Abhijit Bhaduri’s Blog
I write about careers in the AI Economy and about the world of work. The sketchnotes are my own.
Business Line reviews The Digital Tsunami
It’s useful not just for top management and HR practitioners, but for employees too, as it gives you tips on how to navigate the future office.
Career-Hopping: The Hot New Trend
There are new trends at play now. We are moving from so-called job-hopping to actual career-hopping. People are throwing caution to the wind to pursue their passions and be their own masters. Most of us know someone who has spent some years in the corporate sector, given it up to pursue their passion for a sport or to travel, and then, a year down the line, become an entrepreneur by setting up a restaurant or some other business. That’s what’s fuelling the Indian startup dream. Then there are those to give up materially comfortable lives and high-paying jobs to work in remote areas for the uplift of people. Read more
How digital is disrupting careers
Could a tsunami be nature’s way of warning us about massive changes? Look at the timing of the four tsunamis. 1782 and 1883 roughly coincide with the first and second industrial revolutions. Work shifted from agriculture to manufacturing as factories became the main sources of employment. This saw the rise of the blue collared workforce.
The Digital Tsunami: Driverless And Jobless
What is it with search engines? First it was Google who is building a driverless car. Now the Chinese search engine Baidu testing autonomous cars in California. There are enough people worrying about the millions of drivers who will lose jobs because of driverless cars whenever that happens.
The Digital Tsunami: HR
Will HR be replaced by chatbots and machines? The answer is nuanced. The machines are not good at understanding shades of emotions, sarcasm, humor etc. Machines are good at doing “mindless” repetitive tasks. These are the tasks that humans can do without giving it any thought. Routine, repetitive tasks that machines can be trained to do more efficiently than humans will be done by machines. But jobs that depend on social skills and involve complex human interactions will stay with humans. Those who learn to work WITH machines will thrive. HR will certainly need to learn to work with robots who will be part of every workforce. But that is not all. HR will need to be reimagined...
Business Etiquette for the Indian Professional
Upto a certain level in the corporate food chain, our technical skills help us grow. Beyond that it is entirely the soft skills that define success. In a global world even more so. One section I would like to see added to the future editions of the book would be on how to ask precise questions. I always notice how verbose people can be while asking a question that can be asked in less than ten words. Sometimes the questions take longer than answers. A section like that could work wonders to improve communication skills of Indian professionals. Even without that section the book is really well crafted.
Corporate Novels: Mixing Business with Pleasure
Mr R Gopalakrishnan of the Tata Group recently did this story on Corporate Novels for the Economic Times. The article is a great recall of all the "Corporate Novels" that have been written in recent times. In this story called Mixing Business With Pleasure, they have traced authors from corporate India who have penned their novels with stories that somewhere resonate with their experiences. While it is fiction, almost all of them have perhaps been triggered off by some incident or character(s) they have encountered for real. This probably is the formula for realistic fiction that the readers have appreciated generously as well as the sales figures of all these novels will vouch for. I feel honored that Mr Gopalakrishnan is aware of my novels - but I will feel better if I know that he read them as well. Do you think he has?
Interview on mybangalore.com
I moved to Bangalore last October. To be interviewed for the city's website mybangalore.com was the equivalent of the neighbors peeking over the fence to check how you are settling in. It just feels good. That is just how I felt when Dhanusha Gokulan spoke to me. To be counted on as a Bangalorean felt good. The conversation was free flowing - from books to my meeting with the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala, India. Just what was it like to meet His Holiness, she had asked. The fact that you do not know what to say to someone of his stature. Seriously, can you think of one really smart question to ask?
Married But Available and The Hindu
And so, Bhaduri’s hero, Abbey passes out of IIM, Jamshedpur, gets into Balwanpur Industries, works at the township, chafes at the fishbowl existence he has to live there out of necessity, marries, gets estranged from, romances a woman or two, and slowly climbs up the corporate ladder. There is no discernible line of wit in the book; at best it is a collection of puerile jokes; the IIM gang comprises the usual suspects; the career climb is predictable, the women all coalesce into one another, come and go without leaving much impact. So what is the leavening factor in this ‘MBA’, a tenuous title at best? It’s lessons learned on the job which Abbey/Bhaduri imparts in a chatty tone that loses no relevance in the telling.Human Resource/Human Capital Practice/Personnel Management, whatever the term du jour is, it’s a fast moving track, creative and exciting, a track where you think as you run. To that extent, Bhaduri’s case histories with their solutions, make for interesting reading. The way Abbey handles the enforced VRS scheme initiated by the MNC that takes over Balwanpur Industries, is both informative and entertaining.
The 6Bridges Interview
We have all heard about being separated from each other by 6 degrees of separation. With some people you wish the degrees of separation would be 600 instead and less than six for the ones you are desperate to meet. The group that started the website at 6bridges.com (their byline says it is "An exclusive global community of Indian Professionals") did it to connect Indian professionals across the globe. The site focuses on 6 key areas (another six) : Career growth, entrepreneurship, Re-skilling, money management, leisure and professional networking. We got chatting about this and that. Let us cross the 6bridges.