misFortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Prof CK Prahalad wrote a book called Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid about the 4 billion people who live on less than $2 a day. He says that if only we could start looking at this group as a group of discerning consumers with specific needs, the corporations could tap into the immense opportunities that lie there.

How about having the HR folks taking a look at those in the corporation who make up the bottom of the pyramid? Anything that involves dealing with the blue collar employees does not seem to feature in most HR people's careers - and if it does, it is only expected to be a "short stint". In the past some organizations did insist on making a year or so at the factory mandatory, until they realized that the HR talent was wriggling out of those places faster than people do from a crowded Mumbai local train.

If you offer a career start in the factory to a fresh MBA in HR, they will look at you as if you stepped out of the dark ages. "How long do I have to be there?" Can I do this for six months and then come back to Corporate Office?" Or worse still as some would have us believe, "I am a quick learner. I will learn in six months what others may take three four years to learn."

Every HR person wants to begin and end their career in the corporate office. That's where the action is. Wrong. The action is really at the bottom of the pyramid. With the blue collar employees. There is new and path breaking work waiting to be done for workmen/ operators or whoever makes up the bottom of the pyramid for your employees. Even research done in this area is inadequate compared to the attention middle and senior level employees get. If the people who are fresh out of colleges and MBA programs do not actively try to put into practice what they have learnt, how will anything change?

Take for instance training. Even today, the training done for junior or middle level employees gets diluted and passes off as training for the blue collar employees. We have not done enough work to identify what competencies we need to build for them to manage their careers. And why haven't we done that? Because we have never done career planning for the bottom of the pyramid. We haven't even started to understand what makes for career for an a skilled or semi skilled employee. Creating skill grades is just a starting point but that is not where it ends.

How many organizations spend the same amount of time and rigour to do succession planning for BOTP population? Yeah yeah, you will tell me there is that one organization that you work for or know of that has done great stuff. My question is why is that not mainstream? Compensation and Benefits, Talent Acquisition, Capability Building... you name it, there is new and different stuff that can be done. So why isn't everyone grabbing the opportunity?

Someone was telling me that in the Greek Civilization, the philosophers were the highest paid. So that started to attract the best and the brightest to those jobs. If the factory jobs or jobs that addressed HR issues of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOTP) employee population, went almost as high in the org chart as the HR jobs in the Corporate Office, we would be able to attract the freshly minted HR folks to build a career that focused on the largest chunks of the organization. While I know that this argument pans out differently in different sectors and in different organizations, yet I cannot help saying that the principles seem to be universally applicable.

Pareto's 80:20 rule will tell you that 80% employees get 20% of the attention of the HR folks. If only we used the same logic to understand that 80% of the opportunity to do new and different stuff is for the BOTP population, then maybe one day we will all be able to point to them and call them Fortunate at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

People Are Our Greatest Asses (oops ...Assets)

Every Human Resources person worth his payroll, has heard these cliches over and over again. "People are our greatest assets" - usually put on posters all over the organizations that least believe in that philosophy. Ask anyone why they wanted to choose HR as their major in Business School or as a career and you get another cliche that makes me groan. The person will curl up their toes and say, "Because I really enjoy working with people." or that "my friends told me that I am really good with people." That basically means I am not sure what I am good at, but I think I can have coffee and make conversation.

So why do people choose HR as a profession? I chose it because
a) I knew enough about all other courses to dislike them.
b) This was the only one that I did not know enough about to dislike.
c) All of the above

Of course, when I started working after B School, they used to call it Personnel Management. Today you would be really deemed to be uncool if you did not know that we no longer handle Personnel. We are the new and improved Human Resources Department. I guess those days we had to handle the animals in the zoo ourselves, unlike the new kids who get computers to do it all. No more human contact. We can now outsource the contact part of it. Someone told me that anything that can be templated can be outsourced. So I guess human contacts have just been so classified. Outsource that stuff so that we can get down to doing real work.

In one company where I worked they were implementing a new fangled ERP system that was sucking up more resources than the Gulf War. I was told we had to implement that HR system so that it would leave the HR folks free to do real work. "If all the work was taken away, what WOULD be left for that fellow to do anyway?", I had asked. My boss who was standing at the podium with the big cheese of the ERP Company said that he would take my question offline. That basically means that he would either ignore the question or would that he would be allowed to stab me when he met me in the hallway later that evening.

Look at the seminar topics on HR. That will tell you what is the big question that the clods are grappling with? In those days seminars were around topics like, "Human Resources - Art or Science?" Two days or five days of asking bad questions left neither the participant nor the trainers any wiser. In fact I have always had a queasy feeling when I was told that someone was a trainer. It always reminded me of the trainer who came to teach Rover how to shake his paw without wetting the carpet. It was after I joined HR that I discovered there were trainers for humans too. Their task was not different from what Rover's trainer tried so hard to do.

I am just curious. Do all functions manufacture cliches like HR does or is it just us? Do all other blokes have self doubt like we do? Well you know every now and then we will hear seminars where people ask "Is HR a Business Partner?" The answer is obviously expected to be yes if you are to be let in to join the party. But truthfully speaking the jury is still out on that one.