What’s the People factor in your Innovation equation?
Innovation is the hot new buzzword of our time. Everyone seems to be badly smitten by it. Going by the popular literature, those who don’t innovate are assured to perish sooner than later. Given that previous silver bullets Total Quality Management of 80s, Business Process Reengineering of 90s, and the most recent of them all – Outsourcing in early 21st century – have still left a LOT to be desired, there is clearly enough interest and expectation if Innovation can finally deliver!...
Are you solving the wrong project management problem ?
I just read a book titled “The eMedha Paradigm - A Project Manager’s Billion Dollar Odyssey” and felt terribly disappointed and shocked. The author paints a make-believe world in which a sadist CEO does insider trading and makes his kith and kin richer, while his technically incompetent, control-freak and sexually-deprived project manager has a field day sinking the project. The team spirit is in tatters but because of the three-year job bond, they can’t leave their jobs just yet. Sales has promised to deliver the project in 1/3x time period, and now the customer is shouting from the rooftop on grand promises that remain grossly unmet. In short, all real-world ills happening in all permutations and combinations at the same time. While this might not be entirely implausible, I am yet to find such a worst-case view of real-world. This is...
Why do you Innovate ?
Last week, NASSCOM organized a talk on innovation by Rob Shelton, co-author of “Making Innovation Work“, followed by excellent presentations by two of the previous year’s winner of NASSCOM Innovation awards, Intel India and Sloka Telecom. It was good learning to sit in Rob’s audience and listen to his perspectives on innovation. I liked his (probably) favorite punchline (because he must have repeated it couple of times during his presentation): “How you innovate determines why you innovate“. I think this is a great way to sum up if an organization is undertaking innovation as a strategic differentiator or just to play catch-up on a tactical level. In his view, the three building blocks of innovation are leadership, culture and process. His perspective is that innovation originates from business strategy could be either a technology innovation or a business model...
Top 3 reasons why you should encourage social networking at workplace
Yesterday, I had the wonderful opportunity to be invited to a CEO Roundtable breakfast meeting organized by EMC at IIM Bangalore. The topic of discussion was how relevant is social networking for organizations, and what are some of the organizations doing about it. The session was led by Jack Mollen, EMC’s EVP for Human Resources. It was nice to learn how large organizations like EMC were leveraging the power of social networking. He informed that EMC with some 45,000 employees has some 20,000 virtual communities ! Wow, that must be a cool way to get all people connected from any place within the company to any other place. Partha from Mindtree highly recommended reading about EMC’s social networking platform, and also informed that they have been experimenting with social networks for the last seven years now. I shared some of...
Do you know your Zenobia(s) ?
Zeonbia is a great book by Matthew Emmens and Beth Kephart that you can not only complete in under an hour, you probably want to read it once again right away - to get a better flavor of the simple yet powerful story of Moira who must find a way out of the chaos she encounters day one of her job and no one is quite willing to help her. Zenobia is story of our times which is such a hard-hitting truth. I would say Moira is lucky (or rather willing to challenge status quo ?) in the sense she is able to see that there is a problem - a majority of us do not evey realize there is a problem at the workplace. Of course, of those sharp minds who are able to figure out there is indeed...