Inspiring People

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Have come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of businesses. Firstly, there are the businesses that speak the language of "management" where the focus is on optimisation, control and compliance. Where the purpose of business is to make profit not for any larger cause but to give a decent return to shareholders.


Customers and employees of these businesses do not identify themselves with such organizations. They buy products and stay employed until they find better alternatives.

And there are other organizations. Few. And far between.




Where the organization knows that the profit motive is a necessity. But the mission is larger. To change the world for the better.

Not every customer or every employee probably "gets" the mission.

But those that do, they enable the world to change in their own way.


In the first type of organization we have "Human Resource Managers".



While in the second type of organization would be people whose job it is to inspire people. So that they create. And become advocates. And evangelists.

What Enterprise 2.0 can learn from KM

When I started my HR career I was associated with an organization's Knowledge Management initiatives. Soon I realised what are the issues that KM practitioners and vendors face and how the initiatives are actually rolled out in organizations.


Today I can see a parallel of the same issues plaguing Enterprise 2.0/ Social Business / Corporate Social Networking efforts:

1. Technology is seen as a the answer. It was the same in the era of KM 1.0 - thinking implementing a document management system, corporate yellow pages or enterprise search engine to connect people to people or people to information. Wonder what has changed, except social profiles and wikis have replaced yellow pages and static documents - and taxonomies have given way to folksonomies.
2. Structure is seen as the answer when technology does not get far: In KM it was the role of the CKO (remember that?) and currently its the Chief Collaboration/Social/Conversation Officer (take your pick) 
3. Saddle the blame with the culture: When organizations realise that technology and structure does not bring the desired impact the blame is laid at the door of the mythical culture of the organization. Some organizations - we are told - are suited for sharing - and others aren't.
4. The organizations that do "get it" know it's about embedding it into process : During the KM (and currently the E2.0 era) success is managing the change and defining a business case for the initiative - and building on that by embedding that into the business processes - like assessment, measurement, reward, sales and support processes - of the firm.

So is Enterprise 2.0 going to go the same way as KM?

I think so. They are both of maximum value when they are ubiquitous.

Related articles

• The FASTForward Blog " Remember Intranets?: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary (fastforwardblog.com)
• E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez " Enterprise 2.0: Two Success Stories on Connecting People with People to Make a Difference! (elsua.net)
• Enterprise 2.0 Adoption: What Your People Don't Know Will Hurt You (allyis.com)

Time for a Chief Social Officer?

Stowe Boyd makes a great case for a Chief Social Officer I still think the agenda should be owned by whoever is responsible for building the organizational culture - usually the OD head or the HR head. Or is it time for building a "social business unit" as Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group blogged recently.

Personally, I think structures are half the solution - and the easiest to do. What really is a challenge is the change in processes which impacts the work of a large number of employees.

Here is an excerpt from Stowe's post:

Likewise, the way we work is changing, too, as we adopt new tools. Kenneth Boulding said ‘We make our tools and they shape us,’ and that is perhaps nowhere more true than in the adoption of social tools.

With the empirical evidence from open social networks, business is moving quickly to apply the network effect to people-based business operations. But actually digging into the social dimension upends some conventional, industrial era assumptions. For example, recent research has shown that that raw intelligence is not the most critical factor in group productivity. Adding a highly intelligent person to a group involved in a difficult task does not increase the likelihood that the task will be accomplished. It turns out, according to Anita Wooley of CMU:

What mattered instead was the social sensitivity of individual members, the proportion of women (who tend to be more sensitive) in each group, and a balanced participation of conversation.

So the capability of a group to assimilate a challenge, and effectively respond to it — or, social cognition — depends on many factors, and less on individual IQ than we might assume. And anything that can increase social sensitivity — either through demographic balancing of groups, or tools or training to help balance conversation — will benefit the company’s resilience and rapport.

So perhaps it should be Chief Cognition Officer? A senior executive that puts practices and technologies in place to make the company smarter? Maybe bridging IT and HR functions?

I am sure these musings won’t make an impact on the mainstream readers of the Harvard Business Review, who are conservative as cats, and most likely to accept the Chief Collaboration Officer idea and title, and reluctantly at that.

But then, they haven’t come full circle to the deepest understanding of network effects: that knowledge, reason, and values are emergent properties of social systems, of people connected. As David Weinberger once said, ‘There are no smart people, only smart conversations.’ And a business is best considered as a network of conversations, as Gregory Bateson observed, way back in the ’60s.

Maybe Chief Conversation Officer?

Student's query about a career in HR

Image by B Tal via FlickrA reader asked me this query on mail. What would you suggest?

I am {name deleed}, pursuing 3rd sem MBA (HRM) from {institute name}. I am passionate towards HR but my family and relatives suggests me to take up MARKETING as a specialization as they feel that it has a wide scope and a high career growth.

I completed my Bachelors in Business Management (HR), PGDHRM and pursuing MBA other certificate courses in HR.

I request you to suggest me as to,
1. What should i do now ?
2. What do corporates look for in a MBA HR fresher ?
3. Which area in HR has a high career growth ?
4. Where can I get my Internship in HR ?

Here's what I wrote back to him:

If you are passionate about HR you will do well, if you're not passionate about Marketing - then you won't

HR operations has the highest growth - but if you are attracted to the specialist areas like Recruitment, L&D or C&B you should try for them too

Corporates like to take fresh people who have attention to detail and willingness to work hard and learn

Innovation Lessons from Steve Jobs

It's been a long time since I've written about innovation as a specific subject (see this post on Reframing, and this one on Organizational Innovation in India )

However, when I came across this Forbes.com - Magazine Article on what makes Steve Jobs such an innovator - it reinforced my belied that that basic skill of an innovator is to see the same things as we see - but with new eyes.

Here's an excerpt from the article.

Psychologists have worked tirelessly trying to figure out what makes innovators different. In one of the most thorough examinations of the subject, Harvard researchers interviewed 3,000 executives over six years, and they found that the No. 1 skill that separated innovators from noncreative professionals was "associating"--having an ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields. The three-year Harvard research project confirmed what Jobs had told a reporter 15 years earlier: "Creativity is just connecting things."

Jobs is a classic iconoclast, one who aggressively seeks out, attacks and overthrows conventional ideas. And iconoclasts, especially successful ones, have an "affinity for new experiences," according to the Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns.

Jobs sees the same things as other leaders, but he perceives them differently. Perception separates the innovator from the imitator. For example, dozens of people saw the graphical user interface set-up at the Xerox PARC facility in Palo Alto, but it was Jobs who, in 1979, perceived it differently and went on to adopt and adapt the technology for what ultimately became the first Macintosh computer, in 1984.

The key to thinking differently is perceiving things differently. To perceive things differently, you must be exposed to divergent ideas, places and people. This forces your brain to make connections it otherwise might miss. Steve Jobs has done this his entire life. He dropped out of college so he could "drop in" to classes that really interested him, such as calligraphy, whose lessons would come back to him years later when he designed the Mac, the first personal computer with beautiful fonts. Jobs wanted the Apple II to be the first personal computer people used in their homes, so he sought inspiration for it in the kitchen appliance aisle at Macy's. And when he hired musicians, artists, poets and historians on the original Macintosh team, he was again exposing himself to new experiences and novel ways of looking at problems.

Some of his most creative insights have resulted directly from novel experiences either in physical places or among people with whom he chose to associate. For example, when he started the Apple Stores, he purposely avoided hiring someone from the computer industry. Instead he tapped a former Target executive, Ron Johnson. Jobs and Johnson sought ideas from outside the computer industry. They asked themselves, "Who offers the best customer service experience?" The answer: Four Seasons hotels. Walk into an Apple Store. You won't find a cashier, but you will find a "concierge." There's a reason for that.

Does Steve Jobs perceive things differently? Absolutely. Is that a skill unique to him? No. You can learn to be more creative as long as you keep in mind that your brain will fight you every step of the way. By pursuing new experiences and thinking differently about common problems, you are asking your brain to expend energy when its natural role is to conserve as much energy as possible. It's not easy, but by forcing yourself out of your comfort zone, physically and mentally, you will kick-start an improvement of the odds of generating remarkable new ideas that have the potential of transforming your business and your life.

Dave Evans' book Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement

My erstwhile colleague Dave Evans (who's a thought leader in the Social Media marketing space) has written his second book Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement - which is focused on the way businesses can transform into social businesses - combining SMM with social CRM and Enterprise 2.0
I am flattered that he chose to mention me in the book in the chapters on Enterprise 2.0 and the way HR can use Talent Communities.

HR and Collaboration Technologies - Why they don't meet

Rawn Shah of IBM shares a research on Chief HR Officers and asks Are Collaborative Technologies On Your HR Department’s Agenda?

Personally I think HR people (the vast majority of them) are scared of technology and try to shut it out of their minds. Very few senior HR people would be "geeks" - and a lot of HR directors still depend on their middle managers to do anything more complicated than an MS Office document.

To expect them to understand and leverage social technologies is a little bit like asking for the moon. That is why the Enterprise 2.0 and before it the KM agenda was driven by CIOs and CTOs.

As the workplace becomes more and more connected - and as people use their personal smartphones to connect with friends and networks outside corporate firewalls - even the CIOs and CTOs are becoming more and more irrelevant.

Why chance does the non-tech savvy CHRO have?

Here's the results of the survey that Rawn quotes:

In it CHROs say that they are relatively effective in managing labor costs, evaluating workforce performance, enhancing workforce productivity, sourcing and recruiting, and retaining talent. However, three key shortfalls emerged: cultivating creative leaders, mobilizing for speed and flexibility, and capitalizing on collective intelligence. These key shortfalls stand out because CHROs found that they were relatively significant in terms of future importance, but less effective in executing on them.

I find the third factor, needing to better capitalize on collective intelligence, most interesting because the study found that the ‘soft’ skills of collaboration and social networking can have bottom-line consequences. Financial outperformers (as measured by EBIDTA) are 57 percent more likely than underperformers to use collaborative and social networking tools to enable global teams to work more effectively together.

78 percent of HR leaders do not think their organizations are effective at fostering collaboration and social networking. Yet only 21 percent of companies have recently increased the amount they invest in the collaboration tools. Many organizations fail to fully utilize the knowledge-sharing resources they already possess. Only 19 percent of respondents regularly use collaborative technologies to identify individuals with relevant knowledge and skills. 23 percent use collaborative technologies to preserve critical knowledge, while 27 percent use it to spread innovation more widely across their organization.

Indian HR leaders start their own consulting gigs

I've started to see an interesting trend. Indian HR leaders after reaching the top jobs are starting to start their own consulting businesses. The latest in the line are Bimal Rath (who was heading Nokia's HR in India) and Aquil Busrai (who was HR Director at IBM) have both started their own consulting businesses.
They join the list of HR folks like Udai Upendra (ex-HR head of Ranbaxy) and V. Kartikeyan (ex-HR head of Texas Instruments) who have their own consulting businesses.
Why the trend?
Personally I think it's because HR heads after reaching the top of their organizational growth find they don't have a next career growth. Unless they move to a business role, like Google's APAC HR Head, Manoj Verghese who joined Facebook India as Director of Business Operations.

So the next challenge they seek is to set up their own ventures and use exisiting skills and build new skills too.
On the other hand - there are professionals like Ravi Virmani (who have spent their careers in consulting) are moving to industry roles.
Looks like there will be more news on this list in the future.

HR, Enterprise 2.0, The Gap

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John Seely Brown

Here are some interesting articles and blog posts I came across recently. Thought I'd share them with you:

1. John Hagel and John Seely Brown talk about the Enterprise Value of Social Software. Take a read through it. Your business could leverage social media to get real value.
2. Akanksha explores how organizations can leverage the enthusiasm of new joinees and what they need to watch out for.
3. If the internet was in the 1960s how would ads for Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Skype look? Maybe something like these?
4. The link between employees and customers in Culture is Brand, Brand is Culture. Must read, about how Marketing and HR is linked. Something that I have come to believe more and more.
   

Related articles

• Tapping the Network to Facilitate Innovation " emergent by design (emergentbydesign.com)
• Enterprise 2.0 and ROI : forget the "whether" and focus on the "how". | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad (duperrin.com)
• A conversation with John Hagel and John Seely Brown (adaptivepath.com)

CEOs in Asia and Succession Planning

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A senior from XLRI, Indranil Roy gets quoted in this Economic Times article Why do corporates have a natural resistance to succession planning?

Meanwhile, as they expand their operations in Asia, MNCs are looking for a different kind of CEO. Indranil Roy, Korn/Ferry's managing director, Asia-Pacific, leadership and talent consulting, calls then the '2.0 CEOs' as opposed to the '1.0 CEOs' that went before. "MNCs say they want CEOs who are very different from the ones they have. That's because their businesses in Asia have moved from the outsourcing and cost arbitrage model to a talent and innovation model. The likelihood of finding such leaders is highest in India. But still, we estimate it's only 8% of the basic qualified talent."
While the Asia 1.0 CEO was required to replicate or customise existing strategy, the Asia 2.0 CEO will have to generate new growth in an unserved market. The old CEO worked with a culturally homogenous team, but the new CEO will have to build a diverse, international pool of talent with creative skills. "An Indian passport is no longer necessary to be a CEO in India. That was unthinkable when I was growing up," says Roy.

What does Evidence Based HR mean

I came across this interesting blog by Paul Kearns which draws inspiration from Evidence Based Management and says that evidence based HR and practitioners like HR Business Partners who work according to Evidence Based Management principles in HR (see the case for EB-HR here) would impact traditional HR systems and discontinue them.

This is spelt out in the blog post Up a creek without a paddle?

They then inevitably want to question, and eventually dismantle, the crumbling edifice that is the typical HR framework of: -

Job evaluation and grading – plenty of evidence to show it is often a rigid and expensive way of managing rewards that does not produce the highest performance levels possible

Engagement surveys – they realise the theory behind the employee-customer profit chain is suspect and the links between engagement and performance are never as simple as it suggests

Competence frameworks – because, apart from the specious theory that produced this industry – in practice, quite frankly, anyone with any common sense always knew they were going to become a bureaucratic nightmare without any evidence of added value

Performance management – until they are confident that the measures being used actually measure value

Leadership development – however attractive it might sound there is no common definition of what effective leadership means and therefore no evidence can be produced to say that effective ‘leadership’ has ever been achieved

Of course, none of this accords with their non-business-partner, HR Directors’ expectations who, over recent years, blithely followed Ulrich’s lead (correlative, as opposed to evidence-based), which spawned a commonly-held view that there had to be a shift in focus from HR transactions to strategy and that this required steady-state, continuous developments in HR’s role. What they failed to realise was that properly trained, evidence-based, HR BP’s are taught that this shift actually represents a discontinuous, seismic shift in the paradigm on which strategic HR is predicated.

So what do you think? As a HR professional are you ready to embrace evidence based HR? If you do, how will that impact your career? Will your boss glare at your suggestion that you should discontinue Leadership Development?

Leave your comments below - or links if you want to blog about it.

Why do failed CEOs keep getting chances?

Michael Brisciana asks Does Firing Guarantee Future Success?

why is it that once someone reaches a certain level in an organization, it seems that even if they “fail” repeatedly and get fired (sometimes several times), they seem to re-surface months later in a similar (or better) job at another organization? And what does this say about Boards, CEO’s, and other senior managers that they often put their faith in “re-treads” instead of taking a chance on talented, high-potential (but non-pedigreed) “new blood”?

Case In Point

Last week, Hewlett Packard hired Leo Apotheker as its new CEO — seven months after Mr. Apotheker had been forced out of rival SAP after only seven months at the helm.

One of the reasons for this is that organizations are risk averse systems. It is extremely unlikely that a VP in firm X would be hired as CEO of firm Y. There are two possible scenarios if firm Y is looking for a CEO. They would hire a current CXO to become their CEO or hire a CEO from any other firm to become their CEO.

Heads of internal businesses are often overlooked for top jobs because of internal politics issues or because they are identified too closely with one business - forcing Boards to look externally for a CEO. Successful CEOs are usually not available for hire when organizations need them :-) So organizations make do with average or fired CEOs.

How a CEO can build a strong Organizational Culture

Great post on the VentureBlog Advice on Building Company Culture Wonder how many CEOs can follow this list :-)

And in a recent talk given by Scott Weiss, former CEO of IronPort, he enumerated the many things that he did maintain a strong and unified culture at IronPort. Scott is a widely respected leader and CEO, and one need look no further than his list to understand why -- Scott suggests the following 20 rules of thumb while building a company for 0 to 250 employees:

1. Interview every new employee (until 50 then interview everyone that will manage others)
2. Spend 30 minutes per week on Mondays talking to new employees as part of their first day. Stop by their desk within a month to see how things are going.
3. Have lunch with every employee (After 50 you can take 2 out at a time) and get to know them not only by name but some details about them.
4. Hold at least one all hands meeting (at least two execs should speak, not just you) every quarter
5. Go over the real board slides after every board meeting – let everyone know what was discussed.
6. At every meeting with all employees, you must set aside 30 minutes for questions and press for no fewer than 5.
7. An email (or internal blog) to all after every customer trip, conference attended or major news from a competitor e.g. notes from the road
8. Personally roll out the values, strategy, and history of the company during a comprehensive employee orientation within the first 90 days.
9. Attend every company function, event and party as though you are the host
10. Review every significant communication to ALL and ask your team to review yours before it goes out.
11. Give a performance review to your direct reports at least twice per year, spending no less than 5 hours preparing each person’s review and at least an hour giving it. Get 360 feedback in person.
12. Set annual and quarterly goals (between 2-5 is about right although I prefer three) as a company as well as each individual employee.
13. Promote mainly from within and always based solely on performance.
14. Personally roll out the performance review process to everyone – you are the lead speaker, not human resources.
15. Emphasize "speaking up" as a value every time you get the chance (e.g. interviews, evaluations, all hands, employee orientation and lunches)
16. Follow the rules e.g. fly coach, park in the back lot, have a modest office
17. Constantly demonstrate that no task or chore is beneath you. E.g. Fill the coke machine, clean up after a group lunch, pack a box, and carry the heavy crap.
18. When a team has to work a weekend, you need to be there too - even if it's just to stop by and buy them a meal to show your appreciation.
19. When something really goes wrong, you need to take all the blame.
20. When something really goes right, you need to give all the credit away.

HR and Business Strategy

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On the SuccessFactors Blog Mick Collins asks if HR and the Business are on the same page? I believe that HR has to have two continuing conversations - with the leaders of the business and with the employees. The first conversation has to be to understand how business, its strategy and tactics are evolving in response to external reality. The second conversation is to understand how people would respond to any strategic or tactical changes in structure, systems and processes. If for example the business' core competency is operational excellence then all the HR processes - from recruiting to performance management to succession planning to talent development has to be designed keeping that as a the fulcrum.
Here's the excerpt from the blog post:

One particular question asked “What do you consider to be the three biggest HR challenges being faced by your organization today?” At the top of that list was ensuring that employees remain engaged and productive, followed by retaining key talent, and developing leaders.
In my mind, the first “business of HR” response came in fourth: aligning people strategies to business objectives.
It reminded me of a conversation I had when running a marketing function. My manager would (rhetorically) ask me, “What should be marketing’s #1 metric?” The answer: revenue. Every other marketing metric and activity, from building brand awareness to identifying leads, is a contributor to the function’s overall goal: to generate revenue for the business.
In much the same way, HR’s biggest challenge should be helping the business design, deliver, and execute on its strategy, in order to achieve its goals. Every other challenge (hiring, retaining, engaging employees, etc) should flow from that.

Develop Corporate Storytellers

Steve Rubel writes about the The Rise of the Corporate Transmedia Storyteller in his article in Forbes (excerpted below) and claims this is going to be the new model for marketing. Unleashing subject matter experts to tell their and the organizations' stories (earlier touched on in Employees are the new Media- sounds powerful - but will challenge organizations to let go of control and trust employees to make mistakes and learn from them.

This is not a tactical decision - it is a fundamental shift in the way organizations see themselves and will impact both internal and external systems and process. HR needs to also transform then from a "policing" and "compliance monitoring" function to developing the new competencies required.

Here's the excerpt from Steve;s article

The new law of digital relativity (e.g. the relationship between time and space) means the end of scarcity. This was the currency that, for years, powered marketing budgets, filled media coffers and drove the information economy. Now that scarcity is gone, however, we will need to adopt a new set of skills.

Enter the Transmedia Storyteller.

Even though millions of us are now content producers in some form or another, the reality is there’s still chasm when it comes to quality. There’s art and there’s junk. Audiences want art.

To stand out today it’s critical that businesses create content. Activating your cadre of internal subject matter experts is the surest path to visibility. According to the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer, the public is increasingly relying on subject matter experts as trusted authorities. And many businesses are beginning to do just that, especially on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The reality is, however, that organizations need to do more than just unleash their subject matter experts en masse. They need to activate them in multiple channels at once and equip them in how to create a compelling narrative – an emerging set of skills called Transmedia Storytelling

Transmedia Storytelling doesn’t need to be fancy. It can be executed with low budget tools. However, it does need to be thought through. It requires that a business’ subject matter experts know how to simultaneously tell good stories and to do so using text, video, audio and images depending on the venue.

Transmedia storytelling is the future of marketing. And those who can span across formats and share their expertise will stand out in an age of Digital Relativity. There’s a first-mover advantage here. However, it remains to be seen who will grab the ring.

Getting back to a corporate HR role

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Today I start another phase of my career. After 4 years of freelance consulting and then being a part of 2020 social - I am headed back to a corporate HR role.


I am joining an aviation and travel group as AGM- HR and will be heading the HR function for the four companies under the larger umbrella.

So what does that mean for this blog?

I'll continue posting about social software and how it could be a tool for designing the next generation of social organizations - but I'll also blog increasingly about day to day HR stuff like recruiting and performance management, succession planning and policies and process. 


Thanks for continuing to read this blog. I need your best wishes as I embark on this career journey - so leave your comments and thoughts in the comments below

For my day to day thoughts you can follow me on twitter @GautamGhosh

Employee Advocates for Employee Communications

Image via WikipediaOne of the oft-ignored aspect of employee engagement is employee communication. Organizations just don't treat it as priority. I asked this question on my facebook page - and three people have answered yes to the question I posed so far.
So why is that the case?
Primarily it is because employee communication is not thought of as a discipline by HR professionals as external communications is thought of by the Marketing professionals. Most HR communications are restricted to garishly colored emails with 20 size font letters. Or managers are expected to do the bulk of the communications to their supervisors - and we know how that goes.
The question needs to be rethought - and organizations need to look at their employees as an internal community they need to "converse with" and not to "talk/sell to".
So here's my free advice to organizations on how to better "communicate with employees"

1. Listen. Give tools to your employees to make them heard. Use ideation platforms, question and answers, wikis, internal blogs for employees to connect with each other. Figure out what has their attention and time.
2. Acknowledge. When someone contributes a great idea - borrow it and give him/her credit. Make that employee an owner of that idea and support him/her to implement it. The same away acknowledge the employees who contribute answers and contribute to building the knowledge base.
3. Understand. With the data generated in the first two steps organizations can figure out (using Thomas Gladwell's Tipping point lingo) who are the mavens, connectors and salesmen. This would be possible using Social Network Analysis tools.
4. Engage. Using the data from the above step organizations should figure out the highly engaged employees who are mavens, connectors and salesmen and empower them as internal advocates (using the methodology of social influence marketing) 

The thought behind this method of employee communication is that influential employees would be trusted and co-creating a message along with them would be a better way to communicate than just using posters and emails that are likely to be ignored by employees.

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