Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter – Martin Luther King Jr A newspaper deals in stories. Are there stories and matters that an entire community becomes silent about- newspaper included? Yes, there are. Spotlight, based on actual events, is one such story. The story envelops the very city and community that the newspaper marks out as its own turf by calling itself ‘ The Boston Globe.’ And it goes on to reveal how we inflict the conspiracy of silence on ourselves – as an organization and as a community. The conspiracy of silence & cover-up In the summer of 2001,a new editor at the Boston Globe leans on its four-member investigative report team, known as ‘Spotlight’ to dig deeper into a story written by an in-house columnist. A lawyer has charged that the Archbishop of Boston knew a priest was sexually abusing children but did nothing about it. As the Spotlight team starts investigating, they realize that this one case is just the tip of the iceberg. An expanding probe uncovers acts of wrong-doing and non-doing by institutions like the church and…
What Disruption means for HR : Summary of a learning Session for marketing professionals
The Young & their interests We put ‘The Young’ as a customer category and spelled out what interests them. When time came to identify the industry/sector, we found that we had to scratch our heads a bit. This is significant. KEY POINT – The boundaries between industries and sectors are disappearing or getting blurred. Certain industries or product/service categories are fighting for survival itself examples – music industry, mobile service providers, movie halls, publishing industry, retail shops. This is because of disruption caused by technology. Disruption – Examples Netflix/ rentals ; Internet movies/ theatre screenings ; Uber/ rental cars & ownership itself ; Amazon/book stores ; itunes/Spotify / Rhythm house ; Kindle/ Printed books; Mobile apps/ television viewing ; Online booking/ travel agencies ; Paytm/ card-swiping. Bottomline is that a company can move into an entirely different product line or service category. is the most famous example. If watching television via app catches on, ‘television’ as a product category gets wiped out. Hotels will struggle big time if one house in every street decides to become an Air B&B partner. E-commerce…
Followers leading the way
Followers can now force the establishment to back down. Liverpool football club decided to jack up the highest stadium ticket prices for next season. In a synchronized move, 10,000 fans exited the ground during a premier league match featuring liverpool. The message went out loud and clear. The club owners scrapped their plan. The Energy & Resources Institute ( TERI) in India decided to elevate R.K.Pachauri to the newly created post of executive vice-chariman. Mr. Pachauri, a feted environmentalist, had earlier been accused of sexual harrasment and a case was on. In a co-ordinated move, 20 students wrote to the Vice-Chancellor and said they would not accept their convocation degrees from a person involved in a sexual harrasment case. Pachauri was on a long leave before due to this case. He decided to not attend the convocation and is reportedly going on leave again. Why he was elevated inspite of his situation defies understanding. Facebook decided to make use of its overwhelming captive followership among Indian citizens and lobbied hard for Indian followers to support its Freebasics initiative. Amazon has…
Events, Seminars, Conferences- Do you learn anything?
Business events are for networking and business generation. Well and good. They are marketed as learning opportunities. Not so well and suspect. In my limited experience, what you get to know are things that you could possibly know by reading on your own. If the speakers have inspirational quotient, go ahead and indulge yourself. Once you have indulged enough, even that becomes mundane. Why does the learning not happen? Dialogue is missing. An event can be a community in the making. But organizers do not look at it that way. To build a community requires staying connected throughout the year. A shared purpose, collaborative projects, assessments and surveys keep the fires burning. The event is then ripe for a dialogue, a conversation that goes beyond exchanging information. In a dialogue, people explore meaning, purpose, and values. They challenge and support each other by combining enquiry and advocacy. But most industry meets are seasonal events that are folded up lock,stock, and barrel until the next year comes. The events are ends in themselves. So, what do we have, right now? Instead of dialogue, we have experts addressing us. Sharing…
Advice Given – Ignore Politics. Guess What. Politics Won’t Ignore You!
I read about an HR head sharing advice he got from a senior leader on the subject of politics. The gist of it was – “Be aware of politics, understand the dynamics. And ignore it while continuing to do the right thing for you and your organization.” As a politics student, I beg to differ. Politicians have given politics a bad name. Our own ineffective participation in the political process as citizens and voters has given politics a bad name. Politics is not a dirty word. If you equate politics with everything negative and refuse to have anything to do with it, you haven’t quite grasped its essence. Politics is an inescapable part of our human condition. You might think you have washed your hands off, but politics impacts you all the time. In other words, you may ignore politics but make no mistake about it, politics is not ignoring you! What is politics? It is the process of resource-allocation in any set-up. How to use any resource – food,wealth, time, material resources, arms, energy, any resource.On what basis is this…
A Drucker quote & the fun a Devil’s advocate has with it!
Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and under-performance. Everything else requires leadership – Peter Drucker. Here is what the Devil will say! Employee engagement is the oil for easing the friction without removing the cause. Organizational charts are the boxes where confusion is stuffed in. Business analysis is the drainage system for under-performance. Leadership is the art of juggling boxes with oily hands & draining away the tell-tale signs!
Individual Brilliance – Sign of something else?
US goalkeeper,Tim Howard made record saves in a WC football match that his team lost.We can see all the action in one frame.We can see the rest of the team didn’t do as well defending & so the last line of defense had to turn in an exceptional performance.In corporate life,outstanding individual performance could be masking collective failure,not so apparent because all the action does not take place in one frame.An outstanding individual performance that saves the day is a sign of systemic concern.
Peter Drucker on Knowledge Work & The Role of Managers
Peter Drucker is brilliant. In today’s knowledge-based society, most of us use our heads in order to earn a living. Unlike farmers and factory workers who used physical labour. We apply our specialized knowledge to work – whether it is the accountant, the software designer, the trainer, the engineer, the architect. All are knowledge workers. The challenge within organizations is how to make their individual work-output gel together into a product or a service. What is the essence of a manager’s challenge in an organization? All executive leaders, any first-rate professional intent on achieving supreme clarity on the subject ought to read and internalize Drucker’s words which I reproduce. The subject in question is – What is the essence of manager’s challenge in an organization, especially when it comes to knowledge-specialists? Drucker refers to these specialists as career professionals. Here is Peter Drucker at his incisive best. “Career professionals – and particularly the specialists-need a manager. Their major problem is the relation of their area of knowledge and expertise to the performance and results of the entire organization. Career professionals…
Three Work-Realities Impacting Your Career That You Need To Prepare For
Ask any corporate professional if the world of work is changing, and the answer is a resounding yes! Ask how they are responding & the answers are general. Never take your job for granted. Always be learning. Network for career growth. These generalities are useful only if you persevere to understand what in the world of work is changing, how organizations are adapting to such changes. When you relate these changes to your specific circumstances, you will know what to do. Here are the three work-realities to connect your specific circumstances to. 1) Organizations are proactive in changing before they are forced to In the recent past, organizations reacted to growth demand by swelling its ranks. The recession made them shrink. In absorbing this painful body-blow, thinking organizations are determined to do it differently next time. They are not mindlessly expanding at the first signs of revived demand. By taking recourse to outsourcing & technology, they are catering to new business without bloating in size. They are open to internal restructuring as a proactive business strategy. Inspite of the absence…
Right Recruiting: How it aligns organizational performance
For leaders aiming to make organizations perform better on the whole, an under-appreciated area that holds great promise is recruitment. People generally look to training or performance management. But the right recruiting gives you an opportunity to set everything right. Why? The simple reason is it all begins with recruitment. When you decide to make your recruiting effective, you focus on what are the right things to do (the things that matter) 1) In order to arrive at which people are ‘right’ for your organization, you are compelled to articulate the essence of why you exist & what you have set out to do. You can hope to recruit the right people only if you have clarity of purpose. Knowing what exactly you want in terms of mission & results helps you identify the right actions, the right tasks, the right skillsets & the required people capability. 2) With right recruiting, your training needs will qualitatively change. The more you recruit the right people, the less would there be mass skill-deficiency. Right recruiting can help save your training budget or…