Monday, December 22, 2014

Hiring Excellence: AIM, FIRE, MISS

If you have to get results, better results, you need to be creative! Be it marketing, where we see the ultimate rendezvous with imagination or the much obvious food and fashion, creativity is the largest play!

Creativity is spontaneous!

Memory kills creativity as it distracts to draw information from memory, that is the 'learned skills'. Creativity may not be incremental. Not necessarily disruptive at the same time.

"Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You simply must ... Do things."—Ray Bradbury

What's creative about hiring today? Social media? Hackathon?, Not sure what is creative that we are doing in hiring. The best I hear is multiple rounds of interviews, 10, 12 , may be more. Is there anything creative there?
Offers made: Anything creative there? Do we think of what can be done to make the offer creatively intriguing and engaging?

You declined offer: Any thing creative you heard back?

You accepted offer: Anythings creative followed form there?

You resigned: Anything creative followed?

Dumbness is one way to define lack of creativity.

Are we not doing anything new? We are...we do, we make every transaction little more structured and objective, little more tougher and stronger..But do we do anything creative?

Remember the TV ad where an interview panel asks interviewee to interview the interviewer for the position. This is one bit of creativity.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Why you want a premier B School candidate?

High IQ, High on analytical thinking and problem solving, conditioned to manage responsibilities with strategic intent, smart worker, better degrees, better education, are competitive, have seen better teachers, colleagues and are comfortable understanding and managing high level stake holders with ease and poise, have higher aspirations and thus take up challenges, prove themselves faster, better, lead, challenge, create, produce better results, create value and enhance customer's satisfaction and over experience. Anything else, I am missing here, please add!

Now, when I see how many important and critical positions in HR are filled by folks from premier B school backgrounds, I see only 20% at max. Check LinkedIn and you will find this. 
Does that mean, many companies do not want all that what a premier B school guy can produce? Probably yes! 
Look at many LinkedIn job postings and you will see, many a places , there is not mention of education and premier college background, they just ask for numbers of years. 

Arguments in favor of not necessarily getting hung upon the premier tag is, cost and affordability, ignorance and play safe. 
It will be interesting to survey with stakeholders including employees and business leaders and check what difference they have seen in terms of results from people from premier vs not premier B school backgrounds.

Questions to ask--

1. What great changes have been made by the premier B school person, which was not made so far was not seen, realized or not being able to make by a non premier B school guy?
2. What approach did the premier B school guy follow which was way above the approach followed ever followed by the non premier B school guy?
3. What value and prestige/importance that the premier B school guy created for position, department he represented that was not done by a non-premier B school guy?
4. What systems, processes has the premier B school guy has created that was not available or not imagined so far and that helped create value for all stakeholders?
5. What issues and challenges has the premier B school guy brought to discussion and attention of senior management that was never ever articulated by a non-premier B school person so far? 
6. What is the effectiveness scores of HR programs that has been launched by a premier vs Non premier B school guy?


Add comparators that you want to add and try and answer them.

Adjust Emotional Intelligence to adapt to Org Culture


Whether you are in a place that promotes creativity or passivity, you need to align and work through the culture. Leaders either push ideas or influence us to follow. Either which way , idea is good and leaders fail less and succeed more. Ideas are important but we don't feel great about the greatest gift it is smeared with disrespect/care/passion/prestige.

Research conducted on 2000 scientists proved that those scientists who were respected and recognized produced much more success and failures than others! They just produced. Period!


Intelligence/IQ level helps us grab a grade, a job and emotional intelligence/emotional smartness helps us grow in the position/job/role. More than emotional skills of knowing own and others emotions and leveraging and making adjustments (includes curbing own emotions, gulping a bitter pill, ignoring being ignored, forgiving like a saint, even accepting unjust decisions on self and for people, we are responsible for). Why do we adjustments? Because, this is the way world world is and how people grow is a mix of opportunities, competencies and huge mix of being lucky.


There is nothing new in management sciences that religious/spiritual gurus and saints have not told about. 
Survival is the biggest need and that makes us follow rules, fair or unfair. Survival matters. Challenge rules if you can afford to destabilize your position. Sense of survival makes us safe not successful. 


Like traffic in Bangalore, you cannot predict, which hour you will get less traffic. On external environment we have less control and that matters the most, many a times.
So what role IQ and EQ play in our career, start with a day. How does it impact your life in a day's span at work?

Day means tasks, either action packed or dull, thinking or confusing, worried or excited, easy or sucking! It can be any kind of a day! What is designed is happening. What we design within that design is what we call IQ. IQ helps us find a way to the situations, circumstances, variables, factors, people, etc. EQ is getting ready in mind to manage it and convincing self on how to use emotions and apply social skills.
IQ actually is at play every moment that guides emotions and helps it manage the situation: good to ugly. IQ sits back when you get driven by Emotions and stop using IQ. While IQ is a problem solver, emotion is a drive that helps us float , sometimes direction less, aim less, imaginatively and instinctively driven and at times completely under hypnotic control.

IQ is not moral policing element. It helps when you press a panic button or ask for a quick favor!

It is not prescriptive, EI makes a mandate prescriptive. EI is conditioning due to being self-conscious, being self-aware or socially conscious, aware and conditioned to abide or ignore, even violate certain principles for individual, group etc.

Conditioning will always play a greater role in defining social skills. Else we "SOCIALIZE"!

Time to stop Employee Farming!

  #Twitter  handle in Nov 2022 tweeted: "bye literally everyone"! Elon's tweet confirmed that this action was needed as  #twit...