On Asian geniuses

Michael and DD have been blogging a bit about the numbers of geniuses from India and China :-)

DD has some questions (and has hinted he thinks I might know the answer :-). So well, I'm trying.

I fully believe that the educational infrastructure in India is quickly catching up to the U.S. However, India still sends students to places like the U.S. and the U.K. Is this due to quality, diversity, or capacity?

Well Dubs, educational infrastructure is not yet as great as we want it to be. However, the fact that many students go to the US and UK to study is due to a variety of factors. At the undergrad level, it is not so prevalent, and the few who do go there want to experience the liberal arts educational system. Most Indian students who go to the US go for Masters and Doctoral programs. The focus apart from the education there, is also to work in the US after that and earn some dollars. Let's face it. If you are in technology, then nothing helps as working in Silicon Valley. If you are an MBA in finances from Harvard, Stanford then you only want to work in Wall Street. Some choose to settle in the US and UK permanently. Others choose to return.

At the same time, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that China is nowhere in sight of creating the educational capacity needed to support the type of talent growth it is destined for. How many years it will take is an unknown. People say that China is the next frontier. I still believe that India is so far ahead of China that it will be 2 decades or more before China begins to realize its total potential. There’s the talent problem and the infrastructure to support it, but there’s also the issue with language. The language of business is not currently Mandarin.

Well, I don't know. The buzz going around in India is "Don't be complacent with the Chinese.." A lot of Indian IT firms are actually setting up shop in China to use Chinese IT talent to service the Asian region. Indian IT training firms like NIIT and Aptech are doing roaring business to satisfy the Chinese training need for IT. Anyone with some knowledge about the Chinese market can choose to add or disagree with me :-)

Innovation for Indian IT industry

John Hagel writes his thoughts on Indian IT services and the innovations it can leverage after attending a NASSCOM conference:

NASSCOM has announced a joint research effort with BCG on “Developing an Innovation Ecosystem for the Indian IT Industry”. This effort in particular seems to be focused on identifying opportunities for the Indian IT industry to collaborate with other stakeholders in the Indian economy to address challenges in providing more cost-effective products and services to the Indian population.

As JSB and I have written, there is an opportunity to pursue “innovation blowback” strategies, using the Indian market as a catalyst for breakthrough innovation in products and services that can then be used to support global attacker strategies designed to challenge incumbents in the more developed Western economies.

There’s no shortage of opportunities at both the product and process level to drive the growth of Indian IT services companies. The sense of urgency that continues to pervade the leadership of these companies will serve them well in identifying and aggressively pursuing these opportunities.

The only thing that stops Indian IT services firms from focussing their strategy and energy on India is the tax regime. Because software exports are not taxed and services with the country are, the incentive for developing IT products and services for Indian firms is low for the Indian IT service providers. Maybe this will lead to the second and third tier of firms to concentrate on this market and develop some killer-app to take to the global field later on.

Satyam in Training Magazine's top 15

Training Magazine, last night, announced the Top 125 companies for learning and Satyam (in whose lerning centre I worked from 1999-2002 :-)) is ranked #15. It is the first ever company in Asia to make the rankings. Another company I worked with is ranked number 25 :D

The Training Top 125 is based on quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative date (conducted by an outside research and statistical company and directed by Training Magazine) accounts for 75% of the total score. Those measures include: annual revenue, number of employees, employee turnover/retention, training budget, budget as a percent of payroll, among other data provided. The qualitative data (25 percent of the total score) is measured by the editors of Training Magazine, a subjective look at the company's overall application, i.e. best practices, new training initiatives, leadership development, talent management, onboarding, and much more.

According to Training Magazine, "this information technology solutions provider's(satyam's) approach is to develop basic, written and verbal communication skills at entry level, and progressively provide additional skills to enable associates to make business presentations and proposals. Programs help associates communicate effectively in their current role and prepare for the challenges of future roles. Instruction is delivered through a blend of e-learning, and instructor-led and peer learning modules. Each module has an evaluation process built into it to make sure they've really learned."

Winners are as follows:

1. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C.
2. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
3. EMC Corporation
4. Verizon Wireless
5. General Mills, Inc.
6. Ernst & Young
7. KPMG LLP
8. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals
9. Booz Allen Hamilton
10. Export Development Canada
11. Lockheed Martin Corporation
12. Scotiabank Group
13. Cerner Corporation
14. SCC Soft Computer

15. Satyam Computer Services Ltd.

16. Miami Children's Hospital

17. University of New Mexico Hospitals
18. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM
19. Microsoft Corporation
20. inVentiv Commercial Services
21. KLA-Tencor
22. BMO Financial Group
23. Aetna Inc.
24. South African Breweries Limited
25. Deloitte & Touche USA LLP and its subsidiaries
26. David Weekley Homes
27. Olive Garden Italian Restaurant
28. MGM Grand Hotel - Las Vegas
29. Scottsdale Insurance Company (SIC)
30. Children's Healthcare of Atlanta
31. LexisNexis
32. Allstate Insurance Company
33. TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc.
34. Paychex, Inc.
35. Four Seasons Hotels, Ltd.
36. HSBC - North America
37. Alltel Communications, Inc.
38. Wells Fargo & Company
39. Scientific Atlanta, A Cisco Company
40. BB&T Corporation
41. McDonald's USA, LLC
42. AlliedBarton Security Services
43. The Home Depot
44. Special People In Northeast, Inc. (SPIN, Inc.)
45. BÖWE BELL + HOWELL
46. Aflac Incorporated
47. First Pioneer Farm Credit, ACA (Agricultural Credit Association)
48. Wachovia
49. Steelcase, Inc.
50. Gilbane
51. The Reynolds and Reynolds Company
52. John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods
53. Chesterfield County Government
54. Capital One Financial
55. Starbucks Coffee Company
56. American Power Conversion
57. Northwest Airlines, Inc.
58. Windstream Communications
59. DaVita, Inc.
60. Applied Materials, Inc.
61. Cartus Corporation
62. Equity Residential
63. Mohawk Industries, Inc.
64. Vanguard
65. Lancaster General Hospital
66. Washington State Employees Credit Union
67. UPS
68. The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.
69. A.G. Edwards & Sons, Inc.
70. Intel Corp.
71. AMIL ASSISTÊNCIA MÉDICA INTERNACIONAL LTDA
72. Shaw Industries Group, Inc.
73. J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc
74. Royal Canadian Mounted Police
75. Loews Hotels Corporation
76. Tandus
77. American Fidelity Assurance Company
78. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina
79. Cox Communications Inc.
80. Baptist Health Care
81. Saint Joseph's Hospital
82. Ho-Chunk Casino
83. Cross Country Staffing
84. ESL Federal Credit Union
85. Johnson Controls, Inc.
86. U.S. Security Associates
87. MassMutual Life Insurance Company
88. Buckman Laboratories International, Inc.
89. Principal Financial Group
90. QUALCOMM Incorporated
91. American Express
92. Choice Hotels International
93. IKON Office Solutions
94. Westfield Group
95. Detroit Diesel Corporation
96. Computer Systems Center Incorporated (CSCI)
97. PAETEC Communications, Inc.
98. Healthways, Inc.
99. Scottrade, Inc.
100. Oakwood Worldwide
101. Verity Credit Union
102. Vision Service Plan
103. Pioneer Credit Recovery, Inc.
104. Schneider National, Inc.
105. Best Buy
106. Unisys Corporation Managed Services Centres (MSC)
107. Edward Jones
108. MasterCard Worldwide
109. Allied Global Holdings Inc.
110. Convergys Corporation
111. Carilion Health System
112. sanofi-aventis
113. Orkin, Inc.
114. Griffin Hospital
115. FORUM Credit Union
116. Constellation Energy Group
117. Science Applications International Corporation
118. IKEA US
119. Century 21 Real Estate LLC
120. ArchivesOne, Inc.
121. Caterpillar Inc.
122. NDS
123. MetLife
124. UT-Battelle LLC
125. Kaiser Permanente Information Technology

That seems like an awesome achievement. Next year I hope more and more Indian firms start to participate in the rankings. Last year's winner, Booz Allen Hamilton has fallen to number nine, after it's CLO joined Satyam.

On Sourcing and Recruiting

When I posted this yesterday, I didn't realise that I would have a response the same day. If you've ever wondered what is it that "sourcers" do R Karthik's post on creative sourcing would be educative. You can find him online at the Indian Recruiters forum too. He introduces himself as :

"I am a business enthusiast; passionate about HR, entrepreneurs, A.R.Rahman, Sherlock Holmes, humour, creative writing and other interesting pursuits."

In fact his email signature is a Sherlock Holmes quote "The Profession is its own Reward" :-)

On Sourcing

Well, i have worked in the capacity of a recruiter for a Pharmaceutical co.

I wanted to write on sourcing as a crucial phase in the hiring cycle; how we go about widening our candidate populace so as to have to greater lot to select from.

It is not always that we have budgets for advertising!

Again our experience has taught us that advertising is not all that effective an avenue to fetch us (or our hiring managers rather!) the kind-of pool we are looking for.

Sourcing also becomes particularly difficult when we are hiring in tight labour market conditions.

Any recruiter would agree all sourcing tricks don't yield results for all organizations.

Posting your openings on job portals also doesn't guarantee you the expected yield in terms of the the kind/breed of candidates you are looking at.

It may give the recruiter a 'feel-good' of so many clicks/views and it does only as much.

How many times have we suffered heart-burns looking at the ridiculously irrelevant CVs we receive in response to our posts? (this may not be true with tech. recruiting)

While reliance on advertisements/job portals can't be something we can bank on, we as recruiters ought to give wings to our imagination in arriving at other sourcing methods.

I am sure i have raised several eyebrows in saying the above! Imagination....what does fantasy have to do with sourcing or hiring for that matter??

As a case in point, i want to share a true experience of mine (with my 1st employer-the Pharmaceutical).

I took up an assignment of appointing 2 Biz Development Exec.s for Coimbatore region in the co.s Nutrition solutions biz.

Now, specifications ran like this....3 years exp. female candidates with a degree/PG diploma in Nutrition or Food Sciences.

A start-up based in Ahmedabad in the west will have not much of a connect with campuses in the south.

The managers- my customers so far as these positions were concerned demanded a pool from co.s like J & J, Mead Johnson, Novartis, British Biologicals, Raptokos & Brett, Nestle et al. These are the who's who co.s in Nutrition biz.

Little did they realize our constraints; we simply couldn't have done this given the compensation package we had to offer!

They would not compromise on the experience level considering the business stakes involved.

Nor would they look at non-nutrition grads (simple science)....subject matter knowledge was a pre-requisite.

With not much of a choice left, i had to think through and do a little more homework to get started with these openings.

I fantasized and finally hit on something!

Out of the blue, it occured to me that there are some businesses/organizations which employ such qualified nutritionists in possibly non-marketing roles.

What else does the huge population of M.Sc Food Sciences or Nutrition & Dietics students do after their courses?

And then there was light.....

Yes, i set my eyes on VLCC, Apollo and other corporate hospitals that turned out to be good catchment areas for us.

Now that i had zeroed in on my target, the next most important thing to do was to quickly source CVs of some interested candidates.

How do i do that?

I am not that cold-blooded recruiter who would do cold-calls and get access to prospects.

I fantasized further...and now that i was very happy (rather proud) of my idea i thought 1 another fantasy would work.

Quite like Music, HR, and A.R.Rahman...Nutrition is also an interest group.

Several thousands of A.R.Rahman constitute arrahmanfans yahoogroup.

Similarly, If i as a HR enthusiast am part of IHRC, HR Infotech association, NHRD and so on, these folks would also have some affiliation which would have already manifested in the form of an online forum or e-group. But only those passionate or rather fanatic about Rahman and HR would choose to be on such networks.

And we were actually looking for such individuals who were passionate about nutrition as a profession/subject.

I surfed and found to my amazement, tens of such networks on yahoogroups.

Atleast i had something to go back and update my managers about.

We touched base with a few candidates and went on to fill the 2 slots in record time (about less than a month) without any advertisement expenditure.

Last and not the least, the satisfaction one derives out of closing a challenging position which would otherwise have remained unfilled is very soothing.

All the running around, travel, back-aches,reviews and disappointment/angst at candidate tantrums are rubbed off when we taste such successes.

The leit motif of this whole passage is "one can get as wildly imaginative as possible with sourcing".

Sometimes, your gut leads you somewhere while horse sense would suggest exactly the opposite.

Yet, a bit of fantasizing and floundering here and there helps to beat the monotony of work.

Have something to say?

One of the things that people tell me when I ask them why they don't blog is "I don't have different things to say!"

Most people say they only have one important thought, idea, rant, complaint, to get out to the world. They don't see the value in starting a blog for that one thought.

So here's my idea.

If you are one of these people, mail me your thought, idea, rant, complaint and present it to a slice of the world. Of course, it's not like getting featured in the Times of India or the New York Times, but so long as your thoughts are related to business, management, work life, jobs then mail them to me.

I'll post it here on the blog, if you need it to be anonymous your name will not be revealed. If you want to, I'll link your Ryze, Linkedin, Orkut profile or your webpage if you have one.

No censoring. No editing. You have my word.

Of course, the offer holds for bloggers too.

Get the word out.

Yikes ! Indian business leader ?

When I started getting some references from this site, I was shocked.

M/s Tata, Bajaj, Nilekani, Kamath, Mahindra et al, it's not my doing. Please forgive me for someone else's temerity and indiscretion.

As the Abhishek Bachchan Amex ad ends "But it felt good." :-)

Vint Cerf's talk in Hyderabad

The first thing that I noticed when I reached the Marriott hotel off Hyderabad’s picturesque Tank Bund lake to hear Dr. Vint Cerf as part of the first edition of the Google Speaker Series, was the huge level of security. Bomb squads, private security personnel, metal detectors were all keeping a track of the 600-800 people who had turned up to hear the man who co-wrote the TCP/IP protocol. On enquiring why there was such a huge level of security we were told that Dr. Cerf would be a prime terrorist target and no one wanted to take any chances.

There were a lot of people, considering it was a Friday evening with lots of students from engineering colleges of the city and IT employees from firms like Satyam, ADP, Dell of the city and journalists. Of course, bloggers like yours truly don’t yet get considered as journalists in India, so I could not participate in the separate session later after the talk.

Roy Gilbert, head of Google India Online Sales, introduced the Googler who holds the fancy designation of Chief Internet Evangelist to the audience (view Wikipedia article about Vint Cerf here). He said that the Google Speaker Series would be a quarterly affair and would try to showcase thought leaders (and not necessary Googler thought leaders)

When Vint Cerf finally came on stage, what stood out was how old he is.

Sure one has seen his pictures on the net, and that the founding fathers of the internet was around 63. However to see him in the context of the young Google executives was particularly contrasting.

Vint started off his talk saying how an Indian, Yogen Dalal was instrumental in TCP/IP development in 1974 when he was a graduate student at Stanford ( I did a search and found this narration )

Talking about his work with the Jet Propulsion Lab where he is helping in developing the Interplanetary Internet (as a matter of fact, the project is not Google work, but something that Google allows him to pursue) he wryly remarked “You must have heard about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), well that’s because we haven’t succeeded in finding much intelligence in this planet !”

Joking about his designation he said “Well, I wanted to be called an Archduke or something, but then the folks at Google told me that the last Archduke was assassinated in the early twentieth century and that started the first world war. So therefore I dropped that demand and decided that evangelist would do just fine”

He started off with the presentation which chronicled the growth of the internet over the last 10 years from 50 million users in 1997 to an estimated 1039 million in January 2007.

Cerf’s contention was that the further growth of the internet would be in the domain of the mobile phone and the majority of the new users will first experience the internet through that device, which is quite different from PDAs and laptops and therefore has implications and challenges for application providers like Google.

He showed another slide which showed that Asia is the largest proportion of internet users. “As Asia’s influence online increases, the languages, applications, demographics and economics of the internet will be impacted by what you and your countrymen in India and other Asian countries deem interesting”

Africa’s internet penetration is very low and infrastructure would need to be deployed to help increase the percentage.

Then he started talking about the structure of the internet and thankfully for people like me, made it sound simple. Talking about the Internet Protocol that he made with Robert Kahn he said “Bob and I wanted the internet to be future proof, and therefore it was a dumb network. Earlier networks were bound to switching technologies like TV, radio, Telephone networks and were very vertical and could therefore be regulated easily. However the internet cut them all very horizontally”

IP does not care what transport mode is used (satellite, fibre, radio..) and does not care what application it is carrying (video, audio, web, email, IM…) and therefore it had a profound impact on regulatory models.

The challenges for the internet

“The IPv4 can hold 4.3 billion web addresses with a 32 bit address base, however at the current trend the number of unique addresses will run out by 2010, and therefore IPv6 will need to be used which will supply more addresses”

“Broadband is very asymmetrical now. You can download fast but uploading is slower. Therefore video communication through the internet has not taken off. Users will soon insist on broadband symmetry.”

“When Bob and I visualized the internet we had a simple model in mind, that all computers would be connected to all other computers. That however does not work in commercial terms. Organizations need to have VPNs, Firewalls and those were not built into the basic architecture of the internet. If we had to make the internet today we would incorporate that into the basic architecture”

He went along to talk about security implications and admitted that there are no good answers for them.

He said that he did not ever think how the internet would push a new user oriented paradigm where users share, discover, transact, announce, share, collaborate and produce (mentioned blogging in this context  ). Self service by users at Amazon, Fedex, TiVo, Image and Video sharing and communities of interest like MySpace, World of warcraft, Second Life. He talked about the use of the internet to aggregate thin markets (though he did not use the term “the long tail”  )

The future

• “We don’t have semantic networking or search. Tim Berners Lee is working on semantic tagging that will understand if you mean to search for jaguar the car or jaguar the animal”
• “We have to move to time and location as organizing paradigms of data.”
• “What can we do about information decay?” As an example he shared an example “Suppose you are in the year 3000 and you have discovered a presentation written in 1997 using MS Power Point. Let’s say you have MS office 3000 running on whatever machine you have. But can you read it now? Will we need to preserve bits, software, OS and hardware to read old digital information?”

Then he started talking about uses of internet enabled devices like refrigerators, clothing, bathroom scales along with technologies like RFID all connected to the internet.

After that he talked about his work with the Jet Propulsion Lab and developing an interplanetary internet protocol and the challenges of transmitting data over planetary distances “Mars for example is closest to Earth at 3 light minutes and farthest at 20 light minutes.”

Some interesting questions that the audience asked were:

How does he see internet penetration increasing in the rural areas?

“One answer is by mobile phones, except that a lot of such phones are not equipped with GPRS. The other answer would be a reasonable regulatory and financial incentive for a municipal broadband by floating a municipal bond, except that the market is not developed for municipal bonds in India. So it’s not very easy to answer that question.”

How can the internet be accessible for people with disabilities

“We are experimenting with colors for people with color blindness, specially in reading maps. For deaf people we are seeing if video subtitling and captioning can be possible. Speech as a medium to interact with the network will overcome not just barriers like blindness but illiteracy as well. Lots of researchers are working on such answers.”

Why did he choose to join Google?

Why Google? “Well I get to raise the average age, and hopefully not lower the average IQ.

" I have worked all my life in the infrastructure of the internet. Now I want to work in the application space.”

On whether internet can help in reducing poverty?

“I wish, but at the most it can help farmers use to get better prices like e-choupal is doing or to access and deliver work that you could not do earlier like outsourcing is doing. The internet is just a tool and not a magic wand to make our troubles go away”

Rebels and Performance

Who would you have on your team more? A rebel or a guy who keeps himself on line?

I think the answer is obvious. Most people would shy away from hiring a rebel. The time and cost in managing a rebel makes it a easy decision to justify.

And if you have a business that's stable, with no major changes expected, the "other" perspective of the rebel is not really needed. After all, innovation requires change. And change is hard for others to get used to.

However, the reality is, there are no stable businesses any more. Specially not if you work in India. So are you still shying away from hiring or coaching rebels?

Virtual job fairs

No I am not talking about the Timesjobs variety, but as Dave Lefkow (now on his own blog, after leaving Jobster) reports, a job fair at Second Life !

With the much higher levels of interactivity now available on the web in virtual worlds like Second Life there's new hope that a virtual job fair can provide a lot of the same reciprocal benefits that an in-person job fair does. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see TMP Worldwide experimenting with the concepts of networking, hiring events and virtual meeting places in Second Life with a new initiative called TMP Island.

Ah well. No Second Life virtual fairs for us in India yet. Broadband issues need to be sorted out before we can even think of such things :-)

Until then we shall recruit in the First Life mode :-)

XLers over the last year

Prof. Madhukar Shukla compiled this list of what some XLRI alumni achieved over the last year.

Which got me thinking about what I achieved. Oh yes, I joined the ranks of the unemployed. Oops, I meant I became a freelance consultant ;-))

Of course the list does not showcase the achievement of B Muthuraman (78 BME batch) and and Tata Steel CFO, ex-visiting professor, Kaushik Chatterjee (affectionately called KayChat by students) is not an alumni :-) who were instrumental in the Tata-Corus deal. That's because such achievements are rarely the work of one or two or even 10 ten people :-)

Why should you blog

Seth Godin gives you two reasons.

1. Keeps you respectful and humble.
2. Forces you to be clear.

The reasons why you should blog are usually different from why one actually blogs.

For example, I think we blog because of something more basic :-)

Why HR professionals don't get employer branding

Because they are not marketers, apparently.

Their human resource professionals still simply meet with job applicants and fail to provide good reasons to come on board. HR departments need to field marketing and salespeople.

Organisations need a very focused brand vision with a supporting brand message. This then drives how the organisation deals with each employee in all aspects of the relationship and how it communicates, both internally and externally.

I have seen recruiters have a very sales orientation. However, a marketing orientation is missing. How would HR professionals use the 4 Ps of marketing?

Cash is king in China

As far as pay is concerned. So says the article in Management Consultant International:

Companies operating in China are facing significant challenges around attracting and retaining the best employees. Pay can keep people, and pay can lure them away. Many organisations are competing primarily on pay, according to Brenda Wilson, a principal with Mercer Human Resource Consulting. “Pay to hire, pay to retain. If you compete on pay alone, you are going to be out-paid eventually by someone, because someone will be more desperate than you are.”

The social norms help to explain why cash plays such an important role in community and family. “Often you are supporting multiple generations on your salary, and that is even true of those working in multinationals,” says Wilson. "Cash is important, and long-term savings vehicles are not as popular as they are in mature economies.”

I guess once the market matures and firms have been there for a longer period of time stock as pay and other benefits would come to the fore. Though that would depend on the structure of how the companies are owned (foreign firms are usually JVs with state enterprises, is what I heard)

Anybody have some experiences in the China market? Would love to hear from you.

Google Apps for Enterprise 2.0?

Google finally launched the premium services of Google Apps for enterprises.

email storage is 10 Gb/account there. You also get a free trial until 30th April.

This is interesting: APIs to integrate with your existing infrastructure!

Check out more here.

Web worker daily has a detailed comparison here.

Interesting to see the frontal war on Microsoft's domain by Google.

Search terms

It's kind of educative to see what people were searching on search engines when they find this blog.

Take a look at some of the recent search terms which led their users to this blog :-)

• ABC CONSULTANT - I think I should refer this person to my friend Aditya Singh :-)
• (media OR entertainment) AND (consultant OR consulting) AND resume - Obviously someone who knows Boolean search very well. Must be a recruiter. Sorry to have disappointed you, friend.
• list of top Indian companies to work with - Ok this person obviously wasn't disappointed :-)
• watson wyatt - must have been intrigued by the post on Watson Wyatt evangelising blogging.
• Infosys HR generalist interview questions+pdf - Just a suggestion. When using Google to search for pdf documents, specifically use filetype:pdf as a search type. Hmm and HR generalists need help for interviews? Very strange ;-))
• HR issues faced by pepsico , india - Sadly they haven't told me yet :D
• deloitte canada - Ok ok, I know why they found this blog then !
• paul mckinnon dell - Lots of people want to know why Paul left. Hmm...as a matter of fact even I do.
• dell hell betweendate:20060701,20060707 - This person was probably looking for Jeff Jarvis' blog.
• indian resume formats - Hmm, I didn't know there were nationally mandated formats for resumes. When did parliament vote for them :-) ?
• management consultancy international level - Hmm.
• employee Engagement Framework - Didn't find what you were looking for? Give me a call !
• HR Issues in BPO Sector - Ditto
• employee training and development at Cipla - Wow, that's very specific. Is this a prospective employee doing pre-joining homework?
• job vacancies in tata consultants service for singapore airlines - Hmm, so that means someone is very specific for which project in TCS he/she wants to apply. I wonder why!
• challenges of employee training - This searcher would have found something useful on this blog.
• grow talent - Why is this person reading my blog instead of going to growtalent.com ?
• deepak parekh noel tata indian business men - huh?
• iflex attrition rate - Sorry you won't find that here.
• vacancy at tata sky kolkata - Try searching on a jobsite, willya?
• Harsha Bhogle contacts - Huh ??

That was entertaining and I learnt a lot about how people are finding this blog.

NDTVjobs.com blog

Was surprised to see a link from NDTVjobs.com's blogs (update: link does not work anymore so removed it) to this post of mine.


You know what is crappy on their blog and website?

To leave a comment one needs to register (!!) with them. (Maybe they should read Guy's blog if they don't already. Enforced registration, according to him, is the top most stupid and silly way to hinder adoption)

I guess building conversations is not the the purpose of the NDTVjobs.com site, but merely to get some free content up there.

While I don't grudge them that, it would have been better from their side if they had added their own perspective for their readers.

By merely copying my initial content and then linking, NDTVjobs is not adding any value to its readers. It's merely saying "we have no perspective on this". In fact, then they should merely state that they are aggregators of career and jobs related content and not a blog really. And if they want to do that, maybe going the Chimby way would be much better for them and their readers.

Update:
Paras informs me that the link says "page not found".

Heh.

Guess the folks in NDTVjobs didn't like the criticism too much :-))

Added: My first review of the NDTVjobs site and their blogs. The links to Careerjournal and ezinearticles, alas, remain.

Jobseekers can blog on Monsterindia

When I logged into my Monsterindia.com (which of course is a Monster Worldwide property) account I noticed a very interesting new flashing "blog" button.


Intrigued I clicked on it to see a screen that showed "welcome back Gautam, you have stored 0 blogs"

(Rant - Why can't people - that too online firms - understand the difference between a "blog" and a "post" - is beyond me !!)

Anyway, I posted one post from my archives on this blog and discovered it had to be under 5000 characters. Ok. Fair enough.

Then I tried to post this blog post, only to find a weird message saying "Abusive/Offensive content detected" and it wouldn't let me post. The most frustrating part of the thing was that it wouldn't tell me which part of the post it found abusive/offensive. Go ahead, take a look at the original post. Let me know if you have any idea.

So looks like Monsterindia.com is trying to become a MySpace for jobseekers. It has links called "hot blogs" and "recent posts" (thank god they got it right once). Most of the posts in the recent posts section are "I need xyz job, I have these certifications" type of posts. And the comments are more of the same.

Looks like blogs on Monsterindia.com would need to fight for an identity against the very raison d'etre of the site, if they have to grow and prosper :-)

My first post is here http://blog.monsterindia.com/myspace/gautamxl/1970.html

Very interesting... that they have a "myspace" in the URL. I wonder what that means? Joel, any ideas?

There is a RSS feed for recent posts, but not by individuals blogs, and that's too bad!

Hearing Dr. Cerf

On Friday I'll be hearing Dr. Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the internet, as he will talk about the evolution and future of his creation, at Hyderabad.

This is part of the Google Speaker Series and Dr. Cerf is VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

Will blog about it on Saturday.

As you can see, I hide my enthusiasm and excitement pretty well ;-)

Statistics and Analytics

I never thought I'd become such a metrics nut but I have a confession to make. I use several different site statistics free services like GoStats, Sitemeter and of course Bloglines, Technorati and Feedburner stats to keep track of how this blog is doing, how people a discovering it, what are they reading, etc etc.

However ever since I managed to get my Google Analytics working I don't think I'll even use Clicky, forget GoStats and Sitemeter. The analytics from Google gives one so much sophisticated data that ideally one should be using it for e-commerce sites, not for blogs.

I am totally blown away at the way Google can give away such services for free. This application makes even Gmail look simple !

What exactly should a HR generalist do?

Neetu responded to my previous post with a timely comment which basically said "What does this jargon mean?"

So let me try to say what it means means and if you are a HR generalist maybe you can add to how you have made the transition.

1. Move from transactions to being strategic - To do this your firm should have invested in some form of HR management systems. If however, you as a HR generalist are responsible for churning out employee letters or keeping track of leaves accumulated, then there is very less chance that you will left with any time to move to the strategic end of the business.

HR being strategic also means understanding how people impact your business. And thinking about it in an analytical way. It could be in the form of analysing attrition data to discern trends (what are the reasons in my control for which my top employees leave? could be one), Who are the 20% employees who are my A players? Do I know whether each of them are happy? Do I spend enough time with them all?

2. Focus on building business credibility - Many HR folks crib that their business leaders do not spend much time with them. Of course, they won't. They won't unless you start speaking their language. Can you explain how the HR initiative you want to roll out will impact profitability? Can you explain the business logic of the mentoring framework you are so passionate about?

Mostly you don't get to step 1 without step 2. The language of business is money and profit. As a HR executive you have to explain yourself in that language. That is why business understands Recruitment and Compensation. The cost of not recruiting is glaringly obvious. The cost of having a sales incentive and the ROI is also pretty obvious. However for management development and leadership training as well as employee engagement initiatives that lie in the domain of the HR generalist, effort has to be put to explain the cost and expected ROI in "the language of the business" :-)

3. Building higher order skills like facilitation and change management skills - As a HR generalist grows to interfacing more and more with the leadership of a business the more important facilitation skills become. These are the skills that help a HR professional understand the "unsaid problems" of the leaders. The ability to understand the cues and bring forth the key issues of the business.

Change management skills as Prasad explains, has little to do with communication, and more to do with increasing people's capability to handle change.

Thanks for asking the question, Neetu.

What tail is wagging the employee happiness dog?

Kathy Sierra has a great post on how user happiness is usually sacrificed at the altar of internal processes of organizations.

Users are often best served when everyone from the manager to the developers to the accountants has to spend time on customer service and support. But when that's no longer realistic, we must work hard to make sure that nobody in the company forgets who we all really work for--the users.

It's the same true for HR processes. If the appropriate balance is not applied between the two roles of "administrative expert" and "employee champion" either we can have only process orientation and unhappy employees or happy employees and wayward processes.

As a HR professional (or any other professional, BTW) are you making sure that your customers and employees are happy?

HR Generalist or specialist

Monster has a good article on who should be HR generalists (typically people who strive for diversity and have a heavy tolerance for unpredictability) while specialists are people who are detail oriented and like being known as 'experts'. As the article says:

When the economy is strong, specialists in certain areas -- recruiting, for example -- can make a bundle. But what happens when the economy turns in the other direction? Will you be marketable?

Generalists tend to be a bit more isolated from the effects of a downturn. In a downturn, generalists often pick up more of the responsibilities of downsized specialists.

On an Orkut HR forum someone asked what is the future of HR generalists. My answer was that HR generalists have a a great future so far as they:

1. Move from transactions to being strategic
2. Focus on building business credibility.
3. Building higher order skills like facilitation and change management skills

Employees as Brand Ambassadors

Interesting article about how software and BPO companies are using alumni in the various presentations they make to the undergraduate colleges.

Chaitanya Nadkarny, Director, Human Resources (HR) and Recruitment, ThoughtWorks Technologies, asks his technical colleagues — developers and analysts — to make placement presentations. They talk about hands-on experience and this leaves a mark on their juniors, he says.

At Aricent (formerly Flextronics Software Systems), employees are part of the corporate film shown during the presentation. They also travel with the recruitment team to campuses. "We inform candidates of career and salary growth through the alumni's progress in the company," says Indrajit Sen, Director, Recruitment, Aricent.

HCL Technologies too brings alumni on campus and Ajuba International has over 40 `campus ambassadors.'

Using alumni to showcase your company has been the norm on B School campuses. However seeing that it is happening at the undergrad level shows how much competition is on at that level too.

One more interesting bit in the article was:

One significant addition to all presentations has been the disclosure of less positive issues in the technology business. iGATE tells students that work pressure and challenges are as much a reality as rewards. Aricent details out its evaluation methods giving a clear picture of the hard work needed to grow in the company and HCL Technologies emphasises the need to update knowledge.

It also shows how the cost of hiring fresh engineers is going up:

According to HR consultants, the cost per hire used to be about Rs 8,000 to Rs 10,000 five years ago. Now it is between Rs 20,000 and Rs 25,000. Ambrish Kanungo, Senior HR Manager, Impetus Technologies, says sponsoring college fests, alumni meets, merit scholarships and exchange trips have increased communication spends considerably in the last 2-3 years.

Lies, Damn lies and resumes

AK Menon blogged recently how someone he knew wanted him to give a 'fake' referral about her job somewhere else. As he says:

Right now it seems there is a mad rush to milk the 'general boom' that our Industry is supposedly having...and that to me-is seemingly self destructive!!

As a recruiter, I feel there is too many jobs chasing too little skills-and there is an ecosystem being built up -for all the wrong reasons?

And to think -at the supply end, India doesnt have enough engineering professors in the college to educate the software/hardware engineers of the future.

An interesting viewpoint was put forward by tejbir as a comment to the post as he says

One of my friends on joining this "very reputed" MNC tech firm was sent on an international project by showing him as an expert on SAP with 2 years experience while my friend had not worked on SAP till then!

I know of certain "technical writers" in an Indian IT firm whose job used to be buffering up the resume of the software engineers which were to be sent to prospective clients. However, I thought that the practice kind of died down after the Y2K scare. Apparently, as Tejbir's comment shows, that does not seem to be true.

Even Forbes had an article on most common resume lies.

So why do people do it? Why all the fiction? Simply put, in today's environment, where unemployment is low and people change jobs often, fear often leads to desperation, says Challenger.

But whether you get caught in the interview, on the job or years down the road, Bermont recommends heeding his mother's adage: "Whenever you tell the truth, you don't have to remember what you said."

The age of customised business courses

I'm not so sure whether such a trend is good or not. Sure, it gives a focus and builds knowledge about a particular industry, but as we HR specialists are finding out, the growth then becomes limited to the function/industry. What do you think?

Serious talent shortage and lack of experienced manpower, especially in emerging sectors like retail is pushing companies like Dabur, Tesco, Patni and HDFC to launch specialised courses with leading institutes in the country for their current and potential employees.

Paycheck for the IT industry

Regular readers would remember that I blogged about Paycheck some time ago.

Seems like they are taking another approach to make the concept successful. According to the Hindustan Times:

Information Technology Professionals’ Forum-India (ITPF) has launched a new website www.itpaycheck.com. The website will be the first of its kind to provide online connection and sharing of pay data.

The event was inaugurated by Information Technology secretary G Nagendra Kumar in New Delhi. PK Tripathy, President of ITPF Delhi, Biju Varkkey, IIM Ahmedabad and Manoj Varghese, Director, HR, Google-India were among the delegates present at the occasion.

The website is a platform that would showcase the outcome of pay surveys being conducted in the country by Netherlands-based WageIndication Foundation.

Makes sense, as the professionals most comfortable searching for and sharing such data over the internet would be the IT industry. Remember this country is one where a active internet user is defined as one who accesses the internet once a month at least !

Targeting happy employees

Charu Mittra the HR blogger at blitzkreig is exasperated with the latest clickjobs.com ad that tries to make passive jobseekers active :-)

As this commercial says, if you are NOT looking out for a change because you happen to be HAPPY with our job, you are really stupid because you are closing your eyes to phenomenal opportunities...

I mean, here you are rolling out "employee engagement" initiatives, introducing "fun at work", trying to build critical experiences into their profiles, providing international exposure......all to get people to be HAPPY with their jobs.....and there it goes... pooof!!

Yeah, HR people never had is so tough as they are having it now in India. By the way here is the commercial in case you missed it :-)

HR a hot salary sector in India

According to a graphic posted by AK Menon on his blog amongst the hot salary sectors in India, HR and Marketing are the functions while the others are industry specific sectors of ITES, IT and Banking. I guess HR and Marketing professionals working in these sectors are the luckiest folks :-)

Out of the 45 countries included in the survey, the five highest real wage increases for 2007 are all expected to occur in Asia. Indian workers are set to receive the highest increases, with companies forecasting annual salary increases of 12%, resulting in real wage increases of 7% once inflation has been taken into consideration.

The talent shortage in many Asian economies is most manifest at senior management levels, so it is at this level where the most significant salary increases are occurring, leading to a widening gap between junior and senior management salaries in some locations.

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

HBS case on the Wikipedia

Harvard Business School has come out with its first case on Wikipedia.

Interesting case study of the two versions of the enterprise 2.0 article there, the deletion process and part that users rarely see, even though they can.

Wow !

[Hat tip: David Weinberger]

Want to be a business blogger?

The initial skill for a blogger is patience. Building readership is a slow and sometimes frustrating process. You put out a great post but nobody seems to notice it. No comments. Specially if you are writing about anything other than entertainment, culture and politics :-)

Sometimes however, there are opportunities for new bloggers to get a readymade loyal reader base. One such opportunity is now! Rob the businesspundit is looking for a couple of business bloggers to join him.

As he says:

The primary criterion is that you love business. You should enjoy reading about business, thinking about business, talking about business, writing about business, and engaging in business. You have to be willing to be a little controversial, and not afraid of criticism. It helps if you have a particular interest in some or all of the following: entrepreneurship, finance/accounting, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, economics, new technology, management, strategy, execution, and leadership. It probably helps if you are a bit skeptical of manias and fads, and are highly interested in the thought processes and decision making side of business. It also helps if you are interested in how the academic side of business can be applied to the real world. Prior writing or blogging experience isn't necessary, but it does help.

If you fit the mail contact him at (rob-at-businesspundit (dot) com). Did I mention that businesspundit is ranked 2718 on Technorati with incoming links fr0m 715 blogs?

Non-English blogs in Technorati top 100

When one gets to the technorati top 100 most linked blogs the small size of the Indian blogosphere really dawns on you. For example the number 2 blog (with 23,406 inbound links) there is a Chinese blog, and the eighth ranking blog is a Persian blog (with 11,688 links).

No wonder that Rashmi is skeptical of the figures of the Indian blogosphere as reported breathlessly by the media. The highest ranking blog authored by an Indian is Digital Inspiration and that is rank 432 on Technorati (with 1891 inbound links). And this is the case when the majority of Indian blogs are written in English and can theoretically have a global readership compared to Chinese and Persian blogs.

Attrition is a blessing in disguise?

Prakash Muralidharan on his blog, Prakash on Software has a post "Nine reasons for software services success"

In that he touches on two people related reasons, and he actually thinks attrition is good !

People say attrition is the big bane of the industry. I think it is a blessing in disguise for the following reasons:
- It helps transfer "people capital" from inefficient companies to the better ones helping the Darwinian cause of weeding out the weak.
- The day is not far when Bangalore will get "Vietnamed" just like New York got "Bangalored". Indian companies would need to learn to let go of people. High attrition lets you learn to handle the people risk better.
-Forces companies to focus on processes to derisk the people issues better. In a commoditizing business, good processes become a basic necessity not a differentiator.

What do you think? Do you agree with Prakash? I haven't worked in an Indian IT services firm for the last 5 years, so am not sure how much attrition costs in rupee/$ terms. While processes are important, the insight a great software engineer or consultant might add over a potential replacement's skill is never to be underestimated.

In fact he touches on this aspect in his next point

With a bench factor of 10% and a training lag of 3 months factored in, it is clear that to make this work, companies need to have a comprehensive attract-recruit-train-staff machine that churns out project ready freshers.

Writing a novel with an Orkut community

Abhijit Bhaduri the HR head of Frito Lay India and the novelist of the 1980s set MBA novel "Mediocre But Arrogant", also a blogger, is trying out a novel experiment to write the sequel to MBA. [Jabberwock covered it in this article, and you can find my review of the novel here]

On the Mediocre but Arrogant community on Orkut, Abhjit posted a message inviting anecdotes and story ideas from the community members on how they would like to see the protagonist grapple with life and love in corporate India.

I want to build the sequel to "Mediocre But Arrogant" with this community. So if you have friends who want to participate in this live experiment, feel free to invite them to the community. If the idea fits in to the story in part or fully you will see it in print in the sequel and I will acknowledge your contribution in the preface.

A novel web 2.0 approach to write a novel.

If you are interested in giving Abhijit some story ideas you know where to head.

[Update: You can do it via his blog too here] Ah, he's giving me credit for the idea :-)

How to conduct effective meetings

After the cafeteria food the second most hated company ritual is the business meeting. Most people look at meetings as time wasters, things that come in the way of work and at almost all companies I have worked we've hated meetings.

However that need not be the case. Most management work happens in teams and groups. Used effectively companies can get more work done due to meetings ! 3M has a great site and content on meetings here.

On Yahoo Finance management guru Ram Charan lists some great ways to make a meeting productive and effective. As he says:

But the truth is that meetings are an invaluable business tool. You simply cannot lead effectively without them. It's up to you to ensure that they serve their intended purpose of synchronizing people's activities and moving the organization forward in the right direction.

The ability to use meetings to bring people together for a particular output is a critical part of managing your organization's social system -- one of the most important know-hows a leader must have.

Most leaders are great at communicating either one on one or communicating with large groups. However the real test of leadership is leading a small group. So how do you rate yourself on meeting facilitation?

Finally

Am in the top 10,000 Technorati ranking.

Now let's see how long I last there :-))

Telling Selling and Media

Yesterday was when I participated in a panel discussion at the Media Pulse conference organized by ISBM Pune. The topic was "There is nothing to tell but lots to sell" and it was interesting how the different panelists interpreted that same statement.

The participants were Prof. AF Matthew of Mudra Institute of Communication (MICA), Anand Narasimha, CEO of Madison Shopper Marketing, Sudhir Sharma CEO of Elephant Designs and Xavier Prabhu, MD of PR Hub and yours truly, representing the new sunrise world of social media, blogging et al.

Anand started off the session by presenting the picture of how the branding and communications industry is changing. Some quotes I took down were:

• "Brand has become bland in today's world"
• A quote by Sam Walton "The customer wants something more important than the product"
• "Selling is about shouting louder"
• "we are moving from the attention economy to the attraction economy"
• "Marketing is about engagement rather than communicating propositions"
• "From repetitive messages we have to move to surprising the consumer"
• "Moving from transactions to relationships"
• "From one way channels to interactive"
• "Control and command to moving away to co-create and collaborate"

Sudhir stressed how the consumer is wisening up

• "When a consumer sees a great ad, he or she is smart enough to say 'a very good ad'"
• "A brand is not independent from the product"
• He also shared examples of how as a design studio they get insights into a target audiences behaviors and design the products around their needs only to have advertising firms dilute that insight.

Prof. Matthew asked the audience to start thinking of how the political and economical reality of global media empires were impacting content at a local level. From newspapers to movies. He gave examples how Rupert Murdoch controls the editorial content of his 100 odd newspapers and TV channels to reflect the reality he believes in. How the common man is aware of 9/11 but unaware of what happened in Darfur, Rwanda or Kosovo. How locally produced content in France is just 10% of what what the French see on TV and movies. He also noted how the content of Hindi films itself had changed after 1991 to become more intolerant of minority groups.

Xavier Prabhu focussed on the businesses of media and advertising and his main point was that the hypergrowth of Indian industry is saving a lot of marketers from their potentially damaging world view. Some quotes:

• "We believe we can take consumers for a ride"
• "Consumers are smarter and once the economy slows and we have to compete for customers then it will hit us back"

My perspectives as a blogger was showcasing how slowly each of us is moving to being a small media. I paraphrased Andy Warhol's comment to "Now everyone is famous for 15 people". I also talked about the concepts of the Cluetrain Manifesto about "Markets being conversations" and shared examples of how Dell which ignored the blogosphere has chosen to join it. Putting my HR cap on, I said if internal realities in organizations are changing from a command and control perspective to collaboration there was no way that external realities will remain what it was 10 years ago.

Finally the total time of 1 hour felt too small. I would have loved to talk about the long tail, about how bloggers complement and add to traditional media and a million other things.

As Prof. Matthew said when he concluded "We have left a lot of questions open and have not come to any conclusion, but sometimes that is a good thing"

The future of college recruitment

I was flattered when Curt Schafer of the National Association of Colleges and Employers in the US approached me to contribute an article on how college students and employers will match ten years from now.

Well, I hardly consider myself a futurist (did you know that most futurists get it wrong?) or an expert in the area of campus recruitment. However as an interested observer of the process, I had fun writing the article and I hope Curt's organization feels it adds some value. What is interesting is that all the articles would be compiled for the NACE annual conference at New York City in May.

If any of you are planning on attending the conference, I would love to hear from you.

Stuck at the airport

My Kingfisher flight to Mumbai is delayed by two and a half hours. Thank god for free wi-fi to pass the time :-)

Well, it just cost me to forcefully watch a Windows Vista ad, after which I got a secret password to browse the net for free for half an hour.

Not such a bad price to pay. It was a fairly 'educative' advertisement about Vista and Office 2007

Asymmetrical Performance

Rob posts research that says How One Bad Employee Can Spoil Lots of Good Ones

Of course, the trick to being a good manager is to balance and figure out if the employee is "beyond the point of no return" or can you still help him develop and come to the level of others.

The most important part would be to share the plan with the rest of the team and ask for their help, if a manager feels that the employee can still be helped.

For example in a consulting firm I know of, if after having a couple of "superstar" years a consultant's performance level dips to zero, the partner of the practice wants to know from the project manager if this drop is because of a personal issue the consultant is struggling with and can the manager work with the consultant to get him back to normal.

Using exits well

Anuradha has a good post on how to use exit interviews well. The idea of conducting an exit interview after 3 or more months after an employee has left is one which has merits.

That's because often an employee wants to be politically correct until all the financial formalities are done before he/she spills the beans on the actual reasons why she/he left.

The key measure for a HR professional attached to a business unit is knowing who would be 'potential attrition' cases and why. The only way a HR person can know this if they interact and hang out with the employees a lot. Knowing the dissatisfied employees and the reasons of their dissatisfaction can result in preventive actions being taken to retain them.

Of course, the real driver for this becomes a business leader or manager's desire to decrease attrition. That only happens if attrition becomes one of the measures for how a leader or manager is doing. Many times when this idea gets mooted by someone from HR, business managers immediately throw up their hands.

"It's the generation they come from". "They only leave for higher salary". "The issue is common to the whole industry". These become the excuses for not linking attrition to a manager's performance. However, if these generalisations are indeed true then it becomes all the more reasonable to make that linkage, to assess who can retain high performing employees better amongst them.

Yes, that's the key. Not merely retaining all employees, but managing to retain and develop the high performing employees.

How are you doing on that measure?

Indra Nooyi's three point plan for PepsiCo

AK Menon blogs about it:

Ms Nooyi's ambition of making Pepsi the defining corporation of the 21st century-by focussing on a three point agenda

-human sustainability-ensuring people live healthy and longer
-environment sustainability-making the world a better place to live for our children
-employee sustainability-making the company the best people want to come and work in

I sure hope that the intentions are backed by actions also. Most of the time when a corporation wants to chart out a divergent path from it's successful strategy of the past, the money still comes from that legacy.

ITC is trying to use the cash that comes from cigarette sales to fuel the growth in non-tobacco areas.

Would Pepsi be more adventurous? Sure Quaker Oats is a good beginning, but for a firm that sells aerated sugared water and potato chips, walking the talk on human sustainability and environment sustainability is going to be difficult.

Ms. Nooyi, we'll be watching you :-))

Off to Pune tomorrow

It's going to be a hectic trip to Pune tomorrow.

I leave in the morning from Hyderabad to Mumbai, from where I'll drive down the heavenly expressway to Pune and thankfully return late in the night back to Hyderabad directly from there.

Oh, and I'll be at the International School of Business and Media there, participating in a panel discussion on the new world of media, and will try to make sense of the world of social media and business blogging to the folks there.

I've not met too many media folks, so I guess I'll get a lot of opportunity to learn about how they view our world.

Way to hire the web 2.0 way

Guess you guys know about Mybloglog, which was recently acquired by Yahoo! (there is a community of this blog too, in case you want to connect with other readers :-)

Check the job opening that Mybloglog has of a "community manager", and the totally cool way the job announcement and applications are happening. Over a blog post and comments :-))

For some jobs, the medium is the selection process :-)

Of course, that's not so say that your employees will be always found like this, but often one's talent pool are in one's own consumer or customer/supplier pool. If you are a HR manager or a Recruiting manager are you looking creatively for your potential new recruits?

Gossip from the HR Consulting market

Last Sunday I was in Delhi. It was bleak, windy and wet. Having lived in the southern part of the country for the last eight years, I now find the north's cold winters quite unbearable.

But yes, without doubt, Delhi is the headquarters of the biggest HR consulting firms in India, and therefore exchanging the consulting world's gossip is a must do whenever one visits Delhi.

For example the country manager of this large consulting firm is hardly seen as a "thought leader" or "creator" by her own employees. So they are quite stunned to see that the firm's Indian practice has turned fully profitable. All divisions. Quite bemused my friend said "I dunno what she does, she just hired a lot of competent people and gives them a lot of autonomy"

Ah, the elusive holy grail of management :-))

Then there were talks about how a large industrial group which works with a large HR consulting firm in all areas and practices was mulling a large foray into retailing. So all the consulting head needed to do at this firm was meet the Retailing business's HR head over dinner and finalize the deal. Guess what? The client reached the dinner and the consulting head forgot the appointment !

Soon the consulting deal went to the international HR firm that is still trying to grow its practices in India. And the other firm is "persona" non-grata in the retailing group of the large conglomerate.

HR consultants in India's 2-3 biggest firms are not so happy when their promised "international projects" materialise. That's because the "international" bit is "merely" Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. And for the lucky few who do manage to get a South-East Asia project, the project team is totally based out of India. No learning by interacting with global counterparts for them :(

Delhi is also the place where any sort of money seems to be never enough. HR colleagues with eight year experiences are already commanding salaries of Rs 30-45 lakhs (USD 70,000 to 100,000), the spike being driven by the huge shortage of HR talent being faced by the sunrise industries of retail, insurance and the always hemorrhaging talent pool of the FMCG industry.

Apparently HR consultants who carry out salary surveys are the first ones to be very dissatisfied :-))

JAM's foray into the job boards

Yesterday Rashmi (Bansal, not Sinha :-) sent me an email saying that JAM, the youth publication she edits is entering into the job board space with Job OK Please.

It will focus exclusively on youth aged 16-24. The USP of this site is part time/ freelance jobs and projects/ internships for college students.

It also has a section for full time jobs for freshers. So it would be great for employers who need young people (with no experience but tonnes of enthu ;-) to work. The site is free for both students and employers right now. I guess employers will start getting charged after 31st March.

As of now there are only a couple of jobs posted. I guess once JAM uses its publication to build the brand before its target market, then early recruiters would be quite rewarded :-))

Currently the site works well with Internet Explorer, but I had some issues using it in Firefox. Have asked the jobokplease.com team to look into it.

(Update: The Firefox issues are resolved now :-)

P.S. This was my post welcoming Rashmi to the blogosphere back in Jan 2005 :-)

Designing for Social Sharing

Rashmi Sinha, who is a thought leader in the tagging and social software and design space with Uzanto, has put up a great presentation on how a website and its software need to be designed for social sharing.

Take a look at it here:


Not surprisingly Uzanto is behind the cool Slideshare website. And yes, tech and marketing blogger Amit Ranjan is also a part of Uzanto.

Understanding Innovation

Gordon Graham who blogs at brokenbulbs.com has a basic introductory slideshow on what is innovation and the various types of innovation.

Take a look at it here:


You can also see some of the ppts that I have shared as well have liked on SlideShare here.

Paul McKinnon Dell's HR Head quits

After the resignation of Kevin Rollins, it was the turn of John Hamlin and Paul McKinnon to leave Dell.

Hamlin was senior vice president of Dell Inc.'s global online business and marketing division, and was the SVP who oversaw Dell International Services, which was the BPO tech support, consumer care and sales operations. So the 8000 Dell employees in India and other low cost locations all reported into John Hamlin.

I had the pleasure of meeting Paul McKinnon once. Before his professional life he was an assistant professor at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia, where he taught organizational behavior. Therefore he was a little different from most other corporate leaders.

During an interaction he had with the India HR team, one of my colleagues asked him "Paul, what do you think is the most necessary skill/competency that a HR professional should have?"

Without much thought he answered "A point of view"

Wish you all the best, Paul !

Office romances

During a birthday party of an ex-colleague, I met some folks who were talking about the alarming trend of high divorce rates in the employees of India's largest BPO employer.

"Is work life balance that difficult to maintain?" I asked.

"Oh, work life imbalance has got nothing to do with it. Too much temptation"

Penelope Trunk speaks about how business trips with co-workers is a time when such temptations can find expression.

But if you’re married with children, a business trip is like an escape to Disney Land. There are no kids to feed and bathe. There’s no husband for annoying talks about checkbook balances and the next day’s school lunch. There is only freedom and fun. And what does anyone want to do with freedom and fun except have sex?

And dare I add, off-site training also is a major breeding (no pun intended!) ground of office romances.

A friend who heads recruiting for a large consulting firm was telling me how recent MBAs that he is interviewing, specially from the 2003-04 vintage seem to be have a much higher divorce rate.

Guess people today are married more to their careers than their spouses. The situation is more acute for couples who are both driven career people. Often when one is required to move to a different role in a different city/country the other is unwilling to compromise. Of course, why should they. Both invest a majority of the day and the weekend often for the sake of their careers. Most likely they also have office spouses, whom they spend more time than they do with their real spouse !

As Penelope says:

thirty-two percent of people feel like they are married to their co-workers, and in fact, people do better work when they have this sort of relationship with a co-worker. So it’s not that big a leap to cross the great divide and suggest a rendez-vous while you’re in a grand hotel.

Unfortunately too many employers don't recommend that employees get married, although that is changing in the IT and BPO industries to a large degree. I believe that is a much better thing.

Oops ! Just realised that I posted this on Valentine's day !

Janus and HR

Ever heard of the Roman god called Janus? He's the one after whom January is named.

In mythology Janus is the two faced god of gates, doorways, beginnings and endings.

In fact he is also the God from whom the word janitor originates.

So why am I blogging about a two-faced Roman god? That's because Prasad's post, Astha's reply, Anuradha's thoughts, Penelope's comments and on an unrelated note, Nimmy's frustrations with HR in her organization prompted me two liken the role to HR to this god.

As Penelope says:

I get a lot of comments from HR professionals on my blog. I find there are two types: Those who are innovative, forward thinking and take initiative to create change in the workplace. The other type of HR professional is a rule enforcer who is reactive to individuals in the company instead of helping to lead the company.

Often, when HR professionals start their career journeys, the rule enforcing part of their job is the majority part of the role. For some professionals, that is what they make sense of their role in organizations. While others make the transition to a more change and developmental oriented role within HR.

The learning for everyone as Ajit commented is to ensure that one is not wedded to the way we used to do things, but to constantly look ahead and keep learning and developing as professionals and as people. Co-hold both the past and the future as one lives in the here and now.

Yes. We have all got to learn a lot from that ol' chap, Janus.

Update: What synchronicity ! David Maister posts that we are all dentists. As he says:

As providers, we see what we do in a positive light (solving problems and bringing about improvements.) However, from the users’ perspective our presence signals pain, disruption, inconvenience, expense. Ultimately, we may benefit from the provider’s activities, but I’d rather not HAVE to deal with them at all.

We need to remember our place. We’re not glorious “saviors” of clients with problems: we are an unfortunate necessity.

Friends in the Indibloggies

Wow, it's a great pleasure to find lots of friends being nominated for the Indibloggies. Both Amits (Varma and Agarwal), Gaurav, Kaps, Rashmi, Dilip, Arnab and Desh are all nominated in the various categories.

Am also very proud that my friend and client, AK Menon is nominated (probably being the only purely business-focussed blog in the nominations !) in the Best New Blog category.

Another big high for me is seeing my professor from XLRI, friend, philosopher and guide, Dr. Madhukar Shukla being nominated for his blog Alternative Perspective in the Best Topical Blog category.

So, what are you waiting for? Rock the vote, go here !And thanks Ranjan and Amit Agarwal for nominating me in the first phase but I guess after being second runner up in 2004, I have achieved all I could in the Indibloggies :-)

Update : On a totally hilarious note, check out the Razzies version of the Indibloggies' here, the Indifloggies !

Why ease is not everything

What is the best country to do business in the South Asian region?

If you answered India, then the World Bank disagrees with you.

According to the WB, the country with the easiest regulations for doing business in the region is Maldives, followed by Pakistan. India comes a distant sixth, just before Bhutan and Afghanistan. [hat tip: Jim Rosenberg]

However we don't need to be told that this study does not translate into what we see in the real world. That's because if ease were the defining aspect of business then there would be no real competition.

Business ultimately is not about "being comfortable" but to focus outwards on the needs of all stakeholders, customers, employees, shareholders and the community that supports you. That is why despite what the world bank says, India is the growth leader in South Asia.

And on the topic of location and growth, don't miss Richard Florida's blog The Creativity Exchange. Florida, of course, is the famous author and economist who wrote about the Creative Class and why they are important for growth. Check his post on Human Capital vs Talent. Marcus Buckingham would be proud :-)

Four kinds of bloggers

Nimmy thinks that there can be four kinds of bloggers. And she thinks I am a collector, primarily.

So head over to her blog and see if you agree with her classification :-)

No Assholes at all

My blogging friend Max at Successfactors probably got a lot of exposure when Guy Kawasaki blogged about how SuccessFactors is a no-asshole zone and requires employees to sign a "No Asshole" contract.

Max blogs about why SuccessFactors has it and also posts what other employees feel. He says:

Once, my boss was being a jerk. I told him so - in those words. Instead of getting mad, he accepted the comment and we moved on. Later, he thanked me for telling him. My boss thanked me for calling him a jerk. Let me repeat that. My boss thanked me for calling him a jerk. Calling the behavior what it was helped everyone work better together and get more done. Can you do that at your company?

That, I think is the critical difference. Doesn't matter what you call it...jerk, asshole, negative individual, non-effective executive, these are labels that ought to be stuck to behaviors, and not people.

I think most of the commentors are critical because they feel that Max's firm is labeling people, but it really is not. What it is doing is labeling behaviors. By using a strong word, they are really showing that the behavior is unacceptable. If they started labeling people then even would be critical of them too.

And the guy who started all this is Bob Sutton (blog here), author of The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t

Bob was recently interviewed by an friend of mine, so you're sure to read his views soon in India's largest newspaper. Keep an eye out :-)

Nokia embracing Skype?

Nokia employee Abhilasha shares on her blog that Nokia is not satisfied with being a telecom firm, it now wants to be an internet firm !

The first visible steps we saw as employees is the IT injunct to allow access to certain internet tools, chief among them Skype and similar social software. The idea being that we cannot inculcate a passion and comfort with internet without allowing employees to explore... and if the passion doesn't exist, we can never build the mindset of being an internet company.

Now that's exciting !

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