Saytam Scandal: A lesson in doing one's role

I was on the road today meeting probable clients and talking on the phone with colleagues and friends, when I was browsing the net on my mobile.

Was stunned to read that Satyam Chairman Ramalinga Raju had resigned following his admission of massive accounting fraud over the years.

Satyam was the place I joined after my MBA from 1999 to 2002 , and I have really fond memories of the people I worked along with in their training group. However over the last fortnight the organization has been going through a massive crisis of investor confidence and the confessions of the ex-CEO has effective pulled the curtains on the organization's status as one of India's top 5 IT outsourcing firms.

As people are discovering - it is not merely the fact that firms have directors (who are seen as independent) and external auditors (in this case, PricewaterhouseCoopers) but that they really live up to their roles.

I am no expert in corporate governance, but honestly how can you brush such a massive corporate fraud under the carpet and have supposedly "independent" parties assess and advise you?

And how come there were no whistleblowers from within Satyam's Internal Audit and Finance team? A conspiracy of silence?

Something stinks - and Satyam (which means truth) has been lying about it a long time now.

News: $1 billion of our cash doesn't exist
Huge Blow to Indian Tech
Satyam fraud may catch Maytas cos. in its vortex

From the blogs
Voices from Twitter

2009's first Carnival of HR!

Namaste and welcome to the new year's first Carnival of HR!

We've had some great entries for the Carnival, which proves that bloggers might go easy on blogging during the vacations, but the quality of their posts stays the same :-)

Without further ado let's jump straight to the thought provoking posts that talent bloggers from across the world have been posting about :-)

• Mark at Inlexion Point has some predictions for HR for 2009, drawing on the Chinese zodic sign of the Ox!
• Wally Bock at the Three Star Leadership blog focuses on a topical issue - drawing attention to the layoff survivors - and what organizations and HR groups should do to help them.
• Picking up the thread Rick at Flip Chart Fairy Tales (love that name!) asks if HR professionals are ready for the recession.While Rick's data looks at the UK - the lessons are relevant for all HR professionals in economies (like India and US) where we focused on 'development and recruitment' thanks to the earlier 'war for talent'.
• Moving on to Leadership, Nina wonders whether some leaders have leadership pheromones. What do you think? I think those pheromones reside in the behaviors that leaders exhibit and I guess Nina means that too :)
• Chris Young at the Maximize Possibility Blog reminds leaders that succession planning is a fiduciary responsibility. Whether it is Apple's Steve Jobs, or the top leaders of Unilever India caught in the terrorist attack in Mumbai, succession planning as Chris mentions is their responsibility to the shareholders.
• Dan McCarthy at the Great Leadership blog looks back at Best Leadership and Management Development books of 2008. Great list there, and reminds us that we should all take time out to read everyday!
• Continuing with the Leadership theme Denise at Team Doc shares how to fix problems on the leadership team.
  
• Anna at the Engaging Brand reminds us that creating new ideas should be what we do everyday.
• On the other hand, HR Minion would rather call them Goals than Resolutions because it adds structure, are attainable and have steps to achieve them. 
  
• Paul Hebert from the Fistful of Talent blog reminds us that to build organizational culture it's important to sweat the small stuff.
• Alice at the Taleo Blog reminds us that talent pools are no longer be constrained geographically, so is your firm ready to look at hiring people at a global level?
• Amit Avasthi at HR Bytes looks at Talent Management across a group of companies (a conglomerate) and the issues of different HR processes, systems that might impede standardisation.
• Ann Bares at Compensation Force recommends Variable Pay as the best way to build partnership between the organization and its employees, if it is done right. And she has the answer how it can be done right!
• And continuing with the compensation theme Abhishek Mittal has ideas for a benefits market within an organization. Interesting!
  
• And Jon Ingham points us to Strategy guru Gary Hamel's thinking on Management 2.0 and implications for HR folks.
•  Rowan from Fortify Your Oasis reminds us that 2009 would not be such an easy year, if you are job hunting (or even hunkering down and working) and I guess we should fortify our own selves and brace towards it :-)
• However Susan Heathfield of About HR reminds us that in turmoil lies opportunity and that we should continue to focus on the important things.
  

How's that to start off some food for thought to start the new year with?
Have a great 2009 people!

Overweight? Air India does not need you

Air India fires "overweight" air hostesses and specifies it's due to safety reasons, reports BBC:

A spokesman for Air India told the BBC that the hostesses were sacked after they were declared "medically unfit" to fly.
"They haven't been flying for two to three years for being exceptionally overweight," spokesman Jitendra Bhargava said.
He said that the women were between 11kg and 32kg overweight and that "all efforts to get them to reduce weight had failed".
Air India said safety was a "prime function" and that "being grossly overweight does have a bearing on reflexes and can impair agility required to perform the emergency functions".
A hostess with Air India, Sheela Joshi, who is not one of the nine dismissed, said those colleagues had received termination letters in the past three to four days.
"They were told there are no vacancies in ground jobs and since you are unable to lose weight, you have been terminated from service," Mrs Joshi told the BBC.
Arvind Sharma, a lawyer for the air hostesses, said he would try to get the dismissals revoked as part of the ongoing appeal in the Supreme Court.

I can't believe that a government carrier is doing this - bet this won't last and the government will have to reinstate them.

Using Twitter to find a Job

Did I tell you that I am a Twitter addict? For those who don't know what in the world is twitter - here's a small description from wikipedia -

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through an application

The Wall Street Journal talks about how twitter is now becoming a source for people to find a job:

Looking for a new job, Alexa Scordato didn't email or call her contacts about possible openings. Instead, she messaged them via the social-networking Web site Twitter.com.
Her brief message: "Hey there! Looking for a Social Media job up in Boston. Are you guys doing any entry level hires?"
Within a week, she had an interview. Within two weeks, she had a job.
The site, which lets users publish supershort updates of what they're doing, is a virtual meeting ground where a range of communities -- from moms to media professionals -- come to converse informally.
It's been criticized as a site for sharing mundane details about everyday activities. But people like 22-year-old Ms. Scordato, who used Twitter to privately message some people she'd met at a conference, show the site can be more than that.
"I would guess that if I had just sent them a long email with my résumé, I might not have gotten a response as fast as I did," says Ms. Scordato, who was hired by Mzinga, a Boston-area company that helps businesses use social technology.

I've noticed there are a lot of recruiters on Twitter - and guess the most useful jobs would be for the people who hang about at twitter mostly - geeks and social media folks. But soon as Twitter gets more and more mainstream - can you ignore twitter - as a network for job hunting or recruiting?

Previous Posts referencing Twitter
Social Media and Organizations
ROI of Blogging and Twitter
Twittering and HR
Yahoo Layoffs and the Twittering Employee
Am on Twitter now

9 New Year Wishes for Managers and HR people for 2009

In 2009 may all of us:

1. Get to know what each of our employees aspires towards.
2. Have regular conversations with each of our customers and clients (use the phone, blogs, twitter or take them out for lunch!)
   
3. Be ready to make remarkable products and deliver exceptional service
4. Refuse to accept mediocrity 
5. Treat people with fairness.
6. Spend good time with family and friends and have a life outside work too
7. Learn a radically new skill (or two!)
8. Not let the economic downturn affect our sense of optimism 
9. Understand that success and happiness depend on you - not on what is given to you.
   

Be happy and content and thanks for sticking with me for so long!

The Cost of Teleconferencing

Recently I was talking to a friend who heads Marketing for a Financial firm. She asked me "So how much time do you spend in telecons?"

I was surprised and said that I hardly did so. I use the phone primarily to text or to only set up appointments. The actual conversation is almost all of the time face to face.

The reason is that face to face conversation is the richest mode to exchanging information. And while I am a big evangelist of virtual communities and social networking and communication, for some kind of interactions, like building a rapport with a client there is no substitute for direct face to face communication.

So this friend tells me "I am on a telecon with my boss in Singapore first thing in the morning and I end the day with a call with our US office - the call starts at 7 pm and ends around 8.30 pm!"

She goes on "And sometimes during the day, we have to have video conference with other efolks in India, so we go from our office in Colaba (where we don't have videoconferencing facility) to Andheri (where we do). However due to bandwidth problems only five people can be on the video-con. So everytime the 6th person tries to join - one of the people in the conversation actually is pushed out!"

"You know, I think this consensus driven - lets-all-arrive-at-an-agreement mindset is to blame for so many telecons in official work! My husband and I have two different landlines at home for our respective conference calls. I just wish we didn't get invited to all these useless telecons and videocons - and people made their decisions and informed us."

As a guy who believes in collaboration and that people should have a say in the decisions that affect them and their work, this comment took me by surprise. However, it stands to reason if overdone - this approach intrudes and encroaches into a person's family time - she would react this way.

What do you think? How can organizations help people to be collaborative and yet not inflect these issues?

Influence and Power

The blogosphere has been a-buzz the last weekend on popularity and influence.

A Prof of mine actually used to take an elective in my MBA which was earlier called Power, Influence and Politics which was later renamed to the more politically correct Leadership, Influence and Power.

These three terms are closely related. One builds power which is not linked to formal positions of authority and positions by being of service to others. What one leader can offer by way of service can differ, from tangible benefits to a higher level of identity and aspirations - which typically gets called Charismatic Leadership. However what we are actually talking about is Servant Leadership.

In the age of Social Media, where your readers and attention is a finite resource, you have to add something to what they know, feel and understand in each and every post. One cannot be a leader in social media unless one recognises that. That is why Scoble is right when he says:

Here’s why I’ve been saying for the past year that it is far more important who you follow than who follows you: if you follow people just to get followers you’ll end up being overworked, deep in information overload, and superficial to boot. You won’t have a philosophy. It +will+ show. You might be able to fool most of the idiots most of the time, but eventually they’ll see the difference between the “collect follower” types and the “surround yourself with smart people” types like Tim O’Reilly or Jay Rosen.
I can smell the “follow me” types a million miles away, can’t you?
One crowd is off the rails in idiot land, the other is building something of lasting value.
Which one do we want to incent? The “follow me” idiots? Or the “try to get smarter” crowd?
I know I’m swimming upstream, but I want to get smarter. Screw the page views. Screw the business models. They all are lame anyway. I want better friends. Better content. Better news. Better ideas. That means I need to find better people to be part of my social network. Idiots be damned.

Don't become the expert

Earlier somewhere on this blog (in a post that mysteriously vanished!) I asked people as part of a 8 step process for career success, to become an 'expert'.

However, the truth is expertise sits uneasily on my shoulders. I shudder when people describe me as any kind of expert. Even more than I shudder when someone (you know who you are!) describes me as a "Thought Leader".

This post is essentially a reminder to myself, as 2008 draws to a close to understand that the time of the expert is a fleeting one.

Most experts predicted the Indian Premier League to be a modest success.
Most experts probably didn't ever think in 2007 that the US could have a black president.
Most experts were betting on a burgeoning global economy and growing stock markets in India and elsewhere.
Most experts thought that a firm that is a century old won't vanish in 2008 and that Toyota would continue to make operating profits in all quarters and that an entire industry won't vanish.

Don't become an expert. Stay a student, prepared to unlearn and learn and relearn. That is the key to relevance.

P.S. Realised that my friend Gaurav had posted something similar :-)

2008's last Carnival of HR

Whew! What a fast paced year it has been!

The year's last Carnival of HR is already up!

Peggy Andrews at The Career Encouragement - where posts vary from the implications of the economic crisis (special mention to Jon Ingham's post for us HR folks inHuman vs. Financial Capital?), to leadership issues ( special food for thought Wally Bock asks "what is leadership at it's core?" in Leaders Eat Last) then there's HR Bytes on Gartner Stresses on Employer Branding and Social Networking which focusses on my two favorite issues - Employment Branding and Social Networking, together!

Oh, by the way, I am hosting 2009's first Carnival of HR on 7th January. So if you have any interesting HR related posts, let me know about it by sending its URL, a synopsis and post it to i@gautamghosh.net !

Booz Allen Hamilton's free ebook Capturing The People Advantage

Here's a nice Christmas gift to HR (and others too!) professionals! You can get a free PDF ebook Capturing The People Advantage: Thought Leaders on Human Capital by authors at Booz & Company and Booz Allen Hamilton.

You can download it at http://www.strategy-business.com/HCreader

[Clicking on the button will require you to enter an email id and some data about yourself. The link with the download instructions will be sent to that email id.]

The authors (Richard Rawlinson, a partner with Booz & Company based in London. Walter McFarland is a vice president with Booz Allen Hamilton based in Herndon, Virginia. Laird Post is a principal with Booz & Company based in San Francisco.) interviewed leading HR executives and academic experts in the United States, Europe and the Middle East and Asia to find the latest innovative people strategies in such areas as metrics capabilities, flexibility, “market segmentation” strategies for managing human capital, attracting and retaining talent through employer branding, future talent acquisition strategies, and leadership development and learning programs.

How can expanding multinationals train thousands of poorly educated citizens in India and China into a highly skilled workforce? What should an organization do when a government controlled monopoly is transformed at the stroke of a pen into a public company in one of the world’s most competitive industries? And how can a company adapt to a merger if not one of the company’s 20,000 employees has the same job? These are just some of the questions addressed Capturing The People Advantage.

Hope you enjoy it! I have downloaded it too and will share my thoughts soon :D