I believe in bumbling around long enough to not give up at things. And eventually success comes your way, because you tried to fail in every possible way, the only way that’s left is the one successful way, and always, for entrepreneurs, seems to come last. It’s so obvious when it comes.

Drucker’s most powerful ideas have been assembled in one place – The Daily Drucker. Culled from his lifetime of writings, The Daily Drucker presents the keys to his thinking and pulls together his remarkable body of work. Each of the 366 insights in the book are accompanied with a call to action. Each week from now I shall be compiling my notes from The Daily Drucker under a series of blog posts titled The Weekly Drucker Classroom.

Integrity in Leadership

The spirit of an organization is created from the top. When you appoint someone to a senior position it implies that you are willing to have his or her character serve as the model for subordinates. Hence, it is imperative to appoint people with intergrity.

Scribble:
Conversely, when you are considering a job offer, evaluate the character of the CEO and top management of the organization. Align your self with people who possess intergrity.

Identifying the Future

The important thing is to identify the “future that has already happened” i.e. identify the trends in your market that have already appeared, think of their longevity and impact on your life and organization.

Scribble:
Some of the trends that I could identify in the online recruitment space:
i. Recruiting via social and professional networks, blogs, microblogs – Social recruiting
ii. Personal branding on the Internet / Online reputation – Google resume
iii. Employer branding through social media

Management is Indespensable

Whoever makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before deserves better of mankind than any speculative philosopher or metaphysical system builder.

Scribble:
Keep this in mind when up against an armchair critic.

Organizational Inertia

All organizations need a discipline that makes them face up to reality. Businesses are subject to the discipline of the market and hence forced to change with times. But governments, hospitals and non-profit organizations do not face market pressures and lose discipline.

Scribble:
If you ever do start a non-profit initiative, it should be subject to some kind of yardstick and performance metric.

5. Abandonment

There is nothing as difficult and as expensive, but also nothing as futile, as trying to keep a corpse from stinking.

Stop squandering your resources on obsolete businesses and free up your capable people to take advantage of new opportunities.

Scribble:
If your business is failing to take off, the right thing to do is to shut down and move on to something else. I think 1000 days is a good time to take this call.

Practice of abandonment

Abandon is the right action when:
i. A product, service, market, or process “still has a few years of life.”
ii. The only reason for keeping it is that “It is fully written off.”
iii. When a new and growing product, service, or process is being neglected for the sake of maintaining an old or declining product, service, market, or process.

Scribble:
Keep your ears open to these three lines of argument. I’ve heard these before and each time the management decided not to abandon the business.

Knowledge Workers: Asset Not Cost

Attract and retain the highest producing knowledge workers by treating them and their knowledge as the most valuable assets of the organization.

Scribble:
Knowledge workers are more like artists and each one should be recognized for their individual knowledge. They hate being seen as a number.

After Steve Jobs 42.0 and Biking 42.0, we’ve put together Richard Branson 42.0. Credit for this compilation goes to a dear friend Amita who has actively contributed to different sections of the site.

Enjoy the gyaan. Also, if you’d like to compile a 42.0 of any kind, I’d be glad to put it up. You can mail it across to nimish [at] workosaur [dot] com.

The Manpower Employment Outlook Survey is conducted quarterly to measure employers’ intentions to increase or decrease the number of employees in their workforce during the next quarter.

In a nutshell, the report has this to say:

Active hiring plans are reported by Indian employers for Quarter 2 2009. With 30% of employers expecting to increase headcount, just 7% anticipating a decrease and 45% forecasting no change, the Net Employment Outlook is a healthy +23%.

Read the entire report below:

Read this article on YourStory.in to know how and why I started Workosaur.com.

Kensaku Konishi is the President and CEO of Canon India. Having worked with Canon for more than 20 years across different countries, Konishi now oversees the company’s management and business operations in India. The workosaur team caught up with him and sought his words of wisdom for our readers. You can read the conversation here.

I have noticed that a few call centers use Average Handling Time (AHT) as a metric to judge the performance of their executives. Average Handling Time is the average duration of calls attended by the executives. The metric presumes that shorter the duration, better is the executive’s ability to handle a complaint i.e. lower AHTs imply that the executive is doing a great job. Consequently, several executives hang up on the customer midway through the call to improve on their performance metric. I recently encountered this problem with the Vodafone call center and the experience is extremely frustrating. This attitude runs counter to Vodafone’s pug ad in which they’ve painted themselves as committed to helping their customers.

The point I am making here is that certain metrics though seemingly logical may end up hurting your business. Metrics such as AHT are useful only when the employees aren’t aware of it. Otherwise, it can be manipulated and harm the business.

Twitter’s  ’Trending Topics’ suffers from this same problem.

Amita, a friend who’s currently in US, was playing around on Google.com and noticed that as soon as someone typed worko, they got prompted with workosaur as the first option. I tried the same on Google.co.in and again I was prompted with workosaur though it appeared as the seventh option.

Pretty good when you consider that you have keywords such as workout and workopolis (Canada’s top job portal) starting with the same string.

Prompt on Google.com

Prompt on Google.co.in

The who’s who of the online recruitment industry in India are now on Twitter. Just put together a list:

CareerBuilder.co.in
Twitter handle: @CareerBuilderIN
Twitter representative: Scott (@goradesi)
Subjects of Tweets: Jobseeker tips from across the Internet, International news around politics and the economy, Weather reports from Delhi, Scott’s stay in India

Naukri.com
Twitter handle: @Naukri
Twitter representative: PR Team / Brand Manager
Subject of Tweets: Developments on Naukri.com, Recruitment Industry Updates, Jobseeker Tips, Quotes, Hari Sadu

Shine.com
Twitter handle: @Shinedotcom
Twitter representative: Nikhil Suri & Divya Taneja
Subject of Tweets: Developments on Shine.com, Jobseeker Tips

SutraJobs.com
Twitter handle: @sutrajobs
Twitter representative:  Rizwan Iqbal (Co-founder)
Subject of tweets: Job feeds

TimesJobs.com
Twitter handle: @timesjobsdotcom
Twitter representative: Reva Khurana (Product Analyst / Product Manager) 
Subject of tweets:  Jobseeker tips, Developments on TimesJobs.com, Timings of chat sessions with HR Professionals

Workosaur.com
Twitter handles: @wNimish, @workosaur and more
Twitter representative: Nimish Adani (Founder) for @wNimish, Twitterfeed for the rest
Subject of tweets: 
@wNimish – Developments on Workosaur.com, Tidbits about the online space, management and startups, Interesting links, Personal interests such as Crosswords & Puzzles
@workosaur & others – Job feeds

What’s been good to see is that all the above have embraced Twitter whole-heartedly i.e. they aren’t mere outlets for press releases, they don’t seem to be governed by any rules, they are listening to what’s being said and interacting at a personal level.

A few weeks ago Sanjeev Bikchandani (Naukri.com) wrote an article titled ‘Entrepreneurs are risk averse’ – which was met with wide-spread disagreement in Twitterverse. I don’t know what the fuss was all about. Ever since I have given thought to this subject, I have believed that entrepreneurs are not characterized by a propensity for risk taking. Entrepreneurs rationalize the risk they have to take and work towards minimizing them. Or they’d have no chance of making it.

As Drucker says in his book titled ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship’:

I know a good many successful entrepreneurs. Not one of them has a “propensity for risk taking.” Most successful innovators in real life are colorless figures, and much more likely to spend hours on cash-flow projections than to dash off looking for “risks.” They are not “risk-focussed”; they are opportunity-focused.”

Or as Sanjeev puts it:

The point is – entrepreneurs have different goals.

Entrepreneurs who claim otherwise are just trying to flaunt characteristics that they’d like to be associated with and nothing else.