Saturday, September 29, 2007

Congratulations!!!

Team India has done it at last!!! It was a treat watching the World Cup Final (So what if its a smaller version, T20 and all that, I still prefer to call it World Cup!) And what a match it was! After a long long time, we really saw the Indian team play the real game - true cricket and a true team work. Not one Sachin hitting a century and others going for a duck, but each and every member of the team contributing towards the success of the team, not in one or two matches, but consistently, be it against Pakistan, or Australia or any other team!!! Thanks guys! you have brought back the passion I once had for cricket, which was missing long time. I have started enjoying cricket once again...its for Dhoni and his team, I will not fight with my husband anymore for watching cricket and not letting me watch the stupid "reality" shows on T.V, shows which are not "real" at all! I would rather sit besides him and watch the Men in Blue in action!

A couple of discoveries I made during this World Cup, dont know whether everybody will agree to me on them. Would love to get comments on my discoveries though.

Its time for the young guys to rule, reminds me of the TOI camp... With due respect to seniors in our cricket team, guys your time is up. You have given us some great and rare moments of glory, which no Indian can ever forget, but its time for you to pass on the hurdle to the younger lot... You can try out commentry, am sick and tired of Harsha Bhogle. Sachin and commentry, well am not quite sure, but Sachin can definitely start cricket coaching and camps and help us build our Cricket Team for 2020? Rahul, with his cute looks (ah I jus love him for everything else other than his game) can stick to commercials, and even try out acting in Balaji Serials. And our Dada can become a coach, or do consulting for the captains of our team, because I truely believe he has been one of the greatest captain India has ever had. But whatever it is, not more playing on the field please!

Dhoni as a captain rocks! He is as cool on the field as his hair style. And his dare bare show reminded me of Dada again. History repeats itself... n thank God it does!

This World Cup saw the rise of the two sub continent teams... our next door neighbour, and the country we love to hate and hate to love, Pakistan and India. Just a wild thought... If India and Pakistan gets together someday ( and I jus hope it does, in my lifetime), we are going to be the super power of the world. Any game that this two countries play, be it hockey or cricket... we are going to be the world champs! Our deadly combination of the world class batsmen that India has, and superb bowlers that Pakistan has... ah its a Dream Team, which no Australia, or South Africa can ever defeat! Our respected political leaders of both the countries... r u guys listenning?

Shall end with an ode to the Men in Blue. Keep it up guys. You have made us proud and you can do it in the future as well. Looking forward to the series in Australia. Please dont disappoint us. You win or lose, play the game in the true spirit and play the way no one ever forgets... Chak De! India.

Cheers@

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Human Resource or Human Asset

There is an established function known as "Human Resource Management (HRM)" in every organization which manages the human resources of the organization from the perspective of growth and development. The philosophy of this function is pretty clear, making use of professionals as resources with a view to achieve organizational goals. This is quite a successful formula to develop professionals in any enterprise management framework where the enterprise bound by limitations has very little scope to offer to professionals beyond the scope of the organization. However, professionals in knowledge economy have the freedom to think beyond obvious. They can contribute to the industry in any manner they want. When there is a win-win situation, both the organization and the professional have synergic effect. However, many a times it is evident in production centric environment that organizational demand gets priority over the expectations of the professionals. In this process, professionals have to compromise and forego many of their dreams for the sake of 'organizational spirit'. Knowledge economy has put the professionals ahead of the organization. The contribution of the organization is very much dependant on what the professionals can offer. In the process, a professional uses the organization as a channel to reach the customers who are located inside an industrial framework. A typical HRM framework fails to address this space. These three separate entities, the professional, the channel and the Industry are required to be continuously monitored for the assessment of the growth of any 'human resource' aspiring to become an 'human asset' . The level of priority of each creates various combinations for a professional to develop his career path.
Any person has to create his own capability to survive in any growing business situation. When the capability is acceptable by the benefactor, a customer, the initiation process for development of a human asset starts. However, at the initial stage, he needs a channel to reach the customer in the form of an organization. His capability and organizational requirement have to match for such combination to work. The customer is an entity who gets benefited by the knowledge of the professional and the organization gradually becomes a secondary entity to the customer.

Knowledge Economy

Who am I? Why have I come to this world? What role I need to play in life? At times all of us have to answer these questions raised by our own mind. Spiritual world has answers to all these questions. But I have no intention of giving you the insights of the spiritual world. Since our childhood our parents have taught us all that we need to know as a human being. I am trying to peep into the mind of a professional when he tries to seek the answers to these questions. A professional has the ability to earn his living by trading knowledge of his domain. Knowledge has a journey path. Information technology domain has a different story to tell when it traces the evolution of knowledge from data and information. Data is an entity which has otherwise no meaning to anyone unless it is converted into information e.g. a shirt hanging in a departmental store. Information is what we hold after we make a meaning out of data e.g. price of the shirt is $30, 100% cotton. We do not take any action on this information. Knowledge evolves when we digest information and take action on that, e.g. we compare the prices and purchase the one we like the most. Knowledge is taken to one step further when the shirts of the neibouring departmental store are compared with the one we have full information of. That is called intelligence. Information technology has given us the opportunity to convert knowledge into intelligence. Let's now look at ourselves when we call us 'knowledge professionals'. What is our role in the knowledge economy when communication band-width is made available to us by information technology world?
An economy is called 'knowledge economy' when information is freely traded in order to derive knowledge out of it. Here the word 'trading' has a different connotation; it means 'digestion'. Knowledge economy has provided us the opportunity to create information out of data and digest it as knowledge. As a professional, we started our preparatory work in the schools and colleges. We aspired to become someone who would like to make use of all the information coming to us as understanding; would process the information and make a decision out of that. A few walk extra steps to move in a different direction in search of intelligent decision-making. In this process, all our dreams are transformed into reality. Whatis the dream we generally have when we step into the advance stage of academic journey? We need to create something that no one else has ever thought of. We prepare ourselves for that; we sincerely listen to the discussion in the class and try to look beyond the subject for securing the dream. Some people always do it for scoring high marks in the examination. I have no intention to introspect that state of mind. I am only talking of those who want to make a difference in their professional life and our own role in the knowledge society to give them the right opportunity.
With the knowledge that we acquire in the school and colleges, we enter in the professional world and look for opportunities to convert dream into reality. Earlier in the production economy we had to find capital and skilled labour to manufacture something as a product of our choice. In knowledge economy, the product equivalence is intellectual assets. We can claim that asset as ours; we can trade that asset sitting in our drawing rooms. Band width has given us the opportunity. We can acquire any amount of knowledge from the rest of world; search engines are the magicians who throw us anything from the empty box. Are we all aware of our potential in the modern economy? Our religion as a professional in knowledge economy is to realise our potential into productivity using the band width.
I earlier started this article with three questions. Who am I? Why have I come to this world? What role I need to play in life? We need to understand the fact of our own life intelligently. We are not mere puppets in the hand of organization which would satisfy its profit-making goal by trading us as commodities and would provide us no opportunity to trade our knowledge for the creation of intellectual assets. No amount of money can lure us. In the Maslow's theory of hierarchical needs, money loses its charm after some time. When that time comes to your life, you would feel homeless. Our home as a professional is shattered by then. The prayer room seems to have done nothing in our professional life inspite of the fact that knowledge economy has given us more power to show our potential to the industry at large. Organization has only one role to play in knowledge economy; it acts just a medium for us to relise our potential to productivity, helps us reaching our dream home, the industry. An organization is a mute spectator in the whole game of transition where I am the giver and industry is the receiver. We have to understand this hard fact of the professional world around us.

Insight and Innovation

Insight is the capacity to grasp hidden nature of a situation in an intuitive manner.
The worth of a professional is enhanced only when he develops a deep, thorough, or mature analytical ability based out of the power of acute observation. Insight allows professionals to command esteem or respect from the market place; it reveals how the information leads to a state of knowledge and intelligence. Innovation, on the hand is the act of introducing something new. Innovation is the process of making changes to something established by exploiting a new idea, method or device; the outcome is developing a new dimension of performance perceived by customer. There are differing magnitudes of innovation.
Insight emerges into consciousness with a sense of discovery. It can be a slower, more gradual process where the professional undergoes a simple but intellectual comprehension. Concepts constructed in a problem solving environment is replaced by deeper insight that leads to a transition to opportunity creation state. There is continuous interaction between insight and innovation. The result of any innovation can be an insight in the form of new or improved value. Again, for innovation to occur, sometimes insight of the problem situations is required more than the generation of a creative idea.
Innovation is the basic driving force behind maturity of service delivery. A human asset has to extend normal service delivery with a new idea that has not previously been explored. Ideas with regards to internal systems and processes are the fuel that keeps a human asset grow in the potential chain. An idea can originate from anywhere at anytime but the organisation owns the responsibility of turning the ideas of human assets into reality. Innovation is still a necessary first step for professionals to succeed in knowledge economy. Successful business organisation innovate continuously in order to create and sustain a source of competitive advantage.

Monday, September 3, 2007

A nation's journey through 60 years: What's next

For an individual 60 years would mean a lifetime experience of love, friendship, betrayal , death and the other shades of the spectrum of life. For an organization 60 years would mean the mature time when it sees itself propelling towards future based on the momentum gained during the growing past years. But what would 60 years mean for a nation ? It’s too short time in the pages of history where a decade is dedicated at the most a chapter or two.

As a nation we carry historical baggage dating from the Gupta era when Hinduism shaped itself distinct from the prevailing Sanatan religion of the Aryans, absorbing incessant attacks from Western frontiers and ultimately absorbing its attackers into its fold that reached its peak in the glory of the Mughals to the last 200 years of colonial rule. So even before 1947 when India declared itself to be an independent nation its characteristics traits were shaped long back in history. Only thing that was in suspense was how we would carry our heavy luggage down the lanes of future.

Looking back at the last 60 years as a nation we seem to see almost all. As they say in detective stories follow the money , if we see the nations economic history it has seen the Nehuruvian socio-economics, the license raj of Indira to an IMF scripted turnaround by opening itself to the world and suddenly finding itself amongst one of the largest growing economies. Indian IT industry pioneered the emergence of Indian companies which was reflected in the manufacturing and service sector as well. Some of it was an outcome of a conscious effort and some of it happened because it was destined to happen.

In our growing years of democracy we saw the fading importance of rule by a political party with a national base. We saw the black emergency years when Indian democracy choked itself in the same hands it was supposed to be freed. Luckily the situation didn’t prevail for long. Slowly the emergence of regional parties brought about the concept of coalition government. In an utopian situation this scenario would have been applauded as regional agendas would be weighted with the same importance as the national one. Unfortunately in India politics is meant to be largely vote bank based. And if the largest section of the voters are illiterates then democracy is dragged down to be a mere comedy of arm-twisting and ass kissing.

During these journey we saw ourselves engaged in war too with our neighbors. Fortunately nearly every time we were able to maintain our sovereignty although the costs were sometimes too high. But the in-depth analysis of the weaknesses and preventive as well as remedial actions are still in the to be done list.

The last 60 years is also marked with partionist and communal movements ranging from demand for separate states to separation from the state as well. Most of them started within the foray of parliamentarian politics and later emerged as a battle against the state. Gradually they lost the very essence of their cause and everybody interpreted the cause with their own understanding and resorted to terror tactics. A part of the fuel to the fire was supplied by international war-mongers in pursuit of future of weapon business. The net result is that till date India has been the biggest sufferer in the era of global terrorism. What started from neglected north-eastern backyards to the over-protected valleys of Kashmir reached the heart of the nation. Now we are used to the fact that the next big bomb blast could happen anytime.

Each of the last six decades of our national life had its own flavor, unique aspiration, characteristic problems and their solutions. The next decade could be marked with the undomitable aspiration of being big. But that aspiration would be hindered with fighting terrorism home and abroad and the growing disparity of the rich and poor , the gap which will be widened day by day of these non-uniform progress. All these will go parallel with the obvious degeneration of the politicos until someday somebody decides to do something very very drastic.

But one thing will never change. What started as a dream to reach for the skies and was minimized to a mere survival was able to turn around and is now being looked by the remaining world as the probable next big thing. The promises the nation holds to its future citizens will manifest themselves in reality is still the big question. But the momentum has already given the extra push in the inertia. Only if we could ride on and propel the acceleration in the right direction another decade from now on another prouder Indian will be writing about even glorious seventh decade of the nations history.