Reflections: the stoic way!

Featured in LinkedIn, Dec 2016 Everybody is talking about hiring top talent! Companies like  Belong.co  are claiming to have written intelligent codes to reach out to top talent available on social and professional media. They also claim to know how to engage them best for all your top talent hiring needs. We heard the same about  talentpad . They finally shut down!  I think we often misunderstood top talent, as it is always a shifting value against the work/job content-context, people-colleagues and leaders, culture & engagement-information, creative freedom and independence, power of the purpose of the company, leaders and how that influences and aligns with the sense of purpose of top talent!  Talent search and finding its worth is proven only in the long run! Look back at all your top tier B/T school campus hires of past 5 years. How many of them have proven to be the best hires? How many big-fat salaried so called top talent hires have r...

Featured in LinkedIn , Jan 2017 There has been some high profile leadership changes of late and this brought some HR leaders to talk about succession planning and career advancement, etc. But these pundits of HR feudal world did not ever create a written and announced career-path for HR people in their own HR organization, why? ‘Coz they are above suspicion due to some divine sanctions. Even Julius’s wife is not above suspicion!           Career growth within HR happens unplanned and sudden and that throws all sense and sensibilities chucked out of the window. No plan or lack of it is the basic nature of HR. What growths we have seen are the need-based reactive and some just copy-paste fancy sub-functional title gimmick! Have you ever seen an HR competency book? Have you ever seen an HR Capability Building Framework? Have you ever seen any HR whitepaper on how to create super HR humans? HR is a self-proclaimed...

Has there been any caste proliferation in corporate hiring?  Not sure but I feel like seeing it in my face quite often now a days. I was at ICICI bank , Jeevan Bheema Nagar, Bangalore today and I observed the official language of staff talk was mostly TELUGU. The same case at Vignnana Nagar (very close to Jeevan Bheema Nagar). Sample one more, went to H&M at VR Mall , Whitefield Bangalore and nearly all staff talking for their internal communication in TAMIL. Pantaloons store at Indiranagar 100 ft road, nearly all staff communicate in KANNADA.  MUJI store at VR , Bengaluru, most , everyone talks Hindi. It is Japanese retailer in India with JV with Reliance. Amazing store for innovating and high on utility products for household and even beds and shirts too. All these store guys were hired by the Delhi team , at Delhi NCR. Just along the language lines, I observed some streaks of culture. At H&M at VR Bengaluru, staff make a fish market, they keep talking among t...

e-commerce fashion retail players finally realized that fashion will be sold mostly through brick and mortar stores. Fashion is fun and entertainment. Place matters!  Private labels of ShoppersStop and Lifestyles- Melange-Kangana Ranaut and many others like BIBA, Aurelia have made fashion buying more of a touch and feel game. It is not a hardware! Fashion is a soft core product and it requires other sense organs to make decision, not just eyes. Spread and massively quick success of ZARA in India established that fashion will eventually sell through stores. Zara took 50,000 sq ft store at Kala Ghoda in Mumbai with an annual rent of Rs.30 Cr. One 50K SFT store is actually 2.5 times sale of 50 individual 1K SFT stores. High street fashion sells on high street. It always makes sense to open a large format store and I am sure Myntra would do that same as they would have their off-line stores by year-end. I have my short experience with fashion at USPL. This is personal view...