Abhijit Bhaduri's Writings Have Moved to http://abhijitbhaduri.com

HI I finally saved enough money to buy my own piece of real estate - on the web. It took a while. Royalty payments are slow to take off. So it has taken me a few years to mop up the coins that paid for my new website http://abhijitbhaduri.com

Moving is a pain. Spring cleaning is a pain. Following a routine is a pain. Among the many painful things in the world, they don't even stack up to the pain of virtual moving. I am having to mop up pieces of my writing from various parts of cyber space and collect them in to one spot. But then that's part of the deal. The website is still getting its final touches and if you want to see more stuff there, just let me know what is it you are missing and I will try to serve it there. You can mail me at abhijitbhaduri@live.com

The party venue has been changed but the party continues. See you at http://abhijitbhaduri.com/

Abhijit Bhaduri

Who Is Your Competitor?

"If you don't know where you are going, you cannot get lost!" Sound advice for a lot of drivers and travelers you would think. Rascal Rusty had once said "When in doubt, it is a safe option to ascribe any saying to Confucious. After all not too many people will be able to check back with him." Whatever be your stance on Confucious, you cannot deny that it helps to know who you define as your competition. The moment you know who your competition is or is likely to be you can start punching in that direction.

Sports makes things very simple. They mark out a territory within which you fight and the opponent is usually made to wear different colored clothes. That helps. There are of course moments in sports where such clear cut visual cues still result in mistakes. Anyone who has seen a player score a self-goal will know what I mean.

In business, there is much scope for confusion. There is no defined arena within which to compete. You could sitting pretty in your false leather couch sipping martinis and getting ready to count the money. Life is looking good. You are surrounded by the beautiful people and suddenly someone tells you that your world has crashed and that you have to crawl back into the boat and start rowing. You think that's cruel? Well, thats how life is in the fast lane. You have to keep punching away at every competitor all the time if you have to succeed. There is no room for complacency. Hence the warning - think hard and ask yourself who is your competitor. What does that fellow have that will pulverize your being - metaphorically speaking. You may not believe this, but I would recommend that you do this every few months or whenever you jump a traffic light, whichever is earlier.

You would think the Swiss know their cheese and watches. There is more to them, but we will stick to the watch industry. In the early part of the last century, the Swiss were sitting pretty on a reputation for building carefully crafted watches. A swiss watch was a family heirloom. If you dropped it the owner was authorized to boot you out. We all accepted that state. Then Japanese watches happened. These were digital wannabes. If you dropped it, the watch would still tell the time. The once thriving watch makers of Switzerland were finding it hard to compete with the Japanese watches. Then Swatch happened in 1983 from the Corporation for Microelectronics and Watchmaking Industries, SMH. The teens loved it. It was no longer cool to wear only one watch, they said. You had to wear one for every piece of cloth. Then they said, you need a watch to reflect your mood. Round one goes to Swatch.

That was then but ask any teenager, they will tell you wearing a watch to tell the time is like so last century. Like man, you got your cell phone. Use that to set the alarm, snooze for another five minutes and then roll over in bed and call your boss to say you are late because you are caught like in one traffic jam of a lifetime. Who do you think makes the most watches today? I am told it is Nokia since every mobile handset has a watch built into it and the number of cell phone users is growing faster than corruption in some countries. Watch manufacturers not only compete with other watch manufacturers, but accessory (watch is a fashion accessory after all), and even mobile phone makers. Just being aware of who you are competing with helps you plan your responses better like running away before getting mauled by a ginomous beast.

In Sociology competition refers to the rivalry between two or more persons or groups for an object desired in common, usually resulting in a victor and a loser but not necessarily involving the destruction of the latter. In business life is less forgiving. So when leaders define the company's vision and mission, they also need to define the current and potential list of competitors. That lists needs to be frequently revised. Many market leaders define competition as "share of wallet" - and by that we don't mean your teenage children but the amount of business a company gets from specific customers.

When the teenager buys a packet of potato chips with her pocket money the manufacturer has a share of wallet. If the next time she has it, she chooses to buy chocolates instead, the share of wallet has been redefined - this time from the salty snack segment to the sweet snack. If the next time, the teenager decides to spend her pocket money buying extra "talk time" from the mobile phone company, we have the telecom sector competing with foods. The argument goes on and on. So not only do you need to know where you are going, but it also helps to see the invisible competitors racing you to the customer's wallet.

Early Adopters, Long Tails and Laggards

A trend happens when a fad goes mainstream and stays for a duration long enough to attract increasingly larger percentages of the population. A fad is therefore a trend in diapers. We have no idea if it will grow up to be a Nobel Laureate or a serial kisser. Both begin with some brave souls who are tired of conforming to the norms of the larger group. That large group could be defined as your little fiefdom in the office map or the society at large. The need to be "different" is the mother of all fads and trends.

Every group will have a few of these "Early Adopters". They will be the first to try out a new technology, a new benefit plan of the company, try out exotic food or even buy the stock of a new company that promises to make pigs fly. Early adopters will sign up to try beta versions of software that may make their computers crash - but that's part of the pioneer's risk taking ability. Not everyone has it in themselves to be an early adopter. It needs an appetite for adventure and the ability to live with a certain amount of ridicule when everyone turns up to laugh at you for believing maybe that new technology would be able to introduce pigs to the aviation industry. If Christopher Columbus had waited for a Frequent Flyer Miles program to be launched, he would have missed discovering the New World.

When someone creates a sustainable business model catering to the niche markets, often made up of evangelistic Early Adopters, that's also called a Long Tail. Chris Anderson used this term to refer to the group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or "non-hit" items in the market. This customer demographic is called the Long Tail. Go into any of the social networking sites and you will find evidence of a passionate group that has the money power and passion to fund an entrepreneur's efforts at meeting the group's needs.

The Early Adopters need followers if they have to succeed. When they try something different from existing group norms, the rest of the members have a choice - whether to follow or to ignore that behavior. The early adopters form the core group and seek to build their numbers. Here is where the "cool factor" comes in. If being seen as part of that group is desirable then more group members sign up. Therefore having a "cool" spokesperson makes it easy for the second wave to join the pioneers - the Followers. When the Followers join in, what started as a Fad will move towards becoming a micro trend. Imagine a micro trend to be the adolescent version of a fad. In the interesting book called Microtrends, Mark Penn says, "One percent of the nation, or 3 million people, can create new markets for a business, spark a social movement, or produce political change."

The Laggards join when the fad has grown to be a trend. They are the most risk averse and need constant reassurance that it is OK to join the mass movement. Laggards have a huge fear of failure. They need the comfort of numbers to validate their decisions. They hate being "different" as much as the Early Adopters hate being part of the mass of Laggards. When the Laggards start growing in large numbers, it is time for Early Adopters to find the next big trend. While the Earlies warm the hearts of innovators and bring joy to the Marketing department, the Laggards create the mass market that warms the cockles of the Finance heart.

So you want to be a trendspotter. Where do you start? Try to tune in to the talk in the cafeteria and the water cooler and identify the different interest groups in the organization. What are their concerns? What do they consider to be cool? Who are the icons of cool in the office? What are the issues that get the cool group hot under the collars? Join the group for a postprandial or for idle chat over coffee. Then try to sift out what is common to all the groups? And then zone in on the fads that the cool folks are into. Mass media is a good place to practice the fine art of trend-spotting. The themes that are highly controversial could be fads or even possible micro-trends. The stuff that moves into the mainstream pop-culture zone exists because of its acceptance across the lowest common denominator. Get it Spotty - that's what a trend-spotter will be called for short, right?

The early bird catches the worm say the Early Adopters. It is the early worm that gets caught the Laggards will warn.

The Art of the Possible

Some do it every day, some do it weekly, some do it weakly, yet others weakly try to do it. Some do a lousy job of it and there are those who use it to leave their colleagues breathless but satiated. You guessed right. The skill in question is about giving your colleague feedback about areas of improvement. Most managers try to avoid giving feedback unless thrown with their back to the wall or while reviewing performance.

Chances are that if you told a colleague that needed to give them feedback, they would walk into your office with a feeling of dread. Expecting you to lambast them about stuff they had not done. About deadlines they have missed or about colleagues who they have miffed in the course of their existence. When you hear someone say, "Can you come to my office for five minutes? I need to give you some feedback..." the greater probability is that your first reaction is not to expect anything positive being told to you. Leaders and visionaries often set themselves apart by getting their teams used to the idea that feedback is also about telling someone that they just did a good job.

Giving someone feedback to drive improvement in performance is a tougher act. Most people dread it. Performance improvement is driven when people understand exactly how their actions, behaviors or choices had led to an undesireable result. So the more accurately the link between action and results is established, the clearer it is to an individual on how to improve. Some managers go a step further and suggest what alternative action would have led to success. People learn if the person giving the feedback also shares the manner in which he or she evaluated the alternative choices that led to the final outcome.

I have often heard people say, "I don't like to sugar coat my feedback. I like to tell it like it is." One must be truthful and accurate, but without being hurtful or abrasive. Feedback that hurts the self esteem of the receiver will never produce behavior change. So before you sandpaper your colleague's self-esteem with your version of the truth missile, just ask yourself if the intent behind the feedback, is to help the person improve or lie their bruised and bleeding. Most people are sharp enough to figure out if the intent was to hurt or was it to help the person do better. You can identify it so clearly when someone is not being truthful or biased or is merely saying stuff to hurt. Right? So can the rest of the world. If your feedback is just making the recipient defensive, chances are that your feedback is coming across as an attack. No matter how valuable your suggestion is, no change will happen.

The term feedback is neutral. There is no such thing as giving someone "positive feedback" or "negative feedback". The recipient classifies it as helpful or unhelpful. Hence this can be a very strong tool to drive change in behavior. Feedback provides guardrails that can nudge a person's behavior in a desired direction if handles patiently. Every manager owes it to his or her team member to invest time to coach and give feedback that reinforces good behavior and builds awareness of "derailers". David Dotlich and Peter Cairo identify eleven such derailers in their must read book called "Why CEO's Fail: The 11 Behaviors That Can Derail Your Climb to the Top and How to Manage Them." This book is based on the Hogan Personality Assessment.

One last piece of learning I wish to share. Formalize the meeting where feedback will be shared. I have often seen colleagues get taken aback when their team members state that they were not given regular feedback on their performance throughout the year. "That's not true. I have been giving feedback on an ongoing basis.", the manager moans. The manager should set up a formal "Performance Feedback Session" with his or her team member and ensure that the person receiving feedback also marks it as a structured feedback session. That prevents disappointments at a later point of time because it sets expectations of the role. Informal feedback sessions do not count. This is an important opportunity to shape behavior and the manager would do well to invest the time perfecting the art.

Are You A Global Manager?

You have attended global conferences. That basically means that you have snored through Executive Development Programs in every country. You have seen the Seven Wonders and notched up more frequent flyer miles than your nearest rival down the hallway. You have developed a taste for exotic spirits and by that I do not mean people who pursue Extreme Sports. But are you a global manager?

In 1992, Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal had stated in this HBR Classic that was called "What is a Global Manager?" I once had a boss who used to ask each of his subordinates to summarize such articles and books in no more than a sentence. He was a big one for precision. In case you had not read that article, let me tell you that their conclusion was that there is no such thing as a "universal global manager".

Being a global manager means being able to manage and bring about change in settings that challenge your own world view. When you next ask someone about their experience in "change management", ask them what significant behavior, skills and attitude of themselves have they changed and in what time frame. How did they identify what needed to be changed and then how did they go about doing it. That will often give you a better insight about change management skills and approach of this person than probing for leading widespread change in others. If you have not been able to change yourself, then you will never know what it takes to change others.

Part of the requirement of being a global manager is to be able to expand your worldview or Weltanschauung. Welt is the German word for "world", and Anschauung is the German word for "view" or "outlook". It refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs through which an individual interprets the world and interacts in it. A global manager is one who is equally comfortable in a world that he or she is not familiar with. That comfort arises from the ability to interpret the world whose cues are unfamiliar. So learning to make sense of data in unfamiliar settings is the key. If you are a global manager then you ought to be pretty skilled at making sense of unfamiliar settings and cultures. The ability to discover trends in a world of chaos helps when you are operating in a new business environment where all the old rules have been rewritten.

In a world where "talent is the new oil and like oil demand far exceeds supply" navigating the talent landscape helps the global manager to be competitive. We are all used to learning to read cues that will help us choose great talent. Being truly global means leveraging diversity to go beyond the familiar. Global managers learn to look beyond nationality, race, ethnic, function, education, working style and gender when they build their talent pool. The manager who wants to operate on a global canvas will need to build teams often with diverse people who all need different ways and approaches to be managed, coached and coached. To be able to run businesses in diverse business environments and succeed is never easy.

Being a global manager means being comfortable holding almost two opposing thoughts and not allowing either one to overwhelm. Being able to flex one's style to address different business and people needs means that such individuals are a rare breed. They learn to manage change. Not in others or in other corporations but starting first of all within themselves.

Four CARDiac Arrests

I hate people who send in electronic greeting cards to everyone in their office address book. That is a cheap way of discharging social responsibility. It is a simple three step process. Select e-card, click the "Select All" option in the address book and press send. One greeting to all 14,479 employees across the planet. Imagine how painful it would have been to send a personalized greeting to all of them. Last year I received one such greeting from someone whose existence I did not know of. I wondered if I should just ignore it and press delete or should I reach out to this colleague. My debate was cut short. Before long the world was grappling with the flood of thank you messages. "Thank you for your wishes and wish you the same." Someone had done the unforgivable act of choosing the "Reply All" response to all 14,479 of us. The server got choked with this deluge of goodwill and had to be shut down. HR then put a ban on sending e greeting cards.

This year we are doing things the old fashioned way in our office. It is still a few paper cards being given out at year end. The HR Department just messes up my life. They sent me four New Year Greeting Cards. Cards that you can send to the most important people in your life. That sends me into a tizzy. All my life I have been operating with the belief that my boss is the ONLY important person in my life. After years of bad appraisal ratings and poor increments I now finally understand the root cause. It is not one but four I need to please. Why else would the company have assigned so many greeting cards to me? I draw out the company's organization chart. After drawing out a gazillion dotted lines and solid lines, functional reporting lines and project reporting, I give up. I report to at least 28 people one way or the other. Many of whom I have never met and probably never will. I am several greeting cards short. So I stick to safer bets.

Has everyone got the same number of cards or is there some hierarchy in that as well. I ask the mail room in-charge. He tells me he has been given one greeting card.

"Who are you giving it to?" I ask him.

"It is for my landlord. I owe him two months' rent. This is a cheap way to earn some goodwill."

"What would you do if you were given more of these?" I try asking for ideas.

"I would shred the others. Don't need them."

This is a serious interruption to a busy workday. I write out one and pass it to my colleague in the next cubicle. She looks at the card and at me in turn. I need to build bridges with co-workers. I smile at her hoping that she now considers me a cubicle pal. She shrugs and continues staring at her computer. "If you want to give me a card, at least buy one rather than passing off a freebie card to me. Have some more respect for your colleagues." That's one precious card and relationship down the tube.

I distribute the next one with greater care. I mail one to my wife just to be different. Two days later when I see the card unopened, I carefully drop hints within her earshot. It works. She half opens the envelope and without even opening the card to see the message she says, "Must be for you. Some moron from your office. The idiot has addressed the card to me. How careless." I do not have the heart to tell her the truth.

Now is the final moment. I decide that I will mail the last card to my boss. Where does he live? I have never been part of the charmed circle to have been invited to his home, so I do not know his address. I wondered if I should buy a regular greeting card from the neighborhood bookshop. I am unable to decide. Should I send him a funny card? Risky perhaps. One never knows whether he will laugh at the same joke. Better to send him one with flowers. Then I remember that he is allergic to flowers. I had greeted him with a bouquet on the day he had joined and then he sneezed for the next two days. Bad start to a relationship. I finally vote in favor of the office card. That is a safe bet. I make a mental note of finding out his home address.

A week into the new year I bump into boss in the cafeteria.

I ask him, "I hope you liked my New Year card."

"It was beautiful. I loved it. The lines were very meaningful. Thanks a lot. I hope you got the card I sent."

That was one from the left field. I did not know I was important enough for him to send me a card. There was no time for truth. This was a PR moment. OK... OK... I lied. I mumbled something about the lovely card he had sent and how thoughtful it was of him to have sent me one.

I came back to my desk all confused. My boss did care enough to send me a card. While trying to look for a ball-pen that actually works, I rummage through the papers and come across the greeting card I had written for my boss. The envelope was still intact. I had not found out his home address and had never mailed the card to him.

Work at Fun to Have Fun @ Work

Fresh out of Business School, MBA in hand, the taste of toast and mixed fruit jam still fresh in the mouth, when we joined the work place, life was very simple. You came in to work and bust your guts trying to work. We all hoped that the big boss would get impressed with our dedication. That had the potential of a generous appraisal rating for that year. Even when that did not happen, all of us gnashed our teeth, wrote his name on paper and shred that up to express our point of view (to ourselves). There was no such thing as fun at work.

Then the dot com boom happened. Young kids showed us that it was OK to be a dreamer. They quit jobs at blue chip companies and abandoned potentially hefty 12% pay hikes (that was the maximum you could get those days in my firm) in favor of an unknown world. A world where they would have the corner office by the time they were hitting twenty five. The "corner office" meant the CEO's Office and not the cubicle in the corner where the photocopier was kept. One of them had told me casually while quitting, "I want to have fun." That was blasphemy. I was no idea that we were supposed to have fun in the office. I asked the lad very apprehensively, "We are not supposed to do those fun things on the office desk? You could get sacked if you get caught." That reckless lad gave me a look that was hard to define. My logic was clear - work was meant to be making you miserable. To get away from the agony called work, we hung around with friends and had fun.

Six months down the line the young lad came back to visit us. He came in a car that I had only seen my CEO drive. Over dinner, he told us that they had a lot of fun in the office. The dress code was non existent. He could practically come to work in diapers if he chose to. Every Friday they drank beer and danced in the office which would be converted to a make shift dance floor. The Directors who were in their twenties, danced with other twenty somethings who were employees. This was truly democratisation of the workplace. Everyone traveled First Class if Business Class seats were not available. Everyone claimed they were having fun, until one day many of those places went belly up and closed shop.

Then for the next few years, everyone went back to accepting the notion that work and fun were not designed to happen at the same time and at the same place. Can you really have fun with colleagues? After all the English language has two different words to describe a colleague and friend. To complicate matters people have different definitions of fun. Sticking a "kick me" behind your classmate in school may not be appreciated by a colleague at the receiving end.

Then Outsourcing happened and a different profile of employees barely out of school and college joined the BPOs and KPOs. The workplace had to change to reflect their presence. The older employees got replaced by The Millenials. The workplace again had to have prominent elements of fun because that became a retention tool. Elements of fun were designed around making the office culture as close to a college campus as possible. You don't need to leave college when you come to work became the format of fun at work.

The more homogeneous the employee profile is, the easier it is to have one activity that fits in to a common definition of fun at work. If the primary task is not enjoyable, the importance of providing fun as an additional component at the workplace becomes important. Can the task have an inherent piece of fun built in? The more mundane and repetitive the task is, the greater is the importance of having the fun element during the workday. It has to be an activity that rejuvenates and refreshes the employee.

Fun has a connotation of informality and playfulness. So any activity that lowers the hierarchy - especially in a society that is deeply hierarchical, provides an element of fun. Hence watching the senior manager's clumsiness at a sports event during the Annual Day celebration provides much mirth. The Annual Day is by definition annual. With shorter attention spans, having fun more frequently becomes a great driver of satisfaction. So wearing business casual clothes on Fridays cannot be defined as your original contribution to livening up the world of work. Think harder. I have always been amazed how big a deal wearing casual clothes to work is made out to be. It is supposed to enhance productivity I am told. Then hippies should have been the most productive generation, Rascal Rusty would say.

Recent research shows that the Millenials like activities that let them learn new skills. Pure buffoonery is not what they define as Fun at Work. So let them learn a new language, learn salsa dancing, learn magic tricks... just let your imagination flow. Ask them about hobbies that they wished they could pursue and skills they could and should learn but do not have the time to pursue. They might come back with weird suggestions - be prepared. Having fun at work is not easy after all.

Should We Make or Buy Leaders?

When are you hitting the office again? I have some work for you to do. Go to the corner office and without spilling coffee on the carpet out of sheer nervousness, ask the occupant what he or she does for a living. The trick is to tell them upfront that "playing golf" is not one of the options they can choose. That sobers them into really thinking hard. Chances are that most of them will tell you that they are trying to make more moolah for the shareholder. Now you should step up, look at the dude straight in the eye and ask, "What are you doing to ensure that happens continuously long after you are gone?" At which point, you will probably get thrown out by the office security anyway and will never know what the correct answer should be.

The CEO's job is to ensure that there is a steady stream of ready talent at all levels of the enterprise. It is especially important for the Chief Executive to ensure that someone is ready to take over the top job should a truck cut short his own trip across the road. Whenever someone asks me whether or not to join a particular organization, I ask that person to research and look for data on how many of that company's top ten executives have been grown from within. If more than half of the top directors or functional leaders are have been nurtured through the joint efforts of the company's CEO and HR then it is a good place to go to. That is a good measure of how the company has instituted processes to grow and nurture top talent. Having said that, it makes great sense to have a healthy mix of external hires at all levels since they may bring in skills that may be needed for the future. A sixty forty ratio of in favor of internal hires helps to reassure employees that the talent pipeline has a track record of producing leaders that pass the acid test.

Like all other decisions of a firm, there is a make versus buy decision to be made not just for products and services but also for leadership talent. Growing as opposed to buying your own leadership pipeline requires deep commitment of time on part of the organization to ensure talent is identified early and then nurtured through a combination of challenging assignments, executive coaching and learning from attending the odd training program. Research done by Center for Creative Leadership tells us that approximately 70% of leadership development occurs on the job and in the context of challenging tasks, while 20% occurs interpersonally, particularly with coaches and mentors and only a measly 10% occurs in formal training classes. I believe classroom training can supplement Make sure that a person attends the training program only after they have been doing a job, that you are training them for, with reasonable rates of success.

Developing the leadership pipeline is a vital ask from the existing leaders of the organizations. Leading edge organizations have been using the Leaders Nurture Leaders approach to have leaders handpick the top managerial talent and then design programs where they devote anything from five to fifteen days in a year nurturing talent not only by giving them exposure to latest research in management or strategy, but to help them understand what it will take to be leading the organization. I have known of organizations where the CEO spends five days at an off-site with the future leaders of an organization sharing concepts, case studies and even ethical dilemmas with them.

While the lateral hires into the leadership ranks of an organization bring in a view from the outside, which is just as necessary, it is the home grown talent who serve to inspire the existing employees because that action speaks louder than words. There is a certain reassurance that comes from seeing your own colleagues take their place at the head of the table. At each level of the organization, the chosen leaders need to demonstrate that they are successful because they truly live by the values that the organization claims to have. Growing your own leaders is the same as growing your own garden. It requires the right soil, weeding and nurturing before you get to see the flowers bloom. Creating a bouquet from such flowers makes it a rewarding task even though it is infinitely faster to buy them from the local florist.

Do You Have a Lovemark?

I had the opportunity to talk to a student group on Employer Branding. When I asked them to name their number one choice of an employer, the overwhelming majority voted in favour of Google. Then I ask them for details that one would be expected to know about a potential employer eg the office location, the number of employees they have in India etc. All these queries draw blanks. I ask the group about what specific jobs at Google they wished to apply for. Except for three students, no one really cared and yet they wanted to be a part of an organization they had very limited information on. We proceeded to pick some more possible employers. The group had strong points of view about many organizations – most of which were not necessarily based on information or data. That is what Employer Brand does to your attractiveness as an employer.

The Employer Brand is what people believe is the promise of an organization as an employer. In a competitive talent market, that is the reason why someone chooses to put your organization's name as an employer on their resume - at least for a while. The existing employees' perception of the employment proposition has an equally strong impact on what the employer brand would be seen as. That is the reason why the existing employee decides to hang up when the headhunter calls. It is the reason why a newbie feels good or regrets the decision to join the organization, especially if they had a choice. It is what the employee says about the organization to friends and family when HR people are not listening.

Kevin Roberts (author of Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands) talks about some brands that go beyond and become what he calls "Lovemarks". When you plot brands on a 2x2 matrix of Love and Respect, there are some brands that inspire love AND build respect for themselves. Those in that hallowed zone are called Lovemarks. When a brand achieves Lovemark status, the consumers becomes evangelists for a brand. The relationship between the brand and the individual is beyond the realm of logic. Being a Lovemark does not automatically make it a top choice as an employer but it probably helps. That is because our needs as employees are different from those that we may have as consumers. The sobering thought is that, the No 1 Lovemark in the list of top 200 Lovemarks is not a corporation but Shah Rukh Khan. Apple at number 4 trails Kajol and Google is at number 9 followed by Rani Mukherjee.

Employer Branding is the sweet spot where Human Resources meets Marketing (and feels inferior). Marketing people spend money, time and resources building consumer insights so that they know who buys their brand, when do they buy it, why do they buy it or why not, where do they buy it and how do they consume it. Based on this research they can decide how to communicate with their Target Audience. These are the same questions the HR person needs to answer about existing and potential employees.

The number of vacancies that the organization fills through employee referrals is rough measure of the strength of the Employer Brand - at least as far as the existing employees is concerned. Finding out what potential employees are saying about you as an employer is equally important. Sometimes that information floats in the most unlikely places. The social networking sites such as Orkut, Facebook, MySpace etc have communities that feature organizations. Chances are that your organization has a presence there and you don't know it yet. Doing a search on blogs will sometimes reveal what the buzz is about your employer brand. The quiet little kid in that corner might the most widely read blogger on the internet who is writing stuff about what it feels like to be working in this organization. I hope you read his blogs. Unfortunately in many cases, perceptions about the organization as an employer are being built and most top executives don't even have a web presence.

At a recent gathering, a hundred top HR professionals from around the world were asked if they were members of sites like Orkut or Facebook. Only three embarrassed hands went up. That was stuff for teeny boppers most of them said. Yet if you are fishing in a shrinking talent pool would you rather know what the buzz was about you or would you turn a blind eye (or ear) to it? If you did not know what people were saying about you wouldn't be in a position to impact that opinion. Banning blogging and social networking sites is not a solution. I hope the HR people embrace this change and actually begin to leverage the opportunity to turn their Employer Brand into a Lovemark.

Coach Coach Hota Hai

I am currently reading Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer. He writes about the Dalai Lama who is considered to be the spiritual Coach to a nation and to many world leaders. He says though the Dalai Lama is "increasingly famous as a speaker, his real gift, you see as soon as you begin talking to him, is for listening." That ability to listen makes him a true Coach. The world leaders listen to him because he in turn is a world leader who listens.

Organizations want to see their managers become one, each employee wants to become one and the parents want to be one to their kids. While one half of the world is looking for an effective Coach, the other half is trying to reach that sweet spot and proclaim themselves as experts while the fog is still thick. Every HR professional is not the de-facto Coach of the organization. They ought to be - but in all likelihood they are not equipped to be. One test is to ask the person to differentiate between the role of a Mentor and that of a Coach. Some organizations use the term Mentor and Coach interchangeably. No wonder they say if you don’t know where you are going, you can’t get lost.

So all those who believed that you were the first Mentors to walk the earth, sorry, the prize goes to Odyssesus. According to Greek mythology Odysseus entrusted his son Telemachus to guide the young man into adulthood in the absence of his father. A Coach is different from a Mentor. While Coaching is task related, Mentoring is about life itself. The role of a Mentor is to link up all the roles of the mentee - as an employee, as a parent, as a spouse, a sibling etc and then identify the patterns of dysfunctional behavior that the individual displays. A Mentor guides you through the journey of life. The reward is learning and insights for both. The Mentor is best selected by the individual himself or herself rather than assigned by the organization. So when organizations launch a "Be Mentor to a Young Mind" campaign, they need to leave the choice of the Mentor to the "Young Mind".

The Coach needs to be able to diagnose various group processes that are happening in the organization and craft their interventions accordingly. The measure of success of a Coach is to finally make a difference to the functioning of the individual and the organization. The executive Coach when successful will impact the performance of the executive. While the Human Resources folks will hand over the 360 degree reports and other state secrets to the Coach to get a headstart in identifying areas of development, the main deliverable for the Coach should be to help the individual learn new processes. There is always the danger that the Coach becomes yet another manager in the organization because of the power this relationship has. So periodically remind them that the football Coach teaches new techniques, based on the insights they have about the psychological makeup of the players they coach. Their job is not to take the ball during a tough moment and score the goal themselves, no matter how tempting that is.

Bunty Aur Babli in the Corporation

The workplace has always been a safe haven. This had always been a place where the regular folks came to work. They all spoke English with the same fake accents and chewed gum while moving their jaws sideways and wore their underwear like a fashion statement. They all used "kewl" and not just a simple "Yass" like the wannabes. The regular folks all had been to similar schools and had seen similar films and read the same set of books while growing up. It was not surprising that their world view was also the same. They all had similar nicknames too. So Harmeet or Harpreet were all called Harry or something that sounded Western. Then when they came into the workplace, they all hung around with the regular people in the office cafeteria and on weekends socialized with each other over imported wine and cheese. Their progeny played "Scrabble" in the next room.

Then the talent crunch happened and all this changed. The regular folks had to come to the workplace and rub shoulders with a diverse employee population. The talent crunch forced organizations to look beyond those who spoke the Queens English. The social change in the office has been palpable. Slowly but surely, the workplace has been adapting to the new inhabitants of cubicles. Over the last few years, there has been a steady dilution of the number of "regular" folks in the offices. The "Buntys and Bablis" - the people from small towns and rural areas have ecome a growing minority that we have to learn to include. The movie Bunty Aur Babli was about the dreams of young men and women from the small towns of India. In the workplace Bunty and Babli represent the archetype of the talent pool corporate India has to integrate into the somewhat homogeneous and insular workplace that we had got used to. I don't know when this insignificant minority began to forge ahead and move into corporate offices, but today you cannot ignore them any more. The people from small villages, the second tier towns, from the not so prosperous end of the great Indian middle class have started becoming noticeable. Maybe it was triggered by the BPOs and now Retail who were desperately looking for more and more employees just to make their business model work.

Many Human Resources people still believe that Diversity and Inclusion programs is just a passing fad. Wrong. Diversity is the answer to the talent crunch in any organization. The BPOs have been doing this for a while. So while they started off with their offices in the Metros, they have quickly discovered that to attract and retain talent they need to take the opportunity closer to those for whom that job is an aspirational job. Frustrated at their failure to attract fresh graduates of the top few Engineering colleges or Business Schools, many top Employers are opting for the next layer of institutes. The time is running out there too as the demand supply imbalance is offering options to the Bunty Aur Babli institutes. Having acquired diverse talent, the bigger challenge is to build an inclusive environment that enables the people who are “different”, to feel engaged enough to give their best. Therein lies the business case for making Diversity and Inclusion a part of the HR professionals’ list of challenges.

The inhabitants of Bharat have stepped forward and are now ready to lead India on their own terms. The Bharat-ization of corporate India is inevitable.

Where Have All the Employees Gone?

I keep bumping into people who are completely uncool. I swear there are some who have not realized that our function is not called Human Resources anymore. We are about Talent Management. You do not hire fellows anymore. And you get a minus 5 if you think that it is the folks in Staffing or Recruitment that give you jobs. That department is now called Talent Acquisition.

My friend Prof Madhukar Shukla says that the term "Human Resources" tends to dehumanize people and views the employees as one of the factors of production at par with land, capital or enterprise. I explained to him that for a while the trendy things was to refer to good ol' employees as Human Capital or Intellectual Capital. That must have made communication difficult. Imagine someone saying, "I will join you for lunch at the Human Capital's Cafeteria". Just now as we speak the new term of endearment at the workplace is "Talent". Even those employees who can best be described as possessing only enthusiasm unfettered by talent are also now walking in the workplace with a swagger. Everyone is behaving like the little monarch who needs constant attention and fussing only so that they stay on your payroll and do not walk away for a 40% pay hike. Now that there are no more employees left in the workplace, just raw "talent", the rules of the game are changing.

Talent is defined as an "endowment or ability of a superior quality". It is an innate ability to accomplish stuff that is beyond the ken of an average person. The person in charge of Talent Acquisition is impacting your business way beyond what you realize. Hire the wrong people and that not only impacts morale, but also impacts your firm's competitive edge. Hence the task of the interviewer is to spot such talent and lasso them in to the organization. This is not a job for the faint hearted. When a sports coach goes from village to village to spot children play street football, they see a large range of players and then spot that exceptional person who goes on to become the next God of Soccer. You need to have that soccer coach in your organization who can sift through a million resumes and sit through numerous interview meetings until they find the person who has that ability of a superior quality.

This is a vital job. So do not leave it to an ape who hires your next CFO by asking deep probing and dumb questions like, "If you were an animal which one would you be?" These questions may be cute conversation starters if you are trying to make a quick impression at the office party, but do not use it for choosing talent. Make sure that the person entrusted to spot talent is trained to look for gems amidst millions of badly written resumes. Talent Spotter has to be able to look for the right fit without getting distracted by glib talk. So before you look for more employees ... er... talent to hire, make sure you have the right person in charge of Talent Acquisition.

See you for coffee at the Talents' Cafeteria of our office.

Work Life Balance - Walking the Tight Rope

I know the young kids will never believe me when I tell them that I never had an X-Box or an iPod when I was growing up in various towns across India. Somewhere along the 90's, globalization happened. Salaries started to rise. Productivity and Quality became important criteria for survival. As companies started to face competition not just from Indian companies but also global behemoths, the treadmill started. That was the beginning of corporate India's "Get In Shape" campaign. We got on to the treadmill and felt good as we saw our fat melt away. Corporate India stepped up the speed of the machine and we started to actually get in shape. These were exciting times. If you felt giddy with the speed, you were not good enough. The layoffs started to happen but the treadmill started to go faster and faster until every ounce of fat had been shed. Every extra headcount had been trimmed and outsourced. Every little piece of change that had rolled off under the bed was reached out to and put back into the balance sheet. Meanwhile we had forgotten about Corporate India that was still running on the machine.

There is no time to waste. So we have added one more TLA (Three Letter Acronym) to our vocabulary. We are finding ways of achieving WLB (Work Life Balance). So what does getting that WLB mean? Is it driven by the individual or the organization?

We all play multiple roles in our lives – that of an employee, a parent, a spouse, a friend, a sibling, a son/daughter, a neighbour etc. When any one role takes precedence and prevents tasks related to the other roles being done effectively, there is need to fine tune that balance between various roles.

As employees we all want faster promotions, more money and live the lifestyle that Bollywoood stars do. Organizations need to be more competitive and deliver more with less resources. In a growing economy like India’s salaries are going through the roof. To be ahead of the competition, we are all putting in longer hours at the workplace. How many of you still pursue the hobbies and sports that gave us so much joy and meaning when we were growing up. If we revived them today, those would rejuvenate us and prevent burnout in the workplace. WLB means being able to find the time for the roles that rejuvenate. That could mean being with family for some or listening to music or going for a trek to discover Nature.

Sometimes the problem is different. I was talking to my friend who is the head honcho of a big corporation which has put managing WLB as a key priority for every people manager. He was talking to me of his team member Soumya, who comes in late everyday because he drops his kid to day care which doesn't open until 9:15am. Then he has to go home for lunch and inevitably gets late because of traffic snarls. In the evening Soumya leaves at 5pm sharp everyday because he has to go for his evening MBA four days a week and on Fridays he takes language classes. Soumya refuses to work weekends since the "organization is telling the employees to push for Work Life Balance." His boss asks me, "Isn't Work the first part of the WLB equation?" Yet this employee will compare increments and career opportunities with all others who are busting their gut trying to meet office deadlines. Isn't that unfair, my friend asks.

When I look at my neighbour's daughter who is all of twelve and has to come back from school and immediately rush off to take Tennis/ French/ Ballet on weekdays and has to go for Karate and Theatre classes on weekends, that makes my workday seem light in comparison. Her mother told me that during summer she will take classes on creative writing as well, since she will have more time. All this is needed to make your child an all rounder I am told. Last Sunday I saw her punching her day's schedule into her cell phone as she walked in to the elevator. I am getting a PDA for my birthday, she told me.

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.