Saturday, January 27, 2007

Anecdote

I have always believed in the importance of narrative, and stories in organizations. Sometimes, these narratives assume even more importance than logical/efficient decision making. A typical example is the commonly heard "this is how we do things here". I found an interesting blog that is dedicated to such stuff - Anecdote. Anecdote is a consulting firm that works in this niche area.

Here's an interesting post from Anecdote - the difference between a sound argument and a good story

Bruner called the two modes of thought ‘logico-scientific’ (or paradigmatic) and ‘narrative’, arguing that:

the types of causality implied in the two modes are palpably different. The term then functions differently in the logical proposition ‘if x, then y’ and in the narrative recit ‘The king died, and then the queen died.’ One leads to a search for universal truth conditions, the other for likely particular connections between two events – mortal grief, suicide, foul play. (pp. 11–12)

To compare the two modes, Bruner claimed, is to understand the difference between a sound argument and a good story.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

What should I do with my life?

I will be posting links to interesting articles that try to answer this question that has troubled mankind for long. Will update this post over the next few days.

Steve Jobs - You've got to find what you love

Po Bronson's book - What should I do with my life?
Most attempt to answer it with one eye open, one eye closed. We let our fears govern our decisions; rather than challenging the validity of those fears, we accept the boundaries set by those fears, and end up confining our search to a narrow range of possibilities, like the guy looking for his car keys under the streetlight because he’s afraid of the dark. Some broad examples: we confine ourselves to a range that is acceptable to our parents or our spouse; we confine ourselves to places inhabited only by people "like us," meaning of our class and education level; we place too much emphasis on being respected by an imaginary audience; we shy away from avocations that take a long time to mature and pay off

Synchronicity!

On Jan 21st, I wrote this on an alumni group of XLRI

"I doubt if the i-Phone will succeed - the main reason being that for once Apple is entering into a field that already has a lot of path breaking innovation happening (in a few years phones went from being just phones to cameras to music players to e-mail clients etc).

The I-pod, on the other hand, was launched in an environment where there was hardly any innovation happening on the portable music player front. The Macintosh, and its GUI was also launched in a similar technological environment. Both these products turned into icons because of the disruptive innovation they brought in. Iconic products tend to tap into the customer's need to identify with something that is path breakingly unique unique, and not possessed by many (atleast to start off with).

My guess is that the i-Phone does not have enough disruptive innovation built into it."

On Jan 24th, Peter Fader, in an interview featured at Knowledge@Wharton said:

Fader: Apple is facing a very different market. It's a market that's far more mature than the MP3 Player market was at the time. It's a far more sophisticated customer base. Apple had the opportunity to go into the MP3 market and basically reshape that market and create the standard for customers' tastes and preferences.

Those things have already been done by the myriad players in the cell phone market. Apple can do a very limited amount of reshaping. I think that when this phone actually hits the market, some of the grand visions that Steve Jobs has as well as some of the Apple zealots are going to be rather disappointed.

Interesting to note the high degree of similarity. Talk about synchronicity!

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Sanjeev Bikhchandani on Naukri's IPO

An excellent interview by Gautam.

Companies look beyond IIMs for fresh talent

Very interesting trend

Beyond a point, the rising salaries of entry level management talent from premier b-schools may actually become unsustainable, making them unaffordable for a lot of companies! Already, FMCG companies are facing the heat at premier campuses, with the financial services sector/ consulting firms offering much better pay packets. Wont be surprised if this trend becomes a full blown reality in the next few years, particularly with the small number of "premier b-school MBAs" churned out every year.


Saturday, January 6, 2007

The spiritual organization

A recent article of mine which appeared inThe Hindu Business Line.

Link to the article: The spiritual organization

Full text follows:

People who work in a `nine-to-five' kind of workplace must often wonder why `work' is structured the way it is. The modern nature of work has its underpinnings in the Industrial Revolution and its many factories. These factories presented an interesting challenge in how a large number of workers were to be efficiently managed to produce a desired level of output. Frederick Taylor successfully studied and analysed work in factories, with his simple motto being reduction in variability — in other words, viewing people as mere parts of a machine that had to work together to produce a desired product. Needless to say, this view of work and human resources could not last for long.

People do not necessarily work to satisfy an economic function. People work for various other reasons including fulfilment of their potential, following their passions and so on. Such motivations are much truer of the modern knowledge worker who works more in the realm of ideas and analysis as opposed to actions and objects. Yet, I find that most organisations still largely view job roles along the lines of the `parts of a machine' model described earlier. With most modern professionals spending a significant chunk of their waking hours at work, work ends up being an important sphere to achieve a lot of life goals apart from economic goals. Work may even become a path to spiritual development (suddenly shifting the focus from the here and now to the next world if there is one!). The Industrial Revolution (and the Protestant Reformation) on the other hand, made society focus more on this world, with work being an important component in it. The Industrial Revolution and the modern knowledge economy are at opposite ends of the spectrum in the nature of work they create. And yet, very little has changed in the approach that modern organisations have towards people.

Most organisations that claim to be modern in all respects — be it technology, strategy, CRM, operations and so on — manage to be extremely archaic in their people practices. I find a huge hangover from the industrial era still permeating the hallowed corporate hallways. It appears that the `modern' knowledge worker lives in a world populated by access cards, nine to five regimes, appraisals that tend to measure performance in the way a car's performance would be measured and so on. It is thus no surprise that the very term human resources seems to convey a view of people as input-output machines (pay salary, will work).

In my view, the organisation of the future must be a spiritual one. Its goals must be closely aligned with the life goals of its stakeholders. In such an organisation, I would give people the freedom to choose what they want to do, within broad constraints. The underlying theme would be that people inherently love to work when the kind of work they do is closely linked to who they truly are. This concept finds support in the Bhagawad Gita too, where Lord Krishna commands Arjuna not to be a coward, and to be true to his dharma (the true nature of one's personality). The current approach to hiring, on the other hand, seems to be one of `filling open positions'.

Second, the spiritual organisation would pay closer attention to the non-work goals of employees. This may mean allowing employees to spend significant chunks of time pursuing these goals even during the `working day'. Career growth paths would be super-customised and not standardised. Thus, on a broad level, a spiritual organisation would place self-actualisation before profits, and this paradigm would present itself in the organisation structure, hierarchies, roles, career paths, approach towards customers, products and so on.

It is not as if organisations have been entirely oblivious to the way people view work today. A lot of new age companies — technology companies like Google, start-ups and others — do experiment with people practices to foster a culture of flexibility and openness. Hierarchies too are becoming a lot more informal. However, if one looks at the entire spectrum of organisations and not just a few nimble new-age companies, there is still a long way to go. People have progressed from being mere `resources' to `human capital', which is the most important non-substitutable resource in this knowledge economy. It's about time this change is acknowledged and capitalism turns into human capitalism!

(The writer, an alumnus of XLRI, is working with a multinational financial services company )

Some of my previously published articles:

The role of strategy in firms

My latest column for The Hindu Business Line explores the role of strategy in firms . Full text follows -- While there are many defini...