Technology as a catalyst

This on the New York Times, an article about how a librarian had to change her practice skill-sets from being an archive keeper of knowledge to someone who teaches the right way to access the right data.

How many of us still read books? Flip through their pages? Very few of the new generation do this … they prefer new age media to books. If the same concepts can be taught through videos, games, et al then why bother with reading the books?

If this is the world to come (and I am not fighting against it or complaining), then the article takes an interesting take on how old age practices have adapted themselves to the new age solutions.

Price of failure

Yesterday I met some friends over snacks at Candies (in Bandra, do look it up if you are in the area). A friend of mine has recently switched to work as a manager in a reputed firm, and he was overall happy with his job (work from home and all the perks).

Then he said something which sparked off this post, he said the amount of money the firm wastes in their day-to-day activities is insane. At first it seemed as if he was talking about how the organization has money to spare … but then to drive his point home, he gave examples. Inane but true. A lot of us are willing to put in that extra buck just so that everything that can go wrong won’t.

The design has to be perfect, the models have to be dressed in a certain fashion, the product has to be the best. In creating these spaces, we are de-risking ourselves … that’s what I like to tell myself. But are we?

Is the price of failure so high that we don’t take action and let others do what needs to be done? So what’s the price of failure for different people? For a person who has nothing to loose, its zero. A start-up for example can afford to go in some communities and have it misrepresented … its ok, bygones can be bygones for them. But take a Coca Cola or a Pepsi (not that these are the aforementioned organizations), and you suddenly have to think about ten thousand other factors. Not a freeing thought, is it?

Would it help if one could see the price of failure as zero?

Targeting your blog’s content

It’s a thought experiment that I would want to share with you all –

  1. Divide the blog’s content into content which I want to share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc
  2. Tag the posts accordingly
  3. Create separate feeds for each tag
  4. Sync the right feeds with the right media

That way, intended audiences could be targeted and on different spaces. All through a single blog :-)

Gaming as a Learning technology

I was watching Jane McGonigal’s TED talk and her logic of gaming being a parallel learning track for this generation’s youth is pretty convincing.

For example, a researcher at CMU through a survey has found that by the age of 21, a youngster has put in almost 10,000 hours of online gaming.

Add to it Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour rule of success, and you have a whole generation of teens who are virtuoso’s in gaming.

Compare this to the 10,080 hours of education that you attend in your secondary school (i.e. if you dont miss a single day of school), and you have an alternative track/medium where an individual is deeply engaged. I had earlier blogged about how games can be used to engage people at work. Well, the same holds true for education, and the platform is almost set. Now it’s for game designers to design games like Superstruct and Evoke, so that modern day games (where the world spends 3 billion hours of online playing every week!!) can be harnessed to educate, collaborate and design new-age solutions for the world.

Jane further goes on to say how games can be used to solve world problems – you can watch the rest of her talk here

Criticism

I often contribute to the team blog of the company where I work. It is fulfilling, where else can you blog at work :-)

In the past two days however, the team blog … specifically my posts have come in the spotlight. By a critic … the comments are coming from a different perspective, maybe by someone who has engaged with the philosophy and found it either too abstract or too disillusioned.

The outcome being that there is criticism about the ideology and some more criticism about the author. Personally speaking none of my blogs have ever attracted much traffic, so I never had to face much applause or critique other than my immediate circle of friends. Critique from an unidentified source, adds that element of mystery and even a little bit of surprise (Ohh!! Someone does read my stuff!).

What I have not picked up over the 4-5 years of passively active blogging I have done is … how to handle criticism. A post I recently found is pretty good and maybe it will help other bloggers as well, so sharing it here.

Appended —

Pallavi commented that the critique might just be a different perspective or a different opinion. The final choice of taking that is always upto us. I looked back at the comments I was getting, and have decided to take the new perspective and try something new on the team blog. Will update once I get the results.

The Hell Curve

The Hell Curve
The Hell Curve

No, I deliberately wrote it as Hell instead of Bell.

Managers who have run teams must surely know this model. A friend of mine works in one of the top IT organizations this country has, every year he worries incessantly about how he is going to survive appraisals. Not his own, he is consistently in the top 10% of the firm, but his teams.

They carry out appraisals using the bell curve in this organization … that means in any project team, someone has to be top performer, someone has to be average and someone has to be in the bottom 10% … survival of the fittest in this corporate jungle … that’s the rule.

The problem with this rule is that managers are forced to take under-performers and average team members as opposed to top performers. This is so, because when appraisal time comes, he cannot appraise everyone as a top performer. So if he has more than 10% of his team putting their hearts into the project, then after a year, someone will get an unfair assessment … someone will be disappointed in his superiors. Someone will get disillusioned. And that someone would be reporting to the manager who appraised him.

The only solution available for the manager then, is to select a mediocre team and hope that they deliver the project. An entire organization that runs on mediocrity!

My question to HR personnel then are two-fold –

  1. Why the bell curve?
  2. What will you do if the curve becomes skewed (towards the top performer side)?

No risk, No return

Or No pain, no gain … the adage holds, is what empirical data says. A working paper by Harvard Business School presents its findings on human capital, performance incentives and ownership models.

Do different kinds of firm ownership drive the adoption of different managerial practices? HBS professor Raffaella Sadun and coauthors focus on the difference between the two most common ownership modes, family firms and firms that are widely held, namely that have no dominant owner. They find that the greater weight attached by family firms to benefits from control induces a conflict of interest between family-firm owners and high-ability, risk-tolerant managers. Key concepts include:

  • Family firms systematically offer low-powered incentive contracts to external managers compared with widely held firms. The differences are economically large.
  • Where incentives are more powerful, managers exert more effort, are paid more, and are more satisfied.
  • Firms that offer high-powered incentives are associated with better performance. This result holds even after controlling for the type of ownership.
  • Economies where family firms prevail because of institutional or cultural constraints are also economies where the demand for highly skilled, risk-tolerant managers languishes.

What this study suggests, is that to have high performance managers, organizations should employ the high powered incentives (this may not be as simple as cutting the current CTC of an individual into fixed and variable components). The last finding suggests that economies (and even societies) where family firms are prevalent (take Marwaris or Sindhis), the risk-appetite may be lesser. The first set of findings is also interesting since it is related to satisfaction.

So the next time you are considering a job, maybe these tips might help you evaluate that job slightly better –

  1. Is there a variable component, is the calculation of that component completely transparent?
  2. Will you be empowered enough to take risks and get the job done?
  3. How mediocrity based is the leadership? (As in, is the leadership attracting the best talent, or the talent which can be ordered around)
  4. Is your work ecology risk tolerant Or does it always stick to the safe path?