Malaysian Diaries

Landed in Kuala Lumpur (KL) an hour back and I am simply blown by the way the city is designed. Met a lovely Malaysian sexagenarian of Sri Lankan origin on flight who said that "KL is the most friendly city for tourists." So what makes it friendly?

The cleanliness? Er, maybe. Spotted a cockroach this morning at the airport (not reading too much into it, they are the toughest insects known to man!)

The grandeur? Possibly, the airport and station was huge but I personally thought T2 in Mumbai was more spectacular.

I think we miss the thing that makes KL (or for that matter any world city) tourist friendly and a smart city is the fact that it is well designed and well mannered.

The hallmark of its design is evident in the fact that not once so far have I felt lost. And the hallmark of its people's manners is from how they spoke and helped us when we reached KL or looked for help. The simplicity and seamlessness of the design makes it so bloody good!

I go back to the Sri Lankan sexagenarian who I met on the flight and what she had to say about Mumbai: Poor signage with most signs at crucial junctures only in hindi and not in English, ill mannered people with her family being manhandled at the temples where she went for prayers and to pay homage to the Gods. I convinced her to come back to India and visit some of the other smaller towns and hamlets where the people are still warm and where tourists are treated well. But if we indeed want to have smart cities India we are going to need better design and better manners in treating people.

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Standard Diversity

As I returned from Delhi to Mumbai last night a little observation caught my amazement. The airports had a very similar look and feel in both cities. In fact when I started recalling the airports at Bangalore, Mangalore, Ranchi and Delhi they are all similar looking to each other.

But you would almost always be able to make out which of those cities you are in if you were left on the roads of this cities. The buildings, the roads, the signage, the colour and life on those streets are unique to each city.

Compare that to the structure and life of the organization and you will find an uncanny resemblance. With benchmarks being defined the world over most systems and practices organizations follow, adopt and adapt are fairly standard. And in our enthusiasm, we may push for employees to "comply or perish" which may not always be the ideal thing you do. The life of an organization is in its people and in the diversity they possess. And through this comes forth its polity, its history, its culture and even its values (not stated but practised).

While we drive for Compliance of structures and systems we must not fail to Celebrate the diversity and differences of the people and the views they bring to the table. Eventually it is they that breathe life into the bricks and mortar, wires and nodes, laptops and desktops of an office!

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Rise of Organizational Complexity

Over the last few weeks, I have been watching a unique show called CrashCourse on YouTube. It covers a lot of academic topics such as history and economics and psychology from school and college level courses in an interesting and fun way. There is a new course they have begun called Big History which is particularly interesting. It covers the entire 13.8 billion year history of the universe and the 4 billion year history of our planet. (You can find more information about it on www.bighistoryproject.com)

One theme that it constantly speaks of is the rising complexity. And somehow I see that transcending across galaxies of organizations and people just as easily as the galaxies of stars and its planets. The theory simply states that 'Systems tends towards exponentially rising complexity over a linear time scale. We see that evidently through the evolution of life on this earth where of the 40 thousand odd years of humanity's existence we have effectively had civilizations only for the last 1/4th of that time period. An extension of this theory is that rising complexity results in rising challenges: a never ending series of effects and side effects!

Pull the same concept to organizations and they too start with single member ventures or with a handful of founders with a startup. But as the complexity in companies begin to rise, as the organizations start getting bigger, wider, more complex and more diverse so do their challenges, worries and constraints!

As the challenges are so also will their solutions will be: big, wide, complex and diverse. But I see this more as an eventual state. Because there is another set of rules that govern this universe: that of emergence and evolution.

Every state of rising complexity is matched with a state of evolution and its building blocks being formed through a state of emergence. And while some organizations adapt and let change course through their veins, others resist and eventually implode like a death star.

Organizations have a life of its own in the sense that the noblest desires of its leaders to survive would not help if its DNA is built with resistance to adapt and become something else. So what really does remain permanent?
Targets? They change every year.
Goals? They change every 2 to 3 years.
Strategies? They progress every 5 years or so.
Business Models? Transform every 10 years (maybe sooner!)
Mission and Vision? They too will see an evolution sometime in the organization's lifetime.
The only permanent element is the element of change. And the change is gradual and continuous.

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You're Turning More Into Yourself

Every year, every day, every hour
You're turning more and more into yourself.

You realize each moment your deepest fears,
And may hold on to them for days or even years.
But make peace with it some time in the future,
And let the fear become a small part of your nature.


And each time you unearthed your darkest desires,
You may have succumbed to its roaring fires.
But one day you stand up to the temptation's test
And put those flames at last to rest.

But there are also an instance or two
Those dreams you really look up to,
And the sweetest truth is when you discover
That the dream was real and yours to uncover.

And so each time when you realize
About yourself something deep or a great surprise,
Your nature transforms into something so real and true.
That each moment you turn more and more into you!



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How Do You See Me?

I got a call from one of my colleagues one day, telling me they wanted to speak to me about something urgent. From the sound of it, it felt like something had gone horribly wrong and I thought it best to speak with the person right away. In a matter of minutes this person was down at my desk and we decided over a cup of coffee on what was trouble brewing. Immediately the person spoke about resignation. Actually the words were more like, "I guess you have already heard... I have put in my papers last week..."

While the conversation did continue on about matters related to resignation like work handover, last working day and dues settlement, I don't want to talk about those process matters here. What I do want to highlight here are a couple of other things the person said. The person mentioned that one was bored with the drudgery of daily work and that one was feeling this way for 6 months prior to this conversation. What amazed me was that I thought in my little head that I was a pretty good work friend of this person and that the person would share with me one's problems!

It is a known fact that many organizations do not have HR professionals and a majority of those who do are involved in operational and process-centric tasks. It is ironic but true that HR managers across organizations receive among the poorest client engagement scores from their clients (employees) as compared to business teams from the same organizations. While this may just be the nature of our never-ending journey in the function: that increased HR engagement scores result in increased Client engagement scores; it is also a reflection of the nature of our relationship with the business.

How do they see us? I remember while I was part of the business we viewed HR as this disdained entity that would not do anything more than peddle organizational processes and push organizational mandates while engaging only senior leadership in the unit to better business performance. We engineers on the other hand looked for a coach, a guide, a facilitator who could converse with us on our issues and work towards creative solutions for our talent challenges.

Sounds like a lot but if we think about it from Ulrich's model of HR professionals we play the roles of Admin Partner, Change Agent, Strategic Partner and Employee Champion if we aren't doing this what are we really doing as HR. And all of this is based on the foundations of any strong relationship: trust, communication and camaraderie.

It didn't take a lot for us to stop relying on HR for the support we needed and look internally for that support. Ironically, Human Resource Managers fell short of being decent People Managers while business managers filled that gap to their best capacities.

My own tryst with my colleague as an HR manager served as a wake-up call to be a more people's HR manager and not just a process HR practitioner.

My Inheritance

The excitement one gets with the news of receiving an inheritance is quite unlike any other news. The possibility of a large sum of riches (or even a small one for that matter) is a gift for which all one has to do is be known to the person who bequeaths those riches.

So now I tell you that you have to bequeath your riches to your future generations, what do you have to give them? How much is your money going to last? How many generations have you thought of providing for? 3 generations maybe 4? That's about 200 years if your 4th generation lives to be 90 yrs old! And what value would your money hold? 200 years ago a paisa was a lot of money; today it doesn't even exist (except in your bank account as interest accrued!).

So I ask you again, what can you bequeath you future generations that has just as much value or even more value than today? Your stories which tells them of their legacies? Your values which tells them of their beliefs? Their life which is passed on generation to generation through you genes?

What will you bequeath to your future generations?

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