Indians in US.

Abhijit is married to Nandini and has a daughter Eshna and son Abhishek

"Where do you see the future of the work and what skills should young professionals build to be ready for further challenges?"

The future of work can only be commented on based on how one defines the term "work". If we define work to be the physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something, then it doesn't take much genius to say that as society progresses the physical aspect of every kind of work gets minimized through technology. People are inherently lazy – why do you think the TV Remote was invented? Less physical effort is a preferred state of being.

That leaves the mental effort part of work that needs unraveling. Ever wondered what makes computer games successful? There lies the key to what makes for a happy work experience. I remember playing this DOS based game in the late seventies called Rogue. It was quite a cult game and strangely it had no cool graphics, no sound effects and only one cool feature called "The Boss Key". If you pressed F10, (presumably when the boss walked in) it would temporarily create a very official looking screen which we could even type in stuff. As soon as the boss was gone, we could press F10 again to resume the game where we had left it! The first blueprint of what Heaven is all about.

Here's what a fan had to say about this game- and this is almost 15 years later I stopped playing it.

"You ever heard them talk of the rogue-style games? Did you ever wonder what they mean by this? Well, in short words: Rogue was the first open ended ever changing RPG (that is Role Playing Game for the uninitiated). Every time you play it, it comes up with a new dungeon. Your task is simply to stay alive for as long as possible, go deeper into the dungeon and collect as much gold as possible. On your way you meet monsters, find treasures, magical objects etc. This game comes along very simple but casts its spell on you immediately. You sit there trying to proceed further and further, building up your character to explore the next level and get some more gold." http://www.download-full-games.com/pc/role_playing/rogue.html

What does that tell us about the future of work?

Lesson No 1: "Every time you play it comes up with a new dungeon".

Translation : The work has to provide for an interesting task that changes often enough to sustain the employee's attention span. If the employee is unable to achieve success at the current level, there is still an escape mechanism that allows you to bypass a task that is boring or one that does not value add to the employee.

Lesson No 2: "Your task is simply to stay alive for as long as possible, go deeper into the dungeon and collect as much gold as possible."

Translation - The work must provide for a sense of accomplishment. And an opportunity to collect as much gold as possible. (You didn't need me to translate that last bit, did you?)

Lesson No 3: "On your way you meet monsters, find treasures, magical objects etc."

Translation - Meeting monsters, yes that's what some people call co-workers or clients, can be fun as long as you have the chance to kill them. Well the game certainly allowed that to happen. Some monsters in Rogue were just irritants. You could kill them without much effort. With some just needed you to figure out what armor to use. And then as you moved into the most complex levels (I swear I actually made it briefly to Level Eight for full five minutes before being slayed by a Troll). That thrill of being in Level Eight of Rogue was no less than what a CEO experiences when he/she first enters the Board Room. The fact that I had made it to that level in a game did more wonders for my ego than any promotion has ever done – not that I have been promoted very often. All because I had the satisfaction of continuously learning some nuance that helped me to master that game.

Lesson No 4: "This game comes along very simple but casts its spell on you immediately. You sit there trying to proceed further and further, building up your character to explore the next level and get some more gold."

Translation : Work must allow the person not just a feeling of accomplishment, but also the opportunity to better oneself. Rogue taught me to get up after each defeat. I would dust myself clean and rub my hands in grim determination to reach a higher level in the game. Some days I did and some days when I didn't, I used to toss and turn in bed wondering why I had gotten knocked off at an embarrassingly low level. How many work environments fire up this passion in people?

If you can learn about "the future of work" from a computer game, I guess it is only logical to draw lessons from the people who play these games. What makes a successful video/ computer game player?

Lesson 1: Keep learning new games.

Watch how the people who play games have a compulsive desire to try out new games. So keep learning new skills – it keeps alive your ability to learn. As long as make the same mistakes, you cannot proceed to the next level. So work at it till you have mastered the game. Want to check if you still have the ability to learn? Try learning a new language.

Lesson 2: Try to figure out the design and logic of the game.

No gamer will respect you if they discover you used cheat codes to get to the next level. Besides, the successful gamer will always try to figure out what the design of the game is all about. A mobile phone maker hands out their latest cell phone to each job applicant and checks how many features of the phone they have discovered in fifteen minutes. That's proof about how successful the applicant will be in adapting to change.

Lesson 3: Enjoy the Game:

If you don't love your work, you will never be good at it.

Lesson 4: Get a life

All play and no life will turn you into a social jackass. Get out into the real world and balance your game and life. Being a zombie and playing the game for 18 hours every day may get you to Level 10 but you will still be a Rogue !