The frustration with MBAs

I was recently speaking with a friend who runs a successful company in the HR space. I asked him if he was looking to hire any fresh MBAs for his company.

His immediate response was, "I don't think so! Most fresh MBAs think they are God's gift to mankind. They cannot take on any responsibility for anything, and they expect you to even wipe their noses for them!"

I take it that he wasn't referring to the IIM-type MBA but to the average MBA out of the 2000-odd management schools in the country.

"Then they come to you after just three months and say that they are not seeing any 'growth' in their jobs. In just three months, I tell you!!!" He was plainly upset. "I feel like telling them - sir, why don't you become the CEO and make me your assistant?"

"Then they come and complain about the favoritism shown by their bosses. What they don't understand is that the person who works more sincerely, who works longer hours, and who comes in on a weekend to meet deadlines will definitely be treated with special consideration - that is not favoritism." He obviously had specific incidents in mind.

"And within a year these MBAs are gone on to another job that pays a few thousand rupees more! They talk about quality of work but they will run to any sad job in any no-name company for just a few more rupees."

All this was about his own experience. Then he told me something that quite shocked me.

"The HR head of company X (a leading insurance company that I will not name) has decided that he will no longer hire fresh MBAs without work experience. He will rather go for 12th pass students studying at open universities via correspondence - at least they are less likely to have a pompous attitude!"

No wonder the market for the "average" MBAs has dried up. The students of previous years have given the community a bad name.

When we started Proton, we aimed to create managers with positive attitudes and the mindset of responsible professionals.

Whether our students do well in the real world will only depend on whether we have succeeded in teaching them these basic things.


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Choking on fumes in Delhi

The air over Delhi/NCR is thick with pollutants as it is every winter, only this year it appears to be worse.

Many years ago, a PIL lodged by the Center for Science and Environment had led to Delhi's public transport switching to CNG. It was a big victory in the war against air pollution.

But in the last few years, matters have again worsened. People blame the number of cars on the roads, but the problem isn't the number of cars, it's the type of cars and the type of fuel. I'm sure my Honda cars spit out cleaner air than what they take in! The pollution checkers often ask me, looking at their monitors in disbelief, "Gaadi ka engine on hai ki nahin?"

Look at the accompanying photos to see where the pollution is coming from. Of course old "tempos" are polluting, especially in Gurgaon where they have not been forced to convert to CNG. But are new Tata diesels intrinsically polluting? Chevy Taveras? How can a Toyota diesel engine in an Innova generate so much smoke? Is the diesel fuel being badly adulterated? A lot of questions need to be answered before the winter sky in Delhi/NCR will be blue again.

While all cars on the road theoretically meet the maximum emission norms and get a pollution-under-control certificate periodically (often with money changing hands or with some temporary tinkering with the engine), I would dearly like to know what even these measured emission levels are, categorized by car type/year. While the limits for diesel vehicles are much more generous than those for petrol vehicles, I am sure that there will be far more diesel vehicles coming in just below the limits than petrol ones.

Diesel is subsidized with respect to petrol, so more people buy diesel cars, but we all pay for this behavior with our health (a massive negative externality). I know there are super-clean diesel engines available, but apparently not on Indian roads. Why can't we restrict the subsidies only to CNG?


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Taming "video-game capitalism" - Part 1

I've been trying to think of an all-encompassing metaphor for what supposedly ails capitalism - the superhuman greed, the recklessness, the immense volatility, and the lack of ethics - and for what supposedly are capitalism's strengths - the courage, the focus, the absence of passivity. The metaphor that seems to come the closest is that of the video-game.

Most capitalists are not crooks or thieves. They are more akin to video gamers, taking big bets with bravado and no fear of consequences (and no fears of consequence, either, if you know what I mean). If you get killed, you just re-start that level and try again!

In a way, this is by design. Many decades ago, Schumpeter trumpeted the virtues of the "creative destruction" inherent in capitalism.

But such creative destruction adds little value to human progress when the "creation" is not speculation in a genuine innovation (such as an entrepreneur pursuing a new technology) but simply speculation (as during the Tulip Mania in the 1600s for example). And there can be a large human cost, as livelihoods are lost and lives are ruined.

For sure, it is difficult to separate "good" creative destruction from "bad" creative destruction in practice. The first pet store in a town may be an example of an innovation, but the tenth such store might not be particularly innovative and yet its bankruptcy may have a high human cost (even if the pets did not mind). We all know how bad central planning is at mandating which ventures are worthwhile and which are not - in India, we probably lost decades of growth as the government tried to figure out just how many licenses should be issued to produce motor cars, television sets and light bulbs.

Still, is "video-game capitalism" going too far? Perhaps playing pure finance by the numbers is a bit like persecuting a video-game war such as the Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, where CNN carried almost-live green-tinged infrared footage of Paveway bombs floating towards and then striking their targets. The ripping of bodies, burning of skin and spilling of bloody guts was all sanitized.

How do we tame "video-game capitalism" without snuffing out the very essence of capitalism?


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The first job: glass half full or half empty?

When I went for training in the US to get used to the fast bikes and the fast roads, one thing the trainers would always say was, "Remember to look THROUGH each turn.... and if you encounter an obstacle, look THROUGH the obstacle to where you want to go. Don't look so hard at the obstacle that you crash straight into it!"

This phenomenon is called target fixation. There's a nice video about it here:


I believe target fixation happens in life as well. If you only see the obstacles, you are likely to hit many of them!

When you look at your first job, what do you see?

• Do you see the glass half empty? Do you see only the humdrum details of what you will be doing from day to day till the weekend comes around and gives you some relief? Do you worry about how you will manage to put up with the boredom or with the hard work, as the case may be?
  
  If yes, you are probably not going to do as much with your life as you could have. It's sad, but it's true. I am willing to bet on that.
  
  
• Do you see the glass half full? Are you excited by the bigger picture of where the company is headed? Do you feel that you can't wait to get started? Have you already identified the simple skills you plan to learn on the job that will help you in later life?
  
  If yes, you are certainly on your way to success. I am willing to bet on that.
  

For my first job, I joined Dr. Ramachandran Jaikumar, professor at the Harvard Business School, as a modestly-paid associate because I wanted to be near the great man and learn from him. As it turned out, those years were very precious. I realize today that I have copied many aspects of his style of thinking. Every venture that I have been involved in has benefited from that.

Sandeep Manudhane took up tutoring a few children not because it was a sexy job, but because in his mind was the vision that became Professional Tutorials (now PT Education) and led to Proton and SBM as well.

Tony Nicely joined the insurance giant GEICO as an insurance clerk at the age of 18 and rose to become its CEO. Some people think he may replace Warren Buffet at Berkshire Hathaway as GEICO is an important company in Buffet's portfolio. Not bad for someone who started off as a clerk!

Mark Hurd started his career selling computers in Texas for NCR. That must have been a tough job! But he rose to become CEO of NCR. Then he became CEO of HP!

Steve Jobs started his career with Atari as a technician, trying to save money for a spiritual trip to India. We all know what he did with his life!

Jack Welch was the son of a train conductor and a housewife, and started his career as a junior engineer... at GE.

Even Prof. Jaikumar started his career selling consumer products all over Africa if I remember right, to save money for further education in the US. That was not the kind of job that a typical mechanical engineer from IIT would have liked.

Don't get me wrong - all these people had big dreams and ambitions. Most of them had already put in a lot of hard work before they took their first job. But that did not mean that they were snooty about what work they did in that first employment.

In fact, what I really learned - or tried to learn - from Prof. Jaikumar was his unending optimism. He was never negative, always excited, always positive, never snooty. He saw an opportunity in everything.

So to those of you trying to decide on your first job - see the opportunities, don't see the pitfalls.

More to the point, your ultimate success will mostly depend more on what is WITHIN you - what you have learned and what you bring to your job, including hopefully a positive attitude - rather than where you start out.

It's very simple. Think about it for a while.


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Knowledge management at Nagarro Software

Knowledge management (KM) has been gaining in visibility for several years. As Nagarro grew, we realized that we would have to do something on the KM front if we did not want to waste all the experience and knowledge we were acquiring in different parts of the organization over the years. It was no longer possible to carry all the knowledge of the company in your head!

On the marketing and sales side, we would initially create each proposal and presentation from scratch. It took a lot of time and a lot of mistakes would creep in. We then went in the opposite direction and created a single standard deck, but then it was not very customer- or industry- or technology-specific and so was not very effective by itself. We had to approach this in a more sophisticated way.

With a lot of effort by my colleagues and over some time, Nagarro developed a fairly sophisticated KM process for the sales and marketing material. Presented in a simplified way, this is how it works:

1. When we come across a sales opportunity, a request may go to the KM group asking for slides on, say, "Europe, manufacturing, chemical industry, SAP, automation, manufacturing execution systems".
   
   
2. The KM group will go to their Microsoft SharePoint repository and pick out all slides on these topics and send them to the sales or presales (technical sales) folks.
   
   This is the RETRIEVAL and DISTRIBUTION of knowledge.
   
   
3. Now, outside the KM group, the slides may be modified for this particular customer, new slides may be added and some may be subtracted.
   
   
4. When the presentation is finally delivered to the client, it is compulsory for a copy to be sent back to the KM group. The KM group takes the presentation and stores it as such in its repository in a systematic way.
   
   You may call this the STORAGE of knowledge.
   
   
5. But the most important thing the KM group does is to take the presentation, slide by slide, and identify which slides are new, and which slides have been modified from the original. Incidentally, with new Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) technology, such identification can be automatic if the slide was edited while the user was connected with the MOSS.
   
   
6. The KM experts give new slides relevant tags (e.g. "factory planning") and store them for future requests after carefully editing out customer-specific details.
   
   
7. In parallel, the slides that have been modified are studied carefully to see if they are a) improvements on existing slides, or b) new flavors of existing slides (such as a "Europe" slide with a "Germany" flavor"). Improvements on existing slides are saved as newer versions after checking with senior personnel. New flavors of existing slides are also stored separately as such.
   
   Steps 5-7 comprise what may be loosely called the IDENTIFICATION and CLASSIFICATION of new knowledge.
   
   
8. Of course the work does not end there. The slides have to all be kept up to date. For example, if at any time in the future, anything changes on a slide (let us say Nagarro gets a new European quality certification and someone modifies the Europe slide), the different flavors of the same slide must also be updated.
   
   One may term this the MAINTENANCE of knowledge.

I am not an expert in this area, but this cycle of Identification, Classification, Storage, Maintenance, Retrieval and Distribution of knowledge has saved us a lot of time and has tremendously improved our sales efficiency. This is Knowledge Management at work!

A couple of our friends run overseas KM centers - Nitin Seth runs the McKinsey Knowledge Center and Nitin Aggarwal runs the ZA Associates Knowledge Center (he was formerly the head of the McKinsey Knowledge Center too). Alok Aggarwal co-founded Evalueserve which is a pioneer in this general area. Do click on these links and see what these folks are up to.

You may also want to check out the technology aspects of KM using Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) or look at the Wikipedia entries on the subject.