Learnings

Learning from Harvard Business Review (May – June 2017)

Recruitment Procedures

“SAP uses a metaphor to communicate this idea across the organization: People are like puzzle pieces, irregularly shaped. Historically, companies have asked employees to trim away their irregularities, because it’s easier to fit people together if they are all perfect rectangles. But that requires employees to leave their differences at home—differences firms need in order to innovate. “The corporate world has mostly missed out on this [benefit],” Anka Wittenberg observes.

This suggests that companies must embrace an alternative philosophy, one that calls on managers to do the hard work of fitting irregular puzzle pieces together—to treat people not as containers of fungible human resources but as unique individual assets. The work for managers will be harder. But the payoff for companies will be considerable: access to more of their employees’ talents along with diverse perspectives that may help them compete more effectively. “Innovation,” Wittenberg notes, “is most likely to come from parts of us that we don’t all share.”

Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage by Robert D. Austin and Gary P. Pisano

Data Management

Single Source of Truths (SSOT) i.e. Master Data

Multiple Versions of Truth (MVOT) i.e. Extracts from the Master Data

Data was once critical to only a few back-office processes, such as payroll and accounting. Today it is central to any business, and the importance of managing it strategically is only growing. In September 2016, according to the technology conglomerate Cisco, global annual internet traffic surpassed one zettabyte (1021 bytes)—the equivalent, by one calculation, of 150 million years of high-definition video. It took 40 years to get to this point, but in the next four, data traffic will double. There is no avoiding the implications: Companies that have not yet built a data strategy and a strong data-management function need to catch up very fast or start planning for their exit.

What’s Your Data Strategy? By Leandro DalleMule and Thomas H. Davenport

Business in Africa

He went for a five-day visit. “Immediately all these poor people were asking for money,” he told me. “But then I realized there are a lot of rich people, too, and although it’s hard to make it in this market, it’s just as hard for everyone else as it is for me.” Back in China he called an acquaintance at the customs authority and asked him what was the heaviest, most expensive to ship product being exported in large quantities to Nigeria. The answer? Ceramics.

Qi’s story is an example of how Chinese companies are patiently forging a new institutional reality in Africa. Perhaps because government agencies and other institutions are very much under construction in China itself, Chinese companies are unafraid of incomplete and evolving institutions. They make things up as they go along—pivoting toward different local partners and adapting their plans to changing conditions. They are open to the ideas of their African counterparts. At once relentlessly realistic and irrepressibly optimistic, they act without waiting for conditions to be perfect, and in so doing, they alter those very conditions.

As Ron Bloom, President Obama’s onetime senior counselor for manufacturing policy, put it, “If you get an auto assembly plant, Walmart follows. If you get a Walmart, an auto assembly plant doesn’t follow.

The World’s Next Great Manufacturing Center by Irene Yuan Sun

Stress Management

HBR has run articles showing that you can cultivate personal resilience by taking some downtime, via scheduled or unscheduled breaks, or by cutting yourself off from technology.

Grant: A lot of evidence speaks to that. But I think we tend to define breaks too narrowly. Kim Elsbach of UC Davis has done research showing that one of the best ways to give people a break is to assign them mindless work. Rote tasks can free up your mind to think creatively. As people advance and develop more-complicated skills, we make the mistake of taking repetitive tasks off their plates. Switching between challenging, creative problems and, say, entering data into a spreadsheet for a few minutes can help us recharge.

“Above All, Acknowledge the Pain” by Adi Ignatius

Learning to Manage

“I understand that when people don’t know how to cook, it might be hard to imagine making three meals out of one expensive chicken. But it’s not difficult to learn, and it’s a pleasure. If we all learn basic cooking skills, we can make extremely affordable food.”

Life’s Work: An Interview with Alice Waters by Alison Beard