Video of our panel on Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business

This is a video of our panel discussion at Nasscom Product Conclave. Moderated by Vivek Paul (of Kinetic Glue) and a panel of D Vijay of Texas Instruments India, Sumeet Anand (of Kreeo) and yours truly

From left: Sharad Sharma of Nasscom, Vivek Paul, Vijay Doddavaram, Sumeet Anand and me.

Related articles

• Panel Discussion on Enterprise 2.0 #e20 at NASSCOM Product Conclave (gautamblogs.com)

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Tweets from #nhrd11 - A recap

Image via Wikipedia

Here are the tweets I have been making from the National HRD Conference since yesterday


RT @Rajlakshmi_S: Make your own conference - a big hit, a big innovation at #nhrd11 #unique
27 minutes ago

Executive coach is the new freelance consultant - impressions after a day of #nhrd11
27 minutes ago


China has a shortage of 500,000 CEOs says Mohandas Pai #nhrd11

HR people should hire people, train people based on what customers and investors expect - Dave Ulrich #nhrd11
5 hours ago

Delta gives employee bonus coupons to customers asking them to give it to employees when they get great service - Dave Ulrich #nhrd11
5 hours ago

Prof. Dave Ulrich is now speaking on the future of HR #nhrd11 - theme "HR from the outside in"
5 hours ago

RT @AbhijitBhaduri: 12.2 million user base of 3G in India; 15m mobile subscriber added per MONTH. 100,000 tablets sold/month. #NHRD11
6 hours ago

RT @AbhijitBhaduri: "HR has to be a specialist in community processes." PM Kumar at #NHRD11
7 hours ago

PM Kumar says "Management gets the union it deserves" #nhrd11
7 hours ago

Don't understand why an organized movement against corruption is applauded, but organized movement for people (unions) discouraged #nhrd11
7 hours ago

Formal employment only accounts for 10% of Indian workforce - max 45 million people. Non-formal work accounts for 400 million-Bijou #nhrd11
7 hours ago

Processes cannot create resourcefulness. Processes are like the road on which F1 race take place - PM Kumar #nhrd11
7 hours ago

My blogpost on the 1st panel discussion at #nhrd11 bit.ly/sga1Sh
7 hours ago

The line manager can handle toolkits - HR people overrate their needs. says PM Kumar #nhrd11
7 hours ago

RT @Ester_Matters: If everyone's business is people it can turn that nobody's business is people- chandra from ibm #nhrd11
7 hours ago

what it means to be human? We are the only species who can imagine and reflect. We have 2 needs, to relate & to express- PM Kumar #nhrd11
8 hours ago

Sri Sri Ravishankar "Krishna was the first HR manager - for Arjun " - Gita the 1st HR manual? :-) #nhrd11
22 hours ago

"In India we have 19th century mindset, 20th century processes and 21st century needs" Sam Piroda #nhrd11
23 hours ago

"Self esteem is fragile in India. hard to build teams without self esteem. Criticising your work is seen as criticising you"Pitroda #nhrd11
23 hours ago

"right people at right time at right place make things happen. Domain expertise, leadership skills, is what I look for" Sam Pitroda #nhrd11
23 hours ago

Sam Pitroda via telecon addressing #nhrd11 - Vinita bali introducing him as the architect of telecom revolution in India
23 hours ago

Vinita Bali "what can business learn from art, theater, creativity - from excellence from other fields" #nhrd11 Sam Pitroda next speaker
23 hours ago

"Quality of people and how they work together is the differentiator that separates winners from leaders" Vinita Bali #nhrd11
23 hours ago

Vinita bali addressing the conference - "It is not a HR conf. Its a people conference. Its a conference for all business leaders" #nhrd11
23 hours ago

@mullyspeak here http://bit.ly/stcSOe Code of Conduct #nhrd11
23 hours ago

#nhrd11 SY Siddiqui says National HRD Network has crossed membership of 12,000
23 hours ago

SY Siddiqui says "Bangalore is an apt city for "Live and Breathe the Change" theme" #nhrd11
23 hours ago

The halls at #nhrd11 are named after the stalwarts of HR and OD in India - Dharni Sinha, Ranjan Acharya, Pulin Garg,
23 hours ago

C Mahalingam (Mali) read out the code of conduct for the HR professionals at #nhrd11 - now the lamp lighting ceremony
17 Nov

Agenda of Business and HR is the same says @abhijitbhaduri kicking off #nhrd11 Sam Pitroda, TV Rao, Vinita Bali
17 Nov

RT @Ester_Matters: Org effectiviness (as new hr) will report to ceo and Traditional hr will report to the coo #edlawler #nhrd11
17 Nov

Whose business is People? Liveblogging #nhrd11

Note: Liveblogging the National HRD Conference - excuse the typos please :)

Members of the panel: Santrupt Mishra (CEO Carbon Black, group Head of HR for Aditya Birla Group) , PM Kumar (Business Chairman - Group Corporate Development - GMR ), Vijay Chandok (President -International Banking and SME- ICICI Bank) , Bijou Kurien (President and CEO-Lifestyle, Reliance Retail), Dr. C Sripada (Head HR - IBM India & South Asia), and moderator Anand Shankar (MD - Aon Hewitt India)

Anand Shankar - sets context - who's responsibility is it to engage employees?

Santrupt Mishra - On a lighter note: The headhunter's business is people. The individualist says it's a person's business. If the focus is paternalistic or collective then they would say it is the business of everybody. We need to segment what is the area we are talking about.

PM Kumar - We need to understand what it means to be human. We are the only species who can imagine and reflect. We have two needs, to relate and to express oneself. Anyone who deals with people need to remember that.

Vijay Chandok - First I thought it is obviously the business of the line manager. But the analogy of the F1 driver, focusing on the critical aspect of the pit-stop. Who is responsible for winning the race? A delay in a few seconds can impact the result. The Line Manager is significantly partnered in the same way by HR.

Bijou Kurian - 85% of our employees are in the frontline. People don't aspire for this role. Attrition is in 3 digits sometimes in the retail business. We need to attract and engage them. It cannot be delegated to a department. Typically we use people as a denominator. In a P&L we focus on topline and bottomline. How do we measure "Return on People"?

Chandra - The first answer that popped into my mind is "My business is people, as the HR head". Then it is responsibility of anyone who impacts it.

Santrupt - The leadership rests with HR but delivered by line managers - therefore its a partnership.

PM Kumar - The line manager can handle toolkits - HR people overrate their needs.

Use cases for Talent Communities

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeHave had some interesting conversations with HR and Recruiting folks on how they can use BraveNewTalent's Talent Communities. There are three major use cases that have emerged.

1. A person who's interested in a role with a company visits the careers page of a website. He/She finds no suitable current opening - and the company loses a chance to engage that person in a relationship.
2. A company is looking for a person for an job opening and finds there are 3 people who are equally suitable for the job. It makes an offer to the best of the three and loses the ability to engage the other two  almost for ever.
3. A company goes to an engineering college and selects Trainees who would join it after 6-7 months. Usually connecting and keeping such campus recruits engaged  is tough. There is always the scare that another employer can approach them a week later and get them to join them for a couple of thousands more.

In all these cases candidates become passive resumes stored in ATSs or other databases. Recruiters are too busy with current openings to focus on keeping a relationship alive with the above three constituents. And even if they make the effort, once a candidate moves around you lose contact.

So the solution is to connect such candidates via a talent community. They are sorted based on the group they belong and other attributes and the organization can share updates, news and specific job openings as and when they open up. The candidates connect via social network ids and therefore 

To ask how you can do so, send me an email :-) at gautam @ BraveNewTalent . com

National HRD Network's Annual Conference - Are you going to be there?

Looking forward to meeting many HR colleagues and friends at the NHRD Network's Annual Conference from 16-19 November

It's going to be great event with people like Sam Pitroda, Sri Sri Ravishankar, Dave Ulrich (who will be speaking on Securing the future of the HR profession & the HR professional), Ed Lawler, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Dr Santrupt Misha, TV Mohandas Pai scheduled to address 1500 HR professionals (full speaker list here )

You can also attend one of these amazing pre-conference workshops on the 16th and 17th 

Another exciting aspect is the HR Showcase - to find out what innovations HR professionals are doing - 50 chosen HR initiatives that added business benefits would be showcased by the respective companies 

The uniqueness of the Conference would also be the Large Scale Interactive Process "Co-Creation" - where every participant will play a part!

Panel Discussion on Enterprise 2.0 #e20 at NASSCOM Product Conclave

Image via CrunchBaseNovember is going to be a month of conferences. On the 10th of November I would be in a panel discussion with Vivek Paul (ex-CEO of Wipro and Founder of KineticGlue), Sumeet Anand of Kreeo, and Vijay Doddavaram of Texas Instruments at the NASSCOM Product Conclave at Bangalore.

If you're interested in Social Business, Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 I suggest you attend the same :-)

More details here. If you have inputs on the session you can leave your queries, comments here

Am also excited because I would finally get to meet Shel Israel (co-author of Naked Conversations, one of the first books on business blogging) who's been an online friend for so many years! Shel would be conducting a workshop for startup entrepreneurs on how to make a great business pitch. Details here

Why and How of external talent communities

Kevin Wheeler has a great post on Talent Pools vs. Communities. You should go read it here.

As I am meeting prospective clients I am facing similar statements

• Why should I build a talent community?
• Our company already has a Facebook page, Twitter account - why manage another platform?
• We are using Linkedin to recruit - our internal recruiters have more than 15,000 Linkedin connections - so we're already doing social recruiting.

If you have the same questions/ doubts - here are the reasons:

• Companies that engage with prospective candidates and build a relationship with them- sharing their culture and details. As Tony Hsieh says "Your culture is your brand"
• On Facebook and Twitter all your updates go out to all the people following your liking your account. And yet engagement is notoriously difficult on Facebook and ephemeral on Twitter. The other fact is that  the focus of these accounts is not talent/jobs/careers but customers/communication/marketing. As Shiv Singh says - you are competing for attention (on Facebook) with 30 billion other things !!
• The focus of platforms like BraveNewTalent is the ability to segment and communicate with specific groups of your followers - you cannot do that on generic social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook where brands focus on "broadcasting" and chasing non-useful metrics like number of fans/followers
• Platforms like BraveNewTalent become "social media hubs" pulling in tweets, YouTube videos and Job openings on to one platform. People who follow you see all your content in one place
• Great that you have social media rockstars on your recruiting team and are leveraging their networks. However, ever thought what would happen when they are poached by the competition? They take their network with them. Does the organization really have the time and resources necessary to pursue lawsuits?
• Talent communities are not job-boards. Organizations have to attract and engage the workforce they want to hire. And they have to also develop the ones who are following them. Unless a talent engages with them, they cannot "spam" a job seeker.
• Yes it takes time and effort to create and engage a community. It's a network of relationships. Relationships take time and effort. But the benefits can be immense. You decide if you want a job-seeker (in the normal way of business) or an advocate (by building a community). Read this post by my blogging-buddy Luis Suarez on what is a community.

So are you ready to be an innovator in the Talent industry? Reach out to me - mail me at gautam @ bravenewtalent dot com or call me at +91-97422-39954

It would be my honor to enable you for success.

Steve Jobs on Work and Love #RIPSteveJobs

Image by marcopako  via FlickrFrom the Standford university address:

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

And here are some memorable quotes:

• “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
• “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” “My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.”
• “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” 
• “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” 
• “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about.” 
• “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
• “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.” 
• “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” 
• “Innovation … comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” 

Skills The Social Recruiter Needs to Build

Recruiting has traditionally been of three types.

One is typified by the Old Boys Club persona. These are typically the ones working on retained searches, placing CEOs, COOs and whatever are the other CXOs. I met one of them a couple of years ago and when he heard that I was working in the intersection of HR and Social raised a distasteful eyebrow and said "I don't need social media. I am exclusive. Most of the leaders of India Inc. would give an arm to reach me." They command usually high fees (to the tune of 33% of candidate's salary - and take usually 11% before the search is commissioned, 11% when the shortlist is given and the remaining when the candidate is selected)

Then there are the third party recruiters working on contingent searches - trying to be the first one to push that CV that they have sourced, talked to the candidate (and sometimes not even that!) to the corporate recruiter before a rival does. Always yearning to reach the standard of the earlier described Recruiters on a retainer. They typically get lower commissions (8.33% in lean times to 12.5-20% in better times) and only when the search is complete.

And then there is the corporate recruiter. Some focusing on middle and top level recruiting. Others on entry level and campus recruiting. They juggle the third party recruiters and headhunters on one hand and the hiring manager within the company on the other. They also have to manage their own performance measures like being under-budget, tracking metrics (time to hire being the easiest) and chasing line managers (for things like job description, to taking interviews)

Insert into this ecosystem something as disruptive as "Talent Communities & Social Recruiting" - moving from transactions to relationship, from secrecy to transparency - and then one realises the skills that need to be built by the Social Recruiter:

1. Community Building and Facilitation: This is critical and encompasses a whole lot of skills that focus on putting the needs of the community paramount and recognizing the various social roles in the community and supporting each of them appropriately
2. Content Creation and encouraging others to do the same: Recognizing which kind of content is most compelling for the community and adds most value to the members. And encouraging such content from them by ask questions.
3. Storytelling: Had posted about it earlier - and now its the turn of stories to be "trans-media" from videos to text to mobile to real world.

What other skills would you add?