A New Year ode to the crooked one

As I sit down to write my first piece for the New Year, I wonder what I should write about. Should I continue writing about how we need more innovation and entrepreneurship to change the country and the world? Or about how women are set to conquer the corporate world? Or share my tips on what you should do to climb the corporate ladder even faster?

But then, how do I write as if life is normal, when it’s not? When every news medium is filled with more and more data about our depravation? The number of rape cases in the capital city is enough to earn Delhi the tag of ‘the rape capital’ of the world. Wikipedia’s entry on named scandals in India (refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_in_India#Named_scandals) lists over 40 scams in 2012 — in troubled states like Jammu& Kashmir, to supposedly well-managed ones like Gujarat. We have been moving from one protest to another over the last year, from anti-corruption to women’s safety, to God-knows-what-next; India Gate has started resembling Tahrir Square, except that we are a democracy, and, therefore, have no one ‘dictator’ to overthrow for our redemption!

Where have we gone wrong? Are we right to place all the blame at the doorstep of our political leadership, as we are doing now?

I surely don’t believe so. When we find things going so wrong, perhaps it is the right time for each one of us to sit down and introspect within ourselves. Let’s face it. Today, most of us are running non-stop, chasing higher and higher targets, without pausing much to think about the means we are using to achieve our goals. We participate merrily in the consumer revolution, without a thought for the extent that we degrade the environment around us.

We fund and sell dubious micro-finance products even as the beneficiaries commit suicide. We celebrate and deify personalities like Vijay Mallya, the Ambani brothers, and many others, even when we strongly suspect that they have bent every rule, and bribed every babu, to succeed. We feel for, and defend, Rajat Gupta, despite the irrefutable evidence against him…after all, did he not manage to climb to the pinnacle of the corporate world….so what if he had to take some shortcuts! I know…perhaps, I am being rather harsh. But I worry a lot about what example we are setting for our children, and the next generation of Indians? We push our children to do well in life. While we make sure that they know how important it is to earn money. Do we spend an equal amount of time and energy to teach them values, to emphasise that money at any cost will not do? I believe not. Neither do our schools teach them values. I remember the time when my son was in a prestigious school in Bangalore; one day he came home and told me about how their school principal had been arrested by the police for beating up his wife! I was completely horrified. But then, was I not at fault for paying donation to get my son a seat in that school? What did I expect from a school that gave away its seats to the highest bidders?

But why do I, and people like me, pull all the strings we could, and spend way beyond our means, to get our children into such schools? We are really a generation in a hurry; a generation of Indians who grew up feeling that we have to succeed — dare I say, by hook or by crook! Our role models showed us a path where you could break all rules to win the race. Idealism was for the losers. We were street smart. If we had to copy in tests to get that unfair advantage over our friends, we quietly did it. We grew up, went to college, and actively participated in eve-teasing, binge drinking, and bullying, all in the name of ‘ragging’….something that every cool kid was expected to do!

Parents looked the other way, because they did not want their kids to be ‘losers’. They wanted them to make friends at the right places, so that they would get the right breaks in life. We went to work choosing jobs that paid us the most, quite willing to shut our eyes to what our employer did, or did not do. We chose our bride or bridegroom based on his/her earning capacity, and many-a-times, paying capacity.

We ‘network’ with folks of questionable credentials, because we want their favours. We ask our sales team to do what it takes to get the orders, and we take them along to demonstrate what we mean. One board member that I met recently said to me, “We have to be practical and appreciate that there is a cost to doing business in India!” This was in response to my query, on how the board had looked the other way when executives in the company were siphoning off money.

Today, we are all protesting, feeling enraged and agitated. The cynical in me thinks this is because the cumulative effect of all our actions are finally coming back to bite us. Now, it is not somebody else who is getting killed, but one of our own — a GM (HR) in Maruti-Suzuki; now, it is not some unknown person going to jail, but one amongst us who happens to be a director of the Reliance Group; now, it is not some hapless rail passengers, but hi-fliers, who are paying the price for Kingfisher’s shenanigans; and, it is not some poor tribal girl getting raped, but a middle-class student in a residential colony in Delhi, who is with a person she is engaged to marry in a month’s time. So, we have been stirred out of our apathy, and we are out there in numbers, making our outrage known.

Please don’t get me wrong. Protest we must, most definitely. We have to continue to protest until our voice, and outrage, is heard, and taken seriously. It’s, indeed, heartening to see the extent, the spontaneity, and the peaceful nature of the protests underway today. It gives me hope that the first signs of change are around the corner.

However, for any real sustainable change to come about, it is important that we, each one of us, also start taking stock of our own sins of omission and commission, and begin taking stands. As consumers, can we start boycotting newspapers & TV channels that regularly give us ‘paid’ news? As journalists, can we perhaps take stands when our media bosses expect us to collude and bargain with businessmen and politicians? As sportsperson, can we refuse to ever throw away matches, and vow to expose those in cahoots with betting gangs? As parents, can we refuse to succumb to the temptation to pay money to buy seats in medical schools for our children?

As facilities managers, can we insist that the transport companies we engage to run buses and cars for our employees only employ trained and licensed drivers, who don’t run amuck on the roads threatening lives, every day? As managers, can we stop, forthwith, the pernicious practice of employing agents, paying hafta and commissions to get our dirty work done in order to run our operations smooth? And as home-buyers, can we refuse to pay the builder a part of the money in black, even if it means we don’t get that ‘special deal’?

If there is one thing that we should set out to do this New Year, I submit that it should be to starta process of serious introspection, and to resolve to change our society by changing ourselves first. I have made a start with my New Year resolution which is to watch what I do at work and at home so that my actions set the right example for my kids and my employees.

I am reminded of what our poet-philosopher, Kabir Das, said in one of his dohas:
“Bura Jo Dekhan Main Chala, Bura Naa Milya Koye;
Jo Munn Khoja Apnaa, To Mujhse Bura Naa Koye”

Translation:
“I searched for the crooked man, met not a single one
Then searched myself, “I” found the crooked one”

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?