misFortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Prof CK Prahalad wrote a book called Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid about the 4 billion people who live on less than $2 a day. He says that if only we could start looking at this group as a group of discerning consumers with specific needs, the corporations could tap into the immense opportunities that lie there.

How about having the HR folks taking a look at those in the corporation who make up the bottom of the pyramid? Anything that involves dealing with the blue collar employees does not seem to feature in most HR people's careers - and if it does, it is only expected to be a "short stint". In the past some organizations did insist on making a year or so at the factory mandatory, until they realized that the HR talent was wriggling out of those places faster than people do from a crowded Mumbai local train.

If you offer a career start in the factory to a fresh MBA in HR, they will look at you as if you stepped out of the dark ages. "How long do I have to be there?" Can I do this for six months and then come back to Corporate Office?" Or worse still as some would have us believe, "I am a quick learner. I will learn in six months what others may take three four years to learn."

Every HR person wants to begin and end their career in the corporate office. That's where the action is. Wrong. The action is really at the bottom of the pyramid. With the blue collar employees. There is new and path breaking work waiting to be done for workmen/ operators or whoever makes up the bottom of the pyramid for your employees. Even research done in this area is inadequate compared to the attention middle and senior level employees get. If the people who are fresh out of colleges and MBA programs do not actively try to put into practice what they have learnt, how will anything change?

Take for instance training. Even today, the training done for junior or middle level employees gets diluted and passes off as training for the blue collar employees. We have not done enough work to identify what competencies we need to build for them to manage their careers. And why haven't we done that? Because we have never done career planning for the bottom of the pyramid. We haven't even started to understand what makes for career for an a skilled or semi skilled employee. Creating skill grades is just a starting point but that is not where it ends.

How many organizations spend the same amount of time and rigour to do succession planning for BOTP population? Yeah yeah, you will tell me there is that one organization that you work for or know of that has done great stuff. My question is why is that not mainstream? Compensation and Benefits, Talent Acquisition, Capability Building... you name it, there is new and different stuff that can be done. So why isn't everyone grabbing the opportunity?

Someone was telling me that in the Greek Civilization, the philosophers were the highest paid. So that started to attract the best and the brightest to those jobs. If the factory jobs or jobs that addressed HR issues of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOTP) employee population, went almost as high in the org chart as the HR jobs in the Corporate Office, we would be able to attract the freshly minted HR folks to build a career that focused on the largest chunks of the organization. While I know that this argument pans out differently in different sectors and in different organizations, yet I cannot help saying that the principles seem to be universally applicable.

Pareto's 80:20 rule will tell you that 80% employees get 20% of the attention of the HR folks. If only we used the same logic to understand that 80% of the opportunity to do new and different stuff is for the BOTP population, then maybe one day we will all be able to point to them and call them Fortunate at the Bottom of the Pyramid.