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Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:00:02 EST How to Manage Gen U: Generation Unretired As the recession forces more older workers to postpone retirement, a major shift is under way in the makeup of the U.S. labor pool
| Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:00:02 EST Special Report: Managing the Unretired 
| Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:44:28 EST Proxy Contests and Shareholder Slates Bev Behan asks former CalPERS governance chief and current Shamrock Capital Advisors exec Dennis Johnson how he chooses boards to target and what to consider if you're asked to join a shareholder slate
| Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:30:23 EST Essential No. 3: Marquee Customers Your best customers can do more than just buy from you. They can help you fuel growth by serving as an extension of your salesforce
| Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:20:31 EST Essential No. 2: Market Segments Target a high-growth market segment within a large market, advises David G. Thomson. You can even find a segment within a market that is otherwise stagnant
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Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:21:07 +0530 Nehwal criticises Delhi's preparations, then backtracks NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Delhi's chaotic preparations for next month's Commonwealth Games proved India was not capable of hosting major international events, Games ambassador Saina Nehwal said on Saturday, before retracting the statement hours later. 
| Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:25:53 +0530 G20 members agree economic recovery to continue GWANGJU, South Korea (Reuters) - G20 delegates agreed on Saturday global economic recovery would endure although the speed of expansion may slow, a South Korean official said. 
| Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:34:48 +0530 Pakistani militants stoking sectarian rift - minister ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pro-Taliban Pakistani militants are trying to create a sectarian rift, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Saturday, as a new wave of violence piled pressure on a government already struggling with a flood crisis. 
| Sat, 04 Sep 2010 16:45:33 +0530 Chandhok completes first laps of Korean F1 circuit LONDON (Reuters) - Karun Chandhok declared South Korea's new, and as yet unfinished, grand prix circuit to be in good shape after becoming the first person to drive a Formula One car around it on Saturday. 
| Sat, 04 Sep 2010 12:51:36 +0530 Tendulkar tells youngsters to resist lure of money NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar advised young cricketers on Friday to resist the lure of money and play the game in the cleanest possible way. 
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Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:16:59 GMT IIM-Lucknow students head to foreign universities As part of the Student Exchange Programme (SEP), 53 students of the premier Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIM-L) will head to partner universities in foreign countries.
| Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:20:32 GMT Toyota raises the pitch in hatchback market It is a market which every automobile major is eyeing. The hatchback market in India, which is growing at 35 per cent annually, has quite a few superstars Maruti Suzukis Swift, Hyundai i20, Volkswagens Polo, the Skoda fabia and Fords Figo.
| Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:14:54 GMT Dell checkmates HP Dell has managed a coup by knocking off HP (Hewlett Packard) from the No. 1 position in the Indian personal computer market, after six years.
| Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:30:39 GMT Q: Dilip Kapur, Founder & President, Hidesign Puducherry-based luxury leather brand Hidesign, in which Louis Vuitton holds a 20 per cent stake, is set to launch its eyewear brand in the next quarter. Also on the cards is a range of jewellery, handbags etc along with designer Rohit Bal.
| Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:29:00 GMT Sri Adhikari Brothers: Mastiii on top Laaunched in July this year, Mastiii, the Hindi music and comedy channel from Sri Adhikari Brothers, has made it to the top slot in the music television genre across Hindi-speaking markets.
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2010-09-03T13:07:00Z IT in the Age of the Empowered Employee Incremental innovation and process improvements have always come from those closest to the problem. It's the basis of kaizen, a system where employees continually improve manufacturing processes. It's also a founding principle of Six Sigma — tap employees' relentless, incremental quality improvements.
The same is true in the way employees are harnessing consumer technologies — social, mobile, video, and cloud. They're improving how they do their jobs and solving your customer and business problems. And it's not just a few employees; it's a critical mass of employees. In a survey of more than 4,000 U.S. information workers, we found that 37% are using do-it-yourself technologies without IT's permission. LinkedIn, Google Docs, Smartsheet.com, Facebook, iPads, YouTube, Dropbox, Flipboard — the list is long and growing. Many of these scenarios are do-it-yourself projects. For example, want to ask me business questions on Facebook? Piece of cake, I'll just friend you. Personal iPhones for email, apps, and Internet access outside my clients' door? Check. Google Sites and Docs to exchange documents with partners? Sure, I can spin up a free site or IT can spend the $50/user/year and make it secure. YouTube to post fix-it-yourself videos for tough service problems? My kid's good with a Flip camera. She can film me doing the fix myself.
In all of these real cases, an employee figured out a better way to solve a customer or business problem without IT's help. Call it the consumerization of IT; call it harnessing the groundswell; call it Technology Populism. It's all the same thing: individuals harnessing readily available social, mobile, video, and cloud technology to solve customer and business problems.
In our new book, Empowered, we call these covert innovators HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives. HEROes are those employees who feel empowered to solve customer problems and act resourcefully by using whatever technology they need to use. HEROes comprise 20% of the U.S. information workforce, but your industry may have many more or many fewer highly empowered and resourceful operatives.
It's all well and good to have employees solving customer problems. But chaos and rogue behavior is not okay. To identify the employee initiatives that are worth pursuing and figure out how to make them safe and enterprise-grade, your IT organization needs to get involved.
Peter Hambling, the CIO of Lloyd's of London, recently shared a story with us about Facebook and iPhone. A sales person wanted to use Facebook to talk to a client. An underwriter wanted to use a smartphone to access key account and policy information while away from their computer. The business manager and IT security professional feared the unknown and shut down both solutions.
As a CIO with business acumen, Hambling understood that he and his IT organization needed a new contract with business managers and employees that allowed him to help with technology solutions while sharing the responsibility for business risk with employees and managers. To get it done, he took the business case to the board of directors and got permission to proceed with caution and with a clear eye on the tradeoff between business value and business risk.
They didn't stop with Facebook and iPhone. They've also embedded IT staff directly into the cubicle farms of business employees; they've built innovative solutions with teams comprised of business and IT employees; they've created applications that empower employees to understand global risk through a familiar interactive map. They created a new contract with business managers and employees that gives IT professionals a place in the business.
Hambling exemplifies one of the key action items that we've discovered: Make new technology risk a business problem to be managed rather than an IT problem to be stifled. And that requires a new way of thinking and of working.
We spoke with hundreds of people when researching Empowered. In discovering their solutions to these thorny empowered technology problems, we identified a new contract that's emerging between IT, business managers, and employees. We call it the HERO Compact and it looks like this:
In the HERO Compact, there is a real give and take needed between employees, managers, and IT in this empowered era. Employees need to step up and behave responsibly (which means HR needs to be involved). Business managers need to roll up their sleeves and learn enough about the technology to understand the potential risks. (Managers also need to encourage and reward experimentation.) IT needs to assess and mitigate technology risk. And that means IT staff need to be much closer to business employees and activities so that they can help with technology platforms. And everybody must put technology-induced risk into its proper business context. It's a new set of priorities all the way around.
Are you building a new contract to empower employees to solve the problems of empowered customers? Are you running into barriers? Finding successes? In either case, I'd love to hear about it.
Ted Schadler is VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and Coauthor of Empowered: Unleash your employees, energize your customers and transform your business.
| 2010-09-03T13:02:18Z China's Great GDP Leap Forward I am Chinese and have been curiously watching the world react to how China's GDP has overtaken Japan's. It is now only second in size to that of the U.S. Since the Opium War in 1840, "catching up" has been a national dream of the Chinese people. In 1957, Chairman Mao called for the country to catch up with the U.K.'s steel output within 15 years. In 1995, China's steel output amounted to 95.36 million tons, beating that of the U.K. and the U.S. In 1996, China became the leading steel producer in the world, with annual output of 100 million tons. In 2005, China's GDP overtook that of the U.K.
Western countries might look at China's rise with mixed feelings. But we in China don't feel we have much reason to feel proud. Our per capita income in 2009 ranked 124th in the world at only $3,600, less than 1/10 of those in Japan and United States. China lags behind a number of countries in Latin America and Africa, not to mention the developed countries in Europe and America. And that is only the beginning of our worries.
Unhealthy Structure. GDP can be broken down into three parts: enterprises, residents, and government. From 1993 to 2007, share of government revenue in GDP has gone up from 11.68 percent to 14.81 percent and share of enterprise revenues in GDP has increased from 38.83 percent to 45.45 percent, while share of residents income in GDP has declined from 49.49 percent to 39.74 percent. Government and state-owned enterprises control huge resources in China, which reduces efficiency of resource allocation and easily leads to widespread corruption.
Widening Gap between Rich and Poor. China's Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) has risen to 0.49, much higher than in Europe and Japan (between 0.24 and 0.36). The combination of low per capita income and high Gini coefficient is dangerous and might cause social unrest. Furthermore, the relatively low consumption among the rich and the lack of strong middle class make it difficult for China to stimulate consumption demand as a replacement of export demand.
Lack of Transparency. According to Transparency International, China's Corruption Perception Index has declined sharply from 27th in the world in the early 1980s to 79th in 2009. But still, many companies are making profits by bribing rather than innovation and value creation.
High Environmental Cost. Pollution has become the top threat to China. The recent landslide in Zhouqu was due largely to overuse of natural resources. Most rivers in China are polluted by heavy metals or industrial wastewater. According to the National Environmental Protection Agency, the environmental pollution cost in China reached RMB512 billion in 2004, more than 3 percent of GDP. China needs to pay back for this kind of environment-destroying development.
As John K. Galbraith has put it, there are three different ways for developing countries to realize modernization:
- to achieve symbolic modernization by creating superficial glory such as first-class airport, expressway, etc. This does not necessarily mean the improvement of economic welfare.
- to achieve maximization of economic growth which highly depends on compulsory residential savings or exploitation of environment and resources. This will eventually lead to the polarization of wealth and income, as well as rapid environment deterioration, thus threatening the social stability.
- to achieve selective economic growth which really cares for the poor, and chases only environment-friendly GDP. That's the right choice. GDP alone is very misleading. What China needs is green, reasonable, sustainable, and healthy GDP. Only if it achieves that can China claim to be second to none
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Liu Shengjun (lgary@ceibs.edu) is the deputy director of the China Europe International Business School's Case Center and Lujiazui International Finance Research Center, based in Shanghai.
| 2010-09-03T13:00:38Z Celebrating an Emotional-Labor Day If you really want to take a break from your managerial labors, don't just ignore the BlackBerry. Stop empathizing. Stop being positive. Stop being Mr. or Ms. Confident.
On Monday, millions of Americans will observe Labor Day by studiously avoiding the trappings of work. But managing meetings and e-mails is trivial compared with the emotional labor it takes to be a leader. For a real respite, try thinking pessimistic thoughts, worrying out loud, ignoring a few needy people, and complaining a lot. You'll feel refreshed when you come back to work on Tuesday.
Obviously, an Emotional-Labor Day would be a disaster for your relationships, and it wouldn't be much fun for customers either, with sales clerks turning off their smiles and waiters turning their backs. You wouldn't hear a single "Have a nice day" all day. In fact, the whole world would come to a shuddering halt, as police officers, collection agents, and prison guards allowed their sappy, sentimental selves to show through. Order would dissolve into chaos.
The point I'm trying to make, though, is that with the global economy rapidly turning into a service economy, emotional labor is becoming the predominant work that people do. There aren't many jobs left that require zero emotional labor. Just about every occupation requires you to express emotions you don't feel.
It's mainly for that reason that the study of emotional labor has exploded in the 27 years since Arlie Hochschild of UC Berkeley coined the term in her book The Managed Heart. At first, researchers studied the emotional labor of frontline employees, health-care workers, and people who face difficult tasks such as evicting tenants. Employees, it was found, have three ways to display their jobs' required emotions: Express their genuine feelings (though few people truly get excited every time a customer walks in); engage in "surface acting," stretching their faces into a semblance of a smile (or frown, if needed); or engage in "deep acting," which is sort of like method acting. Deep actors try to really feel excited when the customer walks in.
Surface acting has negatives: It's transparent, and it tends to make the actor feel inauthentic and generally lousy. Deep acting, by contrast, is often indistinguishable from the real thing and tends to be better for the actor's psyche. But not everyone has the knack for it.
Recently the study of emotional labor has taken an intriguing turn toward the C-suite, with researchers calling for studies of chief executives' emotional-labor strategies and the psychic effects of deep and surface acting. Leaders have to display many more emotions than their employees. They have to be, at times, friendly, sympathetic, supportive, confident, optimistic, tough, and angry. And they have to use a great deal of judgment in determining which emotion to display and how to display it.
"If an employee shows up late because of a personal problem, is that a situation where you respond with empathy for their personal problem, or do you have to draw the line and be firm?" asks Ronald H. Humphrey, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Because of situations like that, leaders "have to use judgment a lot more than the typical service worker," he says. In a recent paper, Humphrey and Jeffrey M. Pollack of the University of Richmond and Ph.D. student Thomas Hawver propose that performing the emotional labor required for leadership "may have complex effects on leaders, both positive and negative."
The researchers say CEOs are probably more likely than other people to use deep acting, because studies have shown that this tactic is common among individuals who identify with their roles. That's good news for the CEO's mental health, but there's a serious downside to role identification: It can lead to emotional exhaustion, studies have shown.
So consider this on Labor Day, while the nation is lionizing the hardhat with the muscle in his arm: The CEO is a worker too, and in many ways his or her work is harder than the rank and file's. The muscle you've developed may not be visible to your kids when you roll up your sleeve, but it's there inside you, the result of long, hard hours of emotional labor.
Andrew O'Connell is an editor with the Harvard Business Review Group.
| 2010-09-03T12:58:13Z Does Your Company Suffer from Process Attention Deficit Disorder? Does your organization suffer from subpar operational performance? Have your costs, response times, or reliability slipped relative to competitors or versus customer expectations?
Maybe your organization has Process Attention Deficit Disorder. If it has, symptoms will likely show up in three areas: incentives, behaviors, and organization.
Incentives. In organizations suffering from PADD, people aren't motivated financially to pay attention to process improvement. Process improvement isn't a role in the "C-Suite." It's not a path to the top. People are recognized for growing new markets, launching new products, or doing deals. The best and brightest go into marketing, sales, or finance, or they run a profit center. They don't go into process improvement. Process performance isn't measured, tied to financial results, or tied to compensation. Most measures are tactical or transactional. They do not capture the full needs of the customer or the relative health of a process. Resources are managed by functions, or markets, or products — not by processes.
Behaviors. Judging by what they spend time on and talk about, senior managers show they don't value process improvement. They don't make room for it in their communications, as they might for financial results, new product launches, deals, safety, or compliance. Senior executives don't spend time reviewing process performance, teaching about process improvement, or nurturing projects or individuals involved in it.
Organization. There is no organizational unit, or only a low-level unit, that manages processes. Without an organization, there is no power, no focal point for attention.
In my last post, I argued that many companies have tried process improvement approaches at times or in places in the organization. But few have built it into their DNA. I suggested that competing demands for executives' attention is one of five key factors that get in the way of sustained process improvement. For example, if a new leader comes to a company from GE and brings Six Sigma — as Jim McInerney did when he joined 3M — then the company may launch a process improvement program.
But the program may not outlive the leader's tenure. I told the story of Allied Signal, led by Larry Bossidy, which had great success in improving its performance through their Six Sigma program. Yet when Bossidy departed in 2000 and was replaced by Mike Bonsignore, the company dropped its Six Sigma attention to focus on a GE-Honeywell deal instead.
As the 3M and Allied Signal stories demonstrate, a leader can launch a process program and drive significant benefits. But executives can change or their attention can shift. There are always many competitors for an executive's attention. Only when process improvement is on the top management agenda can a company make the often large investments in process redesign, information technology, training and education that are required. Senior executive knowledge of his or her company's strategy is a key driver of the way that work should be designed or redesigned. Only senior management can resolve turf issues between departments and functions — issues which can torpedo cross-functional process improvement. Redesigning work from a customer's point-of-view and the ongoing pursuit of operational excellence implies changes not only in IT and processes, but also in organization, attitudes, and behaviors. The biggest execution challenge is shifting the mindsets of people within the organization. Therefore, any major process improvement program must have the active engagement of the top team.
In my research, I have found that one of the main causes of Process Attention Deficit Disorder is that the topic of "process" — how work is organized — is not part of the background, education, or career advancement of most executives. Senior managers don't know what process improvement is or don't believe it matters. Senior executives believe they are responsible for strategy and achieving quarterly (or monthly or weekly) financial results and growth. Middle managers, supervisors, and staff manage how work gets done.
In a magnified culture of personality, where senior leaders draw 500 times what front line workers earn, too many leaders see themselves, implicitly or explicitly, as superheroes. In the tension between the personal and the institutional, many leaders see themselves as personifying the organization, rather than serving as stewards. In this guise, they often don't see the value of investing in strengthening core capabilities, institutionalizing process competence, or building innovative cultures. Their egos get in the way of them seeing this. They focus on themselves and their strategy, not their company's operational capabilities. By thinking only of their results now, they pay less attention to their firm's outcomes later.
Please let me know what you have seen capture the attention of leaders. What is it about the nature of process improvement that turns off most senior executives?
Brad Power (bradfordpower@gmail.com) is a consultant and researcher in process innovation. His current research is on sustaining attention to process management — making improvement and adaptation a habit (even fun?). He is currently conducting research with the Lean Enterprise Institute.
| 2010-09-03T12:30:15Z Who'll Catalyze Change: Us or Them? A couple of months ago, I pointed out that any post-recession recasting of processes, practices, and positions must include changes to the CEO's role, and suggested that the time had come for chief executive officers to transform themselves into chief enabling officers.
Some of you agreed, others didn't, and still others offered new ideas. Bernard Tsang, Mohammed Rehman, Mat Maynor, and Deven Pravin Shah, among others, added fresh reasons for bringing about change, while Mohit Jindal wondered if change should be paced out.
The comments provided a 360-degree perspective on the subject, and made me wonder if I should have also written about how managers' roles should change. (Cath Thompson favored that as an alternative to a patriarchal change model; that is, one in which change is seen as having to be driven from the top.)
The more I thought about it, though, the more I wondered: Why just CEOs and managers? Why not all employees? Shouldn't their roles change too?
I'd like to explore that idea, so here's a question to start with: Who should bear the onus of catalyzing change? CEOs and top management? Or should change emerge from the ground up? While leaders clearly have to play a role, everyone knows that change can't be brought about unless employees get involved. As in a democracy, so too in an organization: Employees at all levels need to be both responsive to and responsible for change.
For five years now, I've been immersed in a change experiment across levels, roles, and functions. We at HCL have embraced a philosophy that's based on an inversion of the management pyramid, with managers becoming as responsible to employees as employees are to managers. As I note in my recent book Employees First, Customers Second, this experiment is a work in progress. Good ideas take time to develop and therefore can't be implemented immediately. Still, we've seen early signs of success, notably the financial results HCL has enjoyed during the recent economic downturn.
One lesson I have learnt from the experiment: Unless you have employees who believe in change and believe that they can be its owners, you have no chance of transforming your organization and adapting it to new realities. In every organization, you will have a few transformers who are eager to lead change; fence sitters waiting to see the early results before they embrace change, and lost souls who will find every reason that the change won't work. If they hope to succeed, CEOs must empower the transformers, encourage the fence sitters, and leave the rest alone.
You must have the conviction to hand over control to employees who care about the organization's future as much as you do. Only then will you be able to create a company fuelled by employees' energy, which will unleash the power of the many and loosen the stranglehold of the few. Once this momentum gets going, change is unstoppable.
We've tasted initial success because of the influence our transformers have over those fellow employees who are sitting on the fence or who like to bring down every new idea. My experiments and experiences show that these transformers, enabled, encouraged and enthused by management, can help organizational structures adapt to the shifting business environment.
Too many people caution us about acting on instinct and conviction. But we must surround ourselves with employees that dare to try new things in new ways. They may not achieve perfect results, but if they focus on getting better each day with one more attempt, they will solve many problems that appear unsolvable.
We must give our employees a chance and — with heartfelt conviction — encourage them to devote themselves wholeheartedly to their work. Don't you think so?
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