The people principle

Dr. Wayne Brockbank spoke to the Tata Group on The people principle and the new role for Human Resources. Some excerpts are:

"The question now is how to cultivate a culture that supports and creates new innovations that will keep you ahead of the competition. You can't rely on the past; you have to bet on creating the future. The mandate this development delivers for HR professionals is to manage organisational capability much better in the future than they have in the past.
The world's best-managed companies understand what the organisational context needs to be for their business to survive and prosper. They know the key capabilities that success demands. That's what we call organisational capabilities.

Gearing the company for fast change

Let’s assume for a moment that fast change - which means the ability to change quickly, to be adaptable and flexible, to move quickly - is the chief capability you need to be successful at the Tatas. Then the questions that rise are:
- To what extent are we hiring people with the proven ability of working in a fast-change environment?
- Do we promote people who are able to manage a fast-change company?
- Do we transfer people to give them the opportunity to practise fast change?
- Do we fire people who do not change quickly?
- Do we have a way of measuring the ability of a company to change quickly?
- Do we reward people who change quickly?
- Do we have training and development programmes that help and encourage fast change?
- Do we use the voice of customers and shareholders while communicating a fast-change environment across the company?
- Do we have a communication mechanism in place to help people throughout the company understand that fast change is critical?
- Do we have an infrastructure that helps people manage change quickly?
- Do we structure the organisation so that it is flexible, adaptable and able to move quickly?
- Are work processes designed to move quickly and facilitate fast change?
- Does the arrangement of the physical space around us encourage fast change?
- Finally, are leaders regular and consistent role models of fast change?

The best-managed companies, such as Unilever, Marico, Citicorp, Hewlett Packard, AT&T and others, use this basic framework to make sure their HR practices are fully and exactly aligned to create the organisational capabilities required to execute strategy in the most powerful way possible.

Linking competency model to results
I think competencies, too, have a crucial role to play, but the problem here is that most competency models are so generic it’s hard to see how they add much value. The best companies make sure that competencies are customised and tailored to the specific, strategic requirements of their business. Linking a competency model to results can produce a powerful package than can drive measurement in compensation systems.

Measuring HR outcome is very, very easy, and it’s a simple process. The most difficult part in measuring HR is knowing what to measure, not doing the measurement itself. Once we know what to measure, measurement can occur very quickly. Most HR measurement systems start by measuring HR in everyday practices. That’s not a very good idea. What you should be doing, instead, is try to measure what HR does.

In a complete HR measurement system, you have to measure what HR does, what it delivers and what it impacts. Once you understand this, you can show the relationship between what HR does, what it delivers and what it impacts."

Career Coaching- The new business

Career coaching is a comparatively new field compared to traditional coaching that concentrated on personal and individual development.

As the name suggests career coaches help individuals to think through their career aspirations and decide on their correct (or rather, more suitable) career options.

Most career coaches come from the job search industry and try to help job searchers with their job search. However there also exist in this space people like Harvard academics Timothy Butler and James Waldroop who are partners in the firm Peregrine Partners.

Some other folks are Patti Wilson of Career Company, Ian Christie of Bold Career

Some more detailed articles are here and here.

I think the options for Career Coaches is bright in India. Lots of people jumping into jobs only to find themselves disillusioned later is a common phenomenon. Most people currently turn to people who 'prescribe' things to do (the neighbourhood 'good boy', the cousin who got a MNC job etc.) without taking into account the person's interests and dreams. The focus of our careers are so much about money and status, but never happiness. That has got to change !

CEO compensation keeps rising

David Batstone writes in the Worthwhile Mag:

"A new report reveals that CEO total compensation in the S&P 500 rose by a median of 27.16 percent in 2003, nearly three times the rise seen for 2002, when total compensation rose a healthy 11.48 percent. Every element of pay tracked (base salary, annual compensation, restricted stock and other long-term incentives) rose in value over the last year save one: the value realized from the exercise of stock options actually fell, by a median of 1.01 percent.
What is worse than mockery? Disdain. That's exactly how many rank-and-file workers feel they are being treated. Over the past several years, most workers have seen their pay packages hold steady, if not decline. "

My comment:
In India we've had discussions triggered by certain leaders that there have got to be some ratio beyond which CEO salary should not rise. And figures like 1:25 of lowest pay in the organization and CEO pay have been bandied about. But in India at least (and I suspect, other countries too) there are a lot of CEO perks that never get valued in the annual report of the organization. And further complicating the scenario is the salaries of promoter-CEOs who take home pays like $ 1.8 m !

Employee Engagement survey by Hewitt Associates

Top Consultant.com reports:
"A new study by Hewitt Associates shows that employee engagement levels at high-growth companies exceed those of lower-growth companies by more than 20 percent. The study also suggests that higher-growth organizations focus more energy and attention on employee engagement than their counterparts.

Hewitt's survey, based on data gathered from more than 4 million employees, compared engagement levels and practices of double-digit growth companies (those with five-year compound average revenue growth of 10 percent or more) against companies that achieved less than 10 percent growth. "

Growth in Freelance Consultants

Top-Consultant.com reports: "freelancing is becoming an ever more popular career choice for experienced consultants looking to increase their earnings - or take greater control of their work/ life balance. In a press release issued this week, the Professional Contractors Group (PCG) estimates that there are now around one million freelancers in the UK, with up to 40% of the UK?s workforce expected to have become freelance by 2010 - powered in no small part by the rise of broadband and the home-working solutions that this has made possible.

Established consulting brands do not like to admit it, but they are increasingly relying on their networks of 'Associates' or freelance consultants to plug shortages in permanent consulting staff. The firms lose a bit of control over the quality of consulting they deliver, but on the plus side can gain flexibility in resourcing - and reduce the risks associated with over-expanding in the early phases of a recovery. "

In Bangalore I can already see this happening. An amazing number of XLRI alumni are opting for flexibility that freelancing provides. Specially ladies, though a male batchmate has already opted for it. I think another factor is the intellectual focus of such jobs. A lot of the people who opt for freelancing also write and do classes at B-Schools. Such things are usually under a scanner when working with traditional large organizations (due to concerns of copyright etc). Of course, Charles Handy has already forecast this, calling such people "Fleas" compared to the Elephants (or large organizations!). And Dan Pink in the USA has already named these people as the "Free Agent Nation" !

The IBM vs Microsoft battle : Undermining Windows

Rajesh Jain points to a Forbes.com article that says:
"Microsoft wants to dominate this business and make it a Windows world. IBM has embraced Linux and in doing so has stoked the biggest threat ever to confront the Microsoft monopoly. While IBM's products run on Windows, it wants its customers to see how nicely they would run on Linux as well, using the free operating system as a lure. 'Like getting free bread in a restaurant,' says Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy at IBM and a pivotal proselytizer of Linux inside the company. Ultimately, customers may not need Windows at all.

For 20 years Microsoft has out-earned, out-smarted and out-maneuvered IBM. At long last IBM may have found a way to get even. Twenty years ago IBM ruled the computer industry. But today Microsoft runs the show. It earns 30% more profit than IBM on one-third of IBM's revenue and has almost double its market value. With Linux, IBM hopes to get even."

Madhukar on the Media

Dr. Madhukar Shukla on his Blog says:
"... most of us tend to believe - somewhat naively - that when we buy a magazine or a newspaper, or watch a TV channel, we are the customers, because we pay for it (even if nominally).

We tend to ignore that the media revenues come, not from subscriptions paid by its readers/ audience, but from advertisements paid for by businesses.

So, perhaps, a more rational way of looking at media should be like this: Media sells its subscribers/ audience/ spectators/ readers to its primary customers - the businesses, and gets paid for that service!!!"

Bill Gates gets it ! Addresses CEOs on Blogging, RSS and Communities

Well this really pushes Blogging and communities to becoming agenda for CEOs. But here the point is, will the not-so-tech-savvy-CEOs ever get it? Gates probably understands the power of self publishing, and here he's outlined it in pretty layman terms about what that would mean...

But I still have my doubts...

Ok enough of what I think...here's what Bill thinks:

"Another new phenomenon that connects into this is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS.
This is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they'll wonder why I didn't put their name on it. But, then again, I don't want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I'm saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.
Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don't know to come visit that Web site, and it's very painful to keep visiting somebody's Web site and it never changes. It's very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it.
And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you're interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn't interfere with your normal Inbox.

And so if I do a trip report, say, and put that in a blog format, then all the employees at Microsoft who really want to look at that and who have keywords that connect to it or even people outside, they can find the information.

And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail -- that it's too imposing -- and yet the drawbacks of the Web site -- that you don't know if there's something new and interesting there -- this is about solving that.

The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it, and we're progressively getting better and better at that by watching your behavior, ranking things in different ways.

Another big phenomenon is building communities around Web sites, around products. And virtually every company ought to have on their Web site the ability for their customers, their suppliers, various people, to interact and their employees to see the dialogue taking place there and jump in and talk to them and help them.

The idea of these communities making these things fun, how you make sure nobody dominates the community or invades the community, a lot of progress there that make those things important. Built into every one of our products now are connections back to the community, a thing called Office Online, or Visual Studio, our development tools have the developers online, that's called MSDN. And we learn so much about what people are doing or what they want from that and we literally require our employees to engage in those communities so they're up there and visible and getting that direct exposure not through statistics but through particular customer dialogue."

The distributor vs. the innovator

CNET News.com reports on the Intriguing battle of types of Innovation:

"The confrontation between Hewlett-Packard and Dell is more than a particularly lively bout of competition in the $106 billion-a-year printing industry. It is a clash--and an intriguing test case--of two different models of innovation and corporate strategy.
With its engineering roots and its corporate tagline 'HP Invent,' Hewlett-Packard is committed to spending heavily on research and then funneling that home-grown technology into new products. Those products, in turn, must be able to command profits high enough to keep financing the corporate invention machine. Hewlett-Packard's printing business is a showcase of success for internal innovation.
Dell, by contrast, is pursuing a 'virtual' research-and-development model. It does some engineering development work itself, but that typically amounts to tweaking an existing product. Dell's main role is to scour the world for technology, fine-tune the products of corporate partners, wring costs from the supply chain and sell products directly to customers. "

B-School Rants

B-School Issues

It seems to be open season on B-Schools.

First Mintzberg started with his new book "managers not MBAs" and now Rob at Businesspundit points to this Economist article which asks "are business schools teaching the right things"?

Some interesting views:


Jeffrey Pfeffer, from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, argues in a critical article† that the basic business proposition of business schools, especially those with MBA programmes, is “the enhancement of the careers, measured mostly in terms of salary, of their graduates”.

and

The most commercially wounding criticisms are those that appear to contradict the claim that an MBA enhances career prospects. There was uproar when, two years ago, Mr Pfeffer and Christina Fong argued in Academy of Management Learning and Education that there was little evidence that getting an MBA had much effect on a graduate's salary or career. “Usually it just makes you a couple of years older than non-MBA peers,” one source told them.

Roughly the reverse of Mr Mintzberg's complaint is the criticism advanced by Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School, who is writing a book on why management has failed to develop as a profession. He points out that other activities in which society prizes a sense of restraint, judgment and the pursuit of the common good, such as law, health care and religion, have evolved into professions. A surprising number of business schools, including Wharton in Pennsylvania and IESE in Barcelona, were founded by people who wanted to improve the ethical sensitivity of managers. (IESE, founded by Opus Dei, a Catholic organisation, still has religious statues and paintings in its principal rooms.) “At the heart of professionalism is the renunciation of certain things,” claims Mr Khurana. American managers have not obviously been keen on renunciation in the past decade.

and on the dichotomy between teaching and research

Part of the problem is the way that management research—like so many areas of knowledge—tends to explore ever more obscure topics as scholars seek out an unvisited niche. With reason, Ms Pearce is particularly baffled by so-called “critical management theory”. A description of this abstruse subject on the Academy of Management website announces that “Our premise is that structural features of contemporary society, such as the profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality and ecological irresponsibility often turn organisations into instruments of domination and exploitation.” Few are the companies happy to pay $50,000 for their top managers to learn that.

Pulling together research and teaching will be hard. “You are starting to get splits,” reports Roy Lewicki, editor of Academy of Management Learning and Education: “Contract faculty teach, and tenured faculty mainly do research and are better paid.” Perhaps the professionalisation of management teaching, recommended by those two reports of the late 1950s, has now gone too far. Perhaps management education would beat off its critics more effectively if it went back to its beginnings, and got more corporate managers to teach. It might be easier to train them to communicate properly with students than to get professional management academics to teach students to be good managers

I think we are seeing this in India too. Indian B Schools were never greatly reseach orientated. I think soon Indian organizations will also start their own internal Corporate Universities to get people trained on management skills in their specific contexts. Of course there already exist Birla Management Centre, Tata Administrative Service, Welcomgroup Management Institute, Oberoi School, Infosys Leadership Institute but I think soon there will be specific service providers who will trigger this in more small and medium businesses too !

Behavioral Impact of Training

Behavioral Impact of Training

On IHRC a member asks

"Though we have initiated the pre and post test methodology that the Model suggests and then measuring the differential gap of learning that arises. However we wouldnt like to restrict ourselves only to conducting tests as it becomes quite rudimentary after a point in time. Would request the group members to share the initiatives undertaken in their organisations to measure the transfer of learning post the feedback stage. Our primary concern at this stage is measuring "Behaviourial learnings" due to their subjective nature. All creative but implementable inputs are truly welcome as this is my KRA for the year!!!"

My response was:

Measuring "behavioural impact" of training is a very tricky issue and
really needs a lot of resources and time to sink into it.

Do you have those resources at your disposal? Is it worth the time to
measure it ? Who wants it? Senior management or your dept?

If you absolutely want to do it , my suggestion would be to select
interventions that take a lot of organizational capital in terms of
monetary and time implications. Doing it for training like
"communication skills" will not really help you.

The first point needs to be taken care before people attend the program.
1. Is the training needs analysis done in a way that makes sense for a
person to attend a certain program.
2. Who decides whether that particular training is what is required
for a team/individual?
3. Is the issue best addressed through training rather than coaching,
on the job mentoring or organizational issues like job alignment, goal
setting?

If all the answers to the above questions are yes then you could
actually go ahead with a measurement process. If not, then you are
looking at a wrong solution for the problem

The process needs to be evolved in agreement with the participant and
his/her manager.

The easiest thing would be to evolve post training action plans and
periodically review them and build it into the performance management
process

First impressions of Gmail

First impressions of Gmail

Ok folks, I know you'd like to know what Gmail offers which is different , so here goes:

1. It feels great to see my mailbox say 1MB occupied and then 0% of 1000MB used :D yeah, its a big high ! I can now get all my list serv emails as individual emails and not lose out any attachment or need to go through to the websites :-)

2. The conversation thread is quite a life saver and keeps the emails easy on the eye

3. The reply box is situated below the mail and expands and is quite intuitive to use.

4. The ads are quite non-obtrusive and even helpful if you want more data before you reply.

5. It's still my second active day of using so I haven't really used the keyboard shortcuts...but I think that would be a great boon to a heavy emailer (as opposed to the person who uses it just to receive emails)...ditto to the "spell checker" facility !

6. The search function is quite fast (what do you expect of Google !) and the labeling instead of moving to folders is a great concept too

Keep watching this space... !

Homegrown Talent

Winning with Homegrown Talent

I get a newsletter from EZI which usually has a couple of articles about Leadership and this time they profiled a good HBR article.

Hiring outside talent is a costly, common strategic error made by many companies, write Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nonda and Nitin Nohria in the Harvard Business Review.. Their survey of top stock analysts showed an average 20% drop in performances after stars switched companies. This is because an A player’s performance depends on both personal abilities and the organization s/he works for, explain the authors. Company-specific factors in a star’s success include: human and financial resources, systems and processes, leadership and training, internal networks and strong teams. Hiring high-fliers can also embitter loyal employees, create interpersonal conflicts and send a company’s share price plummeting, as shareholders anticipate higher wage bills, note the authors.

They consequently urge companies to develop talent internally through careful selection, training and mentoring processes. Retaining top talent involves showing flexibility, offering stars public recognition and encouraging them to acquire new skills, claim the authors. Imported stars, however, are tough to tie down and easily lured away by higher salary offers. If forced to hire externally, companies should ensure that replacements have similar profiles to departing A players and strong general skill sets. Successfully integrating outside stars also involves drawing up detailed plans and setting long-term goals, note the authors. Growing talent internally still gives a company the competitive edge, they conclude.

-- Didn't we see a lot of such examples when CEOs left Blue chip firms and moved to the dotcom world. They failed because the took the processes in their large firm for granted and did not factor their absence in a start up - and so failed. Sometimes I wonder if people overestimate their abilities in the Leadership arena !

Gmail !

Going Gee-Mail !

Hey folks I never thought being a regular Blogger would have such a reward !

Yesss !

I've been one of the lucky few to already have a GMail account already !

Thanks Blogger !

Google News

Terra Lycos beats Google for the 1 GB email !!

Google News reports: "With all the hype surrounding Google's Gmail and Yahoo's makeover, Terra Lycos, Europe, this week quietly launched their 1GB email service. E-mail service has not become completely commoditised, though -- at least, not yet. "

Flawless Consulting Skills

Flawless Consulting Skills

One of the things I have been upto was attending a training program on "Flawless Consulting Skills" which is based on Peter Block's book "Flawless Consulting" and was conducted by Block's training firm DesignedLearning. Our trainers were Nigel Tanner of BTLi and Joe Malouff of Effiqual Designed Learning Canada. Both are associates of DesignedLearning.

The focus of both the book and the training is "internal consultants" or staff functions but the process and the methodology can as well be used by independent consulants. The thing that impressed me about the training was the focus on "skill building" rather than just concepts. Even the book is very rooted in Block's own experiences as a consultant and the focus on the process of consulting and being authentic.

Customer Experience & Silos in Management

Customer Experience & Silos in Management

Hey folks, sorry I haven't been blogging for a while. Had been busy with some extra work :-)

Ok here's these great thoughts that I bumped into on the biz blogosphere.

Rob the BusinessPundit talks about how Ideo helps companies focus on Customer Experience and Jon at Business Evolutionist reiterates what I have always believed. The functional focus of B-schools is what I believe has been leading to the lack of Systems Thinking (no wonder that Senge's and Hammer's ideas seemed so radical) but Jon gives it a historical perspective...blaming Alfred Sloan for that !