What's hiring got to do with self esteem?

A while ago I ran a training program on hiring practice for senior managers of a large PSU here in Bangalore. One of the role plays involved interviewing skills and therein interviewing a recruit. The interviewee so chosen was a youngster who seemed to be full of vim and pleased as a punch. In fact his behavior bordered on the cocky. The prospective candidate did extremely well in navigating the technical questions that were thrown at him by the panel. At the end of the interview round, much to my surprise, the unanimous verdict was that that particular candidate would not make the list of selected candidates as he was 'arrogant'. I responded by saying that the candidate looked confident and not arrogant and that the organizations needed confident people who were technically very sound and that the candidate should be chosen. The panel was not very convinced. What's the point here? An issue that most lends bias to a recruiting process is lack of confidence or self esteem in recruiters.Recruiters with low self esteem abhor confident candidates and will not select them. Unfortunate but very true. How does one mitigate this rather unfortunate state of affairs? A route may be to have a panel of interviewers, where hopefully biases will cancel themselves out and more importantly training recruiters to recognize and deal with biases. Hiring a poor candidate is bad, rejecting a great one is even worse and in a competitive world, organizations recognize that this is workplace harakiri. While many do recognize that hiring is a very important HR activity, few spend enough of money in training their recruiters and developing staffing metrics which would give an early warning of poor practice.

Celebrating Mediocrity

The other day I was at a HR Seminar at the Leela Palace, where the lead moderator, threw this curve ball at us: How many of you believe that academic excellence is important to success in work life? My hand shot up, a midst deafening silence and as I looked around I was the only bloke with my hand in the air, looking a little like Billy Bowden signalling something. Even as my hand descended, I was a tad perplexed by this seeming lack of respect for academic success. Does it mean that academic success is not important at all and does it also mean that we can wander our way through school and suddenly turn to be a top performer at the workplace. Don't you think it is a little simplistic to assume so? Most people swear by academic credentials simple because it goes to show a certain level of rigor, discipline and focus to suffer which are extremely important for latter day jobs. It may be assumed that somebody who showed this at a young age can replicate it at a later one.This is not to say that people who did poorly at some point of time. cannot or should not be successful. The chances though are slim and for want of a better system, we look at academic excellence to forecast future performance. In India, we suffer the pangs of envy and like to pull down anything or anybody that is successful. It makes good business sense to study successful people and learn a trick or two from them rather than saying that success itself and best practices are bunkum.Very rarely have successful people got to their rarefied position out of luck - more often than not it is something special that they have done or maybe not done wrong. As we grow as a nation, it is important to celebrate success and successful people and make winning a habit. Losers and whiners perpetuate a losing cycle which if it has uses has eluded me.We need winners as role models, to encourage others to do well and excel. Let us not celebrate mediocrity - it might look fashionable, but has limited use in a competitive world!

My Bengaluru....

A popular saying these day’s in Bengaluru is that we have drifted from being a – Garden City to a Garbage City, more so when the saying is accompanied by a seeming perverse delight, as if the person in question is in no way involved and filth and garbage appear and disappear on its own accord. I have always held that the normal Bangalorean is a spoilt brat. A tantrum throwing adolescent who takes things for granted and complains about almost anything – its too dirty, its too sunny, its too windy, policemen are too strict or too lenient and the litany goes on and on and on.

The other day waiting at a traffic signal, I spied upon a family at my fore in a car. The kid in the car was either a poor traveler or had had too much to eat and was violently vomiting through her window while her mother looked on rather nonchalantly. The upshot was that the car side was soiled much to the chagrin of the family. What followed was bizarre! The mother uncorked a bottle of water and proceeded to clean up the side of the car, oblivious to the filth that she was creating around her on a road that did not solely belong to her and her family. Having soiled the road they just drove on, as did I with two wheeler whizzing past on adjoining footpaths that are supposed to serve the pedestrian. My anger was so great that I shot the lady, in question on my mobile camera of course!

CMJ

Cricket has lost much of its romance with television. A couple of decades ago one could listen, on radio, to Gundappa Vishwanath, late cutting Derek Underwood to the third man boundary past a diving Kieth Fletcher at second slip or even a Jeff Thomson bounding in to bowl to terrorized English batsmen on a bouncy Perth wicket. It was romantic because you had to imagine the action! TV robbed us of that and reduced our heroes to mere mortals. Radio commentating was an art and for over three decades Christopher Martin-Jenkins enthralled us with his comic, wit and understanding of the game of cricket. Jenkins was a tad eccentric too.It is true that on a golf course in Jamaica he tried to ring his office with the TV remote control he had picked up on his way out of his hotel room. Even when he recognized his mistake he seemed disgruntled that the device did not get him through to London. He had a distinctive style and he would compare cricketers to birds and animals. Mike Hendrik had a pigeon toed approach to bowling while Ravi Shastri resembled a Camel while he ran! Jenkins had this rather condescending approach to Indian cricket befor 1983. In the World Cup that year,he was fairly certain that England would beat India in the semi final and i could hear the quiet desperation in his voice as Mohinder Amarnath shut the Poms out of the tournament. In the final against the might of the West Indies India were shot out for 183 in just over a couple of hours on a green top at Lords. There was a finality in the voice of Jenkins.....the upstart was being put in place....and when India turned it around there was genuine incredulity and joy for the under dogs lead by Kapil Dev. CMJ was a consummate broadcaster. His clipped, precise tones soon became synonymous with the English summer, as did those wonderful stories that he told, whose end could be so hard to predict - often he was not quite sure where they were heading himself. He was brilliant on the radio: clear, distinctive, and always at ease in front of a microphone, even if he had only just burst into the commentary box seconds before picking it up. Jenkins died a few days ago from cancer and will be missed by many. I will too, for the romance that he created around my favorite cricketers, who were but mortal humans I discovered with the advent of TV in India!

Ashamed to be Indian

I like N.R.Narayanamurthy ( Founder of Infosys ) or Murthy as he is called simply because his simplicity shines through in complex situations and he is able to cut through the flim-flam and BS with ease and felicity. Yesterday he told the Indian public at large that he was 'Ashamed to be Indian'. This from a man who probably is an Indian icon for much of the civilized world. He is ashamed for the horrific act of brutality that six or more lumpen elements perpetrated on a young women in a moving bus in our national capital New Delhi. This reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi who said something similar when the Indian sub continent was suffused with hate and vengeance even as the sub continent was being cleaved into two nations in what was a weird and tragic accident. Does Murthy offer a solution? He is humble enough to say that he does not have all the answers for the moment but is just ashamed to be Indian! Contrast this with the lovely Gul Panag ( Bollywood actress), who says that statistics are probably lying and that Delhi is not the Rape capital of India. Does this really matter in the face of the agony that the young women who battle for life faces? The portly Kushboo ( South Indian actress - made famous by a temple being built with her as a Goddess in Tamil Nadu ) goes on to add that all rapists need to be hanged pronto, all the time resembling a Deepavali fire cracker about to explode/implode! Brand Delhi is taking a beating - much to the oblivion of its politicians and Indian society at large is taking a bigger one with our inability to look at women as simple human beings, rather than item girls or pieces of entertainment. As more women enter the workplace, issues of harassment are going to become pieces of contention that will surface with increasing rapidity and regularity, unless there is a fundamental shift in the way that the Indian male thinks.This can only happen at home, where parents teach their young son's that there is an intrinsic equality among all life that needs to be respected and preserved.Subjugating other people is not sustainable over time as history has shown repeatedly.Bullying, harassment and rape are forms of primitive subjugation that has no place in modern society and people who indulge in them need to be aware of the repercussions. Interestingly Should we be ashamed to be Indian? If we are proud to be Indian for many things that this great civilization has thrown up, we ought to be ashamed as well for this horrific act of senseless, drunken brutality perpetrated on a young woman who fought with all her might to defend herself. The only one who probably, needs to be not ashamed of herself at the end of this sordid and rather chilling episode!

Shockwaves

The other day I was watching a rather interesting interview of Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy the particle physicist from Pakistan. The noble doctor has been hammering away for nuclear disarmament for many years. However I was a little puzzled by his argument against India's nuclear program. His contention is that the nuclear explosion at Pokhran in 1974 was a disaster for India! How so? Hoodbhoy argues that it was this explosion that got Pakistan to work on theirs and go nuclear. He further argues that it was this explosion that eventually lead Pakistan to have the nuclear bomb and get military parity with India. While this may be true it is worth remembering that while Pakistan may be India centric, India is not. India's nuclear program was aimed not at Pakistan which has always been considered to be an irritant rather than a threat. The bigger threat was China and that too in a neighborhood that was hostile after successive wars were fought. Let us hark back to 1974 for a moment. Pakistan and China were an alliance, to whom the American's were cosying up under a Richard Nixon who disliked India. The Russian's were our only ally and China was a nuclear power that could always arm twist a non nuclear India.I do not see what other choice India had but to catch up with the Chinese

. Hoodbhoy goes on say that since Pakistan now has a nuclear bomb that country can harbor terrorists, who can strike at India with impunity and India will not be able to respond for fear of provoking a nuclear war. Kargil proved otherwise, didn't it? India used conventional weapons to smash occupying troops. I do not think that the equation is as simple as Hoodbhoy makes it out to be. India need not fight a war to choke Pakistan off. It can be done by diplomatic and economic means, which even the Pakistanis seem to now recognize. The People's Republic of China has developed and possessed weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and nuclear weapons. China's first nuclear test took place in 1964 and first hydrogen bomb test occurred in 1967. This was a full ten years before India's. China has been implicated in the development of the Pakistani nuclear program. In the early 1980s, China is also believed to have given Pakistan a "package" including uranium enrichment technology, high-enriched uranium, and the design for a compact nuclear weapon. Chinese complicity is what worries and should worry India and not Pakistan as Hoodbhoy erroneously believes.

On violence and other things......

As Mumbai braces itself and waits with bated breath, it is said that Balasaheb Thackeray battles for his life in what is a deserted city. The state administration has moved in a large number of reserve police and the Rapid Action Force as well to counter violence that might erupt should the Shiv Sena chief pass away. There has been a prelude with Sainiks attacking media persons a couple of days ago. Why and how violence can be justified by grieving political party workers is a question that has troubled many in our young country? While the Sikh riots of 1984, post Indira Gandhi's assassination might be qualitatively different it falls into the same genre. In more recent time the mayhem that was caused by the death of M.G.Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu and that of Cinema star and legend Rajkumar in Karnataka are a case in point.In both cases entire cities were shut down and millions of rupees and some lives lost due to looting and senseless violence by so called grieving supporters.Does this behavior have a place in a mature country? There is a pattern which plays itself out time and again and in order to protect innocent citizens administrations need to break it ( the pattern ). What does this mean? Lets look at a similar situation. The occupying American forces in Iraq had their hands full. While they expected a grateful local populace to treat them like liberators all they got was abuse and violent riots.A young American Major who viewed video footage of the riots saw a pattern after many sightings. What did he see? 1. A small crowd would first assemble. 2. The congregation would gradually grow larger with time. 3. Food hawkers would appear and set up shop as if on cue to feed the crowd. 4. The tension would grow and soon somebody would hurl a rock and all hell would break loose. The Major had a brilliant idea and requested the local administration to prevent food hawkers from setting up shop near a potentially riotous situation. Next time a crowd gathered there were no food hawkers to feed them, the restless crowd soon melted away in apparent hunger and frustration.What had the Major done? He had simply changed the pattern or changed the rules of the game? Indian administrators need to do this too. We simply cannot afford to allow lumpen elements driven by suicidal tendencies to take control of our cities.We need better strategies for crowd control.Violence is not an option anymore.

Great leaps that end in disaster.....

A glossed over and poorly reported disaster of the modern age has to be Mao's- Great Leap Forward. Mao was so inspired by Nikita Khrushchev's call that the USSR would overtake the United States in industrial production in just fifteen years. The Chinese leader promised that the Chinese nation would overtake the British in the same fifteen years and so was launched a program, that would eventually kill close to thirty six million Chinese peasants who died of starvation while members of the communist party lived fairly well fed lives. How did this come to be? When you have a cocktail of lies, stupidity and bravado disasters are not too far away and lurk at every turn. Mao began by 'collectivizing' all private land holding in China, which was very unpopular with the peasants. This was done to improve productivity. He next said that steel production must go up substantially and encouraged and then ordered people to set up backyard steel furnaces to produce steel at home.Neither Mao nor the peasants understood steel making technology and the upshot was that most peasants melted their tools- shovels, rakes, pikes, axes in the smelting furnaces of their homes. The end result was that the tools were gone without any steel. The communist party was too afraid to tell Mao that his plan was an unmitigated disaster and that food production across China was dropping. What they kept telling him was that food ( rice ) production had gone up and that people were singing paeans in his praise! Mao like all megalomaniacs was so full of himself that he believed the lie. The story has interesting take away's for all of us: 1.Science leave alone the rocket science kind is not common sense and its planning and execution is best left to experts. 2. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 3. Eventually it is the famous 'aam admi' that gets the short end of the stick, however else you plan it, simply because the rich did not become so by being daft and swallowing patriotic propoganda! Did this have a bearing on India? I think it did, as by 1961 starvation deaths had reached a peak and Mao was desperate for a way out. In 1962 the Chinese fought us in a short war...................a timely diversion!

Stinking Bengaluru

I'm glad I live in the outskirts of Bengaluru, a reason being that I do not wake up to see mounds of garbage staring at me or worse have to smell it every time the wind comes my way. The dreaded problem of garbage has come to Bengaluru before other cities and this does not mean that it will not come to them. Many many years ago I made a train journey with a British lady and her boyfriend from Gujarat to Bengaluru. The lady kept making jokes centered around Garbage that I found difficult to fathom leave alone laugh at. Now I do, at least the fathom part. Garbage is a problem simply because the general population thinks it is not an issue that concerns them, that is till they see the garbage heap growing at their doorstep.That is the moment the finger pointing starts. Most households neither segregate or process their wet and dry wastes. Many a busy denizen just dumps his garbage at the street corner while on his/her morning walk and expects the garbage to disappear from his/her sight. This is a piece of magic that is not going to happen. Hapless villagers around Bengaluru who were absorbing our trash for years have woken up and cried a halt to dumping of waste around their villages even as we behave and live as if we are from an alien land living in Bengaluru and the issues of this city does not concern us. The garbage has raised serious questions on the spread of disease particularly dengue which is life threatening.While we can keep pointing fingers it is important to ask how the problem can be addressed as a normal citizen. Even while there are charges of corruption and neglect, the BBMP and state government claims to be looking at long term solutions in processing waste and thus reducing the need for landfills.While Bengaluru stinks we need proactive solutions and effort even at the cost of spending time away from regular work to avoid shooting ourselves in the foot!

The Battle of the Bulge!

An interesting question doing the rounds is whether we have reached a moment in India's history which is a defining one. A couple of days ago, I watched a heated exchange between the leader of a Khap court or Panchayat from Haryana and a woman activist. The Khap's are advocating a ban on the use of cell phones for girls below the age of eighteen and more so are encouraging families to get their young daughters married off to prevent rape, incidence of which has risen sharply in the North Indian state over the last few months. The lady in question was pretty peeved and was making the point that the law of the land did not allow for both. Not too far away in Delhi social activist turned politician Arvind Kejriwal is giving politicos a scare and has them scurrying for cover. The point for me is that, both protestors are from India's middle class, which seems to have attained a critical mass and a life of its own. You find more of these folk striking out at citadels that were difficult to breach not too long ago: Rural India, the rich and politicians. Today the middle class is ready to take them on to good effect and I think that this is the genesis of a movement that can only better India. A report by National Council for Applied Economic Research's (NCAER) Centre for Macro Consumer Research said by 2015-16, India will be a country of 53.3 million middle class households, translating into 267 million people falling in the category. There are many India’s and that is a fact. What is also a fact is that a burgeoning Indian middle class refuses to be ignored anymore and wants to be heard, whether it is about corruption or ancient social prejudice.

The Battle of the Bulge has truly begun and its outcome is going to define India in the years to come.