Organisations as Schools for it's employees

Most organisations that I have seen (or heard about in first person experience) do not have a robust employee development program. I maintain the proposition that it is the responsibility of each organisation to cater to the career development of it's employees - it's more like an extension of the guiding philosophy of an educational institution. A true school should progressively look at moulding it's students, provide an environment conducive to reflection and learning and drive the students to realise their inner potential. To say that corporate organisations would do well to adopt this philosophy might sound a bit far fetched, but let us examine the idea bit more before completely rejecting it.
In the knowledge industry space there cannot be an argument on the fact that the cerebral power of an organisation's employees is the only true value proposition. People make the difference - people can break or make projects or products. The most fascinating aspect about human potential is that it's limitless - the depth that the human mind and brain fathoms, the ideas that originate from it and the power of human initiative, will and enterprise makes it may be the world's most valuable renewable resource! And the best part is that your employees do not depreciate, rather they appreciate with age and experience. The Law of Scarcity is one of the fundamental principles of economics - the value of an item is directly proportional to it's scarcity - human potential describes the extreme case of the Law of Scarcity where there is only a single unit of the product available in market - each of your employee is unique.
But how many organisations realise this fact and put a premium on the realisation and development of it's most valuable limitless resource?. Think of the possibilities - if you provide an environment that is conducive to the creative growth of your employees you could have an organisation that continuously reinvents itself and ride on the enterprise and human potential of your employees.
Another analogy is that to gardening. The intent of a gardener might be to make money selling the produce of his garden, but the only way he can do that is to attend to the flowers in his garden, nurture them, provide them with the best conditions for growth and reap the benefit. This is exactly what organisations in the knowledge space need to do. (I need to point out here that the Indian IT company MindTree's chief executive is called a Gardener!).
So it is my staunch belief that the adoption of a philosophy similar to educational institutions will only benefit corporate organisations. We need organisations that put a premium on moulding the thought and potential of it's employees. I believe that organisations are still obsessed with Customers and Processes while forgetting that the presence of motivated and driven employees are prerequisites to both of these measures. I urge you to just reflect on one thought - human potential that is limitless, renewable, appreciating and indomitable - what else matches up to it?

Varun Gandhi's greatest mistake: Lessons we can learn

Varun Gandhi made a master stroke in Pilibhit - and with one single speech he changed the course of his political career forever. The venomous communal nature of his speech has been condemned and discussed across the nation for the last many weeks. My intention is not to debate whether the speech was communal or not. (First off, this post is written under the assumption that the tape seen on TV is not doctored and it was indeed Varun Gandhi who made those statements!) Take couple of minutes to see the video below - Varun Gandhi's statement after the controversy erupted -


For me this act of Varun Gandhi where he passionately defends himself and tries to absolve from the crime is a bigger weakness of the individual than his speech at Pilibhit. He might have been compelled by the situation, driven by the impending elections (according to some an admission of his mistake would have been suicidal for his career and the party prospects) to defend his stand vehemently - but he lost a golden opportunity to set his record straight, to uphold the desired moral values and set a precedence of honest, sincere and straight politics.
The ability to acknowledge one's mistakes and accept a view different from one's position is such a critical value for success in teams. It's so common for multiple teams to work on the same project. Individual teams in a project will have their own individual dynamics, culture and power structure and when these different teams come together to work in a single project it's not surprising that there will be glaring differences. There could be some very obvious reasons for this rift including communication problems, difference in skill levels, different management style and managers etc. But it's been my experience that the inability of teams to reflect on their performance vis a vis the overall project goals and unwillingness to accept their mistakes is a major reason for the failure of a number of multi-team projects. It is not uncommon for people and teams to make mistakes, but it will snowball into a tragedy if the individual or team does not acknowledge that a mistake has been made, or still uphold that nothing has gone wrong. There are multiple effects of this kind of a behaviour in a multi-team environment:

1. It distorts the actual progress of the project and stalls any rational anaysis of the cause of failure.
2. The inability of a team to reflect on it's actual performance and failure is a closed approach and will lead to the status quo being continued. This eliminates the opportunity to analyse the shortcomings in the team and start a process of revival.
3. It will build animosity amongst various teams in the project and will bring down the morale of the team.

Reflecting more on it I realise that rarely have we been taught to accept defeat and acknowledge that making mistakes are alright. Our education systems (that is the Indian Education system) is highly intolerant of mistakes and failures - mistakes are treated with a rampant cane culture in schools, parents compete and terrorise their children to succeed and it is a social stigma to fall back in the race of life (yeah how many essays and speeches have I started with the line 'In this highly competitive world where everything is a rat race....'). But this attitude is suicidal when it comes to working together on a project or a mission and unfortunately many projects have fallen prey to precisely that attitude.
Whenever I have faced this scenario, I have always yearned for people who can take a larger systemic view who would put the success of the project above proving their point. It would be a dream to have a team like that with individuals who put the project above personal differences and ego. More and more I have got to work in multiple teams I have understood that the energy derived out of the synergy of all teams involved is much greater than the energies of all the teams combined together - and I hope that this value prevails in most teams - the willingness to say 'Yes I was wrong and now let's see how we can do it better'.

Will the multiple captains formula work for Kolkota Knight Riders

I watched with much amusement the press conference by John Buchchanan and Sourav Ganguly today - thanks to one particular news channel with a bengali lead anchor streaming the video almost every alternate minute! What was Buchchanan thinking when he came up with the strategy of having no fixed captain? I do agree that T20 cricket is very different from the other forms of the game but did that call for an experiment of this radical nature?
It's excellent to theoretically preach that every member of the team should be a leader, but over all these years I have never seen self navigating teams - team work and leadership are entirely different entities for me and strongly tied to the nature of an individual and you really cannot push a person to be a leader especially in sports. Team Sports like any other activity that warrants a very high degree of discipline (for example the army) works best when there are fixed roles and responsibilities for the team members - lack of clarity in the role of an individual is one of the leading reasons for dissatisfaction and failure of most teams. Another major reason why I believe the case for multiple captains will not work is because of the power and idea imbalance that it will bring to the team. The influence of a captain is well illustrated in cricket - MS Dhoni, Kevin Pieterson and Shane Warne for some - the teams under these individuals have succeeded because they brought a certain level of energy, trust and confidence in the players and developed a motivated and loyal squad under them. I wonder how and when Buchchanan would decide to change the captains - when the team suffers couple of losses under one guy would he pick another person from the team as the captain? This is going to be disasterous and demotivating for the entire team and the new captain will also be playing under immense pressure to win and save his face!
Howsoever good individuals might be, for the team to succeed the presence of an inspirational leader is extremely essential and John Buchchanan's strategy is doomed to fail.

Innovation is a matter of organisational culture

Innovation is undoubtedly the most overused cliche ('value addition' would be a close competitor) in modern management jargon. Infinite media and printing space has been dedicated on this single subject and I am sure many companies and individuals have made millions selling that idea! But I believed that getting an entire organisation to innovate together was almost an impossibility until I joined TESCO. I had two pertinent questions about organisational innovation:

1. Individual enterprise vs. Organisational innovation. Will a bunch of independently innovative employees lead to an innovation organisation? This is a very common predicament - every organisation will have a set of employees who think ahead of the curve, ideating on new changes and opportunities for the organisation - but will the mere existence of such people without proper support from the organisation lead to any meaningful act of innovation?

2. How do you translate innovations to quantifiable business opportunities? Innovation like most other organisational fads tend to remain just a rhetoric in most organisations. We are vehemently endorsed to innovate - but what do we innovate upon and how? How can an organisation move from mere rhetoric to generating ideas with an impact on the bottom line?

The other day when I walked up to my office - I saw the entire campus strewn with different types of hats with the caption 'It's Back'. It took me a while to understand that the hat campaign was referring to Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats concept and was the publicity campaign for the Innovation Summit at TESCO Hindustan Service Centre (HSC). The Innovation Summit poses real life business problems ranging from Identifying Old Stock in our stores to automating the cab booking processes in HSC, to the employees and has resulted in ideas that has saved hundreds of thousands of pounds for the organisation. The support that the summit receives from the top management is amazing and that I believe is the real wind beneath the wings. Initial ideas that are submitted are discussed and nurtured and follows a process of elimination with the participation of even the company directors. During the last Innovation Summit - I found an energy akin to what I used to see in my college during campus fests, at HSC - truly then I came to realise that Innovation is a matter of the organisational culture.
Well the business advantages the organisation has received is one aspect of it - the more important part is the air of innovation and change that it brings to work. The current Peoplesoft project that I am working on is the most daringly different and innovative one I've been associated with and every person who has come to TESCO from another company vouches that. I feel a culture where people are looking on a daily basis to improve their processes and adopt the latest technologies, a culture where everyone from a developer to a manager is eagerly interested and nurtures any small process improvement is a true indicator of an organisation that innovates.
So here's what I've learnt - 1. Individuals ideating alone can result in small process improvements or inventions but never in an organisation wide culture of innovation. This will demotivate and kill any enterprising spirit of the employees. 2. A formal process that supports and encourages innovation and may be the solving of specific problems with a very strong support of the management is critical to translate the jargon of innovation to financial benefits (interestingly a sizeable sum is kept aside to implement and pilot the ideas generated by employees in TESCO. This shows a strong commitment from the organisation to act on the employee's ideas). 3. Employees need to internalise the process of innovation and it has to be encouraged at all levels of the company and 4. Tying Innovation to the rewards and recognition mechanism as well as the appraisal process will only help nurture this value.

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest!

The dissonance of mutual distrust and hate pervade the air around us - India particularly has been marred by segregation and differentiation on every possible identity - caste, religion, language and region. It almost feels as if people love to hate and the roots of one's existence is determined by the vociferousness and intensity of one's allegiance to singular identities. Can we dream of a time when love, respect and tolerance would ride over mutual animosity and hatred? Yes, I am tired of hearing how Islam is the only perfect religion, how Hindus need to rebuild the temples destroyed by Muslim invaders, how Biharis are taking away the jobs of Marathis, how a statue of Christian Charlie Chaplin cannot be erected near a Hindu temple, how the world is divided into us and them, how the great grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru will cut the fingers of anyone who talks against Hinduism, how fakirs can be answered by street warfare and bombs, how we should hate and distrust each other and live in our own self construed insecurities.
In 1955, in the wake of the threat of the Nuclear Bombs - world's eleven eminent scientists and intellectuals came out with a declaration for peace known as the Einstein-Russel manifesto, signed by none other than Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell. Reading through the manifesto, I felt that it's relevant today as it was 54 years ago. Here is a short passage from the manifesto -

"There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death."

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest - in our times botched by parochial and communal interests can we do that?

Third Front on the Podium?

The Indian Political scene has already warmed up to the impending General Elections. As it looks increasingly possible that neither the UPA nor the NDA will muster enough numbers to form a government in the centre - the Third Front has been creating much ruckus. The Third Front projecting itself as a secular non-BJP, non-Congress alternative formally took shape after a meeting at Tumkur near Bangalore recently. But I am extremely confident that the third front is not a viable alternative at all. Simply put, it is just an alliance of convenience by a number of the regional parties - an alliance without a central leadership, without any manifesto and without any direction and clue who will be with whom after the elections. That is exactly the reason why players like Mayawati of the BSP, Naveen Patnaik of the BJD, Jayalalitha of the AIADMK etc. have not sided with the third front yet. Already political commentators have raised the point that the front will break up when the question of prime ministership will be raised. If hypothetically the third front by some miracle garner enough votes to stake a claim to the centre and if a concensus Prime Minister is decided upon, will the government survive for long? My hunch is a big no. Just pan back to 1977 when all cards were highly touted against the Congress following the acrimony of the emergency - there was a very strong reason for all non-Congress parties to come together to protect the Indian democracy. Together they did come - the Socialist Party, Jana Sangh, Bharatiya Lok Dal and Congress (O) and came to power with Morarji Desai as the Prime Minister. Yet, the coalition collapsed and could not last through the entire 5 year term. The same story repeated in 1989 when the Third Front of that time came to power with VP Singh and later Chadrashekhar as the Prime Ministers and collapsed by 1991. Unfortunately another attempt by the non-Congress, non-BJP parties to form the government in 1996 gave way to the formation of the United Front government under the hitherto unknown Deve Gowda who was followed by I.K. Gujral as the Prime Minister and the country again went to polls in 1998. Even in 1977 when the wave was strongly against the Congress(I) and there was a purpose for unity amongst the non-Congress parties - the Janata Dal coalition could garner only less than 300 seats and did not last the entire term. In 2009 - when the polity is far more fragmented and when there is no real ideological factor uniting the parties of the Third Front what can we expect from them?
My argument is that the Third Front is unfortunately just not big enough to garner enough numbers to stake claim to a stable government in the centre.The power equations are too complex for any meaningful middleground to be reached and I see the Third Front just as a parade of potential coalition partners for either the Congress or the BJP. Except for the Left parties, there isn't any party that swears by any ideology in the Third Front - so inevitably after the elections they will take the best offer at hand, for they will have no other choice - power is afterall the best aphrodisiac as Kissinger once said!