Tom's top 3 strategic imperatives are people related

On his blog uber-guru Tom Peters writes :

I hereby assert that the three most important strategic factors* [*or, at least, three of the tippy tippy topmost important strategic ...] affecting enterprise success are:

(1) Recruiting-evaluating-hiring

(2) The 1st-line supervisor promotion decision

(3) Promotion decisions in general

If my threefold assertion is even close to true [and it is, at the very least, worth examining], are its implications directly reflected in your calendar and business practices in general? If they are not so reflected, what—precisely—are you prepared to do about it?

Being at the receiving end and Layoffs

Prasad reviews Abhijit's book (my review is here ) and looks at the HR lessons from it. I'd like to highlight two:

 I have found that 'being at the receiving end of HR' (experiencing an HR process as an employee, especially if it is a 'not so pleasant' experience) can be a great eye-opener for an HR professional. This helps one to be more sensitive to the 'human' in 'Human Resources'. While most of us have been employees also (in addition to having been HR professionals) for most part of our careers, we often have this strange tendency to discount our experiences as employees (as internal customers of HR strategies/ processes/ policies) as compared to our experiences as HR professionals (who design/run HR strategies/ processes/ policies).

The last point I want to talk about here is insight that the book provides about the 'increased cost' (human and social cost) of retrenchment in the Indian context. Since there is little or no social security provided by the state, the role of the employer/expectations from the employer in this domain get heightened. I would even say that since the joint family system (that used to provide some sort of insurance/social security) is breaking down, this aspect can become even more significant. Then there is this issue of 'family involvement'. Since many of us still have the tendency to 'get our families involved' in most of the important decisions that we take (like marriage and job!), separation from the job has an impact on the family that goes beyond the economic impact (as it can have impact on dimensions like family pride and even identity!). This also has implications for the 'innovative' employee engagement & employee retention strategies/ initiatives that many organizations are trying out these days - initiatives/strategies that try to 'lock in' the employees by actively involving their families (like parents day, get the families to the office etc.). Yes, these can help in reducing employee attrition/voluntary turnover. However, this would also makeretrenchment/involuntary separation more difficult for the organization and more painful for employees (and their families).

On a related note today's Corporate Dossier in ET looks at the inability to layoff people in the Indian context, from a legal and cultural angle.

 In their defence, CEOs dole out a long list of compulsions and arguments. The foremost argument proffered is that of ‘Company is Family’ . Ask Kishore Biyani, chairman, Future Group who almost agrees with Goyal on the latter’s patriarchal approach to leading a business.  “Indians tend to be very emotional , and we treat our employees as family. Culturally, we are very different from other countries. In our society , the workforce is treated like the kutumb (family) and the CEO is the karta (a guardian, if you will) of the family. It is his responsibility to maintain the well-being of all employees. If an Indian company is firing people, you can be certain that it’s the very last resort left for the company,” he says.

When posed the same question, Harsh Goenka, chairman of one of the older Indian conglomerates, the RPG Group, puts forth a similar argument. “Traditionally, our mindset doesn’t allow us to downsize, and labour has always been a sensitive subject in this country. Companies have gone sick and died but they have refused to resort to layoffs,” he says. What they don’t realise, he adds, is that the entire workforce suffers instead of a few.

Though there have always been political dimensions to firing people, such pressures have only become more acute lately, as the Jet episode clearly brings out. “Political effects seem to be of a more serious nature since most of our unions are affiliated to political parties. Therefore, the politics takes an upper hand, compared to the business needs,” confesses Niraj Bajaj, chairman of stainless steel products maker Mukand.

No wonder then, companies are often all too careful about managing their financial troubles with socially responsible solutions. For instance , the Tata group, which has actively scaled down its workforce in companies like Tata Motors and Tata Tea, and is of the view that economics doesn’t always win.

Jobs and the India slowdown story

Business Today publishes an interesting survey. Take a look:

According to the latest BT-TeamLease Employment Outlook Survey (October-December 2008 quarter), the caution visible in the last quarter has turned into a decisive downturn—both in hiring and business sentiment. The Employment Outlook is down 10 index points. Employers are in the wait’n’watch mode. The result: hiring activity is likely to be sluggish in most sectors—IT, infrastructure, retail, FMCG & media, financial services, telecom and manufacturing & engineering. ITES is the only sector that is buoyant, according to the survey. However, this buoyancy has turned into caution after the Wall Street crash because many companies depend on the now sick US financial services companies for major portions of their revenues. The survey, incidentally, was conducted before the crash.

he hiring outlook for cities across the spectrum has taken a beating. The survey puts Job Outlook for Mumbai at 60 index points, down 15 points compared to the previous quarter. Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Delhi see a dip in the fortunes with the cities posting declines of 40, 16 and 10 index points, respectively. Chennai’s bad run also continues with a drop of 10 index points. The only city that has a positive Job Outlook is Hyderabad, which, incidentally, witnessed a drop of 31 index points in business sentiment. 

On the other hand, blogger and exec search consultant AK Menon posts :

Rama Bijapurkar's prognosis on consumer spending is a revelation!! Her take: Consumer India is a hydra -headed monster-and consists many demand segments or "mini Indias"and each of them is not as badly hit by the US recession!! The news on the overall consumer demand is better than we think it is!

-there are some 85 million farmers and their families -who have had a good monsoon and crop and recent loan write-offs.

-there are 5-7 million government -and quasi government employee families who are laughing all the way to the bank!

( Both these segments by far out number the 20 million affected by stock market or the 2 million in IT/ITES sectors with shaky jobs and low confidence!!)

-This is probably the first time that the rich are getting hurt more than the poor-but they have the resilience to ride through-especially since most of them are hurting on account of being the most over leveraged!

-And finally- as the top 20% of India accounts for about 43% of consumer spending-the bottom 60% for about 36% -the mass may be safer than the class.

MBAs and the slowdown

Harish the B School prof who blogs at Marketing Practice asked me to write a guest post on his blog for the MBA students who are graduating in a couple of months.

Here's what I wrote, with a marketing twist .

Twitterpacks Linkedin Company Buzz and HR Carnival

Hi folks, it's been some time since this blog was updates, as I was out of town on vacation. I was however compulsively checking twitter and facebook via my mobile web. That was when I got a tweet from Hugh Flouch that he found my twitter id from something called Twitterpacks.

Having never heard of Twitterpacks I did a search on Google to find that it's a wiki which tries to answer "If someone were joining Twitter today whom should they follow?"

And some kind soul has added my Twitter URL to the careers pack under the business management section.

Thank you whoever you are :-)

Check out the Life Coaches, Advertising, Marketing and PR folks also listed on the wiki. If you're not on Twitter, you might want to check it out.

In fact, Linkedin has started applications of which one is called company buzz , and enables you to monitor the conversation about your firm on Twitter.

Oh, and you can check out the 29th October Carnival of HR at Dan's Great Leadership blog. Some great posts by the top HR bloggers at one place.

Indian moon mission and Time

Most of us look at time as a limited resource, and in that mindset stress over things that we haven't been able to do. BP Rao takes another view , that there's always tomorrow and if you missed an opportunity it's never to late to start on it.

The bad news is that all of us have something to repent about. The good news is that it’s never too late to repent. You might not be able to do one thing that you missed- but you could quite easily immerse yourself in another which gives you that much joy- provided you give that activity the priority, it deserves.

I guess as you grow older things take on differing degrees of importance. In youth, you would seldom care about your health. With the major focus on work, it was inevitable that you pretty much took good health for granted. Something that you cannot afford to do as you get older. Likewise, for the younger person with less family responsibilities, the ability to take more risks ( be it for a career change or moving to a different environment altogether) is much higher than an older person who has more responsibilities - with less time on his side.

At the end of the day, we live life based on the choices we make and the priorities we assign. There is hope for us yet. Dennis Waitely, whom I admire as a writer,sums it up so well: ” Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you have wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow”.

People who live truly fulfilling lives make time for everything that is meaningful to them. This includes work, leisure, health and family. A balanced lifestyle is not based on a mathematical equation.  What matters is not the amount of - but the quality of - time you spend on all that’s important to you.

As I see the news about the Indian moon mission those words are really relevant. Who would have thought 10-15 years ago that India would become a handful of nations to send an unmanned mission to the moon - the Chandrayaan.

Because we didn't fret yesterday about lost opportunities of the day before but focused on tomorrow and planned for it.

Negotiation Importance

It always surprises me when I realise that 'negotiation' is not taught as a skill at any stage in our formal educational life.

What is amazing is that negotiation is a skill that is useful in every sphere of our lives. However, most of us blunder our way through negotiations, due to our inherent self. People who are assertive can negotiate better but their focus remain themselves. People who are non-assertive (like me!) can get swept away when negotiating with an assertive individual and neglecting their own wants and needs.

Negotiation is a skill that is closely tied to one's personality and that is why a formalised education in the processes of negotiation is useful for everyone. It gives people like me an opportunity to claw back into the race. :-) Most of all negotiation is used in every aspect of corporate life...with external customers or vendors, with internal staff and line managers, to get budgets that one wants, to get one's salary or raise or to change one's role. It seems criminal not to develop this skill.


Originally posted in June 2004 

Innovation and Creative Organizations

Organizations can be creative in two ways...! maybe three! 

One, consider the case of a traditional Indian licence rajconglomerate that seeks to be 'creative/innovative' in the new age...It's better off trying to replicate the 'skunkworks' analogy and isolate the creative group (with high business outcomes) from theexisting culture and help them flourish ...! Lots of organizations have tried this approach and succeeded like Indian automobile manufactures .
This is the structural solution...easy to do...but the cons come inthe integration part...the 'skunkworks' will never truly be 'a part of the bigger organization'...always be considered the 'geeks' amongst the 'suits'.


And eventually most of them will leave and the business would have lost the lessons they had learnt...unless the business tries to take on the culture.


That's when we go to approach two .


Approach two is to embed creative thinking into the organization, have dedicated champions who understand benefits...strive and keep at it ...and nine times out of ten this won't succeed...and the companies will have obits written about them..But for the one in ten who succeeds, well you can be sure that HBR will write a case study !And approach three ?Well you can begin a creative company to start with ! Jokes apart, when I read Edgar Schein's views on Organizational Innovation, it made me a little sad :-( From the Businessworld site:

MIT's Edgar Schein has very strong views on organisational culture. He believes business theory has got it all wrong - it is impossibleto transform an innovative company into a business-driven one."Aculture of innovation doesn't scale up. As a company grows, it must either find a way to break away small units which continue to innovate, or abandon innovation as a strategic priority. Also,different organisations with different cultures are needed at different stages in the evolution of a market. Current business theories are too locked in making a mature corporation in a maturemarket not only economically effective, but innovative as well. That may be just as difficult as making an innovative company economically effective. In a developing market based on new technologies, you may need more organisations like Digital, many of which will not survive,but will create an industry. Thus, playing their role as innovators.I am not sure that companies can avoid getting into such a culturetrap. Business books always have a solution for everything. I am trying to be a bit more pragmatic. Some problems don't have an easy resolution. Companies do die. Wang could not make this transition. Neither could Polaroid. It is not something which you can necessarily fix unless the entrepreneur is able to see it and chooses to abandon some of his original values. But you cannot say he should see it -some do, some don't. It is very easy for us to say what theentrepreneur should or shouldn't do. But it is very difficult to predict if they, in fact, will do it."

Originally posted October 2004 

Going Cross functional

A Cross-Functional Team is usually called on when there exists a business problem that requires the combined effort of experts and when it is recognised that the resulting solution would need to span a range of functions.

Increasingly businesses face problems which are not pliable to 'simple' solutions. One factor is that businesses themselves see opportunities not in silos but in systems thinking. So a recruitment ad, is not just a recruitment ad anymore- it is also an opportunity to build the organization's brand ! Therefore it becomes imperative for the recruitment team to link up with the branding/mktg team and the corporate communications team.

In fact, I feel that going forward we will see a whole lot of cross-functional work being done by people.

In HR we already interact with other organizations like corp communications, mktg, IT to deliver our services to the employee. And therefore there are no 'pure' HR people anymore.

The issues with cross-functional teams are that the barriers are built over time. We study in MBA that the functions are 'silos' but the reality does not sink in for a long time. We continue looking at imaginary barriers like 'us' and 'them' and I think that a 'silo-mentality' is the greatest barrier to the success of a cross functional team. Throw in the complexity of people working from across cultures in a globalised world under stringent deadlines - the challenges could not be greater.

As managers and HR people the focus should be on breaking down our artificial barriers and 'turf-protecting' mentality. And telling people that all our actions should be directed so that the customer out there who buys our products and services.


Originally posted in Feb 2004 

Some great presentations

Social Networking Beyond LinkedIn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ere webinar)

Understanding Twitter

Twitter for Public Relations

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter pr)

And about being a freesoul ..I know Ev, JSB and Howard in this list...

Freesouls

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: joi_ito book)

Transparency

This is my 2201st blog post on this blog. (my other blog has some 1500 other posts ;-) I wanted to showcase how corporate culture and information and gossip is going to be magnified by social media.

Today I came across WorkExp , which is primarily a blog consisting of submitted posts by Indian techies about their organizations.

So as a HR person are you ready for the flipside and downside of this kind of transparency. Yes, it'll be messy and not easy to deal with. But this is going to be the new pub where people will share stories, only difference being it will be archived and search-able for posterity.

Life coaching online? I don't think so

I don't know what to think of this. TechCrunch reports about a startup that helps people become life coaches to their friends. I just hope people don't fall for this charade. It's good to talk things over with a friend. But don't mistake it for a coaching session.

But Noomii says that while these professional Life Coaches are certainly worthwhile, anyone can be a Life Coach with a little help.

To begin using the site, you first have to find a friend that you’d like to coach (and who’s willing to coach you). Once you’re paired up, you both fill out a survey that gauges which parts of your like you’re happy with, as well as the goals that you’d like to achieve (you can set sub-goals for each of these goals). Then the site presents these goals in an intutive panel with checkboxes next to each goal.

The idea is that because both partners can see the others’ goals, you’ll feel more motivated to get things done. The site also recommends meetings once a week in person or online to discuss how much progress has been made and what needs to be done. It seems like a good idea, provided you pick a good friend to pair off with, though I could see it straining a relationship if one person refused to keep up with their goals.

The first sale is to yourself

Alan Weiss has some wisdom for consultants (and others) in facing the rough times.

I’m seeing too many people get down on themselves, and that’s a very powerful enemy. Look around. There are people doing quite well, often with more baggage than you’re carrying. If they can do it, why can’t you? Are they better? Or simply more disciplined and more positive about themselves?

What is the value you provide to others? To whom will you provide it? How will you convey it? If you can’t answer those questions, you need strategic help. If you can answer them but can’t achieve results, you need tactical help. And if you don’t feel like trying, you need emotional help.

“In the best of times our days are numbered. And so it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were assigned in the first place…the opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to hit a ball and to bounce a baby.” – Alister Cooke

Interesting blog posts from the HR professional's network

Weekend reading from the HR professionals' network blogs :

Santosh posts on Unavoidable layoffs and coping with them.

Madhudhar posts on Respecting the fine line between HR, IR and administration as well as Jet Airways - an HR guy's nightmare .

Pradeep Maheshwari on Anger in Management .

Making management a profession

I've blogged about it earlier  - but Messrs Nohria and Khurana want Management to be a profession like a medical profession, complete with a sort of Hippocratic oath. And this time they are using the financial meltdown as the lever.

While acknowledging the importance of experience and soft skills, the authors firmly believe that managers whose judgement is based on formal knowledge are more effective. Citing the positive effects of professionalism on medicine, the authors draft an eight-point Hippocratic Oath for managers designed to raise their expectations of themselves and encourage moral behaviour.

But could enforcing a code of ethics undermine the entrepreneurial talent whose activities drive the economy? This is unlikely, argue the authors, highlighting the stimulating effect of a code on creativity in fields like medicine. The key challenge in writing a code lies in reaching a broad consensus on the aims and social purposes of management, they add.

The real test for a professional would be - as Prof. Shukla points out - do they remain managers once they get out of an organization? A CA remains a CA. A doctor remains a doctor. A lawyer remains a lawyer. But a manager does not remain a manager once he/she is out of an organization. That, according to me - is the key for being a professional.

Laying off the Innovators

With the Jet Airways posts (here , here  and here ) looks like we have a 'lay off' meme on this blog, and the trend continues , when I came across this post by Bob Sutton that in times of massive pruning of headcount how do you make sure that the really creative people are not laid off too?

But beware of the evils of using layoffs as a reason to expel everyone in your organization who does not act, think, and look like everyone else -- beware that most of us are prone to hold an overly narrow image of a "good employee."  As I show in Weird Ideas that Work, since we human-beings have powerful and positive emotional reactions to people who are "just like us," and equally powerful negative reactions to people who are "different," the hiring process in most organizations acts to "bring in the clones."

Unfortunately, when organizations are doing layoffs they have the hat of the cost cutter, not the innovator. That's why it does not come naturally.

So when someone is strategising out the layoff they have to think simultaneously about growth in the future. And therefore holding on to the hope of a better future and the people who can take you there is important.

Michael revisits the Cluetrain Manifesto

Blogger friend Michael Specht revisits the 95 theses of The Cluetrain Manifesto . Go through them. View them with a HR lens, a Marketing lens, a communication lens and ultimately with a business lens.

Then ask the question, dare you ignore the social community, whether online or offline?

Cluetrain Review

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web 2.0 cluetrain)

The ideas only economy

is a long way off says Tom Davenport

 Did you wonder whether our economy had grown a little overly precious? How can we really be producing value if we're all sitting around blogging and Facebook-friending each other?

1999 the British think-tanker Charles Leadbeater published the book Living on Thin Air. It was both an appealing notion and a scary one: that we no longer have to produce anything but ideas. I am not suggesting that we will be returning to the Dark Ages, or that there isn't some value in Web 2.0. We'll still have friends, and it will still make sense to write on their walls on occasion. Networks are important, and they contribute to economic life as well as social life. Even over-employed workers will still produce some user-generated content. But it seems to me that many of the activities, business models, and assumptions behind social media are a bit fluffy, and that fluffiness is going to be difficult to maintain in the post-bubble environment we now find ourselves in.

Instead of finding more ways for us to all yap at each other, in this more sober economy we may want to emphasize other priorities. What new products and services will make for better, healthier lives and relationships? How can companies improve their performance? How can teenagers improve their math and science skills, instead of their texting skills?

The generation that went through the Great Depression seemed to be imprinted with a permanent desire to work hard, save money, and live in an economically conservative fashion. Of course, I'm not arguing for that. But it wouldn't be a bad outcome if the current crisis led to a more diligent, industrious economic climate. Chatting and socializing are important things, but they're not the only things.

Consulting gains at the cost of Banking

Interesting article in Businessweek

With the banking industry in crisis, many job-seeking MBAs—especially those who once dreamed of lucrative careers in investment banking—are rushing to broaden their options by applying to consulting firms. And while it means more competition for jobs in that sector, for the firms doing the hiring, it means a more robust crop of candidates to choose from.

How is the attractiveness of Private Equity as a career now, following the credit crunch? If you have any idea, drop me a line in the comments below.

A better way than a layoff?

Air India to give leave without pay to 15,000 employees (via press trust of India ):

Air India said today that it was open to letting its workers to proceed voluntarily on leave without pay for 3-5 years under a scheme applicable to employees in non-operational areas, which number about 15,000. "The scheme is purely voluntary," a spokesperson for state-owned Air India said.  

Earlier in the day, Air India's Chairman and Managing Director Raghu Menon had said: "We are planning to offer leave without pay for three to five years." Those who avail of the offer will also have the option of coming back, if they so desire, at the same seniority and last drawn pay, he said.

An official of National Aviation Company of India Ltd, the holding company of Air India, clarified that this was not tantamount to retrenchment as was being done by private carriers Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines.

So a good time for people to pick up alternate skills/career options, in case the aviation industry does not pick up?
If this is really the case then a big hats off to Air India's management over Jet Airways'

Reactions to the Jet Airways layoffs

While some people left comments on this, here are some thoughts by others who responded to me on email:

From a Management Consultant:

Is there a business logic to this downsizing save that of rising ATF and economic slowdown? Or is it a case of poor workforce planning? Without naming any suspects in this matter -  is it possible to look at issues like workforce size risk assessment (my coinage - I occasionally suffer from consultantspeakitis) - to be done regularly by HR that kowtows to expansive (read: speculative) business strategies. I am sure businesses understand the logic of cycles - my question is does HR understand this as well?

I am sure it must be a harsh decision to layoff people in this manner but it looks a little tardy for a Jet that have folks doing some financial and business forecasting to appear oversized and fat suddenly. Should have done some regular workout of the mental kind, guys!!!

On a private note, my boss fattened on me for 12 months and now says I don't know whether we will have business to "sustain you" for the next month!!!

From a HR Manager:

It's really appalling. Especially when big brands have to execute dud like this one

Can you please let me know

1. Which all sectors are doing well in this time of turmoil?

2. Reports akin to this one, has a propensity to create insecurity amongst employees. How can employees are handled in situation like this.

Well, for this person I only can't really claim to have the answers. The sectors that would do well are ones without direct or indirect impact of fuel prices, and credit crunch. Which is not really a whole lot of industries. The economy is a system. One trigger on one level can lead to a totally different in other areas.

For a HR manager there is only one way to deal with employees. Be open, transparent and honest. Do not gossip and share half-information with them. If you are in an industry which is experiencing lay-off in competitors' - recognize that your employees would be impacted. They might have friends there or they might just be worried.

Encourage your business leaders to talk about the reality and steps your organization is planning to take to fight the slowdown. Non-communication by HR and leadership is the biggest mistake you can make.

If your firm is also going to lay off people, start communicating early. Engage an outplacement firm and a counselor's services. Treat people fairly and give them enough notice. Don't try and be cold. It might seem an easy decision to fire people by couriering relieving letters or by sending text messages (!!) but in the long term will hurt the organization's credibility a lot more.

Engaging with employees' emotional upheaval may seem messy and tiring - but as you share in their good times so should you share their pain.

I wonder why people think management is easy.

Update: Jet Airways reinstates 1900 employees . In my view this makes the company look stupid, and the earlier decision a knee jerk one. On another note would this prompt the management not to take any other important decision and ask the Chairman to take it?

Goyal said the decision had not been prompted by political pressure but by his own conscience.

"I couldn't take the sight of all these young boys and girls who had been laid off. I took this decision because of my own conscience. Not in response to any political pressure. I made this decision just now when I was on my way to this place with my wife," said Naresh Goyal, Chairman, Jet Airways.

The company had said it was forced to trim staff to cut its losses but Goyal claimed that he had not been consulted before the Jet senior management ordered the retrenchment.

"I was not there when this decision was taken. I came to know about it later," said Naresh Goyal, Chairman, Jet Airways.

Jet Airways lays off 1900 employees

Over the last one and half decade the middle class of India has been one of the most ardent supporters of liberalisation and economic freedom that the PV Narasimha Rao government with the then Finance Minister (and current PM) Dr. Manmohan Singh  started off in India.

The public of India has benefited greatly, as productivity gains and competition opened a plethora of choices to them. Civil aviation was one of the sectors, which was opened up, and the government carrier Indian Airlines was assaulted by competition.

One of the stars was Jet Airways, which had much superior service and in many cases much better aircraft than Indian Airlines.

However, the civil aviation sector was among the first sectors of India to feel the cost of rising fuel prices and the current economic slowdown. Jet yesterday struck up an alliance (critics referring to it as a duopoly) with rival private airlines Kingfisher to cut costs and pool resources.

However when today news came in that Jet had laid-off 1900 employees (including ground and cabin crew) with more possible in the near future, it was greeted by shock.

The shock was due to the fact that only months ago Airline Training Academies in India were promising lots and lots of jobs (like this managed by Kingfisher itself), and many people looked forward to that as a great career option.

So while the shock and dismay may be understandable, it really does not make sense to address political parties or the government to help them save their jobs. What next, ask political parties to intervene when one doesn't get a pay hike or a promotion? Thankfully the government minister is choosing not to fish in troubled waters.

If people want a secure government job until retirement, they should join Indian Airlines.

However, certain employees allege that they have been laid off without the promised notice period or pay , then that's a major HR fiasco by Jet. It could have been handled in a much better and human way and not violated the rules in any way, as Sanjay says .

P.S. Note that trust and loyalty are at an all time low , not just in India, but in other parts of the world too.

Social Media and Organizations

If you are ready to manage organizations in the future but don't know what Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed are, then you ought to learn.

Soon these (and similar) tools will have a huge impact in the way organizations operate. Both internally as well as externally.

Marketing and brand management are still reeling with the impact of these game-changing approaches to communication and filtering. Soon, organizational processes and HR would also bear the tsunami of these changes.

That's because these are not merely innovative tools - they are driving a fundamental change in mindsets.

Paulo Coelho is putting up his content for free and is connecting with readers across the world using digital media. Tom Peters puts his presentations on his organizations blog for free download by anyone. You don't have to do any registeration! Chris Anderson in his forthcoming book talks about how people expect a change in pricing for digital media - for free.

We've all heard of the quote "Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come", right?

The flip side of that quote is "If you're not on the right side of that idea - you won't be around"

So what is your organization doing? Putting up walls to stop collaboration and sharing? Or encouraging it?

And as HR and Managerial people are you spending your energies to fight it or facilitate it?

If you're fighting it - do you think you're attracting the best people or driving them away?

And if you're driving them away - do you think your organization will last - without processes that are congruent with the times and the best available people?

You're worried?

Yes. You should be.

You still don't believe me? Still think you should block Facebook in your organization? Maybe hearing it from a hotshot Accenture consultant might convince you....if you're that sort of person.

Check also this slideshare presentation by Hill & Knowlton on Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialsoftware enterprise2.0)

:)

Checkout medical jobs at Health Jobs USA.

Stay Hungry Stay Foolish book launch at Delhi

Quote of the evening:

A failed entrepreneur is one who quits and goes back to a job. If you're not a successful entrepreneur - it just means that you are not successful - yet!

- Sanjeev Bikhchandani 

Yesterday I made it to Gurgaon to the DLF Grand Mall for Rashmi's book launch at Landmark. Sanjeev Bikhchandani , CEO of InfoEdge (naukri.com) was amongst the first to arrive. The rest of the panel, including Shantanu Prakash of Educomp, Sunil Handa of Eklavya Education Foundation and teacher of the Leadership in Entrepreneurial Motivation and Rashmi herself reached soon. Deep Kalra of makemytrip.com however could not make it.

From left: Sunil Handa, Rashmi Bansal, Shantanu Prakash and Sanjeev Bikhchandani

It was an interesting panel discussion, with Sanjeev moderating it and the panel interacting with the audience. Some interesting points that came out was that the book was to be an internal IIM-A book, to be given to the students when they joined, when it was pointed out that the stories of 25 IIM A alumni who became entrepreneurs needed to be told to the rest of the world too. And that's when the book was decided to be published by IIMA itself (to keep the cost low). Sunil Handa shared "Rashmi and Sanjeev had the idea. The book needed to be priced very low, so that a college going student could afford it - in place of a movie" That's how the book came to be priced at Rs. 125.

Sanjeev asked Rashmi "So how did the idea of the book originate?"

Rashmi responded "Well, we've all read stories of school and college dropouts who became world class entrepreneurs. This book tries to show that even an MBA can do it" The audience chuckled. She talked about how our parents generation thought that a government job was security, while our generation was told that getting a good education and a private sector job was the best bet. The recent financial crises had shown that it no longer was true. Today's generation that grew up in the liberalisation era had much less fear of doing 'business'.

Sunil Handa was emphatic that entrepreneurship is in the DNA of everyone, specially Indians. He called it a junoon (madness) that afflicts people. He pointed to the fact of the sales of the book "We budgeted for a print run of 10,000 copies, but in three months we have already sold 25,000 copies. It has touched a chord in people" Talking about his LEM course at IIMA, Handa said "I started by getting students to read about entrepreneurship, but that didn't seem to work. So I soon started to call these guys to come and take the course, like a small chat around a fireplace. In my opinion, when students get to see people like Sanjeev and Shantanu in the flesh, they start feeling "hey, I also can do it. Issme aisi koi khaas baat nahi hai. Ten years ago they must have been in this very classroom"

From left: Sunil Handa, Rashmi Bansal, Shantanu Prakash and Sanjeev Bikhchandani

To a question from the audience on whether some communities in India have more entrepreneurial skills, Sanjeev responded that in some communities there was openness to people doing business. However there are more support systems for entrepreneurs today - so that anyone can be a successful entrepreneur. Handa chimed up with "I ask Vinayak Chatterjee to come to the class and ask students, kaun kehta hai Bangali business nahin kar sakta hai?"

On the question whether an MBA is good to do when one wants to become an entrepreneur Shantanu responded that "It is very useful, as you get distilled wisdom from years of management thought, concepts and models. As an entrepreneur you will need to learn management and financial models when you scale up. It helps"

On when to jump into entrepreneurship Sanjeev replied that someone like Shantanu was an entrepreneur before he joined IIMA, while Sanjeev decided to spend some time in the corporate world. "I felt I needed time. I wasn't ready" When someone from the audience asked him when would one know one is ready he responded "It's like falling in love. No one else can describe it to you. You know"

On the perception that entrepreneurship is risky Shantanu said "I can prove to you that entrepreneurship is not risky" Sanjeev shared "If you work very hard you will be a success in 5 years, if not it can take 10 years or max 15 years. But you will succeed. The trick is to not quit"

It was fun meeting Rashmi and Sanjeev again. And to listen to all the talk on entrepreneurship. Sanjeev in fact asked Rashmi about her own entrepreneurship story. She said "We just felt that our idea was right and therefore it made no point to stay and keep working for Times of India and wait when we were middle aged to launch a youth magazine ."

The biggest unexpected surprise for me was to bump into the Jabberwock , Jai Arjun Singh who also attended the launch. Yeah, Delhi is great for meeting fellow bloggers :-)

Oh yes, I have started reading the book. Watch this space for the review.

Think Before you speak

I heard a story yesterday. It was about someone - let's call him N.

N was an employee of one of India's top software organizations. He had joined them straight out of college and been an outstanding performer. Rising up from the Sales function he quickly moved to Delivery and then shifted to a new business unit.

He had been for 6 years in the system when he was recognised as a potential future leader and sent to head Delivery for the new business in a country where the company was setting up operations. Soon the business in taht country grew by leaps and bounds - and the CEO of the firm - let's call him P - came visiting.

Over the course of a press conference when someone asked P about terrorism and its causes - he gave a reply that suggested that some people were predisposed to terrorism. Unfortunately N was a member of the community that R talked about.

He was devastated that the CEO of the company where he works held such views - so much so that he talked with the country head that he would resign as he could not bear to continue working for such a company. The country manager tried to convince him to stay - he even talked to P (who had by then returned to India) and P even tried saying things like "I didn't mean it like that"

But the damage had been done.

N resigned and returned home to India, without even having another another job offer. However in 4 months he had joined an MNC in India in an equivalent role.

So the lesson for leaders is two fold

• Think before you talk about really controversial issues. They will be construed as the company's views, not just as your views, and
• It's not really what you mean - but what people infer that really matters. 

You know you have to start looking out when....

Colleen from Hindustan Times asked me what would be the 5 signs that signal to professionals that it’s time to look for another job.


So here's what I wrote back to her (and apparently this was already featured in HT 7th Sept issue) about when you should start looking for another job, not looking at the mostly obvious reasons:

1. You don't have friends at work : For a lot of people work is a social process. Being in a workplace where people do not connect with you is a warning sign, even if the money is great and work is challenging. It is the signal that the value system that people share might be very different from yours.

2. You are only contributing but not developing: This might not seem like a big reason, but means that you'll soon get stuck and not rise up the ladder. Beware the organization that rewards you for your current achievements but does not prepare you for growth.

3. Processes never outlast people - This means that work is chaotic and you will always be called back to take care of what you did earlier - lack of process orientation shows an organization that wants to look professional but is always ad hoc in reality. It will never scale up. Don't hitch your wagon to an organization like this. It will only go down.

4. Your pace is not in tune with your organization's. This can work either way. You do a good job, but your organization expects you to grow and contribute more and faster. Or vice versa. In either case it shows you are not going to last long. Start looking for a role with pace that suits your comfort

5. You do a lot of stuff, but don't make an impact. It might seem like an absraction, but impact would be defined by the amount of difference you make in your organization's work. Or what management jargon calls 'value add'. Not everyone can do it in all organizations. It can be tough to discover an organization where your strengths can make an impact. Take the advice from a mentor/coach on how to make an impact. Sometimes you lack certain skills that really count in an organization. No use trying to develop that. It would be better to search your own pitch where your skills would be suited better.

What do you think? Care to add more to the list?

Meaning at Work a meaningless concept

Lot of people blog and write about finding meaning at work. I don't know why I am bothering to write. Maybe I believe that meaning is such an individual thing that one really cannot write it for a larger audience without being misunderstood or sounding very "wishy-washy"

What is meaning after all?

I believe that finding contentment is finding meaning - and you might have a very different way of describing it. Work and Careers even though it occupies a major part of our waking hours, still accounts for a small part of our life's importance. This is what keeps a lot of us from being truly engaged at work.

That's because for a lot of people work is a means to an end. When you ask them what is important in life - they would point to family, health and security. This often points to money - not work. Which is why when economic conditions are good people tend to hop jobs and when the conditions are not so great they hunker down and wait for the ill wind to pass.

Then there are those who believe that there can be meaningful work, but the mistake they make is that they assume that "meaning" is something external. Like a quest for the Holy Grail. Or the Higgs Boson particle, if you prefer a secular example.

But meaning, like peace- is a concept that is dependent on the person and not on external context. As one tenet of Logotherapy states:

We have freedom to find meaning in what we do, and what we experience, or at least in the stand we take when faced with a situation of unchangeable suffering.

But there are so many people urging people to "find" meaning at work that people keep looking for it in external aspects. Like enriched jobs. Or challenging work. Or flexible career options . Or alternate careers . Or entrepreneurship . Or having life-long employment. But having all or any of these won't guarantee people will find meaning in work.

We have to give that freedom to ourselves, as Viktor Frankl stated. That's what makes it such an individual journey and such a tough one. When one is lucky to discover that meaning - paradoxically to the law of attribution - one reasons it on external factors on not on something internal.

We've all come across those lucky few and they seem convinced that it was entrepreneurship/flexible work/alternate careers/ROWE that made their work meaningful and they sway us too. And then that leads to disappointment.

Discover your own meanings. Don't expect others to be able to advise you about it.

Trial on Google's SMS channel

Hi, if you're based in India, and don't have the time to visit this blog on the net, or to read the posts on the email newsletter, then you can now subscribe to it via SMS, using Google's SMS channels in India.

Click here to subscribe.

Yeah, I am a sucker for these new fangled things that are still in "Labs" stage!

HR Professionals community grows to 350 people

This is a post to let you know that the HR Professionals community has really grown from its small beginnings and now has more than 350 people - and 6 groups discussing Innovative HR and work related areas like Learning and Development Specialists , Consulting , Compensation Experts , Recruiters  and HR Generalists .

Then there is the Forum  where people can discuss any issues they are passionate or want to know more about.

For people who want to start blogging but don't really know how to go about building a readership - the community has a blogging feature which has a ready-made audience of the community members! Check it out here

The community primarily comprises of HR professionals from India, but there are a large number of consultants and experts from other countries as well.

So why don't you join us there?

On a totally unrelated note, you can join this blog's Facebook page too. Currently there are 35 fans :-) You can follow this blog on Google Reader by clicking "Follow This Blog" on the right hand column. Currently there are 9 followers.

Over the last week, the engagement metrics have been really rising on the blog. The visitors' average actions per visit is 2.7 and average time per visitor was 2minutes and 10.6 seconds.