Category: Business Management

What do you make of EQ in the online world?

Over the last decade, email has become the cornerstone of business communication across industries & geographies. They are good at handling the transactional communication that most of our business roles involve. But they suck in communicating emotions or feelings. I routinely check myself against reading the emotions of the email sender and actively profess against it to anyone who cares to listen.

Over the same period, Emotional Quotient as a business competence has grown in stature & importance. Reading any content about EQ, you find out that that the ability to actively respond to others feelings & emotions in our interactions (business or otherwise) is a key requirement.

So if emails are bad in communicating emotions & EQ is critical to building positive relationships, where has the email era left us wrt positive relationships in business?

Taking this further, if email-like communication is taking over our personal lives too (via social networking sites), what is in store for personal relationships?

Thankfully, Facebook is already thinking on these lines & is taking steps to address such needs. Read more about this initiative here.

[Picture courtesy: flickr | aaipodpics]

Aakash Tablet – More Than Just the $35 Price Tag

image

It was a revelation for me to read the background story about Aakash ($35 tablet) in this FastCompany write-up.

Firstly, its impressive to know that the design for this potential-commercial-success is coming from an academic campus (IIT). The design is then sold to a commercial manufacturer (DataWind) with a challenging price target to meet. The challenge for the manufacturer is sweetened with access to a large protected market (subsidized purchases by the government).  This sounds like a good example of the value chain making the best of the strengths of the individual players (IIT / design – DataWind / commercial manufacturing – Indian government / distribution with a cause). The understanding of this definitely increases the credibility of the project for me.

Secondly, the fact that the IIT students (& professors) are getting involved in a live product development experience is amazing. And that too a ground breaking product (price point) of a worthy impact (distribution across government schools). Kudos to the people involved.

—–
Related Posts:
~ Drivers on Indian roads are so undisciplined because ..
~ Leadership Lessons From India

Top Ideas From 2011’s Best Employers

BestCompaniesToWorkFor2011

Going through Fortune’s 25 Best Global Companies to Work For feature, some practices of these organization caught my attention. Below is a collation of some of these that might be useful for anyone.

  • Catch Them Doing The Right Stuff   Top executives spend 3 hours each week making personal calls to thank employees for specific positive behaviour. 
  • Horizontal Growth If your employee has doubts about having made a wrong career choice, let them try out jobs in different areas of the company through formal job rotation.
  • Work – Life Balance To help maintain work – life balance, make a rule that senior executives cannot call meetings before 9:30 in the morning and cannot hold a meeting after 5:00 in the afternoon. 
  • Transparency  Hold Know Your Compensation (KYC) sessions, where employees learn where their compensation is compared to their colleagues & also the salary ranges in their organization.
  • Diversity  Maintain a healthy male to female ratio at the executive/senior management level with as much as 50% the positions filled by women.
  • Positive Networking  Allow promoted employees to name colleagues who helped them along the way; those colleagues are reached out to with personal thank-you emails from company leaders. 
  • Societal Contribution  Allow employees to contribute to a social cause of their liking at the company’s cost to address both the individual & organizations’ social responsibilities.
  • Networked Organization  Senior leaders spend a large amount of time with employees via skip level meetings, birthday get-together, personal thank-you sessions, coffee with high performers, etc.

—–
Related Posts:
~ What are the right motivators to keep employees engaged?
~ Roadblocks To Achieving Goals
~ Intrapreneurs – Engaged Employees

What are the right motivators to keep employees engaged?

www.fastcompany.com screen capture 2011-8-16-11-26-17

This blog post talks about the right motivators that managers & leaders should deploy for effectiveness & longevity of top talent within organizations.

  • More often than not, individuals don’t realize themselves what their primary motivators are.
  • The challenge for leaders / managers / organizations is to align individual’s personal strengths / goals towards organizations goals. While this is easier said than done, it could be a very effective talent management strategy.
  • I’m sure many of you come across this animation by Dan Pink about Drive. If not, its a highly recommended watch.