The latest issue of the Global Knowledge Review is out

Ok, this post is a little late :-), but I can blame blogger for it...it was impossible to publish something yesterday :(

Every issue you can 'sample' one of the articles and I am sure that will whet your appetite for the full issue...you can always go and see what the contents are here.

This edition's article for everyone viewing is: Answers on the back of a postcard please...by Chris Collision. You can see the earlier articles at this place.

The other notable articles are :

Observe people and then learn by Dave Pollard, Knowledge sharing and distribution by Kurt April and The Foundation of Effective KM and Strategy by Dr. Bruce Lloyd. One article that really resonated with me was Break-through innovations and big corporations - a contradiction? by Janina Kugel.

The articles I am really looking forward to reading from next month's issue are:
KM Choices by Denham Grey (Denham is an awesome thinker...so am really looking forward to this one!) , Peer Assist for Cross Organizational Learning: Reflection by Carol Gorelick (that sounds like a great cocktail of my favourite topics ) and an intriguing article titled What are you cooking today? by Lilia Efimova...wonder what Lilia will serve up !!

That was a fast one !!

Mark Hurd of NCR gets the HP head honcho job ! Congrats Russell Reynolds ! That was a fast close for one of the toughest tech head jobs. And one that did not finish with the usual list of suspects like Mike Cappellas (did I hear sighs of relief?)

"Mark came to our attention because of his strong execution skills, his
proven ability to lead top performing teams and his track record in driving
shareholder value. He demonstrated these skills by turning around NCR, which,
while smaller than HP, is a complex organization with multiple business
segments," said Patricia Dunn

"Hurd has been part of a culture that builds and not dismantles. This
should be a signal that HP is not going to head into a garage sale," Stahlman
said.

And this is what Hurd said

"You talk about problems but there are a bunch of opportunities at the same time," Hurd said in response to one question about strategy. "I want to get underneath every piece of the business and will be focused on doing my best to optimize each part." Hurd made several comments that were similar to the ones that Fiorina often made to defend the Compaq deal -- namely that it made strategic sense to have a diverse portfolio of tech businesses ranging from PCs and servers to printing, software and services.

Rob at Businesspundit wonders if HP played too safe by opting for a polar opposite of Carly while Juli at Tom Peters blog asks what would Hurd be judged on.

Korn/Ferry or H&S ?

Seems like there is a big competition for capturing the attention for C level searches. First came this news item:

Korn/Ferry said Monday it has regained its position as the No. 1 executive search
firm in the United States and the world, according torecently released rankings
from two trade organizations.Korn/Ferry, which ranked third in the United States
and second internationally a year ago, edged out Chicago-based Heidrick
&Struggles International Inc. (NASDAQ:HSII), which took the top spotglobally
last year, and Chicago-based Spencer Stuart, which was No. 1in the United States
last year.

And then Heidrick & Struggles came up with this on their website:

2004 year was a banner year for Heidrick & Struggles, particularly
in our work at the top. We successfully completed nine of 11 CEO searches
assigned to external advisors by Fortune 500-size U.S. companies. (Source: David
Lord, Executive Search Information Services) The impressive list of marquee
client companies where we placed CEOs in 2004 includes: ArvinMeritor, Baxter
International, Coca-Cola, Computer Associates, JC Penney, Kmart, Nike,
Owens-Illinois and Starwood Hotels.

On the whole looks like the high level search business is booming !

The 20 largest global retained executive search consulting practicesposted
a 25% gain in professional fee revenue in 2004, while the 40largest retained
executive search firms in the United Statesregistered a 21% gain in revenue,
according to the just-releasedannual search firm rankings issue of Executive
Recruiter News (ERN),whose publisher, Kennedy Information, Inc., has tracked the
globalbusiness of executive search since 1970.

The long tail and the bottom of the Pyramid

Chris Andersen compares his theory of the Long Tail with CKP's theory of Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Regular readers of this blog would remember that I am not a terribly big fan of CKP.

Women, employment and Indian workforce

Halley Suitt posted about a HBS conference which focussed on the South Asian women's career growth in organizations, at Tom Peters' site.

Interestingly the comments veered to the weird when someone commented : "Amazing the way India and Islamic countries discriminate against women via a caste system. It is their loss to discount/humiliate over 50% of their talent."

Now, normally I would recognize a racist comment and not react without facts, but I commented anyway that:

"Women in India (as elsewhere I suppose) are discriminated , no matter what their caste...
In fact, in the "lower" castes they are more economically active and form a part of the workplace (even though it's unorganized and not taken into account as "corporate workplace")...
remember, in a country like India, more than 80% of the workforce is not organized and work as daily wage laborers, farmers...
So john, saying women are discriminated by the caste system is grossly incorrect. They are discriminated, for their gender, period!"

Then I decided to dig up some data and some interesting facts that a site called Neon Carrot had were:

• domestic workers in India: 14 million
• women employed in rural areas: 31 %
• women employed in cities: 11 %
• people registered as unemployed with 936 employment exchanges: 41.6 million (beginning '04)
• employment in the unorganized sector: 91.39 % of work force
• employed in agriculture: 50 % (2003)
• India's working age population (15-60 years): 610 million (estimate 2003)
• growth of India's labour force: 1.9 % per year [BBC Jul 04]
• growth of job creation between 1994-2000: 1.07 % per annum
• estimate of wage increase over the next four decades: 800 % (estimate by IMF) [BBC Jul 04]

Hmm, so the news about employment in the organized sector that one hears only affects 8.51% of the workforce !

Have a great Holi-day !

To all my readers, here's wishing you all a great and colorful Holi !

Google finally opens at Hyd

It's beta no more...after 9 months of operations, the Google Hyderabad team is finally live.

Check this cool write up at the Googleblog

unlike other offices, we have Indian food for lunch every day. Perhaps most important, we have launched the first chapter of the International Google Cricket Club, where the preferred delivery is, naturally, a googly.

I mean, if my readership gets so big, that I can get Adwords support at apna Hyderabad? Cool!

The fringe benefit tax

It seems as the biggest gainer of the Fringe Benefit Tax would not be the government, but HR consulting companies, as they try to help their clients make sense of the haze of confusion surrounding it.

Check what they are saying.

By the way folks, even if the posting on this blog is low, you can keep abreast of what I am reading at my linkblog.

Looking past the $ dreams

One IIM Ahmedabad MBA student was reported (and covered extensively by the media) to be offered a whopping US $ 150,000 salary !

Rashmi Bansal (herself an IIM A alumnus) decodes the placement news for us lay folk...on her blog in this post titled The $150,000 googly.

I quote this bit from the post:

Bottomline: Take all these figures about MBA placements with a fistful of salt. There are many good reasons to consider doing an MBA but the hope of that $150,000 job should not be one of them. The richest men in the world - like L N Mittal - have made their millions not on the backs of MBAs but native intelligence, hard work and good luck. If that's your dream - follow their example!

India's best managed companies....according to BT

Business Today and AT Kearney recently came up with a list of "India's best managed companies". The list comprised organizations like Infosys, L&T, Wipro, ICICI Bank and Tata Power.

Conspicious by its absence is the Reliance group which earlier used to be right up there!

The only drawback about this review is that it covers organizations that are listed in India, so a lot of organizations that may be better managed do not find mention here.

The most interesting part of the survey for me was the emphasis the survey laid on Learning, Innovation, Knowledge Management, having a web based performance support system, and whether people's contribution to the KM system was part of their performance measurement system. Now that's interesting and recognises how the thought is coming round to the growing importance of human capital even in core industries like Power, Cement and Construction !

The top 10 intranets for 2005

Jakob Nielsen picks the best:

• Banco Español de Crédito (Banesto), the third largest bank in Spain
• Cisco Systems, the world's leading computer networking vendor (U.S.)
• Electrolux, the world's largest manufacturer of powered appliances (Sweden)
• The Integer Group, the seventh largest promotional marketing agency (U.S.)
• NedTrain, the Dutch National Railway's maintenance subsidiary (The Netherlands)
• Orbis Technology, a small software developer (U.K.)
• Park Place Dealerships, operator of ten luxury automobile dealerships (U.S.)
• Procter & Gamble, a leading manufacturer of branded consumer goods (U.S.)
• Schematic, an interactive design and technology agency (U.S.)
• Verizon Communications, a leading telecommunications company (U.S.)

courtesy Rajesh Jain

So is your organization's intranet a better one than the above? Tell Jakob about it !

Some stats

Krishna of TI India is surprised by some recruitment statistics...like:

1. Infosys Technologies has been hiring about 50 people a working day for the last nine months
2. Wipro adds three employees to its staff every working hour
3. Satyam will see an addition of 30,000 to the present 20,000 in the next few years
4. TCS’S headcount stands at 43,681 people with over 6,200 added in last two quarters.

Read the full article here
He's amazed because over the last 20 years of operations TI India has a total employee strength of around 1300.
That number is approximately what Infosys or Wipro adds in a month. :)

more blog posts on KM

Dave Pollard writes about some of the questions he faced on KM from students.

Some gems from it are:

• A KM project is like any other change project, and the key is to ensure you follow John Kotter's Leading Change approach.
• I'm not sure you can expect management to know what the gaps are, in this era when, as Drucker says, for the first time most employees know more about their jobs (and hence more about their 'knowledge gaps') than their boss.
• off-the-shelf blog tools are not yet ready for prime time in business organizations: They are too complicated for busy employees to learn and use effectively, and their hard-wired reverse-date organization and indexing doesn't match users' needs to be able to browse blog content other ways.
• Depending on the nature, culture, structure and industry of the organization, it [KM] may find a 'home' as part of IT, Learning or Sales & Marketing, or split between all three.
• Don't obsess over content and ignore contact and context. Don't do it all top-down. Don't do it until you understand the culture of the organization and how they're 'working around' knowledge problems now. Don't expect to get credit or insist on taking credit for your success.

Read more here

why blogging is good for your career

Damon Darlin posts Tim Bray's reasons on the Business2Blog. Makes you feel better than reading the silly "blogging can get you fired" kind of articles!

As Anil Dash says, he doesn't think people have lost jobs because of blogging.

KM world's top 100

The KM world has released their top 100 KM product and service companies...

And there is one Indian firm in the service group, along with the likes of Accenture, Basex, Bearing Point, CSC, Delphi Group, Doculabs, Forrester Research/GIGA, Fujitsu Consulting, Gartner/MetaGroup, IBM Global Services, IDC, Ovum, PerotSystems, PricewaterhouseCoopers, The 451 Group,

and that is:
ZenSar !

Kudos Ganesh Natarajan and team !

And is this too about KM...?

I think this article talks more about Business Intelligence, Data warehousing than KM...

Amazing how you can call anything KM and get away with it(see post below) !

About KM...

The Business Line puts through some points about ....KM??

I really think, people label everything as KM...there really ought to be somebody which should step in and say

"What you are talking about is good management, but its NOT about KM...KM deals with harnessing the team and organization's combined knowledge to facilitate higher productivity and innovation"

Tata's look for a 'refresh' ?

Now this is really not necessary ....the Tata's are India's oldest and most respected conglomerate present in old economy businesses like cement (ACC), steel (Tata Steel) to auto (Tata Motors) and software (TCS).

So why do they need to do this?

The Tata group has embarked upon an exercise to “refresh” its corporate identity and has hired international design agency Tower Partners LLC for the purpose.
In an interview with Business Standard, Tata group Chairman Ratan Tata said, “There's a need to refresh the brand from time to time.”
Tata said the mandate given to corporate identity design firm Tower Partners was to refresh and strengthen the brand, not to change it.
“There have been issues with the logo. It is difficult to use it in some places. So, the whole thing needs to be looked at but I think we would be crazy to change it,” he added.
Tata said most people did not realise how Coca-Cola and Shell had changed over the years and that they had gradually modernised their logos. “If you look at the logo of Shell in the sixties and today, it is different," he said.

I know that they had changed the logo only 6-7 years ago, and I think its really unnecessary ! Mr. Tata put your money on things you own ! The brand is owned by your customers, (as businesspundit says) changing logos is a pointless exercise !

Bill Ives : On blogs and KM

Bill has finally announced his book on Blogging for business, that has been co-authored by Amanda Watlington. I'm excited because I'm hoping that my interview (that Bill took through asynchronous online interaction ;-) might be there. Oh ok, I'm just hoping. I know that he interviewed Dina and moi (any other Indian bloggers in the book, Bill?)

Bill posts on his blog why he thinks blogs can be a great KM and personal KM tool too. In fact, before this blog started getting linked to by folks, I had initially started it to keep it as a central repository of my various POVs on various online and offline fora. (check out my earliest posts - somewhere in 2002 and 2003 :-)

As Bill says:

From an individual perspective blogs offer:

• Creation – publishing content within a personal voice
• Collection – managing personal content in a searchable archive
• Context – applying commentary to content you manage
  

From a networking perspective blogs provide:

• Connection – discovering others with your interests
• Conversation – engaging in dialogs on an organizational or global basis
• Community – building networks around shared themes
• Collaboration – finding new business partners

Quite interesting to see the number of books on blogging that are now being planned. Shel and Scoble's book is also in the offing!

US workers apathetic and contemptous of management

CLO media points to a survey on workplace attitudes conducted by Harris Interactive for Age Wave.

More than half of American workers question the basic morality of their organizations’ top leaders and say that their managers do not treat them fairly, according to results of a representative, nation-wide survey of 7,718 American workers aged 18 and over.

The survey covered workers’ views on work, engagement in the workplace, benefits, forms of compensation, employer competence, employer integrity and retirement. Facing a growing shortage of qualified workers and an aging workforce, employers must move rapidly to develop strategies for dealing with these emerging multi-generational workforce issues, the researchers found.

Other key findings include:

• Small firm employees feel far more engaged in their work than their corporate counterparts.
  
• Older workers are the most satisfied, the most engaged in their work, and the least likely to feel burned out.
  
• Younger workers are the most distressed and restless, and they feel the least amount of loyalty to their employers.
  
• Substantial numbers of employees feel dead-ended and are seeking changes at work or new jobs all together.
  
• Job security, health care coverage and professional development are valued above additional compensation.

Family business in a huge technology company?

In the US?

Impossible, did you say?

Don't say that, like our very own Bajajs who groom their sons for the CEO position old man Jacobs of Qualcomm did the same...for his son.

So there, don't say, the US is too professionally managed to get the family in the way of the business.

Where does Qualcomm go from here, into being a monopoly? Hmm...sounds like the Ambanis, with CDMA and a monopoly and...wait, does Paul have a brother?Oh yes....oh, brother !

Who are these guys?

Who are these guys?

Is that the question you ask when you come across the terms: Third party recruiter, Head Hunter, Executive Search Consultant, Recruitment Consultant etc etc.?

I can understand your confusion. Maybe you should check out Anthony and Mike's blog and the Recruiting.com blog pretty regularly (my suggestion, subscribe to their RSS feeds!) or you can check these sites

Kulper & Company demystify the Executive Search process. Hell they are even ISO certified !
Quintcareers.com tell you how to Care and Feed Headhunters and Recruiters (kinda makes them sound like your pets?? ;-))

Here is a list of the 40 largest headhunter companies.

Revenge of the Right Brain

Picked this up from Jack Vinson's blog....loved the implication....someone asked me "What after the age of knowledge?" and my answer was "The age of Aesthetics!"

Evidence?
iPod.

QED

Daniel Pink writes in the current Wired (13.02), Revenge of the Right Brain, that traditionally left brain jobs are being outsourced and automated. And the stuff that is left is subject to more and more right brain sensibilities as the left brain activities are "perfected."

Tax attorneys. Radiologists. Financial analysts. Software engineers. Management
guru Peter Drucker gave this cadre of professionals an enduring, if somewhat
wonky, name: knowledge workers. These are, he wrote, "people who get paid for
putting to work what one learns in school rather than for their physical
strength or manual skill." What distinguished members of this group and enabled
them to reap society's greatest rewards, was their "ability to acquire and to
apply theoretical and analytic knowledge." And any of us could join their ranks.
All we had to do was study hard and play by the rules of the meritocratic
regime. That was the path to professional success and personal fulfillment.
But a funny thing happened while we were pressing our noses to the
grindstone: The world changed. The future no longer belongs to people who can
reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. ...

Management - A profession or a discipline?

Nitin Nohria, Rakesh Khurana and Daniel Prenice have taken a fresh look at the debate, is Business Management a profession, according to HBS working knowledge.

My answer: No, it's a discipline. It is not something you can get certified on, or tested on. Management is so context specific that a successful manager can be a spectacular failure when he/she moves across functions and/or companies/industries.

I mean, if there is a certification for managers, what would the curriculum be? B Schools rarely agree in the curriculum in totality and there are fresh calls for the rehaul of the MBA program by people like Mintzberg, Tom Peters, Seth Godin and others.

People get into management from various streams of careers, from technical careers, from research, from shop floors, from academics - without an MBA , and of course after an MBA also.

So what would a certification of management possibly cover? It can at best be generic ...

What I would agree with is a certification of board members. There has to be country specific regulation and certification as to who can get into the board of directors of an organization.

What do you think?

Public Sector banks on Human Resource change path

Business-Standard reports that Public Sector banks, State Bank of India and Bank of Baroda have undertaken HR change in the areas of compensation as well as organizational structure.

SBI has internally worked out the details of a performance-related, variable payscale for its officers. A senior SBI executive confirmed the move.
It may soon place the matter before its board for approval.

A radical market-related pay package at SBI will force other public sector banks
also to follow suit.

BoB plans to increase the number of general managers from 22 to 28 and recast the positions as strategic heads of businesses. The general managers will now focus on business development rather than look at operational aspects.

The attempt was to decentralise power and empower people down the line so as to speed up the decision making process.

That is interesting news. I wonder if these proposals will be accepted by India's trade unions representing bank managers (yes, such a thing does exist !)

AT Kearney for sale?

The Top Consultant blog says that ATK might get a management buyout from EDS...back to the partnership model?

Carly rumors

Whats the world (bank) coming to ?

Carly Fiorina, the recently ousted chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co., is in
the running to be the next president of the World Bank, a Bush administration
official said Tuesday.

There have already been rumblings that Carly might join the Republican party...but this is news..is the world bank more about politics or more about business...or is there not too much of difference between these two universes anymore?

Wait, what's this news about her taking over at Amtrak?

The Best companies for developing leadership

A group called Executive Development Associates did a survey on which organizations are the best for developing leadership talent and the results are:

Organization Percent of votes
--------------------------------------------------------
1. GE 67.7%
2. Johnson & Johnson 45.2%
3. Dell Inc. 38.7%
IBM 38.7%
5. Weyerhaeuser 35.5%
6. Bank of America 25.8%
Pepsi Co. 25.8%
UBS 25.8%
9. Cisco Systems 22.6%
Procter & Gamble 22.6%

Thanks Canadian Headhunter to directing me to this survey, which was also covered by Forbes.