Sunday Posts

This is a question I asked my Trainer friends often, without ever receiving a satisfactory answer: Why isn't there a course on understanding failures? Business failures are more common than business successes. Failures teach more - 'double loop learning' is what the learning theorists would say - and understanding what not to do is indeed the bedrock of a sound strategy. Yet, while various trainers sweat out in the endless quest of differentiating themselves, they all offer different formula of success - this method or that, always fool-proof, always the only route to success - no one wants to talk about failure. Why? Apart from the explanation that talking about failure would be bad omen, there are hardly any good explanations for this rather inexplicable omission. That Business Executives don't want to talk about failure is wrong: Read any business book, and the narrative is often structured as a struggle, that things got worse before it got better! It i...

I have had several conversations with Learning and Development managers in large companies in India, primarily in an attempt to get them to adopt the Global Business Professional credentials that we have developed. These interactions present me with some insights what the Indian Learning and Development community is doing, and re-ignite an old discussion about the need to re-imagine the profession in India. Indeed, in most cases in my experience, Learning and Development is a non-strategic function in the Indian companies, an extension of Human Resources. The Learning and Development Manager, who, despite his/her title, mostly a junior operative, engaged in functions such as induction training and compliance related work, traditionally HR domains. Whether the company is focused on 'inner market', where Indian companies in most sectors enjoy a level of protection, or export-led, which is far more competitive, does not seem to matter such. The IT Services companies that I e...

This reflection relates to my own experiences, and various conversations I have had with Indian executives, particularly from the training industry, regarding the Joint Ventures or licensing arrangements, which seem to be popular and growing, between Indian and Western training outfits in the training space. The questions - the value of partnership, who should one partner with, what to expect - come up again and again, and indeed, my advice was sought, as recently as last week, for a similar project.  There is a consensus among the Indian executives that such partnerships/ licensing add value. Of particular interest to Indian companies are packaged concepts and ideas, models and certifications that such partnerships bring. Consider the recent outpouring of emotions on Facebook and other similar platforms on the demise of Steven Covey, though the mainstream media largely ignored it, which came primarily from the training business community in India. I am sure similar friendly f...

Training in India has come of age: The choices, range of courses, price points, geographical spread, availability of trainers, have emerged, carrying the industry a long way off from the duopoly of NIIT-Aptech days. However, despite the progress, two problems seem to afflict the industry still: One, most companies are still trying to be like NIIT or Aptech, and talking about fast, franchise-led growth; and, two, the training is still dominated by derived content from one Western fad or the other, and very little research and development is actually being done in India.  Training in India is an exciting industry. It sits right in the middle of growing population, rising industry demand and a sub-par education system. The opportunity in the sector is, therefore, exciting: It can, and should, play an important catalytic role in helping the Indian industry move to the next level. This role, which will indeed come with increased profitability, demands new thinking, which is in ...

I often get asked about training business in India. This is a summary advice that I shall give, based on my experiences so far, on where the opportunity is. I think too many corporate training businesses in India try to ape the western companies. Often, they are offshoots or aligned to some Western publishers or training providers. The problem is - this alters their agenda. Rather than being driven by the markets and its needs, these businesses become tied to targets set by their Western partners. I have been in situations myself, and also asked around other entrepreneurs, why they follow these targets so unthinkingly. Two reasons are normally given. First, these Western partnerships are viewed as crucial to competitive existence. Second, it is assumed that Western companies have a better business model for corporate training that India needs, and hence, it is not about servicing the market but about introducing a 'high-quality' product or an idea. The problem with this approac...

My take: Indian training market will go through a major change in the next twelve months. Call whatever you like, though 'Coming of Age' may seem most appropriate. It may offend some people, justifiably so, some Indian companies are leading training companies in the World. Like, NIIT , indeed. But, somehow, I think they categorise themselves wrongly. Many of these companies, like NIIT , Aptech etc, built themselves filling the great void in the education space. They are great private education companies, as good as any in the world. They are very vocationally oriented, mainly IT, and this is possibly why they benchmark themselves against training companies like New Horizons, Learning Tree or Oracle University. However, the motivation, commitment and alignment of most of their learners are quite different from the ones in the West. They are mostly school leavers than the mid-career professionals. Not that these companies don't offer a bouquet of in-company programmes, but t...

I have just finished another trip to India and I return rather reassured that the training business is on an upswing. The great freeze that affected us - training providers - last October, seems to be lifting and the companies are looking to return to business-as-usual. Of course, my conversations revealed that it won't actually be business-as-usual, and the unfreezing will take longer than immediate term. My feeling is that this market will start to return to pre -recession levels in around April 2010, but with a number of important changes which may alter the industry landscape. I have obviously met a number of industry veterans, who kept a brave face but betrayed a level of uncertainty. The balance is obviously shifting in the market, the cost cuts are still fairly severe and training managers in most corporations are still firmly on the firing line. The cosy relationships that sustained corporate training is under scanner, and increasingly, efficiency enhancing ideas, On-demand...

As a part of my work on the Leadership Programme, I came to realize that one of the more important aspects that one needs to understand about leadership is what leadership is not. I have been reading Warren Bennis and his warnings about Pseudo -leadership is very real: I do think the world is full of pseudo -leaders and the big problems we face comes from the failure to call the wheat from chaff a lot of times. To start with, take the distinction, following Max Weber, between Power and Authority. Weber argued that POWER is about the ability to force people to obey, whereas the AUTHORITY is when one is obeyed without having to resort to force. In real life, however, this distinction gets blurred and too many people confuse the two. This happens on both sides of the table, incidentally; those who obey sometimes mistake the power - the senior person's ability to fire or punish the junior person - as some sort of automatic authority, and those who are in the driver's seat someti...

One of the propositions on the table for me now is to evangelize a new Leadership Development programme, to be offered in India and other South East countries. My engagement at this time is fairly minimal - all I am doing is answering the questions asked - but the whole activity triggers a thought process. While the offering in question is a fairly straightforward Leadership Qualification, accredited by one of UK's Leadership institutes, this allows me to reflect upon whether such a programme is at all suitable for India and what needs to be done, if one needs to start developing leaders in India. But, first thing first. Do we need to develop leaders in India at all? The question is an obvious yes, given the fact that we need them at all walks of life. There are so many problems to be solved, so much of human energy needs to be channelled. However, in India, it is often a case of many Chiefs and no Indians, in the Western sense of the expression. In many cases, we do not seem to ...

I had an interesting experience last week which is worth writing about. I was asked to recommend ways to improve the operations of an organization. This was outside my work, and I knew little about the business and its operations before I was asked to sit in a few meetings, observe and give recommendations. The request was made by someone who I could not say no to, despite the fact that I have enough on my plate now. I ended up having a very interesting, insightful experience, which was my main takeaway from the exchange. The organization in question is a government contractor, and delivers training services in various occupational areas. The organization has grown over many years, and some of those growth was ad hoc . The systems and processes that I noticed seemed to have grown organically, from its roots as a small firm, and somehow did not scale up when the organization got larger. Besides, following a merger a few years back, this firm has suddenly become very large, have achieved...

Suddenly, Learning Organizations are back in the agenda. Or, is it? Someone reminded me that training budgets were the first to go in recession, and obviously that does not mean the organizations are serious about learning. I do think that it is that straightforward, and current budget cuts may indeed have been prompted by real difficulties in the market place, but it gives out the wrong signal. The point is, okay, that the organizations NEED to get more serious about learning. Because the world is changing again - from the way business is done, to the buyer-seller composition. New ideas and challenges will emerge now, as it always does in the aftermath of a bruising economic crisis. Deep recessions like this always keep claiming their victims long after they have lost prime time presence, possibly because of the panic button reactions sometimes stop organizations from learning and moving forward. It will be interesting to study how successful organizations deal with deep recession. We...

I am as optimistic as ever that we shall emerge out of this recession soon. Whoever I tell this reminds me that the party is not going to start anytime soon, though, they agree, that the worst may be behind us. But, as long as we look forward rather than back, new things will happen and new possibilities will emerge. And, besides, after all this pain of the Great Recession, who wants to return to partying as usual. This recession, however, will have two long term impacts. While this crisis undermined the moral force of the theory that the market gets it right all the time, it has also severely undermined the governments' ability to bail us out of any future crisis. The pendulum seems to have run its full course, over thirty years, where we have moved from public spending to fiscal responsibility back to public spending again. So, in the coming years, we may go back to the old days of fighting inflation and high taxes and interest rates, as capital will become scarce in general. ...

The last two years have been extremely useful to me in studying and understanding how cultural differences come in the way of business and working relationships . Elsewhere in this blog, I have referred to the phenomena of Anglo - Saxon arrogance, something which I experienced on a day to day life in business. But, in a broader sense, and when I reflect with neutrality and perspective, I realize that this odd arrogance - the assumption that the Asian business culture is essentially backward and wants to emulate the West - comes from the pervasive eurocentric concept of civilization . Therefore, it is harder indeed to explain and teach a western business executive ways of the East, though I must not apply a stereotype and there are many exceptions of conscious efforts made by western executives to be truly global citizens. The problem of this eurocentricism , apart from the brazen disregard of other people's sensibilities [which are usually toned down by good manners], is tha...