Everytime I catch up with a batchmate of mine after a long time, the dreaded question comes up inevitably. So ‘how is your work going?’ question……..

Of course, one of the basic tenets of a B-school education is that you can never be found to be doing anything less than rocket science, more so if you are from the IIMs. So it is possible that the only thing you may have graduated to doing in the 4-5 years is now you are allowed to give the ‘print’ command rather than going and picking up the paper from the printer yourself for the boss.

But then when you talk to a batchmate, you are always creating strategy and laying the roadmap for a multi-billion dollar business all on your own….. So you have the Assistant VPs in finance firms, Program Mgrs in IT firms and any other esoteric sounding titles….But of course people are also smart enough to ask the relevant questions, all in the quest for finding whether I am doing better than him….

So here’s a thought…’If the work you do was so amazingly great, why are so many of the folks jumping firms?’

…Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life….

- Steve Jobs @ Stanford

I wonder how my dots will look a few years from now…

This speech is probably one of the oft forwarded email forwards…but for the inspiring words that it has…his delivery of the speech was quite a let-down. I happened to see that on youtube.

We see so much of this kind of writing all around the place…but somewhere the majority of folks(including me) still plough on with their mundane existence awakening ourselves to the ‘practicality’ of life and just holding on to the dream till they get so bogged in surviving each day that they cannot stop to think of their dreams….

Damn the rational mind!!!

Employee motivation is a big challenge for any HR professional especially in the Indian IT sector where expectations management is a big issue..

This piece is a cool satire on the whole thing of employee motivation…would love to see managers using this….

The conclusion is pretty simple:

¤ When your company says “Great companies are made by great employees,” they aren’t talking about you.

¤ When your company insists that “Each employee makes a special contribution,” that’s not you either….

¤ When your company discusses its relatively low turnover rate, it wouldn’t mind if it went up another point, if you catch our empirical drift.

¤ Your deep-seated fear of being revealed as a fraud who doesn’t really deserve the job you have is unfounded. Everybody knows.

I am not a big fan of Seth Godin though a lot of people seem to follow his blog and writings. But I like this post of his:

The URL to his post

Extending this a little further, seriously, I think we do tend to overestimate the importance of what we are doing, the report, the meeting, the deliverable that we stop thinking and just keep doing and stop caring about the real things….

What is the motivation for a person to continue on their job and provide transition to another person who is going to replace them in another 30 days?

With the number of layoffs in my organization in the US and Europe, it is quite a strange situation to attend meetings where the host for the meeting announces that they will be leaving the company in the next few days. There is a strange awkward silence for the next 30 secs before someone makes an appropriate remark wishing them the best.

On the other hand, in contrast, Nilekani and co are sitting in the studio promising a $3 billion bonanza at the end of the year and a 40-45% growth expectation. The world is really turning around…

Now I am reading the book ‘Three Billion Capitalists’ which talks about the shift of power to the East. It sure is an interesting time.

But the real question is how long before we start thinking about our jobs under the scanner? I dont think it is as far as people might think it is.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Come to think of it, actually manufacturing companies have been doing it for a long time whenever they shut down factories. I guess the more protected class of white-collars have been left alone until now…

This is definitely a question that I have thought of on multiple occasions. What makes a company diversify into a totally unrelated field, burn up their own cash cow and finally sell the business to focus on their ‘core areas’ after a few years at a loss?

I liked this article by Guy Kawasaki. I think it is a nice way to put things in perspective..

Of course, I like point 5 best…

5. Restrict the use of experts to narrow areas. Never use experts to create your product roadmap or marketing plans unless you want MBAs who have never run anything larger than a school snack bar to decide your fate.

Ms.Bansal has also talked about the yuppie MBA. Looks like we are not a very well-liked group not withstanding the so-called money (havent seen it yet myself though…but i guess hope is the way to the future)

As of yesterday I have completed 4 years in office (hmm…as I start this, it almost seems like I am writing a note for the US president..)..well..I digress…

I have completed 4 years in office in the same company and the questions are so much more frequent. How can you stay in the same firm given the market scenario? Most of my batchmates have shifted at least once.

(at this point, I will mention that I have seen quite a number of people in my company who have stayed for much longer)

I was wondering what would be the factors to make a person stay for long or at least in my case what were the factors?

I guess the following have contributed:
1. The variety of roles that I have got involved in the company including onsite stints
2. The value that most of my managers have given to the work I have done or what I call ‘personal brand equity’(an ego trip essentially :))
3. The general DNA of the organization - for eg, I believe my company has a fairly high quotient of work/life balance and it is upto the individual to do what he/she wants

But then there is the other side always gnawing:
1. Are you missing out something on the outside?
2. Are you becoming too comfortable within the familiarities of the company?
3. Are you still managing to learn something every other day?
4. What does the future hold in this company?

It’s an answer that I dont have yet…

The Nasscom report that came out recently predicts skill shortages. But I think, we are already facing that in our daily episodes and the report is a trifle late. After all, people are what makes businesses tick and if you dont have the right people, you are doomed.

If you ask any project manager in the IT industry, he/she will tell you that a large amount of their time (bandwidth the official word) is used up on managing resource attritions and thereby transitions. I believe therefore the cost of attrition is becoming higher with every passing day.

The reason is that it is just so difficult to find a ‘good resource’, the good not referring in any way to their technical skillsets but to the attitude that people carry. Today, I was discussing with a colleague about how a project manager can really chill out if he has a bunch of good guys in his/her team.

But sadly, that is not reality. In reality, the team composition is usually similar to a normal distribution, with 1 or 2 really excellent people, at least 1 really mediocre person and the rest of them just average. So, if you are unlucky, you may not get the 1 good guy also. Then, you can say goodbye to the work/life balance everyone is talking about nowadays.

That is why I admire so much the gamble that Reliance takes. Here they are willing to spend 100 crore rupees on assembling the best possible team for their retail venture. They have got their fundamentals right. Mukesh Ambani knows that if he chooses the right people, he will just have to sit back and enjoy like a satisfied shareholder.

The faster IT companies realize this and do everything to bring down the attrition rates from the 20s, the faster they can save themselves a lot of trouble…..

This was a forward that came sometime back to me from a friend…supposedly a quote made by a HR executive.

“Every day for the last four months I have been hiring. I come to office each day, hassle my recruitment team, agencies and consultancies for resumes, perform interviews, negotiate salaries and make offers. It’s amazing to see how people negotiate for salaries and perks, no one asks anything anymore about what the job entails, what they can contribute, or how they can grow and realize their dreams here. It’s about pay, and people are eagerly willing to display unbridled stupidity in managing their careers by focusing incessantly on money. Heck, the time it takes

to finalize an offer nowadays, I could send out an offer letter, go have several children, watch them grow, put them through school and then head back to office, the candidate is likely to have finished negotiating his pay and ready to join. This is all fine and dandy; it’s a hyper-inflationary job market.

What’s disturbing is the not-so-new trend of IT jobs flying out of India. I hear an 850-seater call center has decided to move out of India due to attrition and increasing costs. Hell, my own company has pushed out 100 jobs out of India into Eastern Europe, and I was part of that decision. We need to wake up and smell the stink of the decay we are creating all around us in the IT job market. Year-on-year end people here expect nothing less than 30 to 45% salary increases, where as the average salary hike in the US per year is 3% and Eastern Europe is 4%.

I could go on and on about the quality of the flotsam and jetsam that washes on to my desk in response to job ads, but we all know it. Sometimes it takes as many as 40+ interviews to close one position. Sad part? The bozos still think they are worth it.

At this rate IT India better ensure they have transferable skills,

because in a couple of years from now they will not have jobs to feed their money-frenzied lifestyles.

Let’s do justice to the lessons the dotcom tried to teach us, what goes up must come down.”

I think this is very true. I cant think that this kind of 40% hikes can go on for ever. I guess I can buy property in Bangalore once the dreams come down!!

In continuation of my property post….

I am wondering if the property cycle in Bangalore is linked by some factor to the job cycle and which cycle comes first. Now the job market is doing really well and hence people are getting more and more money and therefore taking more loans. When the job market starts getting saturated, the property market will probably see the impact but after a lead time. It will take some time before we see the impact actually showing up on the number of loans disbursed and the number of flats taken up.