Smart Move

For a long time now, I have been thinking, why not these IT companies in India come to an agreement (may be with the help of NASSCOM) & come up with min-max salary levels for their employees based on experience, skill levels & roles (just like how the prices of Pepsi and Coke are same). This may help to stop attrition to some extent especially jumping ships for the same role with (way) higher salaries.

Everytime a team member comes to me with his resignation quoting his offer in hand with >50% hike, I stand helpless and let them go with nothing much that I can do to stop them. This agreement among the IT companies will in fact help them to control the spiraling wage increase (not that I am against getting a huge wage increase).

Today when I read this news I was a bit surprised. Though it's not exactly what I have been thinking I think it is a good move and this may be a step towards achieving what I envisaged(!). I am sure the top guys in the Indian IT industries would have already thought about this. Who knows they might have already discussed & dropped or the discussion may still be on.

Snippets of the news...
In Pune, IT companies in Hinjewadi IT park managed to seal a pact under which they will hire from rivals only after candidates have fully served out notice periods.........The companies have also agreed that new employees cannot join without a relieving letter from the previous employer

So suriprised to see how much money these companies loose because of the attrition.

...These companies have been crippled by 17% attrition leading to an estimated loss of about 5% of total revenues — about Rs 850 crore — every year....

Smart move, right?

Brickbats at Infosys

I was literally shocked to read this. Employee dissatisfaction level seems to be skyrocketing at Infosys. So many good performers (including me!) are leaving Infosys. Honestly, Infosys as a company is a great place to work. So many good things to talk about this company. In recent times its colors have changed a lot. Now the bad things are outnumbering the good things. I felt it's not the company I joined anymore. So I quit. So have many people.

With the IT job market picking up speed, I think it's high time Infosys management gave a good thought about the employee satisfaction and did something seriously to improve the same. Afterall just the concrete walls and great campuses can not make the sofrware!!!

    

Fired Today

65,500 jobs lost between August-October in India

Playboy lays off 14%

Gone in 60 Seconds

Can you believe that on an average six people have lost thier job in every 60 seconds in December so far?

Read the story here.

Pretty scary statistics, eh?

Fired Today

1. Bank of America to cut up to 35000 jobs

2. HSBC lays off 193 staff in India

3. ArcelorMittal plans to cut 650 jobs in Belgium

4. Santander to cut 1,900 jobs at its UK bank

Fired Today

With more companies firing employees everyday I thought 'why not track it'. This is just what I come across today. (There may be plethora of companies firing. I didn't go in search of this news. This is just what my eyes caught).

1. Yahoo India - to lay off 3% of India workforce

2. Rio Tito - Sydney - cuts global headcount by 14000

jack welch to JACK WELCH

Wouldn't it be nice to read a book that analyzes the commonalities of successful CEOs and what made them really tick. "What Made jack welch JACK WELCH" by Stephen Baum does that. Does that very nicely. With lots of stories from CEOs succeeded and failed it was an interesting read.

Bottomline is that only the 'shaping experiences' made the ordinary people to become extra-ordinary legends. Almost all the great CEOs had a very ordinary childhood and normal brought up. Small leadership responsibilities that they took up during their school and college days did really shape them up well. Learnings that they got out of those small responsibilities did play a major role in their career indirectly later. Very inspirational. I did reminisce my good old school & college days.

Strongly recommended for reading. (At least the stories would help you to make a great conversation in a gathering).

Corporate Ladder

With an average of 3 years in each designation, to climb to the top position (CEO) at my organization I would have to spend a quarter century from now. By that time I would be in my mid fifties losing out to competitors and might not become a CEO as I would be too old & on the verge of my retirement.

What should I do?

Size Does Matter...!!!

Siva & I along with few of my other friends had a long discussion a year ago on Best Companies to Work for in India - Business Today Survey. It is that time of the year again. Business Today's recent edition carried the same survey for this year.

Last 6 years of this survey Infosys topped 4 times (in years 2001, 2002, 2005 & 2006) and secured 2nd position in year 2004. In this year's survey Infosys fell down to 5th position.

Survey has analyzed a little bit on why Infosys fell as well. Few reasons are given as growing scale (in total employee count), inadequate communication, slow promotions etc.

I could infer from the people who have spent long time at Infosys on how the company has transformed so much from the old days to what it is now in terms of employee friendliness. Company took hardly three years to grow from 30000 plus employees to 80000 plus employees. Survey results show that company has not coped up well with the size. Had it been a slow and steady growth, guess it would have been easier to manage the employee expectations.

Microsoft India has come as the #1 in the survey. Total employee count is 5000 plus.

Other positions and the total employees strength in the bracket.

2nd MindTree Consulting (5500)

3rd Johnson & Johnson (404)

4th Sapient (3500)

Size does matter...!!!

 

Bullies @ Work

I think most of us would have faced bullies at work (like we did in school days). An article in the recent edition of Business Today on the topic "Managing Bullies at Work" was an interesting read. Bullies at work make serious damage to you psychologically. Bullies are nasty individuals making your life miserable. I myself have faced (still facing) such bullies at my work life.

Question to the readers: What is your practical suggestion to handle such jerks?

(I was really wondering was I ever a bully to any of my colleagues? I think only my colleagues could give me correct answer to this question.)

(Unf)air Deccan

I conceive a novel idea. Give my flesh & blood to execute that idea and start a business. In a few years I go public and make a good deal of money (!). During a lean period when I need a lot of cash to pay off my debt, a fat man expresses his interest in taking over my business and takes it over. Though I would still be part of the management, things won’t be the same any more. How would I feel?

Read Vijay Mallya’s Air Deccan take over from here.

With the low cost and premier airlines under his wings now with 33% of market share, which is more than Jet-Sahara (31.5%) & Indian (21.9%), and rights to fly overseas just around the corner, Vijay Mallya has stroke a great business deal.

Looks like Vijay Mallya has announced that the Air Deccan’s ticket fares would slightly go up while maintaining the low cost identity.

Do you think as a business man Capt.Gopinath is a failure?

Dividend Earnings

Mukesh Ambani - Rs 869 cr
Azim Premji - Rs 697 cr
Shiv Nadar - Rs 403 cr
Anil Ambani - Rs 87 cr
N.R.N. Murthy - Rs 33 cr
Nandan Nilekani - Rs 23 cr

This is dividend income of some of the big shots in India in year 2006-07.
Source: Business Today

What was yours?

Friends Chart

Friends - a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.

I have a theory. For every 2 years of career life, you loose 50% of your friends that you have made in your career life so far. Look at the chart and a sample data with an assumption that you had 10 friends during the first 2 years of your career & not made friends after that.

Not having friends at your work place would make your life miserable. Having a friend at your workplace would make your (work) life a lot more enjoyable. But I guess there will really be a point at your career where you would not have any friends at all. By adding more friends each year of your career you may put off the stage where you would be with zero friends.

Look back your career life so far to check the validity of this theory and share it.

Giving Back...

Few months back I got a feedback from one of my colleagues that it was time I started giving back to the organization whatever I had learnt till then. (I was on a learning curve). Last couple of weeks I am hearing his voice echoing in my ears repeatedly, but on an entirely different note.

In corporate world there is something called CSR - Corporate Social Responsibility. When a concern is becoming big it starts thinking about contributing something towards the improvement of its region/society. I have not seen a start up or a company that is making losses talking about CSR. Only the biggies that are making good profits and have good resources talk about CSR. These companies take up some kind of social service activities such as adult literacy program, environmental cleaning etc.

When I was in school and college, I used to think a lot about social services. I used to console myself that I could not do anything because I did not have money and once I got into to a job and started making my dough I would start fulfilling my service desires. Then it was justifiable and in line with a company’s CSR policy (?!). Almost three quarters of a decade into making money (being on earning curve) I have not given back anything significant so far to the society. It does not have to be just money it could be of any form like my knowledge, my time, my advice etc; it could be to anyone but without expecting a favour in return.

Now I am using 'my busy life' as the scapegoat. :(

I keep getting my colleague's voice in this context again & again and grows louder day by day. I think it is time I started something pretty soon before I become deaf.

Or should I just call my psychiatrist to fix an appointment for my hearing voices?

Exploit...

On a sunday afternoon I got a mail from one of my team members updating the status of his work. He is a smart one in the team so obviously victimized with loads of work, which made him to work during the weekend. Is this an exploitation?

This may sound like exploitation. But actually it is not. It is opportunity in disguise.

India and China are becoming (should I say already became?) outsourcing hub for the developed nations like US & UK. As a matter of fact US & UK are exploiting the low cost labour in India and China. But for the countries like India and China with over population and poor employment opportunities this 'exploitation' is certainly an 'opportunity'. In fact a great opportunity that has changed many lives.

Total number of employees in India's top 3 IT companies alone has reached around 200,000. Recruitment projections each of these companies show are mind-boggling. Our work environments are becoming more and more competitive with highly intellectual people around. To stand out in the crowd there is a lot need to be done by each individual. It has become not an unusual thing for the people who are 'meeting the expectations' to end up with lower performance ratings. Everyone is crazy about 'making a difference' and going that 'extra mile'.

There is a saying: You can achieve little with little sacrifice; you can achieve more with more sacrifice; you can achieve great with great sacrifice. Achievement is always directly proportional to the sacrifice. If we look at the history of great achievers there would be lot of sacrifices in their lives.

In my experience I have realized that when it comes to getting opportunities & growth one should let others exploit (positively). That’s the hard reality now.

Playing Welch

I have a machine, which constantly fails to meet my objectives. It has lot of performance issues. I could easily decide to throw away and purchase a new one or send the machine to a repair shop. Unlink of machines addressing performance issues of people who work for you is not an easy thing. That too when it comes to people with ‘attitude’, it becomes a great challenge to address the matter. Performance management is still an area where a lot of research is going on and is an area using which business consultants make handsome money. There is no standard performance management practice across the globe. Each organization adopts or creates its own practice, which none of its employees agree that that is good. In most of the companies there is no ‘performance management’ only ‘perception management’.

It’s quite usual that we have to face people with performance problems at work. There were many instances during when I wanted to sack people out of my project (if not out of the company). As a boss I could easily decide whether a person would scale up or not and whether to sack him or keep him. But it is the phase that comes next which always makes me sick. I think of the consequences to that person after sacking. Empathy would occupy me all over and I would not be able to make a decision which is of organization’s interest. I would try to find at least one or two qualities in the person to keep him. Who am I helping by sacking a person who has real performance issue? Is it me? or my boss? or my boss's boss? Who is the 'corporate'? Are those mortars and bricks the corporate? The consequence of keeping or sacking him ultimately goes to the investor, the one who enjoys or suffers the good or bad results of the company.

A few weeks ago, I felt pathetically helpless when I had to reject 7 out of 8 people whom I interviewed for recruitment because they did not meet the expectation. When I had to reject people from rural background, from a small unknown village I would feel like hell. I put my legs in their shoes to realize how would they feel or react to the negative result of the interview. This may be because of the fact that I myself was not from a great background. In one of such situations, in my previous organization, my class mate from my college & I who were in the panel decided to select a person instead of reject. We justified ourselves saying that when we could survive that candidate would also survive. Was it unethical?

Mr. Jack Welch, ex-CEO of the empire GE was a great manager. He is one of the best managers of the century. When I read his autobiography ‘Straight from the Gut’ a few years ago it was very motivating. I have strongly recommended to many people to read this book. Being a CEO for 20 years for an empire like GE and growing it multi-fold is not an easy job. He is notoriously known as brutal & ruthless for the way he managed his human resources to ensure good performance. In his saga he had laid off 100,000 people from his organization. In his autobiography he explains how to manage & ensure performance of your people. It goes somewhat like this: (sorry that this is not a verbatim recital from that book) When a shop owner approached him of advice on how to manage the performance of the people employed in that shop, Jack advices to lay off bottom 10% of the people in terms of performance. When the shop owner said that all in his team was performing pretty well, Jack advised to go ahead with the lay off rule so that it would result in improved performance of the others too. This is how threat is injected into the veins of the employees and more ‘performance’ is extracted using the survival of the fittest concept. Unlike most other organizations GE demands year on year productivity improvement from its offshore vendors. Terror, eh?

I like Mr.Welch. I liked his style. But Playing Welch is not easy. I can’t do that. I am too sympathetic to have the guts to bite the silver bullet as Mr.Welch. I am experimenting ways which work for me & will adopt in the longer run. Who knows one day some one might write a blog on ‘Playing Seeni’.

Kindergarten Engineers

A week ago, my wife & I visited one of my friend’s home. My friend has a kid who goes to kindergarten. My friend was telling that the next day his kid had his term exam. I was observing the kid for sometime and I observed no sense of tense or no seriousness of the exam. The kid was busy playing and enjoying himself with out a trace of exam fever in his deeds. Whereas his mom & dad highlighted a numerous times during their conversation with me about the kid’s exam and they sounded real nervous about it.
Suddenly an analogy struck me.

Back at my work place I have many fresh out of college people in my team. Having those kids in the team keeps the work place very lively with all the fun, as if having kids around. I have observed that most of the freshers would not have the seriousness of project delivery deadlines while me and my team leads are pretty worried about meeting the deadlines & meeting the quality etc. When retrospected my good old ‘fresher’ days I realized that I was no exception.

Now it’s my turn to worry and be serious on behalf of them (as someone else did on behalf of me). However, I am sadistically happy that soon they would grow up to realize the seriousness of the environment they are associated with. Some cycle that!

Automobiles...not light weighted

A serendipitous bump into statistics about Automobile industry took me by surprise. I did a little bit of surfing & digging to write this post.

To start with, a small comparison to understand how big Automobile Industry (US) is...

Top 10 Hollywood Movies in terms of collection so far are:
Titanic (1997)
Star Wars (1997)
Shrek 2 (2004)
E.T (1982)
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
Spider-Man (2002)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge os the Sith (2005)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
The Passion of Christ (2004)

The Total collection is $4,268,752,087.

Total sales revenue of one vehicle line (Ford F-Series) for one year (2004) in US was $28,185,330,000. [Sales of 939,511 units at an average sales price of $30,000]

Amazing, ain't it? Well, let us keep the comparison of profits aside.

In 2004, Total revenue from new vehicle sales in US is $270,000,000,000. This revenue is somewhere in between the GDPs of Columbia and Saudi Arabia in year 2004. They are ranked at positions 31 & 30 in terms of GDP that year.

As per year 2005 data, US is at number one in total number of cars & light commercial vehicles produced with 11,524,000 units. India is at 12th position with 1,406,000 units.

I never realized that US auto industry is this big. Now, I feel that I should have read Lee Iococca's autobiography, which is lying in my book shelf for a pretty long time. Another interesting fact is that new car sales revenue is going south in US in recent years whereas in India it is picking up for obvious reasons. I have always thought that in India, the sales revenue is more because of the first time car buyers. But that is not the fact. Major revenue comes from the buyers who buy their 2nd or 3rd car. Just one and a half years with my first car I have seriously started contemplating about my second car - UV type. Looks like this can be extrapolated to all car owners. The automotive market in India is going pretty steady, may be that is the reason why major to niche players in automobile sector are opening their shops in India. In a way I am happy that Chennai is becoming like what Detroit is for US. This may sound like a tall claim now, but the future is not too far.

Following is an excerpt from McKinsey's report:
In the span of a generation, India's automotive market has transformed a failing local industry into a thriving producer of reasonably priced, reliable small cars, some for export. Alongside the assemblers, successful component manufacturers and suppliers have developed. Still, while India's industry is booming, consumers, rather than investors, are reaping the greatest rewards. Read the rest from

http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/newhorizons/auto.asp if it sounds interesting.

The Threat, The Fear and The Panic

'The playing field is being levelled', the statement made by Mr.Nandan was the inspiration for Mr.Thomas L.Friedman to coin the title for his bestseller 'The World is Flat'.

A few weeks ago I went to Bangalore on an official trip. An advertisement board in Bangalore airport grabbed my attention and made me to stand, stare and shake my head. The ad-board has a golf field, Tiger Woods is walking up on a slope in the golf field and the ad-line goes 'There is no such thing as level playing field'.

Probably many would have guessed when I said the name, Tiger Woods. Yes, the advertisement is for the Consulting, Technology and Outsourcing giant, well, global giant, who provides end-to-end solutions to its customers, the one and only Accenture.

I know that Accenture India sucks. Probably Accenture has its shop in India just to show their customers that they have presence in Indian market, which is the most chanted name as the offshoring and oursourcing destination. But definitely Accenture-America is not a sucker. It is so obvious that Accenture sees Infosys as a threat, while Infosys is just a 2.5 billion dollar company originated from India and still in the warming up mode to provide end-to-end solutions to its customers & trying to become a business partner.

As an Indian I am so proud that a company originated from India makes a company like Accenture feel the fear and panic enough to release such an advertisement. I was wondering what would a CEO or CIO some corporate think when he sees such an ad? I felt that this ad is a definite image booster for Infosys.

Actually Accenture is not the first one in that panic list. I think IBM was the first one to (over)react its panic. IBM story goes three years back. In 'Wall Street Journel', (just to emphasize, there wouldn't be a single CEO in US who does not read Wall Street Journel) there was a full page (or a half page - not sure of the size - but that doesn't matter really) ad which goes something like this. 'We are better than any consultancy in Banking domain'.
Irony is in American dictionary you can not find the word 'consultancy'. It clearly shows that IBM felt that TCS was a threat to its business.

For IT solutions, India should become like what China is for manufacturing unless it would be too difficult to run this 'India Story' a few years from now. I believe that research is one important area where India Inc must concentrate more to accelerate the growth and enjoy the benefits of globalization. We can not survive so long just with the low-end jobs being outsourced.

'The Manager'

An essential characteristic of the superhero mythology is, there's the superhero, and there's the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When he wakes up in the morning, he's Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic that Superman stands alone. Superman did not become Superman, Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S", that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears, the glasses, the business suit, that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us.

Lately I have been having this feeling that wherever I am & whoever I am with, I am 'the Manager'. Like the Superman, I felt like I was born Manager. I kinda looked strange too. One day I was in my kitchen, enlightening my wife with 'short stories' from my life. I observed her way of cooking for a while and 'the manager' started to appraise the way she was cooking. I passed my wisdom on how important it is for her to improve her productivity and time management.

Result? Well, I had to take over the rest of the cooking and later I had to dramatically fall on my knees to apologize in style to set everything right.

Lesson? Wife is the Chairman, MD and CEO of the house. What can a poor manager do about it?

I felt like I woke up from dream of being 'the manager'. Ofcourse, now-a-days I am 'the manager' only at my work and not everywhere and not with everyone.

Note: First para, the comparison of superheros, is from the movie Kill Bill Vol.2 by Quentin Tarantino.