Can industry bodies like CII and NASSCOM play a different role in building a common talent pool? What if every fresh entrant into the workforce is employed not by an organization but by an industry body (eg Nasscom employs all software engineers who have base level and undifferentiated skills). The member companies can farm out the work to be done by this pool. Think of it like work being allocated to a secretarial pool. What if...?
I have discovered poetry and music in strange places because I got lost. I love wandering about aimlessly when I am in a new city. It was during one of those meanderings after dinner one night in Madrid that I discovered that some of the streets had some words engraved on the cobbled stones. A helpful resident of the neighborhood told me that they were the lines from the Spanish poet Becquer.
Was Malcolm Gladwell wrong about the “10,000-Hour-Rule”. He said, it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a master of a skill. His book Outliers told people that if they put in 10,000 hours of practice, they could master any skill. His finding was based on Anders Ericsson's research paper. Maybe practicing for 10,000 hours will NOT make you an expert. Here's why ...
The Digital Transformation Playbook talks of the five domains which need to be transformed if the organizations have to succeed in the digital world – how the businesses view customers, their competition, how they leverage data, innovate and create value for customers. 1) customers are part of a network, 2) competition comes from platforms more than products, 3) data is a strategic asset, 4) innovation is driven by small experiments and scaling, 5) value is dynamic and adaptable. That makes these 5 areas very different from what they have been traditionally. This shift is hard for leaders in the analog world to fathom.My review of The Digital Transformation Playbook by David Rogers
Do only the poor work for money? After all, I have seen even the highest paid employees bargain with clenched teeth about an amount that would be less than a percentage of their earning. When someone says, “It is not about the money, it is the principle of the thing that I care about”. You can bet that it is indeed only about the money. Or are we missing the point?
Kevin Kelly - the editor of Wired magazine has had a ringside view of the way technology has evolved. In this book he talks about the twelve forces that are shaping our future. For example, adding artificial intelligence to any service can change it in amazing ways.Every major digital company has been using more and more of it. Facebook uses it to recognize faces with almost the same degree of accuracy as a human. Netflix knows everything about your movie viewing habit and can predict the movies (that have not yet been made) that you will like in future. Yes, they knew that you will love the House of Cards even before you saw it.
Stress is a silent killer. But you know that. What you don't know is how almost half the workforce is suffering from its ill effects. Loneliness is the biggest curse of the contemporary India. The pressure to find employment drives people to uproot themselves from their friends and family. That takes away the biggest mental safety-net one could have. Software engineers have often said that they dread weekends because they have no friends in the city where they are now working. Hanging around in malls is a poor substitute.Loneliness is a curse - but how is it killing the workplace? Read on...
The decisions that happen as people wait for their loved ones who are battling their odds of survival are beautifully sketched out. Should she let the doctors operate on her comatose husband? What if he dies on the table? What if he lives but in a vegetative state? Everyone around seems to be so unhelpful. The snippets of conversations between Shiv and Tara are ever so natural and spontaneous.“Do people dream when they are in coma?” Tara asks Shiv and then adds, “He better be dreaming about me.”
