Posts on decoding the world around us. Focussing on business, strategy, government and networks
My maternal grandfather was a very scientific man. Surprisingly so, for a man who worked his way up the ranks from a young boy in hotel kitchens to a senior finance and accounts manager. Science and medicine may not have been a part of his career but were certainly an obsession in his personal life. He ...
Ravikumar at work is a high-performing project manager co-leading the year’s most prestigious project with an equally brilliant female colleague. Ravikumar at home is a son, husband and father in a patriarchal family where he is the sole earning member. How does Ravikumar reconcile his personal and professional roles? How can he be an inclusive, empowering male colleague ...
I watched the movie, “The Walk” this week. And it shook me to the core. We live in a world increasingly torn between stifling innovation with tighter intellectual property, company policy, organizational culture and government regulations on the one side and raving about the power of disruption in entrepreneurship that can change the world on ...
Traditionally, all learning in organizations has been driven through training programs. Several organizations also offer elearning modules to facilitate, what one might call, learner-led learning. Now for those in the learning and development function, this brings up some common concerns: Uptake of elearning is low while investment on licenses is high ...
NASA just released a statement suggesting there was once water on planet Mars and that ancient Mars was habitable for life. This got me thinking about organizations working across planets, intergalactic commute and people working on one planet while their “office” was in another. What would teams and their work arrangements then look like? Closer home, ...
In my work, I often get questions such as "How do I collaborate?" “I asked them what they thought. That’s collaboration, right?” Or, “We spent three weeks discussing this before I took a call. That’s definitely collaboration”. One such recent conversation made me think about what really is collaboration after all? Using the principle that collaboration must ...
It was Friday morning. We were taking the elevator down to the basement this morning to drive in to work, my husband and I. One of those days when we had a long wait before one of the elevators finally showed up, it was the smaller one, and it already had a family of two ...
At a recent workshop with a client, I was helping a bunch of people managers understand what people management was really about. That it was not only about feeling pride in being able to decide someone’s rating and salary hikes at the end of the year or reveling in the social status of a large ...
At a meeting with the senior leadership team discussing a new and improved performance management system, several senior executives raised questions about the efficacy of the system. They questioned it's relevance to the organization, its impact on employee morale and so on. It seemed odd for these concerns to arise without the group even having discussed ...
Originally published in Human Capital Online as Deriving the Success Factors by Radhika Subramanian and Prof. P. Vijayakumar in May 2014 The talent management context Priyanka is a recruiter who works with Magica, an FMCG in the personal care retail space. Magica is an organization with evolved HR practices and in the past two years of working with ...