Exploring The Future of Work : February 2008

Feb 29, 2008

BlogsJam lists this blog in the Business and Management Channel

Ashish from citipals mailed me to let me know that they are launching a blog reader (not a web based RSS reader) called blogsJam.

In his email he wrote:

We are planning to announce the launch of blogsJam: (http://blogsjam.citipals.com/top-business-management)
blogsJam is a fast web based blog reader.
It categorizes blogs (and blog posts) by channels/topics.
Your blog has been posted in the above category by virtue of the wonderful posts you have on your website. Congrats!!
The customizable blogsJam widget will provide increased distribution for your posts.
You could also use the blogsJam widget to showcase fresh, relevant articles on your blog.

So if you want, you could grab the widget here.

Some other channels they have that are worth a dekko are:

Feb 28, 2008

Inviting posts for the Carnival of HR

It was a deliciously evil HR idea started by (who else!) the Evil HR Lady herself.

I'm hosting the carnival on the 5th of March.

So mail your blog post URLs you want to be featured, to me at gautamghosh+hrcarnival@googlemail.com

Looking forward to a very exciting carnival!

As a reminder, keep it down to one post per blogger. And if you could--something that you've written in the past couple of weeks is preferable.

Feb 27, 2008

Twittering or Microblogging and HR

Of what good is Twittering or Microblogging? A few months ago even I did not understand. Much the same way as I did not "get" the concept of blogging in 2002 (I'm a slow learner, you see ;-)

What is Twitter, you ask?

If you are seeing this blog post on the web then you might have noticed some text on the right hand sidebar under the heading "Twitter Updates" with some text under it.

Twitter is the tool that helps make this possible and people are using it differently from what it was started for. In a very simple form, it asks you to answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. People can choose to follow your updates, if they choose to become your "followers". Here's a more in depth article by Jeff Jarvis on the Twitter phenomenon.

Then like Technorati for blogs, there's a specific search engine for Twitter called Terraminds. I am such a Twitter newbie that I discovered it today. I searched for HR and Human Resources and found lots of people to follow.

The biggest advantage of twitter is that it enables you to get away from the computer as you can choose to receive the tweets on your cell phone. So imagine that you are doing an informal salary survey for accounting professionals, and you tweet your question to your followers if any of them know how much accountants are making, you can receive real time data.

That's not all, tweeter tracking is another killer feature for you to track specific phrases and have them delivered to your phone/IM. So imagine you are hiring Strategy Consultants, you can set up a track for "Strategy Consultant" and whenever anyone publicly mentions that phrase in their Tweet, you get an update and can contact the person directly. Adding an @ before the username of a person on Tweeter makes the person see it as a reply.

Since Twitter has opened up their API lots of applications are being built around it. My personal favourite is Twitterfox, a Firefox extension that enables me to twitter without going to the website.

Then for the bloggers amongst you, there's Twitterfeed that enables you to send a link to your blog posts to your twitter followers. Some 9 ways Twitter can add to your blogging depth and richness is described in this article.

Oh yes, did I mention how you can use Twitter for recruiting?

Anyway, if you are on twitter, or have decided to convert to a Twitterer (or is it Tweeter?) you can find me here! And other HR folks and Recruiters on Twitter too.

Feb 25, 2008

Blogs getting indexed differently on Google

Ever tried searching for IBM or Tata Group on Google? One gets a search result that looks like this:

Today I did a search for my name on Google and saw something similar.

Doing a search for prominent bloggers like Rashmi Bansal I came across a similar results.

So that means for google at least, if it is certain you are looking for a particular site it will showcase the blog posts that people have visited the most. Another reason to turn to blogging :-)

Feb 23, 2008

Ironic news item of the week

From news item

Britain's Management Consulting Group Plc (MCG) said its chairman, chief executive and finance director had all resigned following pressure from investors, boosting the company's shares on Wednesday.
MCG will seek to name a new CEO "in a matter of weeks, not months," Giles added.

The company added in a statement that Chairman Rolf Stomberg and Finance Director Craig Smith had also resigned.
"We are hoping for a more effective management," Gartmore's Media and Public Relations Head Kimberley Robinson said earlier.

Why Enterprise 2.0 will not happen without culture change

Bill Ives posted on a social software platform that wants organizations to be able to build communities of practice.

While a part of me wants to celebrate that such tools are available and people are investing time and money to build them, another part of me dreads the hype-hoopla and disillusionment cycle it might take organizations through.

Enterprise 2.0 will remain a buzzword until it is backed by cultural change in organizations. And changing a culture is not easy at all.

Otherwise Enterprise 2.0 will go through the same phase as KM went through when organizations implemented software solutions that promised lots of sharing and collaboration and when that didn't work out, firms blamed KM (equating them to the tools).

So I'm sticking my neck out and saying what I said about KM - Enterprise 2.0 is about Organizational Development.

Related posts:
Organizational Development and Knowledge Management
OD and KM - More thoughts
OD and Web 2.0

Feb 22, 2008

How small business can leverage the Web

I was talking to a friend who offers marketing and branding services to the Small and Medium Enterprises sector in Delhi and I told her that she should start a facebook page for her firm, and that it's free to do so.

I then realised that sharing it here could help a lot more people. So if you go to the Facebook Business page and then click on Business Pages, you come to this page

Click on the button "Create a Facebook Page" highlighted below

You can then create a page either for local businesses, brand or product or artists, bands or public figures.

You can then get a page like this and people can write about your business and become its fans. It's great for SEO also as the page gets indexed and ranks fairly high on search engines.

Another way to build a good search engine rank for your blog page or firm is through Linkedin.

Most people put in links to their blogs using the generic Linkedin defaults, like this:

However, one can instead name these links by going to "edit my profile" and then clicking the edit next to the websites. In the drop down menu choose "other" and then name the keyword you would want the search engine to track.

Since Facebook and Linkedin have very high page rank of 8 and 7 (in Google) and overall credibility across all search engines the link passes on the credibility for your blog and website too (that's what my SEO friends tell me)

So apart from SEM small businesses can use such measures to build their visibility.

Starting off in consulting

Interesting stories by veterans of the consulting industry on how they started off in consulting

Might be of interest to folks who are either looking to start off in consulting or for folks who are already into the management consulting industry :-)

As one reads the stories, it strikes me as how the reasons are so human, the need to move to a particular location to be near (or away from) a significant other, to earn more money as family was increasing, the need to solve problems, to show other consultants that they could do better and so on

Hat tip to David Maister

Hillary rubbishes Chelsea's work

Ok, this is interesting :-)

Senator Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, works for New York-based hedge fund Avenue Capital Group and previously held a post with international management consulting group, McKinsey and Company.

"We ... have to reward work more," US broadcaster ABC quoted her as saying. "By that I mean I have people in New York working on Wall Street as investment managers, as hedge fund executives.

"Under the tax code, they can pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes on $50 million, than a teacher, or a nurse, or a truck driver in Parma pays on $50,000. That's very discouraging to people.

"You just feel like, 'Wait a minute, I'm working as hard as I can,' " she said.

It's not the first time the former first lady has railed against her daughter's profession. In 2006 she told an audience that young people thought "work is a four-letter word".

OK, now I know why young upwardly mobile professionals are not voting for Hillary. I wonder what Barack Obama thinks about knowledge workers

Feb 21, 2008

100 Talent specific sites

Amy Quinn sent me an email about an article "Where the Talent Is: 100 Sites to Find the Elite in Any-Given-Field" that they have painstakingly set-up to focus on niche jobsites for different kinds of talented people from design folks to lawyers to management to healthcare etc.

The list is US centric of course, but I see a lot of scope for a list of the same type focussing on the other English speaking parts of the world.

For HR jobs they list only one site :-)

Workforce HR Jobs: Sometimes HR personnel need to be hired as well. Help yourself find the best employee for the job with information you can find on this site.

And for management sites there are quite a few:

The Ladders: Looking for new executives or higher level employees can be difficult. You can find employees and place listings on this site which specializes six figure jobs and up.
Executives on the Web: Find your next corner office resident through this site. Check through thousands of high level resumes to find the best person for your job.
6 Figure Jobs: Make sure you're paying out the big bucks to the right person. This site will help you find qualified candidates for your high level positions.
ExecuNet: Find CEOs, vice presidents and other high level management through this site. Post your job and get responses from interested candidates.
hundredK: Whether you're looking for a new director of sales, a vice president or even a CEO, you'll find qualified applicants on this site to help you get the best for your business.
Manager Crossing: Make sure your management is top notch by drawing from candidates on this site. Posting jobs is free so there is no loss if you don't find exactly what you're looking for.

So if you are looking for US based candidates in a specific field of specialization you should check out the 100 sites listed there.

Feb 20, 2008

Yahoo Layoff and the Twittering Employee

Ryan Kuder was recently laid off from Yahoo like lots of others across the world (even in India). However, what makes his case different is that as his day progressed he was twittering and his personal experiences were shared by lots of people across the world.

Today he has a blog post up sharing the experiences and the implications such kinds of social media has on people's realities. All the best Ryan, may you find your next dream job soon!

Somehow, someone with a blog that had more than a hand full of readers found my tweets. Henry Blodget excerpted my day on Silicon Alley Insider. That story hit the top of Techmeme by Tuesday night. Yesterday, my layoff was on the front page of the LA Times print edition and it was reprinted in today's Merc. I started Tuesday with 87 followers on Twitter. By Wedensday night, I had over 400. We're just a few shy of 500 now. Hopefully one of you is hiring ;)

I certainly didn't expect all of this when I got laid off. But the way I see it, the more people who know I'm out there looking, the more likely I am to get a job. And so far, the response from friends, colleagues, and total strangers has been amazing. Thanks for the emails, the tweets, the LinkedIn invites, and the Facebook messages.

The most interesting thing about all of this to me as someone involved in social media has been the way that news or content travels virally across the web. Someone found something interesting that they thought worth sharing, and then so did the next guy. I think it's an interesting case study, especially for me as a marketer, to watch things spread like this.

I think it's also a great way to look at how a job search can happen today. It used to be emails and phone calls to everyone you knew. With Twitter, there's been a bit of a different spin. I can keep anyone who is interested in the loop on how my hunt is going. And I've got a network of nearly 500 people out there who can feed me leads. And it's been working so far. I've got a meeting with an entrepreneur at lunch today and am having lunch with a Twitter friend on Friday. The response from recruiters and hiring managers has been great too.

What are you doing to embrace this sometimes scary mostly exciting new media?

Leadership and Multiplayer Online Games

Paul Hemp posts on the HBSP site (via steve rubel on Twitter):

An article I’m editing for an upcoming issue of Harvard Business Review provides a glimmer of hope for all of you med-pots out there – and offers some disturbing food for thought if you’re in the business of leadership development.

The piece – by Byron Reeves, Tom Malone, and Tony O’Driscoll – argues that multiplayer online games, such as Everquest and World of Warcraft, give us a sneak preview of what leadership will look like in tomorrow’s business world. A study of these games found that people who’d never be identified – or identify themselves – as candidates for a real-world leadership training program are able to effectively lead teams of dozens of players on strategically challenging missions. That’s because certain games’ characteristics – non-monetary performance incentives, data transparency, temporary leadership roles that give people the chance to practice their leadership skills – make it easier to be an effective leader. One implication for real-world organizations: There may be large and untapped reservoirs of leadership talent that you don’t know you have.

This echoes a theme in the interview in the interview I did with HBS professor Linda Hill that appeared in the January issue, entitled “Where Will We Find Tomorrow’s Leaders.” One of Linda’s key points is that organizations risk overlooking potential leaders because they are “invisible” – that is, lack the high-profile personal characteristics such as compelling communications skills that we associate with leadership. Ironically, these invisible leadership candidates may in fact possess characteristics – for example, modest egos that don’t get in the way of collaborative work – that are ideally suited to tomorrow’s business environment.

One reason I think most organizations do a bad job of identifying leaders is that they confuse the outer expressions with the underlying behaviors of people.

Most organizations really don't do a good job of articulating behaviors that a leader needs to build and showcase. Top management and board's tend to focus too much on financial success in the past than behavioral aspects of a leader, not taking into account that past successes are also contextual to processes and teams that might not be the same in the current organization.

Related article: Developing People for Leadership

The near perfect Manager?

Was reading a review of B Raman's book The Kaoboys of the R&AW, Down Memory Lane, about India's external intelligence agency, and the person who started it from scratch and probably gave it it's culture - Rameshwar Nath Kao.

It then struck me that this description of RN Kao would probably be the way people would describe the ideal manager. What do you think?

Through the book, one notices Indira Gandhi's absolute confidence in her external intelligence chief and this for one reason: his professional competence. Kao was responsible for setting up R&AW practically from scratch.
Raman remembers some of his qualities: 'He gave credit to his colleagues and subordinates when things went well and took the blame when things went wrong. He was liked by the high and the mighty not only in India, but also in many countries, but throughout his life never once did he drop or use their names.'

KM 0.0

Dave Pollard has an answer to KM's dilemma on how to succeed.

In a recent post where I waxed rhapsodic about how the best approach to everything could be reduced to three magic words (love, conversation, community), I presented this one-sentence summary of how this might apply to knowledge management (KM):

KM is simply the art enabling trusted, context-rich conversations among the appropriate members of communities about things these communities are passionate about.

In another recent post I laid out how the work of information professionals is now being done in (what I consider) leading organizations, around five key types of deliverables: awareness products, research products, guidance products, self-assessment and connectivity tools, and facilitated events.

While a few enlightened organizations might choose this path, I am afraid that the majority of organizations who are still stuck in the command and control mindset of the last century.

Everyone is replaceable?

Maybe, but in the new economy, there are certain differences. Alex blogs on the ReadWriteWeb:

For a startup, two months is an eternity, but even for large companies two months is a long time. Today, people need to be replaced real-time - one is out and the next one is in full-speed, day one. This is difficult, particularly because of the incredible amount of information that we end up processing daily.
Increasingly, modern business is becoming a complex, distributed information processing system. The nodes of this system are employees, tirelessly passing bits around to each other, crunching and filtering with the goal to compute, to gain competitive advantage, and to help the business survive.

The problem is that unlike factories or boxes in the computing cloud, employees in the modern company are not identical. Each one knows a unique piece of the information puzzle that makes a company tick. Two weeks is not enough to do the transition and two months is way to long to waste training up the new guy. This is why the old adage that everyone is replaceable may need some re-thinking.
Recently, my insurance broker switched companies. He quickly contacted me, offered an attractive new package, and then drove 1.5 hours from his office to my home to sign the papers. His commission would not want warrant the trip, but he was smart to make the investment of his time because he won me as a client. On the other hand, the cost of losing a talented employee for his old company just increased - they also lost a client, and I am sure I was not the only one.

Although my insurance agent lives in the technical world, he is part of new breed of folks that I call the digital elite. He uses Facebook to keep in touch with his friends, he was savvy enough to look up my company on the web, and he knows all the cool financial web sites. In other words, he is on top of what's going on. He knows all about the speed of information in our world. And this makes him a serious and important player, of the type that is really hard to replace.

As organizations become smaller and focused around the talents their employees bring in, we're going to see a lot of employee-organization branding together. Specially the "superstar" employees (a rainmaker in consulting organization, for example)

Yes, a lot of things are going to change, subtly but slowly :-) HR and management groups must be aware and open to these changes, specially in the small creative hotshops.

Feb 19, 2008

Tata amongst the top 50 innovative companies

According to FastCompany:

Within the first 10 days of 2008, Ratan Tata, the magnate behind India's $72.8 billion Tata Group, made a reported $2 billion bid for Ford's Jaguar and Land Rover brands and unveiled its long anticipated $2,500 "People's Car" called "Nano." India's largest conglomerate made a clear statement that Indian business is not just an outsourcing ghetto. It wasn't the first time that Tata the man, the fifth generation of his family to run the company, had demonstrated his global savvy. In the 1990s, when he took the helm of the company, its trucking unit was enduring the biggest losses in Indian history. Since then, through a series of international acquisitions (Tetley Teas, steelmaker Corus), the 70-year-old mogul has transformed the company into a mosaic of 100 diverse businesses, with more than half of the company's revenue coming from non-Indian operations.

So cool to see a greater than century old Indian conglomerate in the company of dotcoms and startups and design firms :-)

Going from Industry to HR Consulting

Interesting Q&A at WSJ.com:

Q: I've spent seven years in telecom human resources and labor relations and now want to get into management consulting. There seem to be many requirements for entry, including previous consulting experience. How can I make this transition?

A: You face an uphill battle. Consulting is a different animal than industry and most firms aren't interested in corporate candidates unless they have worked in consulting-type roles or are stars in their fields, says Gary Smith, managing partner with Smith, Scott&Associates, a Colorado Springs, Co., recruiting firm that fills consulting openings.

"It's exceedingly difficult for a person with only corporate experience to make the transition to consulting unless they are exceptionally good at what they do or have real stature in their field," says Mr. Smith.

The reason is that experience limited to just one company or industry isn't useful to firms that seek to solve problems for multiple clients across many industries. Less than 5% of industry professionals he interviews are hired as consultants, Mr. Smith adds.

Many consulting firms seek specialists with narrow expertise. In the HR arena, this might be sales or executive compensation or organizational development. If you feel you have specialized expertise, such as in compensation, "strip away anything on your resume that isn't related to compensation and say what you accomplished and delivered," says Mr. Smith. "Saying that you designed a sales-compensation plan a year ago isn't enough."

The same is true in India. Many HR consulting firms look at corporate HR roles as more akin to consulting roles and tend to not take into consideration years that a HR professional might have spent as a Business partner - because the focus as a consultant is more on design and development than on execution skills for an individual.

I have heard of cases of senior HR people with 10-15 years of experience being equated with 4-5 years of consulting experience based on internal formulas that consulting firms use to calculate 'fitment' for applicants.

Attracting Great People

Penelope Trunk chronicles new ways to attract people in this age of hyper-transparency. Her ideas?

1. Tell people where they’ll go next.
2. Use your public relations team to prop up the manager.
3. Get some respect for speciality recruiters.
4. Advertise in niche communities.
5. Leverage social media.

I found the bit about speciality recruiters interesting. I would expand that to include HR generalists too, specially the ones who are employee advocates. I know that a lot of such folks, carry their former employees along with them in their social networks (from Yahoo IM buddies to Orkut and Facebook too!)

Feb 18, 2008

Page 123, line 5

I came across this interesting meme on David Maister's blog:

"Well, there is a new meme zipping around the Net: open the nearest book to page 123, go down to the 5th sentence and type up the 3 following sentences. Then, pass the message along to other people you want to invite to contribute to the game."

So here goes, from The HR Value Proposition by Dave Ulrich and Wayne Brockbank:

"Information is also what binds supply chains together. The more an organization can do to make sure information passes smoothly to the places where people can use it, the better off it will be. And since information is much what creates culture, organizations that create and sustain effective cultures manage information effectively".

Hmm, that's the best articulation of OD and KM linkage that I have come across :-)

So anyone else wants to take this meme up?

Consulting Skills

When someone asks me what are consulting skills, as opposed to technical/functional/industry expertise, I variously try to explain it using Peter Block's Flawless Consulting skills model.

Steve Shu succeeds in putting it into words beautifully, calling it client facilitation skills:

In my mind, client facilitation refers to the processes (and skills) that a consultant uses to get a client organization to critical decision points, deep understanding, and committment to move forward or redirect.
A master of client facilitation is a person that can:

Master analysis skills of the trade: use top-down logical reasoning, use many analytical frameworks, work analyses from multiple directions
Communicate well: whether it be via face-to-face conversation, writing, phone, or instant messaging (yikes)
Teach and frame things properly: because interactions with parties may be varied, quick and because parties may have varying levels of knowledge, one must be able to ramp-up conversation levels quickly and put them in the proper context
Recognize where the organization is at and how decisions are made: is the marketing department behind in their understanding? who does the CEO look to as his/her right hand? if so, what are the steps to getting the right hand on-board or up-to-speed? how do we get things to tip? can we get there in one step or will it take two steps?
Lead people *without formal authority*: can you educate people, empathize with the organization, get the organization to trust you, and pave a vision and/or outline a set of tradeoffs with such clarity that motion must happen?

Blog Post number 2000

It was on 8th of July 2002 that I first tentatively posted my first post. It was a Blogger that still was run by Pyra Labs and hadn't been acquired by Google.

This was what it looked like:

Then after a couple of years when a lot more templates were available to choose from, I opted for this look and a new name which was around for a longish time.

Then for some time I used the K2 format when we could play around with Blogger templates:

I think then in 2007 I settled for the current look :-)

My posting frequency has also varied down the years, with 2006 and 2007 being the most prolific by posting frequency so far:

2008 (65)
2007 (517)
2006 (618)
2005 (375)
2004 (288)
2003 (110)
2002 (16)

Search engines have primarily been responsible for driving traffic to the blog with over 70% of visitors over the last year having come through them.

The blog that sends the most visitors after the search engines has been Rashmi's blog. Thanks Rashmi!!

The best part of the 2000 posts has been the comments that people have diligently left and have given me food for thought and occasionally castigated me too. It has enabled me to connect with like minded people across the world and has also enabled them to find me when looking for an area of shared interest.

Thanks Blogger! You've been an incredible friend and a very useful tool!

Waiting for crisis

The Evil HR Lady looks at how some people and most organizations don't do anything unless their is a crisis that forces them act, and it's a sad fact of life. The medical metaphor has been used by David Maister in his book "Strategy and the Fat Smoker" (review here)

If we analyse why this takes place (and this is something that Maister mentions in his book), I am reminded of the time Anu posted about the "Marketplace of Perceptions", which explains why we procrastinate:

“There’s a fundamental tension, in humans and other animals, between seizing available rewards in the present, and being patient for rewards in the future,” he says. “It’s radically important. People very robustly want instant gratification right now, and want to be patient in the future. If you ask people, ‘Which do you want right now, fruit or chocolate?’ they say, ‘Chocolate!’ But if you ask, ‘Which one a week from now?’ they will say, ‘Fruit.’
Can we say that in HR terminology, that would translate as – Recruitment? Now!...Retention – Tomorrow? So recruitment remains a “current hot topic,” while retention becomes a “future hot topic”.
Why so?
Laibson offers a mathematical explanation -
Consider a project like starting an exercise program, which entails, say, an immediate cost of six units of value, but will produce a delayed benefit of eight units. That’s a net gain of two units, “but it ignores the human tendency to devalue the future,” Laibson says. If future events have perhaps half the value of present ones, then the eight units become only four, and starting an exercise program today means a net loss of two units (six minus four). So we don’t want to start exercising today. On the other hand, starting tomorrow devalues both the cost and the benefit by half (to three and four units, respectively), resulting in a net gain of one unit from exercising. Hence, everyone is enthusiastic about going to the gym tomorrow."
So there is a gain in procrastination because what we start tomorrow will always have more value than what we start today, given our tendency to discount the future. And this especially seems to apply to acts which have an outcome in the "future" as opposed to "now"

So what can do, in the face of seemingly human perception issues? Well, one approach is that we could choose to reward the behavior now that will lead to future rewards. However, that may not be possible all the time.

In that case, the "to be done" has to be listed as a higher cause than the individual and the organization itself.

In a world where billion dollar CEO terminations are the norm, getting people to keep their cynicism aside and working at a larger cause is not always easy.

That's why we have the short-sightedness in personal and professional lives.

Feb 17, 2008

Coaching growing in the UK

From the Times

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), more than three-quarters of organisations now invest in coaching, including performance and personal coaching, for their employees.
At Lloyds TSB, the corporate-banking division in Scotland was one of the first of the bank’s departments to embrace performance coaching. “Many people wrongly assume coaching is about addressing underperformance,” said Manus Fullerton at Lloyds TSB Scotland. “In fact it is of greatest benefit when coaching your best performers. All the top sportsmen and women have coaches to help them improve.
“We are taking the same approach in our business, not just coaching individuals, but training our teams to coach one another. We have witnessed growth in business levels, staff engagement and a real appetite for further coaching.”
Despite the touchy-feely image, Cartwright, a former sports coach and psychologist, agrees that coaching is not for failures – quite the reverse. “Tiger Woods has five different coaches and nobody would say he is a failure,” he said. “But we have this macho British idea that chief executives ought to be able to just get on and do the job. In most businesses, once you reach partnership level your training and development stops.”
With a few more executive coaches there would, he said, “be fewer people quitting, getting the sack or jumping out of windows. It’s lonely at the top – who else can these people talk to?” Cartwright points out that senior executives can’t talk to their peers – because they will be after their job – they can’t talk to their board because that would be seen as a sign of weakness and they certainly can’t confide in their subordinates.

Coaching poor performers may or may not get you results. However coaching a high performer could send out a signal that you are interested in developing them and that he/she has never really 'arrived'.

Feb 16, 2008

Consulting stints can aid CEOs

From AESC's search wire

It has been 30 years since Robert Kidder worked at McKinsey & Co., but he still describes that early career experience as "life-defining." His stint as a management consultant taught him a style of logical thinking that proved invaluable in later jobs as chief executive of Duracell and Borden Chemical, he says. Maybe it is time to let go of the jokes portraying consultants as glib, clueless apostles of PowerPoint, who have yet to hold "real" jobs.
Lots of onetime consultants are getting the last laugh, landing posts as CEOs of sizable corporations. Consider John Donahoe, the new CEO at online-auction house eBay, who spent more than 20 years at Bain & Co. Or look at Hubert Joly, a former McKinsey consultant who is about to take the top job at travel-industry titan Carlson. In fact, companies ranging from insurer Aon to gift maker Russ Berrie have picked ex-consultants as their CEOs. Working at a consulting firm has long been regarded as a great way to learn high-level strategy, which could be helpful in all kinds of later jobs.
But offsetting doubts have been plentiful, mostly about consultants' ability to master the ingenuity, tact and persistence needed to get big ideas carried out. Former Honeywell CEO Lawrence Bossidy crystallized that concern in 2002, when he and consultant Ram Charam co-wrote the best-selling management book "Execution." The authors contended that former consultants and other executives without front-line experience can flounder when managing key lieutenants or making delicate pricing decisions. "They have never been tested in mobilizing line people to execute," Messrs. Bossidy and Charam wrote. "They haven't had the experience that develops business instinct." The authors' remedy: move such people into operating jobs gradually, so they have time to build their missing skills.
Reinforcing that point, John Wood, an executive recruiter at Spencer Stuart, says he favors a two-step career progression for ex-consultants. Their first corporate job should be in a familiar area, such as strategy, where they can gradually learn how a big company really functions. Once they have absorbed that lesson, they can be promoted into big operating jobs and do well, he says. Rush a career, and the risk of failure increases.
The past 15 years have produced plenty of examples to support the Bossidy/Wood point of view. The most successful ex-consultants tend to follow career paths similar to that of Louis V. Gerstner Jr., who packed in plenty of operating experience between his early days at McKinsey and his eventual triumph as the CEO of International Business Machines. By the time they ran entire companies, their consulting jobs were just small entries on their résumés.
Longtime consultants who enter corporate careers near the top don't always fare as well. Kevin Rollins spent 12 years at Bain and then joined Dell in 1996 as a senior vice president. He became CEO of the computer company in 2004 and was eased out last year. Dell widened its product line substantially during Mr. Rollins's tenure, but its reputation for customer service suffered, and efforts to diversify didn't pay off as hoped. Both Messrs. Gerstner and Rollins declined to talk about their careers.
These days the constantly changing demands of the CEO's job may play to ex-consultants' strengths. Steve Ellis, world-wide managing partner for Bain, notes that many of Bain's alumni end up as CEOs for companies controlled by private-equity firms. These firms were active acquirers until the market turmoil of recent months. Such CEO placements are a good match, Mr. Ellis says.

Oh yes, and some ex-consultants also try running for elections to the post of the President of the US.

Love and Romance at work

Remember the Indian survey on love and lust in the workplace I posted about? Compare that to the US survey:

More than 40 percent of employees admit to dating a co-worker at some time during their career, with 20 percent saying they've done so more than twice, according to Careerbuilder.com's annual Valentine's Day survey which was released this week.

Additionally, close to 30 percent said they went on to marry somebody whom they dated while at work.

While office romances can begin at the desk, they are more likely to spark at seemingly benign functions outside working hours. About 13 percent said their romances began when they ran into a co-worker outside the office. Others, 11 percent, said their romances began at lunch or Happy Hour, while 10 percent said it was a result of working together after-hours. Two percent cited the company holiday party, while 10 percent attributed their romances to love at first sight, the survey said.

Of those who date co-workers, 27 percent said they have dated somebody in a higher position in their organization. Females, at 37 percent, did that more than males, at 20 percent, the survey said.

Those ages 35 to 44 were the most likely to have dated a co-worker at some time during their career, with 44 percent of respondents saying they have done so. Those ages 55 and older were the least likely to have dated a co-worker, the survey said.

Work life balance? What is that, these people seem to be asking. Work and life lines seems to be blurring all the time

Legal Eagle HR people needed in UK

Personnel Today says that HR people who are legally savvy have a better scope to advance professionally than others.

And now there's a new career trend taking hold, upstaging even the role of business partner: HR legal eagles.
Employers are crying out for legally-savvy HR practitioners to help them manage the ever growing octopus of employment legislation, say recruitment experts.
Alistair Cook, director at HR recruitment firm Digby Morgan, says he has seen a massive growth in demand for employment law specialists over the past year, especially on the interim side.

"There's been an increase of about 60% in the number of legal HR roles in the past 12 months. At a senior level, employment law and employee relations specialists can command £2,500 a day or £250,000 a year," he says.

Martyn Wright is director of Oakleaf Partnership HR recruitment specialists. He says that the advent of shared service functions has meant the responsibility for employment law is increasingly being devolved to HR, especially within London's square mile.

"Most generalist HR jobs involve some form of employee relations but now employers, particularly in the City, specifically want employment law specialists to work in HR."

In India, traditionally, for personnel and Industrial Relations professionals who paid their dues working in factories with blue-collared workforces, knowing the ins and outs of the various labour laws applicable to them was a prerequisite for success. Only in the recent past with more and more organizations applicable under the various state level Shops and Establishment Acts, has there been a plethora of HR professionals with a comparatively low knowledge of legal aspects.

I wonder if the UK experience would be applicable in India too in the near future?

Feb 15, 2008

Looking for answers

OK, this is a lowdown trick to write a mandatory blog post after feeling guilty that one hasn't been blogging too much. And it doesn't take too much effort and could be mildly amusing for people interested in such sort of things.

So I looked up my visitor stats for the last one month and found that "notchup" was the most frequent search term that led unsuspecting people to this blog (helped by the fact that this blog comes in number 10 when you search for Notchup on google).

On Notchup I haven't heard of anything much after I imported my linkedin profile there. Employers haven't been exactly falling over themselves to pay hundreds of dollars to interview me. Ho-hum, time for a wake up call for gullible folks like me who actually thought this model would work.

The second most popular term was (surprise, surprise) "gautam ghosh" and while I would love to believe that people were searching for me, I guess most of them were looking for the filmmaker.

"Paul McKinnon" was the third most popular search term, and I guess that was because he was being hired by Citibank in a time of turbulence and change, and this blog comes in number 2 on google when you search for him, even higher than his Linkedin profile.

However the most interesting terms are the ones that lead to people spending more time on the blog and google analytics gives me just that.

The person who searched for the long phrase: - on appraisal, 500 infosys employees 'voluntarily resign' - spent 53 minutes on the blog. Wow! Thanks! Though I don't think you found what you were looking for.

Another person who searched for the term - reason for doing mba - spent 47 minutes here, while another one who was looking for mckinsey india number consultants spent 44 minutes. What is the answer to that question, I wonder, 200-300?

A person who was searching for online career coaching india spent 37 minutes on the blog. Hopefully he/she was able to find something that answered some queries. However, are there any online career coaching sites focused for India?

Then there was a person looking for a period of 34 minutes on work life balance capgemini india. Heh, with French roots I am sure there is enough balance between work and life there :-)

There's a slightly bemused question asked by someone which led him/her to this blog - why indian ceo - and spent half an hour here. I hope you got your answer!

There was one person who searched for leadership style of sanjeev bikhchandani. That person spent 25 minutes on this blog. Sanjeev's blog would have given a better picture of the person and his leadership style, isn't it?

Feb 14, 2008

Lucy Kellaway tears into headhunters

Lucy Kellaway, the bête noire of buzzword users, trains her acerbic pen at the headhunting profession:

Modern headhunters spout as much guff as management consultants, but without the excuse. Consultants have to, to hide the fact that it often isn’t clear what they’re selling. Headhunters are selling something pukka so there’s no reason why they can’t come right out and say so.
Korn Ferry describes itself as “The premier provider of human capital solutions” and the other big firms are no better. Heidrick & Struggles boasts that “as innovators we are actively redefining top-level search to encompass complementary services”. Michael Page’s approach goes for bathos: “Our journey starts when we see a difference between where we are today and where we want to be,” it says on its website.
Last week an acquaintance told me he had just employed one of the world’s largest headhunting firms to help him find a new managing director. He received an introductory e-mail from the firm that began: “As a Leading Total Talent Solution Provider we have some special assessment tools to help identify the ‘right’ candidate.”
The only important word here – right – has acquired inverted commas, while the rest seems to have been produced by an automatic buzzword generator. All the above words are dismal, but the word “talent” is the worst. Most people aren’t terribly talented at all. And once you start talking of talent, it’s only a hop, skip and jump to “talent pools”, with the dangerously misleading idea that schools of talent are swimming around, just ready to be fished out by the headhunter.
With the e-mail came attached a “Leadership Advantage Toolkit” containing 66 characteristics that might be desirable in a leader, including “dealing with paradox” and “organisational agility”. These had to be rated according to “mission critical”, “important” and so on.
This is a low trick. It is about making clients think they are buying rigour in the hope this will make them less likely to protest when presented with the inevitably disappointing shortlist of candidates.
In fact headhunting is both simple and difficult. The theory is simple: there are good managers and not-so-good ones. Alas, most are fairly mediocre, as managing isn’t easy. Choosing the good ones has nothing at all to do with 66 carefully weighted competencies: it is more a matter of finding three. The ability to think, the ability to act, and (most important) the ability to get others to act.

Feb 13, 2008

Virtual Leadership

Erik from i4cp.com forwarded me this article on how organizations must make a deliberate attempt at building leaders with skills to manage in a virtual environment:

"Virtual distance" in this study was defined as both perceived and physical distance, highlighting the point that leading virtually is often a blend of virtual and face-to-face interactions. What seems to matter here is the perception of distance between leaders and those who are supposed to be following them.

Perceived distance can lead to a higher level of distrust, and trust is among the core building blocks for high-performance leadership (Reina & Reina, 2006). In the absence of familiar visual cues, conversations become harder to decode and trust-building becomes a tougher challenge. A lack of trust can also result in communication problems, which are often compounded by differences in language backgrounds among global teams (Manning, 2003).

Avoiding these problems often requires special skills and tactics. For one thing, virtual leaders need to be able to use available technologies well. Technologies are, after all, a double-edged sword. Video conferences, online chats, instant messages, polling, e-mail, the use of avatars and other forms of communication can be powerful tools. However, integrating these forms of communication to enhance effectiveness isn't easy, especially if you consider differences in communication styles among the virtual team members.

Organizations with virtual teams and a large number of distributed workforce must think and plan for this before it becomes a crisis. It can be the next competitive difference for organizational success by building high employee engagement.

New Blogroll

From the Blogger in draft, I've got the new blogroll updated on the right hand sidebar.

It has the logo of the blog and the last post headline along with the date when it was updated. Cool, right?

Hat-tip Amit

Feb 12, 2008

The Need for HR

"You see we need a HR person to be here all the time" said the manager

"Why?" I asked

"Well, when people come late, or don't behave according to organizational norms, HR should point it out to them?"

"And why can't a leader/manager like you do that?"

"Well we have to get work done through them, and we can't spoil our relationship policing them, therefore we need HR to do that" said the manager.

This conversation happened in the recent past.

Those of you who share the feelings of this manager, please evolve. It's the manager's job to discipline and point out when people step out of line. Not the HR professionals'.

Becoming Global managers

We have started the phase where Indian companies are globalising. To succeed, they need to be led by global leaders and managers, people who are comfortable with viewpoints and cultures not their own. What are the characteristics of a global manager? Abhijit Bhaduri, head of HR at Frito Lay, himself a global manager, having worked with Colgate Palmolive in Malaysia and the US, has some thoughts:

Being a global manager means being comfortable holding almost two opposing thoughts and not allowing either one to overwhelm. Being able to flex one's style to address different business and people needs means that such individuals are a rare breed. They learn to manage change. Not in others or in other corporations but starting first of all within themselves.

If one has to succeed in the future, this is a skill one has to learn and build at the outset. Right now one can be leading global teams, because the going is good. However, when business goes through a cycle down, the ones that will be left standing will be the people who fit the definition of a global manager.

Brand yourself through lots of tools

The personal branding blog talks about how in a recession personal branding takes on much more meaning.

It's true. A lot of people think that blogging is a great tool for personal branding. While it remains the case, blogging is useful for a certain type of people - People who are great at writing to get their points across. It's a skill that most people don't really build when they are growing up.

Today to stand out and brand yourself as a blogger with some authority, one needs to choose a niche which has a handful of noteworthy bloggers focusing on it. Great content is one thing, getting the community to notice you is another thing.

One gets noticed by two means - either if one is a known brand in a field or if other bloggers are talking about your content. The second case can happen if one is a handful of people blogging on that subject. Sure, you won't get traffic like Gizmodo or TechCrunch but that should not be your aim at all.

That brings us to the question we started off with. What if one's writing skills are below par to engage the attention of blog writers?

One can then showcase one's work on business and social networking sites like Linkedin. Even Facebook is a great way to be on people's radar. The only drawback about these sites is that a lot of time investment is required to build a community you want to be visible towards. The temptation is to be transparent about all that one does, however can result in unforeseen negative impact on oneself.

Video is an option for people who are great at presentations, but being in front of the camera and appearing natural is also a skill that needs to be learnt. Video alas, cannot be searched except by text tabs added around it.

One also has to use microblogging formats to brand yourself, without turning into a spam generator.

Feb 8, 2008

How can SMBs compete with big players

Four of us from Tvarita Consulting attended a NASSCOM SME sector conference in Hyderabad in December 2007. Some entrepreneurs shared what is essential to make a small player succeed in a market and compete with large firms.

One insight was that customer needs can be classified as follows:

Irritant
Headache
Migrane

Only enterprises with high discretionary spend will bother with irritants. And these spends will invariably go to the big players. The headache will also be resolved by bigger players.

It's in the migrane areas that small businesses can get a foot through the door. By making a name which causes clients/customers to look beyond the bigger players. Smaller players can guarantee senior talent involvement and a hunger to perform - both which a large player can ignore due to the size.

Related points raised by speakers was that small businesses should explore and find that niche, as one of them said "the reason to exist".

Another speaker said while promotion could be built on educating a client that a migrane is waiting to happen, but to avoid making "missionary sales". An SMB is only one service provider amongst many and its services/products have to fit into the clients' larger ecosystem.

Feb 7, 2008

The Most Influential headhunters in the world

BusinessWeek has a list of the 50 most influential ones. To profile:

You can't get to the top without the headhunters. That's as true for businesses as it is for established and emerging leaders. The world's top headhunters control access to the lion's share of C-suite succession and leader-replacement searches for the world's largest corporations. Their influence also extends to the top ranks of the most ambitious smaller companies, which understand how crucial top talent is and are willing to pay for it.
Who are the most powerful talent brokers? They include former management consultants, corporate human resources executives, authors, boardroom advisers, graduates of the world's most elite business schools, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and trusted confidants of the world's most powerful business leaders. They are almost universally workaholics and globetrotters with a passion for the business of executive matchmaking, an affinity for socializing and peering deep into the human psyche, and a finely honed instinct for fitting candidate and company.

Thirty-one of the first 50 headhunters profiled herein hail from North America, the world's largest market, for their refined talent-spotting abilities. Many of them recruit for industries—such as financial services, consumer goods and services, technology, retail, and manufacturing—that have long relied on external talent to drive performance and fulfill senior leadership functions including the most prized C-suite posts.
And given its recent recruitment of two especially influential headhunters from competing firms, NYSE-listed Korn/Ferry International (KFY) takes the lead with seven headhunters on this initial list of executive recruitment power brokers.

Oh, and there's one Indian on the list too. Dinesh Mirchandani, Regional director, Boyden World

Feb 6, 2008

SHRM should embrace web2.0

....to become more relevant, feels Kris Dunn at the HR Capitalist.

But is the world's largest HR organization upto a change in culture?

Tvarita Consulting pays for me to be a member at SHRM, and I don't get anything of value from there. Maybe it's because my work is more related to India, but even Kris feels SHRM is not the place to turn to, then obviously there is something wrong.

It's the same case for similar networks in India. Bodies like NHRD are rooted in the structures of the past. How will they evolve to be relevant to the new generation of HR professionals?

Recruit superstar women rather than men

According to this research (hat tip Bob Sutton) by Harvard Business School Professor Boris Gryosberg:

talented women who switch firms maintain their stardom, and their new employer’s share price holds steady. Groysberg provides two explanations for this discrepancy:

• Unlike men, high-performing women build their success on portable, external relationships —with clients and other outside contacts.

• Women considering job changes weigh more factors then men do, especially cultural fit, values, and managerial style.

These strategies enable women to transition more successfully to new companies. And that has crucial implications for all professionals. By understanding successful women’s career strategies, women and men can strengthen their ability to shine in any setting."

So, organizations can help people become successful by letting them build networks externally? Huge career implications for men from this research, also the need to focus away from only compensation to assessing the fit of the organizational culture with their personality and work styles.

I need to study the research in detail.

Employee Engagement Network

Terry alerted me to the Employee Engagement Network, a social network focused on employee engagement issues and people interested in it. The network is hosted on Ning and it focuses one on thinking about the next level of granularity that will evolve in the social network area, IMHO.

We'll engage with the larger population of netizens on Orkut and Facebook (both of whom have limits to the number of connections you can have - 1000 in the case of Orkut and 4999 for facebook) and we'll also become members of niche interest based communities, and Ning gives a great platform for making such networks. It's like what eGroups (later groups.yahoo.com) did to email distribution lists in the late 1990s.

Let a million networks bloom :-)

And if you are interested in Employee Engagement join the network and let's connect. The RecruitingBlogs.com community is also hosted on Ning. And so is Indian youth magazine JAM's Club Jam

Feb 5, 2008

Hyderabad BarCamp on 16th February

I've managed to miss the geeky gatherings called barcamps one to four earlier in Hyderabad. However hopefully would make it to the 5th BarCamp.

Would I speak on something?

Well, if people want to know how to scale up a startup and not have HR headaches as they scale up I could talk on that :-)

The 'When I Grow Up' Facebook App

Divesh Sisodraker erstwhile EVP and CFO of Taleo Corporation - now with TheJobMagnet has put together a facebook application called "When I Grow Up!"

You can start by typing in a career in a box. Or, click on "Take a Test" above to help figure out where to begin. One can also "Ask For Feedback" above to have your friends, parents, teachers or anyone else pitch in.

So one can start with choosing a career of their choice. I chose "Training and Development Managers" and then I found that there is a small overview:

Plan, direct, or coordinate the training and development activities and staff of an organization.

Then one can explore the tasks that are entailed in that role:

> Conduct orientation sessions and arrange on-the-job training for new hires.
> Evaluate instructor performance and the effectiveness of training programs, providing recommendations for improvement.
> Develop testing and evaluation procedures.
> Conduct or arrange for ongoing technical training and personal development classes for staff members.
> Confer with management and conduct surveys to identify training needs based on projected production processes, changes, and other factors.
> Develop and organize training manuals, multimedia visual aids, and other educational materials.
> Plan, develop, and provide training and staff development programs, using knowledge of the effectiveness of methods such as classroom training, demonstrations, on-the-job training, meetings, conferences, and workshops.
> Analyze training needs to develop new training programs or modify and improve existing programs.

Knowledge one needs to work in that career is also available. As one can see for a Training and Development manager it covers a lot of detail and yet falls short:

Knowledge

> Clerical - Knowledge of administrative and clerical procedures and systems such as word processing, managing files and records, stenography and transcription, designing forms, and other office procedures and terminology.
> Administration and Management - Knowledge of business and management principles involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.
> Personnel and Human Resources - Knowledge of principles and procedures for personnel recruitment, selection, training, compensation and benefits, labor relations and negotiation, and personnel information systems.
> Education and Training - Knowledge of principles and methods for curriculum and training design, teaching and instruction for individuals and groups, and the measurement of training effects.
> Computers and Electronics - Knowledge of circuit boards, processors, chips, electronic equipment, and computer hardware and software, including applications and programming.

Skills:

> Management of Personnel Resources - Motivating, developing, and directing people as they work, identifying the best people for the job.
> Learning Strategies - Selecting and using training/instructional methods and procedures appropriate for the situation when learning or teaching new things.
> Monitoring - Monitoring/Assessing performance of yourself, other individuals, or organizations to make improvements or take corrective action.
> Reading Comprehension - Understanding written sentences and paragraphs in work related documents.
> Instructing - Teaching others how to do something.
> Social Perceptiveness - Being aware of others' reactions and understanding why they react as they do.
> Speaking - Talking to others to convey information effectively.
> Time Management - Managing one's own time and the time of others.
> Critical Thinking - Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems.
> Service Orientation - Actively looking for ways to help people.

And ability to succeed:

> Speech Clarity - The ability to speak clearly so others can understand you.
> Oral Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in speaking so others will understand.
> Inductive Reasoning - The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).
> Written Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in writing so others will understand.
> Near Vision - The ability to see details at close range (within a few feet of the observer).
> Oral Comprehension - The ability to listen to and understand information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences.
> Speech Recognition - The ability to identify and understand the speech of another person.
> Fluency of Ideas - The ability to come up with a number of ideas about a topic (the number of ideas is important, not their quality, correctness, or creativity).
> Written Comprehension - The ability to read and understand information and ideas presented in writing.
> Deductive Reasoning - The ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.

It also shows the salary and percentile that the salaries are pegged at. However, that's only US-centric and the rest of the world will not benefit so much :-)

$ 58770 $ 80250 $ 107450

25th 50th 75th

So the app will not be a useful tool for people starting their careers but also for folks in their careers and looking for career shifts. Divesh wrote :"Our aim was simple: create a place where people could quickly and easily explore all the dimensions of occupations that they were interested in, or find an occupation that fit them, but that they hadn't previously considered."

Feb 4, 2008

Love and Romance at Work

According to a new survey by TeamLease on office romance in India:

found that around 44% of respondents saw romantic liaisons as the quickest way to climb the corporate ladder.
Nearly 16% of respondents admitted to having been romantically involved with someone at their workplace. Of all cities surveyed, Delhi emerged the most candid, with 28% conceding to such affairs.
But despite the fact that 56% of executives felt that there was a negative impact on the quality and speed of work as a result of their relationships, most respondents believed that their organisations had no right to interfere in their personal affairs. The respondents also felt that women were equal partners to office romances and even initiated affairs, the survey pointed out.
Hmm, so are people saying that HR should do something or not.
On the one hand they are saying that the office should not interfere in their 'personal' lives. On the other hand a majority claim that their is a "negative impact" on the work. That sounds like people want to have their cake and eat it too.

As a HR consultant my suggestion to any clients of mine would be not to over-complicate the issue by having any policies around romance. Policies about sexual harassment and usage of organizational assets like email/IM for personal/romantic use should be discouraged. One can have a policy on spouses working in the same team/reporting relationship, but having people declare their relationship status is getting into murky territory. However managers should give objective feedback to employees when work is suffering without getting prescriptive or normative. Because a lot of these relationships between two married (to other people) employees can be about platonic "office spouses". Where does one really draw a line? And should a line be drawn at all?

The other area of concern is the view that one can romance their way to the top. If an organization's performance management system is not objective and transparent then people do being to talk on these lines. How an organization handles these issues shows how mature it is.

As Valentine's Day approaches at work, how do HR professionals engage themselves with the cupid at the workplace?

Feb 2, 2008

Sapphire HR Newscast

News from the HR World
XLRI Jamshedpur
School of Business & Human Resources
NEWS-VIEWS-TRENDS

Retail cos. look on the fair side of hiring

Some of the biggest players in the organised retail turf are looking up to the fairer sex, especially when it comes to dealing with killer attrition blues. Reliance Retail, Future Group, Shopper’s Stop and RPG Retail are experimenting with a host of hiring models to improve the ratio of fairer sex in their workforce. Most of these retailers have now cottoned on to the fact that women professionals are much more suited for retail job profiles, which ultimately improves retention levels.