Sunday Posts

I watched a popular Indian mythologist expound on an Indian Business TV channel that Indian organisations are essentially different from Western ones. His reasoning is that the Western organisations are supposed to be separate, stand on its own, entities, Indian organisations are extensions of its owners, and hence, not just culturally different but organically distinct too.  I am sure this is an attractive opinion. In this season of celebration of Indian exceptionalism, what's better to think of a culturally exclusive form of business? Also, one that makes all the idiosyncrasies of Indian businesses look explicable and even desirable! I am sure a lot of this Business Sutra will be sold - I can see many presentations blooming around this central thesis. Except that, leaving out the soundbites and mythologies, it reflects a profound misunderstanding of both Western businesses and Indian business culture. In fact, the whole premise is based on a false dichotomy, or, to ...

Everyone, it seems, loves an Org Chart. The little boxes of power, those straight lines of responsibility, that one page definition of the hustle of start-up life - neat, tangible and reassuring! It is loved by those who make them, as they see themselves securely placed in one box or another, and by those who demand them, investors, accreditation agencies and bankers, so that they know how to give credit and how to apportion blame! When they are given out publicly, as is usual in countries that thrive on hierarchy, customers treasure them for writing complaints to the big man at the top and salesmen treasure them to cut the chase. But, it is also one of those old-fashioned things that everybody loves to hate. Particularly in the start-ups, where the rough and tumble of daily lives often do not follow neat structures and fixed boundaries, a secure spot towards the top is as desirable as the lovely cabin at the upper decks of the Titanic. In a world where rolling up the sleeves and...

I have been intimately involved in a 'project' to change an organisation - a complex one in a highly regulated space - and I speak of the mechanics of change usually referring back to this experience. While it lasts, this has been the most demanding, frustrating yet exhilarating work I have done so far: Progress as in one step forward, two steps back was all very common, and often, we seemed to have taken forever to resolve even the most straightforward issues. Indeed, by writing about it, I am not trying to claim any breakthrough success or mastery of the art of change management. On the contrary, this is more like the dispatches from the fault lines of an organisation in transition. I learnt to hate organisational politics for no particular reason other than because people said so. In today's cynical democracies, people in politics are typically sleazy ones, those who try to be everything to everyone, with the sole objective of making themselves rich. Statesmen are a...

I have come across a number of people who are struggling to keep their professional and personal identities separate on social media. The challenges are common : Have two twitter accounts or one ? Have read so many stories , few with happy endings but a lot more lot less pleasant , of people mixing up their twitter accounts and sending wrong messages to wrong people . On a more involved scale, getting one 's work colleagues on Facebook , and the recent case of one of the jurors contacting one of the defendants , is something fraught with danger . However , another side of the story is that it is incredibly difficult to keep the two separate, and often , an honest effort smacks of dishonesty and manipulative behaviour . The point , indeed , is that this is all about an individual person and it is best to be as open and honest to the world as possible . However , it is equally true ...

I have been reading Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner's timely book, The New Social Learning , which points to the social nature of organizational learning. I would rate this book only 3 out of 5, and found parts of it quite laborious to read. Lots of it reads like PowerPoint slides put together, which makes it quite dry and difficult to engage with: However, the book nonetheless makes important points that any Learning and Development practitioner should take notice of. The central thesis of the book is to conjoin the psychological and sociological approaches of learning theories together. Starting from the point of organizational learning, indeed Tony Bingham heads ASTD , or the American Society for Training and Development, which is one of the most respected professional associations for training and development practitioners in the world. Their approach, however, centers around facilitating a 'learning organization', through 'paving online community roads' and ...

Usually, politics is a negative word these days. Gone are those times when politics was a liberating force, a way of thinking and doing things for ascendant middle classes (and later still, for working classes), something that led to freedom and progress. Now, this means manipulative behaviour, something that one should not do. This negativity is nowhere more pronounced than in business literature. The reason for this is the rational roots of business thinking. We must remember that management as a discipline was created out of the great industrial organizations of United States and Europe in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century. The roots of business education lie in the economics and organizational science departments in North America, with great rationalist thinkers like Herbert Simon etc. The founding assumption of management as a discipline is that everyone, at least most people, would act in a rational way, with an enlightened self interest. There is little room to hav...

Every bit of statistic indicate India is making great economic progress, except in the look and feel of its cities. It is rather obvious in what one sees while the plane approaches to land in Shanghai, the glittering towers, or Dubai, the Desert trail melting into an always busy metropolis of tall buildings and shiny cars, and in Mumbai : Endless slums with blue tarpaulin . Then, once outside the airport, the hustle of bazzar ; on the streets, the feel of swelling population and poverty, and chaos everywhere. Looking at this, every commentator wonders how India actually works. One marvels at the achievements of the Indian Industry and asks around how businesses could still function with the crumbling infrastructure. Non-resident Indians endlessly complain how nothing actually works as it should, and residents display a studied indifference or immense ingenuity to find ways around when they don't. India was in the public imagination through two award winning attempts last year. Two ...

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...

Everyone seems to agree that we live in the era of great change. Everything around us is changing - as textbooks say - and every manager worth his/her salt knows this. But, there are certain areas, this belief in change does not reach. One such area is sales, though this is the most customer-facing of all business functions and where the impact of market change is the greatest. Let me explain. The businesses try to handle change with a great inward focus. The thought is something like, Change is more IT; Change is Diversity in workplace, modern reward management and miscellaneous improvement in HR; change is also the way the board meets over video conference. All such things are change. But, ask a CEO what change means for the sales team, he would normally only say that we live in a more competitive world, but will assert that his/her salespeople are completely geared up: After all, why are you in sales if you are not competitive. The problem is that the changes facing the sales funct...