Commitment!

The buzz word amongst the HR community a couple of years ago, was attrition and employee turnover. The smaller it was the HR manager breathed easier and lived to tell the tale another day.
To curb attrition and employees taking off for better quarters was born the concept, of 'employee engagement', wherein the employee wants to stick to your organization, like glue, so that the HR, does not have to go hunting around for fresh employees at periodic intervals.
Engagement gets a person committed to an organization & provides the glue, that I alluded to earlier.
What are kinds of commitment that you would see?

1. Affective: wherein there is an emotion bonding between the organization and the employee. The reason why you rarely see folk quitting organization's like the Tata Steel, L & T or Infy.
2. Continuance: Plays out during a recession. The poor chap is going to lose a great deal by quiting his/her existing job. He/she fears getting another one so is committed.
3. Normative: The employee is obligated to hang on for past favors.

My hero of yesteryear's Steinmetz provides an interesting study in 'normative' commitment.

Our friend landed on the shores of the land of liberty a refugee, from his fatherland, Germany. unknown & unwelcome.After great strife & desperation he potted a job with a small motor manufacturer for a pittance, when nobody else would even look at the hunchback, with an over sized head, speaking little English.

As his genius was recognized & fame grew he came to the attention of another great, Thomas Edison, owner of the now famous General Electric. Edison, knew genius, when he saw it & wanted Steinmetz on board, but no amount of money or perks could lure the great electrical mind away from his job with the motor manufacturer.

Why? Because the motor manufacturer would be in trouble, if Steinmetz quit? So said Steinmetz and he did not want that, as he was obligated to his boss, for giving him a job, when he needed one.

While the negotiation went back & forth, GE eventually bought out the manufacturer to get Steinmetz!

That is normative commitment.

What a story! I get goosebumps thinking about such commitment. I think it is an old world notion that kid's of today would not comprehend.

It is imperative, that HR focuses on the right kind of commitment. Believe me, it does matter!

Today nobody talks about attrition & turnover, because, the HR leverages, commitment of the continuance kind. A dangerous game to play!

October Greats!

Steinmetz & Ford.

October 1908 Henry Ford introduces the Model T car (costs $825)

Organization Behavior is a study close to my heart, simply because, it leaves room for rumination & discussion ( at my age I'm rather tired of hearing myself all the time ). At times, kids in class leave you staggered with startling insights, which leaves you thinking for days.

As I teach OB, a name that crops up often is that of Henry Ford, genius who revolutionized the nascent automobile industry, with his work practices.

Ford was many things & more. A genius, a brilliant mechanical mind, an astute businessman, a narcissist and a man who was by no means humble.

From works on Ford I remember an endearing story, where Ford is said to visited the quarters of Charles Steinmetz, the man who electrified the US and a genius in his own right. Ford was interested in finding a solution, for the malfunctioning headlamps of his Model- T. In the midst of their serious discussion, Steinmetz, apparently excuses himself and walks off to tell his grandchildren a bedtime story. A furious Ford, leaves Steinmetz's house & would have gone except that a train was not available at that late hour.When Ford returns, Steinmetz has his problem solved!

Ford is known to have told, on occasions, his overzealous, subordinates ' It's my name on the wall!'

The story of these men captivates, me. One a towering industrialist, the other a humble, affectionate, hunch backed genius, who had little sense of time or occasion.

What would have I given to be in the age of the 'King of the Road' & the 'Magician of Liberty Hall'.

Murder of the First Degree!

G- Boats centre of Gravity.

B- Boats Centre of Buoyancy.

M- Meta centre.

GM- Meta centric Height.

The senseless boat tragedy at Thekaddy, Kerala, took my breath away! A boat that sank, in what was probably 10 meters of water, killing upwards of thirty people, many of whom were kids, who were on a holiday. If you carefully sift the facts, you can see, no feel, the apathy of the Kerala administration, who runs the show.

Why?


Boats, poorly maintained, overcrowded, a probable lack of Life Saving Equipment & inexperienced crew, would have led to this disaster.

What went wrong?

The boats Centre of Gravity ( G ), would have gone up unnaturally, as the boats skipper, would have allowed tourists, crowd the upper deck. This would have taken the "G" above the "M", leading the boat to have a negative, GM, or meta centric height, causing the boat to become 'unstable' as against a normal 'stable' state.

As passengers, rushed to one side of the upper deck, to have a look at, animals, the boat would have listed & coupled with the negative GM ( unstable ), capsized and sank.

I do not want this to sound like rocket science, because it is not & anybody with a reasonable idea of ship stability or naval architecture would be up to speed on dangers that light weight boats of the size that went down, would face, with shifting masses on board.

The boat crew should have kept passengers on the main deck & warned them against rushing to one side of the boat.

Early in my career at sea I had a similar experience & got away with my life, because, I had just enough of knowledge to do the right things, in the available time.


The poor folk who died at Thekaddy, did not have an idea & the guys who were expected to take care of them were pathetic.


That to me is murder of the first degree!


The responsibility eventually rests with the top management who recruited, poorly trained people with even more abysmal levels of commitment.

Eventually, it is simbly, Human Resource Management!

Profiling!

Continuing on, my blog on, ' The boy who wore striped pajamas', I watched the movie with a sense of deja vu. There was something, about the movie, that I could not put my finger upon.

Normally, wanton, brutality, against people who have no defense, brings tears to my eyes. I abhor bullies! In this movie, even as a emaciated Jew is being kicked to death, the 'Kommandant' ( Bruno's dad) sits eating his meal with absolute nonchalance, not five feet away.

Sick!

However, I just could not get myself to hate Herr Kommandant! Why?

This morning, while driving to work the nickel dropped. Herr Kommandant resembled a professor I know from a German University. The professor, is one of the gentlest folk you could meet & maybe my brain ( shows that I have one ) was a bit confused with the two characters- Herr Professor & Herr Kommandant.

As managers, many of us carry out an unconscious profiling & stereotyping of interviewees much to our chagrin, at a later date, when a poor selection has been made.

Happens to all of us, so watch out! Keep interview biases out.

This piece has mainly been written because, most interviewer's that I come across these days are appalling.

Groupthink!

A British Army bulldozer pushes bodies into a mass grave at Belsen. 19 April 1945

Over the weekend I watched two movies, which were not great, but touched me none the less.

The first was 'Valkyrie', a Tom Cruise, starrer, about a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. You can see the quiet desperation in the team led by the Colonel as time ticks away and it is clear that the war is lost. The only hope that remains is to kill Hitler, get a pliable government, in place in Berlin and sign a truce with the Allies, before the Russian's from the East & American's from the West, reach Germany. This was one of the twenty plots that failed to kill the fuhrer & many of the assassins were then caught and summarily shot, while others were hung from meat hooks.

The second flick is 'The boy in the striped pajamas'. A little boy, Bruno, moves with his family to a new home, as his father, takes over as the Commandant of a concentration camp at, what I suspect is Bergen Belsen.The boy thinks that the camp is a farm, till the horror's of the camp slowly come home.

Both movies, for me were a stark reminder, of what one man's madness can deliver and hijack the entire psyche of a nation. Hitler & Germany here.In OB terms we would call it 'group think' and it is fundamental that any nation, organization, team or family reserves the right to question and protest, without which you would find yourself led up the garden path and when you do realize that it is not the right path, the time for redemption would be gone.

The following short piece, gives you a picture of life at a Nazi Concentration camp:

The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the British 11th Armoured Division. 60,000 prisoners were found inside, most of them seriously ill,and another 13,000 corpses lay around the camp unburied.The scenes that greeted British troops were described by the BBC's Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them:
“
...Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
"This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”
"I could not believe the horror of these camps," said one liberator. "We found piles of bodies in train cars that had been dead for days.

Strangely, the only people who seem to abhor, the senseless, killing are Bruno's mother & and grand mother.The Government in Germany recognized the efforts of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his resistance team and declared them war heroes. This happened a few years ago!

HR & MOB Violence!

As HR systems get more sophisticated ( These days we seem to have a metric to measure everything ), we see the odd incident of work place violence turning particularly nasty and some poor soul, finding himself/herself at the receiving end of a mob of angry workers.

The HR manager at PRICOL a Coimbatore, based, auto spare parts plant was lynched a few days ago. Is India the only place where workplace mob led violence turn gory? A search threw the following story up:

Riot, Killing in China Highlight Complex Business Culture

The recent riot at a Chinese steel plant during which protesters upset about possible job losses allegedly killed a manager and scuttled the factory’s takeover by a private firm is a reminder of the complexity of doing business in the country.Janet Carmosky, chief executive of the China Business Network, a group that aims to improve business relations between China and the West, says Chinese typically have stronger feelings about regional ties and nationalism than Americans do.“You’re getting into a very complex relationship landscape when you’re operating in China,” she says. “They’re more emotional about their work than we are in a lot of ways.”
Emotions boiled over in late July at Tonghua Iron and Steel Group, a state-owned enterprise in northeast China. According to the official Xinhua news agency, about 1,000 workers protested as a private firm was in talks to take a controlling share of the steel producer.Xinhua reported that the Beijing-based private firm, Jianlong Heavy Machinery Group, had sent manager Chen Guojun to conduct the talks. Another state media outlet, China Daily, quoted a police officer as saying workers were infuriated about a comment from Chen that thousands of jobs would be cut.Protesters allegedly beat Chen while others threw bricks toward arbitrators and police to thwart a rescue, Xinhua reported. In the wake of the protest, the merger talks were terminated, Xinhua reported. Xinhua quoted a retired worker who seemed irked that Jianlong was only interested in Tonghua when it was profitable.
“Jianlong stopped the merger discussions at the beginning of this year when our company suffered losses amid the financial crisis. It resumed the talks as the company’s business recovered. Why should we let such a private firm to take control of us,” said retired worker Zhang Guanghui, according to Xinhua.Pulling out of a merger when business looks bad and returning to it in better times may make sense in a U.S. business context. But in China, such behavior raises thorny issues of betrayal at not being cared for, says Jason Patent, vice president of cultural affairs at China Prime, a consulting firm that helps Western businesses enter the China market.“The whole notion that you can separate the business world from the personal world is a very American notion,” Patent says.Public demonstrations, including workplace protests, are not uncommon in China. They are among the only ways citizens can fight perceived injustices in the tightly controlled political system.If a private multinational steel firm rather than a private domestic one had been involved in the Tonghua situation, the reaction would have been different, Carmosky says.
Multinationals can expect to be treated with great care in China, she says, because the country is concerned with not losing face.“It would have been more modulated for sure,” she says. “People would have kept their emotions in check.”

It is important to understand that both India & China, are high on cultural parameters like long term orientation and uncertainty avoidance. With this in view, losing a job, is akin to death for the worker & ill informed, incited mobs will kill. Also mobs find security in numbers are quite willing to take extreme positions, as they feel that the group will protect them.

If you are a HR, it is wise, to keep this in mind while negotiating with blue collared folk.

Bollywood!

Yesterday I ran an exercise in class, to check if my spiel on the concepts of Organization Behavior had had any impact on the kids of Term 1/ Sec C ( they choose to call themselves SEXY, but that's another story ).
The exercise was about, a group of Indian Engineers, working in devastated Afghanistan & my point of view was that the greatest challenge that the engineers would face, would be, their own safety and their ability to reach out to an Afghan population that was culturally different,tired & hopeless.
In course of my discussion, it emerged that Bollywood could be a tool to reach out to the local population, as Afghan's are enthralled with Hindi movie's. The more romantic, the better! No blood & gore for them.
The much denigrated Hindi cinema, a brand ambassador for a nation ! Many of you would cringe, but I suspect you will also agree that it's true. A while ago, I asked a few youngster's, what movies they saw & the names reeled out were all Hollywood flicks. Did they see Hindi movies? The answer was a nonchalant no, though I'm sure, given half a chance, these guys would be ogling at Priyanka Chopra in Dostana! English elitism for you.
I'm all for Bollywood. It is one of those invisible strings that holds India together. It has done more, to spread Hindi across, India, than the woolly headed babu's residing in Delhi. Who Care's if the Hindi, that Bollywood speaks is not what comes out of Benaras?
In the erstwhile Soviet Union, Raj Kapoor & Amitab Bachan, represented India as does Shrukh Khan in much of the Arab World.
The Chinese representative to the UN, is said to have said that, India conquered China, without physically invading it, by its ideas of Buddhism & philosophy. I guess Bollywood is doing just the same.
On my list, Hindi cinema will go down as of the definers of this fledgling nation, that we call India!
The exercise on OB, turned out to be great fun & the kids laughed a lot, a just reward for me, I thought!

Beauty & The Brain!

Over the last month I've followed the rather bizarre case of Anand Jon, with a kind of detached interest. For those of you not in the loop, the case is as follows:

Anand Jon, a desi, was educated at the Loyola College, Chennai, as Anand John Alexander.The guy, cool and suave seems to have been the hear throb of the small group of girls in his college at the point of time and revelled in their attention. His pictures from the past show a physically beautiful person, a Stud.
Migrating to the US and getting noticed as a fashion designer, he was talked about by the Page 3 press in India, as a guy who had made it in the land of Liberty. A while ago his world, despite rather vociferous protestations, by his sister Sanjana, fell apart, when he was accused of raping minor girls, who went to him as fashion aspirants. Anand Jon has since been sentenced to 59 years in prison and faces a rather a bleak future.

Sanjana, over the last few days has been drumming up support for her brother, saying that he has been framed by a racist US administration. In the event that authorities in the US of A are racist, did it take these folk this long to comprehend the truth and if they did why did they continue to hang on in the US Of A. Why do people throw their future away, in moments of madness, is a question, that will always intrigue me, and I have no answer as yet.

God is mysterious and I guess one of his ways is not to mix beauty & brains!

Holiday's & The Wizard of Menlo Park!

This week has left India saddened by the unexpected death of one of its finest chief ministers YSR Reddy. the public out poring of grief is testimonial to his greatness as a leader and human being. What followed his death, leaves much to be desired. The no holds barred race for the top slot in Andhra Pradesh, sycophancy is pushing his novice son for the post and shutting down of educational institutions in many states including Karnataka.

I have never been able to deduce, as to why educational institutions take a hit when a person of Eminence passes on. How are school kids to utilize this time & what does it signify? By not working, do we indicate respect?

I was Reading a story a few days ago, about the 'Wizard of Menlo Park'. For the uninitiated, this was Thomas Edison, one of America's greatest sons and inventors. He gave the world the incandescent light and helped electrify the US. When Edison died, there was a proposal in the grief stricken nation, to switch off electric power for a minute as a mark of respect. the US Congress, turned the proposal down, saying that it would be too dangerous. In all likelihood Edison would have concurred.He was passionate about his work and apparently worked upto eighteen hours a day!

Wasting time seems to be endemic to us and I'm glad my institution decided to work yesterday!

Flying high!

I'm a little averse to sitting through long lectures, being exerted and told as to how to run my life. Yesterday was an exception. I sat through a fairly lengthy talk by Capt.Gopinath, the founder of Air Deccan, who spoke on the occasion of the first ever convocation ceremony at my Management Institute, Alliance Business School.

The talk was, his story, his life. All guts and glory. From a poor village boy, to army captain, to entrepreneur he has seen it all. He dared to dream and pursued his dream and won. The story was riveting. He exhorted young students to follow the straight and narrow and remain ethical at all times. Shortcuts to success are not the Captain's mantra.

He also spoke of the distress that farmers face when they lose land in the name of development. Many of us have lost touch with what happens in our villages and an agitation by farmers is just newspaper chatter.For many farmer's loss of their land is akin to a loss of life and are reduced to being refugees in their own state or country. A tragedy that many of us cannot even comprehend.

I was also touched by his mention of his seventh grade teacher who assisted him in getting admission to a Sainik school. Not the type who forgets people who helped him realize his dream.

Capt.Gopinath's mantra has been perseverance and patience. A view that I endorse.