IR gone AWOL from HR

Two recent articles should go a long way in provoking a debate about how large organisations deal with their employees, particularly those who are disgruntled.

Mr V S Mahesh, in "The Maruti strike & an old story from the Tata Group" quotes JRD Tata - "One lesson I have learnt through 50 years of working with people is that there are no union problems…only management problems.” This is a telling remark; there are two others in the same article:

• "There appears to be an extreme paucity of good HR professionals who can balance the soft and hard aspects of people management. I believe the primary cause for this is the sort of HR-related education offered in our management schools and executive development programmes."
• "For decades, our management cadres have been fed a diet of quantitative models and American perspectives on HR, such as viewing people as a variable cost rather than the only asset that can appreciate in value and limiting talent management to incentivizing white-collar knowledge workers."

In another article, ‘We need to be clear how to handle Gen Y', it says that "Mr S.Y. Siddiqui, Managing Executive Officer- Administration (HR, Finance & IT) at Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, is convinced that the root of the problem was Gen Y that ‘went in the wrong direction.'"

That's a curiously contrarian point of view. While Mr Siddiqui goes on to say "The third is in our senior management. I think in terms of our culture building capability, we did have some gaps", there is this insidious thought in my mind that perhaps Gen Y was going in whichever it wanted to go, but perhaps the management was not looking.
 
In a report called "Global Workplace Innovation - Generation Y and the Workplace Annual Report 2010", for Johnson Controls (freely downloaded from the Net), the section on India has this to say:

"Who is the Generation Y in India?

"In India, they make up the more than half of the population. Despite the large potential workforce, not all are ‘employment ready’ and so their talents are in short supply. The Generation Y in India is a remarkable group that is ambitious, optimistic, embraces change and have a clear sense of where they are headed. Most are ‘entrepreneurial and business savvy, as well as technologically capable and connected.

"With about half of India’s one billion people under the age of 25, Generation Y in India is the world’s largest. Positioned in a time of exciting and rapid economic growth in the country, they are keen to participate in the country’s future and success. The country’s recent parliament elections saw a huge turnout of Generation Y population, demonstrating their ambition to take the country forward. Highly competitive, Generation Y is more than ever before seeking higher education and landing jobs in multi-national companies in areas such as IT, back office operations, media, strategy and management positions. With opportunities aplenty in the current economy, they are also job-hopping, something not seen in their parents’ generation."

There's more of this; you could download the whole report and read it yourself, if you so desire. 

If this understanding is correct, it would seem to me that Mr Siddiqui's statement that "Therefore my first premise is that whichever company, whichever sector, we need to have a very clear thinking how we are going to handle Gen Y", is really patronising. Or is this a standard managerial perspective? That you 'handle' people, not understand them and their motivations, and work together for a common win-win game?

I am not a HR person by qualification or nature of work - I hope some of you are and we could discuss this matter - I believe there needs to be a much degree of sensitivity in dealing with people than I seem to notice in the Business Line article.

Voice of Youth

My friend Steve Correa has sent me these two vids. I love them, and have his permission to share them. These are part of a presentation he had made at a recent NHRD conference.

What Makes a Video Go Viral

Now we know the secrets of great viral video ads! And, lo and behold, the secrets don't come from ad agencies or data analytics companies; they come from academia.

The article is reproduced below. You can read it here in Scientific American.

"New Theory Explains What Makes a Video Go Viral

"According to an algorithm, the four ingredients required are congruency, emotive strength, network involvement and something called "paired meme synergy".

"More than 10 million people have watched a YouTube video of an iPhone being pulverized in a blender. It's actually a commercial for Blendtec — a company most viewers had probably never heard of. But with the viral clip, Blendtec let social networking spread its name and message rather than paying for a mass advertising campaign. And it worked like a charm.

"Viral-produced movies" are the new holy grail of advertising, but they're tough to pull off. Only the best among them can overcome the slight annoyance people feel when they realize a video they enjoyed was actually an ad — and yet compel them to share it with friends anyway. As Brent Coker, a marketing professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, says, "Ensuring the success of a viral-produced movie is still largely hit-and-miss … babies, pranks, and stunts seem to have great success on some occasions, but turn into catastrophic failures on others."

"So what defines a great ad — one that a viewer will choose to Tweet or post to Facebook?

"Coker has come up with a recipe for success called the branded viral movie predictor algorithm. According to the algorithm, the four ingredients required for a video to go viral are congruency, emotive strength, network involvement, and something called "paired meme synergy."

"First, the themes of a video must be congruent with people's pre-existing knowledge of the brand it is advertising. "For example, Harley Davidson for most people is associated with Freedom, Muscle, Tattoos, and Membership," Coker explained on his website. Videos that strengthen that association meet with approval, "but as soon as we witness associations with the brand that are inconsistent with our brand knowledge, we feel tension." In the latter case, few people will share the video, and it will quickly "go extinct."

"Second, only viral-produced videos with strong emotional appeal make the cut, and the more extreme the emotions, the better. Happy and funny videos don't tend to fare as well as scary or disgusting ones, Coker said.

"Third, videos must be relevant to a large network of people — college students or office workers, for example.

"And last, Coker came up with 16 concepts — known on the Internet as "memes" — that viral-produced videos tend to have, and discovered that videos only go viral if they have the right pairings of these concepts. "When combined, some combinations appear to work better together than others," he told Life's Little Mysteries.

"For example, the concept he calls Voyeur, which is when a video appears to be someone's mobile phone footage, works well when combined with Eyes Surprise — unexpectedness. These also work well in combination with Simulation Trigger, which is when "the viewer imagines themselves being friends [with the people in the video] and sharing the same ideals," he said.

According to Coker, one viral video that used all three of those memes — and exemplified the other BVMP strategies, too — was a 2007 ad by Quiksilver, the beach apparel company. The grainy footage showed surfers throwing dynamite in a river and surfing on the resulting waves. It quickly topped 1 million views."

IIT and AIEEE coaching classes – Villians or Necessary evils

IIT and AIEEE coaching classes – Villians or Necessary evils

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011 - New Scientist

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011 - New Scientist

10 Famous Literary Characters and Their Real-Life Inspirations

Not my work - got this from here. You really have to go to the link above - the first page of the original post is reproduced here. 
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We all know truth is stranger than fiction, and some things (and people) are just too good to have been made up. We’ve already shown you quirky cartoon characters based on real people, and though we imagine there are many more life-to-literature adaptations than life-to-cartoon, we’ve decided to continue the trend and pick some of our favorite famous literary characters inspired by real-life people. For the most part, we’ve skipped the autobiographical inspirations, mostly because there are too many too count, though many writers would probably tell you there’s a little bit of themselves in every character they write, so in some ways that distinction is a losing battle. Click through to read out list of ten famous literary characters and their real-life counterparts, and let us know your own picks for your favorite truth-inspired heroes and heroines in the comments!

Tintin — Palle Huld

The 15-year-old Danish writer and actor’s 1928 voyage around the world, documented in his book Around the World in 44 days by Palle reportedly inspired Hergé’s Tintin, himself a young jet-setting fellow. As far as we can tell, Snowy was just a stroke of pure genius invention.

The Art of the Semi-Autobiographical Novel

Not my own work, I hasten to add. But brilliant nonetheless. I don't know where it was originally posted - it came to me via a friend. Read on. 
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To assuage our interest and close the circle, we decided to follow up with a list of a few of our favorite semi-autobiographical novels — that is, novels wherein at least one character is based on the author, and usually containing a plot that revolves around the author’s true-life experiences. Click through to check out ten of our favorite semi-autobiographical novels, from the barely-veiled straight autobiographies to the masterful collages of life and fiction. We know there are hundreds and hundreds of these, so please chime in and let us know your own favorite semi-autobiographies in the comments!

We the Animals, Justin Torres

Justin Torres’s unbelievably exquisite debut novel could be described as a collection of searing anecdotes, gradually easing the narrator away from his collective self-awareness as part of three brothers (“We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more”) to the painful, necessary schism into “they” and “I.” He admits that he drew much of the story and characters from his own life, and when we saw him read, he laughed large at the “how autobiographical is it really?” question and shrugged, but the more he spoke, the more he seemed like his narrator. “Your consciousness is informed by your experience,” he said. “It’s just how the mind works.”

Black Swan Green, David Mitchell 

Though you may not know it (unless you’ve read this novel), celebrated author David Mitchell suffers from a stammer. In an article he wrote celebrating The King’s Speech for being the first film to accurately portray the speech defect as he experiences it, he wrote, “Despite growing up in a much saner family than the Duke of York’s, my open and kind parents and I discussed my speech impediment exactly never, and this “don’t mention the stammer” policy was continued by friends and colleagues into my thirties. I’d probably still be avoiding the subject today had I not outed myself by writing a semi-autobiographical novel, Black Swan Green, narrated by a stammering 13 year old.”

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

Though not his most famous work, Dandelion Wine is a beautiful, magical rumination on boyhood and the myth of the eternal summer. Recently, just before Bradbury’s 91st birthday, it was announced that Black Swan producer Mike Medavoy would produce a film version of the novel in conjunction with Bradbury. Of the project, Bradbury said, “This is the best birthday gift I could ask for. Today, I have been reborn! Dandelion Wine is my most deeply personal work and brings back memories of sheer joy as well as terror. This is the story of me as a young boy and the magic of an unforgettable summer which still holds a mystical power over me.” [Ray is one of my absolute favourite writers and this is one of my absolute favourite books by him - Jayanta.]

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

It’s well known that Sylvia Plath’s only novel, originally published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas” in 1963, is based on Plath’s own descent into clinical depression. Like her protagonist, Esther Greenwood, Plath had a magazine internship in college, met with a similar mentor, was rejected from a writing course she desperately wanted to take, and fell into a deep, lingering depression. Unlike Esther, however, Plath was unable to pull herself back into the world, and committed suicide about a month after the book’s UK publication.

Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

“Mountain,” Baldwin once said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” The book, based in part on the author’s own experiences as a teenage preacher in a small church in Harlem, is a fantastic, tense tale of a 14-year-old boy’s spiritual awakening and moral maturation.

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s semi-autobiographical novel of World War I marked a turn towards the romantic for him — though perhaps everyone gets a little romantic about what they see in their own life. Many of the characters — Catherine Barkley, Helen Ferguson, the priest — are based on real-life people, and of course Henry is based on Hemingway himself and his own doomed romance when he served in the Italian campaigns of the First World War.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre was originally published in London in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography with the pen name “Currer Bell.” Though the autobiographical subtitle was dropped when Brontë dropped the pen name (a sort of obvious correlation there, if you ask us), scholars have found many similarities between the story and Brontë’s own life. Like Jane, Brontë was an orphan sent to live in a terrible boarding school, and it was there her two elder sisters died, rather than just a friend, as in Jane Eyre.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Perhaps the most famous semi-autobiographical novel, Joyce’s Bildungsroman follows Stephen Dedalus as he begins to buck the traditions of his Irish Catholic childhood, before finally taking leave of Ireland to pursue his ambitions as an artist. Many editions of the novel have pictures of Joyce on the cover — no need to pretend to model this Dedalus character after anyone else (except of course the mythical character of Daedalus).

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

Alcott’s novel, which follows the lives and experiences of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, is based on her own experience growing up with three sisters and set in the same house where it was written, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Alcott is Jo, of course — who else?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson’s notorious drug-addled novel was based on based on two actual drug-addled trips to Las Vegas that Thompson took (with his attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta, of course) in March and April 1971, while reporting for Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated. Supposedly, most of what would become his most famous novel was scribbled frantically in his notebook at the tail end of each of these trips. In cases like this, Thompson’s famed adage bears repeating: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” Yes they have. [And Ralph Steadman's drawings are magical! - Jayanta]