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Greetings!
#5. August 1, 2012
Linkedin Poll
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Role of HR in facilitating Organizational vision into reality…
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Lessons In Sustainability From India's Entrepreneurs
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Imagine Life
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This World…
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General
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In this issue…
Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam said, "If you salute your duty, you need not salute anybody. But if you pollute your duty, you have to salute everybody.“ We, after all, have a choice. Do what pleases us and then face the consequences or else abide by our duty and stand tall. Theodore Roosevelt gave us the caution too, “We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.” Preserving environment in our own small way itself is a big contributory initiative. This is part of our ‘dev ryna’ [obligation to gods] too! Tune up your car, switch-it-off at traffic signals, avoid wasting water, switch-off electricity when not needed etc. etc. are just few small steps. You know more than me. Ask Y. Start MAG – My Actions Game.
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Cheers, Rajiv Khurana Editor PS – Please don’t forget to send your feedback at rajivkhurana@vsnl.com. You may even call me at 9810211256.
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The organization/s that I work/ed for demonstrate HR processes and practices vis-a-vis organizational Vision
Linkedin Poll 50 40 Response
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30 20 10 0 %age
A 44
C 14
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A clearly defined co-relationship
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A confused and mixed up co-relationship
C
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Hardly any co-relationship
Total 111 Source: http://linkd.in/NzWB5E Conducted by Rajiv Khurana during July 2012 Respondents’ profile:
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B 42
45 + Male Female
63% 78% 22%
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#5. August 1, 2012
A B C
D E Intellectual property: Rajiv Khurana, CMC, FIMC
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CMC, FIMC www.thepersonnellab.com www.rajivkhurana.com
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F G H
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Role of HR in facilitating Organizational vision into reality‌
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Role of HR in facilitating Organizational vision into reality…
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#5. August 1, 2012
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A
Align
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Build
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Challenge
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Deliver
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Examine
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Fast-track
People have personal goals and specific agenda. Discover them. Align them with the team agenda and the organizational agenda. This sets up the foundation for talent engagement. When people come with their ‘will’ and ‘skill’, they need the right environment/culture to nurture and perform. Build the pedestal. A wake up and shake up call is needed regularly. Assumptions need to be challenged. Life and business as usual needs interventions through vibrating and relevant thoughts. Plant them. Create processes and policies that produce hassle-free results. Be an example of credibility and reliance. Discard lip-service, enhance true-service. Be an example for others to emulate. Regular critique is critical. Measure impact both qualitatively and quantitatively. Show willingness to change based on the response. Develop stiffer HR analytics to keep on course. No one has seen the ‘slow and steady’ winning the race. These days the ‘fastest and the steadiest’ moves leaps and bound. Be agile. You can’t rest on your heals. Toes can only give you some comfort.
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Role of HR in facilitating Organizational vision into reality…
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Gear up
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Harness
Future arrives sooner than before. The writing on the wall needs to be read even before it gets written. Demonstrate consistently that you are far ahead in terms of ideas, readiness, actions and even reactions. Be the Gardner who loves the planted saplings. External supply of plants is getting tough and dearer to get on time. Think beyond the regulars. Develop, nurture and increasingly use the skill set of consultants and contractors.
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Invest
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Justify
Grow beyond processes and policies. Invest in strengthening the passion to perform. Move out to learn multiple functions. Short duration battles of T20 need ‘thorough bred all-round’ calibre. Create the distinction of ‘practitioners of HR’ and ‘facilitator from the HR function’. Hold back your gun. Let others shoot and grow as the people leader. You are the James Bond who does everything from behind the scene yet never goes to collect the medal. Let others enjoy the accomplishments. They will make it long lasting. This is your justification. Or else, leave the HR function…
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Lessons In Sustainability From India's Entrepreneurs David Ferris
If succeeding as an entrepreneur in the U.S. is difficult, then doing so in India is next to impossible. Cities are polluted and crowded with slums, the government is shamefully corrupt, and millions of potential customers are in distant villages where there is no Internet or even electricity. But entrepreneurs are figuring out how to grow under these difficult circumstances, with lessons for us all. That is the message of a report issued last week by advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi. It amounts to a pep talk for a global economy still in the swoon of recession and facing looming shortages of water and power and the specter of climate change. All corporate citizens face stiff headwinds, but, as the report notes, “the world’s sustainability challenges are arriving first and fastest in India.” The report highlights Indian companies that have applied some universal principles that other businesses may have forgotten. Those principles include self-reliance, looking to people instead of machines for solutions, thinking in whole systems, and embracing the Indian spirit of “jugaad,” a Hindi word that means overcoming limited resources by improvising like crazy. If these entrepreneurs can succeed in the face of daunting obstacles, the report implies, then there’s no reason you can’t. Take a look at some examples from the report: ‘Human Bank Machines’: Thousands of Indian villages are so remote that they have no bank branch, meaning that millions of rupees end up hidden under mattresses instead of in circulation. The Reserve Bank of India employs “business correspondents” who serve as traveling bank tellers for these far flung customers. As of 2011, the bank employed 60,000 correspondents who had opened 75 million bank accounts. The accounts pay about 4% interest, and the correspondents receive a commission on every transaction and earn up to $200 a month, in a country where the average monthly wage is $65.
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Hot Lunch Delivery: More than 5,000 people are employed in the megacity of Mumbai delivering hot, homemade lunches to day workers. The “dabbawalla” — literally, “a person with a box” — doesn’t make the lunch; he picks it up from the worker’s home and delivers it in steel containers, and then transports the empties back home. In 1998, Forbes gave the dabbawallas of Mumbai a six-sigma rating, meaning that they deliver with 99.9999999% efficiency. That’s one error for every six million meals. The dabbawallas’ latest competition? American fast-food outlets like McDonald’s, KFC and Taco Bell. http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidferris/2012/06/13/lessons-in-sustainability-fromindiasentrepreneurs/
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Amazon, Meet UPS: E-commerce company Flipkart has made itself into the largest online bookseller in a country where there is no reliable, inexpensive courier service like Window for action FedEx or UPS. Furthermore, Indian consumers are leery of loving professionals buying goods they haven’t laid eyes on. Flipkart solved these obstacles by doing the deliveries itself, letting customers inspect goods before buying, and accepting #5. August 1, 2012 cash on delivery. Like Amazon, the company is now branching out from books into a larger universe of products. Factories Without Waste: Asian Paints, based in Mumbai, is the largest paint company in India and the fourth-largest decorative paint maker in the world. When the government forbid the company from dumping its effluent, the company decided that instead of paying the high costs of disposal, it would figure out how to eliminate its liquid waste altogether. Now the company’s plants produce no discharge and use the recycled water for flushing and gardening. The report quotes Manish Choksi, the company’s chief strategy officer, as saying, “It’s no longer an economic burden.” Fair Prices for Farmers: The bane of India’s farmers has always been the middlemen. Armed with better market data than the peasants, they capitalize on ignorance and pay less for produce than it’s really worth. Enter the Indian conglomerate ITC, which has built 6,500 Internet-enabled market centers in the hinterlands. Dubbed an “e-Choupal,” named after the Hindi word for “village meeting place,” the center gives growers access to the latest commodity prices, weather forecasts, and other useful information. ITC buys crops at the e-Choupal, but farmers can access the data whether or not they sell to the company. Cabling Cash by Cellphone — India has millions of laborers who work far from home and wish to send money to their families. Only 10 percent of villages have a bank branch — but almost everybody has access to a cellphone. EKO Financial Services figured out a clever and nimble method for mobile delivery of small amounts of cash. Every town has a merchant that has a credit or microlending relationship with its customers. EKO leveraged these relationships by making the merchant the local “branch,” accepting and disbursing cash payments through the EKO system. As of 2011, the company had 150,000 customers and worked with 1,500 merchants. Power from Rice Waste — The state of Bihar is India’s poorest, with 85 percent of the people living off the power grid. Its chief crop is rice, which results in another burden: 1.8 billion kilograms of rice husks go to the landfill each year, where they produce methane, a gas that warms the globe. This is the business opportunity of Husk Power Systems, which is developing gasifiers to convert rice husks into electricity. Fifty kilograms of husks per hour can provide a modest amount of power to 500 people. Husk still has its first projects under development but has identified 25,000 sites that could use its power plants.
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I wonder how applicable these lessons really are to U.S. businesses. What inspiration, if any, can your company draw from these examples? Or does the report have it all wrong about India?
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#5. August 1, 2012 "Since ancient times India has been famous for its wisdom and its thought. The ancient Persians, Greek and Romans were eager to learn from its sages and philosophers. When, in the eighteenth century, the first translations of some Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita became available to the West, European philosophers rhapsodized about the profundity and beauty of these writings. Here they encountered a fusion of philosophy and religion, a deep wisdom and a concern with the ultimate, that had no parallel in either contemporary Western philosophy or Western religion. Indian philosophy is highly sophisticated and very technical and surpasses in both in volume and subtlety.“ - Professor Klaus K. Klostermaier "Wherever we direct our attention to Hindu literature, the notion of infinity presents itself." - Sir William Jones
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No other living tradition can claim scriptures as numerous or as ancient as Hinduism; none of them can boast of an unbroken tradition as faithfully preserved as the Hindu tradition. Hindu literature is the most ancient and extensive religious writings in the world. Hindu religion is not derived from a single book. It has many sacred writings which serve as a source of doctrine. The most important texts include the Vedas, Upanishads, the Puranas, the Epics Ramayana, Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita.
Ymag is an initiative of YPROSINDIA, a social enterprise founded by Rajiv Khurana