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I am a big proponent of effective management. Whether it be in your daily life, work or even relationships, effective management of any area will increase a person’s productivity and make them happier. At least that is how the theory goes. In most practical cases however, we have a tendency of becoming complacent and putting off for the future what could’ve been accomplished today. Its not our fault, i hear its something we get through genetics. A kind of self-serving mechanism developed over centuries of evolution arising from the flight or flee response. Some amongst us stay and fight, become revered in society and history while others flee to protect themselves or maybe to fight another day.

In his latest book, Strategy and the Fat Smoker, David Maister writes that just by knowing what is good for you or bad for you will not help people choose the better path. If that was so, he argues, everyone would be exercising and not indulging in the habits of smoking or drinking. After all, everyone knows that is the path to a healthy and better life. Humans are inherently self serving and looking out for number one, i.e. themselves. And they are not rational creatures, but creatures of emotion. At most, they create circles around themselves and include people whose needs they might also serve, but for many, that circle includes only one. When thinking about management, especially management of people, this is one of the basic truths or facts of life one must embrace if they want any chance at moving forward.

People management has always been a very interesting subject for experts around the world. They recognize the need for having a structured environment for people to work in, to have a schedule of tasks to complete and a clear and concise goal to achieve. The funny thing is, most people who have to be managed also recognize this need. Yet, often quite a big disconnect keeps on appearing in organizations around the country (and the world) and a lot of productivity (read: money) is lost in the process. In order to bridge this disconnect, we increasing find the need to satisfy a employee’s personal needs and align them to the company’s need in order for the big money to start rolling in.

So how do we bridge this gap? Any idea’s?

Its time of recession you hear a lot of people say, business is not well then there are others who have carved out opportunities  in these dark times.

I have been hearing two things lately from people I meet.  And largely you can divide them into two groups. First group is the people who are saying stay safe lie low, if you have a job thank your stars and stay put don’t make a move till 2009 is over.

Then there are the others, the more fearless ones who are feeling the change are seeing the half full glass.

You might have heard a lot of the negative side I would like to put in front of you the arguments of these crazy fearless people and let you be the judge of their sanity here are their arguments

They are saying since there are budget cuts every where, companies with smaller foot prints are getting a chance to present them selves. People who never considered smaller service providers or vendors are considering smaller companies who can offer competitive prices. They are saying companies who previously never even gave them audience are opening to doing business with them because they can provide competitive services at rates lower than bigger counterparts.

Second argument they have is that quality human resource is available at pays that smaller companies can afford. Because all the big ones are shedding of extra weight human resource is available to newer companies at packages which they can afford. And because the fact that bigger is secure no longer holds true, the employees are understanding the reality that at this time a smaller company has more chances to pass through this recession than bigger companies. This is helping these newer companies to start attracting good talent.

Another thing they say is cost of running has gone down a little, with rents going down with this recession. Landlords agreeing to offer their space at lesser security deposit and lesser advance makes it easier for some one to setup a shop.

I don’t know if you agree to these points or not but in last few weeks I have seen 3 people leave their secure jobs and start their businesses.  Have seen an exponential increase in head hunting efforts by companies who are deeply rooted here, and as of now know at least 3 companies who are hiring like crazy.

BNET blog has uploaded this video which is a must-watch for all the management guys.

What with the crisis in the economy, employees are especially concerned about their performance reviews. As a manager, you probably hate them, too. They’re a bureaucratic pain in the you-know-what, one that you would rather avoid. As a result, you wait until the last minute to prepare. Don’t do it, says management consultant Leila Bulling Towne in this new BNET video. Instead, plan your reviews carefully to put your employees, and yourself, at ease.

Here is the video:

Vopium is a Danish-Pakistani portal that focus on providing a platform for almost free calls and SMS to any part of the world. As we covered in one of earlier posts, they have got a  funding of EUR4.2 million.

The company’s operations are mostly based out of Lahore since 2003 and currently 50 employees are developing new applications in this facility. Tanveer Sharif, Vopium’s co-founder, recently told me that they are planning to double the workforce before the end of 2009. They are also planning to expand their operations.

Speaking of VC funding, he said that it has both its pros and cons but they’ll help other Pakistani companies to get funding.

As for the VC funding, let me assure you that it is not always a blessing. We have raised USD 6.8M last year, and we would love to help other Pakistani companies to achieve financial injections.

He also said that they are helping other Danish-Pakistani companies to set up their operations in Pakistan. Some of these are Gatefone, Youpark and Getmore.

Downloading, chatting, Youtube, even Facebook is a major NO in most of the office environment- and that for a valid reason. Most employers like their employees to be totally focused on work and nothing else, since this is the exact reason employees are hired for so that the employer’s right to monitor and limit your unofficial online activities.

However, there are two sorts of monitoring, ethical monitoring and un-ethical monitoring. These days, online monitoring is one of the recent ways to judge an employee’s performance. Companies have well defined policies regarding usage of internet. This online monitoring may have many positive aspects but this also raises the chance of unethical monitoring. I tell you what unethical monitoring is, that is reading your emails, chats or personal data without your consent or knowledge under the pretext of monitoring.

Most of us, when come to office in the morning, first thing we do along with checking our official email is to check our personal account as well. How many of us stop and think of what if your boss or any other techie person in your office is also reading your personal emails or chats? Or what if there is a spyware on your computer without your knowledge? This is actually happening! Now if getting the work done is the employer’s right then privacy of checking personal email is the employee’s right too. If the employer fears of valuable information being exploited or leaked then these websites should be banned from the workplace instead of being monitored discreetly as this is I believe, totally unethical.

Corporations see in software’s seductive invisibility and seemingly open-ended flexibility a never-ending frontier of promise, where hope triumphs over reality …. And hope, unfortunately, has never been a very effective strategy.

The above quote is taken from a paper “The Trouble With Enterprise Software” by Cynthia Rettig, published by Sloan Management Review. I recommend it to everyone who is involved with software and business. It is especially useful for non-technical executives. If you are in the IT/software field, it is very common to experience the tension between business and IT. This paper debunks many of the common myths and makes an honest assessment of the often messy situation with enterprise software.

A few excerpts from the paper.

As work became more complex and specialized over the 20th century, the use of data — numbers and facts — as fodder for more and more analysis and fact-based decision making intensified. And digital technology “was perfect for this kind of world.” Of course, digital technology not only supported that complexity but also played a large part in actually creating it, weaving a continuous web of unending data.

What do business executives miss?

Business executives, however, simply want to continue to believe that technology will lower costs, improve processes and reduce the size of the workforce. They don’t want to understand IT issues. In part, this is because technology requires special skills and intellectual talents that are quite distinct from those needed to understand and manage business organizations, markets and strategy. But it is also because executives do not like to hear about the downside of technology.

On the difficulty of aligning technical and business sides:

… long-term plan calls for closer and closer communication and collaboration between the IT and business sides of the organization. While much to be desired, this has proved difficult in the past, and with increasing complexity in software systems, it is unlikely to improve by itself in the future. Differing backgrounds and perspectives, goals, even vocabularies — all hamper efforts to improve communication across this internal digital divide. Biases intrude: A recent study by Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, found that only 28% of CEOs thought their CIOs were proactive or creative in terms of business process improvement

The pdf of the paper is available through Google search.

The Trouble With Enterprise Software
Has enterprise software become too complex to be effective?
Cynthia Retting
Fall 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 21

I stumbled upon this blog post and found it to be a useful checklist for preparing for sales, demos and other selling activities. I have included one set of list but there’s more at the post about the meeting, followups and sales strategy.

Build The Client Relationship

The positive Client relationship that may take an eternity to develop… can be destroyed in an instant

1. Listen: Talk 10%, listen 90%.
Clients will love you and heck, you might just learn something.

2. Know the client’s business:
Do the research and understand their products, distribution, competition and position within the market.

3. Know the client’s customer:
Understand every step and emotion their consumers go through on the path to a purchase.

4. Be their brand steward:
Be protective of what’s responsible and relevant to their brand.

5. Exceed their expectations:
Surprise them with more than they expect and they’ll see more value.

6. Persuade, don’t sell:
Clients can smell a selling style and they think it stinks.

7. Don’t be self-serving:
Judge and support the work from a business perspective. If a client thinks you are looking at creative for creative sake the trust evaporates.

8. Demonstrate enthusiasm:
Show them that you love their business and helping them solve problems.

9. Know the client:
When a client knows the creative people on a personal level it goes a long way.

10. Apply some of these steps to the people you work with:
When the internal team trusts and respects each other, the work only gets better.

Source: Ramp Projects Blog

The rise in popularity of semi-professional social networks has led to a large number of digital version of paper tigers. Just to be clear, by a paper tiger I refer to someone who artificially inflates his or her online profile to make it appear more impressive than it is in reality.

This is no different than people who exaggerate on their resumes and interviews. However now the digital profiles are the norm and they are ah, so easy to manipulate and inflate. On a similar note, some folks are obsessed with getting connected with every living soul they can find. The whole networking thing is becoming a confused spaghetti of friends, colleagues, people you actually know and folks who are”friends” of acquaintances of someone who has exchanged a few emails with you. A senior executive I know refuses to use linkedin.com because he is afraid that he will offend someone by ignoring their connection request!

Anyway back to the trend of inflated online profiles - I have stopped taking these things seriously because after you meet a few of these people you realize that it can be a lot of hype and marketing. Instead of taking these profiles at face value, just keep in mind that there is some variance and self-promoters will use all tools to their advantage. This is just something which happens as the current networks have very little trust built in the system. You are what you claim to be and that is it.

Rozee / Naseeb networks just received Rs.12.19 Million from the ICT R&D Fund to launch a career and alumni management software application that will be offered to universities free of charge.

The web application will contain different modules to allow university career centers to liaison with the industry, track their alumni and more. Based on the vague set of marketing jargon I could find on the web, these are the modules that should be available to each university:

• Job postings by industry HR managers for students, alumni etc
• Lets students … er.. create CVs (honestly you had to wade through 2 paragraphs of marketing-speak to find that) - including a brief “graduate synopsis” summary
• Employers can search for particular skills, or create a graduation book dynamically
• Alumnis can also … er.. create CVs and update their info (employer details etc).
• A professional network interface to connect people together
• Faculty Profiles, Research interests and papers.
• Internship Portal

So in other words, Rozee just received Rs.12.19M to pretty much take their existing set of tools and tweak them to make a white-labelled hosted solution out of it to offer to 85+ universities in the next 18 months. As you can imagine, white-labeling an existing product is a fairly straightforward task taking no more than a few months.

This also represents growing confusion in the hiring market now because of a sudden abundance of platforms for job placements - from 2-3 to 30+ - which is likely to segment and confuse job seekers as well as complicate life for recruiters.

Brightspyre’s early foray into university-specific job boards is already showing signs of employers being confused about having to manage multiple job boards - add those to PSEB’s recent Internship Portal (also created by Brightspyre) and we can see type of disintegrated and fragmented online future we’re heading towards in the recruitment space.

For more information about this, read the ATP story linked below — though I have to warn you, that story is written by the Marketing Manager at ROZEE and is chock full of sickening marketing jargon — seriously, this jargon is actually worse than the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator - some brilliant quotes from it below.

“…a first-of-its-kind web-based technology has been developed to create a Campus Career Portal.”

The Magic of Technology

As Arthur C. Clarke said,

“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,”

very effectively empower universities to achieve economy of scale that lowers the cost of higher education for the common man, through effective and revenue-generating linkage between industry and academia. The use of technology consequently enables better placement of jobs for graduates as well as a greater ability to showcase faculty talents to sponsoring industry members.

*GROAN*… how can someone let them butcher Arthur C. Clarke’s vision by linking it to a job portal!?

I’m deeply disappointed at ATP for letting a marketer corrupt their real-estate’s high standard with B.S.

I just had the chance to look at JustMeans, who are offering an incredibly fresh way for companies to find good employees via an online platform. In short: their platform is nothing short of beautiful.

The beauty is that JustMeans isnt only focusing on helping with the process of hiring (i.e. helping you get more resumes, parse resumes, schedule interviews or what not ) but they’re focusing on something that is much much more valuable to me today - they’re helping companies create a better brand or impression among candidates; helping companies find the right candidates who will be a long-term fit; and most importantly helping generation-Y find more meaning in their work.

Their approach is that (1) they allow companies to build a rich information portal that describes them and whatever is unique about them and sets them apart — this really goes well beyond the "company name and profile" standard. (2) They actually allow anyone to start discussions with different people from the company… not just the HR or PR people but any of the employees who’re part of the company’s "network"… and these conversations are also available on the portal or peruse when researching that firm.

Through conversation candidates can likely discover who that company really is and what they believe in… candidates can discover well before applying to positions whether or not that company will offer intellectually stimulating work, a respectful work environment, or a vision to be happy to be a part of, a lunch-menu that feeds a demanding stomach…. whatever you choose as qualities of the "perfect job". In that way they are much more likely to discover a company that they would gel with much better.

JustMeans basically helps to filter candidates down to people who’re actually interesting in the firm on merit, so that when that firm opens job positions they are likely to find just the right talent for their firm.

I had the chance of speaking to their CEO Martin Smith and the amount of leadership and domain insight he demonstrated was remarkable. According to him, any successful platform or trading floor reduces the total transaction costs against which value is purchased, and JustMeans is helping to reduce the transaction costs of finding more meaning in your work. Read the full interview at Social Bridges.

Now, for the dozens of job boards locally trying to cash-in on a bandwagon - why cant anyone think beyond whats already (not) working and try to solve the deeper issues of the average company trying to attract good talent. Can we think beyond logos as a way of attracting those people and help us build employment brands? Pretty please?