Best educated or the best

Sanjay thinks that companies are besotted with educational brands and that shows how they don't think of performance on the job:

I even remember sitting in a conversation when a promotion was being discussed and there were two candidates one a great performer with great potential but from a so-called tier 2 institute and another one from a tier 1 institute but not as a great a performer or potential and most people seemed to favour the person from tier 1 insti.

I had a really difficult time arguing with the client team that the education is supposed to convert to performance on the floor which should entitle people to promotions and not the tag of the education alone, it definitely was quite a difficult conversation. One of the very strong criteria they had for promotion was the qualification a person carried.

Recruiters, hiring managers, HR professionals all help in perpetuating this myth.

Why? What's the point of being from a 'premier institute' if it does not add value to the organization?

Update: A commentator blames HR people. However, I'd like to place the majority of the blame on the hiring managers. If they say non-MBAs are to be considered then the recruiter/HR person has to abide by that unless they have a better reason to only look for MBAs

But this is not just about MBAs and non-MBAs, distinction between 'premier' and 'non-premier' campuses is hogwash!

Weep for the profession

On several egroups that I participate in, I have heard similar stuff. People never want to do any 'searching' (forget research!) on their own. They want stuff handed down to them on a platter and then spoon-fed to them.

Evidently the HR Wench is undergoing the same feelings that she so eloquently describes here.

Let's weep for the poor organizations that such HR folks service. Now I know why a majority of people hate HR.

Er, looks like HR may not be only profession given to self-flagellation and introspection on how to add value.

But what if tomorrow’s IT people became the new rock stars, or at least the new business “Masters of the Universe”? What if the IT person became a hybrid-business technologist, with an impressive combination of technology skill and business savvy?

Imagine an IT department made up of these IT rock stars. Business people would love them for their ability to hone technology into business advantage. IT would no longer be a technology rest-home for the business-indifferent.

Now, replace IT with HR. Sounds like our collective dream, right?

Actually Tom Peters has labelled HR as the Rock Stars of the Talent Age, unfortunately HR people themselves do not seem too excited to become rock stars. Who wants the glaring spotlight when you can sit in the dark and not get threatened? How many HR folks would identify with Tom's message:

| View | Upload your own

Power of the Personal Brand

Rohit Jain, HR Consultant blogs about the two ways to create a strong organization brand:

One approach is to promote and ‘Create a brand for Organization’ which in turn will grow the business and people; the other is to promote and ‘Create a brand for an Individual’ which in turn will promote the organization and business. For different set of groups, organizations both work very well.

Several small to mid political parties are good examples of the second approach. They often create their media plan, campaign around the head of the party because that’s what is likely to get them most mileage. Once they are able to create a strong brand for that person, the organization tends to ride on their brand. They find it easier to differentiate and strong play the characteristics of an individual in most of the cases as against that of the organizations. A strong individual brand is something that has seen to be in many walks of life.

So if you are an emerging organization struggling to create an employment brand, can you turn your CEO and other top management into stars of the industry? It's easier for people to relate to people, so how can you tell stories about your people that'll make others want to be like them?

Building a Cool Place

Abhijit suggests five factors if focused on that will result in a cool place to work. Now let's see how a regular place to work would score in the cool-quotient.

1. Iconic Top Management - This one is tough. There are only so many firms with charismatic and iconic founders and CEOs. 98% firms would be uncool on this standard for coolness.
2. Informal Culture. As Abhijit himself says, building an informal culture is tough. And it's tough in certain cultures because traditional authority and power-distances make it difficult for informality to set up as organizational culture. Check how India ranks on the components of Hofstede's model. Is it difficult to understand why we're so माई बाप about everything from customer service to asking for our own money?
3. Healthy employees: I'm really not sure how many organizations would be called cool on how healthy their employees are. In fact, the trappings of building a healthy workforce (a gym, a pool, tennis courts) are taken much more to be the signs of a 'cool place'. I reckon that 99% of employers would score very low on that.
4. Technology to support flexi-working: Again most Indian organizations would rank very very low on this.
5. Careers that Match the Individual's Aspirations: It would be even marginally true if organizations had alternate careers. However again for a large majority of organizations, career development means setting the organizations needs first and then if needed the person's.

So how cool is your organization?

What would be the factors that would say to you that your company is cool?

How IBM uses Social Media

Interesting article in Businessweek

Social networks in the corporate world involve very different dynamics, and scientists at IBM Research's Collaborative User Div. in Cambridge, Mass., are learning all about them. Over the past two years, IBM has been busily launching in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits. "We're trying to see how things that are hot elsewhere can be fit for business," says Irene Greif, an IBM Fellow who heads up Collaborative User Experience.

So far, IBM has Dogear, a community-tagging system based on Del.icio.us, Blue Twit, and a rendition of the microblogging sensation, Twitter. It also has a Web page called Many Eyes that permits anyone (including outsiders, at many-eyes.com) to upload any kind of data, visualize it, and then launch discussions about it on blogs and social networks. The biggest success is the nine-month-old social network, Beehive, which is based on the premise of Facebook. It has already attracted 30,000 users, including top executives.

Why would Big Blue want to promote such behavior inside the company?

A couple of reasons. First, in a global company with nearly 400,000 employees, most people are too far away to plop down in a teammate's cubicle or grab a cup of coffee. These social tools, IBM hopes, will provide a substitute for personal connections that flew away with globalization—and help to build and strengthen far-flung teams. "People are putting up pictures of their family, the same way they'd put them up in the cubicle," says Joan DiMicco, one of the research scientists.

Adapting these tools, according to IBM, is also important for recruiting. Hotshots coming out of universities are accustomed to working across these new networks—and are likely to look at a company that still relies on the standard '90s fare of e-mail and the phone as slow and backward.

Isn't that cool? IBM is really keen on discovering whether knowledge access is faster via social media than traditional KM efforts. In fact one of my online buddies, Luis Suarez, is a community builder in IBM. Check his presentation that he made to Next08 on More Collaboration through less email. On a related note, on my post on HR and web 2.0 someone else from IBM left a comment:

Gautam, Excellent thoughts. We at IBM have done a good amount of work to address the need to manage, innovation, the changing workforce, the globally integrated enterprise, matrixed organizations of work through social networking and other tools.

ROI of Blogging and Twitter

I'm going to share some stuff without going into details. You heard about how blogging can be a source for business? I don't mean stuff like professional blogging, stuff that people like Amit do. To solely live off advertising via the blog would mean I increase my readership 10x. Erm, isn't going to happen in a hurry.

So what is the ROI of blogging and Twitter that I am talking about?

Am going to share with you two instances that happened in the recent past:

Sometime in Feb I got an email from a person whom I had never contacted me. He introduced himself as the head of Talent Development of a manufacturing concern in India and said that he had read my posts and wanted to explore if my firm could help in their competency development efforts. I said sure, and over the next couple of months we communicated via email and phone with the firm's Talent Development team and we have the deal now. We're going to help them in implementing competency development interventions over this year for a significant part of their leadership and management levels.

Oh, and did I tell you that we've never interacted face to face?

The business came in purely because of this blog.

Story No. 2

There's a blogger I've interacted with earlier via both our blogs. Recently when we both started Twittering (find it much easier than saying "micro-blogging") he twittered that he had got an internal transfer into the HR group of his firm and was having trouble with thinking through a HR intervention.

I twittered that if he could pay me enough I could help him with him. I was only half-joking.

He messaged me directly on Twitter that I could call him and his boss on a certain day. The conversation started, we sent a sort of proposal. Then we didn't hear something for a couple of weeks and he messaged me that they were busy with something else.

So a couple of months passed and last week he Twittered me again. Could we restart the conversation, he asked?

So the story hasn't yet ended and yet both these examples offer a glimpse into what could be a ROI for using blogging and Twitter for business purposes.

Yes there are caveats.

One: Both you and your prospective client would need to be on that social media platform.

That is why, as a prospective rainmaker, I need to be visible across various social media. So, I take care to have a profile every imaginable place. From blogging here, to having pages on Google Pages, the newly launched Google Sites, to trying out Linkedin ( I was amongst the first 20,000 people to sign on), having a profile on Orkut, a page on Facebook (Go ahead, check it out, and become a fan if you want to), Twittering, starting a community on MyBlogLog and now linking my lifestreams on FriendFeed. I also follow tonnes of Business, HR and Recruiting related blogs.

Oh, and did I forget to mention, that building networks virtually is something I have been doing from a long time? From HR and KM related groups to now HR groups on Ning ?

Yes, Blogging and Twittering are just tools. One probably needs to have a mindset to utilise them?

IPL cricket and the corporate angle

In Outlook Kenneth L Shropshire, director, Wharton Sports Business Initiative, spoke about the IPL owners and their team performance and links with business performance. Interesting to note the differences since businesses often end up mimicking sports (note terms like talent, coaching, superstar players, etc.):

To what extent do the principles of running a business apply to sports?

It is often tough to determine this. The best measure of success is that if you have a team, say the Yankees, which consistently wins, your profits from that team increase as well. At times, teams are criticised for not finishing very high in the rankings; but then some of them are purchased for a very low price too.

How are conflicts between managers and owners or players often resolved?

One way is to see how much profit-sharing there is within the league. Players who do well need rewards, they should be encouraged to do better. But teams within a league also need to be encouraged to compete. That depends on optimal profit-sharing.

What about leagues pushing sportsmen to do more than they are able?

Too much emphasis on performance in sport, where you cross an ethical or legal barrier, is not viewed positively by the public in the US. That's why we're having problems with performance enhancement drugs, steroid use etc.

Related stories here on Outlook website:

What's not that clear is the strategy of using brands to piggyback on the fortunes of a sports team: defeat can have a negative impact on the brand. That's why experts say it's best to just treat it as a standalone business. "Corporate values do apply in the world of cricket; but unlike a regular business, these values do not make the outcome of a match predictable,"

Half of Employers Lack Leadership and Education on Workplace-Diversity

Erik Samdhal of i4cp sent me a heads-up to their survey:

A recent study by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) found that 53% of companies do not sponsor diversity training in their organizations, 66% do not have specific diversity councils to serve as a watchdog on issues including race, gender, and sexual orientation and 77% do not have affinity groups in place to support minorities.
The study also found that 68% lack a high-level executive who oversees diversity initiatives. And 65% of respondents admit their organizations do not have a global diversity strategy.
“Many employers seem to think of diversity and inclusion as simply an EEOC compliance issue,” said Eric Davis, i4cp’s Associate Editor. “Employers need to view diversity and inclusion as an important strategy for developing talent. Organizations embracing that concept are more likely to have top-down diversity policies, which include accountability.”
According to the survey, when diversity programs are in place, accountability for diversity strategies tends to start at the top. When asked how leaders are held accountable for driving diversity in their organizations, 31% of respondents said CEOs are subject to annual diversity reviews. Twenty-three percent of those surveyed said their CEO’s compensation is tied to how well the chief executive carried out the organization’s diversity strategy. However, nearly 20% of respondents say their top leadership is not held accountable for ensuring diversity.

In one of my earlier organizations, I was frequently called on to present the session on Diversity and Inclusion policies for new recruits. When I realised that most new recruits were joining from Organizations where such words had never been mention, I switched to a "Devil's Advocate" mode and asked them why they thought an organization had to have these policies.

Most people would say something like "It's a good thing to do". "Societal obligation" etc. etc.

My response was that organizations almost never do something which does not benefit the shareholder. This comment would seem strange to them. How could a policy like this be linked to profit motive.

The link is quite simple. If you are out there selling to a diverse client and consumer base, across geographies and nations - then your workforce has to reflect that diversity.

If a company doesn't, then it is headed for the dustbin of history.

Add to your iGoogle page

Now it's easy. Click on the button below


By the way the MyBlogLog Community of this blog now has 124 members. And the Feedburner subscriber count has crossed 1800.

Cool!

By the way, I updated my About page here to add this bit :-)

Gautam has given talks on “Blogging for Business” at organizations. He’s frequently quoted in the press as an authority on business blogging. If you want to interview him or invite him to speak at a conference, e-mail him or call at +91-98665-11236.

So do you wanna?

Why Searching for Meaning at Work is pretty much useless

Lucy Kellaway writes in the Financial Times:

The search for meaning at work not only goes on unabated but also seems to be getting more urgent all the time.

This crisis of meaningless is a relatively new thing. A report from the Work Foundation published last week argues that looking for meaning at work would have seemed outlandish even a generation ago. But now, as a joint result of affluence and our general leaning towards introspection, it has become the norm. We all insist that our jobs should mean something.

The author of the report, Stephen Overell, points out that meaning is a subjective thing: what counts as meaningful work to one person won’t to another. This means that companies, for all their insistence on “employee engagement programmes”, can’t create meaning and should not try.

Instead they should concentrate on not destroying it – which many of them manage to do effortlessly enough through treating their employees badly.

Read the full article here . Thought provoking!

The Ron Paul Effect: Returns on Conversation

That's the term Rob uses to explain why he's not focussing too much on the web. Yes, it can be an echo-chamber. One should be talking and speaking to other non-web-social-media-people too!

I have a hard time focusing on the web these days because of the Ron Paul effect. For those involved heavily in the web and social media, it seemed as if Ron Paul was at least making a dent in the primaries. As it turned out though, most of the rest of the world had no idea who he was. I think about that every time someone tells me about the latest frivolous web tool that is going to be the next big thing. I wonder, “the next big thing to who? A bunch of web novelty seekers that just move on from big thing to big thing?” It only seems like “everyone” is using the latest and greatest tool because we are pulling from the wrong sample.

I’m not one of those people who thinks that web is bad, or that it is useless. I just think it is a time sink and that the return on “being part of the conversation” is negative for most people. That isn’t anything that hasn’t been said many times before. I just wanted to explain why I’ve been missing.

What's your return on "being part of the conversation"? Is it negative? Why do you persist then?

About Ram Charan and his consulting advice

Regular readers would know I am a big Ram Charan fan, so I loved this article about him on the CNN site. Some interesting vignettes:

Charan's weird and wonderful life is an unintended byproduct of dedication, he insists. Dedication to learning and teaching and service, to the whole set of Hindu virtues embodied by one of Charan's favorite phrases, "Purpose before self." "People used to ask me, What is your ambition?" says Charan, who turned 67 this past Christmas. "I say I have none. My dedication is going to take me where I'm going to be."

"A leader who does not produce leaders is not a great leader," he says. "If you agree, I'd like to put that in." (Gomber nods.) Charan is trying to help Emaar construct a document that will help its managers discern in others what he calls "natural talents," or "God's gifts." "Each of us has to be the best calibrator of natural talent of the people who work with us," he says. "What are the three to five most crucial natural-talent items that each person has? It has to be specific" - he taps the whiteboard for emphasis - "and very clear" - tap - "and repeatable" -tap!

He remembers when he was 7 years old in 1947, watching from the roof of his home as flames destroyed the cloth shop belonging to his father and uncle. After the fire the brothers started over with a shoe shop. Charan was in the shop every morning before school to help open and every afternoon after school until closing. He counted the rupees in the till at the end of the day, inspiring a lifelong appreciation for the "blood" of business. ("Any company I go to, the first thing I check is cash. How's your cash? Where's your cash flow? No blood, you got a problem right away.")

Charan never excelled at the academic research that leads to tenure at a top-tier school. He was interested more in cause and effect than statistical correlation. His aims were practical: How can I solve this problem? How can I help this person? This company? He began taking on more and more consulting gigs. Most B-school professors consult on the side; in Charan's case, it was his calling.

What defines his career, even more than the quality of his client roster, is its stability. This is his 37th year working for GE, his 33rd for DuPont. He worked with John Snow for 15 years before Snow left

His method is no method. He is wary of abstraction and belongs to no school of management theory. "Converting highfalutin ideas to the specifics of the company and the leader - that's the trick," he once confided to me in an elevator. "The other part is working backward to define what the need is, and then searching for what helps. Then you bring it to common sense, and common sense is very uncommon."

Charan brings observation, curiosity, and care. He lets his clients decide how to use him. Sometimes all he does is ask the right question. "I remember the first time he came to see me," says Caperton. "We were driving to the airport in Charleston, W.Va., and he said to me, 'Why are you trying to grow this thing so fast?' I was sort of shocked by the question. Three weeks later my financial guy came to me and said, 'We don't have money to meet payroll.' Charan realized we were growing too fast, that's why he asked me that question. That was a much better way to teach me, wasn't it?"

"Charan really pushed me on the whole business-partnership piece," Conaty recalls, meaning no more HR initiatives for HR's sake, "and the function as a result is much more credible and visible in GE today than it was."

"I knew what I wanted to do," says Reed, "but I wasn't 100% sure how to get it done. That's a big distinction if you're in business. A lot of consultants come in to tell you what you should be doing. This was not that. This was a question of how best to get it done."

Reed says, "Ram is a catalyst in the real sense of that word. He facilitates things happening but doesn't take part in them himself. And he is an immense source of energy. When you're trying to get large organizations to do things, energy is extremely important. He forces you to tell him what it is you want to do, and he forces you to really be clear in your own mind what those things are and what steps have to be taken. Often it's getting the wrong guy out of a job. But the point is, he starts out by basically forcing you to think with him and be very clear. Then, okay, you notice that he isn't doing anything, he's just forcing you to do it. Then once you've agreed on everything you want to do, he calls you up every ten minutes and asks why haven't you done it yet."

"I'm a lucky man!" Charan likes to say. "I am allowed to do what I love to do!" While I still don't really understand him, I am beginning to believe him. Surely there are many ways to live fully and be happy on this earth; probably, he has found his own.

Roundup of some great HR blog posts

Laurie has a cool compilation of links talking about HR and other animals, oh, actually she's talking about Animals and Human Resources ;-)

Kris Dunn at HR Capitalist says we should pause and think a lot before announcing a telecommute program to fight rising gas prices. Involve the business in the decision. Let them own it. Don't do it for the sake of doing it.

Steve at All Things Workplace blogs that talents should be made stronger. Are you putting your talents to work and developing them?

Scott provides a slideshow to Charlene Li's book Groundswell focusing on Social Technographics Ladder. Guess I am a Creator, Critic, Collector, Joiner and Consumer all in one :-)

Michelle Malay Carter puts on her worklevel goggles to THE question in HR "How do we get a seat at the table?"

The Happy Employee has a roundup of the World without HR Contest. Hey, nobody told me about any contest :(

The HR Wench has something to say to third party recruiters. Heh, yeah we HR types totally get along with third party recruiters. Something like Marketing and Ad Agencies, if you don't know HR ;-)

Theory of Constraints

Jack Vinson blogs about TOC and I think the rules for technology given below are applicable for any change effort:

On recommendation of a friend, I re-read Necessary But Not Sufficient by Eli Goldratt, Eli Schragenheim and Carol A. Ptak. It's another Theory of Constraints business novel. This time the focus is on the principals at a large software vendor (ERP systems) and their primary systems integrator.

The rules for technology:

1. What is the power of the technology?
2. What limitation is being overcome (limited capacity, for example)?
3. What old rules were followed because of the limitation (and need to be eliminated)?
4. What new rules need to be created?

I liked how the authors walked through the discovery and articulation of these rules with the characters. The "limitation" is often hard enough to discover, but those "rules" that came about because of the limitation are a bear. They quite often have nothing to do with the technology being proposed, but without acknowledging them, the limitation becomes the rules themselves and the technology (or any other change) will never see its full benefit.

So what are the rules because of old systems that you ignore when changing systems and processes?

Some interesting websites

There's a lot of action happening in the recruiting and work related sites section. Here's my take on some of the ones that have come to my attention:

• Talentty: I got to know of them when they added my blog to their blogroll. No request for coverage via a mail or something like that. Smart. However the blog does not have any updates after April 5th. Not so good. The main website itself has tried to segregate according to industry, and specialising in the Tech and ITES domains. There are also tabs for "Hot Jobs", "Walk-ins", "Onsite Jobs", "Startup" , "Freshers" and "Freelancers". The software section has the most jobs, however overall the number of jobs at Talentty is low. While they have added bells and whistles like RSS feeds category-wise, unless they are able to ramp up the variety and number of jobs I don't see Talentty making much of an impact on the jobsite scene.

• Orglex - This site showcases itself as a place for Industry and Organizational hubs. Putting a different spin on business networking when you join a hub. A hub is basically aggregated content from across the web on News, People, Blogs and Jobs that fall under that hub. Orglex seems to be positioning itself as a place for recruiters to find and get talent. While the attempt at aggregating all this content from across the web on one site can help it get membership, I think the lack of original content and exclusive jobs can affect the growth. The net is going local, and there are no geographical based hubs that one can join. So if I join management consulting and if there was a India hub too that I join then the technology should be able to filter that anyway, since news can be filtered by Google News. Interesting proposition, but work needs to be done on it.

• Workology - Has just come out of its invitation-only testing phase and apparently has 1000 members. It's primarily UK based and one sets up an account and tags oneself. The system then throws up work and projects for people who are interesting in contracting and consulting opportunities. In fact the site is geared for the new way of working - portfolio careers - and therefore shouldn't be your stop for a career related job. They have a blog too at http://www.workology.com/blog/

• Zyoin - It bills itself as the Next generation Career Portal, and it seems to be a referral jobsite too, a la Reffster. They also have PayScale's gadget to calculate salary to help jobseekers find the salary suitable for them I presume. Their blog http://zyoin.wordpress.com/ talks about online learning and assessment to be also in the pipeline. I still don't think that India is ready for referral jobsites. Somewhere there has to be an integration from these sites into organizational Applicant tracking systems and they should be geared to organization's internal referral programs. The other mistake these jobsites seem to be making is that they think that building a website is enough. They have to invest in a sales team and sell the concept to corporates since the bigger jobsites are well entrenched and leverage their existing relationships. And unless there is a proof of concept of online assessment to go along with it, corporates will not choose to try a new innovation.

The other thing I don't see is a concerted effort to leverage social networks that Indians seem to be joining in droves, like Orkut and Facebook and hi5. Building a site and trying to get an audience is a tough proposition for new sites.

Advorto's guide to Online Recruitment

Advorto, a UK based HR recruiting software company, has put together a free guide to online recruitment and they are making it available on registering some details if you visit http://www.advorto.com/guide.

Some of the areas the guide covers and are usually ignored by organizations are:

• Start with your career site - It's pathetic to see the bad quality of career sites that organizations employ. Marketing and Corporate Communications should be talking to IT and HR to make it a showcase to future employees.
• Consider other sites - Apart from the job sites, are there industry sites where your potential audience hangs out, virtually?
• Use your intranet, it’s free!
• Start a candidate e-newsletter - I gave this idea to a previous employer, got an award for it, but I don't think they have yet implemented it. And today I'd add to offer the newsletter by RSS feed too.
• Create an online referral system
• Consider using social networks
• Add a recruitment blog to your site

Most of these are not heavy on your recruitment budget, but usually HR and Recruiting heads in India are unaware of these new channels to boost the pipeline of candidates. This small pdf guide is sure to be a great resource for them! If you're interested in Recruitment in the new online world you can check their blog out too.

Great Places to Work in India 2008

From the Economic Times

Noida-based IT services company, RMSI, has won the best workplaces 2008 awards. The awards are the outcome of a survey conducted by the Great Place to Work Institute (GPTW) India, in partnership with The Economic Times.

Marriott Hotels India and Google India were the first and second runners-up, respectively. The announcements were made on Friday in Mumbai.

Speaking at the event, GPTW CEO, Prasenjit Bhattacharya said: “Trust in management, pride in one’s job and camaraderie are the three things that makes an organisation a great place to work.” The study, that gave two-third weightage to employee feedback and a third to a structured questionnaire, surveyed more than 36,000 employees across 250 companies. Of these, the top 50 companies were recognised at the event.

Emphasising the role of people, Tarun Das, chief mentor, confederation of Indian Industries (CII), said: “We need to adopt a PPPP approach i.e. public private and people partnership to make this country a great place to work. Also, women need to come to the centrestage. This does not mean I support reservation bug, they need to be given due recognition.”

This year, manufacturing companies made a comeback as they were the second most-represented sector (24%) after the IT (26%). Of the top 50 companies, while 11 belonged to the IT space, 10 were from the manufacturing sector. Cadbury’s, Agilent Technologies and American Express were some other companies that featured in the top 10 list.

Ah well, another year another ranking. How do these rankings actually affect people's choice of a workplace? Would you join say an RMSI over any other IT services company all other things (role, location, salary) remaining same? And if Trust in management, pride in one’s job and camaraderie are the three things that makes an organisation a great place to work then how can organizations consciously build "pride in one's job"? Isn't than an intrinsic attitude to the employee? Does the organization need to select people on the basis of attitude, then?

In the company of giants

In an article on the Mail Today I've been put in the company of giants as "our Blogging Stars" meaning Indian "stars". The others in that list are (gulp) Om Malik, Rafat Ali and Amit of Labnol fame.

The article claims Blogging has become serious business in India now.

I'm not really so sure. As this interview between Darren Rowse (known as Problogger) and Guy Kawasaki shows a majority of Bloggers earn less than $15 dollars a year.

So how can blogging become serious business? That will happen when blogging networks take off in India and some bloggers become a part of the larger media businesses. These would be the bloggers who have an audience and a certain 'brand' appeal. Not everyone might want to pursue this and not every 'big' blogger would choose this path.

For example, UTVi which is headed by journo-cum-blogger Govindraj Ethiraj has roped in two prominent bloggers, BombayAddict and Rashmi Bansal for two different TV shows. And popular blogger Sidin Vadukut joined Mint WSJ as a journalist.

That is most likely how blogging will evolve into a business.

P.S. The Recruiting Animal takes me to the cleaners for posting this :-)

Marketing and HR have to talk

On CNBC-Tv18 one of my favourite programs is Storyboard. A week ago they ran a special episode anchored by Nokia India's head honcho Shivakumar.

The theme for the episode was advertising and branding of pure services businesses. They did a feature on airlines and showcased Kingfisher Airlines as a case study and also looked at a pure consulting business and talked to a Partner at Bain & Co, in India.

The learning was that services businesses are people related. Their behavior and skills is the actual product that the client/buyer is paying for. And then reporter said one thing "Marketing has to get off its ivory tower and talk to HR to actually build the brand in reality"

That's so true.

If your brand promise is something else and your recruiters and HR generalist select and measure people against other standards, you're setting up your services organization for a failure in front of your customers.

Is your a services organization? How much does Marketing and Branding work along with HR?

The carnival of HR and the Moneyed Midways

The Carnival of HR is up at the Career Encouragement blog (apologies for the delay in putting this up), and there's this interesting collection of the best blog posts featured from the various blog Carnivals collected and judged by the Political Calculations blog - called Moneyed Midways - and our blog post is one of them.

Awesome! What a way to end the week!

By the way, here's a social network exclusively for HR professionals that I thought would be an interesting experiment. It's on Ning and you can join it by going here. There are 32 members as I write from senior HR heads to COOs of organizations who have enrolled in the last one day since I started it.

hrNsight

Just discovered a site called hrNsight which describes itself as a "independent user-driven professional content online clearinghouse for the exchange of information and insight for HR professionals hosted by VenuLex. VenuLex has established relationships with over fifty of the nation’s leading law firms, accounting firms and consulting firms to provide quality information to HR professionals and their professional associations. VenuLex is independent; we do not provide consulting services and are not affiliated with any of our contributors. "

Whew!

Well what is cool that this site considers this blog a 'leading HR blog' which gets featured in their HR blogs section.

Thanks, good folks behind hrNsight, for giving this blog the honor.

MNCs struggle to manage talent says McKinsey Quarterly

From McKinsey Quarterly (registration reqd.)

A McKinsey survey of managers at some of the world’s best-known multinationals covered a range of sectors and all the main geographies. Our findings suggest that the movement of employees between countries is still surprisingly limited and that many people tempted to relocate fear that doing so will damage their career prospects. Yet companies that can satisfy their global talent needs and overcome cultural and other silo-based barriers tend to outperform those that don’t.

The responses confirmed impressions from the interviews that companies now struggle on a number of talent-management fronts, such as achieving greater cultural diversity, overcoming barriers to international mobility, and establishing consistent HR processes in different geographical units

Participants cited several personal disincentives to global mobility, but one of the most significant was the expectation that employees would be demoted after repatriation to their home location. “Overseas experience is not taken seriously and not taken advantage of,” commented one senior manager. “Much valuable experience dissipates” because companies have a habit of “ignoring input from returnees, and many leave.” The quality of the support for mobility a company provides (for instance, assistance with housing and the logistical aspects of a move) also plays a decisive role in determining how positive or challenging an overseas assignment is for expatriates.

Well, looks like some countries like India don't really keep up with that trend. Overseas exposure is still looked at with a certain expectation. However there are country specific skills for some functions like employment law related for HR and financial accounting practices for Finance that an expat would need to learn.

On a different note, if the expat is relocating from a slow growing economy to a hypergrowth industry in India (like telecom, retail or insurance) then the experience is actually of little or no use, and can also be counter-productive. The person might need to go through a very long unlearning and learning phase.

Review: Escape from Corporate America

When Alex sent me his wife's first book, I took a lot of time to get down to reading it. It was the early proof and the cover wasn't what you see on the left side.

Then I wished I hadn't kept it off for so long.

Escape from Corporate America written by Pam Skillings is ,first and foremost, a joy to read. More often than not, business related books are absolutely boring to read, even if the content is quite interesting.

Pam however is a writer who knows her mettle. And she knows what she's talking about. As someone who wanted to be a journalist and ended up working in corporate America to earn her paycheck her book's message is a simple one : "If you are doing something that you are hating just because you think there is no other option, you need to treat yourself better"

Doing so she looks at the people who have left corporate roles behind and started alternate careers, from people like Dilbert creator Scott Adams and Hollywood gossip blogger Perez Hilton.

Skillings is right when she says that most people on most days don't find meaning and engagement in what they do. They spend majority of their waking hours and they don't know how they are getting through it. Most employers are not known for being generous employers and except for a handful it translates that a majority of employers are 'bad places' to work.

She tells the story of an investment banker who became a chef, for example. And she addresses the doubts and risks that all of us have before going so.

This book is not for the entrepreneur to be, or how to make up business plans for venture capital and PE firms. It is a steady nudge showing a mirror on us asking us are you truly happy at your work?

Of course, there are lucky few who get, well, lucky. The learning for us HR types is how we can make that a reality for others too. Pam has a questionnaire that Bob Sutton blogged about here.

Of course as a HR professional I wish Pam had included concepts like Career Anchors and Job Sculpting but I'm not complaining. With these numbers of disillusioned or disengaged employees why are HR groups not doing something to change that statistic.

The chapter that resonated with me most was solopreneurship. Probably because I had done it. I just wish I had this book to read before I took the plunge, maybe things might have been a lot smoother. Pam offers a lot of very practical advice on how to get solopreneurship to work for you.

But as Seth Godin says, sometimes not taking a risk is the biggest risk of all.

Am not sure if the book is available in India (it just launched on 13th May) but you should read it. Even if you are very happy in a corporate job. It makes you look clearly and with humor on what you are giving up on. And that's always good to know :-)

P.S. You might want to read the excepts at Forbes.com

If children or other family members rely on you financially, it's important to make sure that they will be taken care of during the transition. Making an educated financial plan will be a top priority, and you will have to put more money aside to ensure that all essential costs are covered.

Still, while such preparations may take longer, the benefits can more than compensate. You may have more time to spend with your family as a result of your career change. You will definitely be more fun to hang around with once you're working in a career that energizes you.

Many of the successful corporate escapees I interviewed had families to support, and quite a few were the primary breadwinners. They approached their career changes a bit more cautiously than others, but they didn't settle for career drudgery just because they had responsibilities.

HR certifications not any great help says reader

apeksha left a comment on "Talent shortage in HR in India?":

We have a whole lot of graduates being churned out each year..unfortunately most of them though talented, are not from a "recognized" college, or lack the right 'attitude'.

as for having a body like CIPD, i dont know. I just became a graduate member of CIPD, will get my degree from the university of Edinburgh..and i still cant find anyone who wants to hire me becuz i do not have "adequate" experience

Last Friday I attended a meet of SHRM India at the Satyam School of Leadership in Hyderabad. Nina Woodard head of SHRM in India, was talking about the PHR, SPHR and GPHR certifications that SHRM's HRCI body offers. While PHR and SPHR are very US specific certifications, GPHR certification seems to be the only one for non-US professionals to take. However the eligibility for that seems limited to HR leaders who are already delivering global HR processes.

Of course, there exists the other route to develop HR professionals, which is by building their skills like CII, National NHRD Network and XLRI are trying to do together. However, in my view that is a much slower model and might not take newer competencies that are becoming essential to HR professionals into account.

Subverting Monsterindia.com's usage policies

I got this very interesting email from someone recently:

Hi,

We have Monsterindia.com if u

Wanted to share my account at low cost (See below). And if u are interested pls contact us immediate.

Hours - Total( 1 year) - Installment

6pm - 9am(eve) - 24000/RS - 2000/RS (Month)
9am - 6pm - 48000/RS - 4000/RS (Month)
24 hours - 60000/RS - 5000/RS (Month)


Note: Give us ur full contact details..

Thanks,

So is this a new idea for recruiters or smaller organizations on how to make additional revenue? If so, then I am sure it violates some of Monsterindia.com's terms and conditions of usage. Guess it's this one:

Users are also prohibited from violating or attempting to violate the security of any Monster Site, including, without limitation the following activities: (a) accessing data not intended for such user or logging into a server or account which the user is not authorized to access;

Am not sure if this is a rampant scheme or some chap just came up with this idea and was unfortunate enough to mail me.

I guess the feedback for Monster is that their services are probably overpriced for some of their clients and they should have some other schemes particularly for small and medium enterprises.

I wonder if these practices are also happening to the other jobsites like Naukri and Timesjobs?

Can't the webmasters scan for different IP addresses using the same employer id? Those would be very suspicious cases for such usage.

The Case for Shallow relationships

Ford Harding, consultant and expert on Professional Services Marketing, posts on his blog:

The characteristics of a good, though not-deep relationship include mutual respect as people and as professionals and commitment to help each other, if in limited ways. They do not need to include shared interests beyond the narrow field in which the two people network together.

At this level the born-again Christian and the atheist give to each other and get back. The sports nut and the ballet buff work to make each others’ lives better. People whose countrymen are at each others’ throats look out for each others’ welfare.

This is not a utopian vision. It exists in many heavily networked markets. It is not a formula for world peace, but can make our lives more interesting and rewarding.

Remember one more thing about these less than profound relationships: Anyone who has been out of work or had a personal crisis learns that it is not always the people you expected to who help you the most. Sometimes the deep relationships are not as deep as we had thought and some of the shallow ones aren’t so shallow.

I often see in networking groups that my friend Vincent Wright manages that unknown people volunteer to help with nary a thought about getting 'returns'. Such people understand the actual meaning of networking.

I'll be at the SHRM India meet at Hyderabad today

If you are going to be there too, then let's meet.

SHRM India is the Indian chapter of the Society of Human Resources Management.

Details here. Call Shrividhya to get more info.

Setting Up a Competency Center

An email a reader sent me:

Let me introduce myself. I head the competency management center at xyz, inc.

I request you to share your knowledge on, setting up a Competency Center. I would want to work on the following this year

1. Setting up the state of art infrastructure.
2. Come out with a robust model for training of all employees in soft skills.

Pl do guide me on coming out with a good working plan.


for point 1. Setting up the state of art infrastructure: I would ask you to take the following into account:

Growth of the business
Kind of Competency Development needed
Budgets

For point 2. [Come out with a robust model for training of all employees in soft skills.] I would suggest you to:

1. have a discussion with the heads of the business
2. come up with gaps between current competency and future needs of business
3. Analyse if it makes sense to build the competency or acquire it. For example if the organization is going for a strategic change in direction it might need to hire different kinds of people than trying to make the current people develop different skills/mindsets. Skills are easier to build. Mindsets are not
4. Decide on your delivery plan - classroom, e-learning, blended learning depending on how your people are distributed.
5. Link these development initiatives to actual work, by way of projects and give people's managers accountability for the success.

Hope that helps!

The role of trainer

On a training e-group there was a discussion whether it is correct or proper for trainers to use the group as a resource bank to ask for presentations on various soft-skill topics.

This got me to think about the role of a trainer and I posted this email to the group:

This dependence on "slides" still means that we trainers are on a "Teaching" mode.... the sage on the stage

To really achieve learning amongst adult learners I would suggest using the different aspects of adult learning like active experimentation, reflective observation, concrete experience and abstract conceptualisation (ref: Kolb's learning theory)

Only then can we move from a "teaching mode" to a "facilitator of learning", being the "guide by the side"

People in a training room have collectively more wisdom and learning than the trainer, and the true role of a trainer is to get them to express it and share it with each other and crystallise it. A trainer is a catalyst.

When you try to teach adults, they will never learn

Plaxo taking on Linkedin

Stealthily contact management site Plaxo has been adding functionalities to take on business networking site Linkedin as well as trying to become a platform for people to integrate their disparate online personas (like Friendfeed for example)

So when I logged in today to Plaxo (I am still a Linkedin regular :-) I noticed that Plaxo has added people search abilities.
Then there's the option to add your professional profile, which you might agree does not link very clearly to its stated position of being a "address book for the web"
But Plaxo's most interesting feature is Plaxo Pulse which tells you what your connections have been twittering, blogging or connecting with others.

In fact, one can now setup a public profile that can been seen by others with a easy to remember URL like mine is http://gautam.myplaxo.com/

Should Linkedin be worried? Maybe not in the short term, since Plaxo is still limited to the early adopters and its earlier privacy concerns haven't really gone way. However, if Linkedin does not iron out its performance issues, people might start using Plaxo increasingly more.

Getting Free and Getting High

I recently completed an online survey on Career Anchors that my Organizational Behavior professor from XLRI, Dr. R.K. Premarajan asked his former students to do.

According to his conclusion my top two career anchors are:

Getting High - High career anchor indicates a passion for solving the unsolvable –a constant drive to take on challenge.
Getting Free – People with autonomy as career anchors cannot stand to be bounded by rules. They tend to do it in their own way, their own time and their own standards. They prefer work where the goals are defined but the means of accomplishment are left to the person.

Hmm, explains quite a lot about why my career has gone the way it has until now :-)

Which are your primary career anchors amongst the following?

• Getting Ahead – People having an overriding interest to influence, manage and lead others. They value positions and power and prestige and possess a range of competence required for general managerial roles.
• Getting Secure – People have an overriding need to feel safe and secure and have a predictable future. They may prefer stable predictable work with low risk.
• Getting Free – People with autonomy as career anchors cannot stand to be bounded by rules. They tend to do it in their own way, their own time and their own standards. They prefer work where the goals are defined but the means of accomplishment are left to the person.
• Getting Balanced – These people believe in integrating the professional life with the total lifestyle. They enjoy working for organizations that recognize personal and family concerns.
• Getting High - High career anchor indicates a passion for solving the unsolvable –a constant drive to take on challenge.

Edgar Schein did a lot of work with career anchors. Here is what he came up with:

1. Autonomy/independence - wanting to be self reliant - useful with today's contracting out.
2. Security/stability - wanting to remain with one employer for life - not so likely any more.
3. Technical/functional competence - to identify with a professional discipline.
4. General management - having a broad, overview, facilitating role, not a specialist.
5. Entrepreneurial creativity - a premium wherever innovation drives competitiveness.
6. Service - dedication to worthwhile causes ranging from the environment to poverty.
7. Pure challenge - just solving difficult problems - no pattern necessary.
8. Life style - disinclination to sacrifice life style solely for career advancement.

Also take a look at Life Interests and Job Sculpting.

Insights You Can Get from Exit Management

Exit Insights By Tvarita Consulting

From: gautam, 24 minutes ago

| View | Upload your own

How can you manage your exit process better? Some thoughts and approaches by Tvarita Consulting


SlideShare Link

Ready for Chief Blogging Officers?

OK, this article on the Workforce site (hat-tip Kaushik) seems to be the perfect example of a link bait, and I'm biting it :-).

I personally don't think companies should rush into blogging or go about embracing web2.0 tools indiscriminately, unless they are clear on what they are trying to accomplish by doing so. Having objectives for blogging and usage of other social communication tools is a much better idea, otherwise people would feel that "these folks have a fun job". Blogging is definitely not only fun (for professional bloggers there might be a huge cost also attached!).

Blogging and other tools (like Twitter etc) are inherently more suited for the human voice, hence a corporate tool must reflect a human voice of the organization. Something that Mario Sundar does so well on Twitter as well as the Linkedin blog. His real success comes from getting others within the organization to showcase the organization and its success.

And no, I don't think Chief Blogging Officer as a designation is going to catch up in India. Ok, maybe a manager of communications who looks at "social media" (but the term itself is so outdated now - and before you point out - yeah I know, I have a label on the right hand sidebar called Social media!), and that too would be confined to the digital and online world for the next 2-3 years at least!

However, I would admit to one thing. Hiring a blogger to augment your PR/Communication team is a great idea, since a blogger knows that bloggers are not journalists and you don't pitch them stories like you do traditionally. PR people might not change their behavior and hence it's a good point to have a blogger to connect with external bloggers. Chris Brogan has a great post on how to do that BTW.

By the way, here's an excerpt from the article:

For better or worse, it seems corporate blogging—and the title of chief blogger—is beginning to hit its stride. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott and Kodak have recently recruited chief bloggers, with or without the actual title, to tell their stories and engage consumers.

“It’s a good idea to have a chief blogger,” said Mack Collier, a social-media consultant and blogger at the Viral Garden, citing Dell’s Lionel Menchaca and LinkedIn’s Mario Sundar as examples of a personality positively affecting a brand.

At the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, in March, “[Menchaca and Sundar] were getting hugged in the hallway,” Collier said. “And that popularity is bleeding over into Dell and LinkedIn.”

Today, just more than 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies have corporate blogs, according to SocialText, and only a handful have a designated chief blogger.

Using Blogs to Brand Yourself for Career Growth

"Jigyasa" (meaning 'curiosity'), is the annual journal of MHROD (Master of Human Resource & Organizational Development) which was conceived by Delhi School of Economics in 1995.

When Bindiya, the Editor of the Journal asked me for an article for the journal this is what I came up with :-)

Using Blogs to Brand Yourself for Career Growth

It’s been almost five and a half years since I started blogging about business issues. Almost 2000 blog posts later I have come to the conclusion that blogging is not just a cathartic way to get things off, to make connections and publish your take on current events from sports and politics, but can also be a tool that boosts “Brand You!”

“Brand You!” was a phrase coined by management guru Tom Peters more than a decade ago for Fast Company magazine. Not surprisingly though, both tompeters.com and fastcompany.com have integrated blogging deep into their websites. Uber-tech blogger Robert Scoble is now with Fast Company’s TV website.

However, back to “Brand You!” The radical idea in 1997 when it was published was that the employee-employer contract was no longer for life, but contextually based on how useful were each of them to the other. Hence, the only thing that would guarantee employees future work would be the ability for them to brand themselves and their work. In some ways, it’s a scary idea. Brand You! focused on making people look at themselves as individual consultants who would work with various employers on a project to project mode.

Revisiting the concept Tom Peters wrote:

If you grew up thinking that you were going to work for Citibank for 40 years, you're simply not going to survive with the same set of attitudes that you've had in the past. If you're going to reinvent yourself for this new reality--and I say "if," but it's really not an option--here's how to develop the attitude that will let you reimagine yourself as the CEO of Me Inc. and save yourself before it's too late.

In fact, what Tom was asking people to do, is what Dan Pink chronicled in a much more radical way, about people turning free agents in his book “Free Agent Nation”.

For a new generation the mindset has to be thinking of being CEOs of Me, Inc.

This is where Blogging comes in.

Blogging is a tool that can help people brand themselves as experts and be pursued by prospective clients (employers). The advantages of blogs are manifold –

1. Blogs are great for showcasing expertise – Even if you are a programmer, a tailor on London’s Savile Row, an author, a designer, a cartoonist, an accountant, a blog can help you showcase your expertise. When you write with passion about your area of expertise, it comes through and communicates your unique voice to a reader better than any brochure or static website.

2. Blogs are great for tapping the Long tail – Wired editor Chris Anderson coined the term Long Tail to explain that very small producers of goods and very small consumers could economically still produce, sell and find each other thanks to the aggregating power of the internet. Being in a ultra-specialised niche is not scary anymore, if the total market exists across the world. Long Tail is the phenomenon that causes unknown books to sell at Amazon and for small sellers on ebay.

3. Search engines love blogs – We have seen circumstantial evidence of search engines changing in the way they rank results - giving preference to “recent content” over more authoritative content. That means there exists a great opportunity for producers of original content to get noticed by a worldwide audience.

4. Building a community – As someone said, links are the currency of the internet, and the same holds true for blogging too. When I started blogging I found a few HR and Recruiting bloggers in the US and Canada, and then through them I connected to a lot more bloggers in our niche. To help our readers find them I include them on my blogroll. I also keep watching incoming links to my blog, especially from within posts and try to respond to other’s take on my thoughts.

So the best way to build a blog and your own career-related brand is to produce great content, getting people to find you and connecting to them and investing in building a community. Other tools like social networks (Orkut, Facebook) and business networks (Linkedin) and microblogging tools like Twitter are also additional tools to supplement your blog’s branding and communication strategy.

Linkedin | Facebook Page | Orkut | MyBlogLog | Twitter |

Some really good HR related posts

The Evil HR lady tells someone working in a small firm how to deal with a lousy pay raise.

SystematicHR looks at the reasons why Taleo seems to be going downmarket.

Steve Roesler says that a well bred head should be accompanied with a smart heart. I cannot stress how useless is IQ without EQ.

Michelle Malay Carter takes a look at the 2008 list of most Democratic Workplaces and says though she disagrees with the term she likes what they are measuring.

Penelope Trunk has a test to decide whether one will get promoted. Want to know more? Check it out.

Prasad Kurian ruminates whether 'passion at work' can be developed at all and links to something called anasakti - passion without attachment (stop smirking you dirty minds!). Kartik was thinking of the same issue a couple of months ago.

Mike looks at a new technology offering that adds some personality to hiring. Another post of his looks at how psychology, sociology and economics seeks to answer the same questions and how it relates to talent management.

Scott McArthur blogs about a survey that says people expect Networking will become a more and more important and distinctive skill in the future. I totally agree, and am amazed how consultants can't seem to network and collaborate to share business, operating in their needs to guard "their" clients and "their" projects. More on this point later.

From my other blog:
There's a SHRM India meet in Hyderabad on 9th May. RSVP details here. Nina Woodard SPHR, GPHR, Executive Director SHRM India will be there.
HR still faces challenges in India getting business acceptance.
There are millions of SMEs without HR processes or leadership

Getting my own domain name

In case you are wondering why I haven't been blogging too much, there are two reasons.

Twitter has been taking up my time for me to connect with social networks and other bloggers and social media enthusiasts, thanks to the absolutely cool Twitterfox - an extension for Firefox.

The other thing has been my own domain, GautamGhosh.net to which I have currently mapped my wordpress.com blog. Have to figure out if and how I'll integrate this blog on to that domain.