Posts Tagged ‘Management’

Newer Entries »

Essence of a Manager

February 11, 2011

My book now has a publication date in March 2011 and advance copies can be ordered from Springer.

It can also be obtained through Amazon (UK) and Bokus.

Springer Science+Business Media


Essence of a Manager

Pillai, Krishna, 1st Edition., 2011, XIV., Hardcover

ISBN: 978-3-642-17580-0

Due: March 2011

What makes a “good” manager? This is a book by a manager about managers but it is not just for managers. It is for anyone and for everyone who is interested in the way people – and not just managers – behave and function around the world. Based on actual experience the title “Essence of a Manager” is a succinct distillation of what this book is about. It is not a management manual and yet it is a map for navigation and a guide for behaviour which can be valuable for practicing managers at all levels. It formulates a sound thesis to describe the qualities needed in a “good” manager and builds up from elemental qualities to develop a holistic view of a good manager. Nine fundamental attributes are proposed as being necessary and sufficient to describe a “good” manager. It is applied management philosophy for a thinking manager and deals with the fundamental drivers which lie deeper than language or culture and which control human behaviour.

Amazon (UK)

Bokus.com

Some reviews can be found here: Reviews EOAM – Around the world and back to Finspång

Lars-Otto Gullman, retired, former Director Metallurgy, Gränges, Finspång

I wish I had read Essence of a Manager some 40 years ago, prior to my own industrial career!  A similar presentation of the demands on a manager and how a manager can develop his abilities I have not seen till now. In Essence of a Manager the author analyses the nature of the personal qualities a good manager must possess to be able to perform his tasks in a satisfactory way. A method, based upon interview technique, is presented as an effective means of identifying potentially good managers. Many examples are given from the author´s long and worldwide experience of managements styles in different countries and cultures.


Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Behaviour, Business, Management | 1 Comment »

Why Forecasts need to be wrong

October 7, 2010

 

The Lorenz attractor is an example of a non-li...

Image via Wikipedia

 

This started yesterday as a short comment on the changing forecasts by Hathaway on solar activity in Solar Cycle 24 but has now become something else.

As clarification, I  distinguish here between prophecies and forecasts  where:

  • I take prophecies to be a promise about the future  based primarily on faith and made by prophets , witchdoctors, soothsayers and politicians such as “You will be doomed to eternal damnation if you don’t do as I say”,
  • I take “forecasts” to be an estimate of future conditions based on known data with the use of calculations, logic, judgement, some intuition and even some faith. They are extrapolations of historical conditions to anticipate – and thereby plan for -future conditions.

(more…)

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Behaviour, Business, Climate, Management, Philosophy, Science, Solar science | Comments Off on Why Forecasts need to be wrong

Habitable planet to be discovered in May 2011?

September 22, 2010

The only thing certain about forecasts is that they are more often wrong than right – and I exclude forecasts made entirely on known science or “laws” of nature where the level of uncertainty is insignificant (e.g. the sun will rise tomorrow). Nevertheless “Future History” which is a study of how forecasts evolve and how accurate they have been is a most powerful tool when making judgements about directions to follow and actions to be taken. In management “Future History” methodology is, I think, one of the most powerful tools for the development of corporate strategies and action plans.

The New Scientist reports that :

“Two researchers have used the pace of past exoplanet finds to predict that the first habitable Earth-like planet could turn up in May 2011”.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors that fit on a chip doubles about once every two years – a trend now known as Moore’s law. Samuel Arbesman of Harvard Medical School in Boston wants to see if scientometrics – the statistical study of science itself – can similarly be used to not only study past progress but also to make predictions.

He and Greg Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, are testing the idea with exoplanets. Over the past 15 years or so, the pace of planet discoveries has been accelerating, with some 490 planets now known. “It is actually somewhat similar to Moore’s law of exponential growth,” Arbesman says.

To predict when astronomers might find the first planet similar in size to Earth that also orbits far enough from its star to boast liquid water, the team scoured the discovery records of 370 exoplanets.

They focused on two basic properties needed for habitability: a planet’s mass and its surface temperature. They used these two factors to assign each planet a ‘habitability metric’ ranging from 0 to 1, where 0 was uninhabitable and 1 is close to Earth’s twin.

A rough estimate of each planet’s habitability was then plotted against the date of its discovery. Using different subsets of the 370 planets, the researchers made curves from the individual points and extrapolated the curves to find when a planet would be found with a habitability of 1. They then analysed the range of discovery dates to determine which would be most probable.

Habitable planets: http://t2.gstatic.com/images

Their calculations suggest there is a 50 per cent chance that the first habitable exo-Earth will be found by May 2011, a 75 per cent chance it will be found by 2020, and a 95 per cent chance it will be found by 2264.

In fact, exoplanet researchers have made forecasts of the future informally, plotting the mass of planets against the date of discovery to see how the field is progressing. “We’ve done that for many years at conferences,” says Eric Ford of the University of Florida in Gainesville. “The new aspect of this paper is putting an uncertainty on those predictions and unfortunately the uncertainty is quite large.”

One source of uncertainty is how factors like changes in funding and the development of new techniques and technology can alter the pace of discovery. “Like the stock market, past returns are no guarantee of future performance,” Ford says.

“There are always these complex factors of how science is actually done,” Arbesman agrees. But he says the forecasting technique could still prove useful, even if these factors are not accounted for directly. In part, that is because new technologies tend to take a while to ramp up, so they may not lead to sharp jumps in the number of discoveries made.

Previously, Arbesman has quantified how the ease of discovering new mammalian species, chemical elements, and asteroids affects the rate of their discovery. New species and asteroids are more difficult to find the smaller they are, and indeed larger ones are found first. For chemical elements, the opposite is true, since the bigger they are, the rarer and more unstable they tend to be.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Philosophy, Science, Social Science | 1 Comment »

IBM is second largest private employer in India

August 18, 2010

In 2006 IBM had 53,000 employees in India which grew to 73,000 employees in 2007. Since then, the company has maintained that it is a global company and geographic numbers do not have any meaning in that context. In 2010 IBM employees in India exceeded 100,000 and may be as many as 130,000.

IBM still employs the most people in the US but almost one in three of IBM’s total workforce of over 400,000 is now in India.

http://www.accessnorthga.com/img/stories/205230/ibm-india_medium.jpg

The Times of India reports that

The fact that IBM has over one lakh (100,000)  people on its rolls in this country is one of India Inc’s best-kept secrets.
Tata Consultancy Services is the largest private sector employer in the country. It had 163,700 employees as on June 30.

No one in US-headquartered IBM will admit that it employs such a large number of people in India — for fear of a backlash at home. There’s been rising anger in the US over the transfer of `American jobs’ to lower cost havens, particularly India. Faced with an economic slowdown and a politically-damaging high employement rate, Barack Obama himself has begun to sound jingoistic. He has issued barely-veiled threats against US companies that ship out work and promised candies to those who stay patriotic.Even as an IBM spokesperson declined comment when contacted, a source within the company said that in a couple of years, the India employee strength could cross that in the US, where it employs about 1,55,000 people, and where the pace of hiring is substantially slower than in India. IBM globally has a little over 4,00,000 employees. So, close to 1 in 3 of its employees is already an Indian.

Its staff strength is more than four times that of India’s biggest private sector company, Reliance Industries, which employs about 23,000 people. It is bigger than the combined employee base of the two Tata Group’s crown jewels, Tata Steel (81,000) and Tata Motors (24,000).

A cross-section of industry analysts and manpower recruitment firms TOI spoke with not only put IBM’s India workforce (including that of its wholly-owned subsidiary IBM Daksh) at over one lakh, some even went to the extent of saying it might be 1.3 lakh — well over Infosys’ 1.14 lakh as on June 30. Infosys is India’s second largest IT firm by revenue and third, it now transpires, by employees.

Since 2007, the company has stopped disclosing the geographic break-up of its employee numbers. The last time it provided figures was in 2007, when it said it had 73,000 employees in India. Since then, the company has maintained that it’s a global company and geographic numbers do not have any meaning in that context.
 (more…)

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Business, India, Management, Technology | Comments Off on IBM is second largest private employer in India

Brainstorming for Innovation

June 12, 2010

In conducting and participating in brainstorming sessions for innovation, I have found the critical requirements, judged empirically, to be:

  1. A limited number of participants (about 20 in my experience is a practical limit and 5 is too few),
  2. A minimum level of intellectual ability (and I have seen sessions ruined because “political correctness” or misguided notions of “fairness” have led to the inclusion of incompetent participants),
  3. Sufficiently long but not too long sessions (with each session never less than one whole day and never more than 3 days is my rule of thumb),
  4. Well prepared participants who have spent sufficient time in individual contemplation of the matter at hand (and since participants tend to come to such sessions unprepared it has always been worthwhile to allocate time – perhaps half a day for a two-day session – at the beginning of the session for individual contemplation),
  5. A clearly prepared initial “problem statement” even if the group may itself later modify the problem statement,
  6. A moderator capable of cutting across hierarchical boundaries, avoiding negative comments during any idea-generation phase, of enforcing the grounding of statements during the assessment of ideas and unafraid of puncturing “noise” and “stories”, and
  7. A clearly communicated post-session process.

In Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea Prof. Girotra of INSEAD and Professors Terwiesch and Ulrich of Wharton examined the effectiveness of group dynamics and the innovation process. Their experiments show  that a hybrid process – in which people are given time for individual contemplation on their own before discussing ideas with their peers resulted in the generation of more ideas and of a higher quality than a purely team-oriented process. In a conventional team process concepts of “fairness” and hierarchical inhibitions were not conducive to innovation.

In my experience, the initial contemplation and role of the moderator and his ability are crucial.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Management | Comments Off on Brainstorming for Innovation

Ethics and Business

April 19, 2010

In the wake of the latest Goldman Sachs scandal, Gordon Brown has accused them of “moral bankruptcy”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8628231.stm

But polticians would be well advised to see to it that they also actually operate under an ethics code of their own.

Milton Friedman, Peter Drucker and others must bear their share of the responsibility for having propagated the view that corporations should only be concerned with the profit they deliver to shareholders. They have – maybe inadvertently – supported the view that humans in a corporate setting can and should abdicate their own ethical codes. The Wall Street Journal has even declared from on high that ethics cannot be learned and ethics courses are irrelevant to business. Utter rubbish of course, but even the “newspapers of record” such as the New York Times or The Times or Der Spiegel or the Wall Street Journal have lost their famed objectivity and have become political advocacy channels. It is such high-profile and basically amoral views which have been greatly responsible for providing a cloak of respectability for the attitude that:

  1. Corporations have no business to concern themselves with ethics, and
  2. Even if ethics is important then compliance with law is a sufficient substitute for having a code of ethics, and
  3. If an action is seen to be compliant with laws then this is sufficient.

Large corporations, ably assisted by the Big Four auditing firms, have fine-tuned the processes and documentation needed to show compliance. After Siemens experienced their scandals in 2007, anti-corruption training courses were held compulsorily throughout the company – mainly to assist in the negotiations with the SEC and minimise the extent of the inevitable fine. The training courses were conducted by staff from KPMG and I was disappointed but not surprised that the trainers either did not have the intellectual capacity to see – or perhaps did not want to see – the distinction between corruption and non-compliance.

There is no excuse for corporations to abdicate from ethical responsibility and satisfy themselves with the appearance of compliance. By taking the position that unacceptable behaviour is only that which is non-compliant they have, of course, also defined everything else that can be done as being acceptable. But it does not stop with just the officers of the corporation. It extends to ownership. Normally an owner is expected to take some responsibility for his property. But yet, no shareholder is really willing or able or required to take his share of the responsibility for the ethical conduct of a corporation he partially owns. And this is so even though the shareholder, as an individual, may well have an admirable code of ethics of his own.

The financial world has been particularly aggressive in promoting the notion that ethics has no place in business, and only the limits set by law have been acknowledged  and accepted as constraints on behaviour. Since law is retrospective this has allowed the creation of strange and wonderful financial and trading products in areas where the law has been silent and lawmakers have not yet written any laws. In such areas, where there is also an absence of any guidance from any ethical code, financial bubbles and dubious practices have grown unfettered by any constraints.

In my view, an organisation cannot isolate itself from the social environment it is surrounded by. It must have an explicit view of its own integrity and therefore of its own ethical code. Merely being compliant with law is insufficient. The owners must be party to this. It is time to bring these into the main-stream of management and into the fundamental vocabulary of a manager. Not for the sake of public relations or for avoiding criticism but because it is the right thing to do.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Management | 1 Comment »

Newer Entries »