Carnival of the Capitalists

This week's carnival of the capitalists is up at the PoliBlog. Yes, you'll find my contribution there too :-)

A new take on Entrepreneurship---Existential Enterprise

I picked this from Rajesh Jain's Blog and he picked it from a post by Dave Pollard. Am posting a part of the post. Rob at BusinessPundit might find it useful !

The #1 reason entrepreneurial businesses fold is because they simply run out of cash. The #2 reason is because the owners make one or more fatal decisions, and the most common fatal decision is to produce a product that nobody wants to buy.
Here's an alternative model, based on what Charles Handy calls Existential Enterprise, and which I have called New Collaborative Enterprise. Its first two principles turn the business school formula upside down:
1. Marketing: Don't sell or market anything -- identify and produce something for which there is a substantial unmet need.
2. Financing: Don't borrow money or sell part ownership in your business -- only spend your own cash or cash you've earned.

Corporate Blogging Survey

Vasant pointed out this Corporate Blogging survey. Go check it out, some interesting answers to the questions of why corporate people blog and where it is headed.

waiting to read....

1. Small Pieces Loosely Joined written by David Weinberger, you could read the chapters online.
   
2. The future of Ideas written by Lawrence Lessig

What's common to both books? They are both refreshing new looks at the phenomenon of the Internet. Something tells me I'll love to read them !

Adversity Quotient...?

I came across something pretty interesting. Peak Learning's site showcases something called Adversity Quotient based on Dr. Paul Stoltz's work. With so many xQs (IQ, EQ, SQ) being in vogue over the last few years, my first response was, "oh no, not again"...but when I took a closer look, here is what the site said:

Adversity Quotient®, or AQ®, is the science of human resilience. People who
successfully apply AQ perform optimally in the face of adversity—the challenges,
big and small, that confront us each day. In fact, they not only learn from
these challenges, but they also respond to them better and faster. For
businesses and other organizations, a high-AQ workforce translates to increased
capacity, productivity, and innovation, as well as lower attrition and higher
morale.

AQ theory draws from award-winning science to explain in simple terms why
some people are more resilient than others—in other words, why and how they
thrive, even in the most demanding circumstance. It also tells us what it takes
to become more reslient.
AQ measures are exceptionally robust. The statistically valid and reliable (not many people can say that ! - Gautam) Adversity Response Profile™ is the exclusive online tool for screening applicants and developing greater resilience in people.
AQ methods are proven — they produce measurable, permanent gains in resilience. Our simple AQ-building process increases performance, health, tenacity, agility, innovation, accountability, entrepreneurship, focus, and effectiveness… among other attributes that help individuals thrive within an organization.

AQ is grounded in research. It can be measured and tracked against performance and other variables that affect business results. AQ leverages on our natural ability to learn and change, enhancing this vital capacity. In fact, unlike other types of learning, AQ can be permanently rewired and strengthened.

Read more about the AQ book on Amazon.

HR becoming a trusted business partner

Somebody sent me a useful checklist. Do you all (HR people and business folks) think that this is a good starting point. Of course, this is assuming one has highly developed HR skills (which contrary to public opinion is not common sense!)

Becoming literate about the business you serve - in HR we want to help our business partners succeed. As their partners it is reasonable that we understand things like,

· Their intended reason for existing,
· Their preferred markets, customers, products, and services,
· How they will operate and work together
· How they make and spend money
· How they measure success
· The boundaries and constraints must be honored
· What and where they want to be in the future.

At some point you may want to develop a profile for each of your business partners. To help get started, ask yourself questions like these…

· Who are the business partner’s customers?
· What do they want from your business partners? (Are they getting it?)
· What does the business partner offer their customer?
· Who are the competitors how are they different from the business partner?
· How do the business partners measure their success?
· What are the 3 top issues facing the business partner now?
· What are the business partners' core work processes?
· How is the business partners unit organized?
· What is my value proposition statement to the business partners?

Tracking Employment 2010 trends in India

Picked this up from the XL Alumni watch blog:

The current issue of Business India (July 19 - Aug 1, 2004) carries a 2-page coverage of an interesting future survey of the Employment Trends in India.The survey, based on Future-Search Conference methodology, was conducted by Chennai-based, Totus Consulting, and identifies 3 influencing factors and seven trends which will change the nature of employment in the country.Ganesh Chella (84PMIR batch), the Founder & CEO of Chennai-based Totus Consulting, says, "We wanted to take a hard look at future macro-trends, not at current best practices. The whole exercise was to seek, not critique..."

Read on more here( I've highlighted the main points in bold):

The seven macro-trends thrown up by the study are a "reflection of what
will be," says Mr Ganesh Chella, CEO, Totus Consulting. Some of these trends -
the increasing work-life imbalance for instance - are already evident, but
others are not so visible, he adds.
Employee rights, for instance, are a great source of concern, he says. The issue here is not just who will take care of employee rights in the future, but also what the consequences of not taking care of employee rights are, he explains. "Will this neglect result in white collar activism?" he asks.
Similarly, career longevity is likely to emerge as a major source of concern for those over 45. But the people who cope with this anxiety will be those who embark on a second or even third career in their middle years, he says. Thus, retirement in the traditional sense will soon disappear making it necessary for society to have appropriate coping mechanisms, he points out.
The study also found that women would continue to be under pressure, trying to balance their own needs and expectations with those of society. Women themselves will, however, be responsible for finding solutions to these problems with options such as `free-agency' flourishing because of this, the study adds. The growth in concepts such as `temping' and `free-agency' will also be driven by the increasing work-life imbalance, explains Mr Chella.
With organisations increasingly being driven only by performance, a `no-frills' employee value proposition will emerge, the study states. Most businesses will not invest in developing talent and will instead look at `buying' it. In many cases, organisations will increasingly turn to intermediaries such as professional employer organisations, Mr Chella says.
These intermediaries will gain in influence, he adds. The HR function too will be influenced by the persistent focus on the bottomline and on ensuring performance, he says. Traditional HR skills such as managing `employee relations' will no longer be a part of the HR vocabulary (who will do that, I wonder, the line manager? - Gautam), he adds. Similarly, the study found that education would increasingly become a prerogative of the private sector, with porous boundaries between industry and education. As part of this process, many young people will join the workforce after completing high school (10+2) and will work for a while before returning to college for a graduate degree.

On tactics and tricks of retention

I am a little sceptical always of these so-called "strategies" for things like attraction and retention of people to an organization.
I believe that the best employers are firms that build processes and policies around people and not vice versa. These are practices that view the people who work not as a faceless nameless mass of "Human Resources" but as live, real people who have live real issues.
Whether senior or junior management, blue or white collar, the best way to retain employees is to respect them and care for them. It is when HR people try to be 'extra smart' and end up being manipulative that people see through it and that breeds cynicism of the HR function.

Folks who have stuck to their organizations tell me its because they feel valued there, and the organization goes out of its way to accomodate their desires for growth and learning. They also accomodate personal needs for transfers easily and these people have also been open enough to look at cross functional moves when the company has given them an option.
Of course there have been people who have left these firms, and yet even the disengagement process has not left them with a bitter taste in the mouth.
The underlying theme for a great relationship between any employee and employer ? Mutual respect and acknowledgment of the tacit psychological contract .

Poaching returns to Silicon Valley

From Brian Caulfield's post on the Business2Blog:

An expert on Silicon Valley recruiting, John Sullivan, mentioned to me earlier this year that many recruiters, among the first to be let go during the bust, were being called back into action.
Sure enough, it looks like we're starting to see some results. Juniper, a business built on poaching Cisco talent before the bust, has just grabbed two of Cisco's key sales guys. Nice. You want to really stick it to a competitor, start with sales. Meanwhile, Google has just grabbed BEA's chief software architect, Adam Bosworth, with the ultimate recruiting tool: pre-IPO Google options.

He also points to John's article on "poaching techniques and tools"....nice, if you are a recruiter...and bad news, if you are a manager of talented people!

ASTD conference 2004 speaker handouts available online

For people interested in cutting edge Learning, Training and HRD thoughts, I suggest you take a look here.