This is a guest post by Avnish Anand. Avnish is a philosopher of sports (a more apt description than a sports expert, sports journo, or sports enthusiast). He watches almost every sport and has an opinion on every issue in each of these sports. The opinions are compiled on his Sports Site, A Common Fan.
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The world of sports is extremely performance driven. It’s the hardest “industry” to continually stay at the top. No other industry is as competitive. Winning in sports is everything. There is no place for non-performers – winners thrive and losers perish. Business organizations also aspire to create a similar kind of culture – one which is completely performance driven and breeds excellence. However, few HR teams know how to go about doing so. What they need to do is take a break from what they have been doing all along and start doing what people are doing in the world of sports. So what are the key things that people in the world of sports do?

Great players don’t always make great managers and vice versa – In most organizations, the best individual contributors are often promoted to become managers. The world of sports runs differently – those guys have long known that the skill set required to become a great manager is drastically different than the skills necessary to be a great player. A lot of great managers have been very ordinary players but in corporate organizations managers have more often than not been great workers also. HR in organizations needs to learn this – to promote based on people and management skills and not just on their ability to contribute individually.

To win it is important to focus on the key positions that play the most significant role in securing victory – Sports teams know that it is not possible to have top performers in every position and also that attempting to do so is a futile exercise. HR teams are not so focussed and end up spreading their resources thin. Successful teams have always concentrated on filling the key positions with top performers and HR needs to do the same – start prioritizing jobs by their potential impact on the success of the business.

Your performance statistics will never improve if you keep hiding them – The best sportsmen always love to compete and compare themselves against others – by keeping score. The world of sports is obsessed with tracking performance figures and that ensures that non performers have nowhere to hide. Compare that to the corporate world, where the HR keeps all the performance statistics under wraps. No information about target achievements and appraisals are ever made public. This also forces the HR to keep salary increments a secret. Non performers keep getting away. Thus to build a performance based organization you need track, measure and distribute output and performance reports.

Rewards and recognition programs should not have a fixation for parity – In sports the best players often get paid many times more than the mediocre performers. In business, the difference is far less. HR uses tools like normalization curves and target percentiles to justify their action of keeping salary differentials low. It is difficult to get the top talent (as required for point 2) if they are not paid significantly more and treated differently than the average performer. It also corroborates the fact that in sports, performance is rewarded and paid for accordingly. HR often has no justification for its payment practises and hence is forced to keep them secret (another example of point 3)

Firing poor performers is a good thing and not a bad one – In sports, teams are always striving to improve – even if it’s by the teeniest bit – it’s a pre-requisite for teams that want to continue the winning habit. They are always looking to weed out the bottom performers and replace them with better talent. HR managers on the other hand believe that sackings are bad for morale and keep delaying it – giving poor performers’ chance after chance. How’s that for the motivation of the star performers – seeing their efforts get negated by that of shoddy performers, who are not even made to pay for it.

In sports, Winning isn’t everything… it’s the only thing – Sports teams are never satisfied with second place. It is this kind of “performance culture” that brings the best out of players. Unfortunately HR departments are quite happy with an above average performance. Average goals often result in below average results. There is no motivation to exceed expectations.

Don’t reward complacency with training sessions – Great sportspersons have the personal will and drive to get better. They don’t have to be tutored like school children to work on improving themselves. HR teams are preoccupied with training sessions. They believe that grown up and career conscious men don’t have enough self motivation to improve on their own and have to be sent to training programs to achieve that. Well I have news for them. If you have a company full of such men, you are in big trouble.

Disclaimer – We are talking of teams and organizations that want to win, not ones who are happy being mediocre.

Dear Investment Banks / Brokerage Firms / Insurance Cos,

The way the cookie has crumbled has resulted in your employees rushing for jobs on workosaur. The recruiters who use our services have started complaining about their inbox being flooded with resumes of your employees. Many of the recruiters have started using your firm’s name as a filter for detecting spam.

So, please get back in shape. Shift to economy class flights. Move your offices towards the city’s outskirts. Build a leaner and smarter business. Use the extra money to retain most of your team.

And, allow me to pacify the recruiters on workosaur.

Sincerely, workosaur.com

This is a guest post by Mr. Yash Asher – Online Marketing Specialist. He also blogs about Online Media at Asheresque.
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Who is the most efficient employee in your office? The one, who remembers everything, can pull out old mails in a jiffy, the kind that makes the rest of us look like monkeys attempting to play chess. You want to kill him but not before finding out his secret.  Have a look at his email inbox. I have a hunch you will find levels of organization an army general would be proud of.

For the rest of us mere mortals there are 2 options
• use Gmail as mail client (not allowed in most companies)
• or use Xobni (inbox spelt backwards, currently works well with MS Outlook)

Xobni allows you to
• Search your mails super fast (it will index your mails to be able to do this)
• Find documents exchanged in a jiffy
• Find contact details in a jiffy, no 4-5 right-clicks any more, you don’t even need to create the person’s profile in your mailbox, Xobni extracts this information from emails automatically
• Be aware of the network people operate in. No more “what’s the name of this guys boss?”
• And all this without navigating away from the mail you are currently focused on. Hence, you can reply to anyone with complete knowledge of your past interactions.

Plus the killer app as far as I am concerned is the analytics engine. With Xobni you can know what is the time of the day a person mail to you regularly, what is his her standard response time, how many times have you had to mail him, and how often does he respond, speed of his response, etc. Just a look at this information can help you schedule your conversations with everyone better.

It even allows you to integrate your Linkedin account with your inbox and build professional networks beyond the office emails.

While this will not solve all of your work problems but definitely give you a much larger degree of control over your mailbox and will free up your time.

For more information and to download the app check out Xobni.com.

PS: Check our list of Internet Tools for the Workplace.

Peter Drucker (1909-2005) – the leading founder of the field of management and the most influential management thinker in the second half of the 20th century was also a prolific writer with his body of work spread over 39 books. Reading a small part of his body of work has, by far, been a more productive exercise than the 2 years I spent at a well-renowned b-school.

For those who wish to make a start, I recommend ‘The Daily Drucker‘ – a book that comes very close to being a blog. In the book, Drucker has assembled his most powerful ideas in the form of 366 readings, one for each day of the calendar year. Culled from his lifetime of writings, each writing comprises of an insight, detailed in 200-500 words, accompanied with a call to action, and space at the bottom of the page for the readers to scribble their comments. And as Drucker himself writes about the book,

“The most important part of this book is the blank spaces at the bottom of its pages. They are what the readers will contribute: their actions, decisions, and the results of these decisions. For this is an action book.”

As I read and re-read The Daily Drucker, I am convinced that if Drucker was alive, he’d have had a blog by the same name. Each day, the RSS feed would have populated our Feed Readers with one insight from the great man. Also, just like he urges his readers to use the white space below each reading, visitors to his blog would have been urged to contribute with their comments.

Note:
This article was originally written by me on my personal blog in November 2007.

This is a guest post by Mr. Hari Joshi – Director, Foreign Languages Institute (Bangalore). They offer courses in Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, Dutch, German and Chinese. In this post, Hari talks about the benefits of learning a foreign language – especially for managers who are and want to be a part of organizations with a global workforce.
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As the world becomes flatter, back-end processes from countries all over the world are being moved to India. Latin America, Europe and Far east countries are now as important as the United States to the Indian economy. If we wish to seize this opportunity, Indian managers must step out of their comfort zone and familiarize themselves (you don’t have to be an expert) with foreign languages like Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German.

If you are a manager and working for an multinational, chances are that you will come in contact with foreign clients or language specialists working for foreign clients. In such a scenario, knowing the basics of a foreign language will stand you in good stead, both with the clients as well as with your language team.

Traditionally, French and German have been the two most popular foreign languages amongst Indians, the bigger opportunities lie in geographies where the language of business is Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

Japanese: Given it’s strength technology and innovation, Japan is the second largest consumer of Indian software services. And anybody, in the Business Development or Technolgy function of an IT firm, with a moderate knowhow of Japanese stands to gain fantastic international exposure in Japan. Most of these stints are longer term, given that the language is used only mainly in Japan. Interestingly, a recent survey has revealed that savings made by professionals working in Japan are higher than those made by their counterparts in United States and Europe.

Portuguese: Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique and Macau. The most noteworthy of these is Brazil (2.5 times the size of India) which has eneterd into several bi-lateral business agreements with India. Evidently, those who know Portuguese, get to work at some of the most exotic locations. Well, you can even flaunt it on your trip to Goa which was earlier colonized by the Portuguese.

Spanish: Spanish is the world’s third most spoken language, and more than 50 crore people worldwide speak Spanish. This includes the whole of Latin America (apart from Brazil) and Spain. Also, those who know Spanish would find it easy to converse across most of Europe.

So, fellow workosaurs, I would like to end this article by appealing to all of you to pick up a foreign language. Along with the language, will come better business development opportunities and the chance to know more about the cultures prevailing in different geographies.
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Note:
Those of you interested in learning Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, Dutch, German or Chinese, can contact the author at +91.9886373048.

On most occasions, when we read a business book, we are introduced to an idea – a new perspective or a new concept relevant to the way we do business today. The book is intended to change our perspective and thus our behaviour. But seldom do we actually internalize the concepts OR change the way we do things – based on what we’ve read. Marketing guru Seth Godin dwells at depth on this issue and tells us How to Read a Business Book. Here’s what he has to say.

So, how to read a business book:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it… pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action – that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 26 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries. It is also the largest online business network in India with 1.1 million Indian members. Recruiters are actively looking at LinkedIn to weed out profiles that are not active on the popular jobsites. We strongly encourage workosaurs to create a profile on LinkedIn and use the following steps to leverage LinkedIn for better career opportunities.

1. Complete your Profile & Make it Searchable
• You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include a professional summary, specialties, current/past positions (with descriptions), education, affiliations and activities. This makes you appear in more search results as well as gets you more connected (as explained in the next step).
• Upload a professional-looking profile photo. This will also help people identify you quickly.
• Create a public profile with a customized URL that includes your name. Enable “full view” of your public profile. Also, LinkedIn enables you to make the profile information available for search engines to index.

2. Get Connected with Contacts already on LinkedIn
• Search your webmail contacts for people who are already on LinkedIn.
• Search your past or present colleagues: If you have filled your past and present employment details correctly, then LinkedIn shows you other people from the same organization who are on LinkedIn and also alerts you when new members from the organization join LinkedIn.
• Search your classmates: If you have filled your employment history correctly, then LinkedIn allows shows you other people from the same school who are on LinkedIn and also alerts you when new members who are from the same school join LinkedIn.

3. Make your Profile more Saleable
• Have colleagues, clients, teachers, and partners speak up for you – get recommended for the work you do on LinkedIn. Obviously, the more recommendations you have, the better. Also, make sure you have some solid recommendations all-around i.e. from your managers, your peers and your subordiates.
• Be a serious participant on LinkedIn Answers for topics related to your career. If your answer is chosen as the Best Answer, you are shown as a domain specialist by LinkedIn.
• Join 3-4 relevant LinkedIn Groups. These groups are displayed in search results and serve as a good visual cue to draw attention to your profile.

4. Promote your LinkedIn Profile
• Add a link to your profile as part of your email signature.
• Display a LinkedIn badge leading to your profile on your blog (if you maintain one).
• When you comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your signature or in the URL field.
• Publish your LinkedIn profile on your resume (for the recruiters to verify the veracity of your resume and to show off your recommendations/specialties)

5. Be Active & Contactable on LinkedIn
• Log in to LinkedIn and check your Inbox (messages / InMail / Introductions / Invitations / Q&A / Recommendations) on a daily/weekly basis. You will then be more visible in the Network Updates feed that your connections see when they log on to LinkedIn.
• Edit your status message to reflect the current activity you are involved in. You’ll be surprised at the number of LinkedIn connections who would chip in with suggestions when you let them know what you are doing.
• Add the Answers Application for a regular feed of Q&A in your domain of expertise. This ensures that you are able to participate in relevant Q&A discussions.
• Add the Jobs Application for a regular feed of relevant jobs that fit your profile. When something interesting comes up, you can apply without the hassle of e-mailing or uploading a resume.
• Edit your contact settings and grant permission to be contacted for different opportunities. Also, ensure that you provide your phone number here.

Adherence to these steps will soon show results. If you need any inputs relating to your LinkedIn profile, do send a mail to nimish [at] workosaur [dot] com and I shall make my services available.

PS: Check our list of Internet Tools for the Workplace.