Points to Ponder

"Love Unconditionally but Trust Judiciously! Quite often, friends & foes come in a single pack".

Points to ponder by (Viswa P Rath)

Relationships are all about wiring..........................Reality Bites - Jay Sun.

Duracell - Power Packed

Someone I know; brilliance that lasts and lasts........ duracell power packed lady!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jace/323707598/in/set-72157594422482898/

Photo courtesy: http://flickr.com/photos/viswaprath/372179908/

Making a market in talent

A 21st-century company should put as much effort into developing its talented employees as it puts into recruiting them.

Savvy companies understand the competitive value of talented people and spend considerable time identifying and recruiting high-caliber individuals wherever they can be found. The trouble is that too many companies pay too little attention to allocating their internal talent resources effectively. Few companies use talented people in a competitively advantageous way—by their visibility and mobility and creating work experiences that help them feed and develop their expertise. Many a frustrated manager has searched in vain for the , knowing that he or she works somewhere in the company. And many have had the experience of getting stuck in a dead-end corner of a company, never finding the right experiences and challenges to grow, and, finally, bailing out.

In a modern, networked, and , intangible assets (such as skills, reputations, and relationships) generate the highest value. Effective resource allocation means unleashing the value of talent by mobilizing talented people for the best opportunities—including, in particular, opportunities to become even more developed by finding work that creates distinctive new skills and knowledge.

As global markets become more dynamic and competitive, companies will need to deploy talent even more flexibly across broader swaths of the organization. Since management must develop and execute value-creating initiatives so quickly, talent is becoming more critical to corporate performance, specific needs for talent are more unpredictable, and companies must develop talent more rapidly than ever.

Research demonstrates that companies with enlightened talent-management policies have higher returns on sales, investments, assets, and equity. But most large companies aren't set up to allocate talent easily across the traditional organizational silos that stand as their most prominent structural feature. By offering and transacting job rotations and arranging development opportunities for talented workers, managers may foster talent management within particular corporate silos. But this approach fails when, as now happens more and more often, a company seeks to achieve talent synergies across the breadth of its operations.
Fortunately, some of the largest and most talent-driven companies are beginning to shatter the old orthodoxies. By developing internal talent market-places, these companies are giving managers the best opportunity to mobilize the talent they need for success while giving the most talented people better opportunities to utilize and develop that talent. Like knowledge markets, talent markets become strong by leveraging individual self-interest to drive enterprise-wide collaboration rather than by relying on top-down mandates to rotate jobs. The goal isn't simply to clear the market but to help a company get its work done more effectively and to increase the value and allegiance of talented workers by expanding their company-specific knowledge. Many of these companies also find that allocating talent effectively can make an enormous difference to important outcomes, such as .

Self-directed, talented people benefit considerably from such a market: the more talented they are, the greater the demand for their services and the better their opportunities will be.

Highly talented people are less likely to be blocked by less talented bosses taking credit for their work. Better opportunities also ensure that job experiences challenge these employees, who in the process develop more quickly. Broadening their exposure to the organization also helps them to develop a more extensive network of contacts to share reputations and information. Such self-directed and talented people are the very ones an enterprise is most at risk of losing, since they are the most likely to be actively testing external talent markets to find more attractive opportunities.

At the same time, senior people who are pursuing important opportunities will have a to draw upon, with a more diverse range of skills to tap. People who acquire reputations for developing talent will have a greater likelihood of attracting more and better job applicants, while "people eaters" will have trouble.

But the real beneficiary is the company, which wins by getting far better matches between its job opportunities and its most talented people and by gaining far greater transparency into shortages and excess supplies of talent.

Of course, talent marketplaces also present challenges. In companies with well-established organizational silos, the cultural changes will be enormous. Here, a talent marketplace may be only part of an effort to integrate more broadly. Some companies may need separate marketplaces for different skill sets (for instance, one for project managers and one for industrial engineers). Other companies, particularly those that already view talent as corporate rather than business unit property, will find the transition to talent marketplaces much more natural for all. Making sure that the right infrastructure of brokers, standardized performance reviews, and protocols exists is no small task. But for the right companies, the benefits can easily outweigh the costs.

Given an opportunity to develop and hone skills, top talent will be more likely to stay in the company. Talented people who have a broad base of experience specific to it can grow into its future leaders.

A talent marketplace can't be built easily on the foundations of traditional, siloed organizational structures. But for large, growing, and complex companies that know talented individuals may be their most powerful competitive asset, talent markets represent the .

**Ref:Lowell L. Bryan, Claudia I. Joyce, and Leigh M. Weiss; Mckinsey Quarterly,
2006 Number 2. Lowell Bryan is a director and Claudia Joyce is a principal in McKinsey's New York office, and Leigh Weiss is a consultant in the Washington, DC, office.

The two sides of a debate: The Hindu - Shashi Tharoor Cloumn

Publication in The Hindu:

THE SHASHI THAROOR COLUMN - The two sides of a debate

Online edition of India's National NewspaperSunday, Jan 07, 2007 - Please log on to the following link:
http://www.hinduonnet.com/mag/2007/01/07/stories/2007010700130300.htm

Comments to : thehindu@vsnl.com Copyright © 2007, The Hindu Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu

A New Look at Diversification.

A new look at diversification:

In basic materials, only diversified companies approach an efficient portfolio’s risk–return performance, since they can exploit negative correlations among the business cycles of different commodities.

Should managers ever diversify their companies on the shareholders’ behalf? The underperformance of many conglomerates has given diversification a bad name. In any case, most investors can, if they wish, independently assemble a set of assets lying on or near what financial theorists call the "efficient frontier," which represents the highest return for a unit of risk. Nonetheless, some evidence suggests that a moderately diversified company performs at least as well as—and in some industries better than—more focused ones*. Consider the basic-materials industry: only diversified companies approach the risk–return performance of an efficient portfolio, for unlike their more focused counterparts, they can exploit negative correlations among the business cycles of different commodities. This flexibility allows such companies to pursue opportunities, even when times are bad for some of their businesses, by adjusting their investments toward more attractive projects or regions. Since many basic-materials businesses require similar skills, diversification doesn’t have to take these companies far afield.
**Ref:Michael Dalby and Timo S. Smit2004 Mckinsey Quarterly.

Ten trends to watch in Business Place

Ten trends to watch :

Those who say that business success is all about execution are wrong. The right product markets, technology, and geography are critical components of long-term economic performance. Bad industries usually trump good management, however: in sectors such as banking, telecommunications, and technology, almost two-thirds of the organic growth of listed Western companies can be attributed to being in the right markets and geographies. Companies that ride the currents succeed; those that swim against them usually struggle. Identifying these currents and developing strategies to navigate them are vital to corporate success.

What are the currents that will make the world of 2015 a very different place to do business from the world of today? Predicting short-term changes or shocks is often a fool's errand. But forecasting long-term directional change is possible by identifying trends through an analysis of deep history rather than of the shallow past. Even the Internet took more than 30 years to become an overnight phenomenon.


1. Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly, not just globally, but also regionally. As a consequence of economic liberalization, technological advances, capital market developments, and demographic shifts, the world has embarked on a massive realignment of economic activity. Although there will undoubtedly be shocks and setbacks, this realignment will persist.

2. Public-sector activities will balloon, making productivity gains essential. The unprecedented aging of populations across the developed world will call for new levels of efficiency and creativity from the public sector. Without clear productivity gains, the pension and health care burden will drive taxes to stifling proportions. Nor is the problem confined to the developed economies. Many emerging-market governments will have to decide what level of social services to provide to citizens who increasingly demand state-provided protections such as health care and retirement security. The adoption of proven private-sector approaches will likely become pervasive in the provision of social services in both the developed and the developing worlds.

3. The consumer landscape will change and expand significantly. Almost a billion new consumers will enter the global marketplace in the next decade as economic growth in emerging markets pushes them beyond the threshold level of $5,000 in annual household income—a point when people generally begin to spend on discretionary goods. From now to 2015, the consumer's spending power in emerging economies will increase from $4 trillion to more than $9 trillion—nearly the current spending power of Western Europe.Shifts within consumer segments in developed economies will also be profound.

4. Technological connectivity will transform the way people live and interact. The technology revolution has been just that. Yet we are at the early, not mature, stage of this revolution. Individuals, public sectors, and businesses are learning how to make the best use of IT in designing processes and in developing and accessing knowledge. New developments in fields such as biotechnology, laser technology, and nanotechnology are moving well beyond the realm of products and services.

5. The battlefield for talent will shift. Ongoing shifts in labor and talent will be far more profound than the widely observed migration of jobs to low-wage countries. The shift to knowledge-intensive industries highlights the importance and scarcity of well-trained talent. The increasing integration of global labor markets, however, is opening up vast new talent sources. The 33 million university-educated young professionals in developing countries is more than double the number in developed ones. For many companies and governments, global labor and talent strategies will become as important as global sourcing and manufacturing strategies.

6. The role and behavior of big business will come under increasingly sharp scrutiny. As businesses expand their global reach, and as the economic demands on the environment intensify, the level of societal suspicion about big business is likely to increase. The tenets of current global business ideology—for example, shareholder value, free trade, intellectual-property rights, and profit repatriation—are not understood, let alone accepted, in many parts of the world. Scandals and environmental mishaps seem as inevitable as the likelihood that these incidents will be subsequently blown out of proportion, thereby fueling resentment and creating a political and regulatory backlash.

7. Demand for natural resources will grow, as will the strain on the environment. As economic growth accelerates—particularly in emerging markets—we are using natural resources at unprecedented rates. Oil demand is projected to grow by 50 percent in the next two decades, and without large new discoveries or radical innovations supply is unlikely to keep up. We are seeing similar surges in demand across a broad range of commodities. In China, for example, demand for copper, steel, and aluminum has nearly tripled in the past decade.
The world's resources are increasingly constrained. Water shortages will be the key constraint to growth in many countries. And one of our scarcest natural resources—the atmosphere—will require dramatic shifts in human behavior to keep it from being depleted further. Innovation in technology, regulation, and the use of resources will be central to creating a world that can both drive robust economic growth and sustain environmental demands.

8. New global industry structures are emerging. In response to changing market regulation and the advent of new technologies, nontraditional business models are flourishing, often coexisting in the same market and sector space.

9. Management will go from art to science. Bigger, more complex companies demand new tools to run and manage them. Indeed, improved technology and statistical-control tools have given rise to new management approaches that make even mega-institutions viable.

10. Ubiquitous access to information is changing the economics of knowledge. Knowledge is increasingly available and, at the same time, increasingly specialized. The most obvious manifestation of this trend is the rise of search engines (such as Google), which make an almost infinite amount of information available instantaneously. Access to knowledge has become almost universal. Yet the transformation is much more profound than simply broad access.New models of knowledge production, access, distribution, and ownership are emerging. We are seeing the rise of open-source approaches to knowledge development as communities, not individuals, become responsible for innovations.

Companies need to understand the implications of these trends alongside customer needs and competitive developments. Executives who align their company's strategy with these factors will be the best placed to succeed. Reflecting on these trends will be time well spent.

Reference: Ian Davis is worldwide managing director of McKinsey & Company and Elizabeth Stephenson is a consultant in McKinsey's San Francisco office. A shorter version of this article was published in the Financial Times on January 13, 2006.