Abhijit Bhaduri’s Blog
I write about careers, skills and the world of work. The cartoons and sketches are mine.
Silicon Valley's Blind Spot: Talent Management
If Silicon Valley’s data-driven approach to problem solving can be combined with an interest in organizational science—and an acknowledgment that there is a science to understanding and managing people—its key talent management processes may become not just more rigorous, but also cutting-edge. These firms need to invest equally in furthering people sciences to understand their employees, and scientific talent management practices without getting carried away by fads and hype.
9 Must Ask Follow-up Questions in Interviews
According to a new research by Harvard Business School professors Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Julia Minson, and Francesca Gino, people who ask follow-up questions are perceived as higher in responsiveness, an interpersonal construct that captures listening, understanding, validation, and care. Here are 9 follow-up questions you can ask.
Five principles of designing experiences
Designers need to design with empathy. That means giving up one’s prior knowledge of the subject and looking at it with the eyes of a novice to understand the feelings of a user. This is easier said than done. Observing people in their natural surroundings is a good starting point. But don’t do it like a tourist. Instead immerse yourself in that world.
2018 - The Year of HR Data Theft
The pattern is clear about data breaches. The hackers sneak in to the databases. Since they are in stealth mode, their presence is not detected for months. Could it be that your employees’ data has been compromised and you are blissfully unaware?
McKinsey Jobs Report for 2030
Automation is inevitable to drive productivity and growth. 60% occupations will see 30% automation by 2030 says McKinsey’s latest report. This means a lot of people will need to make mid-career transitions.
Did you inherit the job from your parents
The New York Times ran a study on the jobs we are most likely to inherit from the mother or father. In their study they found that males are 2.7 times likely to share dad’s profession. Males are two times likely to share their mother’s profession. Daughters are 1.8 times likely to follow dad and 1.7 times likely to follow their mother. Parents certainly shape our view of work. It is no surprise that the children of parents who were unemployed are more likely to be unsure of the profession they would choose.
How To Hire Someone Who Is Not Good at Communicating
Although most of us spend more time communicating online than offline, recruitment methods are still heavily skewed towards analogue or physical communication skills, particularly the job interview. Indeed, interviews favor those who can communicate their ideas fluently and come across as likable. How can we discover talented people who are not good at communicating but are otherwise terrific at delivering top-notch performance?
Hackathon - how to run it
Hackathon are not about tweaks. They are all about exponential thinking. This is about taking a moonshot within 36 hours or so. The teams get down to building prototypes and speed-coding. It is best if they can create a working prototype in 36 hours. That too about a goal that is crazily tempting simply because of the impact that it could have. And then again... it might fail. So what. Hackathons are not for the faint-hearted. It is race to complete an impossible task.
The Digital Tsunami: Talent Management
When the entire talent pool consists of a few thousand people in the world, the demand and supply equation does get skewed in favor of the experts. In case of Artificial Intelligence, the talent pool is limited to less than 10,000 people across the world. These people are being tapped by everyone from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft as well as every other industry. The MD of Daimler Benz recently said their competitors are no longer other car companies like Tesla, but Google, Apple, Amazon etc. The same holds true for talent. If Artificial Intelligence is on its way to becoming like electricity, there are not enough electrical engineers being churned out.
Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella
Hit Refresh (publisher: Harper Collins) is a book that is the blueprint Nadella has in mind as he tries to change the culture of Microsoft from know-it-all to learn-it-all. The new culture at Microsoft is all about listening, learning more and talking less. The book is a terrific study in changing culture. Nadella’s decision to launch Windows 10 in Kenya instead of Sydney was an effort to build a culture of inclusion. Both countries have educated and tech savvy customers as well as skill gaps. Building a culture that obsesses about the customer is not easy.
How Office Politics Corrupts the Search for High-Potential Employees
Few topics have captivated talent management discussions more intensely than potential. But how good are we at evaluating human potential? The answer is, it’s mixed. In the real world of work, organizational practices lag behind, with 40% of designated “HiPos” — high-potential employees — not doing well in the future and at least one in two leaders disappointing, derailing, or failing to drive high levels of engagement and team performance. Despite the tools being available, political processes derail how talent is identified in organizations.
Binge Learning - is that even a thing?
Pyschologists will explain this as Goal Gradient effect. We start to hurry up and put in more effort as we get closer to the finishing line. While doing push ups, try counting backwards 10... 9... 8... instead of the usual 1... 2... 3... and see how how it affects your motivation. Rats run faster as they approach a food reward. Humans increase effort as they approach rewards such as gift certificates or goals such as visual finish lines.
Why are Digital Giants Building Offices
There are enough people who earn a living without stepping into an office. A wartime correspondent can get a Pulitzer without being in office for months. A job that can be done with no interdependencies can be done from anywhere. The gig economy is proof of that.However, deeper bonds are formed between people who cross each other several times a day. In the late 1940s, psychologists Leon Festinger and Stanley Schachter, and sociologist Kurt Back found that physical space was the key to friendship formation.In a hyperconnected world, the notion of friendship is acquiring new shades. Online friendships are being formed on social media over shared interests. Whether these friends could work together on a day-to-day basis on tasks remains to be studied.
Citius Altius Fortius Jobs Will Go Away
The jobs that follow the “faster, higher, stronger” principle will progressively be taken over by machines. It is easy to program the robots to do something repetitively and do it blindingly fast. Not only can robots do the work faster than humans, they do not have Monday morning blues. They do not seek vacation days nor do they object to working on weekends. They can go through mountains of data in a moment and identify anomalies. They are better legal assistants than humans. They make better radiologists than humans. Any job that is faster for machines to carry out makes it uneconomical to be left to humans. That means we will have many of these jobs carried out by robots replacing humans – men to be precise.
9 Strategies to Be a Star Employee
Every organization tries to hire the best candidate for the job. During succession planning discussions, only a handful of these hires get classified as stars. Every high potential employee does not live up to the expectations. This is what was puzzling Bell Labs. Robert Kelley and his team from Carnegie Mellon found 9 characteristics that star employees demonstrated. They did these 9 things everyday.
Want to Experience the Joy of Giving
I have never met the team at Medha but I would like to support their work. You can donate any amount from Rs200/- or more. You do not have to be a millionaire before you donate for a cause you care about. That is what I liked about the philosophy of SmallChange the NGO that I am partnering with. You can contribute to Medha's kitty by clicking here:CLICK THIS: https://www.smallchange.ngo/fundraiser/teens-learn-life-skills/If you donate Rs1000/- or more, please send me a mail at abhijitbhaduri@live.com & I will send you a signed copy of a sketchnote I made on Gratitude. I am no artist, but it is just my way of saying thank you for helping us build a better India.