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!