..you should read Loic Le Meur’s blog post. I found myself in agreement with every point he has made.

करना है तो करना है.

I personally hate meetings. However, while I keep them to a minimum, some meetings are unavoidable. So might as well make the best of it by following the advice given in these 3 articles:

• 5 tricks to keep meetings short
• How to start meetings on time
• How to run a meeting like Google

Many of us would relate to this conversation between Watson and Holmes. I certainly do. It explains what triggered inside me the urge to start something.

• Watson: Which is it today, morphine or cocaine?
• Holmes: It is cocaine, a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?
• Watson: No, indeed, my constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.
• Holmes: Perhaps you are right, Watson, I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.
• Watson: But consider! Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change, and may at last leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another, but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.
• Holmes: My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artifical stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.

Every recession tells us the same story – that castles can’t be built on thin air. But each time we recover from a recession, the smartest and brightest get back to building one. And the herd follows. They get themselves to believe that the castle is for real. Unfortunately, the fact that some people make disproportionate sums of money by distributing the illusion sparks off a chain. However, the truth is that castles are also built with bricks. And it’s only when you’ve built the castle that you’d be able to experience the pleasure of staying in one. Also, nothing beats the joy of creation.

This is a guest post by Ms. Paromita De. Paromita is an HR Professional with substantial experience in different aspects of HR – from recruitment and selection to training and development to compensation & benefits.
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Effective organizations in today’s world are facing enormous challenges. Downsizing, diversity, global competition and total quality are a few harsh realities staring the organization in its face. However complex the challenges may sound, it is ultimately the human resources that make the organisation either go or not go. An organisation as an entity has multiple dimensions to it – conceptual and human, technical and functional, cognitive and behaviouristic. In the organizational behaviour context, a cognitive approach has traditionally dominated through units of analysis such as perception, personality and attitudes, motivation and goal setting. The behavioural decision-making area is concerned with the cognitions involved in judgment and choice. Hence, it could be stated that the cognitive framework is a crucial factor for an organisation to reach closure on hiring employees.

Every organisation follows a recruitment philosophy while hiring people. Ideally, the selection process should draw on the organisational needs. These needs again, differ from organisation to organisation. From the perspective of an organisation, it is necessary to internalize goal specifics such as maximising production, maximising worker satisfaction, minimising interpersonal conflict and so on. In a similar manner, an individual’s needs simultaneously have to be matched with that of the organisation. It is only then that an effective organisation emerges.

The above concepts could be better explained through relevant examples cutting across different businesses and functions. Advertising agencies such as Ogilvy & Mather, Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi have all been built on the foundations of a top-notch creative team consisting of art directors and copywriters from different walks of life and with no specific technical knowhow. Such diversity is prompted by the need for varied perspectives that can trigger out-of-the-box thinking and lead to a truly unique and memorable advertising campaign for their clients. Technology-driven organizations such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Intel lay great emphasis on the intellectual prowess of candidates. They employ the top PhD students from the leading engineering and science schools across the world – including Stanford, MIT and IITs. This is imperative because the business demands continuous innovation and the need to stay abreast with advancements in technology. Given the scarcity of such talent, they willingly mete out large amounts of money to retain these employees. On the contrary, successful automobile manufacturers like Honda and Toyota have all realized the importance of a strong engineering team coupled with low-cost labour at their production facilities. The skill set required here is limited and the workers need not necessarily be “smart” in the traditional sense. Also, there have been several organizations, composed of people with the best academic track record and backed by leading investors, which have faded to anonymity. The smartest people with the most innovative ideas have failed then because of the non-alignment of their business model and their people strategy.

To match people to jobs, besides information about the job, data about the qualifications required to perform the job must be understood by the analyst of the organisation. Working conditions may explain the need for particular skills, training, knowledge, or even a particular job design. Unique working conditions influence hiring to a great extent. For instance, an airplane manufacturer has problems installing fuel tanks inside wings of the bombers it builds and say the crawl space is extremely narrow and cramped. These tight conditions can cause considerable production delays. The best selection procedure to be followed here by the Personnel department would be to recruit welders who are less than five feet tall and weigh about a hundred pounds. In this case, physical attributes of a personality matter more than his/her intellectual personality. Then, age is an important consideration in roles such as field sales given the hectic nature of the job.

Another issue that must be looked into are those which are binding upon the organization from a socio-cultural standpoint. A case in point is equal opportunity employment on the basis of gender and caste, which is now becoming mandatory in most nations. Organizations like Infosys and Wipro are perfect examples of good corporate citizens and they are now reaping the benefits for the same. Employees look upon these organizations as the most preferred employers in the industry. This highlights the need for organizations to look beyond intellectual and academic merit of candidates.

From careful deliberation on the above points, we see that the success of organizations lies in being able to identify the right kind of people at the right time and by being sensitive to cultural issues surrounding the operating environment. Be it personal development or organisation progression, a career-ladder strategy follows a principle that the most appropriate selection criterion will not necessarily be performance on the immediate task for which a person is hired. Organisations instead focus on selections procedures on how trainable the new members are and how readily they will adapt to organisational norms and later duties. It can be concluded that organizations that have been successful have had the “smartest people strategy” rather than the smartest people.

The Wikipedia is impossible, but here it is. It is one of those things impossible in theory, but possible in practice. Once you confront the fact that it works, you have to shift your expectation of what else that is impossible in theory might work in practice… We have to get good at believing in the Impossible.
- Kevin Kelly

A bunch (5-6) of us back in college called ourselves as cockroaches. Because our objective was not to excel at studies but to hang in there and survive and graduate and get placed. When you look at things from a survival perspective, life becomes quite easy. The pressure is off your shoulders. This approach/way of life has remained with me. As long as I can just about manage to survive as a startup, I am happy. I have no immediate expectations of huge traffic and huge money. Right now it’s just a matter of survival and I think am good at it. Will change gears, when the time feels right.