THE YEAR GONE BY

DECEMBER 2012! We are at the threshold of another New Year brimming with anticipation about the changes it will bring. Time perhaps to take a step back and reflect on the events and milestones of 2012 that impacted our professional lives. Has anything changed majorly in the year that passed? Any disruption in the way we work? Here is my take on what I saw as the game changing trends in human resource management in 2012.

Welcome the Generation Flux
We have heard of Gen X, Y, and Z. But 2012 brought us Gen Flux — the new generation workforce not defined by age but by a certain mindset. A mindset which is willing to adapt and change depending on what the environment demands; a type of personality which refuses to get set in one way of doing things; the kind of professional who can flit in and out of careers growing and learning new skills in every stint. Scary? Definitely if you are the kind who grows roots and thrives in diving deep. Exhilarating? Sure if you are a Gen Fluxer like Elon Musk who at 41 was one of the founders of PayPal, which revolutionised online payment, oversaw the construction of the first modern day electric car, the Tesla Roadster, privatised space travel with SpaceX and is now the Chairman of Solar City, a Solar Power Systems in the US. A transplant to California from South Africa, he epitomises the new age professional with his willingness to move locations, change industry while being focused on the end goal — which in his case was to solve ‘important problems that would most affect the future of humanity’. So let us toast to the arrival of the professional with neither white or blue collar who by refusing to fit into stereotypes will last longer than all his earlier Avatars.

The new look organisation is flat
It has been a long time in coming but finally 2012 has heralded the advent of the new organisation with very little hierarchy. When billion dollar organisations like Instagram are built with 17 engineers, traditional n-tiered organisations are shaken up from their roots by the after shocks. Can we justify rigid hierarchies or even the much vaunted ‘matrix’ organisation when the need of the hour is high-speed execution? It is getting proven time and again that small but high profile rockstar teams working together with minimal ‘management’ are able to achieve stupendous results. So even larger companies are now creating smaller skunk teams to work on key projects. These teams report directly to the ceo, work under the radar and are shielded from the conventional pulls and pushes, which afflict all large organisations. Eric Ries in his highly popular book Lean Startup argues passionately that it is more important to take time and get the product-market fit right than to grow big. The embrace of Agile Management will force more and more organisations to rethink traditional structures. Workflows and not functional roles will define organisations in the Agile world.

Holy grail no more
Do you really need annual performance reviews when your need is for results today and now? How material is age and experience when nobody has done what you are doing before? Can we divorce job descriptions from experience? Can we redo designations to reflect what the individual is doing? One by one well set hr traditions are being questioned and recast to reflect the reality of the fast changing work environment and demands of the new generation of workers. “Performance reviews reinforce the twisted view that a manager’s job is to sit in judgment on his employees. Your employees know how to do their jobs, and if they don’t, why are you waiting to tell them? Performance reviews make formal and stilted what should be an organic, continual conversation about the work, team dynamics, near-term and long-term priorities” says Liz Ryan, an expert in the new millennium workplace.

Innovation becomes a ‘must do’ from ‘nice to do’
Industries are getting transformed thanks to the huge push that new technologies and new ways of communication are affecting. Kickstarter has shown that crowd funding for ideas is not a pie in the air but a reality. Kiva has proven that reaching small amounts of money from lenders to borrowers, cutting out the middleman altogether is possible. The need to innovate has become mandatory pre-requisite for survival. We saw how Wal-Mart, the uncrowned king of retail is now recognising the threat it faces from an upstart Amazon. Realising that it will lose its customer base to the online retailer, it has now quickly scaled Wal-Mart Ecommerce strategically in Silicon Valley, away from headquarters, so that it can rekindle the innovative spirit it needs to fight the new genre of competitors. And this holiday season should demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy when Wal-Mart Ecommerce puts Amazon on the defensive.

Everybody wants Rockstars
Tom Friedman, the famous New York Times columnist and author puts it bluntly when he says ‘average is over’. He goes on to say that any job that requires average skills will be done through technology or ‘offshored’ to the cheapest possible foreign location (And India will not remain the cheapest location forever). Therefore any organisations that seeks to thrive in the current innovation and disruption driven economy will demand a class of talent that is completely off the charts. These are geniuses that are going to think differently and come up with completely different way of doing things. They are going to challenge status quo and while doing so take their employers well ahead of competition. Reasons enough for the new generation of employers to look for Rockstars when they hire. They are willing to pay what it takes to get such folks but they are very clear that they do not want to settle for anything less. No wonder then that being a geek has officially become cool now. The wild success of Big Bang Theory, a sitcom around Caltech and mit folks validates and reflects this reality.

People management goes hi-tech
Every employee who walks in today is using smartphone, ipads and living on multiple social networks. It is impossible now to separate personal and professional life through walled gardens as we did before. Office gossip is public today on sites like Glass Door. Compensation to the last digit, culture nuances, personalities of various managers areall available on the web if you care to search. Same thing holds for employees as it is easy to find where they go after work to whom they befriend and what they say. So hr managers have been forced to rethink how they engage with employees. Do they use private networks or public networks as the medium of communication? How transparent should the organisation be? Should they dictate the ‘do’s and don’ts’ for what can be said and done by them on public forums? Can they even do it if they wanted to? These are all questions which have come to the fore now as new technology demolishes the concept of public and private persona.

The corner office turns pink
Virginia Rometty, Meg Whitman, Marissa Myer made news and set the trend for a growing number of iconic Fortune 500 companies to be headed by women ceos. Think about it -Hewlett Packard, ibm and Xerox all traditional technology firms concurrently having women at the top can not be a coincidence. The next generation ones like Yahoo getting a woman as the turn-around ceo, Facebook with Sheryl Sandberg as the coo don’t look like aberration but as deliberate choices. And come January 2013, we will have Lockheed Martin, which is as near as you can get to a macho technology company having Marillyn Hewson at the top. Time for men to watch out for the glass ceiling.

LAYOFFS IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

I was in the bay area when the dotcom bust of 2001-02 happened. I got to see, first hand, the pink slip mayhem that got unleashed right after. Start-ups folded up virtually overnight, with no funding in sight. Big companies saw their sales plummet, and had to re-size their operations if they wanted to stay afloat. The impact was not restricted to one sector or industry. As retail demand slowed down, the big-box retailers had to let go of their staff. The real estate market crashed, and there were way too many agents for the fewer sales that were happening. Only the healthcare sector was doing well, as you could not postpone your illness with or without a job! The dotcom bust was followed by the Iraq/Afghanistan war, which again took a toll on the economy. Then came the financial crisis of 2008. So, clearly, the boom-bust cycles have become quicker in the last decade, than in any other period. And they are no longer restricted to one country.

What happens in the larger economies of the world immediately impacts the others across the globe. We have seen how each downturn in the US and Europe has affected the Indian economy in the recent past. If big brother sneezes, the economy in India will catch a cold. The other key point that has emerged over the last decade is that even governments need to live within their means. The European crisis brought out clearly that countries like Greece that splurged on hosting Olympics and building large bureaucracies, are now virtually on the street with a begging bowl. The unthinkable is happening, as even socialist governments are now cutting jobs and benefits because they have no other choice.

Why am I talking about all this now and what does it have to do with layoffs? I am highlighting this situation we are in today, because we, in India, are constantly debating about whether it is in our culture to do layoffs. We hanker back to the time when Indian companies treated employees like family and would rather sell the family-silver than let go off a loyal worker. Very recently when Jet Airways announced a large-scale layoff, there was a hue-and-cry with emotional employees crying on tv. Sure enough, Naresh Goyal, the md of Jet Airways, made a statement taking all the employees back and pronouncing that they were like family to him. Is this sustainable? No, it is not…especially when Indian companies are competing in the global market for customers and employees. There has been a tectonic shift in the job market post economic liberalisation, or rather post the cold war era. Today, there is really only one economic order, and that is one or the other form of capitalism. wto will ensure that countries open up markets.

Corporate India has to accept the same metrics of performance measurements as its counterparts elsewhere. It has to follow the same economic cycles as others in the developed world. So, willy-nilly, Indian firms will have to follow international practices when it comes to hiring and firing. No longer can we question whether layoffs are a part of our culture, because companies big and small will have to resort to it to tide over bad times.

It’s only when we accept that a layoff is as inevitable as hiring, can, perhaps, both employers and employees be better prepared to face it, and hopefully come out of it with the least amount of trauma. First, let us talk about what employees can do, as this is one aspect that is often ignored when this topic is discussed. But there is a lot that is in your hands, and I’m listing a few here to get started:

Dummies guide for the about-to-be-axed

• Save: Today’s employee is earning substantially more than the earlier generations. In our parent’s time, more often than not, the salary was just enough for home cooked food, dresses twice-a-year, one vacation a year, and a public school education. So the monthly income, and monthly pension post-retirement, was crucial for survival. It is not so anymore. Thanks to the mnc’s, and the globalisation of the labour market, Indian employees demand and get market salaries. This has increased the disposable income at all levels. The flip side, as we saw earlier, is that this higher income is a double-edged sword. It means you will have periods in your career when you are jobless and have no income. Assume that this will happen, and then make your spending plans. Put enough away so that you can be out of job for 6-12 months and still manage. Do not get into binding outflows like multiple loans, which demand a steady high level of income.

• Retrain and Reskill: Job market, today, is a merry-go-round. Even as one employer or one industry is firing, there will be others who will be hiring. But they may require totally different skills. For instance, even as the jobs available for a typical software developer is going down (all the it services companies like Wipro, Infosys have slowed hiring), the demand for Data Scientists is shooting up (Data Scientists are experts in analysing data). Watch out for trends in your industry and your job, and try to think ahead about what the new jobs would require. Enroll in the right courses, network with the right people, and stay on top of your game. Sometimes as industries morph, you might need to transform yourself completely. It may be at times, a good idea to use the time between jobs to strategise, plan and prepare yourself for a complete shift, instead of just jumping on to the next available but a similar job.

• Remain plugged-in: No, I’m not asking you to join the gossip bandwagon to know what is happening in the company. Rather I’m asking you to do a harder task. Whether you are a technical, marketing, finance or hr professional, make it your job to understand the business your company is in. How is the company making money? Who are the customers? What are the competing products? What are your instincts telling you about the company’s prospects? It was interesting to see how most of the best leaders in Cisco like Mike Volpi and Charles Giancarlo left the company in 2008, when the company by Wall Street standards was at its peak. This is because they probably realised that the networking industry was changing, and that Cisco was not in the sweet spot with the right products. They may have anticipated that Cisco will slow down and they would be better off exiting early.

• Join and leave for the right reasons: Sometimes, exits are not in our hands. But many a times they are, and we can leverage that positively. If you join for the right reasons such as the role, culture, belief in the product or service, then the probability that you will like your job, perform well, and stay on are a lot higher. Similarly if you leave because you want to move to a high growth sector, a significantly higher responsibility, or for exposure to a different market, then employers will appreciate even if they see some gaps in the resume.

• Be transparent in your financial dealings: Times are a-changing, but your parents, in-laws, uncles and aunts might be very much in the past. Instead of encouraging this mindset, you will do a yeoman’s service to them if you educate them on how the job market has changed. Share with them about the work you do, what you contribute, what drives you, why you chose a particular company etc; so that their expectations are set right, and they can be the right support when you need them.

Dummies guide for the axing employers

Now, let’s switch our attention to what an employer can do to ease layoffs and ensure they have a productive workforce, so that when the inevitable happens, it doesn’t destroy the morale of the current employees or the long-term prospects of their attracting better employees in the future. Much has been said about this time and again, but a few points stand out in the context of the Indian scenario. These are:

• Think before you hire: Today there are multiple options to outright hiring. Outsourcing, using short-term consultants, hiring people part-time can all be leveraged very effectively to manage peaks and troughs in demand. While we spawn one of the biggest outsourcing industry, our companies are loath to use outsourcing and try to do everything ‘in-house’. There is also an inherent yet inexplicable aversion to hiring professionals who only want to work for say three days a week or six hours per day.

• Prepare and train managers: The leadership and management team needs to be coached early, on probable scenarios and how to react in a professional manner when such actions become a reality. This will ensure that they do not make unreasonable promises to their subordinates, and will help them set expectations correctly.

• Be transparent: Share as much as practical, especially around the company’s financial situation. Treat employees as mature adults who are partners in helping you achieve your business goals. Help them to internalise what they can do to get the company do better, and thereby ensure that their job is protected. It will also lead to employees keeping track of costs and minimising waste. The other side of this coin is that you will need to reward them when the going is good. Employee relations built around trust and respect go a long way, in getting employees on your side when the going gets difficult.

• Disconnect the individual person from the job: Layoffs can happen because you just need to cut absolute number of employees, or it might be because your business has changed requiring different kind of skills. So in reality you are eliminating or redefining roles, which may or may not appeal to the existing incumbent. So, why not say that ‘we are eliminating your role’, instead of saying ‘we are eliminating you’? This will make the action more unemotional, and help the employee look at it dispassionately. Unfortunately, Indian companies do exactly the opposite, telling media and people that they are asking people to go because of performance issues.

• Learn from your experience: This is the Internet era. There are enough case studies on companies that did it right. What support did they provide, how much severance did they give to their employees? How did they communicate? Invest time to learn, because this is not just about getting the job done but getting it done the right way. For instance, many established companies offer one month for every year served, as severance pay, besides offering outplacement services. Some offer early retirement, while others offer a sabbatical. Kingfisher’s management, of course did not follow any of this, for it did everything against-the-book — no transparency, rumours floating thick and fast, executives contradicting each other, and money running out even as the inertia deepened!

All said and done, layoffs can be hard for parties on either side of the table. There is no easy way to do it or be prepared for it. An important step is to realise that it is not something that can be wished away. Therefore accepting it early and being prepared could go a long way in ensuring that it is handled correctly.

Reimagining the world…

ARE WE ON THE CUSP OF THREE BIG TECHNOLOGICAL
LEAPS — SOCIAL, CLOUD AND MOBILE?

I was visiting the San Francisco bay area after almost a year. I was excited about meeting old friends and looking forward to catching up with the new set of entrepreneurs and startups. There is no better place than Silicon Valley for ‘startup-watching’ as it throws up brand new ones unfailingly year after year, month after month, why, even week after week!

And I was not disappointed. A whole new crop of companies showed up on my radar; some in the consumer space; many in the enterprise space; some started by seasoned entrepreneurs and many by young first-time founders. Interestingly, this time around, technology was more of a lever but the real business seemed to be more old-world, like education, hospitality, or healthcare.

Perhaps that explains why Uber, a startup that provides on-demand cab service in New York, San Francisco, Boston and other metros, is a big rage with the vcs. There is also a palpable sense of urgency with a growing number of incubators promising a cookie-cutter model for launching successful startups in a crunched time frame of 3-6 months.

I began to ask myself, “Are we in the midst of yet another bubble, especially after the disappointing ipos of Zynga, Facebook and Groupon?” It was natural for me to wonder if this were a return to the Pets.com and Webvan era. So, I decided to talk to my friends and get a sense of what was happening. A lot of them have seen multiple cycles, and are not ones to see the world exclusively through rose-tinted glasses. So, here is what I found, looking at this phenomenon through their eyes.

I started my meetings with Keval Desai, a partner with InterWest Partners,who is on the board of many of the new-generation startups like Flurry, Locbox, Gojee, etc. He has been around in the industry for a while, having worked at Tandem in the 90s and more recently, at Google and Digg. Keval says ‘social’ is just getting started and the real impact of overlaying ‘social’ on the way we live and work will be felt over the next 10 years. He believes that the road ahead will have its bumps but we will see some serious growth as three big technological changes, viz: Social, Cloud and Mobile, are coming together for the first time. And better still, the place is awash with entrepreneurs, with ex-Googlers, ex-PayPalers and now ex-Facebookers, all in the fray as investors, inventors and mentors.

Says Keval, ‘‘Companies like Google not only provide a fantastic platform to learn the art and science of building successful products, but also instill a strong ‘can do’ attitude’. He still recollects the eclectic array of speakers — like Mohammed Yunus, Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Gwyneth Paltrow, Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter and many others — who he heard speak at the TechTalk@Google programme. “When you hear them talk about how they changed the face of a nation, company, technology, culture etc, adding one more feature to Gmail seems so very doable!”, says Keval.

As I left his office, I was still marveling at the impact that a company like Google makes, way beyond just its products and services! What we are witnessing today in the valley are the fruits of seeds sown a decade back, similar to the impact the earlier ones like Sun, hp and the likes have had on enabling a Google to happen.

My next stop was the office of Shyam Sankar, who heads business development for Palantir, a hotshot company in the much-talked about ‘Big Data’ space. Shyam is passionate about solving complex, real world, problems through ‘computer science’, which is what got him into Palantir as its employee #13. He believes that companies like Palantir are attracting the best brains because they are staying true to the original Silicon Valley spirit — viz, that of using technology to improve the quality of lives of people manifold. Palantir is spearheading the new mantra that the best results are achieved when you leverage the exponential effect of human-computer symbiosis.

They do this by empowering Data Analysts, experts in their domain, whether be it security, finance or medicine, to do their job better and faster. Palantir’s analysis platform is a powerful tool for visualising large data sets, identifying relationships, and doing rapid data modelling. This, in the hands of smart people, can help detect frauds in large-scale mortgage financing, determine source of large epidemic outbreaks in public health systems, discover potential terrorist threats, and solve many more such complex problems.

Shyam feels that developing countries like India that are struggling to invest monies in putting physical security in place to counter terrorist attacks, could leverage such technology to catch potential terrorists at a much lower cost. And he hopes that Indian decision makers will wake up to this before more innocent people die or get injured, like his uncle did in the Mumbai train bombings in 2006.

Shyam’s trait of practical idealism is something that kept recurring across the diverse set of companies and people that I met. There is an intense urge among the new entrepreneurs to move beyond just sharing music and movies, to leverage new techniques like crowd-sourcing, social network, search etc to solve basic problems of people. One such venture is Gooru, a new search engine for learning (www.goorulearning.com).

I spent time talking with Gooru’s founder & ceo, Prasad Ram, a successful engineer and leader who embodies the spirit of free and open access to education for all. The Gooru team has built the world’s first, free, content curating, sharing and learning platform. I got to know Prasad when he moved to India, first as the cto of Yahoo and later as the head of Google’s research and development centre in Bengaluru. Like Shyam, Prasad is passionate about using technology for social transformation. While there are many important social challenges facing the world today, he believes that education is the solution to creating a productive, empowered and well-meaning society. With this in mind, Prasad set out to build Gooru with a focus on how to create a learning solution for every student that would simultaneously stimulate the educational ecosystem.

Teachers and students can find collections that are aligned to standards, and cover every 5th-12th-grade topic of their interest. Gooru enables every student, regardless of socio-economic status, to attain the same level of learning, by providing access to the best content curated by world-class teachers. To do this, its engineers have had to build an intelligent recommendation engine, crawl the web for content, build the taxonomy, engineer an education-specific search engine and provide easy-to-use tools to enable educators to curate lessons and quizzes from the web resources.

Prasad says that the whole effort was made possible because of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. He signed up investors like Ram Sriram, Google ventures etc, when he had nothing to show besides his cv, and a desire to do some good. Today, Gooru is growing rapidly, with over two million educational resources and nearly 5,000 collections and quizzes, all of which are available at www.goorulearning.org to anybody with internet access.

Interestingly, today’s startups are doing these wonderful things with very little money. Thanks to cloud infrastructure coming of age via Amazon’s aws services, and availability of open source software, getting off the ground does not require a huge investment.

Pooja Sankar, founder of Piazza, who agreed to meet me despite her hectic schedule with a newborn baby, corroborated this as a big factor that’s fuelling the startup frenzy in silcon valley. But she believes that it’s finally the entrepreneur’s passion that gets a venture started, and makes it succesful.

She says that, in her case, the opportunity cost of leaving a job with Facebook, where she was an early employee, was way too high to make sense, except that she had an idea that she just could not get out of her head! It was around helping girls in engineering do their homework and thereby learn faster; a cause that was close to her heart, and a need she had experienced first-hand while studying at iit. That’s how Piazza was born.

Now comes the interesting part — Piazza has a total strength of just 12 engineers and product folks, even as it has put out a product that is being used by over half the student population
at Stanford, mit, and even a few iits. Piazza is a powerful social network of students, professors and tas, which allows them to ask questions, solve problems and seek help virtually in real time. It has virally spread through word of mouth referral from one professor to another, and from one institute to another. Piazza has no big sales force, and no major marketing budget, as the users have taken over these critical roles, unsolicited! My son’s friends at mit told me how much they love Piazza. In fact, they could not imagine how they ever survived earlier, without Piazza!!

Where will India figure in this new startup equation, I kept asking myself. My meeting with Bipul Sinha, Partner with Lightspeed, and a very successful investor in companies like Nutanix, Hootsuite, Pulse, Peel etc, provided me one part of this answer. Bipul says that the time to scale and build has accelerated so much now, that offshore product engineering is hard to justify initially. Most products are launched quickly to get the initial user feedback. Quick product iterations, and scaling when you spot an inflection point, required the team to be in one place without unnecessary communication overheads. No wonder then that companies are choosing to hire talent where they can find them and bring them over to their hq, rather than set up shop outside.

Facebook, Google, Palantir and the likes are scouring the talent market in places like India, and hiring directly for the US! This is true even for incubators like y Combinator, 500 Startups, and TechStars, which are aggressively reaching out to potential entrepreneurs in places like India.

Paul Singh, Partner at 500 Startups, says he is planning to put a person on the ground in India so that they can increase the pipeline of Indian entrepreneurs. Again he reiterated that they offer the same valuation, term sheet, etc, to their entrepreneurs in India as they would to a US-based team.

This should get alarm bells ringing in the Indian startup community, as the competition for startup talent is turning truly global, and we cannot afford our ‘India is different’ line anymore!

On the other side, I heard from Mark Straub, Co-founder of Khosla Impact Fund, on where the bigger opportunity for India lies. He believes, strongly, that India will be the ‘Sandbox’ for any new venture that redefines the price-point and caters to the larger `300 crore market place.

Mark plans to actively invest in India in education, healthcare, water sector, etc, with the objective of creating global enterprises that can make a distinct socio-economic impact going beyond India.

We live in truly interesting times. Finally, the traditional barriers to achievement, like access to high quality education, access to capital and information, etc, are getting demolished with technology.

Indian entrepreneurs today have a unique chance to move to the global stage by building products and services which go well beyond customising the Amazons and Ebays for India. It’s time for us to move beyond traditional labour arbitrage models, to leveraging human capital to produce real innovations that can change the lives of people in India and elsewhere. Can we rise up to the challenge?

World Can Be Your Oyster

Multiple locations and learning new skills multiple times is going to become the norm

 The year was 2000. My friend Satish’s company in Bangalore was acquired by a large US semi-conductor company, and he was asked to relocate to the Bay area. Satish did not fall into the “right out of college,  going to do MS and explore the world” category. He had a family, with two young boys and a wife who was a practicing architect. But move to the US he did, for he could see that his role in business development would not grow further if he insisted on sticking to Bangalore. He needed to go where the larger market was, and he needed to be close to the executive team, if he wanted to continue to be relevant in the new environment. The more interesting part of this story is not Satish, but his wife Kajal. Kajal had graduated from an architecture school in Punjab, and had been designing homes and offices in India for a decade.

When she landed in the Bay area, she realised that the architecture profession offered very different prospects in the US.  A majority of homeowners bought existing homes, sometimes as old as 40 years, and just redesigned the interiors. Builders of new homes were large publicly listed companies who mass-produced new homes. So, custom building of the kind that we see in India was restricted to the very rich 1-2 per cent, and the rich had a marked preference for international names when it came to choosing an architect.

So Kajal had two choices - she could choose to work for a large architecture firm as a lowly, bottom-of-the-rung architect, or she could look at a completely different profession that had far better prospects in the area she had chosen to live. Kajal was smart, and chose the more difficult route of re-inventing herself in the changed circumstance. She went back to college, did her Masters in IC design,  and restarted her career as a semi-conductor design engineer!

Whenever I hear rumblings around jobs, I think of Kajal and Satish. Jobs, and that too the right jobs,  don’t fall into your lap. You make them happen....by making some not-so-easy, proactive, moves.  We, in India, have had a great run for the past decade, with GDP growth rates sprinting up to a high of 8.5 per cent in 2010-11 and the economy expanding on almost all fronts, be it agriculture, manufacturing,  infrastructure or services. But in the recent past, the global slowdown and a weak political leadership put the country back on a downward slope, with a sharp decline in the growth rate to 6.5 per cent for 2012.

The stalled growth implies that jobs are going to be more difficult to come by as corporates, both in the public and private sectors, tighten their belts to survive the slowdown. Owing to the economic slowdown, the number of new jobs created is estimated to fall by a whopping 3 million this fiscal, according to economist Bibek Debroy. A survey by the recruitment firm Manpower reveals that India’s employment scenario is the weakest in the last three years(2010-12). And industry body Ficci states that the waiting period to find a job has increased from 2-3 months in earlier years to 9-10 months today. Many job seekers are settling for junior roles (ref:http://tinyurl.com/cc7td6m). The FMCG sector has been badly hurt by the tightening of purse strings by individual consumers in urban markets. The telecom Sector has had its share of woes, with the cancellation of 2G licenses and uncertainty surrounding all policy decisions.  Many JVs like Etisalat and Sistema, that were formed during the telecom boom period, have either already closed shop, or planning to do so in the near future. The insurance industry has had its share of layoffs, with Future Generali cutting 30 per cent of its workforce and closing several branches.

But there is a paradox here. Even as we talk of layoffs and job cuts, there are 50,000+ open jobs at Naukri.com as of today!  E-commerce companies have taken off, with a well-funded new entrant entering the fray almost every quarter. Most of them are struggling to hire high-end marketing folks, the ones who are going to get them the right number of clicks and views. The same telecom companies, which are going slow in India, are expanding in Africa at almost the same pace as they did in India in the late '90s and early 2000’s.  It is the same story with infrastructure companies.  One of my clients recently landed a large  $100M+ multi-year water project in Sri Lanka, as the country starts rebuilding its post war infrastructure.

If campus recruitments portend any trend then the picture looks even rosier, with the IITs recording a 10-20 per cent jump in salaries in the 2011-12 hiring season.  Companies like Facebook redefined the rules by hiring in India for their US positions,  at a similar compensation ($115-130K) as they would pay for US undergrads.  It was the case with other hot technology employers like Google and Microsoft, who have begun hiring in India for positions in the US, Europe & Asia.

So there are jobs to be had, provided we have the right skills, and the mobility to move where the jobs are. On the one hand, the globalisation of talent that pundits have been predicting for a while is now a reality.  The US is on its way to pass an immigration reform law, which will automatically grant green cards to its highly qualified MS and PhD students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), so that it can meet growing demands of its high tech companies that are facing difficulty in hiring. Singapore has, over the last decade, tailored its recruitment and work visa framework to become the preferred high-skilled talent capital in Asia Pacific. The republic issues highly skilled workers an Employment Passes that allow them to work in the island. Their dependents, i.e. spouses and children, may also pursue employment in Singapore via the Dependent Pass, and may over the years be eligible to apply for the Singapore permanent residency status.

Africa is another attractive growth story. The emerging economies tag is quickly getting passed to the sub-Saharan African economies from the likes of India.  Africa, in many ways, is where India was in the 90’s post liberalisation. Africa’s collective GDP, at $1.6 trillion in 2008, is now roughly equal to Brazil’s or Russia’s, and the continent is among the worlds most rapidly growing economic regions as per the latest McKinsey report. Telecommunications, banking, and retailing are flourishing. Construction is booming. Private-investment inflows are surging. Most of the skills that we developed while building the Indian economy would be very relevant and easily transferrable to the new growing economies in Africa and Asia. Sometimes these opportunities may be right under our nose. Indonesia, for instance may surpass Germany and the UK by 2030, to be the world’s seventh-largest economy, generating $1.8 trillion in annual sales for agriculture, consumer and energy companies by that year as per McKinsey.

India is yet to wake up to even have a direct connecting flight to Jakarta.  Same is true for our neighboring countries like Sri Lanka, where the Chinese have a bigger presence than Indians. So all these are new opportunities, provided we have an open mind and willingness to move. Again this is not like the earlier days, when Indians did go to Africa/ West Asia etc., but more for the money and less for the job.

Now we are talking about getting better quality jobs, in places that have so far never figured in our landscape as promising locations.  When Indians go to work in these places, other Indian businesses like schools, restaurants, etc. will follow suit, as it happened in West Asia and even the US in the past. But all of this can only happen if we are willing to re-imagine ourselves to think beyond the US and the UK.

On the other hand, technology is redefining what we have hitherto understood as literacy.  In the recent past, every conceivable industry, be it retail or media or education, has been “technologised”. Soon it would be hard to be a good teacher, doctor or journalist, if you do not know computers. Technology is no longer the preserve of software engineers sitting in front of terminals in back rooms. It is becoming a key skill and attribute, in the same class as reading and writing, for the white-collar professional. Computing and digital literacy transcend specific positions and industries as our lives, learning, and work increasingly involve technology and the Internet. No longer do we have the luxury of “liking” or “not liking” to learn this key skill, just as we cannot choose to drop language from our learning repertoire.

For majority of us who are well into our 30’s and 40’s, this implies significant effort in re-training and re-skilling. It requires changing our mind-sets too, as many of us have resisted being hands-on with technology as we have moved up the ladder.  But it may not be as hard as it seems. Learning opportunities have multiplied manifold today, with world class institutions like MIT, Stanford, Penn, Princeton etc. conducting classes online, welcoming people across the board, young and old, rich and poor, white, brown or black, to register online and learn.  At no time in the past did we have access like we have today, to content and teachers.  We only need to be willing to put in the hard work and dedication that learning something new requires.

The 21st century work place will demand that we break our mental barriers. Moving across multiple locations, and picking up completely new skills multiple times in a single career, is going to become the norm.  The key personality trait that will define whether you stay relevant and land the right job(s) will be flexibility and adaptability. Are you ready?

WHAT WOMEN WANT

HAPPINESS AT WORK IS NOT ABOUT LANDING THE BEST-PAYING JOB

STARTED MY career in the 80’s, when a majority of the girls around me chose to get married and settle down to a full-time ‘home-builder’ role. Blame it on ignorance, or destiny, I found myself in a sales executive role that demanded a significant amount of travel and external meetings — percent definitely not one of your predictable 9-to-5 jobs in the air-conditioned confines of a corporate office!

Having got into it, I soon realised that I thoroughly enjoyed the thrill of traveling, meeting new people, and ushering computers into the Indian workspaces. I reveled in competitive make-or-break negotiations, and nail-biting finishes. No wonder then that I did do very well in that unconventional role.

Imagine my surprise when my boss, during my second annual review asked me if I would want to consider moving to a more suitable back-office, support role! He was being considerate, assuming that I would soon get married, and would need more time for my family. Perhaps he was right, but I was livid. All I could see was my prospects for reaching the top vanish forever. Even that early in my career, I realised that business roles that directly impact the topline were the pathway to the top, not support roles.

Women, have been forced to make such choices early on in their life — percent right after they finish high school and after landing their first jobs. The result of this shows up glaringly in the gender-based income disparities even in the private sector.The average annual income of a woman is $1,185, less than a third of a man’s at $3,698, in corporate India, as per a World Economic Forum report published in 2010-11.

The same survey, based on responses of 60 of the 100 best employers in India, showed that women employees held only 10 percent of the senior management positions in two-thirds of the surveyed companies. We don’t even need formal surveys to show this, as it is very apparent that there are only a handful of women who make it to executive boards or any position of power in India.

While girls outshine boys year after year in school exit exams, they do not charge ahead to compete for the most coveted seats in iits or iims. Even the Civil Services that offer a highly secure and structured work environment attracted only 195 from the fairer sex, out of a total of 910 — percent a measly 20 percent share in their most recent recruitment drive in 2012.

All this implies that the withdrawal and gradual dropping out from lucrative
professions and powerful jobs starts early on in a woman executive’s life. This is true even in professions like medicine that are considered ‘women-friendly.’

Women dominate nursing while the higher paying specialties such as cardiac surgery, neurosurgery etc are predominantly male-dominated. And this is just not true for Indian women, as a recent study done by Mathew Bidwell, a Wharton School professor, and Roxana Barbulescu, a McGill University professor, demonstrates.

They chose 1255 men and women graduating from an elite mba program in the US as their sample. Their study showed that women are less likely to apply or accept Wall-Street type finance jobs or management consulting jobs and are more likely to take up internal marketing and finance jobs. Of course, the jobs they discard are the higher-paying ones. Not surprisingly, they found that the decision-making in women’s case stems from three factors.

One, women prefer jobs that offer them work-life balance; two, women are often reluctant to apply for jobs that are seen as masculine; and three, women tend not to apply for jobs where they feel their chances of success are low.

If we take it that Indian women would also be using somewhat similar factors in their decision-making, it would explain a lot of gender segregation in India. Flexi-time, work-site crèches, and better infrastructure etc-- facilities that are crucial for women are woefully inadequate in India. Add to this, constraints around personal safety and you have a more complicated picture. No wonder women overwhelmingly vote to take up jobs that address these concerns, leaving out salary and growth prospects as ‘nice-to-have’ considerations, rather than ‘must haves.’

We hear a lot of discussion in the media about what can be done to reverse this trend, or even move the needle a little towards bridging this gender gap. Others question the need to change this, as it appears that women themselves are choosing to compromise. What’s wrong if women prefer to play ceos at home rather than at the workplace?

Do we count the number of men who don the apron, or choose to bring up kids? Are girls better off not spending their adolescent years cramming for jee, as most boys from middle-class homes are expected to?

Perhaps, we are missing the wood for the trees. Our measurement metrics are skewed when we decide to measure success only in terms of power and position. What about the number of women artists? How about teaching, which has always attracted women in droves? Should we assume that these statistics are irrelevant as their salaries are not what the investment
banker and the management consultant make?

In 1972, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the ruler of the tiny Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, coined the phrase Gross National Happiness (gnh) to measure how well his country and its people were doing. This was, and continues to be, a radical departure from the gdp-based measures that every other country chooses to measure its progress by. However after four decades, the UN recently woke up to have a conference in April 2012, attended by over 600 countries, to consider applying gnh as a model of national growth in place of a narrow, purely commercial benchmark.

What if we, in India also look at gender parity through a similar lens? Can we change the framework to measure whether women are as happy as men in place of measuring whether they are earning as much as men? In one such study (the Global Attitudes Survey done across 44 countries & 38000 interviews-http://tinyurl.com/bluusju) by Pew Research Center it was discovered that women, whatever be their position in the corporate hierarchy are much happier than men, at least in Japan, India, the Philippines, Pakistan and Argentina!

Doesn’t that say it all? At least women are evolved enough to realise that happiness is not about landing the best-paying jobs!

Why this Kolaveri Di?

THE COLD-BLOODED KILLING OF AN HR MANAGER MAYBE THE MOST EXTREME EXAMPLE OF HOW EMPLOYERS ARE STRUGGLING TO MANAGE THEIR WORKFORCE DURING A TIME OF ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY; BUT IN ITS WAKE, IT ALSO DRIVES HOME IMPORTANT LESSONS IN REDUNDANCY MANAGEMENT

I WOKE UP in the morning last Thursday to read about the horrifying death of Awanish Kumar Dev, the General Manager (hr) of Maruti Suzuki. This was not one of those deaths that happened as a collateral damage during a violent turn of events, not one that could not be predicted and therefore prevented.

It was not that Awanish came accidentally in the line of fire becoming an unfortunate victim of a violent incident. No such luck. No easy explanation that would help us justify the violence as a one off incident, and hope that it does not occur again. This was a brutal, cold-blooded murder, where the mob of workers came into the office, hunted out executives and assaulted them. They then trashed the premises, and set it on fire, expecting and targeting to kill quite a few people. One person getting killed may, ironically, have been the best-case scenario that unfolded on that tragic day. Things could well have been a lot worse.

Awanish’s murder is not an isolated incident. A similar event happened in Greater Noida, at the Graziono factory, when the country manager was lynched by a mob of workers in September 2008 and another that took place in Yannam (Puducherry) in January, this year, where workers killed the ceo of Regent Ceramics, the biggest employer in that city.

The factory was burnt down and Regent has still not been able to commence production from there. There was yet another incident at Orient Crafts (a garment exporter) in March, where a 1000-strong mob vandalised the plant, as a consequence of which ten workers and two policemen ending up in hospital. In September 2009, Roy George, the Vice President (hr) at Pricol’s, an auto component manufacturer with a plant at Coimbatore was similarly hacked to death by an irate section of workers.

Extreme kinds of industrial violence, like what happened at the Maruti plant, are not isolated incidents. They are neither location-specific, nor industry, company specific. Media and intelligentsia that is projecting that the solution may lie in moving the plant to a Gujarat are ignoring the recent trail of events across north and south India, and across industries as varied as tiles and garments, to the more sophisticated manufacturing plants like automobiles. It is very probable that the next incident might happen in Gujarat or Tamil
Nadu, as easily as it happened in Haryana this time.

If we dig deeper, the issues are there for all to see, right under our noses. It is well-documented and reported that most manufacturing units in India today, including Maruti, are run with contract labour. Contract workers form a very large portion of the workforce today — 40 percent in Maruti’s case, but even larger in several other companies. They do not enjoy the rights and privileges of permanent workers. Their compensation for doing similar level of work is much lower, and the management can get rid of them at-will.

To complicate matters, a bulk of these workers also come from Geny; are in their 20s; and have grown up exposed to the world of plenty, thanks to television, the internet, and economic liberalisation. Cut to the broader environment in the country. Inflation in India is back to double digits. Public institutions, such as government schools, hospitals and public transport, have virtually broken down.

While in the India of the 70’s and 80’s, families did avail of such social services virtually free or at subsidised costs, today, these options are just not there for these youngsters. Today, the cost of basic living, implying two square meals, sending kids to a school and ensuring healthcare for the family, requires a base level of earning that is non trivial, to say the least.

Here, we are not even talking of housing, which in a place like Haryana has completely gone out of reach of even the middle class folks. The same Haryana has Gurgaon, which is touted as the first Indian Millennium city, with 50 malls (yes, 50!), three golf courses, countless gated communities, and nine international schools at the last count.

Most senior executives/owner ceos live in gated communities, send their kids to exclusive schools, and live a fairly insulated life from the surrounding issues that disproportionately affect the workers who are building and maintaining these facilities every minute of the day. The disparity is growing, and increasingly in-your-face now.

What does this reflect? The educated middle class, to which the Awanish, Roy, and others of his ilk including many of us, belong, have been extraordinarily self-absorbed in taking care of themselves and their families. They form the backbone for the mncs, the family-run enterprises, and the home grown public companies.

They use their knowledge and brainpower to formulate rules to help these businesses manage the workers, create wealth, pay minimal taxes, keep the wage bill in check, and maintain a slick public image. They are at the forefront managing environmental concerns, keeping ngos at bay, and making the right noises about “Corporate Social Responsibility”.

Willy-nilly, they turn a blind eye to many questionable practices within these organisations. Finance executives quietly sign the books, even though they are smart enough to know of the glaring irregularities in so many of them; a few are later ‘discovered’, and muck hits the roof. Sales professionals and senior executives participate actively in bidding for and sourcing deals with kickbacks and pay-offs, justifying that they are just doing their jobs.

HR managers, many of whom go out of their way to prove they are ‘effective managers’, do little to ensure equity and wealth distribution, down the organisation hierarchy. In fact, in this specific case, Awanish had put in his papers, and subsequently withdrew them, about six months ago. If that’s true, it goes to prove that he was uncomfortable with what was happening in the company under his supervision.

Do you know that the same Maruti plant had had another showdown about nine months ago, after which, it is rumored, they ‘paid off’ the union leader Sonu Gujjar to buy peace? A very questionable practice, indeed, and one that would definitely not be what they teach you at the xlris and xisss that most of the hr managers come from these days!

However, events in the recent past are making it obvious that this approach is backfiring, and hitting the middle-class where it hurts badly. The telecom scandal landed Reliance executives Gautam Doshi, Hari Nair and Surrendra Paparia in the jail. Vikash Shroff, the M&A Head of Essar and an iim Cal/srcc alumnus has been charge-sheetedfor cheating and is out on bail. While hr folks get killed, finance folks go to jail!

But, in the end, everybody stands exposed and proves to be more vulnerable than they had ever imagined. I will not be surprised if we are seeing the beginning of the after-effects of what we all know has been happening for a while — the destruction of institutions and the moral fabric of the Indian society. Infrastructure, law and order, administration, day-to-day governance, why even our defense sector has been compromised thanks to the all-pervasive corruption that has been institutionalised and is being defended by the top 1 percent.

The white-collar professionals have been silent accomplices who have contributed their bit by not raising questions at the right time, and by not fighting what they know is wrong, with serious repercussions. We have been actively executing on behalf of the perpetrators. Can we absolve ourselves of all the blame? While we blame politicians and bureaucrats for all the ills in our society, it is becoming very clear that our complicity has contributed at least in part to where we are today. Perhaps, we did not foresee that one day we would ourselves become the victims?

Think about it…any one of us could have been in Awanish’s coffin, or in Hari Nair’s place cooling our heels in a jail. If we do not wake up from our slumber even now after watching such ghastly events unfold in front of us, we will have nobody to blame but ourselves. It is time we cleaned up our act, by collectively voicing our concerns and refusing to be silent accomplices in corporate crimes.

I would love to see the entire hr team in Maruti coming together to tell the management what they ought to be doing to win the worker’s trust and confidence for the long term. There is a silver lining in every cloud. Let Awanish’s sacrifice not be in vain. I have no doubt that he would have wanted it that way, for the only two entries in his blog are a call to understand and appreciate true ‘Gandhism’(check out http://awanishdev.blogspot.in/). Oh! What an irony that such an individual should fall prey to such violence!

GROWING UP PANGS

INDIAN START-UPS SHOULD TAKE A FEW GREY HEADS ON BOARD, WHO CAN HELP THEM BREAK OUT OF THE PACK OF THE PACK

STARTUPS ARE in vogue, again. If Bay Area had its Facebook and Zynga, Benguluru has its Flipkart and InMobi. Not a day passes by without some new funding being announced and the promise of yet another hot start-up that is going to transform the landscape. Exciting times definitely for the new graduates coming into the job market! They have better, and more interesting, options where they can get to work on cool technology and game-changing ideas. They can even start off on their own from Day 1 with support from the in-campus incubators, if they are in the iits, bits or the iims. For other colleges there is nen (National Entrepreneurship Network) whose only goal is to foster entrepreneurship among students.

But at some point of time, the start-ups need to grow up. As they succeed, they will reach a stage where their key challenge will become one of execution. They will need to execute well on a variety of fronts, so they can leverage the lead they have established in the market, scale quickly, and put enough distance between them and their competition. To do this, they will need to bring on board experienced, and therefore older, folk who can help them scale; who can speed up execution because they have done it before; and who can mentor, train and build a larger team of youngsters. Google had its Eric Schmidt in 2001 when it had no revenue, just an interesting service that had growing number of users. Facebook brought in Sheryl Sandberg as its coo in its fourth year of operations. And these are not the only senior hires. There is the cfo, the vp (hr), the Sales Head and other functional experts who came on board these companies around the same time.

Most of them have a stellar bio-data and have done much bigger things than where these companies were when they joined in. In fact, Sheryl Sandberg talks about this eloquently in her recent Harvard Commencement speech. She says, when she got the Google offer in 2001 (Yes, she joined Google right around the time Eric Schmidt came on board), she looked at it and realised that a) she had no team to manage, and b) she would be ‘General Manager’ of a non-existent, zero-revenue business! But she still took the job, because she believed that she was getting a seat on board a rocket ship!

Now cut to India. A couple of years back, one of my vc friends put me on to the founder of his portfolio company which, he told me, was growing really fast and therefore needed a strong operations head…and this was a business where operations were a critical part of the company. I went to meet the two founders to figure out what they wanted to do. No surprise — they felt they needed to hire a senior manager — an engineer with 8-10 years experience, they said. A little digging, and I found out that they were getting excellent traction with customers, and had an opportunity to scale and grab a leadership position in the market, if only they are able to execute well. The people they had now, was a young team of 15 agents managing end-to-end transactions. All the more reason, I felt, to bring in an experienced leader who can think long term, and will hire a second level of management to be able to scale quickly. But their fear of hiring a senior person for the role was so high, that the conversation didn’t go anywhere. The company has grown since, but nowhere near the exponential growth that successful start-ups need, to have to break out of the pack. I knew what the deal breaking concerns were here, for I had seen it repeating ‘n’ number of times, with companies at a similar stage of growth here in India. The first and foremost concern is culture-fit — here is a company full of 20-year-olds, and anybody at coo level would be in the late 30’s to early 40’s, a generation apart. How would he fit? Will he think like them? Or would he push them to think like him and thereby kill the start up culture?

Then there is the fear of hiring wrong — if they did hire, then he would be coming in at three or four times the average compensation levels in the company. What if he does not perform? The founders will lose credibility in the eyes of their young team, and it would be a great setback for the ‘employee morale’. Then, there is the money itself — why should we spend so much, when today we can manage with half the budget and half the person — can’t the coo-hiring wait for a year or two? Working with many start-ups closely, I have also uncovered another unsaid fear. Why would a high-flying executive, with great credentials and a secure job, join them for a riskier and less-paying role? It may happen in the Bay Area, but here in Bangalore?

On the flip side, there are people like my friends Sunil and Ravi. Sunil has spent over 20 years running the supply chain operations of a large retail chain. He has just quit the job, and is now at a crossroads. Should he go back to a similar role with yet another large retailer? He feels e-commerce looks exciting, and would be the way retail would go in the future. So, his gut tells him that it is the right time to jump into it, even if it means a smaller role or lesser money. But then, how does he make the shift? His network and his friends are all in the old world. Even if he writes directly, what should he ask for? The companies look so small that he would perhaps only fit the ceo role!

Ravi, on the other hand, has been among the lucky few who did get the opportunity to run a start-up, hired by the founders through the friends and family route. His experience, however, has been mixed. While he enjoyed the challenges of building and scaling the company through really tough times, he was bitter about the unwillingness of the founder to let go. As he put it, the accountability was all his while the strategic calls were the founder’s prerogative. Did he want to take yet another chance? Yes, he was clear that he wanted to do it again, but with a few caveats. And,no prizes for guessing what those were! But again, he was not sure how to find the right venture this time around, in the noise and din that is surrounding start-ups today. There are so many such ‘high flying executives’ I meet, who would give an arm and leg to work for an exciting start up but are totally clueless about what to expect and how to go about finding the right one! Should they demand the ceo’s role? Or, at least, a coo designation? Should they insist on a 25 percent hike in compensation, a risk premium for joining in at early stage? Why should they report to founders who are half their age?? What was the team size going to be? And should they insist on a severance package?
And we have the quintessential logjam, with a wide gulf separating both parties. The result is that, while start-ups need the best talent, our brightest are cooling their heels in large established mncs. The right model that would, perhaps, work for both sides would be a hybrid model where the senior executive comes on-board first on a 6-12 months contract gets comfortable with the team and, then takes a call on committing to a long-term role.

This might also allay the concerns and fears of the entrepreneurs, as they would start appreciating the tremendous value and the multiplier effect that such folks bring to the company. Yes, this would require senior professionals to take a big risk. But then they can always go back to where they came from, if things don’t work out. Isn’t it worth it if there is even a small chance that you can be in Sheryl Sandberg’s shoes??

In The Twitter-Tumblr World, Everybody Is A Journalist

If you see yourself as a tech leader, be willing to put your money where your pen is 

MY FRIEND, who is a Vice-President with a technology start-up in Bengaluru, called me the other day with a problem. His company was growing fast and he needed to recruit aggressively. He was finding it hard to attract star programmers and architects he needed — his company was no Facebook or Google to get the best knocking at the door. He needed the same, if not a better, caliber of people as Google, and he needed it fast.

He decided that he would need to hire a full-time recruiter, whose job would be to attract, hire, and manage talent by creating a unique differentiated positioning for his company. He called me to seek my advice on how to best define such a role, as it went beyond that of a conventional recruiter. I told him that I knew exactly the kind of person he needed — someone like a Morgan Missen, the Talent Manager for FourSquare in San Francisco. So, who is this Morgan Missen, and why did she come to mind when my friend talked about his hiring issues?

Morgan Missen is a brand by herself. In a short span of eight years, she has spent in the tech world in SFO; she has built a strong network with the best of the best software engineers, product managers and UI professionals — people who are the building blocks for product companies anywhere in the world. She knows where to find them, and more importantly, what they are looking for. She brainstorms with the product folks in her company to figure out how to create the best environment for them to work in.

In today’s hyper-competitive market for tech talent, Morgan happens to be running one of the most critical functions in an innovation driven company— how to get the best into the door, and inspire them to produce the best they are capable of. No wonder that she is listed as one of the top women in tech on Tumblr! She figures in all forums with CEOs, Venture Capitalists and Founders. She has redefined the lowly tech-recruiter role, which is typically very transactional, into a highly strategic talent-management role, by seeing the bigger picture and delving deep into the nitty-gritty of execution. It is rumoured that Ashton Kutcher , one of the key investors in FourSquare, personally called and convinced her to accept the FourSquare job offer!

SNAPSHOTS

• If you are a doctor, consider your patient as a partner. Pool all the data and then come up with a diagnosis and treatment that you discuss with him/her before implementation

• In the new world, we are going to be valued for how best we use the ubiquitously available info; process it into knowledge and act on it to produce results

This is but one example of how roles, along with hiring qualifications, are changing in the 21st century. When Twitter and Tumblr came along a few years ago, not too many people realised that it would completely change the role of a journalist as we knew it before. Today, you get news, that too breaking news, on Twitter from people who have never thought of themselves as reporters. Well-written analysis on new products, services, financial transactions, political upheavals, natural disasters, policy issues, etc., are available on a variety of blogs written by amateurs — folks who are extremely well qualified in these subjects, and write very well too!

Recently, one such person decided to write a post on the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook, and put it up for sale on Gumroad.com for $1/download! A recent Pew Research Centre survey found that 37 percent of American internet users or 29 percent of the population, had ‘contributed to the creation of news, commented about it or disseminated it via postings on social-media sites like Facebook or Twitter’.

What it implies is that, in today’s world, if you want to be a journalist, you need to think and act very differently from yesteryear journalists. Take the case of Michael Arrington. As the editor of TechCrunch, an influential tech blog, Arrington initially stirred a hornet’s nest when he combined investing with reporting. But looking back, it’s apparent that Arrington was only an early precursor of the change that would sweep the publishing world. Are you willing to put your money where your pen is? Are you doing such a thorough job of evaluating the business and product you are writing about, that you don’t hesitate to invest in them if there is an opportunity? Let the readers decide if they find what you write credible or not, with full disclosures, is the new mantra.

Today’s journalist has to do a lot more research, and dive deeper into issues, to build credibility and hold an audience; just the fact that he is affiliated with a big name publication, or the impression that he is supposedly neutral will not get him page views any longer! Yet it is a great opportunity for many who once aspired to be journalist, but got stuck in other professions as it happens invariably in India! Go ahead and start writing —if that is what you always wanted to do — you never know where you will reach one day. Tomorrow’s best-known journalist might just be a lawyer or a marketing executive today.

Even medicine, the holy grail of all professions, is not immune to this transformation. Yesterday’s doctors were no less than God. Their words carried weight, and often were taken as the Gospel Truth. Ask any doctor today, and he or she will tell you how the tables have turned. Patients come armed with information gathered from a variety of sources, most of all, the internet. Eight in 10 internet users are hitting the web to get their health-related questions answered, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. They question the doctor’s diagnosis and they pick holes in his treatment strategy. This, of course, enrages many doctors who still hold the opinion that patients should quietly listen and do as they say.

However, if you are a doctor in today’s world, the wiser reaction would be to change the way you work. Is it possible to consider the patient as a partner, a very interested one at that, listen to him with respect, pool all the data together, and maybe then come up with a diagnosis and treatment, that you discuss with him and then implement. What if you communicated directly with patients, online, cutting out today’s red tape.

This, by the way, is exactly what Jay Parkinson, a doctor in Brooklyn, New York, did in 2007. He opened up his Google calendar to his patients, so that they could enter their appointment time online. He made housecalls. And he kept in touch with his patients using all the available communication media at his disposal, like Skype, phone and email.

His practice grew rapidly, and he then went on to build a product, HelloHealth, that all other doctors can use to work with their patients in a more transparent manner. In today’s world, it is better to be proactive, and seize the opportunity to move ahead rather than get thrown out by the winds of change. The first step towards this is the ability to step back and take a look at what you do, and what you need to change, in the context of the new environment.

Every role and every profession will, hereon, be changing in the next decade. Salman Khan, the erstwhile Wall Street executive, is the world’s numero-uno school teacher today, credited with causing an earthquake-like upheaval in education with his Khan Academy! He has no particular teaching credentials, and neither is he part of any big-name institution! But his lessons, hosted on www.khanacademy.org, were viewed by 3.9 million unique visitors as of 2011, with students coming from Bangladesh, India, Finland, and many other countries besides the US.

Prasad Bharat Ram, the erstwhile R&D head of Google India has set-up Gooru.com, an online education portal that one can use to easily access in one place, all the educational content available on the internet.

Now, with so many lessons, exercises, and many other forms of content becoming available for free on the internet, teachers are trying to figure out how they can add value by going beyond what is available on the net.

Can they co-opt the online lessons into their teaching process, and then build a layer of individual attention that they and only they, having the student close at hand, can provide? Yes, but it requires re-orientation; it will require teachers to spend more time understanding what’s out there, understanding each student, and a willingness to partner with them to help them learn better.

I can go on and on. This scenario is playing out in profession after profession across the world today. Technology, the ubiquitous availability of information, and the explosion of new communication media, are, together, fundamentally altering the nature of work and professions as we know them today.

Very few of us are going to be immune from the effects of this relentless change occurring around us. We are no longer going to be valued, and respected, for the ‘information’ we possess or hoard. That is becoming more and more freely available now.

We are going to be valued for how best we use the ubiquitously available information, how we process it into knowledge, and act on it to produce results. Time for each of us to take a hard look in the mirror…hopefully, there’s a Morgan Missen staring back!

Are you LinkedIn?

Jobseekers are forsaking classified ads in favour of the social media route to landing a dream job.

Illustration: Tanmaya Tyagi

THE YEAR was 1996, and the only internet access that was available was a dial-up connection through VSNL. (Anybody remember VSNL now??) Indians, or rather, the young Indian software engineers who were looking to go to the US during the 90s, had discovered a web-based mail service email, the Hotmail! They figured out that having a Hotmail account enabled them to post their resume online, and get connected with employers directly. And all they needed for that was an internet access from a cyber café.

The rest, as they say is history.

Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail, sat up in Sunnyvale when he saw the crazy numbers for the newly-launched service coming in from India! An India that was not necessarily known for catching on to new technology trends, but then, when it comes to landing jobs, we have always been quick learners. We can access the right medium that will take us where we want to go. It is as innate in us, as it is to jostle our way ahead in a crowd.

Therefore, it’s not at all surprising that social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have become extremely popular with both passive and active job seekers today. LinkedIn, is by far the most popular, as most of us perceive it as a ‘professional network.’ A LinkedIn public profile is fast replacing the resume itself.

One can see the activity level pick up over weekends, when executives take time to spruce up their profile, connect to recruiters (yes, even when they are not looking out), and learn a thing or two about who is recruiting actively in their space. If we were to follow the US trend, which usually repeats in India albeit with a lag, then the picture gets even more interesting.

A recent survey by Jobvite has thrown up some interesting statistics:

• One in six workers use social media to get hired
• Almost 90 per cent of job seekers have a profile on a social media site
• 54 per cent of all job hunters use Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to land their dream jobs
• 50 per cent of job seekers used Facebook, 25 per cent used Twitter, and 36 per cent used LinkedIn to look for a job in the last 12 months
• 18.4 million Americans say Facebook got them their current jobs. The numbers for Twitter and LinkedIn are 10.2 million and 8 million respectively

WHAT’S HOT?

LinkedIn recently announced the launch of a ‘follow company’ button. Similar to liking a brand on Facebook or following it on Twitter, the new option allows users to follow an employer brand and in turn receive automatic updates from the brand in their LinkedIn feed. Announcing the new feature on the official company blogpost, LinkedIn says that the new feature will help users to stay up-to-date on company news, career opportunities or industry trends. ‘Follow company’ allows businesses with a LinkedIn company page to install a button directly onto their webpages and other online marketing material to facilitate follower engagement. Brands’ updates will immediately be fed into the status updates of LinkedIn members’ personal homepages.

So, how long will it take before we, in India, embrace the global trend, forsaking the traditional classified ad route to finding a job? We don’t have to look far for an answer. As on date, LinkedIn, Facebook and Glassdoor, among them, have the second largest subscriber base in India, after the US.

LinkedIn has 10 million+, and we can safely assume that a bulk of these would be job seekers, or employers, given the nature of the site. It rules the mid-to-high end hiring in India. Glassdoor, which is a niche jobsite, has an app called ‘Inside Connections’ that lets you uncover who, from your Facebook network, works for the company you are targeting. The fact that Glassdoor gets 17.5 per cent of its users from India says a lot about the popularity of this network among Indian job seekers. I hardly encounter anyone going for an interview today, who has not checked out what Glassdoor has to say about the company, and specifically about the company’s team in India.

Have you seen Miller’s recent ‘coolest job’ campaign? Miller was looking to recruit freshers with a certain attitude, typifying their byline ‘Work hard, party hard’, to promote their Miller High Life beer. They decided to take the Facebook route, given the age group they were targeting. The campaign was so well received that it not just delivered them the candidates, but also made them very popular with the pub-hopping youth segment. Over 91,500 people claim to have liked the page so far, with over 30,000 people having applied for the position. This is not surprising, given the ability of social media to reach across a huge swath of like-minded people, virally.

In fact, social media can be god send in hiring situations where candidates are hard to get and even harder to evaluate with paper resumes. One of the most difficult and often critical roles, that technology companies struggle to hire is the ‘product architect’s’ role, where they need techies who live, eat and breathe software design and code. In the earlier days, it would be impossible to figure out where or how to get this elusive candidate, given that being uber social is not in a geek’s DNA.

Today, you look for evidence on the net — if he was really passionate about technology, would he not write a blog? Is he on Github (the exclusive network for coders), and what’s his portfolio there? What do his connections on LinkedIn tell us about him? What does his book-list look like? Social networks give the future employer a 360-degree view of the candidate, and that is also the catch. Employers have the choice of not wading through oceans of resume on jobsites, but just hand-pick a few profiles based on the intangibles that the job demands.

Recently, I worked on a search for a CEO for a ‘not for profit’ foundation. The client wanted someone from the corporate world, who had the right leadership skills but with a twist. They wanted the candidate to be passionate about making a social impact. They wanted that he/she should be looking to step off the corporate ladder and be willing to give up all the attendant perks. How do you find out what lies inside the mind of a potential candidate, which is what this search required? Social media can help you do this beautifully now.

My shortlist of candidates tracked people who were actively participating in the relevant groups and investing time to get to know what was happening in the social sector. And it worked. We found a highly-qualified female candidate, recommended by her ex-colleague as a phenomenal manager. She had consulted with cry for a short while, and therefore, knew what to expect in a ‘not-for-profit’ company set-up. She was more than willing to take the financial hit as the role and the opportunity to make an impact mattered most to her. And I would have never known of her existence if not for a chance LinkedIn connect to her ex-colleague and friend.

In the high technology startup world that I do a lot of work in, social networks drive hiring processes from Day 1. Start-up entrepreneurs ‘start’ their ventures with a blog, a Facebook page or a Twitter handle. They realise that this is how they can share their vision and get like-minded folks to join them for the right reasons. What better way to form a team with the right chemistry? This happens to be one of the biggest elements of start-up hiring — finding people who have the right attitude. Social media can facilitate this like no other medium can.

The hiring itself becomes simplified as the potential employer has ‘watched’ you over a period of time, and has a feel for how you think. Your online persona has already done the job of ‘selling’ the employer on your skills, without you having to do a monologue on who you are and why you would be a great fit. Phew, what a relief!

Hiring is a two-way process akin to dating, where both employers and employees assess each other, impress each other, and play the tango before making the final call. What better way to do that than through social networks which allow you to present yourself, make the right connections, reference and learn the inside track, all using just one smart phone or a tablet?

Have you got your Twesume ready yet?

Changing Dynamics

There is an urgent need for MNCs to relook at their people strategy in India, says Anuradha Parthasarathy of Global Executive Talent

 

The case ends with the MD, Pradeep Saigal proposing to set up a call with Mark, the AMEA (Africa, Middle East and Asia) president of HR, for Uday to discuss his exit package.  Here is a person who supposedly leads the country operations as the managing director and he concedes that neither he nor his HR lead is empowered to negotiate with Uday to arrive at a reasonable and fair settlement.  We see this pattern throughout as the case unfolds. Saigal squirms when he informs Uday that he needs to move out of his role as the sales director.  He would not have reacted this way if he were sure that the decision was taken in the best interests of the company. Again, when he tells Maya that Uday has to go, he lets it out that he has been working with Mark to ease Uday out.  This is yet another indication that Saigal had been instructed to do this by the AMEA boss and he is nothing but a tool to meet a “desire” to revamp the sales team of Delaware in India. So, we realise that the Indian operations are run remotely by the AMEA chief sitting somewhere in Singapore, Hong Kong or Australia. This is true for many MNCs that operate in India.  In the 80s and 90s when India was but a tiny blip in their sales radar, it was justified as “not worth senior  management’s time”.

But today, as the markets here have grown larger and most of the major economies have stagnated, it is hard to believe that the same strategy is still being pursued!  But then I realised that the reasons have changed. Now India has become too critical to be left to local homegrown leaders. So, what we now see is a power game where again the local management is jerked every now and then based on somebody’s whims and fancy. Often there is no historical context to the decision making as constant reshuffle of management brings in expats who have very little understanding of India.

This approach, of course, has always been a bugbear for the local MNC executive cadre. But again, the returns in terms of fancy perks and significantly above average salaries seemed to weigh in quite handsomely in the past. Now the times have now changed. The new generation in India has many more lucrative options unlike the earlier times. In a globalised world, they can choose to work in other countries. With VC’s and angel investor’s money, they can even try their hand at entrepreneurship. Moreover, there are a host of Indian MNCs, which pay quite well to woo the best talent. As a result, Indian professionals consider themselves no less than expat executives and therefore expect to be treated at par with them. 

An executive who has been on the board like Uday will not accept that he should be given less in severance than any expat executive in the company. Not only will it cause resentment but will also lead to legal battles, which will further tarnish the reputation and image of the company. Social networks make it easy for the professionals to find out where they stand and what their market value is, without having to depend on company appraisals.

In future, professionals are likely to build their own brands independent of the employer.  This will surely tilt the balance in the favour of employees especially the high performing ones.  Technology today is also forcing an accelerated pace of change like never seen before.  Walmart, the world’s biggest chain of retail stores, feels threatened by Amazon, which is a rookie in comparison. Market dynamics, too, are changing fast. Alibaba with its dominance in China eyes to acquire Yahoo!

So, no brand or legacy is infallible in today’s time.  Hiring and retaining the best people in key geographies is the only way to ensure that the organisation can adapt itself quickly to changing times. Doing anything which goes against this will be suicidal, to say the least.

In the changing business scenario, there is an urgent need for the Delawares of the world to relook at their people strategy in big markets like India.  It is imperative that they let the local managers make their own hiring and firing decisions based on what they believe would be in best interests of the company.  A situation like what we see in Delaware is very damaging for the company in the long term.  The Indian employees are keenly aware of the highhanded “big brotherly” tactics adopted by the Delaware management. We hear a rumbling of discontent as Maya and Prahlad (the HR head) who are well respected within the company, feel upset and anguished with the developments. The morale of the team is likely to go down which would reflect in the future performance of the company. Needless to say that every one of them including Saigal will be on the look out for a better opportunity to ensure that they do not fall prey to the same fate as Uday.  And by then, chances are that Mark Steiner would have moved to greener pastures after having made his mark at Delaware!