Its theme is that the vision of most organizations is too constricted by a narrow understanding of what business they are in. It is critical to define the industry, broadly enough to take advantage of growth opportunities. It exhorted CEOs to re-examine their corporate vision; and redefine their markets in terms of wider perspectives i.e. being customer oriented rather than being product oriented.

The paper cited examples of two well known industries which suffered due to marketing myopia – Railroads and Hollywood. Railroads defined itself to be in the railroad business rather than transportation and Hollywood, that was threatened by TV, defined itself to be in the movie business rather than Entertainment. Such narrow horizons to the opportunities of these industries limited their growth opportunities. Besides a strong product an industry needs to have a close watch on customer satisfying experiences.

There are four conditions/myths which cause industries which were once riding a growth escalator to descend into stagnation.

1. Population Myth - The belief that growth is assured by an expanding and more affluent population.
Reality: Any industry needs to improve upon its generic product, not only in making but also marketing.

2. Idea of Indispensability - The belief that there is no competitive substitute for an industry’s major products.
Reality: a) Customers basic needs and preference need to have priority. b) There is no guarantee against product obsolesce, innovate before you are outdated.

3. Production Pressures - Too much faith in mass production and in the advantages of rapidly declining unit costs as output rises, Ignoring marketing over sales.
Reality: Constant need to innovate in accordance with changing customer patterns and taking care of customer needs rather than mass production of a soon to be obsolete product.

4. Dangers of R&D - Preoccupation with a product that lends itself to carefully controlled scientific experimentation, improvement and manufacturing cost reduction, instead of consumer requirements.
Reality: a) Experimenting with fixed variables is different from unpredictable customers. b) An industry begins with customer and needs, and not a patent, raw material or selling skill.

Next Steps:
1. Read this NY Times article by Thomas Friedman about how Detroit has been hit because of it’s Marketing Myopia.
2. Forward this article to the marketing wizards in your company and ask them what they are doing to prepare for the future.

1. Do not project the opportunity, which you are being interviewed for, as a short-term arrangement. Organizations exist to make profits and are not training institutes. They will only be interested in recruiting you if you show a long-term commitment.

2. Do not be presumptuous. While there is nothing wrong in being ambitious and setting goals, the last thing the interviewer wants to hear from you is that you would soon be their boss and CEO.

A good answer to this popular interview question would be:
“I wish to make a long-term commitment to the organization I join next. And while it is good to set milestones, I believe the journey is equally important. So, I just want to give 100% to whatever I do and keep learning along the way. I’ve seen that excellence leads to opportunities and I am sure that would be the case here as well.”

Next Steps:
Send this post to the guy who is unable to conceal his ambitions to be CEO, no matter if the guy listening is an interviewer.

How to start meetings on time (the honest version) Original link
1. If you called the meeting, do your %*?@?! job. i.e. Get there on time; Write a bullet list agenda on the wall; Manage the conversation so no one hogs the floor and the right people get a voice at the right time; Make sure side issues get delegated out of the room.
2. Get the senior management guys to arrive on time. Escort them yourself.
3. Someone must enforce the clock.
4. Plan to end 5 minutes early.
5. Only have meetings that matter.

How to keep meetings short: 5 tricks Original link
1. Making the meeting rooms 5 degrees colder than everywhere else.
2. Remove the chairs from the room. Let people stand.
3. Have uncomfortable chairs.
4. Pick the right person to run the meeting. No pansies/ramblers.
5. Split announcements from discussions.

How to Run a Meeting Like Google Original link
1. Set a firm agenda.
2. Assign a note-taker.
3. Carve out micro-meetings.
4. Hold office hours.
5. Discourage politics, use data.
6. Stick to the clock. Keep a timer.

Next Steps:
Email this post to the guys who spend more time in the conference room than on their desk.

The 1990s may well be remembered as the era of the bold, high-flying, “sky’s the limit” leader with leaders who flaunted the rules and broke away from the herd with incredible daring and flair, and who had an equally spectacular fall - Enron’s Kenneth Lay, Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, and WorldCom’s Bernard Ebbers. At first glance, the lapses in professional judgment or personal conduct from these high-flying leaders appear out of place but such are the trappings of power. While some get consumed by a winner-takes-all attitude, some develop an absolute disdain for rules, some make a Faustian bargain on their way up, and others abandon the practices that helped them get to the top. In each case, the leader becomes vulnerable to the heady effects of power’s rewards.

An Audit for Leaders: Recognizing the Symptoms of Reckless Leadership
Are you spending most of your time plugging holes and papering over cracks? In organizations headed for disaster, CEOs lose sight of the big picture and are myopically focused on staving off imminent disaster.
How do you respond to those nagging, annoying, dissenting voices in your organizations? There are almost always individuals in the organization who recognize when the trouble is brewing and who earnestly try to alert the CEO.
Who can you really trust to tell you the emperor has no clothes? While it is great to have a team that marhces to your orders, you need someone to tell you when the team is marching towards an abyss.
Do you have illusions of grandeur? Has your behaviour changed since reaching the top? Does everyone you know cower before you? Are you sometimes wrong but never in doubt?
Are you too greedy for your own good? Combat greediness by giving something back to society.
Is this a good time to pause, consider doing something different, or even do nothing at all? When in doubt, underreact. Once the first olive is out of the bottle, it’s pretty easy for the rest to start rolling out.

How to have it all?
Keep your life simple. When Warren Buffett was asked how he learned to handle his enormous power and wealth, he said, “I live now the way I lived 30 years ago.”
Hang a lantern on your foibles. - Humor can be a particularly effective tool for acknowledging our flaws.
Float balloons. All the thriving leaders engage in a great deal of reality testing - checking the information they receive, reviewing their assumptions about that information, and testing the quality of feedback by floating wild ideas.
Sweat the small stuff. Worry about what might be ahead and anticipate what may go wrong. It is the small misstep that takes one from the fast track to total derailment.
Reflect more, not less. The overemphasis on doing may lead to an impoverished sense of one’s self and immediate surroundings.

Next Steps:
Share this with the CEO whom you suspect of having an extramarital relationship with their secretary.

Here are a few suggestions for research:

1. Search for contacts in the company (use LinkedIn for this) who could give you a first-hand account of its operations and work culture. Ideally, you should speak to at least 2-3 people on the inside to get a true picture. Try to know what they personally think is great about the company. Make note of seemingly insignificant but interesting anecdotes from their experiences.

2. If you know someone who has been a vendor to the company, try and get similar information from them.

3. Get a first-hand account of the company’s products and services from it’s end customers. Why did the customer choose to use their product/service? What has been their experience - good, bad and ugly? Make note of any suggestions that they have to offer.

4. Get hold of the company’s annual reports and corporate newsletters. Check their official website. Read interviews by the top management of the company and listen in on analyst calls (if available). Also do the same for it’s competitors. Get a sense of how the company has been doing, their strengths, and their focus areas vis-a-vis their competitors.

5. Read reports about the organization in the media. If you conduct an online search for this purpose, then you should also ensure the authenticity of the source. Apart from a search on Google, see the results thrown up by Google News. Also, set up Google News Alerts to keep yourself abreast with any latest developments in the days leading up to the interview.

Once you are through with your research, you would have identified plenty of pluses about the company. You don’t need to memorize everything you learn. All you need to do is discern those 1-2 insights that truly set this organization apart. For example, an interaction with a current employee may have revealed that the company’s CEO knows all his 400 employees by first name - a testimony to the attention given to the employees of the organization. Or a delighted customer may have told you about his experience with the company’s support staff. Or you may have been happily surprised with the transparency exhibited in the company’s annual reports and its website.

These insights can be distiled into reasons that compel you to join the company. The fact that these reasons are not-so-apparent and not-so-obvious are sure to surprise and delight any interviewer. Even if the interview has been dull thus far, this one can clinch it for you. So while research is a time-consuming activity, it is time well-spent.

Next Steps:
Send this article to the dude who thinks he can sleepwalk through any interview.

Next Steps:
Send this post to the colleague who’s on the verge of telling your boss at the morning meeting, “By the way, nobody really wants to hear about your weekend potty-training the puppy - let’s get this show on the road.”

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.

-
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.

Next Steps:
Forward this to your friends and be prepared for a long-drawn debate.

We start this series with key lessons from an article by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones titled ‘Leading Clever People’ from the March 2007 issue of HBR. The lessons assume great importance for today’s executives and managers who have to lead a team of rockstar workosaurs.

In a knowledge industry, there aren’t economies of scale, there are economies of ideas. Leaders have to create an environment in which clever people can thrive. These are the handful of employees whose ideas, knowledge, and skills give them the potential to produce disproportionate value from the resources their organizations make available to them. Think, for example, of the software programmer who creates a new piece of code or the pharmaceutical researcher who formulates a new drug. Their single innovations may bankroll an entire company for years. However, if clever people have one defining characteristic, it is that they do not want to be led. And that is the challenge for managers and executives. How do you lead clever people?

The authors draw noteworthy inferences through case studies of innovation-led organizations - 3M, Lockheed, Roche, Electronic Arts, Microsoft and Google - where clever people are the most important assets. The inferences are presented in form of defining characteristics, shared by clever people, which set the basis for understanding, managing and leading them effectively.

Characteristics that define ‘clever people’:
· They know their worth. Their skills are comparable to those of craftsmen rather than of labourers. You can’t transfer the knowledge without the people.
· They ignore corporate hierarchy and bureaucracy. Promotions do not matter. Salaries and bonuses do. Status matters even more.
· They expect instant access to the CEO/CXOs.
· They are organizationally savvy and must not be mistaken to be politically naive or disconnected. They will ensure that the organization’s agenda is aligned with theirs and vice-versa.
· They need to be protected from the organization’s administrative machinery - mundane meetings, rules, politics and such.
· They like to work in environments where the rules and norms are simple and common-sensical enough to be universally acceptable.
· They have a low boredom threshold. They must be engaged intellectually and inspired with organizational purpose.
· They demand the freedom to explore and fail.
· They need to be encouraged to experiment with their ideas.
· They demand the ability to control the organization’s destiny by being able to take a decision even if it goes against popular opinion.
· They should be allowed to pursue private efforts to foster innovation.
· They are well-connected and are usually plugged into highly developed knowledge networks. This increases their value to the organization and make them more of a flight risk.
· They require a peer group of like-minded individuals. Clever people will flock to where the cleverest people are.
· They expect their leaders to be intellectually on their plane - but they do not like a leader putting on a display of talent and skills that outshines their own.
· They won’t thank you. They must not be led. In fact, your success in leading them depends on your ability to remain on the fringes of their radar.
· They are quick to recognize insincerity and respond badly to it. Respect their intellectual capabilities and engage in straightforward dialogue.

Next Steps:
Share this with your boss and let him/her know how he/she should be dealing with you.

Recently I have been wondering how people stay relevant in the fast changing workplace. Well once again this seems to be a question that has already been answered by Drucker and all I will do is paraphrase.

In a career that spans 50 years or so, it is important to keep expecting change and embrace it. Realize that B-School learning will, however comprehensive it may be, will not take you through 50 years of your career. Keep learning.

There is no magic pill, there is no panacea that will work here. I always hate when that is case, but sometimes that is the way it is. As Drucker puts it, “Knowledge worker becomes obsolete if he/she does not go back to school every three or four years”. Not only will the tools of the trade change, the body of knowledge that you posses will be come obsolete. Change is so pervasive that even people will change in response to their environments, needs and perspectives.

Love change, realize you can’t manage it, try and anticipate it to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible.

Next Steps:
Send this post to a person who has is looking for the guy who moved his cheese.

So my fellow workosaurs, go ahead and support the cause and invite your friends too.