What Writers Always Want To Know

Chapal Mehra is a publishing professional with over a decade in the Indian publishing industry. He began is career as a commissioning person at McGraw Hill and later worked at the Oxford University Press and Sage Publications. His last full-time assignment in publishing was as Acquisitions Manager at Penguin India. He has worked on consulting assignments with Harvard Business School Press, United Nations Development Program  and the Global business Coalition Against HIV/ AIDS. He is a graduate of New York University and is currently based in New Delhi and works as a full-time strategy and content consultant. Ask Chapal about the authors he has introduced to the market and the list is impressive. The three he always mentions are (a) We Are Like That Only by ex-McKinsey consultant and Marketing thought leader Rama Bijapurkar was the bestselling book in the non-fiction and business category for over 2 years(2007-9) and still continues to be hugely successful book in its revised avatar.  Chapal had chaperoned that book into the market. (b) Arun Maira’s Remaking India was considered a path breaking book in the application of consensus building and conflict resolution in business to national politics and development. (c) The Romance of Tata Steel by RM Lala has been critically hailed as a definitive biography of this great Indian organization.

I thought it would be great to have his perspective that first time authors could benefit from. Read more

Funny People

Our culture is full of stories the witty person – think Tenalirama, Gopal Bhand, or Birbal. The theater forms have all had the comic as an integral part of the story. Indian cinema – Hindi as well as other Regional language cinema have seen many shades of humor.  As Indians have become more confident, we have learnt to laugh at ourselves. Only someone who is secure within can laugh at himself or herself. Self deprecating humor is reflective of a self assured person. That confidence for some comes because of prosperity. For some even strife leads to its own variety of dark humor. I believe economic prosperity and exposure to a global environment have expanded the variety of jokes we Indians laugh at today. You see more comedy shows on TV than we did a few years back. Youtube and the Net has given us access to more brands and flavors of humor. So as a country we are discovering the joys of a global fare. Read more

Interview with Samit Basu

“Let us imagine that you had bought, in secret, the world’s most precious jewel, the Eye of Empire, a massive ruby known to have left a trail of lives—violently lost—behind it as it journeyed across harsh lands in the care of desperate men.” So begins Samit Basu’s new book Terror on the Titanic – his first Young Adult novel.

Meet Samit, India’s first fantasy novelist and the first well-known Indian author to cross over into comics. He is the author of an extremely popular trilogy of fantasy novels, the GameWorld Trilogy, comprising The Simoqin Prophecies (2004) The Manticore’s Secret (2005) and The Unwaba Revelations (2007). He has written comics for Marvel Comics in India. Outlook featured him as one of the Indians under 25 to watch for along with Shreya Ghoshal – India’s top playback singer and Konkona Sen Sharma the brilliant actress. He got inspired to start a career as an author during a dull class at IIM (Ahmedabad) while pursuing his MBA. Read on what this talented writer is all about. Read more

Angels, Bosses and Demons

Just Another Magazine or JAM as it is better known as is not just another mag. They have been around since 1995.  They call themselves the complete Youth Career and Fun site (http://jammag.com). Last year during the downturn my friend and social media expert Gautam Ghosh (GG) had used a quote from my novel Married But Available to build hope among those who had not found their dream jobs that “Always keep in mind that you are greater than your visiting card. Don’t disrespect yourself because you cannot get a dream job. Economic conditions will change in the future, and the more you have faith in your own self the better you will leverage the upturn when it comes.”

When you ask interns about their experiences with their project guides or managers, you get to hear some crazy stories. The insecure and moronic will always treat Interns as a form of life similar to amoeba and consequently low down on the food chain. While the smarter people use the interns to get a fresh perspective to some real life issues and problems. The evolved look at it as an opportunity to build the employer brand.

The jobs are back. So are internships.  Their cover story of 15 April 2010 is labelled Angels, Bosses and Demons.  The article clearly identifies the ideal boss. You have to decide who they refered to as Demon or Angel.

JAM’s reporter Prachi Parekh wanted to know how I would treat an intern. Here are some excerpts…
Read more

The Don Tapscott Interview – Part II

The workplace is slowly changing. A multi-generational workforce needs different skill sets to manage. Author, thinker, guru and NetGen evangelist Don Tapscott continues our conversation. (If you want to read Part 1 of the interview, please click here). His research suggests that we are dealing with a smarter but “different” generation today and that requires decison makers to re-look at the way we have run organizations. After all, “IQ scores are up. SAT scores show an increase. There are more people graduating from college today than ever before. So they work hard and they are smart. They just work differently. This gen works in spurts. Taking a social media break is the equivalent of taking a smoke-break or a coffee break for the other generations. For this generation, working, learning, collaborating and entertainment are not separate activities. Working and learning is the same. There’s no reason why work should not be equally enjoyable.” You can read the NY Times review of Don’s book Grown Up Digital here

He identifies eight norms of many members of the Net Generation: they prize freedom; they want to customize things; they enjoy collaboration; they scrutinize everything; they insist on integrity in institutions and corporations; they want to have fun even at school or work; they believe that speed in technology and all else is normal; and they regard constant innovation as a fact of life.

Some interesting stats that come from Pew Research Center only confirm what Don has been saying now for many years. This generation is DIFFERENT in a very fundamental way. How will the workplace view them when they come in as employees complete with their iPods plugged in and desire to achieve work-life balance. Won’t they be viewed as irresponsible or just plain lazy in an economy that is still grappling with the after-shocks of recession?

Abhijit: “This is not just a life stage difference, this is a generational difference because cognition and information process different because of way they have grown up” – what are the implications of this for Executive Education?

Don Tapscott: Work and learning are becoming the same activity in a knowledge economy. Rather than sending executives off to a learning institution, it makes more sense to increase the learning component of their work. In the company I work for, nGenera Insight, our education program is quite simple: Everyone must blog. By blogging, they need to think about what’s going on the world. They need to become knowledgeable and develop their craft of writing. They need to put forward their thoughts and defend them. This is Executive Education fully integrated into work.

Abhijit: Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally are the four pillars of the collaborating economy, according to you. What are lessons here for Managers on how they will need to change?

Don Tapscott: We need to rebuild all our institutions around the principles. But most companies don’t understand what they should be doing. Today there is a generational firewall in the organizations. Leaders must understand that the internet is not about having a page on Facebook or using Twitter. It is actually the new mode of production. It is part of the new operating system of businesses. The Net is to be used to create products and services and collaborate in the workplace. It is about learning to collaborate with stakeholders even outside the corporation.

The young people are coming into the workforce and are bringing with them all the new culture of innovation, collaboration, speed, freedom and customization. This is a very exciting time to adopt new tools. Yet companies do just the opposite. They put the NetGen in a cubicle and ban their tools. This is self-defeating. Organizations need to use wikis, blogs, collaboration tools and document management tools to create a new workplace that can leverage the strengths of the new generation.

Don Tapscott in conversation with Allen Greg

Abhijit: What is the new model of the leader and are there examples we can see of the new Leadership version 2.0?

Don Tapscott: The leader at the top as a great visionary is becoming outdated. The person at the top cannot learn for the whole organization. Learning is everyone’s personal opportunity. Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy says his job is not to make decisions. He says, his role is to actually unleash the power of the human capital. The believes the most important people are the young people in the store. He created an internal social networking site called Blueshirtnation.com (Read more about it here) Best Buy employee site is a model for big firms. They are creating an electronic watercooler that is an integral part of the business. In the new world, the leader is not the centre of attention. It is everyone – every employee.

Brad Anderson, CEO Best Buy

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Read the brilliant 8 part series about the Net Generation by Don Tapscott in Businessweek

Part 1: Net Geners Come of Age

Part 2: How Digital Technology Has Changed the Brain

Part 3: Net Gen Transforms Marketing

Part 4: How to Hire the Net Generation

Part 5: How to Teach and Manage ‘Generation Net’

Part 6: Supervising Net Gen

Part 7: Focus On the Net Gen Family

Part 8: The Net Generation Takes the Lead

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