Two recruiting blogs added ..

...to my blogroll. Blue Sky Resumes blog is for the candidate who's looking for a job. Highly recommended by Gretchen ! Some great pointers on how to differentiate your resume from the crowd.

Hiring Revolution seems a blog with very high quality posts. Both for candidates as well as recruiters within organizations.

KM and OD - follow up

Piers looked at my earlier post on OD and KM and says:

But aren't the insights KM bring to OD just as valuable? If you focus on the organisation and process too much, then don't you squeeze the creativity out of your people, and with that, your ability to adapt?

I agree entirely. Good OD initiatives are focussed on unlocking the value that each of us as individuals gets into an organizational setting.

Jack Vinson and Terrence take the dialogue forward. In fact, the perfect sync between KM and OD will emerge if Knowledge Management systems emerge out of Organizational diagnosis.

The diagnosis must also go deeper into issues:

Why are people not sharing knowledge?
Is it an infrastructure issue or a will issue?
Are they engaged with the larger organizational ramifications? Do they care?
What drives groups in the organizations? Does a KM solution make sense?

Very often, the KM solution has to 'make sense' to the organization. It should be the OD folks in the KM implementation team who need to bring their insight to the table. KM's goal should not be tool implementation but final benefits of the intitiative - higher productivity and more creativity and innovation.

Speed in making a job offer

I have been talking to a friend of mine who works as a Compensation and Benefit manager in a big bank in the middle east. He wants to return to India due to personal reasons. So before he came to India he sent me his resume and asked me to look out for HR job openings for him.

I knew his interest lay in consulting and C&B and forwarded to some friends (in HR depts as well as headhunters) asking them to look at it.

Now, when he lands in India he has an interview call from a BPO operation of a huge financial services company. He goes through 3 rounds with various people from the HR group and they keep changing their mind. First they tell him that he's being considered for a C&B manager position. Then they ask him "How do you feel about being a HR generalist?" and in his interview with the Recruitment head asks "Why don't you join my team?"

Please note, no formal offer yet, and more rounds of interview scheduled.

Another organization calls him up one day, the recruitment head takes a telephonic interview, since the organization is in another city. Then the conversation ends with "Can you fly to our city tomorrow, we want to close it fast!" The day after next he meets them in the morning and by the afternoon he walks out of the office with an offer to join them as number 2 in recruitment.

My friend is bowled over by the speed of the second organization, and their professionalism, and the key to that impression is the respect the organization had for his time and their willingness to take a decision , fast!

For whatever reasons, recruitment processes in the first organization were long winded and making him meet a lot of people. The impression that my friend told me about them was "This behavior makes me think - are they unprofessional, or are they dis-empowered or both? And do I want to part of such an organization? I think not"

What are the messages that your recruitment processes give out to potential employees?

More from Branson

A few bloggers like Anita and Rob have been meeting Richard Branson and blogging about it. This post by Anita is a great insight into one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs.

He describes his hodgepodge of 200 or 300 companies as a jigsaw, and says that he refuses to be held by conventional thinking about sticking to your knitting. Rather, he remains fluid in his thinking and does not rule out anything: "The more diffuse the company becomes, the more frequently I am asked about my vision for Virgin. I tend either to avoid this question or to answer it at great length, safe in the knowledge that I will give a different version the next time I'm asked. My vision for Virgin has never been rigid and changes constantly, like the company itself."

The refusal to be held by conventional thinking. Now here's an innovator in the true sense of the word.
That's the thing that should be taught in today's education system ! Not merely rote learning, but learning how to learn and unlearn !

Innovation blogs and some thoughts

Came across two interesting blogs focussed on innovation. Both are updated on my blogroll.

Broken Bulbs is focussed on Innovation around Taiwan, Korea, HK and China, and is maintained by Gordon Graham.

Innoblog is a group blog run by folks who seem to be intellectual disciples of Clayton Christensen.

On the same vein, Srikanth wonders what the heck is innovation consulting? Dave Pollard has some views (which I blogged earlier) on why innovation consultants have a tough time. Even the cph127 blog questions if Gary Hamel's innovation consulting firm has anything new to offer. I don't think so.

Hunting talent at the mall and multiplex

This weekend we went to Prasad's the mall-cum-multiplex in Hyderabad to watch a Hindi movie. But what popped my eyes was to see a stall set up by Adecco People -One blaring out notices like

"Come apply to us for a chance to work with our Fortune 500 clients in their BPOs"

and,

"Refer a friends CV and carry home a cool gift"

Before the movie started I was forced to see an ad by Ma Foi (how effective is this kind of advertising anyway?)

That really brought home the point that how difficult it is becoming for organizations to hire people even at the entry stage. Once upon a time recruiters had more CVs than they needed and very few clients. Now the demand clearly is pulling ahead of supply. Or, let's qualify that. Quality supply. This is leading to salaries rising and active poaching in the BPO industry. even if existing players have a no-poach arrangement (a practice that I think is very inefficient) new players are constantly coming in and to cut through the clutter differentiating themselves on salary.

The thought being:

These people don't look at it as a long term career, they are here to make a fast buck and therefore lets give them the inducement of more cash and they'll come.

I think the real differentiator in this market would be an organization that actually offers a career and helps them to develop for further roles. Cunselling and organizational support given by employers can ensure that loyalty to the organization is not an outdated concept.

The bottomline being, so long as organizations treat people as 'resources' that's the mindset that the people have towards the organizations.

Some serious cash !

Heh !

You'd be crazy to pay me this much...but if you are...

My blog is worth $53,631.30.
How much is your blog worth?

Apparently this calculation is based on the AOL-Weblogs deal. Wow ! Sure, I guess the calculation is in good fun, but even then...it seems mind b(l)oggling to see that number !

Dr. Shukla - the manner expert?

Dr. Madhukar Shukla who has his Alternative Perspective and musings blog, has been invited to a talk show on the Voice of America as one of the 3 panelists on the VOA "Talk to America" (hosted by Doug Bernard) on October 25th (9:30pm - 10:30pm IST) - or "Tuesday, October 25th at 16 utc (12pm-1pm Washington time)"

How to Listen
Direct VOA Frequencies (in Kilohertz (kHz))
- Europe, Middle East and North Africa( 9700, 9825, 15195, 15445 )
- Africa (909, 1530, 4930, 9850, 13795, 15410, 15580, 17715 )
- Far East Asia, South Asia and Oceania (1170, 6160, 7125, 9760)

The netbroadast might be available at:
http://www.voanews.com/real/live/newsnow.ram

The description of the program reads:
http://www.voanews.com/english/NewsAnalysis/TTA-New-Upcoming-Shows.cfm
--------------
Tuesday - October 25, 2005
Rude America and Cultural Understanding

Peter Post: Director, Emily Post Institute co-author “The Etiquette Advantage in Business”
Madhukar Shukla: Professor, XLRI Jamshedpur School of Management and Labor Studies
Mark Caldwell: Author “A Short History of Rudeness”

A new opinion survey shows Americans are ruder than ever. Road rage and loud cellular telephone conversations at restaurants and other public places are attracting attention to American men and women behaving badly. Where is common courtesy in today’s fast-paced environment? Talk To America asks the manners experts. (from Professor of Strategic Management & Organizational Behavior to a manner expert!? -ir, yeh kya ho raha hai?)
--------------

Technorati rankings for this blog.

This blog ranks number 5 in Technorati's Management list and 10 in Technorati's India list ! Wow ! I'm impressed by myself :-) Of course, the simple reason is that not too many people know about tagging one's blog by topic. Once that catches on I guess my ranking will slip :-)

See where I figure in the Business ranking...number 38 and falling !

Overall I am still around the 14 k ranking , but the interesting fact is that subscribers to my bloglines RSS feeds have been rising even when I was on vacation. Do you read my blog on Bloglines? Can you leave me some feedback on the comment section to this post?

How to hold on to high potentials

Got this from Egon Zehnder's newsletter:

Recent shortages of top managers in a wide range of industries have sparked
a war for top talent, write Nanette Byrnes and Amy Barrett in BusinessWeek.
Major oil companies are luring top players away from service providers like
Schlumberger by tripling their salaries. Yet although firms will spend up to USD
50 billion on talent development this year, many either fail to produce
homegrown leaders or, like Coca-Cola Co. pick the wrong internal candidate to
become CEO. So what are the secrets to hiring, training and retaining stars, ask
the authors?

High-performing companies create a wealth of bench talent by turning
human resources into a strategic asset, they observe. One key talent management
tool often used is a customized HR solution like a global database combining
career records with personal staff profiles. University alliances to hire top
students and graduate training programs can also help to produce talent
internally. Other strategies include recruiting top HR staff, ensuring full
C-level commitment to talent management and amplifying managers’ strengths
rather than criticizing their weaknesses, add the authors. Successful companies
treat losing a high potential as a disaster that is fully investigated via an
exit interview, they note. Talent is a valuable weapon to companies seeking a
competitive edge and deserves far more attention in the future, conclude the
authors.

Richard Branson on Hiring - it's priority number one !

Rob at BusinessPundit is getting to meet Richard Branson in person and is blogging about it too.

He writes:

He talked about hiring, saying that "The number one thing that matters, especially if you're going to be manager at Virgin, is how good you are with people. If you're - if you're good with people and you've got - you know, and you really care, genuinely care about people then I'm sure we could find a job for you at Virgin. I think, you know, that the companies that look after their people are the companies that do really well. I'm sure we'd like a few other attributes, but that would be the most important one."

Now that's something ! It's an endorsement of the strategic importance of people processes by someone who started business at the age of 16 and has learnt everything first-hand ! Rob also thinks Branson should be blogging.

While on a related note Tom Kelly of IDEO blogs in FC Now that “directing is 90% casting.” Kelly's new book The Ten Faces of Innovation has a website here.

The essence of Leadership

Marcus Buckingham ex-Gallup consultant, in his new book distills the essence of leadership. Some excerpts:

There's something unique and different that makes a leader, and it's not about creativity or courage or integrity. As important as they are, you can have those attributes and still fail to be a great leader. A leader's job is to rally people toward a better future. Leaders can't help but change the present, because the present isn't good enough. They succeed only when they find a way to make people excited by and confident in what comes next.

The future is more real than the present; it compels them to act. Turn Anxiety into Confidence For a leader, the challenge is that in every society ever studied, people fear the future. The future is unstable, unknown, and therefore potentially dangerous. So in order to succeed, leaders must engage our fear of the unknown and turn it into spiritedness. By far the most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear -- to define the future in such vivid terms that we can see where we are headed. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.

Leaders can be wrong. They can't be confusing. If we are going to follow you into the future, we need to know precisely whom we are trying to please. It's a scary thing to please all of the people all of the time. So to calm our fear, we need you to narrow our focus. Tell us who will be judging our success. When you do this with clarity, you give us confidence -- confidence in our judgment, in our decisions, and ultimately in our ability to know where to look to determine if we have fulfilled our mission.

From a leadership standpoint, a score is actionable and unambiguous. That clarity is lost if you end up looking at 15 different metrics. It's a terrible leadership failure to tell your employees that all of these measurements are important. When followers are presented with numerous scores, they get confused. The job of a leader is to say, "Of all the things we measure, this is the most important."

Of course, a leader must take action -- action leads to impact. But actions also possess a separate, equally powerful quality. Actions are unambiguous. If you, the leader, can highlight a few carefully selected actions, then your followers will no longer have to infer the future from theoretical pronouncements about "core values" or your "mission statement." We will simply look to see what actions you take and found our faith and confidence on these. But be aware that we respond best to two types of action: symbolic action and systemic action. Symbolic action is just that -- a representation of what the future can look like. Symbolic action grabs our attention; it gives us something new and vivid on which to focus.

For a leader, it's important to disrupt routines. Systemic action changes behavior. It makes people realize that the world is going to be different because they're doing different things. The future becomes clearer, and out of that clarity comes confidence. Effective leaders don't have to be passionate or charming or brilliant. What they must be is clear -- clarity is the essence of great leadership. Show us clearly who we should seek to serve, show us where our core strength lies, show us which score we should focus on and which actions we must take, and we will reward you by working our hearts out to make our better future come true.

The Jobster ERE video

I've been slow in posting this thanks to my vacation. Got a mail from Jobster, that the video of the speech which he made to kickoff the ERE event on 30th Sept is available online.

Go ahead check it out if you are curious and wonder what that Jobster is all about and how they talk about it. :-)

Another Jobster employee, Dave posts an article on why employers should blog. Good stuff

Google RSS reader

The google reader is quite different from Bloglines. It doesn't use frames and I can upload an OPML file to it. Bloglines can't do that. But the google reader can't discover feeds like bloglines does, or share your feeds with others or let you know how many people subscribe to a feed.

Both have great points and I think bloglines' new functionalities being developed is a sign that they take google's threat seriously. It's going to be a good time for us blog readers !

HR consultant gives free advice on Attrition

Sanjay has some free advice for people fretting because of attrition:

In my opinion around 15% attrition is good for any organisation which is not growing its business more than 25% YoY. I say this because a company will never be able to create enough jobs for its good people in the organisation if they are not growing sufficiently enough. I also think that only your good people will leave because they will feel stifled by the lack of growth and the monotony of work as there is nothing new that they can keep doing in a static organisation. It is good to let them go as the organisation can't use their potential and it will seriously cut down internal conflicts and politics by letting go of people. The most popular way of accomodating such talent otherwise is to create job roles with no clear accountabilities and with overlaps with other jobs, this creates a lot of confusion in the organisation and a lot of fighting for turf.

Hence my simple thought is that when you have attrition look at it as a positive sign, especially if you are not growing. Look at the reasons why people moved on and get to the right reasons, other than compensation alone. This will help the organisation focus on the right things and the right people

Not many HR people think about attrition vis-a-vis their business growth. I think Sanjay makes a great case here. And you get the advice free, thanks to the blogosphere!

Business Innovation link

Got a link from a blog titled Business Innovation 2005 . Welcome folks !

Some very good stuff there. Check it out!

The next step for google - recruitment tool?

Dave Pollard says:

There is one last 'search' frontier that Google has not yet conquered, however, and it could be Google's biggest hit yet, and possibly generate significant revenue as well. Google is well established as the company that best helps you find what. And recently with Google Maps/Earth they are becoming established as the company that best helps you find where. What if Google is now working on becoming the company that best helps you find who? The company that becomes the expertise finders, the shared-interest finders, the companion finders, the people who, at last, will help us find, effectively and intuitively, the people we're looking for, not just their stuff. And not just find them, but make sure they're available (and if applicable affordable) and seamlessly put us in touch with them.

So if job portals say they have both the jobs and the candidate databases, and the vertical search engines say they are the gateway to access all jobs, will it be Google saying access all the jobs and all the people ?

Antony at Recruiting.com had an interesting post on rise of the researchers. If google perfects as Dave hopes for, then cost of research could plummet, taking total cost of recruitment down too.

Manpower and ABC consultants tie up

Manpower has tied up with India headhunting firm ABC Consultants to make a joint venture .

What is not clear to me is how will this JV be different from what they are offering at present as separate entities. ABC has some strong functional practices while Manpower has focussed more in the ITeS recruitment space in India. Anybody has any guess what this JV will focus on? Maybe leadership recruitment for the ITeS industry. I know that's a huge pain area that traditional executive recruiters cannot easily crack.

Temp staffing , for which Manpower is known worldwide, is still led by the huge TeamLease which is getting more and more people on its roll and could theoretically become the biggest employer in India. And its about time we overhauled our labour laws to facilitate more flexible staffing options. The Contract Labour Act needs to be amended to distinguish at least between different skill level jobs.

Tom acknowledges Ram Charan

You might think that in the rarefied universe of management gurus, jealousy and backbiting would be rife (I mean, how many people could afford their fees, anyway)

So it comes as a pleasant surprise when Tom Peters calls Ram Charan a "strategy uber-guru".

And here is one of the more brilliant pieces of writing on the elusive Ram Charan by the best magazine for business readers, Fast Company.

He does not own a home--or even rent one--has no nuclear family or significant material possessions, and he has his assistants FedEx his clean clothes to him. He doesn't play golf or vie for the best tables at power lunch spots. Irresistibly drawn to the corporate world's danger zones, he is in perpetual motion, working for the largest and most powerful companies seven days a week, 365 days a year. Most people would call such an existence bizarre, but for Charan, it's the ideal life. "I tell you, I am a lucky man," he says, brown eyes sparkling like his ever-present cuff links. "I get to do what I love to do."

What Charan loves to do--what he has concluded is his life's purpose--is to solve business problems. With his plainspoken, Socratic approach, he helps demolish organizational silos or persuade entrenched executives to change their points of view.

Unlike most consultants, he has no Web site, newsletter, or marketing team. His business comes by word-of-mouth referrals. "He is an Indian guru who found that consulting was his life's calling," says Noel Tichy, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Michigan who has worked with Charan for more than 20 years.

Charan, 64, has become an indispensable right-hand man for hundreds of top managers. After Jeffrey Immelt took over from Jack Welch as CEO of General Electric, for example, the first outside person he turned to for advice was Charan. Equally telling, he serves as a minister without portfolio; companies seek him out for his "wise man" approach rather than choosing a consultant with a narrow specialty in reengineering or organizational behavior. He's considered such an asset, in fact, that many of his clients are willing to do something that's awfully rare in the executive suite: to publicly acknowledge a consultant and give him the credit for helping them change their companies. "Ram will take an idea and make it better," says John C. Hodgson, executive vice president at DuPont, which has been working with Charan in different capacities for close to 15 years. "I use him as a sounding board. I value his thinking, his creativity, and his unbiased view of the world."

Posting on Innovation Challenge blog

I will be posting on the Innovation Challenge Weblog for some time also. Do drop in to see me there.

Innovation Challenge looking for judges

The 2005 Innovation Challenge is looking for judges, if you want to be nominated as a judge click here.

Vote for my manifesto on ChangeThis

I've given a proposal to write a ChangeThis manifesto. It's tentatively titled Prescription for Change Meisters and if you want me to write it go there and click on the "Yes, write this manifesto" button. And if you don't know what ChangeThis is you can check it on the site.

Back from Vacation

Whew ! I go off the blog for a couple of weeks and the biggest scandal hits Indian blogosphere !

Here's a link of support to Gaurav Sabnis who was slapped by a legal notice from IIPM which took exception to his posting about them and which linked to Rashmi's article in JAM.

Here are some great resources if you still don't know what I am talking about.