Why Growing Talent is Better than Hiring it

Dan and Chip Heath in their Fast Company column ask Does Top-notch Employee Talent Transfer to Other Jobs? and point to a research that shows that best talent is context dependent than independent of the organization. Which makes the point that HR's job focus should shift from hiring talent to developing it. Interestingly they point to HUL's reputation as a leadership academy to explain the company's continued success in India.

Some excerpts from the article

In his new book, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance, Groysberg studies a group of professionals renowned for the portability of their talent -- Wall Street research analysts. Analysts are a hybrid of researchers and pundits; they study public companies and write recommendations about whether to buy or sell their stocks.

So what happened? Groysberg reports, "Star equity analysts who switched employers paid a high price for jumping ship. Overall, their job performance plunged sharply and continued to suffer for at least five years after moving to a new firm." Worse, switching firms doubled the chance that an analyst would fall off the rankings entirely (32% versus 16%).

So talent is not, in fact, perfectly portable, even in a job that is one of the most independent around (except for, perhaps, janitors and NFL placekickers).

What gives? Wall Streeters mistakenly see analysts as solo stars, but in reality, Groysberg found that even the best analysts depend heavily on an array of resources inside their firms. They rely on junior analysts who do their number crunching, other analysts who give them feedback, and salespeople who promote their ideas to clients. Not to mention the systems and culture within the firm.

There was one fascinating exception to these findings, a group of people who didn't suffer the lag in performance after transferring: women. Groysberg contends that the alpha-male culture on Wall Street, which never fully embraces women, forces them to compensate by beefing up their external networks, which are more portable. (Either that, or women are superior. Take your pick.)

So what do these findings mean for the world outside of Wall Street? Should we conclude that there's no such thing as different innate levels of talent? Of course not. The Baldwin brothers alone are enough to refute that. But the only way to take control of your firm's talent pool is to create it yourself. (And you should definitely get your child on the Wall Street-analyst career track. A job that entails writing persuasive essays on trucking firms must surely be the world's most preposterous route to a seven-figure salary.)

For instance, Hindustan Unilever, the Indian subsidiary of the consumer goods giant, has developed a reputation as a talent factory. How? Its senior managers are expected to spend 30% to 40% of their time grooming leaders. And executives usually change roles every two to three years so that they learn different aspects of the business. These investments may seem costly, but they have helped HUL become a $4.4 billion company, which reported 5.4% net profit growth at the end of 2009 -- and the envy of other companies worldwide.

When you own the talent factory, you've created a permanent competitive advantage. So if one of your stars leaves, you can simply wish him the best of luck on his new bus. And then grow another star to take his place.

Atlassian overhauls the traditional performance review system

I have blogged earlier about Daniel Pink's thoughts on what motivates us - as well as the view by an expert that performance reviews should be scrapped. Now Australian software firm Atlassian, inspired by @danielpink is taking a public step to doing something about it. Check the announcement below:

Atlassian's Big Experiment with Performance Reviews

For years, Atlassian's performance review model was in line with 'HR Best Practice'. Twice a year, people would review themselves and their peers via 360-degree reviews. Managers would review their team members and determine their final performance rating on a simple 5-point scale that determined their bonus. I believe it's a similar model to that of many other tech companies like Google and Salesforce.

So, what was the problem? In short, twice a year the model did exactly the opposite to what we wanted to accomplish. Instead of an inspiring discussion about how to enhance people's performance, the reviews caused disruptions, anxiety and de-motivated team members and managers. Also, even though our model was extremely lean and simple, the time investment was significant.
The Trial
For 12 months, we will trial a new review methodology. We'll make iterative improvements along the way. What's more, we'll blog everything  here

Here are the outlines of the trial:


We'll replace the traditional performance review structure with a more lightweight, continuous model.

We'll incorporate the constructive aspects of reviews in the existing one-on-one meetings. Atlassian managers already have weekly one-on-ones with their team members. Now, every month, one of these meetings is dedicated to a discussion on how the person can enhance their own performance and play to their strengths.

We'll provide managers with a conversation guide to help them structure these one-on-ones.

We'll remove the distribution curve.

We'll stop paying individual performance bonuses. Instead, we'll give everyone a salary bump (similar to Netflix's approach, paying top market salaries rather than bonuses).

Every six months, managers and team members use a one-on-one catch up to discuss their performance and how often they have challenged themselves in the last six months. Unlike in traditional performance reviews, there will be no requirements to write lengthy written assessments in preparation for the catch up

At the beginning of each six month period, we'd like everyone to focus on some personal areas where they can challenge themselves either by capitalising on activities they already love or by improving a weakness.


The Impact

This will mean that employees will have more regular chats with their managers about how they'd like to work, not just about everyday tasks. Also, managers won't have to spend hours on thinking back and recording people's past performance during lengthy performance review cycles.

You can follow the process here. They will share their journey publicly.

My views on Personal Branding in the Outlook Money story on Marketing Yourself

I was quoted recently in the Outlook Money story Market Yourself Right on Personal Branding by Anagh Pal:

Constantly evaluate yourself. “Prepare your personal balance sheet; find out what is working and what isn’t,” says Merchant. Figure out what areas of expertise you require to add to your portfolio. “The idea is to build T-shaped expertise, broad expertise of an area and deep expertise of one specific niche,” says Gautam Ghosh, who blogs on HR, social media and personal branding. But there’s no short cut.

Invest time. Learn from every possible opportunity. Attend workshops, seminars and training programmes. There’s lots to learn out there.

Learn from people. Have a wide range of people on your contact list—coaches, mentors, industry leaders, trendsetters and opinion makers. Ask them the right questions. Get their perspective. Follow up.

Invest money. Take a professional course. Let it be something that will help you to grab that next important project, or make a career move that will open up a new opportunity.

Be more than just an employee. Don’t limit yourself to your job description. “Do different things or do things differently,” says Purvi Seth, CEO, Shilputsi Consultants, an HR firm. Go beyond what’s expected of you. Jump on to a project that others are iffy about, take calculated risks. Don’t just change jobs, move laterally within your organisation too. As an HR professional, you might want to dabble in sales to improve your communication skills. If you have always worked for an MNC, you could consider a start-up. Each successful project would mean one more ‘braggable’ that you can showcase to your next employer.

Be an intrapreneur. Think like an entrepreneur even within your organisation. Focus on innovation and creativity. If, say, as a sales manager, you feel that a social media campaign could work for You, convince your boss to let you take a shot at it. If it succeeds, own it.

Tell the world you know. With globally accessible online forums and social media, it is easy to trumpet achievements and share your point of view with the world. Be searchable and accessible and connect with others with similar interests. Be active in industry groups, discussion boards and chat forums on social networks, such as Linkedin. Share your knowledge and help others. And, of course, stay in touch with people who matter—peers, influencers, experts and potential recruiters. The key, says E. Balajie, CEO, Ma Foi Management Consultants, is “constant communication; your audience should hear from you regularly”. If you have established yourself as an expert, the offline world is bound to notice you if you regularly attend various meets and seminars. Try to be visible in traditional and electronic media too. Gaurav Mishra, who builds and nurtures online communities as CEO of 2020 Social, started to blog on Social Media marketing back in 2005. It led him to meet new people, get recognised, a Yahoo! fellowship, teaching assignments and, finally, to set up his own firm.

Build trust. Build relationships. You won’t be present when your bosses sit down in a closed room to decide whether you deserve a promotion or a double-digit increment. The impression you have left earlier has to do all the talking.

Be someone they can trust. Says Ghosh:: “Help people out. If you cannot, identify someone who can. Ensure that the person’s problem is solved.” Such people end up becoming brand ambassadors for You. Saundarya Rajesh, founder-president, AVTAR Career Creators, stresses on sincerity, genuineness and consistency. “We seek those marques that have consistently fulfilled their stated commitments and eventually become loyal to them,” she says.

5 Steps to Build an Employer Brand using Talent Communities

I've blogged about the subject before - and I consolidated my thoughts for B2B Marketing site Paulwriter.com on Talent Communities - 5 steps to to building an Employer Brand

The two objectives organizations will need to start thinking about are:

How to Build an employment brand that is relevant to the needs of the key talented people and to monitor the conversations on the social web to understand how to join in the conversation
Understand where these talented prospective employees are, what they talk about and how to engage them to attract them to consider you an employer.

Organizations will need to move away from building their presence from social networks and integrate them to build online communities for their talent pool.

To read the article you might require to sign in to the site - but it's free and you should do so - if you're a B2B Marketer

3 of the 6 fundamental shifts in the way we work

I have highlighted issues around Innovation, Talent and Passion that  John Hagel and John Seely Brown blog about the 6 fundamental shifts in the Way We Work in HBR Blogs

The collaboration curve supplants the experience curve. We may, for the first time, have an opportunity to turn diminishing returns performance improvement into increasing returns.
As it becomes increasingly possible to scale the number of connections and interactions between participants in a given environment, however, a new kind of performance curve is emerging: the collaboration curve. This is characterized by increasing returns: the more participants — and interactions between those participants — you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement accelerates.

The collaboration curve helps explain the rise of network-centric efforts ranging from open source software development to "crowdsourcing" to "creation spaces." In nearly all of these group efforts, rapid leaps in performance improvement arise as participants get better faster by working with others. The evidence for the collaboration curve is still admittedly fragmentary, but one place to look for it is in the online game World of Warcraft.

In part, the paradox arises because executives tend to focus on talent acquisition and retention, but do not invest much time on talent development throughout the firm. When they think about talent development, they spend time designing training programs rather than re-thinking the work environment to accelerate talent development. If they took on-the-job talent development seriously, they would reassess all aspects of the firm - strategy, operations, organization and information technology platforms - to find ways to foster even more rapid talent development.

Passion is everything. Management can only do so much. All of us are responsible at a personal level, too — for reintegrating our passion into our profession. What is passion? More than simple satisfaction, passion is when people discover the work that motivates them to achieve their potential by seeking extreme performance improvement. Their job becomes more than a mode of income.

Yet our survey in the 2009 Shift Index showed that passion levels are low across all US industries. In most of them there are fewer than 20 percent of employees that say they are passionate about their work--and no industries have more than 25% that say so. Furthermore, passion levels are inversely related to the size of the employer: the larger the company, the lower the passion levels.

Why is passion so important? Because it drives a questing disposition that is essential to employee performance as they react to the inevitable unexpected challenges today's work environment presents. It also drives more connection. Our Shift Index found that passionate workers participate much more actively in knowledge flows that are the new key to value creation. If you can help make your employees more passionate, you can create value in today's economy.

Keeping policies simple and simpler

My twitter friend @vikramadhiman asked me to read this article on Netflix's vacation policy written by @DanielPink and I just loved the simplicity behind the thought.

I have always believed that organiztional processes and policies are needlessly complex - and in a self-organizing system (which is better to deal with complexity in the outside environment) people should know at the maximum three rules - and interpret the rest on their own or as a collective entity.

This policy also fits in with creating a Results Only Work Environment. What is puzzling is why organizations create layers of management people and waste time managing issues that employees could sort on their own, letting them focus on results and performance.


Netflix lets its staff take as much holiday as they want, whenever they want – and it works - Telegraph

At Netflix, the vacation policy is audaciously simple and simply audacious. Salaried employees can take as much time off as they'd like, whenever they want to take it. Nobody – not employees themselves, not managers – tracks vacation days.

In other words, Netflix's holiday policy is to have no policy at all.

If that sounds like a recipe for anarchic stew, devoid of essential workplace nutrients such as temperance and hard work, think again. In its own way, Netflix's non-policy is more attuned to the nature of 21st century work, and even to the values of industriousness and self-discipline, than its sterner counterparts.

Back in the old days – 2004 – Netflix treated holidays the old-fashioned way: it allotted everyone N days a year. You either used them up – or you duked it out with accounting to try to get paid for the time you didn't consume.

But eventually some employees recognised that this arrangement was at odds with how they really did their jobs. After all, they were responding to emails on weekends, they were solving problems online at home at night. And every so often, they would take off an afternoon to ferry a child to the paediatrician or to check in on an ageing parent.

Since Netflix wasn't tracking how many hours people were logging each work day, these employees wondered, why should it track how many holidays people were taking each work year?

Fair point, said management. As the company explains in its "Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture", a 128-slide PowerPoint presentation that has spread like samizdat literature on the internet: "We should focus on what people get done, not how many hours or days worked. Just as we don't have a nine to five day policy, we don't need a vacation policy."

So the company scrapped its formal plan. Today, Netflix's roughly 600 salaried employees can vacation any time they desire for as long as they want – provided that their managers know where they are and that their work is covered.

This ultra flexible, freedom-intensive approach to holiday time hasn't exactly hurt the company. Launched in 1999, Netflix now has market cap of nearly $7bn (£4.5bn). Meanwhile, its chief rival, the video rental chain Blockbuster, last month was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.

Perhaps more importantly, this non-policy yields broader lessons about the modern workplace.

For instance, ever more companies are realising that autonomy isn't the opposite of accountability – it's the pathway to it. "Rules and policies and regulations and stipulations are innovation killers. People do their best work when they're unencumbered," says Steve Swasey, Netflix's vice-president for corporate communication. "If you're spending a lot of time accounting for the time you're spending, that's time you're not innovating."

The same goes for expenses. Employees typically don't need to get approval to spend money on entertainment, travel, or gifts. Instead, the guidance is simpler: act in Netflix's best interest. It sounds delightfully adult. And it is - in every regard. People who don't produce are shown the door. "Adequate performance," the company says, "gets a generous severance package."

The idea is that freedom and responsibility, long considered fundamentally incompatible, actually go together quite well.

What's more, the Netflix holiday policy reveals the limits of relying on time in managing the modern workforce. In an era when people were turning screws on an assembly line or processing paper in an office, the connection between input and output was tight. The more time you spent on a task, the more you produced.

But in much white-collar work today, where one good idea can be orders of magnitude more valuable than a dozen mediocre ones, the link between the time you spend and the results you produce is murkier. Results are what matter. How you got there, or how long it took, is less relevant.

Finally, the Netflix technique demonstrates how the starting premises of workplace arrangements can shape behaviour.

In his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, New York University scholar, Clay Shirky, argues that when we design systems that assume bad faith from the participants, and whose main purpose is to defend against that nasty behaviour, we often foster the very behaviour we're trying to deter. People will push and push the limits of the formal rules, search for every available loophole, and look for ways to game the system when the defenders aren't watching. By contrast, a structure of rules that assumes good faith can actually encourage that behaviour.

So if you think people in your organisation are predisposed to rip you off, maybe the solution isn't to build a tighter, more punitive set of rules. Maybe the answer is to hire new people.

To paraphrase one Netflix executive, the company doesn't have a clothing policy either. But – so far at least – nobody has shown up to work naked.

Moving from Social Media Marketing to building a Social Business

As more and more Indians are accessing the internet and as broadband speeds are picking up, some savvy marketers are looking more and more at the fast growing social networks like Facebook, Orkut and Twitter to become additional channels to communicate their messages and market to their demographic.

Organizations in India that have tested the social media waters include firms like lifestyle marketer Fastrack to Non-Profit firms like Pratham Books to technology companies like Dell and Microsoft to banking companies like HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank and telecom firms Airtel, Vodafone and Aircel to dotcoms like Makemytrip.com, Naukri.com to auto firm Mitsubishi. Media firms in India from Hindustan Times, NDTV, Network 18 , Outlook Group and Open Media are also embracing "social" in varying degrees.

The examples of these companies are spurring many other firms to set up Facebook pages, Orkut communities and Twitter accounts. Many marketers do not really know how to do everything – and neither do their traditional agencies, so a niche group of service providers have come up which encompass the technology skill and the business knowledge to try and provide the help.

Typically the phrase "social media marketing" has gained circulation over the last two years so much that many organizations believe that it is purely a marketing channel and the rest of the organization does not need to involve itself with the same.

That is the short term view.

Social technologies that enable social media – is a fundamentally different form of communication than broadcast media (like telephone, direct mail, television, print and radio) which companies are familiar with.

Traditional organizational communication is opaque. When you connect with a business over letter or telephone – the transaction is not viewable by other customers.

Traditional broadcast communication is one-way and one-to-many. A company broadcasts an advertisement or news and people consume it. Until social media came along people couldn't share what they thought of those advertisements.

What does social media do?

The beginnings of social media were in the bulletin boards of the early nineties. People would ask questions – and other people would answer them. The conversation was threaded and could be about whatever. If you had a bulletin board on a site dedicated to rock music – it would be about rock music. If it was on a tech site the questions and answers would be about technology.

In these bulletin boards more often than not – people's reputations were made. If you answer many questions which are deemed useful by other users - one could get recognized as an expert. These were the precursor to today's Yahoo Answers, Linkedin Q&A and Quora (and a rumored Facebook Answers too)

After the bulletin boards came blogs – which gave anyone a platform to publish his or her views or commentary or stories to a worldwide audience. If a person was passionate about a certain subject – he or she could build a dedicated readership.

Then came social networks – the ones like Facebook, Linkedin and Orkut have rich user profiles, community pages, activity streams and third party applications running on them. Relationships are mutual between users. Twitter is a little different social network than these. Relations are not mutual. I can choose to follow Priyanka Chopra but she doesn't have to follow me back. Which is why it's become a big favorite of celebrities and media outlets. Twitter also limits posts to 140 characters.

The big change between earlier media and "social media" or "participatory media" or Web 2.0 or whatever one chooses to call it is the fact – that people who participate in these have moved from being passive consumers of information and entertainment to creators. Every person can theoretically publish his own newspaper editorial (aka blogs) or his own TV channel (on Youtube).

Most organizations don't get this. They believe Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are additional channels to TV, Radio and print. They then are surprised when consumers react and respond. It's a great high when the reaction is positive – and despair when they react negatively.

The big issue is that when a business opens an account on these networks – it is one part of the organization doing so – usually the marketing department along with its agency. However for the people on these networks – this is the one face of the organization , and they bring all their communication to it – from product and customer service issues to job seeking queries to business partnership questions. When the person managing the account takes time to respond or can't respond the organization gets slammed on the network.

Organizations that are venturing into social media – need to first look at objectives and metrics and then put in a cross functional team that believes in transparent and open communication. It also has to set process and workflows that add on to traditional operations and customer service workflows so that external issues are absorbed internally and resolved and then communicated externally.

Having just one gate between the organization and its customers results in social media bottleneck – and that approach does not scale for larger companies in the long run.

Hence the social business enables a large part of the employees to interact with customers – and encourages customers to connect with other customers. A large technology firm in the US found that it could reduce support costs if it put in a bulletin board where experienced users helped newer users.

At its epitome the social business involves the customer in its innovation process – either by using the collective wisdom of the community or by an ideation system where users give ideas for the product or service.

My twitter newspaper

For those of you who are not on Twitter - it's a great resource for following interesting people and it has become my favorite tool for learning about things I am interested in - and connecting with people across the world.

On twitter my id is @gautamghosh and I tweet about HR, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media related things.

I follow about 350+ people from across the world in these areas and others - and they share tonnes of links to very interesting content that I would normally never come across - leading to serendipitous learning.

If you're not on Twitter you can still see what kind of content I am exposed to - thanks to this great web app called Paper.li which has created the Gautam Ghosh Daily

It'll get refreshed every 24 hrs and arranges great content in a newspaper format.

It reminds me of Flipboard which is an app for the iPad - where you sign in using your social network ids and it creates a social magazine with the content your facebook and twitter friends are sharing.

Yes, these days increasingly our friends and contacts are our filters to the information explosion. The Google CEO stated that Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003. That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says.

And yes we are creating and evolving filters to deal with this information.

David Weinberger blogs about a talk by Kate Crawford at the Berkman Center

Her study showed we are adapting to high levels of info while changing our definitions of focus, attention and productivity. This is not a technological problem to which there is a technological solution. Tech is only a means to an end And the tools and social norms are developing together.

Q: b[me] Does thefact that we are now aware of all that’s filtered out change our ideas about noise?
A: The filters are often social, through yoru friends. There are also filter elites — people who really know how to use these tools. Some of them are obsessed with productivity, and they are personal, individualistic.

Social Recruiting - Hireplug leverages Facebook profiles and pages

Two years ago when I had blogged about referral based recruiting models I had written that organizations should leverage their employees' social networks

I would be a lot more interested if jobsites can leverage the existing social networks where Indians hang out. Making apps that make sharing and applying to jobs and ride on the platforms that Orkut and Facebook provide. Wonder why nobody has thought of that?

Finally it seems that Hireplug a Social Recruiting startup is trying to do it - See their blog post

Turn your Facebook Fan Page into a Talent Magnet

Hireplug's 'We Are Hiring' App. sitting on employees' Facebook profiles and also on Employer Fan Pages prompts visitors for joining Employer's Talent Network. Here is a screenshot!

Once the visitor clicks on 'Join' link. Most information is grabbed from user Facebook Profile and App asks for more information on Skills as show below.

Now the candidate becomes part of the Talent Network(read 'Talent Pool') and is searchable by recruiters using Hireplug.com as shown below!

Innovation and HR's quest to be strategic

Peter Drucker is famously quoted for two statements which distill the basic purpose of businesses.
One says that There are two functions of business - innovation and marketing.
The other says The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

If you search for the phrase "HR seat at the table" on a search engine like Google you'll get lots and lots of results.

However it is not possible for any function to be considered strategic unless it impacts directly either of these two outcomes - innovation or creation of a customer.

Traditionally the domain of marketing and creating new customers has been the forte of Sales and Marketing.

And Innovation has been the preserve of the R&D group. In certain organizations that innovation is not about the product but a business model - like doing the things faster, better and cheaper than the product innovator.

So if HR really wants to be strategic - either it should wait for a business leader who believes that the "culture is the brand" or else go and do stuff that will impact the ability of the organization to either innovate or create new customers.

Unless HR leadership in a firm evaluates most of their initiatives - from Talent Acquisition to Leadership Development to Total Rewards on these parameters - of innovation and creating customers - HR will never be seen as strategic.

HR professionals have also got to stop viewing themselves as "only" HR people - and they should preferably do stints in other functions to build knowledge and skill in aspects related to business models and customer relationship and enrich them with knowledge about people processes.

Are you ready to be strategic?

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• The importance of marketing and innovation (customerthink.com)

How the world of work will undergo 10 changes in 10 years

This is an interesting article on how analyst firm Gartner sees the future of work changing over the next decade:

Gartner Says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years

“Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more,” said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,” he added. “In addition, simulation, visualisation and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”

Organizations will need to determine which of the 10 key changes in the nature of work will affect them, and consider whether radically different technology governance models will be required.

1. De-routinization of Work
The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning. Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. For example, we cannot automate the process of selling a life insurance policy to a skeptical buyer, but we can use automation tools to augment the selling process.

2. Work Swarms
Swarming is a work style characterized by a flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value. Gartner identifies two phenomena within the collective activity; Teaming (instead of solo performances) will be valued and rewarded more and occur more frequently and a new form of teaming, which Gartner calls swarming, to distinguish it from more historical teaming models, is emerging.

3. Weak Links
In swarms, if individuals know each other at all, it may be just barely, via weak links. Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. They are indirect indicators and rely, in part, on the confidence others have in their knowledge of people. Navigating one's own personal, professional and social networks helps people develop and exploit both strong and weak links and that, in turn, will be crucial to surviving and exploiting swarms for business benefit.

4. Working With the Collective
There are informal groups of people, outside the direct control of the organization, who can impact the success or failure of the organization. These informal groups are bound together by a common interest, a fad or a historical accident, as described by Gartner as “the collective.” Smart business executives discern how to live in a business ecosystem they cannot control; one they can only influence.

5. Work Sketch-Ups
Most non-routine processes will also be highly informal. It is very important that organizations try to capture the criteria used in making decisions but, at least for now, Gartner does not expect most non-routine processes to follow meaningful standard patterns. Over time, we believe that work patterns for more non-routine work will emerge, justifying a light-handed approach to collecting activity information, but it will take years before a real return on investment for this effort is visible. In the meantime, the process models for most non-routine processes will remain simple "sketch-ups," created on the fly.

6. Spontaneous Work
This property is also implied in Gartner’s description of work swarms. Spontaneity implies more than reactive activity, for example, to the emergence of new patterns. It also contains proactive work such as seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models.

7. Simulation and Experimentation
Active engagement with simulated environments (virtual environments), which are similar to technologies depicted in the film Minority Report, will come to replace drilling into cells in spreadsheets. This suggests the use of n-dimensional virtual representations of all different sorts of data. The contents of the simulated environment will be assembled by agent technologies that determine what materials go together based on watching people work with this content. People will interact with the data and actively manipulate various parameters reshaping the world they’re looking at.

8. Pattern Sensitivity
Gartner has published a major line of research on Pattern-Based Strategy. The business world is becoming more volatile, affording people working off of linear models based on past performance far less visibility into the future than ever before. Gartner expects to see a significant growth in the number of organizations that create groups specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns, evaluating those patterns, developing various scenarios for how the disruption might play out and proposing to senior executives new ways of exploiting (or protecting the organization from) the changes to which they are now more sensitive.

9. Hyperconnected
Hyperconnectedness is a property of most organizations, existing within networks of networks, unable to completely control any of them. While key supply chain elements, for example, may be "under contract," there is no guarantee it will perform properly, not even if the supply chain is in-house. Hyperconnectedness will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries, and that has implications for how people work and how IT supports or augments that work.

10. My Place
The workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings occurring across time zones and organizations and with participants who barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging problems. But the employee will still have a "place" where they work. Many will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk, and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this work environment, the lines between personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organization subjects, will disappear. Individuals, of course, need to manage the complexity created by overlapping demands, whether from the new world of work or from external (non-work-related) phenomena. Those that cannot manage the underlying "expectation and interrupt overloads" will suffer performance deficits as these overloads force individuals to operate in an over-stimulated (information-overload) state.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020." The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1331623.

The Social Media Celebrity Employee and Employment Branding

This is a great article on a trend that we will see more and more. Currently, it's media organizations who face this situation - but as more and more organizations move to being content and community creators - leveraging social media we'll see this happening in more and more across industries.

As business move from social media marketing to becoming social-enabled business - more and more organizations will grapple with these issues. Also see earlier post on "when your employee brand ambassadors leave"

Dealing With Employees Who Are Social Media Celebrities

The irony in most cases is that the employee attained “celebrity” status in large part because of the company he or she worked for. The company name backing them gave immediate authority to the public.

The employee’s own abilities, however, took the company name and endowed authority to the level that made it truly beneficial to both the company and the employee. They need each other more than they think they do.

The pressure social media and employee celebrities bring to the workplace is mostly positive. It changes the dynamic from “human resources” to “talent management” and that’s really a good thing for everyone.

Businesses will get better people, employees will be better people, and customers reap the benefits from the whole arrangement. Employee celebrities will be viewed as a threat in some companies, but they’ll be rock stars in other companies. Social media gives every organization yet one more thing to consider for the future of their business.

Harvard and Columbia B-Schools start teaching Social Media

This is an interesting news item from Businessweek.

If any Delhi based B-Schools want to start teaching a course in Social Technologies enabled Business I'd be interested to talk :-)

B-Schools All A-Twitter Over Social Media

Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School have joined a growing list of business schools that are adding courses on social media to their MBA curricula, addressing the corporate demand for social-network-savvy employees. The two schools are among at least six that have added courses in the past year that allow students to learn about Internet marketing and social media strategy, according to course syllabi and faculty associated with the classes.

With Twitter's social networking site claiming 190 million users tweeting 65 million times a day and Facebook reporting 500 million active members, companies including Sears Holdings, Panasonic, Citigroup, and AT&T have begun hiring social media directors to develop and manage marketing strategies that address the nuances of the online world. Business schools in the last three years have seen a drop in graduate placement rates—to an average of 84 percent in 2009 among Bloomberg Businessweek's top 30 full-time MBA programs, from 96 percent in 2007. Social media classes are one way of preparing students for careers in a promising field, says John Gallaugher, associate professor of information systems at Boston College's Carroll School of Management, where "Social Media & Web 2.0 for Managers" is being offered in the fall.

"In the realm of technology it's possible for us to teach our students a tool that their bosses don't have, and they can provide that added value from day one," Gallaugher says. "Social media skills are the ones that can set them apart. Those are the skills that employers are looking for."

Columbia, in New York, offers four Internet marketing courses. Two of them, "Social Media," taught by Rachel Sterne, chief executive officer of GroundReport.com, a global citizen news platform, and "Media and Technology," taught by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue, will be offered for the first time next spring, according to professor Rajeev Kohli, chair of the Columbia marketing division. At Harvard, in Boston, professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski last fall introduced a second-year elective course, "Competing with Social Networks," and 172 students enrolled—three for every available seat. "Students know these tools are too hard to ignore," Piskorski says.

Other MBA programs that have added courses that explore social media include London Business School , INSEAD, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France, and the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, known as HEC Paris, according to faculty at the respective schools.

Ratan Tata and the search for Tata Group's new head

Image via Wikipedia

One of India's most legendary and respected business leaders, Ratan Tata of the Tata Group is slated to retire soon.

The hunt is already on for his successor - a selection committee has been constituted promising to evaluate candidates both internally as well as from outside.

However, the business publications are already predicting that the hunt is irrelevant - and that Noel Tata, Ratan Tata's half-brother is already tipped to be the next Chairman of the group.

When Ratan Tata took over as the group's Chaiman in the early 90s - he had to fill the large shoes of the legendary JRD Tata his uncle - as well as the heads of the group companies who were satraps of their businesses for decades - like Russi Mody, Ajit Kerkar and others.

People were worried that Ratan would not be able to live up to the expectations.

However, over the next two decades Ratan Tata took bold and decisive moves - removing the satraps, establishing a new branding that cuts across the group, high profile acquisitions in the Steel industry (Corus), Motors (Jaguar and Land Rover) and looked at India's growing middle class and customised products for them (Ginger in hotels and the famous Nano in motors)

Would an outsider have been able to do so much?

While we celebrate the meritocracy of professional leadership, I believe that being a member of the family gives the leader a moral authority and ownership to take big bets and to motivate employees that an "outside" candidate would never have managed. Tata himself was no ivory-tower leader - having joined Tata Steel on the shopfloor.

What do you think? Should the Tata Group look at hiring someone from out of the group for the Chairman?

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Unilever India Chief says industry being held back by lack of Human Capital

In the Hindustan Times the HUL Chief Harish Manwani has forecast that industry is going to be held back unless it engages with the education sector to plug the employability deficit.

Human capital gap shows

According to a report by consultancy company McKinsey & Co, India would need to upgrade the skill sets of around 500 million people by 2020 to meet its growth requirements. At current capacities, however, the country can train barely 50 million. Yet another consulting firm Boston Consulting Group has said that, of the 89 million people expected to join the workforce from 2009-13, over 47 million would be school dropouts.

"Corporates must actively commit resources — time, money and people — to innovatively collaborate with educational institutions so that academic curriculum is tuned to changing needs of the industry." Manwani said.

In my view, students need to be counselled on their careers and what they have an aptitude for. Currently, everyone who does a basic graduation aspires aspires for a white collar job. Whereas the reality is - we need vocational training at the undergraduate level - skilled workforce to build the industry. In fact, Rashmi Bansal said it best in her blog post. Go read it.

Ex-Wipro CEO Vivek Paul enters the Enterprise 2.0 space

I've blogged about the use cases for employee and talent communities earlier as well as 3 scenarios and stories on how social technologies can help organizations build culture, foster innovation and build a connected team - and thereby move to being Organizations 2.0.

So it's quite interesting to come across a news item that says that Vivek Paul , that the ex-Wipro CEO is now targeting the Enterprise 2.0 space as this article in the Economic Times says. There is only one big Indian player in this space - Cynapse and it'll be interesting to see how Paul's sales abilities and Rolodex takes KineticGlue.

It's more interesting to note that Paul is targeting the domestic market and employee collaboration is one big promise being made. Would it end up confronting Wipro's old rival Infosys' new offering?

Here's the article:
Vivek Paul turns entrepreneur with KineticGlue

Paul’s first entrepreneurial venture, KineticGlue, is helping hundreds of employees at companies such as Dell India, Yes Bank and L&T Infotech collaborate better by using an online social medium. Essentially, KineticGlue will help every company set up its own ‘official’ equivalent of Facebook for employees—only it increases productivity, not eat into it. L&T Infotech, an early user of KineticGlue, has found that collaboration between 500 workers using this platform has helped it discover new revenue streams.

L&T Infotech, an early user of KineticGlue, has found that collaboration between 500 employees using this platform has helped the company discover new revenue streams. Unlike traditional email groups, wherein users interact with each other through chains of messages, corporate social networking solutions like KineticGlue enable project groups within companies to have open conversations, with each discussion thread linked to relevant topics.

This not only helps in forming focused discussion groups, but also breaks hierarchical barriers and encourages bright and less experienced professionals to participate.

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Jobseekers don't want employers to check their social profiles, says study

Another interesting article on how the job hunting process is changing with the availability of social profiles on the web. The assumption is that recruiting firms and employers can access data that will be damaging to the job seeker. However, it can work the other way too. A friend who works with a bank in Asia Pacific region shared that a job seeker was shown as "unreliable" in the traditional background verification process, but based on checking the person's social profiles - they decided to hire the person!

So job seekers don't really have to be alarmed in the way this article proposes, keep privacy filters on and don't indulge in hate-mongering on the web are the two aspects I'd suggest.

Here's the article excerpt:
Job seekers wary of social media

Job seekers are aware that bosses are using social media as part of the recruitment process but don't think it's entirely appropriate, according to a new survey.

The Hays online survey of 885 people found that 38 percent of respondents believe employers use social networking profiles to help vet applications, but should not do so.

It says 35 percent not only believe employers use social networking profiles, but also believe that they should use such information to vet applications.

Just 27 per cent think employers do not use social networking profiles as part of the recruiting process.

"This survey reignites the debate about public versus private life, but this time it's not celebrities or politicians that are arguing their right to privacy, but every day job seekers," said Jason Walker, Managing Director of Hays in New Zealand.

"The majority of job seekers feel that their personal life is their personal life, and their social media profile should not be used as part of the decision making process.