Friday fun: of Sport and Brain

As Haruki Murakami said in one of his books, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, "Muscles are hard to get and easy to lose. Fat is easy to get and hard to lose." Same logic applies to mind exercise and IQ. It is hard to get smarter and easy to slip on the way and yield to laziness and bad habits. Undoubtedly, we can go into lengthy discussions about different types of knowledge and that it's not that bad, but quoting the same book again, "The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school." Who teaches you determination or will power? Resilience? Humility? Forgiveness?

I started going to the gym last week again. After four years of going to the gym 5-6 times a week, a 4-month break was grueling. My body was crying at first needing its daily fix of exercise, but then it sort of reconciled to the fact that it's not getting any. The battle in my mind was even more fierce: how do I balance the MBA pressure with the need of regular exercise? After my short vacation trip to the South of France beaches I could not postpone joining a local Madrid gym any longer. Since then I have been good with attendance and intensity of exercise. Surely, the muscles were complaining at the beginning but now I am getting back into the routine again. After all, PAIN IS INEVITABLE BUT SUFFERING IS OPTIONAL.

One of the reasons I decided to join IE Business School was to get back into the mind gym routine - precisely the same withdrawal symptoms as with physical exercise. I am not saying that when you work there is no intellectual stimulation, but the levels of abstraction are quite different. I was managing to compensate the lack of academic load as much as I could with books, short term courses and learned talks with people of science, but I did not feel it was enough. Morale of this story is: PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE! Every day, in every situation - your body, mind and soul must be working - stagnation is death. On this inspirational note I am leaving you with a couple of suggestions for intellectual stimulation when you have nothing better to do :)

 

How I got to DHL Inhouse Consulting

I am not sure if my career is going to be dominated by yellow and red (remember my previous company was Shell), I just keep my fingers crossed it is not going to be McDonalds in the future.

As you remember, last week I went to Bonn in Germany for an assessment center with DHL Inhouse Consulting. Some of you even sent me messages to find out what that was all about and how to apply, so I figured out I'd rather make the details of the trip public; hope someone finds it interesting and useful.

Everything started on Monday in Bonn with my crude misconstruction of German behavior. Take these three things into consideration: Germany, Monday morning and Germany. Everyone in the office was smiling and greeting me!!! How weird is that? I mean... on a Monday morning it is generally a very BAD idea to talk to me before I had my first cup of coffee. In Bonn people on the streets were greeting me - huh? Well, I allow a possibility that was because I was wearing an awesome Calvin Klein linen suit with a tie and a fresh haircut - still, I was not prepared for that.

What I WAS prepared for is that everything will be measured to the dot and it was. The process ran smoothly according to the schedule, not a minute wasted. I have always admired German punctuality (not when you live with one of them, though), but in general you can check your clock by the German schedule.

The presentations and interviews are done by consultants and project managers, which instantly signals the level of commitment the company places on the recruitment process. As Jack Welch said, recruitment is the single most important activity in any organization. I think Goldman Sachs is another company taking it seriously with up to 60 interviews when you join them.

I have never done a case interview in my life and I should tell you, it's not something you want to go through every day. I used to run assessment centers at Shell, but that was somewhat a different experience... not so stressful I believe. With a case interview you need to think of your feet and lay out your reasoning and calculations there and then. The key (as I see it) is to reveal your thinking and show the ability to look at the problem holistically. Nobody expects you to demonstrate Financial Management knowledge - if that is your biggest asset, probably you should be doing this interview at Merrill Lynch or Lehman Brothers... no... hold on... scrap the latter one... Obviously, you need to pepper your answer with the typical MBA lingo, such as "sustainable development", "win-win solution", "leverage" and the like, but you can only do this much BS - you are expected to give a concrete recommendation at the end of your verbal torrent of business school profanities. The case studies turned out to be relevant real life problems, examples of which can be found on the DHL Inhouse Consulting website. I struggled a little with "getting my hands dirty" and digging deeper into the numbers, but I am aware of my preference to go for the bigger picture. If you demonstrate the ability to think on the fly, you are fine.

The feedback and decision was instant, so walking away from their office three hours later I was given the offer and the details. HR gets involved only at the final stage when it comes to figures and contracts, and it is all polished and smooth, which sort of can be expected from a worldwide logistics leader.

One concern that I still can't get my head around is: if they stress the importance of teamwork so much, why were all the candidates given only individual assignments? Or maybe it's merely because it is only an assessment for an internship, and the "real" assessment will be more grueling, longer and earth-shattering?

Now I have four months before the start and the personal question is what I need to do to get the most of that internship experience and weigh up all the other options. There are electives, there are long- and short-term exchanges, Venture Lab, and surely I can try getting into another company. They say that options are good, they give you the sense of freedom. But when there are too many of them, they give you a headache.

Truth about Expats

The quandary Nokia has found itself in is not uncommon for hundreds of large multinationals. The rule of thumb seems to be: when the proverbial mass hits the fan - call in an expat. Expats are smarter, they don't have ties to the locals (hence unbiased decision-making) and they have a global outlook. This would be true in countries like China, Ghana and 1990s Russia, but Finland does not suffer from lack of local talent, who are capable of running a large multi-billion dollar organization. Obviously, this depends on what you want to do with it. If the long-term intentions are to sell the whole thing, then surely you would need a turnaround manager, who would come and ensure that the company's market value soars. However, if sustainable long-term growth is needed, wouldn't it be a better idea to go for a local?

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The curse of the alien boss

Nokia is reportedly seeking an outsider to revive it. Bad idea

Aug 5th 2010

INSIDE Nokia, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the company’s CEO, is known as OPK. In the wider tech world he is known as a dead man walking. The business press is buzzing with rumours of his imminent demise. Alas for him, these rumours have boosted his company’s share price.

Mr Kallasvuo took over the world’s largest phonemaker (which is also by far the biggest company in his native Finland) in the summer of 2006. Six months later Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and it has been downhill ever since. Nokia’s shares have tumbled by nearly two-thirds. Its profit margins have withered from 15% to 7%. And the firm has all but imploded in America, despite Mr Kallasvuo’s pledge to conquer the region.

Nokia’s most obvious problem is that it is being squeezed out of the smartphone market. Smartphones are not only lucrative in themselves; they are also the gateway to the even juicier market for services and “apps”. Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android range compete on “cool”. BlackBerry is synonymous with business. But what does Nokia stand for? Mr Kallasvuo argues that the forthcoming N8—an all-singing-and-dancing handset that is due to hit the stores in October after several delays—will “mark the beginning of our renewal”. But previews suggest that the phone is more about catching up than setting the pace. Nokia’s ads tout its “revolutionary” touch-screen technology, built-in camera and GPS. Yet such baubles are already commonplace.

This tardiness is a symptom of two deeper problems. One is technological: Nokia has split its bet on smartphones between two operating systems, Symbian and MeeGo, and has not come up with a hit for either of them. The other is cultural: the centre of gravity of the mobile-phone industry is shifting from Scandinavia (which dominated the field from the late 1980s) to Asia and Silicon Valley. Innovations such as touch-screen navigating are being pioneered in northern California, not northern Europe.

What can Nokia do to turn itself around? If you believe the tech press, the answer is simple: dump OPK and replace him with a troubleshooter, preferably an American. Speculation about possible successors is furious: Andy Rubin, the head of Android at Google, is on many lists. Jorma Ollila, Nokia’s chairman and the CEO in its glory days, is said to have interviewed a couple of big American names. Nokia denies all these rumours.

The speculators may well be right. Mr Kallasvuo is the quintessential product of a company that has grown too cautious and inward-looking—a Nokia lifer who cut his teeth as a company lawyer and visibly wilts in the limelight. Nokia cannot afford to appoint another hidebound insider. But trying to find a saviour from far away is perhaps even riskier.

One of the few things that management theorists agree on is that recruiting bosses from outside is something that you should avoid if you can. Listen to über-guru Jim Collins: in “Good to Great”, he observed that more than 90% of the CEOs of his sample of highly successful companies were recruited internally. Or consult Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School: in “Searching for a Corporate Saviour”, he described how companies that invest their hopes in a charismatic outsider are usually disappointed. Or read the painstaking studies that come out of the Academy of Management: they show that even companies that are having a hard time are better off sticking with an insider. The curse of the alien boss is particularly potent in the high-tech sector: think of John Sculley’s disastrous reign at Apple or Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard.

Nokia is especially likely to prove allergic to a foreign CEO. For a start, the firm is headquartered in a country that is dark for half the year. That will surely limit its ability to attract the best and brightest. (The rumour mill suggests that one prominent American has already rejected the job because he or she does not want to live in Finland.) To make matters trickier, Finns deem Nokia a national treasure: it accounts for about a fifth of the value of their stock exchange and a huge share of their exports. A foreign CEO would be under intense scrutiny from day one.

Finnished before he starts?

Nokia is also a global behemoth, with 35% of the world’s handset market. Silicon Valley’s finest may be good at high-end innovation. But none of them knows much about running a company with R&D facilities in 16 countries and sales in more than 160. Nokia has led the industry in creating a vast distribution system in emerging markets: it has some 90,000 sales outlets in China, 1,000 customer-service centres and a huge army of sales people, for example. But the assaults from low-cost local companies are relentless. One of the biggest dangers for Nokia is that it will devote so much energy to taking on Apple, Google and Research In Motion (the maker of the BlackBerry) that it will lose its edge in emerging markets.

All is not lost. There are some examples of successful outsiders—most notably Lou Gerstner at IBM—to be set against the more numerous examples of failures. And Nokia has undergone a remarkable transformation before. It was once an industrial conglomerate best known for making rubber boots.

Nokia sells more handsets than its three smartphone rivals combined and enjoys higher profit margins than some of its traditional competitors, such as Motorola and Sony Ericsson. It has the industry’s best distribution system. Unlike Apple, it sells the equivalent of everything from Porsches to Corollas. Nokia has a better chance of producing a successful smartphone than Apple does of penetrating the Chinese and Indian markets. But in looking for a CEO who can take on the likes of Apple and Android, Nokia faces its biggest test since it decided to bet its future on the mobile telephone in the early 1990s.

First MBA months: summary

  First vacation and it's time to think about the four months I have spent at IE Business School. I have written quite a bit about the program and I laid out some concerns earlier, so this is mostly a summary. I am welcoming my classmate to agree or disagree on any of the points, but here they are:

1. Helping others is bad. Aka "digging your own grave", "spitting upwards" (you know it will land on you sooner or later) or "sawing off the branch you are sitting on". The curve system discourages any desire to help others excel in their learning because a better grade for them might mean a worse grade for you. Thus, crossing teamwork out.
2. Doing less you will get more. There is an inherent performance management system failure. Some of my classmates outright refused to take part in group activities, focused only on individual studies and got better grades. Important lesson: don't commit.
3. If you don't bend the system, the system will bend you (and not in a good way). What is best for the school does not necessarily mean it's best for the students. We were lucky to observe that with a number of events (e.g. Segovia entrepreneurial conference or feedback/professor selection processes). Takeaway: watch out for yourself.

One last thought: MBA might also stand for:

   Mediocre But Arrogant

   Mighty Big Attitude

   Me Before Anyone

   My Bogus Achievement

   Master of Bullshit Artist

   Managers By Accident

   Many Brief Affairs

   Massive Bank Account

   Married But Alone

   Married But Available

...and it does not always work that well:

Turkish carpeting: When Your Looks Pay Off

How do you recruit young and attractive employees without getting into litigation complexities related to age and looks discrimination? Face control is not something easy to implement, particularly in the more developed parts of the world. Apparently, in Turkey they have few issues with that as we can see from the article below.

OK, maybe you can get past the recruitment stage. What happens if you take on a couple of kilos? Now you are unfit to work? Another interesting case - all of a sudden, you are 30!!! Start dusting off your CV, as nobody likes being served chicken or beef by an old person.

So far, I believe it is mainly the States who have implemented strict legislative requirements re: discrimination in the workplace. Hence, we get characters like Valerie (Pam Ann show), and American Airlines get renowned for their aging crew :)



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Turkish carpeting
Aug 13th 2010, 17:41 by T.P. | LONDON

IS IT any wonder that flight attendants are deploying the emergency-evacuation chute and heading for the hills? With competition in the aviation sector so intense, airlines feel under pressure to promote as glossy an image as possible. The latest carrier to take action is Turkish Airlines, where, according to the management, passenger numbers aren’t the only things growing. Waistlines have also come under scrutiny, and 28 flight attendants have been told to lose weight or lose their jobs.

Turkish Airlines has explained that the height and weight of its attendants are "important both in terms of appearance and the ability to move about" and that all the employees involved had previously been warned about their weight. They have now been placed on six months' unpaid leave. If they don't slim down they will be reassigned to other duties.

As Gulliver has previously noted, many carriers do not embroil themselves in the issue of their attendants’ weight, asking only that they meet the mobility requirements to fulfil their roles safely. To place a heavy emphasis on appearance seems a throwback—today’s commercial pilots are no longer feted as heroes, you are not allowed to smoke and you definitely can’t visit the cockpit. Yet the image of the “trolley dolly” lingers on. It's as if Lee Kuan Yew’s opinion that the "Singapore Girl" (the name-cum-slogan of Singapore Airlines' flight attendants) needed "to stay on the right side of the thirties" in order "to remain attractive" has been taken as an immutable truth.

The issue of airlines reassigning or firing attendants over the approved weight is no longer an unexpected story—even if Turkish Airlines lists appearance ahead of mobility when explaining the significance of its cabin crews' weight. However, an interesting twist to this case is that, in contrast to the ten attendants sacked by Air India in 2009, 15 of the Turkish carrier's crew members are men. Will some of the sympathy shown to the Air India crew also be afforded to Izzet Levi, who weighs in at a burly 106kg (233lbs), and his colleagues?

Who's harassing whom?

It would not be so funny if it were not at least partially true. Only the lazy, the fools and those who are in coma have not jumped onto the sexual harassment bandwagon yet. Irrespective which side of the fence you are on, it is so easy to gain attention cheaply, fast and efficiently if you play the harassment card right. The problem exists: as an HR professional I had to deal with issues like harassment, gender discrimination, workplace romance and the like. It is not a sexy job to do, pardon the pun. There are emotions and careers involved, and at times the stakes are very high. 

Often I saw that the complaining party was clearly after a personal gain (money, promotion, revenge), but the amount of attention such matters command, the imperfect regulatory framework and sensitivity/subjectivity of the problem make things incredibly complicated. Thus, often the management perspective is to satisfy the complaint just not to let all the worms out of the can. Now that is just wrong. You overstep the line once, you are getting hundreds of others running after the same freebies, since the precedent has been created. What are your experiences with harassment matters?

Dogs improve office productivity

Amazingly interesting bit of research. Your thoughts?
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Animal and human behaviour

Manager's best friend

Dogs improve office productivity

Aug 12th 2010

OK. Here’s the plan

THERE are plenty of studies which show that dogs act as social catalysts, helping their owners forge intimate, long-term relationships with other people. But does that apply in the workplace? Christopher Honts and his colleagues at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant were surprised to find that there was not much research on this question, and decided to put that right. They wondered in particular if the mere presence of a canine in the office might make people collaborate more effectively. And, as they told a meeting of the International Society for Human Ethology in Madison, Wisconsin, on August 2nd, they found that it could.

To reach this conclusion, they carried out two experiments. In the first, they brought together 12 groups of four individuals and told each group to come up with a 15-second advertisement for a made-up product. Everyone was asked to contribute ideas for the ad, but ultimately the group had to decide on only one. Anyone familiar with the modern “collaborative” office environment will know that that is a challenge.

Some of the groups had a dog underfoot throughout, while the others had none. After the task, all the volunteers had to answer a questionnaire on how they felt about working with the other—human—members of the team. Mr Honts found that those who had had a dog to slobber and pounce on them ranked their team-mates more highly on measures of trust, team cohesion and intimacy than those who had not.

In the other experiment, which used 13 groups, the researchers explored how the presence of an animal altered players’ behaviour in a game known as the prisoner’s dilemma. In the version of this game played by the volunteers, all four members of each group had been “charged” with a crime. Individually, they could choose (without being able to talk to the others) either to snitch on their team-mates or to stand by them. Each individual’s decision affected the outcomes for the other three as well as for himself in a way that was explained in advance. The lightest putative sentence would be given to someone who chose to snitch while the other three did not; the heaviest penalty would be borne by a lone non-snitch. The second-best outcome came when all four decided not to snitch. And so on.

Having a dog around made volunteers 30% less likely to snitch than those who played without one. The moral, then: more dogs in offices and fewer in police stations.