The young at work

Over the last few days I have been subjected to long lectures from friends and acquaintances on the quality of fresh graduates entering the work force and the time required in getting them up to speed. While complaints abound, solutions offered are few and far between and there is smug undertone that we ( my generation ) were better than the current crop. Considering the volume being written on the current youngsters one would assume that we are facing an epidemic of sorts and that India has missed the bus or about to miss the one on demographic dividend. What's the real truth? Well, here is my spiel: 1. We tend to reflect on the past through rose tinted glasses and with fond nostalgia. In short - we had our share of gaffes and were as much as clowns! 2. Our managers were a lot more patient with us than we are with the current breed of graduates. I had pretty good bosses's and wince at what they had to put up from me. 3. Today a larger volume enters the professional workforce and there are bound to be hits and misses.We had ours too. So are things hunky dory and are we being paranoid ? No, on the contrary, I think serious problems do exist. At the start of any career a youngster needs to be able to manage oneself and his/her environment. There seems to be a serious problem here. A young career professional never seems to grow up and is unable to deal with a changed environment.The mind set simply does not exist to accept that serious adulthood has begun!It's like if SRK can prance around trees at 50, why can't I? Simple things cannot be grasped, even to the point where the youngster can answer as to why exactly he/she is in a job? Some obvious areas of concern 1. Arriving to the office on time 2. Being civil to others at the work place 3. Distinguishing between work time and personal time 4.The work place is not a country club and point for socialization but is one where serious work gets done 5. Work gets done in teams and the individual is just a cog in the giant wheel 6. Learning never stops but needs to be accelerated at work 7. A career is like running a marathon and not a 100 yards sprint. One needs focus,discipline and the the good sense to look after one's health rather than indulge in wild partying and drinking binges. Not all of us are Superman! The great Indian middle class taught many of these values to their children at home, but that seems to have been lost, so many of the young are buffeted by conflicting pulls at the workplace and fail to focus. When the inevitable pink slip arrives it leaves many shattered and bitter. While I envy today's young for many things that I missed, I also feel extremely sad at their inability to come to terms with a complex, complicated and ruthless world of work.

Western Practice & Indian Thought!

A little while ago, I reconnected with an ex student of mine on a business trip to another city. The young man, took time off from what was apparently a busy work schedule to touch base with me.We decided that there was much catching up to do, so we headed off to a nearby pub and downed a couple of mugs of draft beer. The evening was great fun amidst loud English pop music. The youngster obviously was very proud of his work and the progress that he had made. I was glad that he was doing well and his career was on an upward curve since on an earlier occasion at college he had looked despondent and very very low. Well to cut a long story short, we go-sipped about Bangalore and his class fellows and common friends that we had. Since I had a packed day ahead, we decided to wind up early, even while the evening was still young and he offered to drop me off at my hotel. This done, while leaving he bent down to touch my feet, the quintessential Indian manner of showing respect to an older person who one respected. It is called Power Distance ! I was touched and very very proud. I have told this story to many of my older friends and most laugh it off asking if we had drunk anything stronger than beer? The answer is no, it was beer and we were not tipsy. I believe that whatever we might like to think, the denim clad Indian youngster is still very Indian and not culturally adrift.In a confused, over sexed world, youngsters are buffeted by conflicting thoughts and emotions but at the end of the day their Indianess remains and they have not abrogated their value systems. As for me, I was very pleased that students that I had taught still remembered me with some affection in a world where permanence is in serious short supply!

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!