Learnings from 2006

2006 has been a watershed year. I completed 7 years of HR and L&D work and 10 years of life in the corporate world.

It was the year when I started my first stint with a global professional services firm, and within 7 months decided that if I don't follow my dreams, maybe I will never do it ever.

Being on one's own is tough for a couple of reasons, one, you have to do everything yourself, right from business development to implementation to follow-up. Secondly, the learning systems that exist within an organization in the form of KM systems, libraries and training are missing. My self-learning is yet to start off and in 2007 we both will try and get some formal learnings to keep ourselves more and more current.

However, the best part of being on your own is not worrying about asking permissions. So whether is it about teaching a HR elective at a B School or writing a paper for a magazine, only one person's decision matters, mine. That's a big high. Interacting with students whether it be in the class or judging HR contests at business schools is a major energizing factors. It also brought me face to face with a lot of their queries about HR and about careers that they have, which I also tried to answer, and invited others too to answer.

There is a lot of business out there, but somehow saying yes to all the business is not what is important to us. That's because we want to work in specialised areas, and not grow too fast doing all kind of work. So a lot of effort has gone into saying 'no' to prospective clients. It made us realise that our identity is defined by what we are not, in addition to it being shaped by what we are.

The experiences in interacting with businesses convinced us that HR may be strategic in a few enlightened organizations, but for a lot of firms it still is a 'cost-centre' and overhead. So in addition to my formal role as a consultant, I also try to play the informal role of a HR evangelist for my clients :-)

The really exciting part for me, however, is to define the intersection of blogging for business and the workshop that I did for Pepsico Snacks ( Frito Lay) only confirmed the view.

So here's wishing you all a prosperous and successful 2007!

Wish you all a very happy new year !

Focus on Needs of Society

XLRI blog says Focus on Needs of Society:

“There is a need to develop a comprehensive course structure keeping in mind the needs of today’s society. B-schools need to move from producing managers to producing social entrepreneurs,” said Rekha Menon, the executive director with Accenture, and an alumnus of XLRI.

Other alumni panelists included Bijou Kurien, CEO of Reliance Retail; Anita Madhok, Dean, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies; C Selvan, Global Head of Innovations, British Petroleum; and Anup Kuruvilla, Director (Global Loan Products) of Salomon Smith Barney. "

The only thought that leaves in my mind is that such an approach would focus more on selection of people rather than 'skilling' business folks with social responsibility. It can't really be 'taught' by a syllabus change. The focus has to be values that students bring with them.

Can I have your horoscope

It is not enough to have skills or attitude, now we even need to know your future !
(hat tip: Drishtikone) More here

Weird news to end the year !

Added later: Seems like people are really dumb to trust pseudo-science like astrology, graphology and even psychometric testing to influence hiring decisions.

Grow up people. Don't outsource your brains to nitwits or discredited tools.

What I read on the blogosphere

Well I can't link to all the great stuff that I am reading on the blogs, so I can now share it, courtesy Google Reader's sharing properties.

Go ahead, read it here. There's a feed too, if you'd like to subscribe to it.

Let JobCentral help you with your job search.

Perceptions about talent in India and China

Interesting post by Todd quoting Kevin Wheeler, Global Learning Resources on a presentation on Asia. Posted with just one comment : Look at the bunching together of India and China as far as talent goes :-) Bold and italics by me.

• "We're heading into a talent storm in Asia" with repercussions in Europe and the U.S. that are yet unknown. Asia will dominate the world economy by 2040.
• Asia houses 1/3 of the world's talent, many not well educated. The small number who are educated are in "tremendous and constant demand."
• China and the U.S. have a lot of similarities in terms of the percentage of jobs that are in manufacturing and mining, but China's heavily agricultural, and the U.S. is heavily service-oriented. China's future will include fewer agricultural jobs and more service jobs.
• China and India have too few educated people, too high a savings rate, not enough jobs, and not enough people willing to relocate. Chinese leaders fear that "they can't generate enough jobs."
• The highly talented and skilled -- a tenth of a percent in China and India, Wheeler estimates -- are paid a "tremendous amount of money."
• 1.24 million college students can't find jobs in China; there are "incredible, incredible challenges economically."
• India's pace is slow; China, as a totalitarian regime, can get things done (e.g. building a road).
• It's a myth that low-level work is being done in Asia; companies such as Motorola, Google, H-P, and Cisco are having Indian teams devise software systems.
• The universities in China and India have loose standards (???) as far as what constitutes an engineer; it could be an auto mechanic. "It's very hard to know what you're getting," Wheeler says, unless you go to a handful of top universities to recruit. (Time to move the IIT brand to the RECs too? - Gautam)
  
• Wheeler says "you're going to have to have very good recruiters in those countries"; you can't expect to send someone over there and expect them to be successful, and you can't easily find a local person who's going to be a successful recruiter.
• "The best way to get talent in Asia," he says, is probably to grow your own." They work hard; they crave a better life (many are unhappy with it as is); are often very individualistic and motivated; want their families to feel their successful; are interested in other cultures; and women are equal to men and are "really sharp."
• Recruiters must redefine their jobs for Asia; they must provide mentoring and coaching as to how to be successful; they need to use travel, the Internet, and more to encourage interaction with the headquarters. Have people travel back to the home country.
• "There's so much energy, so much potential. You can almost feel it in the air there."

TalUncon

Jeff is holding the Talent Unconference in January. Pity, that I can't make it there physically, though Jeff did mail me to say that we should do the next TalUncon in India !

Wow !

2007 seems very very interesting already !

On Jobster and profitability

Well, there aren't too many CEOs I can claim to be buddies with. However, Jason Goldberg comes very close. I admit I haven't ever met the man, but you do build a connection with some fellow bloggers and Jason is one of the many people I consider my 'blogging buddies'.

So when I read Julian's post and thence to Cook's blog and GigaOm, I hope that whatever pressures are on Jason as CEO, and whatever decision he and the rest of jobster management take, I really really hope that layoffs are the final resort to achieving profitability.

Stockholders who've given you millions of dollars can be ruthless in their demands, and disgruntled employees and wary competitors (who are Jobster's real competitors? Not Monster or the big job boards, that's for sure. Neither are vertical search engines like Indeed and SimplyHired) can use the weapon of social media to really turn on the heat. The comments on Cook's blog post are quite personal in nature and don't throw any real light on the issue.

Jason is the blogging CEO of a web 2.0 company. I hope he can use the power of social media to clearly spell out Jobster's focus in the coming weeks. He must address the issue of rumors of layoffs with more clarity.

Jobster's tools promise employers to reach the right people for the right job, and for that reason I wish it becomes profitable in 2007 and reaches the shores of Asia soon. We need such tools.

What I would like to see more is less focus on becoming the 'myspace of recruiting' to more enterprise focussed tools for recruiters.

Good luck, Jason and the rest of the team.

Update: Seems like Jobster is one of the top searches on Technorati. Wow ! Did I talk about the power of social media?

Update 2: Jobster employees and their parents leave comments on Jason's posts. While one of them accuses Jason of lack of transparency, he/she conveniently forgets that for 99.99% of companies such a level of conversation is totally unheard of. One can yearn for absolute transparency, but in organizations with fiduciary responsibilities and legal minefields it's not going to happen.

Joel Cheesman congrats

....on being the winner of the recruiting.com 2006 best blog awards is the Cheezhead !

As Jason says so well about Joel's blogging :

Joel is always trying to get the scoop first and has a unique perspective on the recruiting industry. He is not a recruiter but is deeply immersed in the industry with a heavy slant on SEO and how this can help recruiters and companies get more people hired.

Joel’s blog is a great example of how blogs can be used and is an absolute must read for people involved in the recruiting business.

I wholeheartedly agree. Joel's success is the result of deep vertical focus that he maintains on his blog on the topic of HRSEO, and goes to show that it is, paradoxically, one of the best ways to gain readership. Of course, Joel is an amazingly innovative individual too, and his initiatives like the SHRM auction, Blogs with Jobs and uCheez show that he's out there, taking initiative.

Joel's given me some valuable advice on the SEO aspect a couple of times, and has been gracious enough to not send an invoice. And of course, with CheezAds he's made me earn more than Google AdSense!

Yessir, I totally think he rocks. As I've said before, he's the master.

Blogs by Naukri.com

Recruiterblogs by naukri.com

India's biggest job site is becoming a blogger service provider to its corporate clients?

Hmm, very interesting. However most of the blogs on Naukri.com are quite sucky, check this, this, this and this out, for example.

I guess what these firms now need is a blogging consultant (heh).

Seriously, if any of you work at the firms who have these really sucky blogs at naukri.com please let your firm know that its image is taking a beating in the blogosphere.

Naukri's own blog is a trifle better, but could be much better.

Goes to prove that HR and Recruiters should really learn more about branding, specially in the Web 2.0 world. Employee communication and prospective employee communication is not too different from customer communication. How well people 'get' social media in HR and Staffing/recruiting/resourcing groups will determine how well they link to the next generation workforce.

I think it would be good for Naukri and its clients to attend Regina's talk next February in Mumbai. She's a global HR and OD professional and a blogger too. They wouldn't even have to pay in dollars !

Indian talent bloggers

This post is about some really good "talent" bloggers in India whom I enjoy reading.

Update: How did I forget V Kartik? The former Head HR of Texas Instruments, India has started blogging on OD and More. Here's looking for more and more posts from him :-)

Anuradha Ganapathy - An OD Manager with a US Investment Bank's Indian arm, Anu is one of the rare bloggers I know from before she turned a blogger. A writer of great sensitivity and a HR and OD professional full of thoughtfulness, my only regret is her infrequent posting. However, each post of hers is well worth the effort of waiting :-)

AK Menon - AK is a client of mine, but he's not in this list because of that. He's the CEO of Options Executive Search and uses his blog to reflect on recruiting in India, as well as on the general business trends. Jobseekers in India (or who move to India) should also keep an eye peeled on this blog as AK promises more posts to do with senior management positions that he's working on.

HR Funda - Ajit is a person who I know virtually and yet I think we know each other so well. His blog is a good 'opinion' blog on current HR issues that he comes across. Ajit is a HR manager with a large well known IT services firm, so gets a lot of insider perspective :-)

Sucharith Menon - Sucharith has the best advice for jobseekers, culled from across the web and as a recruiter he knows what he's talking about !

Adwait Joshi - The only blog on recruiting in India at ERE blogs. I think so. Adwait is another person who I wish would post more frequently. But as they say, gems are rare.

B Prem Rao - Management Consultant with a long career, more than 30 years, Prem is arguably the oldest Indian blogger :-D. He's a total YAHOO (Young At Heart, Old Otherwise) as he blogs about People at Work & Play. Focussing on self-development, his posts are short but do the trick.

Prasad Oommen Kurian - OD consultant who's an ex-rocket scientist ! Prasad is one of the most conceptually clear HR people I've ever come across ! A senior from XLRI, he's worked as both an external HR consultant as well as an internal Organizational Effectiveness consultant so he gets a unique perspective to HR and OD consulting [added on 11 Jan, 2007]

Some other bloggers who I keep a track of:

Dr. U Balaji - On learning and life, and human needs, the former SVP of Satyam Learning Center and currently head of Satyam Foundation, Dr Balaji has an intense blogging style, much like himself. Doc, please, please blog again.

HR Channel - It's started off, but will it be maintained ? I hope it will.

First Shally, now David

Whew...I must be doing something right. David Perry, author of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters and Managing Director of Perry-Martel International, describes this 'umble blog as:

your ears and eyes off shore Gautam underlines the fact that India is a hot bed of talent and innovation

Thanks David. I'll try and live up to and continue blogging more about talent, innovation and India :-).

By the way, if any of you is a HR professional and a networker on Linkedin, you should probably join LinkedinHR - "a discussion group for Human Resources professionals who want to use Linkedin to help accelerate their HR missions."

Mistaken Identity

I got a phone call from Singapore, and turned out that it was from one of these innovation centers.

Somebody apparently told them that I had started an IT consulting firm, so they wanted to talk to me as to how we could work together and they would feature me in some research and study. When I cleared that misconception and told them what I was into, the lady on the other end asked "So you really don't even interact with software vendors?"

"No", said I and then she hung up, quite dejected at having made a useless international call and no doubt thinking of strangling the nincompoop at Microsoft India who had given her the wrong information :-)

So if you are a young student, who's started an independent software consulting and services firm you know whom to contact :-)

A longer way to go

Santosh Desai (IIM-A alumnus himself) attends the PanIIM meet on Making the IIMs into a global brand and points out an uncomfortable fact:

And as the professors pointed out, if not in so many words, that if one looked at the ground realities, this question walked the thin line between fantasy and insanity. The need for a globally respected IIM brand came from its alumni to bolster their credentials retrospectively.

I would tend to agree with that. Though not from the IIMs, even I personally have felt good when I hear news of how my juniors are doing well (which is quite simply the "placement news"). There is hardly any path breaking study being done in Indian B Schools that is useful to Indian businesses. Most of the time we study HBS case studies, and discuss US based management frameworks because not enough study has been done on Indian businesses. Even studies on how MNCs need to adapt to developing markets are being done by US business schools and not Indian B Schools.

The IIMs are a great brand because they have super-intelligent students, who were super-intelligent to crack the dreaded CAT. As Rashmi Bansal (another IIMA alumnus) says:

The word ‘business’ in MBA is a misnomer. The programme is, perhaps, Masters in ‘Improvement of Personal Job Prospects’. The corporate giants who recruit don’t care what the student has learnt.

So there. If you're looking at path-breaking research or a PhD head to the US, like Gaurav Sabnis did. In India, the MBAs rule. To work and not create businesses. The ones who do create a business do with inspite of an MBA, not because of it.

The 'other' executives

As I was posting about the Wall Street tabloid , an email arrived about two XLRI alumni who have left the corporate race to do something 'different'.

Gargi Banerjee since 1995 dedicated her career to addressing the issues of the Indian Himalayas and improving the lives of its indigenous communities. Pragya has been very successful in developing innovative solutions to problems such as depletion of medicinal plants, reducing water resources, lack of livelihood options. A recent Pragya initiative is addressing the problem of electricity in high altitude villages.

While Ashraf Patel quit her job to launch Pravah, a New Delhi-based organisation that facilitates high school and college students to confront conditioned values and stereotypes, expands their awareness of social issues and gives them the leadership skills needed to tackle pressing social problems.

For all you I-Bankers

If you want to get into the Wall Street firms and make those obscene amount of dollars, you should probably add this blog (describes itself as the Wall Street tabloid!) to your feed reader - DealBreaker.com

Conor doesn't like my blog

Conor, an Irish IT advisor has a quick rant about the overpowering graphics and colors of my blog, the hit counter and the "b-list blogger" link.

Do you agree?

User experience trumps any other factor for me on this blog (that's why I also publish full feed, for example).

Feel free to subscribe, if like Conor, you like the content but not the looks. Beauty is just HTML coding deep, right?

Update: I've dumped two of the graphics...one is the "Best Indiblog of 2004" picture (I really wasn't, I was second runner-up....but was too sentimental about it to let it go ;-) and the "B-list Blogebrity" picture too (that was a big ego-boost at the time too :-))

Should I dump the performancing ad too? I have to keep uCheez :-) And both have to be "over the fold"

Jaxtr me !

I now am one of the proud owners of a Jaxtr widget on my blog. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will see this widget.


You can make free calls to me from 29 countries, including US, UK and other countries from South America, Europe and Australia.

Unfortunately I will not be able to pick up your call (as the jaxtr service does not extend to India yet), but I will get your voicemails.

You can even click here and leave me a message. So what are you waiting for - it's free and now is a great time to wish me happy holidays !
:)

Dumping Traditional Research

AK Menon gets to listen to the most powerful business woman in the world, during a conference at the Great Lakes Institute at Chennai. In a post titled Global Mindset-Indian roots he says:

"Ms Nooyi commended the institute for having among its curriculum- a course in speaking Chinese Mandarin for students-as a right step in preparing to make a mark in the globalised economy. She also felt it was time for academia and research to come with more contemporary methods of ‘predicting future behaviour’ of consumers, by observation, and ethnography & dumping the traditional methods of qualitative research!"

Am sure that would elicit some response (of agreement) from Dina and Charu :-)

Personal looks and the organization

Sandhya at the HR Channel: looks at the controversial lines between personal looks and the organizational policy

"If you are a corporate, make sure a lot of the jobs in your organization have some contact with the outside world. Introduce styles of looking good, like ties and suits for formal presentations, formal wear when the client visits, smart casuals for one day of the week and so on. Feel free to look down on shabby and untidy clothing, informality is not an excuse to shoddiness. Bring down the essence of looking good to all your employees, even the clerks, the peons and all the support staff. Pay attention and invest in smart uniforms. Like Walt Disney, you could even go into the details like scrubbed nails and frequent baths, but that would be stretching it a little too far. Do make sure that your rest rooms are well lighted and have huge mirrors. For, trust me, that investment is all going to come back to you!"

My 8 Predictions for 2007

After my previous post on the prediction for the talentosphere, I'm sticking my neck out and making some claims for the Indian blogosphere and specifically for the part that ineterests me, business blogging and employment brand management.

1. Job Seekers will start to blog more and more. Specially for technology jobs, blogging will become a source to get noticed by employers.
2. Employers will search for job seeker's blogs to validate claims more and more.
3. Blogging will be the tool of choice for smaller consulting firms and freelancers to get noticed by potential clients.
4. A lot of local language blogging will take off, enabling people to search not just global jobs but very specific local ones too.
5. Larger organizations will start to experiment with blogging, but will give up because they won't "get it".
6. As larger numbers of 2007 graduates join the workforce, more and more organizations will start to regulate social networking from the workplace.
7. Wikis will enter the internal communication arena as a place for employees to 'create shared knowledge'
8. Lots of niche blogs will emerge as content gets more and more atomised. Tools like technorati will become even more important to make sense of the blogosphere.

What are your hunches about 2007?

My Predictions for the Talentosphere

You can find them here.

Comments welcome.

B-School insights from both sides

AK Menon goes to recruit students for his firm at the ICFAI Business School for summer internships and shares his impressions.

Somehow I came back with an uneasy feeling -there is a distinct lack of imagination and ownership when it came to SIP! Over 800 of the brightest youth-from across the country-a good mix of experience and promise-they seem to have all their future plans well laid out..atleast in the rehearsed pitch at the interview!

The missing link- the vital piece SIP which wd give the students a 3 month insight into the practical world –how businesses actually work-the dynamics of interpersonal management, chance to experiment with some of the hypothesis they have nurtured…

Yes, MBA is a lot about playing safe, because it helps self-select people. Why go to the 300 degree colleges if you can find the top 10 students from them in 3 B Schools? However, with
the talent crunch really exploding, things might change as I commented on Rashmi’s post:

I personally think this will get some sanity into the MBA entrance process. If the IITian works for McKinsey or Goldman sachs the motivation for doing an MBA changes. The focus will move from placements to learning more

For a look into the not so glamorous parts of MBA life in a B School check these posts out: Placement Angst and Competing for B School fests

Softer parts of the organization are the hardest

Another conversation I had with someone over at Orkut (see another one here) who asked me:

how wuld one go about developing an organisation from the softer aspects...if you could throw some light.?

My reply was:

The (so-called) 'softer' aspects of the organization is the actual reality of the organization. Hence what is encouraged leads to a reinforcement of behaviors that comprise the culture of the organization. To build the culture one has to constantly focus on actual behaviors and understand how to reinforce the positives and discourage the negative or unwanted behavior.

So what are your organization's "professed values" and what are the "values in practice" ? How much is the overlap? How much is the disconnect?

The more the disconnect, the less trust will your employees have with the company. The more you'll have to focus on 'external motivators' to persuade people to stay. To put it simply, people will be cynical of official announcements/communications and reasoning.

The more the overlap, the more your organization enjoys credibility and trust with the people working for you.

Advice about HR

A lot of mails I get are about HR careers and what someone needs to do a specific role. However this mail was a little different:

I'd like your advice about HR. Frankly speaking, whatever's taught is all very interesting and fine. However, how much of this does a typical HR Manager get to apply within any organisation? I've asked a couple of 'heads' of HR from respectable cos. (consulting and IT) and the replies I got were vague enough to sow the seeds of doubt.

If I'm committing 6 months of my prime to a field, I'd like to know if there's more to it than just being punching bags for the chaps in line functions.

Would you be so kind as to clarify the same? If that is too much to ask (and it very well may be), would you please point me in the right direction?

This is what I replied back to the chap:

The basic foundation of HR is Organizational Behavior. Knowledge and Skills of OB is essential to be a HR professional. Everything else is job contextual and can be learnt :-)

The purpose of HR like other support functions like finance, strategy and marketing is set by top management, and therefore the answers you would get depends on whom you ask.

However, the role for all HR professionals is to influence businesses to pay more attention to the people side of the business.That's my personal viewpoint. That will not happen unless a HR person knows how the business works. The challenge would to be first gain that insight and demonstrate how the topline and bottomline of the firm will get impacted due to any people related initiatives.

Was he satisfied with this answer? I don't know. Maybe he wasn't, as he did not reply back to me. What do you think?

the worst backgrounds for VCs

Guy Kawasaki makes The Venture Capital Aptitude Test (VCAT):

"The three worst backgrounds for a venture capitalist are management consulting, investment banking, and accounting. Management consulting is bad because it leads you to believe that implementation is easy and insights are hard when the opposite is true in startups. Investment banking is bad because it leads you to believe that everything can be reduced to cells on a spreadsheet and that companies should be built for Wall Street, not customers. Moreover, investment bankers are oriented towards doing deals, not building companies. Accounting is bad because it leads you to believe that history not only repeats itself, it predicts the future."

I believe that while a lot of Guy is saying comes from first hand experience, isn't the above statement too much of a generalisation?

What is the latin word for such a fallacy of reasoning?

Finally he trains his guns on MBAs

The downside is that earning this degree (and I have one) causes most people to develop the hollow arrogance of someone who’s never been tested. All told, the downside of an MBA outweighs the upside.

So according to Guy the good backgrounds for being a good VC is Engineering and Sales.

I'm not too impressed to agree with him.

But what the hell do I know....I'm just a management consultant !

Shally's reading me

At CyberSleuthing! Shally lists his favorite blogs and I am honored to be on that illustrious list ! He says:

"# Read Gautam to learn about leadership and gain deep perspective on the recruitment marketplace in Asia and the global village.
# A strategic Organizational Development consultant in the HR space, Gautam's unique multicultural views contribute towards shrinking our planet and bringing all of our worlds closer together."

Wow ! That's a huge responsibility. I wish I can really live up to that.

As Shivam says in this video interview with CNN IBN a blogger is responsible to his/her readership and the readership expects you to be accountable to them.

Thanks for reminding me, Shally, of your expectations from me :-)

By the way, if you are a Recruiter or a Sourcer I would urge you to go to Shally's list and check out the blogs he lists. There are a lot of my favourites (like Recruiting.com, Glenn, Xceler8ion, Jim, Jeff, CH/RA, the JobGals) among them and some others which I discovered for the first time too.

A job for a journalist - Principal Reporter at Fraud Today

Before I start this post, let me admit I don't want this blog to become a job-board, so postings like this will happen on a rare basis (Definition of rare= you are a good friend of mine and you don't find talent easily. Or you pay me $200 for a posting -- Ok ok. Just kidding. This blog is no TechCrunch or GigaOm !)

The Job: Principal Reporter at Fraud Today - a soon-to-be-launched portal focused on white-collared crime.

Here is the ad:
Interested ? Contact Pradeep. His email and cell number is given in the ad.

Knowledge Management Consulting

Today we had a first meeting with a client who's looking at setting up a Knowledge Management initiative as well as an e-Learning infrastructure.

In our meeting I told the that philosophically the approaches are quite different. While organizations approach KM with an extractive mindset ("Let's get a hold of what our people know"), e-Learning is the opposite ("Let's spend huge money, set up an LMS, develop some content, buy some SCORM compliant content, and hope our people learn" :-)

Like most KM initiatives this one too attempts to do a lot of things.

My advice to them was to break down the goal into smaller chunks.

Most of a time the larger, altruistic goal of helping people share knowledge is the 80% of the effort that makes around 20% of the impact. Instead, I told them, a really smart KM solution would need to solve critical business issues. That would be the 20% effort that impacts 80% of the business.

Such an approach would get business on the side of the KM initiative - otherwise KM people are doomed into what Dave Pollard calls "The Organizational Ghetto".

What seems interesting about this project, if it comes through, is that it is an attempt at KM by an Indian firm which is totally an 'old-economy' company. A long term project, priced on a retainer basis - that's what will make it different too, for me as a consultant.

The meeting had one of the moments that really made me happy. The CIO whom we met asked "So how can you help us?" after we had talked about the challenges of KM and my previous experience and learning trying to implement KM within a firm. We told them that we were not IT consultants, but our specialty is rather to explore possibilities and ask questions. I was consciously trying not to use jargon in trying to explain how we could be useful.

"Ah. You are process consultants", he said.

I love it when the client uses the jargon that we were trying to avoid.

Congratulations!

Time says I am the person of the year.

And you too !

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Some good insight from the InfluxInsight blog.

The problem is that Time isn't really talking about "You", instead, they're highlighting active contributors, or what some people call the One Per Centers; the people with time on their hands to write blogs, do sketch comedy on You Tube, write restaurant reviews, etc. It's an elite group of "creators" motivated by the quest for fame, attention and sometimes, a good old-fashioned desire to help people.

So when will this 1% increase?

For us in India this number to become 10%, some things need to happen:

• Cost of access needs to drop
• The mobile internet needs to take off.
• Translation tools, text to audio software to make content understandable to the vast majority needs to be invented or widely used.

According to the IMAI, internet users in India would touch 100 million in 2007. So even if 1% remain 'active contributors' we would still be talking about 1 million potential bloggers/YouTubers/podcasters from India. The possibilities are mind-blogging, er, I meant mind-boggling !

Christmas in the office

Penelope Trunk says:

Diversity in the workplace is not “diverse religious expression.” Diversity should express itself in how people approach business problems. Religion is not appropriate at work in the same way that politics is not appropriate; both are divisive.

Corporate events that are tied to religion make people who don’t practice that religion feel like outsiders and therefore inhibit diversity. (And those of you who think Happy Holidays is non-sectarian, please realize that almost all non-Christians I know hear “Happy Holidays” as “Merry Christmas to those of you who do not celebrate it.”)

Heh. I guess it's not such an issue for us in India. We happily get holidays for all religious occasions (Hindu, Islamic, Sikh, Buddhist and Christian) and are quite enthusiastic about celebrating them in office.

Forget religious holidays, in some BPO organizations they even celebrate 4th of July with US flags and Halloween.

Weird.

Blogging for jobs

It's always exciting to see a jobseeker trying out innovative ways to crack the job market. Check this blog out by a student in Denver. The blog's name is its purpose MSF Student Trying to Break into I-Banking. As the first post clarifies:

Getting a job with a high end firm is hard coming from Denver. I am posting my progress on this blog to hopefully help others and to get some help myself!

Another area in which I have a growing interest is emerging markets. The opportunity to work in one of these markets would, in my opinion, open many doors down the road. Emerging markets would likely entail working somewhere around the world I have never even considered. I am open to that.

Hmm, Anu, that'll be right up your street, right?

The job board is looking for a HR Head

A rumor in the marketplace is that Monster Worldwide in India is looking for a HR head.

Hmm, I wonder what that job would be like.

However a search on Monsterindia.com shows no such job advertised. Doesn't Monster believe in eating its own dog food? Maybe it does, because it advertises for Sales folks there. But no HR vacancy advertised there. Does that mean HR folks are not too many in Monster's membership numbers? Or not enough of that seniority as the HR Head should be?

Questions. Questions.

Paper on Leadership Development

I've finally finished writing the paper (that I shared earlier) on leadership development. If you'd like a copy, just send me an email at my gmail id. In case you don't know, you'll find my email as an image on the right hand sidebar.

Am afraid I am not able to fulfil Ranjan Varma's interest on giving live examples of leaders. Unfortunately that was not the focus of this paper. Maybe some other day, Ranjan :-) Thanks for your feedback, though, that's a great idea!

Maybe I'll do a blog post on some great leaders according to my opinion.

Creating a community

For the most part, a blog is mostly a two way communication. Unless there is a huge discussion in the comments (which has never happened on this blog :-)

So to bring out a flavour of a community this blog now has a community on MyBlogLog. If you are already a member, do join me there. It'll help us to know who all are reading the blog and who else shares our interests :-)

Manpower Inc. buys stake in Grow Talent

Manpower buys 67% stake in Grow Talent: "

US-based $17-billion Manpower group on Tuesday bought 67% in New Delhi-based Grow Talent with an agreement to buy the remaining 33% in the next three years.

The deal size is pegged at under $10 million, though Manpower refused to confirm it. Grow Talent had revenues of about $4 million last year. According to the deal, Manpower Inc. will form a JV with Grow Talent through its subsidiary, Right Management.

Grow Talent’s founder Anil Sachdev, who is offloading 44% of his 66% stake in the company, will continue to remain the JV’s managing director. Grow Talent’s other investors — Analjit Singh, Yogesh Andley, K Balasubramaniam and KK Nohria — will offload about 23% of their 34% stake in the company.

With this buyout, Manpower plans to focus on the Rs 500 crore HR consulting pie in India. Currently, Hewitt, Grow Talent, Mercer, Ernst & Young and PriceWaterhouse Coopers are the biggest players in HR consulting in India"

Update: I guess I jumped the gun :-) Actually the acquisition is by Manpower Inc. HR consulting subsidiary Right Management Consultants. In which case, it makes much sense, giving access to Grow Talent to grow globally and pitch for Indian consulting efforts with existing Right clients in India and in Asia. Ignore the earlier part of the post below :-)

One of Right's strengths is its career transition services for individuals and executive coaching services. The market is still underdeveloped for that in India, and Grow Talent can leverage that for the future. That would be an interesting thing for the market.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I really can't see that logic for this deal.

Temping or Recruitment firms don't really get into the consulting market. There's too much perceived conflict of interest there.

Why dilute your core brand attribute by focussing on too many areas. Manpower's buy in ABC was very understandable. Temping is still in early days in India and getting a piece of the executive search business was a great strategy. The services are quite linked.

But- HR consulting? What sanctity would your advice have if a client knew that you could be the beneficiaries of acting on some suggestions?

Growtalent is more well known for the survey they do with Businessworld and the Great Places to Work Institute. More perception of conflict of interest there too.

Interestingly, one of Growtalent's principal consultants, Nalina Suresh had left GT sometime back and moved to EMA Partners, a global executive search firm.

Some great questionnaires

Consulting guru David Maister who has written some great books on professional services firms has a great set of resources on his website. It's focussed on partnership based consulting firms, but can be tweaked to suit most organizations.

Go here to download them.

David has a great blog as well, and you can find it on my blogroll :-)

Bias and discrimination

FE reports that Bias casts its shadow over India Inc:

"In its global survey, Kelly Services, which is into staffing solutions found that 64% of respondents in India have experienced prejudice when applying for a job in the last five years. The Kelly Global Workforce Index sought the views of approximately 70,000 jobseekers in 28 countries, including almost 2,000 in India.

Discrimination in India was found to be relatively high by global standards with India ranking fifth on the list of 28 countries. Age was the major source of prejudice cited by 16% of the respondents, followed by 13% for gender and 3% for disability."

Does your organization discriminate, when selecting, promoting or rewarding people? Is the prevailing notion that "only men suit that job" or "He can't do that. It needs a young enthusiastic worker to do that job" without data given to deny people opportunity?
Do your job ads say "young programmers wanted" or "Lady Guest Relations Executives Jobs available"?
Are light switches made in such a way that people in wheelchairs can't reach them?

If your answer is yes to any of the above questions, then your organization is in dubious company.

So, what are you going to do about it?

One of Hottest Jobs In India

Says Forbes.com: "Some of the hottest fields are predictable: Information technology, for example, and business process outsourcing. But candidates for jobs in human resources are demanding ever-higher salaries, (Manpower Inc.'s Soumen) Basu says. "That's because the talent shortage has created a need for skilled HR professionals, who can help companies recruit and retain highly skilled staff. 'The HR person has become a rare commodity,'"

I could say, I told you so. But Forbes.com didn't ask me :-)

Of course, dear reader, you read it here first, remember?

Previous Posts on HR Talent in India:
Talent shortage in HR in India?
The war for talent in India
More on HR talent shortage
The coming crunch for HR Talent

Article on Leadership Development

This is the rough draft of the outline of my proposed article on Leadership Development.

Any idea what I could add to it?

I. The shortage of Leadership Talent in India today.

1. What is leadership?
2. How is leadership different from management?
3. How to meet the challenge of the leadership talent crunch.
1. Build the bench strength for leadership
2. Look at competencies for leadership
3. Look the future competencies and business changes
4. Decide how many would be hired externally and how many internally
4. Build leadership development into the fabric of talent management.
1. Leadership development is not a standalone activity
2. Look at leadership when
1. Attracting talent
2. Motivating talent
3. Promoting talent
4. Compensating talent
3. Understand that leadership development is not the HR function’s responsibility

1. It needs to be the leadership’s mission
2. Board members and function heads need to own leadership development in their domains.
3. Business needs to define different kinds of leadership
1. Functional leadership
2. Business leadership – general management
3. Global leadership

• A leader is not a superman. He/She needs to be supported

1. Backup leaders
2. Two in a box

Notional losses and change in writing style

Well there are two things I want to share with you.

First, that I lost a big chunk of blog consulting and training business, because the HR head who was my contact moved to a different job. Normally, that would not have caused any issue, as the new firm might have been the place which would then be more open to my services.

Except for the fact that he's moved to Dubai and says that a lot of blogging sites are blocked by the government there.

Tough luck.

The second fact is that a publication wanted me to write an article on any HR topic. I chose Leadership Development as my topic. They mailed me that the article could be 2500-4000 words long.

When I started writing, I suddenly realised that thanks to blogging I have started to edit out verbose text. Suddenly the whole article could be written in less than 500 words ! Now 2500 seems like a huge unreachable goal. Forget 4000 !

Tomorrow is my deadline. Wish me strength, as I try to add more words to the article. :(

To be an Innovator

Even though I wrote this post a long time ago, what I actually wanted to do was describe how to be an innovator. (I don't claim to be an innovator, but I have observed some at extreme close-up!)

So what do you have to do to be an innovator?

1. Set yourself some 'almost-impossible' goals.
2. Always be suspicious of 'conventional wisdom'
3. Be unconventional. In your career. In your studies. In your learnings.
4. Try to have an in-depth conversation with people who disagree with your points of view - without getting angry at them.
5. Steer clear of dogmas and axioms.
6. When struck with a creative idea, if it hits your gut then go with it.
7. Learn when to diverge and the time to converge.
8. Keep your eyes on the world around even as you hone your idea to perfection.
9. Be open to cutting off your idea, if it is either late or before its time, without tying up your ego to it.
10. Always have 6-7 mentors from different industries, people whose opinions you value. But always trust your instincts.
    

Are you an Extreme Jobber

Fast Company Now blog says in a post titled Hooked on Work: the Allure of Extreme Jobs:

"To qualify as an extreme jobber, a worker must meet the following standards: first, work 60 hours a week or more, then, meet at least five of the following conditions: have work whose flow is unpredictable, work under tight deadlines, have work events outside of regular work hours, be available to clients 24/7, have P&L responsibility, have a large amount of travel, or a large number of direct reports, have a scope of responsibility that amounts to more than one job.

According to Hewlett, the pool of workers who meet the standard for extreme is growing. More than 20% of U.S. workers qualify, she says, and 45% of professionals in global companies. Measured by sheer work hours alone, 48% say they’re working an average of 16.6 hours more per week than they did five hours ago."

If you exclude that bit about the large number of direct reports, then I am an extreme jobber too ! I guess most freelancers would be. People might crib about work-life balance, but for a person whose work becomes life the distinctions become more and more blurry.

As a team leader in HR in one of my previous organizations used to tell his team "For us work is fun. So let's have some more fun!"

As Richard Watson in his latest column, "The Future of Work."says :

"People divide their lives into work and play. But a clever few realize that if you pick the right work it ceases to be work and becomes play. The trick is finding something that you are passionate about and then devoting your life to it. This won't necessarily make you a fortune but it will make you happy. It may also turn you into a successful innovator, because playfulness is an essential prerequisite for invention."

Why do people equate jobs with money

Well because when they are young and just about to get into the 'employable workforce' they are subjected to these kind of ads.

Skills for HR and OD professionals for the future

I keep thinking about the future every now and then (not about my future so much as worrying about it for the profession!)

So when people keep asking me what are the needed skills for HR professionals I keep giving different answers at different points of time (The answer you got if you ever asked me that question would depend on how dumb I felt that day ;-)

So I thought that I'd try to put my thoughts here and ask you all to critique it too :-)

Here are the skills I feel HR and OD professionals really should have (or try and build!)

1. The skills to translate HR deliverables into business metrics.
1. Too often HR people focus their deliverables in a way that does not make sense to line business. Let’s face it. The language of business is money, so if HR is only seen as a black hole for money, it will earn the sobriquet of a ‘cost centre’ and get delegated to the back benches. Hence the ability to talk in the language of finance is a critical skill for HR. Relevant people skills are the differentiating factor in most service companies. HR people must understand how to quantify those skills, how to keep track of them, how to measure them and how to upgrade them. Does a HR manager of a Consumer goods company understand what’s the difference between a great Brand Manager and an average Brand Manager? And how to measure them? Does he understand what the driving needs of the great Brand Manager are and how they are different from the average ones? And, does he understand if the policies of the organization support the needs of the average BM or the star BM?
2. The HR professional must not just be concerned with her internal customers but also with the external customers. The focus must be on the way they can together add value to the customer who keeps the organization in business. Only when HR professionals understand and demonstrate how they can add value to end customers will they be considered strategic partners of the business.
2. The Skills to facilitate change
1. All said and done, HR professionals mostly lack the skills to be effective ‘facilitators’ of change. Their own inability to not get involved in the content and exercise control on the process ensures that they are not accepted by the various parties as facilitators.
2. The focus is very rarely on the human effects of change. As we all know, any change causes heartburn and pain. Most often, either these are unacknowledged or brushed under the carpet by business leads and HR folks either collude with them. One of the foremost way to deal with change is to bring it out in the open – “the elephant in the room” way. Any attempt to wish it away or to deal with it in a secret/underhand way only makes us appear that way.
3. The Skills to understand communication and the changes in the processes underway.
1. HR needs to understand the processes of communication between organizations and how the era of one way communication is over. This has more implications than HR can realize. Newspapers in the west are seeing declining circulations and advertising. People are fed up being passive ‘consumers’ of news but are instead using free software and ubiquitous broadband connections to become ‘commentators’ on news. The culture of rip-burn-remix has spread from music to mainstream news, and organizations are struggling to grasp the reality. HR people have to understand how these generational shifts in how information is consumed impacts their business, both from the outside and from the inside.
2. The new way of learning: In line with the earlier point, the way how people learn is also changing. Gone are the days of the “chalk and talk” method and even the “guide by the side” method. Learners these days and in the future are the people who learn by “immersive” technologies. That will also have an impact on how they learn and perform in the organizations. It also has an impact on how the organizations’ solutions and products are used and experienced by the customers.
4. The age of the free agent and virtual teams
1. With the rise of the creative age, people are looking more at vocations rather than careers, and it is passion that drives them. These creative people will become more and more entrepreneurial and give up the comfort and the anonymity of large organizations to chart out recognition as independent consultants. HR needs to understand how to manage these people to enhance creative input and also needs to guide line managers. It needs to remember that for these folks, independence and eminence is the motivating force, and money is just a by-product. HR also needs to identify who are potential free agents in the organization and what to do to optimize their contribution.
2. As more and more work gets done in a globalized economy by groups of part-time, temp or independent consultants working along with full time employees in different cultures and time zones, creating a culture of inclusion and tolerance of diversity becomes an imperative for HR professionals. This would be a strategic differentiator for the business, because diversity if managed well, could give rise to ideas and innovation that the competition cannot come up with. HR needs to educate the business about the edge that diversity brings and that it’s not just a ‘nice to do’ kind of thing!

The best developer blogs in India

Well, according to Microsoft actually :-)

The top 20 developer blogs that Microsoft adjudged to be the best are listed here.

The criteria for rating was:

•	Frequency of updates - 20 %
•	Originality - 40 %
•	Writing Style and User Experience - 20%
•	Content and Technical Relevance - 20%

Go ahead check out them blogs if you are interested in technology. You won't be disappointed.

Voice for blogs

Linkedin, which is my first choice for business networking, is losing one of it's co-Founders (and VP Marketing) Konstantin to a new startup called Jaxtr (blog here)

Konstantin however will continue to be associated with Linkedin as an advisor (which is a great thing, for us on the Linkedin egroups, he was the face of the company :-)

Konstantin describes Jaxtr as:

Jaxtr allows you to link you existing phone(s) to your LinkedIn profile to let people who visit your profile to call you from all over the world and without international phone charges-even if they call you from their mobile phone.

Unlike Skype, all people who want to contact you need is a phone. They don't
need to register for anything, download/install software, have a broadband connection, buy/use a headset, etc. And they can call you on your regular landline or mobile phone, so you don't need download anything either or be tied to your PC when someone is calling you.

And all this works while you keep your own phone numbers private.

Jaxtr works on blogs, MySpace and even in email/IM.

That sounds like a game changing innovation. I have signed up for the beta and hope to have the widget on this blog when I get it :-)

The really top end jobs

Metrics 2.0 says "Harvard professor Lucian Bebchuk calculates that senior managers in U.S. companies receive up to 10% of after-tax profits in any single year. On this arithmetic, companies could save as much by outsourcing 100 top management jobs to India as by eliminating 10,000 workers. "

Heh. Interesting thought. Highly unlikely though. An intriguing thought nevertheless. Imaging the Accenture CEO's job being done by Nandan Nilekani or that EDS outsources its CEO's job to Jerry Rao at its BPO firm Msource. I think Accenture and EDS will have more to gain to learn about the global outsourcing model and the Indian CEOs to learn about leading a truly global organization.

But who will bell the cat? ;-)

Flexible or Freeze

David Maister asks:

Is it better to go for focus and constancy of purpose, or be open and flexible to new ideas as they emerge? Is it possible to have the best of both worlds?

I think some people have a talent for balancing the constant with the flexible. However the rest of us lurch from one extreme to the other. The luckier ones get to know what they are most comfortable with and choose that path, even while knowing that the other path might bring greater benefits some times.

Like David, I am a sucker for the new, the unexplored idea. Often, it takes me away from my focus. And I lose, in a manner of speaking. However, I also gain a lot, and for me that gain in knowledge is worth much more than cash sometimes.

What about you?

Leadership Development

Karthik (who used to head HR at Texas Instruments India) and has started his journey as an OD consultant a couple of months before I started mine (in fact I wrote about it here) has also started a blog - "OD and more".

His post on development of leaders is particularly brilliant, IMHO.

imagine a depiction of a 3D space with an X-axis, a Y-axis and a Z-axis, and a 0,0 point at the center. To me, the 0,0 point is the "bindu" - the core - and it has to do with "Awareness of Self"(identity, values, angst, quest, yada yada yada). The X-axis has to do with "managing reporting relationships" be they the management of one's team/reports or one's boss / management system (issues here - roles, control, authority, taking a location etc). The Y-axis has to do with "influencing non-reporting relationships" (influence, interface management, peerage, etc). Finally the Z-axis - to do with customer knowledge, business acumen, competitor awareness, product familiarity, technology-savvy, environmental awareness, future-orientation etc.

So the true organizational leader is one who has all these axes developed and if any one of these is faulty or underdeveloped, the leader will not be overall effective. The crux of the matter is the 0,0 point that Karthik talks about. Most of the time it is the least explored aspect and therefore the most difficult to confront and realise too.

Are you being copied?

OK, I think I should be flattered. After HR folks in Iran (since fixed) now it's the turn of fellow Indians to copy from this site.

I got the update thanks to Desipundit. Are you one of the bloggers being copied?

The best way to deal with online plagiarism is to deny them any sort of Google juice. Ignore them. Don't link to them, and they'll wither away, like weeds without nutrients.

On selling a consulting firm

Top-Consultant.com says: "Recent months have seen a raft of consulting acquisitions and all the signs are that 2007 will be another vintage year for management consultancy M&A activity."

Top-Consultant met with Paul Collins, who having sold his own consulting business to a VC - now advises other consultancies how they can achieve a successful sale (well, some consultants are always consultants :-) There's a 27 minutes recording at the site too.

No no, I am not looking at selling my firm :-) before any of you, dear readers, gets any such idea ;-))

Blogs as a marketing tool

Well I've thought of blogs as a tool for self-expression, and a community tool, also as a learning tool, but I never really thought of them as marketing tools.

However, ever since we started the Imagence Partners in September I have been getting inquiries for consulting assignments because of the blog.

That's because of the high ranking blogs get in organic search results.

For example take a look at the results of a Google search results for "organizational consultant india":

The 4 results have three from this blog.

Whereas a search for "employment branding India" gives the top two results from this blog, and the third result is my article written on Recruiting.com

So, my advice to any startup businesses, or those who cannot afford a lot of cash for traditional advertising and PR - start blogging. Of course, it needs a little bit of time and effort, but if you are really passionate about your work, that shouldn't be too much of an issue- right?

Well if you do have some money, you can always ask me for either a training or consulting assignment on how to integrate social media for your organization :-)

Checkout UK finance jobs on Accountant Careers.

Blogs as a marketing tool

Well I've thought of blogs as a tool for self-expression, and a community tool, also as a learning tool, but I never really thought of them as marketing tools.

However, ever since we started the Imagence Partners in September I have been getting inquiries for consulting assignments because of the blog.

That's because of the high ranking blogs get in organic search results.

For example take a look at the results of a Google search results for "organizational consultant india":

The 4 results have three from this blog.

Whereas a search for "employment branding India" gives the top two results from this blog, and the third result is my article written on Recruiting.com

So, my advice to any startup businesses, or those who cannot afford a lot of cash for traditional advertising and PR - start blogging. Of course, it needs a little bit of time and effort, but if you are really passionate about your work, that shouldn't be too much of an issue- right?

Well if you do have some money, you can always ask me for either a training or consulting assignment on how to integrate social media for your organization :-)

The Genius Collector

The Business Innovation Insider talks about "Louise MacBain, aka 'The Genius Collector.' At regular parties in her $20 million penthouse in Greenwich Village, she invites some of the best and brightest thinkers of our generation for cocktail parties loosely organized around the theme of creativity and innovation."

Hmm, I don't think I'm getting an invitation from Ms. MacBain anytime in the near foreseeable future :-)

Pity.

I could do with some parties.

The best blogs for Recruiting.com 2006 awards

It is a huge achievement as there are two blogs from India nominated for the awards, Job Options, which is executive search consultant A K Menon's blog and (ahem!) this blog.

All the nominees are listed here. Some notable blogs I would recommend are Joel Cheesman's blog on all things related to HR search optimization, Jason Goldberg's blog to get an inside sense of how a CEO builds a Web 2.0 based recruiting firm, Jim Stroud's blog for the insightful podcasts, the hilarious cartoons and the secrets of searching and sourcing, the JobSyntax blog, which is a very different career and jobs firm focussed on job hunting secrets for software folk only and of course, last year's winner, Jeff Hunter, who posts a thought provoking post every time.

You need to hop over here and vote.

So what are you waiting for?

So you are not interested in people

david maister.com asks What If You're Not That Interested in People?:

"In my experience, there's too little reflection and examination on the consequences of those points, and too much glib advice (including by me) that you 'should' get interested in people.

I think that misses the whole point about not being able to fake it. People array along a continuous spectrum of how genuinely interested they are in other people, and how comfortable they are in relating to other people on an intimate one-to-one ('drop the mask, be human') basis. Given different underlying characters and personality tyupes, maybe we need to stop pretending that everyone CAN become 'interested in other people.' If you really can't fake it, then what use is the advice that you should 'get interested?'"

I agree. There is no one career ladder. If you don't like a certain role, don't take it. One does not have to bury their own individuality in the altar of career growth. It is time when growth is seen in doing better and deeper work, rather than just growing in the number of people you manage.

Organization Development - path forward

Terry posts some thoughts on what skills/talents OD people need and Don Blohowiak posts a deeper fundamental question.

I agree with Don's diagnosis. OD people are too much 'specialists' that they cannot articulate benefits of their work in business terms. Unlike HR disciplines, whose outcomes are either tangible (Recruitment and Compensation, for example) or agreed by common wisdom(Employee Relations and Performance Management), the benefits of OD have never been championed by any business leader.

For me the central value of OD is to make an organization confront itself and its reality. The ability to continually question assumptions and to make a culture that puts an emphasis on both the individual and the organization.

Some of the biggest thinkers in leadership and management today are talking about such issues. But they are not OD folks. Folks like Ram Charan and Marcus Buckingham are saying what OD professionals have been trying to say all these years. Namely, that structures and processes of business have to come after people. And that business cannot engage people, unless it values them.

However they are saying it in the language of the business. That is what most OD professionals have to learn, IMHO.

You might have heard of the following thinkers also. Yes, they are OD professionals who pioneered the field.

Edgar Schein.
Peter Block.
Chris Argyris.

Too smart for Google

CNNMoney has a provocative piece Google's talent may be headed out the door - Dec. 5, 2006: "Think about it: there can only be one smartest person in every room. There are dozens of trophy hires and incredibly smart, entrepreneurial minds buried inside Google who are fast-becoming frustrated with their inability to accomplish anything. And while Google motors along, minting money with its AdSense and AdWords programs, these brilliant minds are getting antsy."

Yes, there is a downside to having too many brilliant employees. You have to intellectually challenge them on an everyday basis. That is great when a company is growing. But the scenario changes when growth slows and businesses mature. When 100 projects give way to 5 major ones. Not all of these 100 geniuses can lead the 5. Hence, 95 of them will either take to playing second fiddle or armed with their millions start their own company for their own idea.

The second outcome seems more possible. Maybe it's not yet time for Google.

But it surely is around the corner.

Acing Your Year-End Review

CareerJournal brings out good points in Six Tips for Acing Your Year-End Review. But remember, what will help if the year's beginnings were made well.

Were your goals set?
Did they get measured?
If the focus of your role changed did your goals change to reflect that?
What if your manager changed three-fourths into the year? Did a proper handover take place?

Remember, if your goals are not set well or updated according to your role then your appraisal will be subjective and depending too much on your boss.

What you may not know about me

It's been a long time since this blog-meme called 'tag' passed this away. Astha tags me to spill the beans on 5 things that people generally do not know about me through the blog.

Here goes...

1. I have a vague graduation degree. Something very different from the Engineering, Medicine or Science my friends studied. I did my bachelor's in hotel management (BHM) from Welcomschool, Manipal.
2. My first real ambition, when I was 14, was to be a journalist. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Clark Kent and Peter Parker worked at the newspapers. I never did become a journalist, of course. The closest I came was to become the editor of the English sector of my school magazine, being a member of the Journalism Club, then the College magazine and then be a co-editor of my MBA yearbook too :-)
3. I am a compulsive reader. I'd read anything that I manage to get my hands on, an advertisement pamphlet, newspapers, magazines, fiction, non-fiction, the internet.....So long that it's in English or Hindi. I suck at reading Bengali, though.
4. I love eating anything that I haven't tried earlier. I'm an experimental foodie. Love most foods and cuisine. Even sushi ! Bring 'em on !
5. I am an INTP, and almost fit the typology to the T. And the Enneagram type 5. While I have researvations about both these instruments as scientifically validated psychometric tools, I find myself nodding to their conclusions.

So, whom do I tag next?

Dennis. Sudhanshu. Jason Goldberg. Nimmy. Amit. You're it !

Bloggers' news

Am aghast to hear about Rashmi's alleged "impending arrest". I hope things get sorted out. Why arrest the editor/publisher of a magazine for a so-called "offensive" ad? [Via Shivam]

Fellow LinkedInBlogger Dave Taylor is up against folks like Slashdot in the Best Technology Weblog Awards. I voted for Dave, and I think you should too !

Jinal Shah has won the (unofficial) runner-up weblog award by the Fortune Innovation Weblog for her coverage of their Innovation Conference. Amazing !

Babus go to B School

Not just US civil servants but even Indian IAS officers are going back to school. B School, that is.

Just shows that you can learn anytime.

There was an article in Outlook that showed how certain IAS officers who were however sent to foreign universities, abruptly vanished and did not join back. So having the programs in India would be ridding the government of that headache.

The public sector and specially technical PSU firms like HAL are ripe pickings for private companies as the public sector firms are hindered by government regulations like the Pay Commission report and inability to change salaries when they want to. HAL is where my dad worked for 20+ yearsafter his stint with the Indian Air Force, so I know the firm and its culture quite well :(

Speaking of attrition, well as they say, attrition is about statistics. And as someone said "There are lies, damn lies and statistics". Since it is not a figure that has to be reported by way of any statute companies define it as they see fit.

Learning Styles

As part of the HR elective course that I currently teach at KIAMS, Harihar, I today asked the students to take a psychometric test called the Learning Styles Inventory. The LSI is based on Kolb's model of how people learn.

The central premise is that people learn from experiences and that one's learning style is what people do with that experiences.

The model shows how learning is movement from concrete experiences to reflective observation to abstract conceptualization and then to active experimentation.

People have a preference for a certain mode of learning and can be divergers, assimilators, convergers and accomodators/collaborators.

Work and learning are inextricably tied and hence knowledge of one's learning style could be a great tool to be more self aware of one's preferred area of work :-)

You can find more details at this site.

Donald Clark has a great synopsis of the comparison of the Learning Styles with other models of personality like MBTI and Gardner's model of multiple intelligences.

Succession issues in Indian organizations

Business Today has a cover story on the impending succession issues in a lot of Indian firms. (subscription required)

At HDFC, the home loans giant, Chairman of 13 years, Deepak Parekh is 62, and although the company says there is no mandatory retirement age, it's reasonable to assume that Parekh must be grappling with the issue of identifying a successor. At the Tata group, the challenge is even more daunting. Not only does the board need to find and groom a successor to Chairman Ratan Tata, who retires in 2012, but also the CEOs of Tata Steel and Tata Motors, the two biggest group companies by revenues, B. Muthuraman and Ravi Kant are 62 years old and due for retirement in another three years (see Bombay House Blues). At HCL Technologies, Shiv Nadar said recently in a media interview that he wants to call it a day by 2010-11, and at Wipro, Chairman Azim Premji, 61, needs to get a successor in place too (see The Coming Change of Guards), although like HDFC, Wipro has no retirement age for the chairman. Even in south India, TVS Group companies such as Sundram Fasteners and Sundaram Brake Linings have Chairmen-MDS (brothers Suresh Krishna and K. Mahesh, respectively) well into their 60s. Says Shailesh Haribhakti, an independent director on the boards of several companies: "There is now talk in boardrooms of sustainability and how to keep the companies going." Admits Chairman & Managing Director of Larsen & Toubro, A.M. Naik: "The immediate big issue before me is succession planning."

I personally think that firms like ICICI and HDFC have done a good job of developing the second line of leadership. That's because they have group companies that they have managed. The Tatas however seem to be heading the wrong way. I don't think that Noel Tata is ready to step into Ratan's shoes.

Personally I think this retirement age thing is a lot of baloney. If a leader can contribute and has the ability to not get fossilised, then I think he/she should be allowed to continue. That might not be such a popular decision with the second level leadership though.

However, if they have maturity enough then I think they should try the "two in a box" model. Where joint leadership should be taken. That would support the younger person to ease into the role under the guidance of the senior professional as well as freeing him with the strain of lonely leadership.

Blog readership and AdSense

Perhaps India's only blogger who earns a living through blogging, Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration, evaluates A lister Rashmi Bansal's blog and how she could increase her AdSense earnings.

I even get a link from him in that post. :-)

Amit's technorati rank is 482 while Rashmi's is 5,100.

What does this mean?

While inbound links are tied directly to blog earnings (i.e. more the links, more the readership and therefore, more the clickthroughs) smart ad placements could bring you higher earnings than you do currently. So Amit's advice in invaluable :-)

After changing the ad layout of this blog, I've managed to increase my blog earnings by 200%. Or to say it more truthfully, have cut down the time needed to reach $100 to a third of what it used to take.

It's better, in my opinion if the blog has a niche, because then the ads are more likely to be relevant to the readers. This blog has mostly people interested in HR and careers. Thankfully Google has lots of relevant ads in that domain :-)

How does one build readership for a new blog?

One of the big downsides of blogging is to make yourself noticeable in the numbers. I have been lucky. Being a blogger who started this blog more than 4 years ago, time has been on my side. It's probably unfair but there are lots of great HR bloggers who should get more readership than me.

As a SEO friend of mine explained, the longer your blog has been around, the higher its credibility for Google. The combination of high number of inbound links and a long time blog is very good for readership.

A batchmate of mine started a really funny blog recently on movies (Bollywood), Cricket and Calcutta :-) Here is what my advice was to him on building readership.

First, you've got to keep putting your posts for Desipundit tip-off.

Also register your blog into sites like http://india.blogstreet.com , as well as Technorati (you could put the code for "buzz" (for Blogstreet) on your post template...check out mine :-)

Also link to specific posts of "A-list" bloggers. Not only does the blogger come to know that you've linked to him but certain blogging services show the readers also who is linking to his post. That brings in more readers. Comment on others' blogs for the same result.

Of course, the easiest way to get readership is to be controversial :-)

I forgot to add that registering a blog on Technorati and then tagging it with keywords could be a great way for readers to discover your blog. That's how the Fortune Innovation Blog discovered this blog and added it to their blogroll.