ET CITINGS

If translated into policy, the legal approach to human rights would slam head-on into another bureaucratic barrier: the Bank's incentive system. According to one Bank official quoted in the report, employees get their "brownie points" based on successfully getting a loan out the door rather than a project's long-term results. "Staff are promoted based on the numbers of loans they get approved, and the amount of money in those loans," Sarfaty states. "Since [the loan-funded] projects often take many years to yield results, promotion is not tied to favorable long-term outcomes."

The result: Staff members resist policies that are perceived to slow down loan activity. For example, the Bank has a number of operational "safeguard" policies, which are designed to avoid detrimental social and environmental impacts of lending. (Although there is no safeguard policy yet on human rights, several existing policies address human rights-related issues, like involuntary resettlement.) Sarfaty found that the loan approval-focused incentive system indirectly resulted in non-compliance with the Bank's safeguard policies.

"Although employees are required to apply the policies in borrower countries, they do not consistently do so in practice," she writes. "The Bank promotes its safeguard policies as indicative of its concern for environmental and social goals, but its implicit incentive system suggests that these goals are not primary. In fact, most employees perceive the policies as impediments to lending because they add constraints to tasks and thereby reduce efficiency and opportunities for promotion."

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( Interview with Praveen Kadle, CEO, Tata Finance)

These were systemic problems, especially the high cost of operations. The market share was coming down and [there were problems with] product acceptability in the car division. It was quite clear that the company had to clean up its act as soon as possible. So from 1999 or 2000, we started looking at the cost structure. We brought down costs significantly. We improved employee productivity significantly. We restructured our operations. Some of the non-performing assets (NPAs), or underperforming assets, were either sold or were made to sweat a lot so that we could get back returns. I think working capital management was one of the key areas where we did significant restructuring. We used to have a huge inventory problem and about 27% of our total revenue was locked in net working capital -- not gross. So we decided to make the company get into some kind of reverse mode. From positive net working capital where a lot of money was blocked, we thought that we should get into negative net working capital.

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So in 2007, we started Tata Capital.

Also, India requires a huge amount of financial inclusion. Therefore, one can also get the social objective achieved without compromising on the commercial aspects of doing the business. We are in the corporate finance business, where we lend to corporate clients, mostly to mid-size and small companies, which are today not getting the right kind of credit from the banking system. We are also in investment banking, where we support mid-size companies [that] are not getting the right kind of financial advisory or investment banking advice. We are looking at the capital market in a big way, both in equity as well as in the debt market -- especially the debt market, which needs to be strengthened.
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Kadle: Unfortunately, Indian regulations don't allow large corporations like the Tatas to get into full-fledged banking or commercial banking. So we are registered as a non-banking financial services company, which doesn't allow us to get access to the low-cost current accounts and savings accounts of retail consumers. So we certainly have a cost disadvantage on the funding side. But what we are trying to do is to keep our operations cost-efficient by using technology and by using highly-motivated employees to have much better employee productivity and the right kind of processes.
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ndia Knowledge@Wharton: What has been the biggest leadership challenge you have faced in your career? How did you overcome it? And what did you learn from it?

Kadle: That is a difficult question. In terms of leadership challenges, I worked as a CFO all along and now I am a CEO. A CFO is always supposed to be a critic of the company's financial health and tries to help the company improve its financial health. As a CEO you are supposed to set the whole game plan in terms of growth and at the same time, sound financial health, sound processes and all that. So from being a bean counter to now actually be somebody who is executing, I think, is a key challenge.
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"Markets can't do everything," says Donaldson, declining to comment directly on the court order. "One of the things they can't do entirely on their own is accommodate basic needs or satisfy basic human rights. What needs to happen is for governments to be more creative about using markets so that they can accomplish policy objectives like satisfying basic needs." Governments cannot shy away from the responsibility of distributing food to the hungry by citing economic inefficiencies, Donaldson says. "When the government says it is not efficient to distribute food in some instances, the problem with that is that efficiency depends on where you look for it." He offers the example of a trucking firm that finds it is not going to be paid enough to deliver much-needed human blood supplies to victims of an earthquake. "It's true that it's inefficient for the company to do something that will create a small loss for it. But it is pretty clear here that it is not efficient for society as a whole to have that blood and not use it. So what is efficient for a government may not be efficient for society."
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Rajesh Chakrabarti, assistant professor of finance at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. "But the question here is this: If there was no surplus food grain available, should we not have said that the government should import food to feed the poor? In other words, hunger is inexcusable, with or without surplus stock."
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Bangalore-based Akshaya Patra Foundation, which runs the world's largest school mid-day meal program -- be roped in to oversee the distribution of the grain and integrate that effort with other welfare programs along with private initiatives.
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ne-year-old, escaping the 1943 Bengal famine that claimed three million lives. "What [Sen] found was -- and we find this again and again -- there was adequate supply of food. This is the tragedy we have discovered about famines. In most instances -- even in the context of famines -- there typically is enough food to go around, but you have panic buying, hoarding, price-gouging and government mismanagement." He points to nonprofits in the U.S. that collect and redistribute food and other supplies that would otherwise go waste: Surplus Distribution Co. of Akron, Ohio, and Philabundance in Philadelphia; the latter has arrangements with large grocery chains to collect surplus food and distribute it to the poor and hungry.
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India's situation of excess food grain stocks goes hand-in-hand with what many see as a preoccupation with food security. That can be traced to the insecurity that gripped the nation in the mid-1950s, when it averted widespread starvation by importing U.S. food grains under the so-called PL-480 program of the then Dwight Eisenhower administration. In fact, some media reports claim the government prefers to hold excess food grain stocks even at the risk of wastage, rather than run the risk of shortages. After all, governments in earlier years have fallen under the weight of high food prices.
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Kavitha Kuruganti, trustee at Kheti Virasat Mission, an organization that helps farmers in India's Punjab state cope with the effects of "intensive agricultural models" or excessive cultivation. "Today, it seems we have grain we should be distributing free of cost because the Supreme Court orders [it] or because that seems to be a just way of dealing with it. But why has it accumulated in the first instance?" she asks. "It's got something to do with the impoverishment we are subjecting most people in this country to."
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Meanwhile, India's population of poor families rises and falls with every statistical redefinition. The agricultural ministry's records had about 65 million poor families covered by its PDS umbrella. But after the Supreme Court's upbraiding, Pawar agreed with the Tendulkar Committee's report which put India's poor at 81 million families, or 37.2% of the country's population. Devinder Sharma, a food policy analyst and chairman of the New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, feels the government should go by the United Nations Development Program's estimate that 55% of Indians are below the poverty line !
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Labels: Knowledge at Wharton

Rules for revolutionaries

Posted on September 10, 2010 | Author: Guy Kawasaki | View 4

Thinking digital means using technology to look at real data, track interactions with customers, and mine for information to serve people better. It requires thinking clearly and precisely rather than relying on hearsay, habits, and prejudices. Acting analog means using a personal touch.

No revolution ever succeeded without a high degree of analog contact — no matter how great your product, how leveraged your marketing, or how cool your website.

When all is browsed, e-mailed, voice-mailed, and faxed, it's still an analog world ... Great as it can be, digital technology can also create negative feelings by invading people's privacy or simply being a pain in the ass.

Digital power is easy to abuse, so keep these third principles in mind when you're thinking digital. First, never require customers to give you, personal information. The information might be crucial for your database and direct marketing efforts, but that's your problem, not your customers'.

Second, if your customers are willing to give you this information, use it but use it judiciously. That is, don't inundate them with marketing and sales crap. Third, don't collect information if you're not going to do something with it.

Ideally, you and your customers should both derive value from the information they provide. Short of this, at least your customers should get some value.

But if it's only you that derives value, then you're hassling your customers for insufficient reason. Being a customer of your company should never entail the burden of being mere data for your research projects.

From ' Rules for Revolutionaries' by Guy Kawasaki.

Amazon link, here !

The other is even more interesting. It [is based on] ... the Hole-in-the-Wall experiment, [in which a scientist] set up a computer [on an outside] wall of one of our software factories, which was adjacent to a slum. He observed the behavior of the slum children when they saw this computer sticking out from the wall. To his amusement, he found that, within a month, without any formal education, these slum children were actually surfing the Internet. He came to the conclusion that there is a much better method of imparting education and he coined the term Minimally Invasive Education. In traditional education, people are put into classrooms. This experiment found that if you provide children with the tools they are able to learn by themselves. This was a very interesting concept, which was deployed in rural education. We set up these kiosks on school playgrounds and [they included] nothing but computers. That was another strong initiative.
Arvind Thakur, CEO , N.I.I.T
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(NIIT)Thakur: Our whole move to make our business nonlinear meant that instead of just providing services, we needed to provide complete solutions, where a good part of the solution knowledge was built into the intellectual property. With SATS, we actually built the cargo ground handling solution, which has been very successfully deployed in Singapore's Changi Airport. For the past 10 years, we have been supporting, enhancing and building in all the features that I just talked to you about. We have a deep understanding of that application. We then entered into a partnership with SATS [saying] 'Here is something that's working extremely well for you. Can we take this intellectual property and build services around it and implement it in other airports? Obviously, it's your intellectual property so you will commercially also benefit from this partnership'.... We took that IP and we implemented it in Taiwan, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Bangalore and, more recently, in Indonesia and Vietnam.
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Labels: Knowledge at Wharton

ook. The other was focus on new service lines that were essentially nonlinear. If you look at a traditional business, which is really service business, growth in revenues implies proportional growth in head count. And since it was important to improve the cost structure, we started focusing on business lines where growth in revenue did not imply proportional growth in head count.

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Tweeet : "if those idiots in Florida proceed w/their "Koran burning" festival on 9/11 it will do more for Al Queda recruitment than Abu Grahaib! "

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Worse still, this distinction seems to be used as a reason for leaders to avoid the hard work of learning about the people that they lead, the technologies their companies use, and the customers they serve. I remember hearing of a cell phone company CEO, for example, who never visited the stores where his phones were sold — because that was a management task that was beneath him — and kept pushing strategies that reflected a complete misunderstanding of customer experiences. ( in linked in too)
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This ability to go back and forth between the little details and the big picture is also evident in the leaders I admire most who aren't usually thought of as dreamers.( linked in)

Labels: Knowledge at Wharton

f one looks at the research on older workers -- those who are at or close to retirement age -- one finds what Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources, calls "an incredible amount of discrimination, bigger even than discrimination against race or gender." Older people, he says, often find it difficult to get a job, partly because relatively young supervisors are reluctant to hire and then manage employees who are decades older, even though these employees are the type of worker many employers say they want


an incredible amount of discrimination, bigger even than discrimination against race or gender." Older people, he says, often find it difficult to get a job, partly because relatively young supervisors are reluctant to hire and then manage employees who are decades older, even though these employees are the type of worker many employers say they want.

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re quite young to have some serious responsibility. As start-ups get a little bigger, for example, they have to reach out for talent -- such as marketing experts and chief operating officers -- who will help them reach the next level of growth. The founders don't want to hire a kid; they want to look for somebody who has done this before, such as an executive looking for a second career. You see that quite often.

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If you look at the research on older workers, you see an incredible amount of discrimination against them, bigger than race, bigger than gender. Older workers struggle to get hired. And yet these are individuals who are perfectly suited to what employers say they want -- somebody who can hit the ground running, who knows how to handle work-based problems, who is not interested in a long-term commitment from the company, and who is self-motivated and self-managing. All this exactly defines older workers. They are ideally suited for many of these jobs, and yet when push comes to shove, younger supervisors won't hire them.
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They can serve as mentors to younger employees. If older workers stay with the same company, they carry on the culture. They have tacit knowledge that you can't find in a book. And surprisingly, if you look at job performance data related to age, it turns out that older workers perform better on every dimension of job performance. They turn over less, are absent less, their performance appraisals are better and, contrary to prevailing assumptions, they don't cost employers more than younger workers. Wages are higher for experience, not seniority, and higher wages for experience reflects productivity advantages.

On the health care side, the assumption is that older people are sick a lot and will use the health care system more. That's true. But they don't have dependents. In most companies, the actual costs for employers are highly associated with an employee's dependents, not with the employee. So older workers may not even cost more for health care.

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In addition, smart companies know that older workers are less motivated by money, and more interested in meaningful work, social contacts, etc. So when you go down this list, the interesting thing is that older workers sound like younger workers -- those who say they don't want to make long-term commitments to an organization, who say they are motivated by the mission of the company and are looking for work-life balance, time to pursue interests outside of work, and so forth.... In some ways, the quirky part of this is that people in the middle of their careers are the unusual ones. They are stuck because they need money for mortgages, their kids' education and other commitments. They are the ones who can't move and can't be as flexible.
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To the extent they keep working in their company, it's as a consultant or as a part-time employee. That's the typical model.
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And in fact this book is written mainly from an employer's perspective. The goal is to point out the opportunities that hiring older workers provide, and to examine why these opportunities are not being taken up. We are suggesting ways that employers can take advantage of this opportunity. There are many surveys about what older workers want, but not about employers. So the bigger puzzle was on the employers' side
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The part of this book that is unique is that it calls attention to the whole issue of younger supervisors managing older workers. Awareness of the issue is a big point. We also go into ways to address this issue, which revolve around changing the ways that younger supervisors manage. For example, they can't boss older employees around based on their formal authority and expertise, because older workers will have more expertise than the supervisors. And you can't threaten or bribe them. The usual model is to say, "You have to do this or we will fire you." Older workers obviously don't want to be fired, but it is not as big a deal as it is for workers who are 40. Supervisors have to manage in a way that is more empowering. They have to say, "Here is a project; we want your ideas on how to get it done."

Another issue is that younger supervisors sometimes undermanage older workers because they are afraid of them. So they just don't deal with them, don't talk to them. That's a problem as well. We discuss these issues and how to solve them.
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Are some industries more hospitable to older workers than others?

Cappelli: Places where there are labor shortages, like health care, pay attention to this. In health care, a lot of employers are trying to keep older nurses and technicians around because they are in short supply. In more creative fields, there are increased efforts to retain research scientists -- in the pharmaceutical industry, for example. These are places where there are individual contributors who work independently. Some efforts are underway in some corporations to bring back expertise for consulting arrangements. Big companies realize they have gotten bad at managing knowledge. An example is a company that suddenly discovers nobody in its ranks has met any of the partners in its Japanese subsidiary because the only people who knew them have just retired. Or consider the power company that discovered there were only a few people who knew where all the underground lines were and they had just retired as well. They were brought back in as consultants. There are a lot of places out there that aren't thinking about these issues ahead of time.
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Labels: Knowledge at Wharton