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| From left: Lucian Tarnowski, Madan Padaki, Pratik Kumar and Krishna Prasad |
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| Members of the audience |
Image via WikipediaHi, if you are a Senior Executive and have an hour available next Wednesday - would love you to join me and Ranjan Sinha on the "Social Hiring - What every Executive Needs to Stay Competitive" webinar being organized by PeopleMatters, India's leading Leadership and People related content provider.
Dee Hock and his committee of bankers retreated to a hotel in Sausalito, California to try to envision the structure of the new organization. He says he began with a purpose, "enabling the exchange of electronic value," a vision far more expansive than that of his peers, and then set out to devise some principles by which to achieve that purpose:
it must be equitably owned by all participants
power and function must be distributive to the maximum degree
authority must be distributive within each governing entity
it must be infinitely malleable yet extremely durable
Using these guiding principles, Hock and a small hand-picked staff created NBI, which opened for business in 1970 with 243 charter members. In 1977, NBI changed the BankAmericard brand name to Visa, and similarly renamed itself Visa International.
Another important conclusion for Frankl was:... We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us." That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory...." [7]
Frankl's concentration camp experiences thus shaped both his therapeutic approach and philosophical outlook, as reflected in his seminal publications. He often said that even within the narrow boundaries of the concentration camps he found only two races of men to exist: decent and unprincipled ones. These were to be found in all classes, ethnicities, and groups.[9] Following this line of thinking, he once recommended that the Statue of Liberty on the East coast of the US be complemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West coast, and there are reportedly plans to construct such a statue.[10]If a prisoner felt that he could no longer endure the realities of camp life, he found a way out in his mental life– an invaluable opportunity to dwell in the spiritual domain, the one that the SS were unable to destroy. Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and thereby improved his chances of survival.[8]
Image by conskeptical via Flickr
To innovate, create new business, develop new products, you need to detected patterns, look forward and synthesize the future. To increase the organizational capacity to innovate, you need to leverage good synthesis - or “analysis of the future” (I love the research firm IDC tagline).
So here are some thoughts I offer:
- If you have no time nor interest in directly participating in the analysis, ignore the numbers and focus on the rationale. In my corporate career, I’ve seen too many decisions being driven by bogus cited statistics off a PowerPoint presentation.
- Most of us have strong innate synthesizing skills. If you want to leverage that human characteristic, expose data at the point where it is needed, trust and empower people whenever possible. Afraid people will be confused or misled by incomplete or noisy data? Look at how good regular people are filtering the extreme product reviews at Amazon.com. Look at the vision test above.
- Hire people with good analytical skills to look at the aggregation of data. Be honest and transparent when using the results of the analysis. If your intention is to start the spreadsheet from the bottom line, skip all the analysis crap. Real-time KPI dashboards are good because they inhibit “what-if” spreadsheet manipulations.
- If all you are going to give people is decomposed tasks and personal MBO goals, they don't need “strong analytical skills”. Stop asking for what you don't need or, better, start offering holistic views of problems, data and the freedom to act outside the corporate boxes they are in.
- If you are a successful business leader, it is probably because of you have above-average synthesizing skills. Remove the line about strong analytical skills from your resume.
They then inevitably want to question, and eventually dismantle, the crumbling edifice that is the typical HR framework of: -
Job evaluation and grading – plenty of evidence to show it is often a rigid and expensive way of managing rewards that does not produce the highest performance levels possible
Engagement surveys – they realise the theory behind the employee-customer profit chain is suspect and the links between engagement and performance are never as simple as it suggests
Competence frameworks – because, apart from the specious theory that produced this industry – in practice, quite frankly, anyone with any common sense always knew they were going to become a bureaucratic nightmare without any evidence of added value
Performance management – until they are confident that the measures being used actually measure value
Leadership development – however attractive it might sound there is no common definition of what effective leadership means and therefore no evidence can be produced to say that effective ‘leadership’ has ever been achieved
Of course, none of this accords with their non-business-partner, HR Directors’ expectations who, over recent years, blithely followed Ulrich’s lead (correlative, as opposed to evidence-based), which spawned a commonly-held view that there had to be a shift in focus from HR transactions to strategy and that this required steady-state, continuous developments in HR’s role. What they failed to realise was that properly trained, evidence-based, HR BP’s are taught that this shift actually represents a discontinuous, seismic shift in the paradigm on which strategic HR is predicated.
Image via CrunchBaseTop tech firms are realising that keeping the new generation glued, they need changes beyond pure salaries, which is already considered hygiene by new recruits. Launched around two years ago by Cognizant, the C2 already has around 60,000 active users and the site records over six million page views every month.Read my earlier post on the Social Business Employer manifesto - to think about it in a strategic manner. Also go through my presentation for a detailed explanation
“That’s how close you can get a Facebook to the business processes,” said Malcolm Frank, senior vice-president and Cognizant’s chief strategist. “The millennial actually have a completely different expectation in terms of how they work, they love to have virtual experiences,” added Frank.
From the time a new customer project is kicked off, to when it’s actually delivered, Cognizant 2.0 glues the entire workflow together, across varied skills, geographies and business units. “The work flow is not a boring experience, it’s so much refreshing,” agrees Pendse.
For Cognizant as an organisation, the system helps it not only knit the project groups together, but also reduce the entire time taken to identify who can do a particular project better than the rest.
“It’s like a Google search—we put the skill set required, and it throws up different project teams and individuals with prior experience in dealing with such situations,” says Frank. Some 7,000 projects are already registered in the system, and employees have shared around 200,000 posts about these projects.
At TCS, the country’s biggest software exporter, nearly one third of its over 1,50,000-strong workforce is actively participating in the company’s social media platforms already. TCS uses wikis, or personalised, websites that bring together specialised communities, apart from other tools to help its employees collaborate better. While Justask enables employees to ask questions openly, Ideamax encourages employees to share their ideas about a particular technology or a process.
In his new book, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance, Groysberg studies a group of professionals renowned for the portability of their talent -- Wall Street research analysts. Analysts are a hybrid of researchers and pundits; they study public companies and write recommendations about whether to buy or sell their stocks.
So what happened? Groysberg reports, "Star equity analysts who switched employers paid a high price for jumping ship. Overall, their job performance plunged sharply and continued to suffer for at least five years after moving to a new firm." Worse, switching firms doubled the chance that an analyst would fall off the rankings entirely (32% versus 16%).
So talent is not, in fact, perfectly portable, even in a job that is one of the most independent around (except for, perhaps, janitors and NFL placekickers).
What gives? Wall Streeters mistakenly see analysts as solo stars, but in reality, Groysberg found that even the best analysts depend heavily on an array of resources inside their firms. They rely on junior analysts who do their number crunching, other analysts who give them feedback, and salespeople who promote their ideas to clients. Not to mention the systems and culture within the firm.
There was one fascinating exception to these findings, a group of people who didn't suffer the lag in performance after transferring: women. Groysberg contends that the alpha-male culture on Wall Street, which never fully embraces women, forces them to compensate by beefing up their external networks, which are more portable. (Either that, or women are superior. Take your pick.)
So what do these findings mean for the world outside of Wall Street? Should we conclude that there's no such thing as different innate levels of talent? Of course not. The Baldwin brothers alone are enough to refute that. But the only way to take control of your firm's talent pool is to create it yourself. (And you should definitely get your child on the Wall Street-analyst career track. A job that entails writing persuasive essays on trucking firms must surely be the world's most preposterous route to a seven-figure salary.)
For instance, Hindustan Unilever, the Indian subsidiary of the consumer goods giant, has developed a reputation as a talent factory. How? Its senior managers are expected to spend 30% to 40% of their time grooming leaders. And executives usually change roles every two to three years so that they learn different aspects of the business. These investments may seem costly, but they have helped HUL become a $4.4 billion company, which reported 5.4% net profit growth at the end of 2009 -- and the envy of other companies worldwide.
When you own the talent factory, you've created a permanent competitive advantage. So if one of your stars leaves, you can simply wish him the best of luck on his new bus. And then grow another star to take his place.
Image by niallkennedy via Flickr
In the 21st century, America is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within organizations. Maintenance of organizations as structures is less important than assembling resources to get results, even if the assemblage itself is loose and perishable.
Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Organization structure in vanguard companies involves multi-directional responsibilities, with an increasing emphasis on horizontal relationships rather than vertical reporting as the center of action that shapes daily tasks and one's portfolio of projects, in order to focus on serving customers and society. Circles of influence replace chains of command, as in the councils and boards at Cisco which draw from many levels to drive new strategies. Distributed leadership — consisting of many ears to the ground in many places — is more effectives than centralized or concentrated leadership. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done.
This changes the nature of career success. It is not enough to be technically adept or even to be interpersonally pleasant. Power goes to the "connectors": those people who actively seek relationships and then serve as bridges between and among groups. Their personal contacts are often as important as their formal assignment. In essence, "She who has the best network wins."