I started my career with Wipro in 1983 recruited straight out of BITS, Pilani. I joined freshers from IIMs, RECs, IITs, and IISc, who Wipro had chosen for its newly formed Information Technology Division. During the next three months of orientation training, I heard many different folks from R&D, Sales, Quality, Manufacturing come and talk to us on different topics. We had an impressive sales training workshop where all of us were put through the hoops on how to talk and interact with customers, through role-playing. The climax was, of course, the address by A. H. Premji where he talked not about revenues or bottom line, but about Wipro's value systems and beliefs, and his vision for the kind of organization he wanted to build where means mattered as much as the ends. The impressions of Wipro that formed in me then, are still fresh in my mind: That of a big company out to change India's IT landscape. An A-class leadership team with impeccable credentials - top-notch engineers and MBAs with experience in blue chip companies including the Tata Administrative Services. A company that wants to do the best for its customers. And, above all, a company that while striving for the greatest heights demanded the highest level of integrity from each of its employees. We had all the bearings and élan of a company that was prepared for the long haul.
Looking back, it is obvious that Premji was not thinking short term! He was laying the foundation for what he obviously believed was an opportunity to build a global player in the nascent high growth technology industry. He was choosing each person on the team with care; much like a builder would pick his materials if he were aiming to build a skyscraper. Hats off to Premji and his likes, for honestly, to most of us, the India of that era did not look or feel like it had the potential to be a technology powerhouse. These pioneers had to do a great leap of faith then, but today they stand vindicated many times over.
Now, fast forward to today. Unlike that era, the India of today feels like a very different country. During the last couple years, we have seen the Indian economy come out of recession faster than any other country in the world. Employment numbers are up. Consumer confidence is up. In fact we are doing a lot better than where we left off in 2007. For, this time our growth is across sectors and is beginning to be driven by domestic consumption. President Obama visited us to strike deals that would generate jobs for Americans (!) And the French and Chinese leaders closely followed him, for the same reason really. The mood in our country is decidedly upbeat, as we look forward to doing even better in the coming year.
While we have had a couple brief periods of 'India Shining' in the past too, this time somehow, things appear to be for real. We seem to have entered a secular period of sustained growth since the last 10 years. Governments have come and gone across the country, but the economy has marched on unabated at 8-9 per cent growth. We are seeing growth across sectors, and across geographies - witness Bihar in the last 5 years! Interestingly, India's growth momentum is accelerating at the same time that the developed world appears headed for a sustained period of slowdown. And this is sending large quantities of much-needed capital our way, which is being used to create physical, social and economic infrastructure at a pace and scale we have only dreamt of hitherto. It does appear that the 'decoupling' of our economy from the west that pundits have been predicting for long, is now underway indeed.
Now, add to this all the inherent advantages we have known we possess as a country, and we can see why the world is looking to India as one of the future engines of economic growth. We have one of the biggest talent pools in the world today; especially if we include the Indian Diaspora which is more than ready to pitch in to fill the skill gaps, be that in technology innovation or international marketing. We understand the language of venture capital, start-ups and entrepreneurship intuitively, given our thriving small business culture. We have an independent and functioning judiciary. Our democracy empowers people to demand equal chance at growth. India has an enviable demography wherein more than 50 per cent of our population is below the age of 25, and more than 65 per cent are below the age of 35. Plus our economy is predominantly led by services and domestic consumption very much like the US economy and quite unlike others.
Indeed, today, the state of our economy is a lot closer than we realise to that of post World War II USA, when the term 'American Dream' began to imply boundless opportunities to anybody who dared to dream. When the US became the magnet for attracting capital and talent from across the World; When it became the fountainhead for new ideas in finance like private equity, venture capital and sweat equity; When it grew the World's largest enterprises like GE, HP, Walt Disney, WalMart, Apple, Microsoft and set the tone for a sustained economic leadership. The art and science of 'management' evolved and took root during this period with new concepts like strategic thinking, the 4Ps of marketing, assembly line manufacturing, global sourcing, mass merchandising, etc., teaching people how to build successful organisations.
Could this then be our time to do the same? Can we dream of creating our model of World-class organisation - like Bharthi did in Telecom? Like Wipro, Infosys did with IT Services? But many times over? Perhaps a new model of retailing, a new banking system that lends itself to the needs of our country and then to the rest of the emerging world. Imagine what it would mean not just in terms of the number of jobs but the quality of jobs. It would mean that our best executives could be in Jeff Immelt's or Indra Nooyi's shoes sitting in India. No more perceived or real glass ceilings, which prevent our best people from reaching the top slot. We would have new management theories originating from here as we learn from our failures and successes. No more waiting for a Facebook to arrive at our campus to dole out jobs. Our elite kids will have the opportunity to take up jobs where they will rewrite entire industries!
But for all these dreams to become reality we need the leadership, which comes with a brand new mindset. A leadership, which has the confidence and audacity to believe that we can be the America of tomorrow in our own way. A leadership like Premji's in the 80's, which is thinking very long term and is therefore working to lay a strong foundation. A foundation comprising of the best people; A foundation, which is built on the right values; A foundation, which can support not just an organisation but also the community around it. We need leaders who are thinking transformational and therefore have the patience to do things the right way at a sustainable pace.
We are today at the cusp of 'once in a life time opportunity' to create history. This moment comes but once in the economic history of countries and we are very fortunate to be in the midst of it. The dimensions and contour of what we can achieve is truly mind-boggling. This is the time to think long term, think big and think global. It is a time for fundamental transformation when we need to rethink education, finance, infrastructure, technology, the whole works. It is the time to unshackle ourselves from old mindsets when we looked up to the West for all answers. Can we make a start with 2011? Can each of us resolve to think and act on a different scale from the past years?
In the end the choice is for each one of us to make. For if we do not somebody else will come and grab the opportunity. Remember East India Company?
Wish You All A Very Happy New Year!
Dec 31, 2010
A Mistake In Time Saves Nine
A great career involves twists and turns before one discovers the true vocation
The year was 1985. The newly minted engineer from IIT Madras arrived at Jamshedpur to take up his first job with TELCO as a Graduate Engineer Trainee (GET). Surely a dream job for a mechanical engineer in India those days. Sadly this engineer was soon to realise that his dream job was a bit of a nightmare waiting to happen, just as many of us did with our first jobs. He found out that what it took to succeed on the shop floor at Jamshedpur was not the analytical skills that had got him into IIT, but the ability to manage and motivate workers, which nobody had cared to teach him at IIT! It was no fun when he found himself to be the butt of jokes even as he tried speaking his textbook Hindi with the workers, who were more conversant with local dialects of Bihari. It was even more demeaning when he found himself making tea and samosas for workers as a caterer’s strike hit the morning chai supply and threatened to stop the production line! Stressed and disillusioned, he did what many others in the GET programme have done before and after – prepared hard to escape from there by applying to every school in India and the US that would deliver him from the throes of depression he found himself in. And deliverance came in the form of admission to IIM(A) in his case.
But wait a second...this story doesn’t end here. Years later, after his despair about his wrong career choice had vanished, he realised that the experiences in those two years were surprisingly responsible for shaping his future successes. His baptism by fire taught him more about life than the 20 years before at home and school. He owed his newfound ability to laugh, have fun and enjoy life to his Bihari colleagues whose attitude towards life was refreshingly different from the Chennai TamBram culture with its 1001 rules. He had learnt that the art of people management was as critical as the science of designing machines, and this helped him in building great organizations when he eventually set out on his entrepreneurial journey later in life. It humbled him to know that he was never going to be as good as the engineer from Bihar College Of Engineering when it came to mingling with the workers on the floor, and getting them to accept him as their boss. A great ego check and a key learning on the kind of jobs he should avoid. So it came to pass that years later, well after he had run miles away from mechanical engineering and shop floors, he could connect the dots and reflect on the learnings from that mistake he had made early in his career. Steve Jobs put it very well when he said, “ Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future……because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”
Following his heart was exactly what Barack Obama did when he decided to embark on a career as a Community Organiser in Chicago. The path eventually led him to a successful political career and the office of the President of USA. But was it so obvious when he started out? What was crystal clear was that he was admittedly making the mistake of forsaking a six-figure salary in a law firm of his choice, which his Harvard degree would have granted him. “I always felt that the value of a really good education is you can take more risks,” Obama said in November ’07 on Charlie Rose. “Ultimately, if I really need a job, if I’ve got to pay the bills, I’m going to be able to find one.”
And that point really hits the nail on the head! What is the sense of pursuing a great education, if at the end of it one does not earn the luxury of making mistakes and picking oneself up? As many of you may know, Harsha Bhogle, India’s leading sports journalist and broadcaster, did not start out as one. He first tried his hand at chemical engineering even as he pursued sports commentary as a hobby in the background. He quickly moved away from engineering to business, perhaps realising that he was not cut out to be an engineer. His next move took him to IIM(A), and that was followed by a short stint in advertising before he took the plunge into television. It is not like we can write off his initial forays as missteps in an otherwise stellar career. It was surely this unique background that gave him the advantage of lending a completely different perspective and depth to his sportscasting, and thereby made him stand out in the crowd. In Harsha’s own words, it is his varied exposure and training that have led to his excellence in his chosen field… it is what makes people remark, “Wow yes! Hang on! This guy has more than just cricket in him!”.
This ability to try different things, which perhaps look completely foolhardy on the face of it, is very critical when we plan our career. It is the only way we can figure out our true calling, as the false starts tell us what we would, and more importantly what we would not, enjoy doing. Most of us in India spend our entire schooling in an education system which expects us to know what we want to become by age 14. As if this is not enough, our social set-up is so straight jacketed that our parents and extended family members insist on drawing up our future to the last “t” even before the namkaran is done. The net result is that while we come out as engineers, doctors, and lawyers at age 22, we actually have no clue as to what it means to be one. Now imagine if we shied away from taking any chance with our career where would we end? Career is not about drawing boundaries and walking in a straight line. It is about self-discovery and life long learning. A great career is characterised by the twists and turns that one takes to meander into the untrodden path to finally discover what will make us truly happy. That is when we get motivated or charged up to do our best. Many a times it is about realizing what will not work for us. Failures and mis-steps are so critical to this process of self-realisation that avoiding or side-stepping them would be tantamount to short changing oneself. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new” said Albert Einstein and that sums it all.
Published in Business World dated 13 Nov 2010
The year was 1985. The newly minted engineer from IIT Madras arrived at Jamshedpur to take up his first job with TELCO as a Graduate Engineer Trainee (GET). Surely a dream job for a mechanical engineer in India those days. Sadly this engineer was soon to realise that his dream job was a bit of a nightmare waiting to happen, just as many of us did with our first jobs. He found out that what it took to succeed on the shop floor at Jamshedpur was not the analytical skills that had got him into IIT, but the ability to manage and motivate workers, which nobody had cared to teach him at IIT! It was no fun when he found himself to be the butt of jokes even as he tried speaking his textbook Hindi with the workers, who were more conversant with local dialects of Bihari. It was even more demeaning when he found himself making tea and samosas for workers as a caterer’s strike hit the morning chai supply and threatened to stop the production line! Stressed and disillusioned, he did what many others in the GET programme have done before and after – prepared hard to escape from there by applying to every school in India and the US that would deliver him from the throes of depression he found himself in. And deliverance came in the form of admission to IIM(A) in his case.
But wait a second...this story doesn’t end here. Years later, after his despair about his wrong career choice had vanished, he realised that the experiences in those two years were surprisingly responsible for shaping his future successes. His baptism by fire taught him more about life than the 20 years before at home and school. He owed his newfound ability to laugh, have fun and enjoy life to his Bihari colleagues whose attitude towards life was refreshingly different from the Chennai TamBram culture with its 1001 rules. He had learnt that the art of people management was as critical as the science of designing machines, and this helped him in building great organizations when he eventually set out on his entrepreneurial journey later in life. It humbled him to know that he was never going to be as good as the engineer from Bihar College Of Engineering when it came to mingling with the workers on the floor, and getting them to accept him as their boss. A great ego check and a key learning on the kind of jobs he should avoid. So it came to pass that years later, well after he had run miles away from mechanical engineering and shop floors, he could connect the dots and reflect on the learnings from that mistake he had made early in his career. Steve Jobs put it very well when he said, “ Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future……because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”
Following his heart was exactly what Barack Obama did when he decided to embark on a career as a Community Organiser in Chicago. The path eventually led him to a successful political career and the office of the President of USA. But was it so obvious when he started out? What was crystal clear was that he was admittedly making the mistake of forsaking a six-figure salary in a law firm of his choice, which his Harvard degree would have granted him. “I always felt that the value of a really good education is you can take more risks,” Obama said in November ’07 on Charlie Rose. “Ultimately, if I really need a job, if I’ve got to pay the bills, I’m going to be able to find one.”
And that point really hits the nail on the head! What is the sense of pursuing a great education, if at the end of it one does not earn the luxury of making mistakes and picking oneself up? As many of you may know, Harsha Bhogle, India’s leading sports journalist and broadcaster, did not start out as one. He first tried his hand at chemical engineering even as he pursued sports commentary as a hobby in the background. He quickly moved away from engineering to business, perhaps realising that he was not cut out to be an engineer. His next move took him to IIM(A), and that was followed by a short stint in advertising before he took the plunge into television. It is not like we can write off his initial forays as missteps in an otherwise stellar career. It was surely this unique background that gave him the advantage of lending a completely different perspective and depth to his sportscasting, and thereby made him stand out in the crowd. In Harsha’s own words, it is his varied exposure and training that have led to his excellence in his chosen field… it is what makes people remark, “Wow yes! Hang on! This guy has more than just cricket in him!”.
This ability to try different things, which perhaps look completely foolhardy on the face of it, is very critical when we plan our career. It is the only way we can figure out our true calling, as the false starts tell us what we would, and more importantly what we would not, enjoy doing. Most of us in India spend our entire schooling in an education system which expects us to know what we want to become by age 14. As if this is not enough, our social set-up is so straight jacketed that our parents and extended family members insist on drawing up our future to the last “t” even before the namkaran is done. The net result is that while we come out as engineers, doctors, and lawyers at age 22, we actually have no clue as to what it means to be one. Now imagine if we shied away from taking any chance with our career where would we end? Career is not about drawing boundaries and walking in a straight line. It is about self-discovery and life long learning. A great career is characterised by the twists and turns that one takes to meander into the untrodden path to finally discover what will make us truly happy. That is when we get motivated or charged up to do our best. Many a times it is about realizing what will not work for us. Failures and mis-steps are so critical to this process of self-realisation that avoiding or side-stepping them would be tantamount to short changing oneself. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new” said Albert Einstein and that sums it all.
Published in Business World dated 13 Nov 2010
Analysis: Power Of Choice
Women can, and should, demand a working environment that helps us give our best.
"When you come to a fork in the road - take it" said Yogi Berra, a major league baseball Hall of Fame player and coach. I'm reminded of this as I sit down to analyze this case. Life is about making choices. It is no different for the women in the corporate world today. On one hand she can choose to keep quiet and act like Sexual Harassment (SH) cannot and will not happen to her; she can chose to make a noise after it happens or she can choose to quit and fade away because she couldn't take it. On the other hand, she can proactively demand an environment which will discourage SH from happening. Ultimately the choice is for her to make. Time and again women make the mistake of joining wrong places, facing issues and then feeling trapped with no choice but to quit or toe the dominant line. This has led to disastrous consequences for career women. Any number of studies have shown that women quit from the workforce in large numbers between 25 and 35 years of age as they find their employers do not have any policy to help them tide over their short term need to spend more time with young kids. A recent *McKinsey study titled "Women Matter" talks of how 87% of the women in middle and senior management chose Work Environment as the single most significant factor affecting their career decisions while only 49% chose Family Circumstances. So if women are serious about building careers they either have to change the environment or they need to choose organizations with the right environment. The presence or absence of SH surely is one of the biggest indicators of the quality of work environment for most women. But how do you know where an organization stands with respect to SH and many such uniquely gender specific issues such as flexi-time, work sharing etc? The best way to determine this is to be very alert for the subtle and not so subtle messages that the organisation is sending out through its external façade.
A company which is dominated by men at executive levels, hardly has any board representation of women is willy nilly telling you that it has not found the need to promote gender diversity. It is communicating very openly that if you want to come and work for it you need to adjust to its culture and its norms, which so far have failed to be "women-friendly". Such companies if at all they had SH policies would still fail to implement them in letter and spirit. On the other hand there are companies, which will have more than a sprinkling of women in their ranks because they have recruited, retained and promoted women proactively. A very prominent example is of course ICICI in India. Such companies will demonstrate zero tolerance for any behavior at any level which would lead its women employees to feel anxious and uncomfortable. This is what HP's board demonstrated loud and clear when it asked its best performing CEO to leave. This was not a knee jerk reaction. It stemmed out of HP's long-standing commitment and conviction around gender diversity. It is a well-articulated corporate strategy, which was kick-started by its ex-CEO Lew Platt to stem the high turnover of women managers in the '80s. Now in the 21st century HP, roughly one out of three department heads is a woman, and two of the top five executives were women during Carly's time.
There is also a bigger driver here. The same McKinsey study quoted earlier showed that companies with a higher proportion of women on their management committees are also the companies that have outperformed their sector in terms of Return on Equity, PBIT and stock price growth! So more reasons for talented women like Amai, Radha, Indra, Mini and Megha to choose a company, which is actively looking to provide the right framework to protect women against any discriminatory practice like SH.
In this context, Sujoy's words should be music to their ears as it reassures them that they are in the right place. His actions clearly show that he wants to create a working environment, which is equally welcoming of men and women. He wants to be equitable and fair so that he has the best chance to retain Amai as well as Kamal. His earlier experience at Arcola has taught him that SH cannot be brushed under the carpet and it will rear its ugly head in completely unexpected quarters. Putting in place a policy and process for dealing with SH is therefore a no brainer for him.
If I were in Amai's place I would see Sujay's proactive stance as a symbol of his superior leadership qualities. I will work with him to ensure that SH and other such progressive HR policies that would help me perform better and build a career in Kippol are put in place sooner rather than later. Mini gets it right when she says that as women we have to stand Tall. We need to have the self-confidence and belief in ourselves to choose how we will live and work. We can and should demand a work environment, which would make us feel comfortable and help us give our best. If it is not available where we work we should vote with our feet and go work with companies, which do care to provide for our specific needs. Or else even start our own firm. Today's woman will not whine - she will walk out, head held high for she knows her worth. She is ready to take the fork.
(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 08-11-2010)
"When you come to a fork in the road - take it" said Yogi Berra, a major league baseball Hall of Fame player and coach. I'm reminded of this as I sit down to analyze this case. Life is about making choices. It is no different for the women in the corporate world today. On one hand she can choose to keep quiet and act like Sexual Harassment (SH) cannot and will not happen to her; she can chose to make a noise after it happens or she can choose to quit and fade away because she couldn't take it. On the other hand, she can proactively demand an environment which will discourage SH from happening. Ultimately the choice is for her to make. Time and again women make the mistake of joining wrong places, facing issues and then feeling trapped with no choice but to quit or toe the dominant line. This has led to disastrous consequences for career women. Any number of studies have shown that women quit from the workforce in large numbers between 25 and 35 years of age as they find their employers do not have any policy to help them tide over their short term need to spend more time with young kids. A recent *McKinsey study titled "Women Matter" talks of how 87% of the women in middle and senior management chose Work Environment as the single most significant factor affecting their career decisions while only 49% chose Family Circumstances. So if women are serious about building careers they either have to change the environment or they need to choose organizations with the right environment. The presence or absence of SH surely is one of the biggest indicators of the quality of work environment for most women. But how do you know where an organization stands with respect to SH and many such uniquely gender specific issues such as flexi-time, work sharing etc? The best way to determine this is to be very alert for the subtle and not so subtle messages that the organisation is sending out through its external façade.
A company which is dominated by men at executive levels, hardly has any board representation of women is willy nilly telling you that it has not found the need to promote gender diversity. It is communicating very openly that if you want to come and work for it you need to adjust to its culture and its norms, which so far have failed to be "women-friendly". Such companies if at all they had SH policies would still fail to implement them in letter and spirit. On the other hand there are companies, which will have more than a sprinkling of women in their ranks because they have recruited, retained and promoted women proactively. A very prominent example is of course ICICI in India. Such companies will demonstrate zero tolerance for any behavior at any level which would lead its women employees to feel anxious and uncomfortable. This is what HP's board demonstrated loud and clear when it asked its best performing CEO to leave. This was not a knee jerk reaction. It stemmed out of HP's long-standing commitment and conviction around gender diversity. It is a well-articulated corporate strategy, which was kick-started by its ex-CEO Lew Platt to stem the high turnover of women managers in the '80s. Now in the 21st century HP, roughly one out of three department heads is a woman, and two of the top five executives were women during Carly's time.
There is also a bigger driver here. The same McKinsey study quoted earlier showed that companies with a higher proportion of women on their management committees are also the companies that have outperformed their sector in terms of Return on Equity, PBIT and stock price growth! So more reasons for talented women like Amai, Radha, Indra, Mini and Megha to choose a company, which is actively looking to provide the right framework to protect women against any discriminatory practice like SH.
In this context, Sujoy's words should be music to their ears as it reassures them that they are in the right place. His actions clearly show that he wants to create a working environment, which is equally welcoming of men and women. He wants to be equitable and fair so that he has the best chance to retain Amai as well as Kamal. His earlier experience at Arcola has taught him that SH cannot be brushed under the carpet and it will rear its ugly head in completely unexpected quarters. Putting in place a policy and process for dealing with SH is therefore a no brainer for him.
If I were in Amai's place I would see Sujay's proactive stance as a symbol of his superior leadership qualities. I will work with him to ensure that SH and other such progressive HR policies that would help me perform better and build a career in Kippol are put in place sooner rather than later. Mini gets it right when she says that as women we have to stand Tall. We need to have the self-confidence and belief in ourselves to choose how we will live and work. We can and should demand a work environment, which would make us feel comfortable and help us give our best. If it is not available where we work we should vote with our feet and go work with companies, which do care to provide for our specific needs. Or else even start our own firm. Today's woman will not whine - she will walk out, head held high for she knows her worth. She is ready to take the fork.
(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 08-11-2010)
Investing In People
Two books that talk about re-orienting employee management strategies in diverse ways for both humanitarian and financial gain.
2009-10 has been a very difficult year for employers and employees. The Wall Street debacle has shown the high cost that society has to pay when compensation and benefits are structured to encourage greed at the top. There has been a hue and cry about bank CEOs taking bonuses, unmindful of the countless numbers who have lost jobs because of them. This raises some fundamental questions: Is there any way for the company, its employees and the community to succeed together? Can investing in rank and file workers actually lead to higher profitability? Are we getting too obsessed with the creamy layer and forgetting that our core business differentiators are our unsung heroes on the shop floor? In her seminal book, Profits At The Bottom Of The Ladder, Jody Heymann has addressed just that. The book, according to her, answers the key question: Is it truly financially beneficial for companies to cut wages and limit flexibility, or is there a path forward from which companies can profit financially along-side employees?
Heymann has traveled across the world studying companies in diverse environments: Isola in a socialistic, developed economy like Norway, SA Metal in AIDS stricken South Africa, American Apparel, Jenkins Brick and Costco in the cut throat free market economy of USA, ACC in rural areas with nil infrastructure in India. She has demonstrated resoundingly through live case studies that it pays to invest in your critical workforce especially during downturns. This is true across industries and across borders. She points out that in any business there is a core set of employees whose performance can make a significant difference to the top-line and bottom-line of the company. These are the factory workers in a manufacturing business, the warehouse employees in a retail store, call center based support agents for a technology company and so forth. The companies highlighted in the book have invested in their core but non-elite employees by understanding their needs and aspirations, and meeting them effectively. For instance, SA Metal in South Africa set up an on-site Aids Clinic to meet the needs of its employees and in doing so greatly improved employee attendance. Similarly, Costco effectively met the aspirations of its employees by establishing a culture of hiring and training where a simple cashier could one day become the CEO. ACC had to set up plants in the hinterlands of India with no physical infrastructure, and therefore took it upon itself to build schools, hospitals, housing, and roads, an entire township for its employees.
In short, the book reinforces our faith in doing good not just at a philosophical level but also at an economic level. It emphasises that 'profits' need not be divorced from doing the right thing by your employees. Not surprisingly, Judy found that the list of companies that met her criteria were predominantly held privately. This goes to show how corporate behavior especially towards the silent majority has become distorted, dictated more & more by short-term expectations of Wall Street. This book is a must read for all CXO's who value the means as much as the end, and who want to touch people's lives in a positive way as they build profitable companies. Indeed, as Mike Jenkins IV, CEO of Jenkins Brick, eloquently says, if you invest in 'quality' people, you get 'quality' output . How simple!
The second book interestingly addresses the same issue in a different way
Can we help employees perform to their potential by tailoring organisations to fit employees? The authors argue very effectively with case studies that this is not a Utopian dream anymore. In fact many companies are doing it already on a case-by-case basis, though it leaves them open to charges of unfair treatment by employees. So Susan M Cantrell and David Smith have detailed in their book The Workforce Of One the multiple ways to go about customizing the HR initiatives to suit the diverse needs and aspiration of an increasingly complex workforce.
Workforce Of One is a powerful concept, which ought to be studied seriously by the HR professionals in India given that our economy is driven by the exponential growth of knowledge workforce. The book argues passionately that today's workforce is the iPod generation used to consuming its own unique content. The same person when he comes to work in an organisation will expect that the work, compensation, benefits, training et al. should also be designed for their specific needs. No two individuals learn the same way and neither do they look for the same benefits. It is amply seen in the way women in workforce have been demanding more flexible timings. The authors point out six trends - including among others, the increasing diversity of the workforce, and technology which allows us to know each employee intimately - that are driving the workplace to become 'MyPlace'. The lengths to which organisations cited in the book have gone to customise work environment is a real eye opener. Microsoft with its multiple workspace options allows employees to work from a Spa or an Xbox lounge. Best Buy with its highly flexible "results-only" work environment allows employees to customize their jobs, schedules, and place of work. Container Store has done away with the employee manual, relies on just a few simple HR guidelines, and allows employees to define their work-life & career path. Susan & David make you want to start your career all over again in one such company! The book is a veritable bible for any forward looking HR professional or CXO who wants to implement a new way of managing talent to increase productivity. It not only demonstrates why this approach is the way to go, but also tells organizations how to do it by adopting any of the four options suggested by the authors, or maybe even a hybrid one.
We finally have an HR management tome, which puts employees' right and square in the middle of all policies meant for them, and shows that it is the only way forward for organizations that depend on people to deliver ever increasing productivity. We should keep in mind though, that the Workforce of One approach, while motivating employees to give their best, may still not be the panacea for all ills. It did not, for instance, prevent Microsoft from losing its leadership edge over the last ten years. But it is definitely the way to go if we want to ready the organization for the new generation workforce.
2009-10 has been a very difficult year for employers and employees. The Wall Street debacle has shown the high cost that society has to pay when compensation and benefits are structured to encourage greed at the top. There has been a hue and cry about bank CEOs taking bonuses, unmindful of the countless numbers who have lost jobs because of them. This raises some fundamental questions: Is there any way for the company, its employees and the community to succeed together? Can investing in rank and file workers actually lead to higher profitability? Are we getting too obsessed with the creamy layer and forgetting that our core business differentiators are our unsung heroes on the shop floor? In her seminal book, Profits At The Bottom Of The Ladder, Jody Heymann has addressed just that. The book, according to her, answers the key question: Is it truly financially beneficial for companies to cut wages and limit flexibility, or is there a path forward from which companies can profit financially along-side employees?
Heymann has traveled across the world studying companies in diverse environments: Isola in a socialistic, developed economy like Norway, SA Metal in AIDS stricken South Africa, American Apparel, Jenkins Brick and Costco in the cut throat free market economy of USA, ACC in rural areas with nil infrastructure in India. She has demonstrated resoundingly through live case studies that it pays to invest in your critical workforce especially during downturns. This is true across industries and across borders. She points out that in any business there is a core set of employees whose performance can make a significant difference to the top-line and bottom-line of the company. These are the factory workers in a manufacturing business, the warehouse employees in a retail store, call center based support agents for a technology company and so forth. The companies highlighted in the book have invested in their core but non-elite employees by understanding their needs and aspirations, and meeting them effectively. For instance, SA Metal in South Africa set up an on-site Aids Clinic to meet the needs of its employees and in doing so greatly improved employee attendance. Similarly, Costco effectively met the aspirations of its employees by establishing a culture of hiring and training where a simple cashier could one day become the CEO. ACC had to set up plants in the hinterlands of India with no physical infrastructure, and therefore took it upon itself to build schools, hospitals, housing, and roads, an entire township for its employees.
In short, the book reinforces our faith in doing good not just at a philosophical level but also at an economic level. It emphasises that 'profits' need not be divorced from doing the right thing by your employees. Not surprisingly, Judy found that the list of companies that met her criteria were predominantly held privately. This goes to show how corporate behavior especially towards the silent majority has become distorted, dictated more & more by short-term expectations of Wall Street. This book is a must read for all CXO's who value the means as much as the end, and who want to touch people's lives in a positive way as they build profitable companies. Indeed, as Mike Jenkins IV, CEO of Jenkins Brick, eloquently says, if you invest in 'quality' people, you get 'quality' output . How simple!
The second book interestingly addresses the same issue in a different way
Can we help employees perform to their potential by tailoring organisations to fit employees? The authors argue very effectively with case studies that this is not a Utopian dream anymore. In fact many companies are doing it already on a case-by-case basis, though it leaves them open to charges of unfair treatment by employees. So Susan M Cantrell and David Smith have detailed in their book The Workforce Of One the multiple ways to go about customizing the HR initiatives to suit the diverse needs and aspiration of an increasingly complex workforce.
Workforce Of One is a powerful concept, which ought to be studied seriously by the HR professionals in India given that our economy is driven by the exponential growth of knowledge workforce. The book argues passionately that today's workforce is the iPod generation used to consuming its own unique content. The same person when he comes to work in an organisation will expect that the work, compensation, benefits, training et al. should also be designed for their specific needs. No two individuals learn the same way and neither do they look for the same benefits. It is amply seen in the way women in workforce have been demanding more flexible timings. The authors point out six trends - including among others, the increasing diversity of the workforce, and technology which allows us to know each employee intimately - that are driving the workplace to become 'MyPlace'. The lengths to which organisations cited in the book have gone to customise work environment is a real eye opener. Microsoft with its multiple workspace options allows employees to work from a Spa or an Xbox lounge. Best Buy with its highly flexible "results-only" work environment allows employees to customize their jobs, schedules, and place of work. Container Store has done away with the employee manual, relies on just a few simple HR guidelines, and allows employees to define their work-life & career path. Susan & David make you want to start your career all over again in one such company! The book is a veritable bible for any forward looking HR professional or CXO who wants to implement a new way of managing talent to increase productivity. It not only demonstrates why this approach is the way to go, but also tells organizations how to do it by adopting any of the four options suggested by the authors, or maybe even a hybrid one.
We finally have an HR management tome, which puts employees' right and square in the middle of all policies meant for them, and shows that it is the only way forward for organizations that depend on people to deliver ever increasing productivity. We should keep in mind though, that the Workforce of One approach, while motivating employees to give their best, may still not be the panacea for all ills. It did not, for instance, prevent Microsoft from losing its leadership edge over the last ten years. But it is definitely the way to go if we want to ready the organization for the new generation workforce.
Sep 13, 2010
Second Innings
My son had come down for his first vacation after leaving home for college. I assumed that he would want to relax, laze around and catch up on all the lost sleep. But to my surprise he had very different plans. I watched open mouthed as he got up at 5.30 am and left for work at an unearthly 6.30 am every morning including Saturdays. He told me about the villages he visited and the data that his project team was collecting to figure out if formal banking really helped the rural folks. By the end of his vacation, he knew more about the real condition in the villages than I have ever known. I realised that he had already embarked on his proclaimed mission to leverage his education to solve problems he saw around him. But he is not an isolated case. There was this smart young American from Caltech who had descended into Bangalore bag and baggage to try and reach affordable, reliable power to the forgotten lot in India. Running a start-up is lonely uphill task even with friends and family around but to attempt it in a foreign country that too in the social sector, requires phenomenal passion. Then yesterday I met another young man, a National Law School alumni who had quit a lucrative law partnership to build for-profit social enterprises. The law practice at its best fell short of his overarching ambition to change the lives of millions at the base of the economic pyramid.
I can’t but contrast this with what I hear from the successful executives whom I meet day in and day out. Will I make it to the CXO level or will I get stuck with the VP tag forever? Am I making as much as my peers in other places? Am I missing out on the next big thing by staying put in my job? Should I ask for an expat status? Unending list of concerns and desires, which seem to be the hallmark of the more ambitious type A super achievers today. The sad part is that at the end of the day they are still more anxious, more restless and more dissatisfied. There is this sense of where are we going with this? Buying the first car is an unforgettable experience but buying the next car and the next somehow seems to follow the law of diminishing returns exponentially. And so here we are at the peak of our professional life strangely afflicted by this inexplicable mid-life crisis, which refuses to go away. Can we see ourselves playing the same corporate politics, selling yet another brand and sucking up to yet another boss for the next 20+ years? Is there an option out there, which our kids seem to have discovered before us?
In some ways, the SKS IPO has heralded the advent of a choice so far unavailable or perhaps undiscovered. It showed that there are global investors with deep pockets willing to bet on the bottom of the pyramid. It proved that attractive profits could be made if we get the business model right. Above all it demonstrated that a great team with experience in the conventional corporate sector is needed to pull it off. So here we now have a chance to put to use our expertise in scaling, building organisation, designing technology and selling new services, to impact the lives of the multitudes positively. A smile on their face could perhaps mean a lot more than a few more lakhs in the bank. Can we build a new way of reaching affordable primary healthcare to our masses and make a profitable, scalable business out of it? Can we figure out how to deliver high quality education to every child? We have so many problems to solve right here, which need and demand all the entrepreneurial drive and the execution smarts of our best and the brightest. Can we raise our hands? Can we make India the hub for corporate social sector? Is this not more critical and many times more satisfying than building one more IT services company or one more offshore center for an MNC?
Sangita Talwar walked out of Tata Tea to head our almost forgotten but one of the earliest instances of corporate social organisation – NDDB – to spearhead the second milk revolution and reach milk to every child in the country. When asked about her reasons for the unconventional move she said: “This job will enable me to work with rural India and create value for them. The cause here is so large that it is worth leaving my comfort zone. It’s a great challenge for a person who has all along worked with the private sector”. I’m sure a lot of us feel that way but don’t take the first step due to sheer inertia and ignorance.
Today we have venture capitalists that have raised money exclusively to fund social for-profit ventures. Elevar, Aavishkar, Acumen and many more to follow have created a new category of social venture capital funds. So capital is not the issue. But there is a real scarcity of entrepreneurs with execution experience who can come up with new business models or who can fine-tune existing models and scale them. Passion and zeal alone can’t get us there - we have a substantial network of well meaning NGO’s which are struggling to scale their impact. Our problems are huge and complex and therefore need the organisation skills that the large corporates have so successfully imparted, to make a significant dent.
Bill Gates said quoting his mother in the Harvard Commencement Speech in 2007 that “For those to whom much is given, much is expected”. Our generation has had the benefit of the longest Bull Run in the country. We have benefited from the IITs, IIMs, AIIMS etc; that set us up to compete with the best globally and win. It is time to think hard on how we can use our experience, knowledge and network to change the lives of millions rather than just ours. All it requires is a reorientation of our mindset to believe that we can achieve our financial and professional goals without necessarily working for the Wall Street investment bank or the Fortune500 FMCG.
Are you ready for a more meaningful second innings?
I can’t but contrast this with what I hear from the successful executives whom I meet day in and day out. Will I make it to the CXO level or will I get stuck with the VP tag forever? Am I making as much as my peers in other places? Am I missing out on the next big thing by staying put in my job? Should I ask for an expat status? Unending list of concerns and desires, which seem to be the hallmark of the more ambitious type A super achievers today. The sad part is that at the end of the day they are still more anxious, more restless and more dissatisfied. There is this sense of where are we going with this? Buying the first car is an unforgettable experience but buying the next car and the next somehow seems to follow the law of diminishing returns exponentially. And so here we are at the peak of our professional life strangely afflicted by this inexplicable mid-life crisis, which refuses to go away. Can we see ourselves playing the same corporate politics, selling yet another brand and sucking up to yet another boss for the next 20+ years? Is there an option out there, which our kids seem to have discovered before us?
In some ways, the SKS IPO has heralded the advent of a choice so far unavailable or perhaps undiscovered. It showed that there are global investors with deep pockets willing to bet on the bottom of the pyramid. It proved that attractive profits could be made if we get the business model right. Above all it demonstrated that a great team with experience in the conventional corporate sector is needed to pull it off. So here we now have a chance to put to use our expertise in scaling, building organisation, designing technology and selling new services, to impact the lives of the multitudes positively. A smile on their face could perhaps mean a lot more than a few more lakhs in the bank. Can we build a new way of reaching affordable primary healthcare to our masses and make a profitable, scalable business out of it? Can we figure out how to deliver high quality education to every child? We have so many problems to solve right here, which need and demand all the entrepreneurial drive and the execution smarts of our best and the brightest. Can we raise our hands? Can we make India the hub for corporate social sector? Is this not more critical and many times more satisfying than building one more IT services company or one more offshore center for an MNC?
Sangita Talwar walked out of Tata Tea to head our almost forgotten but one of the earliest instances of corporate social organisation – NDDB – to spearhead the second milk revolution and reach milk to every child in the country. When asked about her reasons for the unconventional move she said: “This job will enable me to work with rural India and create value for them. The cause here is so large that it is worth leaving my comfort zone. It’s a great challenge for a person who has all along worked with the private sector”. I’m sure a lot of us feel that way but don’t take the first step due to sheer inertia and ignorance.
Today we have venture capitalists that have raised money exclusively to fund social for-profit ventures. Elevar, Aavishkar, Acumen and many more to follow have created a new category of social venture capital funds. So capital is not the issue. But there is a real scarcity of entrepreneurs with execution experience who can come up with new business models or who can fine-tune existing models and scale them. Passion and zeal alone can’t get us there - we have a substantial network of well meaning NGO’s which are struggling to scale their impact. Our problems are huge and complex and therefore need the organisation skills that the large corporates have so successfully imparted, to make a significant dent.
Bill Gates said quoting his mother in the Harvard Commencement Speech in 2007 that “For those to whom much is given, much is expected”. Our generation has had the benefit of the longest Bull Run in the country. We have benefited from the IITs, IIMs, AIIMS etc; that set us up to compete with the best globally and win. It is time to think hard on how we can use our experience, knowledge and network to change the lives of millions rather than just ours. All it requires is a reorientation of our mindset to believe that we can achieve our financial and professional goals without necessarily working for the Wall Street investment bank or the Fortune500 FMCG.
Are you ready for a more meaningful second innings?
Aug 9, 2010
Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom
How India needs to consciously create an intensive environment for start ups to expand and usher in the era of Indian MNCs
It is hard to believe now, but when I graduated in the '80s, the most sought-after jobs were in the public sector, of course a distant second to the charms of USA. Freshly minted engineers would take a shot at the recruitment tests held by BHEL, BEL, ISRO, BARC' and once they got in, would retire from there. These jobs paid well, came with good perks and phenomenal security. The 70s and 80s were also the time when India was attempting indigenization on a large scale and these companies were at the forefront. In 1981, when Maruti set up a plant to build a modern car, it was an exciting place to be in. CDOT in 1984 with its allure of designing and building a new switch was still a very cool place to work. The marriage market, the ultimate barometer of job status, also confirmed this by giving a premium for bridegrooms from this cadre. Government and bank jobs, which were the post-independence favorites, had given way to a new order - the hotshot PSUs.
The opening of the economy and the emergence of the IT sector in the 90s overturned this cozy world and completely took over the dreams and aspirations of the next generation. And here the order of magnitude of growth, both in number of jobs and in the earning capacity, has been substantial. In just a matter of ten to fifteen years, we have employers like IBM, Wipro, Infosys, Accenture, and Genpact recruiting in thousands every year. The average compensation for a fresh engineer has gone up from Rs 24,000 pa in 1990 to Rs 3,00,000+ in 2010, a whopping 1150% rise!. Old names like IBM and Coco-Cola, new names like Microsoft, Pepsi, Airtel, Nokia, Honda and Toyota and even newer ones like Google and Facebook have created innumerable options. The job content has grown by leaps and bounds with international competition pushing up output quality levels to global standards. No wonder then that the IT sector and MNCs now provide the ultimate inspirational jobs for the Indian middle class.
One of the side effects has been that most of our talent is going into perfecting large-scale delivery on one hand and copycat execution on the other. A software engineer of the 90s, today, would be managing a 5000+ team of engineers and have responsibility for hundreds of millions of revenue. Or if he were on the business side, he would be launching a global brand in India following, to a great extent, the same strategy that succeeded in the parent country. However, somewhere during the course of this euphoric journey, we have given a short shrift to innovation. Very few new ideas in products or services have originated from the country. China has its Huwawei and Haier. India is still not there except in IT Services. More worrying is the fact that in a world where large category killers like Google and Facebook are getting created in shorter and shorter timeframes, we are still struggling to create brand new world-class companies. Infosys continues to be our showcase company 25 years after its inception! This makes us very dependent on the global economy and any hiccup there results in enormous anxiety and hand wringing here. We are worried about American elections changing outsourcing rates and UK elections changing visa rules. What it means is that we do not have control over our destiny when it comes to creating the right quality jobs at the right time in right numbers. We need to able to do this if we are serious about leveraging our demographic dividend to claim our rightful place in the world order. The only long-term solution is to create enough new businesses in all sectors, which can leverage the domestic demand and then extend their reach to international markets. In short, we need a few thousand more Infosys and Bhartis!
The well paying and comfortable jobs of today, to an extent, have become the golden handcuffs of our generation. The escape velocity (the speed required to break free) today is much higher than say what it was even ten years back when the exodus happened from old economy companies to the new ones. So it is going to take conscious effort from all the stakeholders (the extended family, the investor, the entrepreneur) to build a momentum for creating a significant number of start-ups, which can then go on to produce the new set of Indian MNCs in the next decade.
First and foremost, there has to be an appetite for failures, which today is nearly absent in our society. We need to showcase and celebrate failures as much, if not more, than our successes. Our hiring managers need to socialize the well-known fact that candidates who have seen failures bring more to the table than the ones who have only seen success. This will go a long way in making start-ups cool places to work in for our youngsters.
But the start-ups cannot attract the best and the brightest unless they are willing to pay as well as the bigger companies. The competition for talent is intense and global and there is no way anybody will settle for less than market compensation even if the job is far more exciting. Of course, start-ups cannot compete with the established companies in terms of cash and perks. Therefore our entrepreneurs will need to share more equity/stocks with their employees. The mind-set has to move from wanting to hold 100 per cent to willingness to build a company with a group of likeminded "founders" participating in the upside as well as downside. This would definitely attract a certain type of people. Take for instance Vaidhyanathan who recently quit ICICI to join Future Group's Financial Services. When asked what motivated him to take such a risk, he said: "But to take a stake in a business and add value to it is an experience I've never had". There are many more such seasoned executives waiting in the wings for the right start-up at the verge of scaling that would gave them not only the opportunity to build a new business from scratch but also offer a significant longer term upside through stock options, or profit sharing. This would surely incentivize them to compromise on the cash part. But here is where we get stuck in real life as the entrepreneur feels it is too risky with no absolute performance guarantees. A via media would be to bring such people on-board in "interim CXO's" role. This would help both sides to get over their fears and doubts. What is required is a change in our collective mind-sets; new employee engagement models replacing traditional full time employment offers.
Our corporate also needs to step in and do their bit to encourage start-ups. In the developed world, the start-ups get their first Beta customers from their backyard. It creates a win-win situation as the larger companies get a peak into cutting- edge technology and better supplier/vendor options while the smaller company gets its big break in the home ground. In India, the situation is distorted, as we always prefer "foreign companies" to domestic ones. I have heard of cases where Indian companies adopted anglicized names, offshore addresses and hired "white" sales folks to become more acceptable to Indian decision makers.
The Government needs to learn from countries like Israel and contribute its bit by reducing taxes and building incubation facilities. Our Govt. today is going the other way - it gives special status to large firms populating SEZs.
The next decade needs the pint sized, no name start-ups with abundant ambition and guts to dream big to become the new normal in our job market. This is the only way we can get the pendulum to swing towards innovation and entrepreneurship - the foundation for an economy which can stand and run on its own two feet.
It is hard to believe now, but when I graduated in the '80s, the most sought-after jobs were in the public sector, of course a distant second to the charms of USA. Freshly minted engineers would take a shot at the recruitment tests held by BHEL, BEL, ISRO, BARC' and once they got in, would retire from there. These jobs paid well, came with good perks and phenomenal security. The 70s and 80s were also the time when India was attempting indigenization on a large scale and these companies were at the forefront. In 1981, when Maruti set up a plant to build a modern car, it was an exciting place to be in. CDOT in 1984 with its allure of designing and building a new switch was still a very cool place to work. The marriage market, the ultimate barometer of job status, also confirmed this by giving a premium for bridegrooms from this cadre. Government and bank jobs, which were the post-independence favorites, had given way to a new order - the hotshot PSUs.
The opening of the economy and the emergence of the IT sector in the 90s overturned this cozy world and completely took over the dreams and aspirations of the next generation. And here the order of magnitude of growth, both in number of jobs and in the earning capacity, has been substantial. In just a matter of ten to fifteen years, we have employers like IBM, Wipro, Infosys, Accenture, and Genpact recruiting in thousands every year. The average compensation for a fresh engineer has gone up from Rs 24,000 pa in 1990 to Rs 3,00,000+ in 2010, a whopping 1150% rise!. Old names like IBM and Coco-Cola, new names like Microsoft, Pepsi, Airtel, Nokia, Honda and Toyota and even newer ones like Google and Facebook have created innumerable options. The job content has grown by leaps and bounds with international competition pushing up output quality levels to global standards. No wonder then that the IT sector and MNCs now provide the ultimate inspirational jobs for the Indian middle class.
One of the side effects has been that most of our talent is going into perfecting large-scale delivery on one hand and copycat execution on the other. A software engineer of the 90s, today, would be managing a 5000+ team of engineers and have responsibility for hundreds of millions of revenue. Or if he were on the business side, he would be launching a global brand in India following, to a great extent, the same strategy that succeeded in the parent country. However, somewhere during the course of this euphoric journey, we have given a short shrift to innovation. Very few new ideas in products or services have originated from the country. China has its Huwawei and Haier. India is still not there except in IT Services. More worrying is the fact that in a world where large category killers like Google and Facebook are getting created in shorter and shorter timeframes, we are still struggling to create brand new world-class companies. Infosys continues to be our showcase company 25 years after its inception! This makes us very dependent on the global economy and any hiccup there results in enormous anxiety and hand wringing here. We are worried about American elections changing outsourcing rates and UK elections changing visa rules. What it means is that we do not have control over our destiny when it comes to creating the right quality jobs at the right time in right numbers. We need to able to do this if we are serious about leveraging our demographic dividend to claim our rightful place in the world order. The only long-term solution is to create enough new businesses in all sectors, which can leverage the domestic demand and then extend their reach to international markets. In short, we need a few thousand more Infosys and Bhartis!
The well paying and comfortable jobs of today, to an extent, have become the golden handcuffs of our generation. The escape velocity (the speed required to break free) today is much higher than say what it was even ten years back when the exodus happened from old economy companies to the new ones. So it is going to take conscious effort from all the stakeholders (the extended family, the investor, the entrepreneur) to build a momentum for creating a significant number of start-ups, which can then go on to produce the new set of Indian MNCs in the next decade.
First and foremost, there has to be an appetite for failures, which today is nearly absent in our society. We need to showcase and celebrate failures as much, if not more, than our successes. Our hiring managers need to socialize the well-known fact that candidates who have seen failures bring more to the table than the ones who have only seen success. This will go a long way in making start-ups cool places to work in for our youngsters.
But the start-ups cannot attract the best and the brightest unless they are willing to pay as well as the bigger companies. The competition for talent is intense and global and there is no way anybody will settle for less than market compensation even if the job is far more exciting. Of course, start-ups cannot compete with the established companies in terms of cash and perks. Therefore our entrepreneurs will need to share more equity/stocks with their employees. The mind-set has to move from wanting to hold 100 per cent to willingness to build a company with a group of likeminded "founders" participating in the upside as well as downside. This would definitely attract a certain type of people. Take for instance Vaidhyanathan who recently quit ICICI to join Future Group's Financial Services. When asked what motivated him to take such a risk, he said: "But to take a stake in a business and add value to it is an experience I've never had". There are many more such seasoned executives waiting in the wings for the right start-up at the verge of scaling that would gave them not only the opportunity to build a new business from scratch but also offer a significant longer term upside through stock options, or profit sharing. This would surely incentivize them to compromise on the cash part. But here is where we get stuck in real life as the entrepreneur feels it is too risky with no absolute performance guarantees. A via media would be to bring such people on-board in "interim CXO's" role. This would help both sides to get over their fears and doubts. What is required is a change in our collective mind-sets; new employee engagement models replacing traditional full time employment offers.
Our corporate also needs to step in and do their bit to encourage start-ups. In the developed world, the start-ups get their first Beta customers from their backyard. It creates a win-win situation as the larger companies get a peak into cutting- edge technology and better supplier/vendor options while the smaller company gets its big break in the home ground. In India, the situation is distorted, as we always prefer "foreign companies" to domestic ones. I have heard of cases where Indian companies adopted anglicized names, offshore addresses and hired "white" sales folks to become more acceptable to Indian decision makers.
The Government needs to learn from countries like Israel and contribute its bit by reducing taxes and building incubation facilities. Our Govt. today is going the other way - it gives special status to large firms populating SEZs.
The next decade needs the pint sized, no name start-ups with abundant ambition and guts to dream big to become the new normal in our job market. This is the only way we can get the pendulum to swing towards innovation and entrepreneurship - the foundation for an economy which can stand and run on its own two feet.
Jun 9, 2010
Case Study: An Affair, An Agency And An Agenda
Give to a pig when it grunts and a child when it cries, and you will have a fine pig and a bad child. — Danish proverb
Tula Bedi looked at the windmills in the horizon through a film of angry tears. She felt she had hit dead end, but as she often told herself: “I am a true-blue Sikh — we don’t take nonsense unless it saves lives or puts food into empty stomachs!” Tula was not giving up and she was not feeling sorry.
This is a premeditated attack… Here on, I will fight till I have rubbed every dishonest nose on the ground…
“Yes, you warned me that things were going on,” she said to Patrick Lea, her MD at Kontos, an ad agency. “But the ‘goings-on’ I thought would be professional stuff. But this stinks! Did you read the letter they have given me? It says, ‘skills and experience not-transferable.’ Really now! How come I have worked here 12 whole months, but it took as little as a weekend to discover this? I won back a $100-million account, which we had almost lost, and against 12 agencies… Does that look like skills not transferable? Patrick, my redundancy was predetermined!”
Did they think she was that naïve? Had she erred in going to HR and saying, “I want to register a complaint”? Had this precipitated matters?
Two weeks ago, Tula had met Patrick and formally discussed the opposition she was facing from a creative director, Sophie Turner. She had briefed Patrick about the variety of rude encounters with Sophie; about the discriminatory, abusive and unnecessarily aggressive remarks that bordered on manic. She had discussed it all with the CEO, Ralph Warner, too. (Each group company in Kontos was headed by an MD who reported to the CEO of the business. The operations were handled by the MD.)
Tula was the brand director at Kontos for a key client T&T, for Europe and Africa (E&A). Kontos was huge, reputed and popular. T&T — a large technology firm that described itself as ‘Where consumer aspiration experiences dependable technology’ — had three key product divisions, stated simply as B1, B2 and B3.
Over the years, T&T’s global management had been pushing for a single agency format (as against the five agencies they worked with), so they steadily rationalised the list. Mid-2008, just before Tula joined Kontos, T&T moved the global B1 account to its strategic and key agency, Tracy-Lee Inc. Naturally, Kontos lost T&T’s B1 account for E&A region. This meant a tremendous loss of revenue, especially during the trying recession years.
When T&T called for a global pitch, Kontos Europe held just one category of T&T — the B2 account for E&A. For Kontos, it was huge; for Tula it was a big part of her business group which would help her team keep their jobs.
T&T invited 14 agencies; 12 participated. The lead agency, Tracy Lee, was larger than Kontos and proffered better economies of scale. The pitch was competed at three levels: level one was a ‘Why You’, where Tula and team had to present and defend technical questions. The answers were critical to winning the first round.
Level two was a reverse auction, for which Tula had to convince Kontos’ chief global procurement officer that her rate card was optimal. Thereafter, this officer, along with Tula and her team, presented their bid to T&T.
By the time round two was done, Tula had become the talk at T&T’s US office. When T&T called Kontos for round three, the creative pitch, it was, in fact, saying Kontos’ rates were good and, therefore, found favour with the rest of the panel.
When MD Patrick Lea cheered and congratulated her, Tula called her grand dad. “I feel proven, vindicated! In a recession, when an account like Kontos goes into review, it does undermine your confidence. But now it’s so so so good!” Tula was relieved; she would not have to sacrifice the most hard working members of her team now.
They began preparing for stage three, and Patrick and Tula called their best creative directors for a meeting of ideas, along with the old team: Mikhail Fedor and Hazel Keepers, the account managers, and Jeannie Penn, the account director who had engineered rounds one and two. Then, out of the blue, came a mail from Sophie Turner, another creative director, announcing herself as the creative lead on the account. Everyone was startled. Before long came a mail from her, “We don’t need Fedor, Keepers etc. Just background work and day to day help is what they ought to concentrate on.”
Tula was surprised. How can the core T&T team be asked to disappear into the woodwork? There had to be a process of joint discussion on the client, and its key needs. How can that be called off? Things were getting a bit awry; from strategic, the team was going to 100 per cent operational… Why should a strategic team shift to the back burner? Why should a winning team be suddenly quietened?
Sophie began to shut Tula out. When she chose her own team to work on T&T, Tula was taken aback. That team had never worked on T&T; it had never been on a technology account; and, as Mikhail Fedor pointed out, ‘they don’t even know the client for God’s sake!’
How could a creative team that had never known the B2 product, nor the client, work on such a complex account? Tula began to grow restless. This clearly was not an agency decision; a plot was staring her in her face. This was something Sophie was steering. I am not naïve.
Tula decided to have a chat with Sophie, only to save the account. But Sophie had led her to the door and said, “The next time, ask my secretary if I wish to meet you.” And then, “@$+! off! And don’t you dare rat on me!” Five heads in the hall turned, and instantly looked away. Nobody messed with Sophie.Sophie began to shut Tula out. When she chose her own team to work on T&T, Tula was taken aback. That team had never worked on T&T; it had never been on a technology account; and, as Mikhail Fedor pointed out, ‘they don’t even know the client for God’s sake!’
How could a creative team that had never known the B2 product, nor the client, work on such a complex account? Tula began to grow restless. This clearly was not an agency decision; a plot was staring her in her face. This was something Sophie was steering. I am not naïve.
The whole office was talking by now. Patrick was frustrated but tongue tied. Ralph, too, had heard about the hallway rudeness, but laughed it off saying, “So, did you give it back to her?” Ralph’s attitude surprised Tula. He said, “Well! There is almost nothing you can do. She reports to Gregg Timms, the COO for Kontos worldwide, and well… she is also his girlfriend.”
Tula: Ralph, I am trying to earn honest bread, please. Sophie does not behave like this with anyone else on T&T.
Ralph (smiling): Her actions are divisive, manipulative and affect your ability to manage ably, yes? Don’t get me wrong. Your own team has told me this several times. But I can’t help you.
Tula was uncomfortable. She quickly got on to the network and asked around and was told: Sophie — divorced, COO’s girlfriend, relatively poor on ideas but good at client management, but known to mess up agency-client balance with an over-enthusiastic client-orientation.
The next day, there was a crisis. Sophie had unilaterally and gushingly agreed to deliver a job to T&T in 48 hours. Except those 48 were Saturday and Sunday. Tula could not have her team work weekends; it was not even necessary. When she asked Patrick to change that, in walked Sophie to the hub where Tula and the team sat, but going up to Hazel she said, “I see you doing all the work here. Well, I have agreed to some tight deadlines with the client. Her highness doesn’t agree, but then who needs her anyway? We can do it by ourselves, can’t we, sweetheart? Let’s go out for a coffee to discuss this after lunch?”
Hazel retorted rather quickly, “Oops, not free at all today. Drop us an email about what you need, we will take care.” When a red-faced Hazel reported this to Ralph, he only managed to say, “Oh dear!”
This time Tula took it up with HR verbally and mentioned Sophie’s rude viciousness, asking for an amicable resolution; if not, the client would suffer. HR gave her a toll free number to call and take counselling support.
Meanwhile, Sophie was miles ahead. She had begun to hold client meetings without Tula, meeting T&T liaison teams independently, even flying to Germany for these.
Now the rudeness began to show. During a top brand management meeting, it was Tula’s turn to present successful campaigns. CEO Ralph, along with Sophie’s team, began egging Tula to ‘wrap up fast’ using gestures and remarks and interrupting her. Patrick was severely annoyed when Sophie added, “What is she saying? Does anyone understand her?”Slapping the table angrily Patrick asked Ralph to apologise for influencing ‘people’ and told ‘people’ to shut up.
Sophie took to wooing the client rather lavishly, while also making Tula look like a lowly, pointless junior clerk. T&T’s E&A regional office was getting uncomfortable with the confused messages, because Tula Bedi was the one they had a long standing relationship with. Before they could do anything, Sophie, working with the precision of a Swiss watch, chose a new account management team, demolishing Tula’s existing team on T&T.
Tula decided to record every misdemeanour. When she pinned Ralph to addressing this, he simply said, “I haven’t come all the way to ruffle any feathers!” Wow, thought Tula, that sums up why he is so hesitant to help! Why the CEO is so useless, leadership so failing! Ralph was clearly trying not to ruffle the COO’s feathers (Sophie’s boyfriend and worse, his own dotted line relationship). But Patrick had been alarmed by certain typical tones and slants in Sophie’s language and style, which he recognised as discriminating, and made with an intention to degrade and bully Tula. On one occasion when he accosted Sophie with the accusation that she was withholding information from Tula on key briefs to make her look incompetent, Sophie dared him to prove it.
Tula demanded action. She asked her MD and CEO, “How are we sitting here as a business group and allowing a creative director to simply flout norms and rules? And how is it that Ralph, as CEO, is unable to swat Sophie on this?”
Both Patrick and Ralph individually confessed that they had raised this issue several times with senior management, that, of course, all that was unfair, and that Tula was remarkable and her work was what had saved them the $100-million account. But they had no voice in the matter and had been asked to lay off. Tula stood there agitated and shaking, shocked by the helplessness of her seniors as Ralph said, “Sophie is the COO’s girlfriend, no less, Tula. Plus, she reports to him; no one can do a thing about it, including me. Sorry, seems like Sophie runs the show here.”
Tula’s team meanwhile began to feel the pinch of their boss being harassed, for it meant that their careers would hit the ground as well. unless they made smart moves. But no one was willing to do that. At least, not yet.
A light week came along and Tula took an extended weekend off to Italy. When she returned to work on Monday, an unpleasant surprise awaited her. An email marked to all welcomed Jeannie Penn as the T&T account lead! Tula went numb. Jeannie was an account director, who reported to her! Nothing made sense and she asked Patrick what the story was.
Patrick: Worse, Tula, Jeannie is scheduled to fill your shoes. Don’t quote me on this, please. She has been designated senior account director, with brand responsibility and she will report to the global brand director in Sweden.
Tula: In Sweden? Since when did we have a GBD anywhere?
Patrick: A person called Jack Henge has been appointed as of yesterday. He plays bridge with Greg Timms (the global COO and boyfriend), or he used to, at least. I mean, now he cannot, because he will be stationed in Germany while Greg is in Wales.
Tula: What are you saying Patrick? You don’t make any sense. So what if he plays bridge or Bingo? We had a global diktat that a brand will report to the home CEO and will have no global dotted line! And what is Jeannie doing when I am brand director?
Patrick: Nothing, except that a new account needs a new structure, and Sophie has been put on top of the new structure. Obviously, she did not want you. It’s a lot of waffle.
There was another email: it congratulated everyone in T&T biz group for the new account win, and was sent to everyone in the Kontos family worldwide, by COO Greg Timms, but brand director Tula Bedi was not mentioned.
Wow, she thought. Here was a worldwide organisation that hired 9,000 people across 90 countries, and ran a business worth upwards of $3 billion, and its top management ran it with the skills of a night club DJ. The very essence of professional management now laughed her in the face.
Gregg had manouvered the entire organisation and the theory of management, to please his lady love. He was so enamoured that he could neither see his duty nor his wrong doing. He had kept the whole organisation under his spell so that they dreaded to distress Sophie, the organisational lady love. Wow, thought Tula..., in India, where her extended family lived, love for a lady had led a man to build the fabulous Taj Mahal!
Sophie would not have anything less than a position right next to her knight on the organisation chart, as an equal! Sophie was the only creative director who reported to the global COO (her boyfriend) in a different country. This put her sort of outside the organisation structure and impossible to deal with. That was how she managed to have direct meetings with Germany.
Tula had grinned, “Not impressed! Indian men prove their love by plucking the moon for their lady love or proving that the day is, in fact, night. There are Bollywood songs on this.” Ralph nodded slowly, “Yes, I have heard Indians are mystical.”
“Yes,” said Tula, “and you have seen nothing yet Ralph.... We are oh-so mystical.”
Tula looked at the date of the email announcing the new organisation structure and did a double take. That mail was sent on the Thursday night before she went on the extended weekend, so that it reached people just as she left — that meant they had it all planned!
She thought, they were two consenting adults, but how did that allow them to, one, change the organisation’s structure; two, appoint a new brand director; three, demolish a functional team and randomly shift the client business to a bunch of people who had had nothing to do with imaging business? They are playing with the trust of a client who has put a 100 million into the hands of an agency, based on image, published profit and loss and Statement of Intent!
Wow! How naïve all this is! And I used to think my three-year-old son is naïve for thinking he was Spiderman!
Tula’s mind was made. She was going to approach HR. She would raise Cain! This was no more just about her ego and her job; it was about the organisation.
But HR’s Meg Winkle said, “If you lay it so bare, then it will be out in the open and then you cannot deal with Sophie.” Then noting Tula’s expression, she said, “Honey, think about it. We will need to tell Sophie all that you are reporting… word will spread. You will come to be seen as a rattler. Oh, or is it tattler? Must check…”
Once again the doubt and confusion came back. Tula thought of her grandfather, of little Siv, of the house mortgage, of her patient husband Karan. Then the creative pitch danced before her eyes. So close to winning and yet so complex-ly far… damn you Sophie, damn! It was Catch 22.
HR was not willing to approach senior management in a manner that would not damage Tula’s situation. I still have to work with Sophie; a formal investigation will alienate her even more… Heck! Should I wait and watch, then?
Then she recalled Sophie’s cruel words. Last month, Tula was raising money for a local charity, and Sophie had sneered, “Raising money for the poor people back home?” Tula was now clear about her next step. She would file a complaint with HR. Oh, but what if they sacked her for complaining? HR did things like that… Oh, but they couldn’t. By contract, they would have to give her four weeks’ notice.
Tula had 10 days to go to complete one year at Kontos. Filing a grievance would be like declaring war. Resigning was not even a thought in her mind. Completing the year was important to collect some extras that were hers by right, and she did need those to pay off her mortgage.
But Kontos moved in quick, urged by Sophie’s ploys. They declared Tula redundant, just 10 days before she completed her year. And the economy proffered that opportunity because recession was the big bad word, so that redundancy was legal even if unfair. Foul and unethical considering that Tula had only recently won the T&T account for Kontos. Ungrateful because Kontos, which was laying off people week after week to stay afloat, had a short memory.
It was smart, very very smart. Now Tula could not claim unfair dismissal. They had seen to it. Now, Tula would technically not have completed a full year. That meant she also lost her right to claim unfair dismissal.
It was not the sacking per se. It was the planning and conniving. This way the senior management had snuggled back into the good books of the COO and his lady love.
Now it was war. Tula, the true blue warrior, was not going to take any nonsense. She called her lawyers.
(To be continued…)
Classroom Discussion
Business benefits from the best heads; but matters of the heart reveal the foolhardy
casestudymeera at gmail dot com
A light week came along and Tula took an extended weekend off to Italy. When she returned to work on Monday, an unpleasant surprise awaited her. An email marked to all welcomed Jeannie Penn as the T&T account lead! Tula went numb. Jeannie was an account director, who reported to her! Nothing made sense and she asked Patrick what the story was.
Patrick: Worse, Tula, Jeannie is scheduled to fill your shoes. Don’t quote me on this, please. She has been designated senior account director, with brand responsibility and she will report to the global brand director in Sweden.
Tula: In Sweden? Since when did we have a GBD anywhere?
Patrick: A person called Jack Henge has been appointed as of yesterday. He plays bridge with Greg Timms (the global COO and boyfriend), or he used to, at least. I mean, now he cannot, because he will be stationed in Germany while Greg is in Wales.
Tula: What are you saying Patrick? You don’t make any sense. So what if he plays bridge or Bingo? We had a global diktat that a brand will report to the home CEO and will have no global dotted line! And what is Jeannie doing when I am brand director?
Patrick: Nothing, except that a new account needs a new structure, and Sophie has been put on top of the new structure. Obviously, she did not want you. It’s a lot of waffle.
There was another email: it congratulated everyone in T&T biz group for the new account win, and was sent to everyone in the Kontos family worldwide, by COO Greg Timms, but brand director Tula Bedi was not mentioned.
Wow, she thought. Here was a worldwide organisation that hired 9,000 people across 90 countries, and ran a business worth upwards of $3 billion, and its top management ran it with the skills of a night club DJ. The very essence of professional management now laughed her in the face.
Gregg had manouvered the entire organisation and the theory of management, to please his lady love. He was so enamoured that he could neither see his duty nor his wrong doing. He had kept the whole organisation under his spell so that they dreaded to distress Sophie, the organisational lady love. Wow, thought Tula..., in India, where her extended family lived, love for a lady had led a man to build the fabulous Taj Mahal!
Sophie would not have anything less than a position right next to her knight on the organisation chart, as an equal! Sophie was the only creative director who reported to the global COO (her boyfriend) in a different country. This put her sort of outside the organisation structure and impossible to deal with. That was how she managed to have direct meetings with Germany.
Tula had grinned, “Not impressed! Indian men prove their love by plucking the moon for their lady love or proving that the day is, in fact, night. There are Bollywood songs on this.” Ralph nodded slowly, “Yes, I have heard Indians are mystical.”
“Yes,” said Tula, “and you have seen nothing yet Ralph.... We are oh-so mystical.”
Tula looked at the date of the email announcing the new organisation structure and did a double take. That mail was sent on the Thursday night before she went on the extended weekend, so that it reached people just as she left — that meant they had it all planned!
She thought, they were two consenting adults, but how did that allow them to, one, change the organisation’s structure; two, appoint a new brand director; three, demolish a functional team and randomly shift the client business to a bunch of people who had had nothing to do with imaging business? They are playing with the trust of a client who has put a 100 million into the hands of an agency, based on image, published profit and loss and Statement of Intent!
Wow! How naïve all this is! And I used to think my three-year-old son is naïve for thinking he was Spiderman!
Tula’s mind was made. She was going to approach HR. She would raise Cain! This was no more just about her ego and her job; it was about the organisation.
But HR’s Meg Winkle said, “If you lay it so bare, then it will be out in the open and then you cannot deal with Sophie.” Then noting Tula’s expression, she said, “Honey, think about it. We will need to tell Sophie all that you are reporting… word will spread. You will come to be seen as a rattler. Oh, or is it tattler? Must check…”
Once again the doubt and confusion came back. Tula thought of her grandfather, of little Siv, of the house mortgage, of her patient husband Karan. Then the creative pitch danced before her eyes. So close to winning and yet so complex-ly far… damn you Sophie, damn! It was Catch 22.
HR was not willing to approach senior management in a manner that would not damage Tula’s situation. I still have to work with Sophie; a formal investigation will alienate her even more… Heck! Should I wait and watch, then?
Then she recalled Sophie’s cruel words. Last month, Tula was raising money for a local charity, and Sophie had sneered, “Raising money for the poor people back home?” Tula was now clear about her next step. She would file a complaint with HR. Oh, but what if they sacked her for complaining? HR did things like that… Oh, but they couldn’t. By contract, they would have to give her four weeks’ notice.
Tula had 10 days to go to complete one year at Kontos. Filing a grievance would be like declaring war. Resigning was not even a thought in her mind. Completing the year was important to collect some extras that were hers by right, and she did need those to pay off her mortgage.
But Kontos moved in quick, urged by Sophie’s ploys. They declared Tula redundant, just 10 days before she completed her year. And the economy proffered that opportunity because recession was the big bad word, so that redundancy was legal even if unfair. Foul and unethical considering that Tula had only recently won the T&T account for Kontos. Ungrateful because Kontos, which was laying off people week after week to stay afloat, had a short memory.
It was smart, very very smart. Now Tula could not claim unfair dismissal. They had seen to it. Now, Tula would technically not have completed a full year. That meant she also lost her right to claim unfair dismissal.
It was not the sacking per se. It was the planning and conniving. This way the senior management had snuggled back into the good books of the COO and his lady love.
Now it was war. Tula, the true blue warrior, was not going to take any nonsense. She called her lawyers.
(To be continued…)
Classroom Discussion
Business benefits from the best heads; but matters of the heart reveal the foolhardy
casestudymeera at gmail dot com
Apr 15, 2010
Is it luck that determines success in one's career?
Often enough we believe that an element of "luck" is what gets some of us the lucky breaks while others get left behind in the "me too" category. I have always begged to disagree thanks to my inside view of the careers and decisions made by any number of successful executives. Taking risk at the right time, betting your all on what your gut tells you is going to be the future, willingness to leave your "comfort zone" (location, money) often decides the winners. This article that I came across reinforces this. It also tells one that the success factors remain same whether it is in the realms of scientific research or the corporate world....Happy Reading...
http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article392121.ece
http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article392121.ece
Mar 25, 2010
A day in the life of a recruiter - interesting read!
For those of us who think that a recruiter’s job is mere cakewalk, there’s more to it than meets the eye. A lot of sweet and toil goes into finding the ‘right candidate’ and matching the skills with the job in hand. It takes not only analytical skills but also tremendous emotional intelligence to really understand the candidate and fit him/her in the most suitable job. And you thought that recruiters only have to go through a sheet of paper that just mirrors some facts about the candidate?!
Anu Parthasarthy, founder and CEO, Global Executive Talent agrees, “A good recruiter needs to understand the client business well which implies a lot of reading to be updated on the new technology trends, consumer market trends, government regulations(local and international)etc.” She further adds, “It also involves tracking competition specifically with respect to current clients.”
A typical search assignment involves a lot of ground work in researching the potential candidate landscape and broadcasting the search across multiple media to get to the right candidates. This calls for a great team effort with the recruiter being supported by researchers.
The day for a recruiter begins with a great planning and more often than not ends up in chaos as many unplanned activities take place. “A typical day starts with a meeting/call with the team to analyze the research, pool knowledge about available candidates and plan for next steps,” shares Parthasarthy.
“Then the day will have a couple of scheduled meetings/calls with clients and candidates. There will also be calls with other people to get references, candidate leads etc which can help further in closing the assignments,” she adds. Besides this, some part of the day is also spent in preparing dossiers on candidates being presented, status reports for clients and in-house administrative work.
And then of course there is the joy of contributing to a person’s life by getting him the job s/he so relentlessly worked towards day in and day out. “It feels great when your candidates tell you that you impacted their professional life positively,” shares Parthasarthy. “I have had situations where candidates came back after 7-8 years and shared the progress they made within the company. It gives a tremendous feeling of fulfillment,” she concludes.
Anu Parthasarthy, founder and CEO, Global Executive Talent agrees, “A good recruiter needs to understand the client business well which implies a lot of reading to be updated on the new technology trends, consumer market trends, government regulations(local and international)etc.” She further adds, “It also involves tracking competition specifically with respect to current clients.”
A typical search assignment involves a lot of ground work in researching the potential candidate landscape and broadcasting the search across multiple media to get to the right candidates. This calls for a great team effort with the recruiter being supported by researchers.
The day for a recruiter begins with a great planning and more often than not ends up in chaos as many unplanned activities take place. “A typical day starts with a meeting/call with the team to analyze the research, pool knowledge about available candidates and plan for next steps,” shares Parthasarthy.
“Then the day will have a couple of scheduled meetings/calls with clients and candidates. There will also be calls with other people to get references, candidate leads etc which can help further in closing the assignments,” she adds. Besides this, some part of the day is also spent in preparing dossiers on candidates being presented, status reports for clients and in-house administrative work.
And then of course there is the joy of contributing to a person’s life by getting him the job s/he so relentlessly worked towards day in and day out. “It feels great when your candidates tell you that you impacted their professional life positively,” shares Parthasarthy. “I have had situations where candidates came back after 7-8 years and shared the progress they made within the company. It gives a tremendous feeling of fulfillment,” she concludes.
Mar 10, 2010
Enough women in boardrooms?
Courtesy: The Hindu Business Line
Author: D. MURALI
Do women in corporate boardrooms continue to be an exception rather than the norm? “Yes, very true,” agrees Anuradha Parthasarathy, Founder & CEO, Global Executive Talent (www.globalexecutivetalent.com). Even the ones that are there are typically from the owner family, she adds, during the course of a recent email interaction with Business Line.
A management graduate from BITS-Pilani, Anu was the Head of Marketing for Wipro's International Operations Division before founding Nexus Search Consultants, co-founding e4e, and then the current firm as a cross-border senior executive search enterprise based in the US.
Excerpts from the interview:
Your views on how women's presence on boards can be increased.
Women independent directors who have been recruited for their skills are rare. The problem starts at a different level — do we even have enough women at the CXO levels who can then be potential candidates for board positions? No.
So, when companies start looking to shortlist candidates for board positions 99 per cent of the candidates who surface will be men. Board positions today are tough, needing a fairly stringent evaluation process. Also it is a two-way street — the candidates too will evaluate the company to decide if they want to join the board.
Eventually, even the 1 per cent will fall off as it is next to impossible to have a high enough hit rate to select from within the miniscule pool. It is also a fact that most CEOs and investors are men and, therefore, will end up selecting a board which looks and feels more like them.
The only way we can ensure that there are enough women on the board will be through affirmative action; where they deliberately seek out the few women wherever they are and make them an attractive offer to join their board. Why would a corporate do that? Couple of reasons why they would take this extra trouble:
Legislative mandate as in Norway which insists that corporates reserve a certain number of board seats for women.
The CEO is convinced that women board members have a very powerful and positive impact on how well the company is run — that is, his short-term and long-term growth and profitability depends on having women on board. But we do see countries such as Japan with abysmal representation of women on boards still showcasing market-leading companies which are well run by all metrics. Hence it is not an open and shut case.
The only way, therefore, this situation can change at least in the next decade will be when enough women reach and stay at the top of the corporate pyramid and thereby increase the overall available pool of meritocratic candidates.
This will happen only if we get enough women in every layer of management. The only success story so far in this context is ICICI.
Why do women lose out in the mid-career phase?
Conventional wisdom will say that women are biased towards spending more time and effort in bringing up children when they are in their 30s. Hence they opt out of the corporate rat race. However the real reasons are different.
Once women put themselves through professional education such as engineering, management, etc., they are keen on building a good career. In fact, many qualified, educated women feel depressed and frustrated in the latter part of their life because they feel that they did not live up to their potential.
However, even today the corporate world is built by men, for men, of men. Often lip service is paid to the concept of supporting women and encouraging them to work — it is easy to reel out policies for the benefit of PR. But results speak louder than words and it is there to see.
Even in the IT industry, which unlike other industries depend on women for talent, there are not enough women at the top.
The easiest approach is to blame the women, but we all know that at heart all of us share the same aspirations to rise to the best of our potential — unfortunately women get pushed out, thanks to the non-conducive work environment.
We have a culture where there is a lot of emphasis placed on the physical time spent at the workplace. Networking after office hours over drinks is the key to getting to know about new opportunities. Again women hardly participate and get left out of consideration.
Going up also requires women to move out of back-office positions and take on line roles such as sales which can lead to P&L positions. However, travel within India, especially to remote places, is still very tough on women and will warrant taking undue risks in terms of safety.
Finally, the infrastructural facilities conspire to undo even the best intentions — hours to commute to work, no reliable childcare facility, absence of neighbourhood schools, and a school system which expects parents to supervise and tutor kids.
Do Indian companies pursue diversity, in general, and gender diversity, in particular? Where are the hurdles?
Indian companies have started talking about gender diversity especially the ones which want to be seen as progressive and which are catering to a global customer base. American companies want to do business with vendors who proactively pursue diversity, especially gender diversity.
However, as I said earlier, there is more lip service than real intention. And the reasons aren't far to see. Corporations are driven by the short-term, quarter-to-quarter performance goals. They will only bother about gender diversity if they feel their performance is getting affected by not having enough women at different levels.
This realisation can change attitudes overnight. Else we will need the Government to mandate “quotas” for women — in India they have enough on their plate to bother about this and it will have zero popular support.
So we will cross this hurdle when we hit the talent crunch. A talent crunch will force companies to compete for women by providing a better then “home” environment so that they would choose the corporate world over the “home” world.
Companies should feel that they need to attract enough women, retain and grow them if they are going to build a high performance, stable team. They should believe that having women in their midst will change their perspective positively. They should want women in their ranks to understand the customer and market needs better.
As of now, unfortunately (women will not like hearing this), these are not “felt” needs.
Author: D. MURALI
Do women in corporate boardrooms continue to be an exception rather than the norm? “Yes, very true,” agrees Anuradha Parthasarathy, Founder & CEO, Global Executive Talent (www.globalexecutivetalent.com). Even the ones that are there are typically from the owner family, she adds, during the course of a recent email interaction with Business Line.
A management graduate from BITS-Pilani, Anu was the Head of Marketing for Wipro's International Operations Division before founding Nexus Search Consultants, co-founding e4e, and then the current firm as a cross-border senior executive search enterprise based in the US.
Excerpts from the interview:
Your views on how women's presence on boards can be increased.
Women independent directors who have been recruited for their skills are rare. The problem starts at a different level — do we even have enough women at the CXO levels who can then be potential candidates for board positions? No.
So, when companies start looking to shortlist candidates for board positions 99 per cent of the candidates who surface will be men. Board positions today are tough, needing a fairly stringent evaluation process. Also it is a two-way street — the candidates too will evaluate the company to decide if they want to join the board.
Eventually, even the 1 per cent will fall off as it is next to impossible to have a high enough hit rate to select from within the miniscule pool. It is also a fact that most CEOs and investors are men and, therefore, will end up selecting a board which looks and feels more like them.
The only way we can ensure that there are enough women on the board will be through affirmative action; where they deliberately seek out the few women wherever they are and make them an attractive offer to join their board. Why would a corporate do that? Couple of reasons why they would take this extra trouble:
Legislative mandate as in Norway which insists that corporates reserve a certain number of board seats for women.
The CEO is convinced that women board members have a very powerful and positive impact on how well the company is run — that is, his short-term and long-term growth and profitability depends on having women on board. But we do see countries such as Japan with abysmal representation of women on boards still showcasing market-leading companies which are well run by all metrics. Hence it is not an open and shut case.
The only way, therefore, this situation can change at least in the next decade will be when enough women reach and stay at the top of the corporate pyramid and thereby increase the overall available pool of meritocratic candidates.
This will happen only if we get enough women in every layer of management. The only success story so far in this context is ICICI.
Why do women lose out in the mid-career phase?
Conventional wisdom will say that women are biased towards spending more time and effort in bringing up children when they are in their 30s. Hence they opt out of the corporate rat race. However the real reasons are different.
Once women put themselves through professional education such as engineering, management, etc., they are keen on building a good career. In fact, many qualified, educated women feel depressed and frustrated in the latter part of their life because they feel that they did not live up to their potential.
However, even today the corporate world is built by men, for men, of men. Often lip service is paid to the concept of supporting women and encouraging them to work — it is easy to reel out policies for the benefit of PR. But results speak louder than words and it is there to see.
Even in the IT industry, which unlike other industries depend on women for talent, there are not enough women at the top.
The easiest approach is to blame the women, but we all know that at heart all of us share the same aspirations to rise to the best of our potential — unfortunately women get pushed out, thanks to the non-conducive work environment.
We have a culture where there is a lot of emphasis placed on the physical time spent at the workplace. Networking after office hours over drinks is the key to getting to know about new opportunities. Again women hardly participate and get left out of consideration.
Going up also requires women to move out of back-office positions and take on line roles such as sales which can lead to P&L positions. However, travel within India, especially to remote places, is still very tough on women and will warrant taking undue risks in terms of safety.
Finally, the infrastructural facilities conspire to undo even the best intentions — hours to commute to work, no reliable childcare facility, absence of neighbourhood schools, and a school system which expects parents to supervise and tutor kids.
Do Indian companies pursue diversity, in general, and gender diversity, in particular? Where are the hurdles?
Indian companies have started talking about gender diversity especially the ones which want to be seen as progressive and which are catering to a global customer base. American companies want to do business with vendors who proactively pursue diversity, especially gender diversity.
However, as I said earlier, there is more lip service than real intention. And the reasons aren't far to see. Corporations are driven by the short-term, quarter-to-quarter performance goals. They will only bother about gender diversity if they feel their performance is getting affected by not having enough women at different levels.
This realisation can change attitudes overnight. Else we will need the Government to mandate “quotas” for women — in India they have enough on their plate to bother about this and it will have zero popular support.
So we will cross this hurdle when we hit the talent crunch. A talent crunch will force companies to compete for women by providing a better then “home” environment so that they would choose the corporate world over the “home” world.
Companies should feel that they need to attract enough women, retain and grow them if they are going to build a high performance, stable team. They should believe that having women in their midst will change their perspective positively. They should want women in their ranks to understand the customer and market needs better.
As of now, unfortunately (women will not like hearing this), these are not “felt” needs.
Transformational Leadership and its relevance to the VC/ PE community - excerpts of my speech in APEX 2010
2009 was in many ways a watershed year for Indian entrepreneurs and investors. Pre 2009, growth was overwhelming – the challenge was to swim with the rising tide – making sure you were ready with the capital and people to grab the opportunity. Talent was scarce but we knew how to compete against the MNC’s and grab our share with the right mix of cash, stock and lure of an adventure trip. But the first big blip was a true eye opener.
Suddenly the blue chip recruits did not feel motivated to stay on and take the tough decisions of firing and cutting costs – now that the paper upside looked very remote. Not only was the appetite for tough times missing but also there was very little learning that could be leveraged for down times – most had seen only ups with very few having tasted and survived such an unpredictable global downturn. Soon enough the runway which the professional thought that they had negotiated for themselves, disappeared. Owner promoters and founders were anxious to conserve value and were quickly reneging on their committed support. The time looked right for sabbatical as more executives decided to take off rather than plunge themselves into messy waters. The NRI’s and the expats did not like the look and feel of the new biz model which could not pay for international schools and gated communities.
Very soon investors too realized that the real returns were only available when they could up the ante to the next level: create companies with new business models not “me toos” copying successful western ones both in the venture and PE world. Is the real return in “building Amazon” for India or changing the way books are written, published and distributed? Is the Indian PE investor going to gain by building yet another auto company or should he be betting on building a new way for transporting people from point to point? 2009 proved to be a wake-up call. It removed the easy options and pitted investors in the more unknown, risky but higher rewards path of building businesses which will redefine rather than recreate traditional western business models. I believe we are at the very early stage of this great journey which will reshape our view of the business world.
So what kind of leadership will this demand?? It calls for leaders who understand the big shifts that are happening in the world intrinsically not at a superficial level. Who are able to then distill these changes to paint a vision for what businesses need to do differently – redefine their landscape in some ways. Like the good guys who saw mobile payment as a means to redefine conventional banking not just a “mode of payment”. Who then have the passion for proving their vision and therefore are willing to commit themselves to executing through ups and downs. These are people who are driven by the impact that they can see themselves making and not by business cards and cars they drive. Such transformational leaders are required at the helm of businesses today whether it is a VC funded start-up growing wings or a PE funded company redefining its path. This is not more of the same and therefore executives who have perfected the art of “doing more of the same” better and better will be found misfits for such roles.
Most of these leaders are hidden till we search, probe and unearth them for unless we have the right message they are not interested in reaching out. Often enough these are executives who have experimented & failed not the traditional, always successful, born with a silver spoon stereotypes that we paint for our leadership talent. They are often not in visible jobs as they have been very busy making change happen wherever they are. They are not the “stars” hailed by media and feted by every new MNC which sets shop in India. They have been entrenched in execution perhaps in some unfashionable businesses in the dusty town and cities of India or Indonesia. The challenge lies not only in finding them but also in giving them the runway they need to succeed. More often than not, transformation is a slow process in the beginning and gathers speed only later – Rome was not built in a day!
As investors you need to prepare that runway by making sure that there is full backing and support from founders/ family owners etc. to make the change happen. Transformational leaders need empowerment and a free hand to recruit and build teams which will help them execute. In fact this is the magnet that attracts such folks.
The good news is that we have in our midst today people who can rise up to this challenge and in fact potential leaders who are waiting for the right opportunity to prove themselves. For today more than at any other time ambitious executives are hitting the glass ceiling faster and the frustration levels are high – right time for all the investors here to wear the recruiting hat!
My message for 2010 – let us build a cadre of transformational leaders who can redefine the business landscape from India. Whose values, ethos and outlook are quintessentially Indian even as they perceive the world as their arena.
Suddenly the blue chip recruits did not feel motivated to stay on and take the tough decisions of firing and cutting costs – now that the paper upside looked very remote. Not only was the appetite for tough times missing but also there was very little learning that could be leveraged for down times – most had seen only ups with very few having tasted and survived such an unpredictable global downturn. Soon enough the runway which the professional thought that they had negotiated for themselves, disappeared. Owner promoters and founders were anxious to conserve value and were quickly reneging on their committed support. The time looked right for sabbatical as more executives decided to take off rather than plunge themselves into messy waters. The NRI’s and the expats did not like the look and feel of the new biz model which could not pay for international schools and gated communities.
Very soon investors too realized that the real returns were only available when they could up the ante to the next level: create companies with new business models not “me toos” copying successful western ones both in the venture and PE world. Is the real return in “building Amazon” for India or changing the way books are written, published and distributed? Is the Indian PE investor going to gain by building yet another auto company or should he be betting on building a new way for transporting people from point to point? 2009 proved to be a wake-up call. It removed the easy options and pitted investors in the more unknown, risky but higher rewards path of building businesses which will redefine rather than recreate traditional western business models. I believe we are at the very early stage of this great journey which will reshape our view of the business world.
So what kind of leadership will this demand?? It calls for leaders who understand the big shifts that are happening in the world intrinsically not at a superficial level. Who are able to then distill these changes to paint a vision for what businesses need to do differently – redefine their landscape in some ways. Like the good guys who saw mobile payment as a means to redefine conventional banking not just a “mode of payment”. Who then have the passion for proving their vision and therefore are willing to commit themselves to executing through ups and downs. These are people who are driven by the impact that they can see themselves making and not by business cards and cars they drive. Such transformational leaders are required at the helm of businesses today whether it is a VC funded start-up growing wings or a PE funded company redefining its path. This is not more of the same and therefore executives who have perfected the art of “doing more of the same” better and better will be found misfits for such roles.
Most of these leaders are hidden till we search, probe and unearth them for unless we have the right message they are not interested in reaching out. Often enough these are executives who have experimented & failed not the traditional, always successful, born with a silver spoon stereotypes that we paint for our leadership talent. They are often not in visible jobs as they have been very busy making change happen wherever they are. They are not the “stars” hailed by media and feted by every new MNC which sets shop in India. They have been entrenched in execution perhaps in some unfashionable businesses in the dusty town and cities of India or Indonesia. The challenge lies not only in finding them but also in giving them the runway they need to succeed. More often than not, transformation is a slow process in the beginning and gathers speed only later – Rome was not built in a day!
As investors you need to prepare that runway by making sure that there is full backing and support from founders/ family owners etc. to make the change happen. Transformational leaders need empowerment and a free hand to recruit and build teams which will help them execute. In fact this is the magnet that attracts such folks.
The good news is that we have in our midst today people who can rise up to this challenge and in fact potential leaders who are waiting for the right opportunity to prove themselves. For today more than at any other time ambitious executives are hitting the glass ceiling faster and the frustration levels are high – right time for all the investors here to wear the recruiting hat!
My message for 2010 – let us build a cadre of transformational leaders who can redefine the business landscape from India. Whose values, ethos and outlook are quintessentially Indian even as they perceive the world as their arena.
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