Information overTWEET

The blog of a friend kept showing up in my inbox. I felt guilty not reading it each week, and couldn't get it to go into my junk mail. Then I saw the unsubscribe button. 

Click. No more weekly navel-gazing posts.

How was I to know that my friend would be notified?

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This scary personal story was shared by a victim of e-nnoyance: the new peril of information overdose attacking us from the abyss of the internet vastness. Continuous Partial Attention is already a recognized psychological phenomenon, which probably will be beyond grasp of the representatives of my generation, but those in their teens right now have no issues whatsoever texting on their cellphones, browsing the web and watching TV at the same time.

Are we really becoming unable to live without the modern devices of staying in touch. I can't help recalling the character of Drew Barrymore in He's Just Not That Into You complaining how she checks her blackberries, e-mails, cell phones and gets rejected by all those multiple technologies and misses the times when there was just one phone with one answering machine and the answering machine either had a message on it or it did not.

Have you heard of a term "a blackberry prayer"? I was frantic when I heard it for the first time from one of our professors. Respectable-looking ladies and gentlemen looking into their zippers in deep concentration one-on-one with their smart friends, pretending to pay attention to what is going around. Friends on Facebook are not real and the Twitter updates carry less and less informational value. In another Drew Barrymore movie (Ever After), the step-mother said that one should not speak unless it improves the silence. True as ever.

Communicating all the time, snow-balling the information with "sharing" and "retwitting", creating tons of "noise" with own webpage, blogs and livejournals - information has become a commodity. Retaining knowledge in one's head is a faux pas: regarded as something antique - why do you need to learn something when you can just google it? How do we sort through the weeds and divide the ideas from stuff? Unless there is some sort of an algorithm or a magic trick, the rate of hitting the "unsubscribe" button will be soaring soon.

Centered Leadership

In the past years there has been a noticeable surge towards finding what is called "centered leadership" - focusing on yourself and your own strengths to discover the internal resources and capabilities to lead, motivate and manage people. In the light of the recent economically pitiful events this proves to be as important as never, and one of the freshest McKinsey studies concluded:

The best leadership model: Yourself

They have identified five core capabilities that lie at the core of centered leadership:

•  finding meaning in work, 
• converting emotions such as fear or stress into opportunity, 
• leveraging connections and community, 
• acting in the face of risk, and 
• sustaining the energy that is the life force of change.

As always, this is a beautiful model, but commitment and determination must come first. Leadership is never the destination, it is always a journey. As an old Indian saying goes, in order to know another person, you need to walk a thousand miles in his moccasins. Practice proves that most of us are not ready to undertake that trip yet.

Losing IT

If I am becoming addicted to Facebook, is it clinical? Chronic? Curable?

Is losing a cell phone is like losing your life - you cease to exist?

Do you type faster than you write?

What's the difference in time of answering one e-mail and switching a TV channel?

Do you check your e-mail "just in case" more than 10 times a day?

Do you spend more time together with your Blackberry or your significant other(s)? Do you take it to bed with you?

Do you develop a headache if you do not spend enough time at your computer?

Do you remember all your logins and passwords but keep missing birthdays of your close friends?

Do you feel guilty now and make a note in your smart phone to spend less time online?...

Tightening the Bolts

Wow! this is something that has been cooking for a while... I would add that not only a graduation exam is needed, but an entrance exam (something different from GMAT or GRE) as well, testing the abilities to think conceptually and multi-disciplinary, not only being verbal and somewhat number-savvy. I'm up for the change!

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Do MBAs Need a Standardized Exam After Graduation?

Posted on Monday, October 4, 2010 7:52:40 PM GMT

An MBA has long been considered a requirement for C-level positions. By earning the degree, a prospective executive has proven that he/she has the chops to succeed in a senior exec role. However, with the exponential increase in the number of degree programs over the past 10 years, some employers are wondering whether "MBA" holds the same authority it used to.

India, in particular, has experienced a quick uptick in the number of MBA programs available in-country, flooding the job market with MBA graduates. But are these MBAs really qualified? To find out, the All-India Management Association (AIMA) has created an exam, reports BusinessWeek, that will "determine whether business school graduates in India are qualified for jobs." Remind you of something? (Cough, bar exam.) Although we don't know exactly how many employers are going to require the exam, AIMA says there's been significant interest.

Is this something employers really need? Or should GMAT scores and work history be enough? And isn't evaluating business schools the job of the AASCB? I tend to believe that, in the end, employers know which schools are strong and which ones are not. They talk to each other, learn from recruiters and talk with graduates of the schools, making a test unnecessary. What do you think? Should we have a standardized MBA exam?

Service matters

Nobody would object that service is important. The Age of  Industrialization is over: human interactions play the most important role in business. Someone said that business is a conversation and I have no reasons to doubt that thought. So why is the level of service we are getting in general is so low? Really, you might get good service now and then, but if you go back to your grumbles to your friends and family over the past couple of weeks, I am sure many of those were about poor service.

I can quote a personal example. Last week I went to the gym to find it closed because of the country-wide strike (yes, there are drawbacks of living in Spain). Someone gracefully graffiti'ed "VIVA LA GRASA" ("LONG LIVE THE FAT") at the main entrance to the gym in thick black paint and, by the way, it is still there - but the gym was closed. I started wondering why was it so difficult for the management, the front desk reception, or my trainers just to drop a word of it the day before? After all, I pay money to go there, and it's a private gym, so what's their story?

There are even worse stories about internal service. When people work for the same company and they start feeling that something actually depends on their decisions, they begin to forget that they are there to provide service. Finance, HR, IT, Communications, Contracts - I started thinking how often I heard "Come tomorrow", "I'm too busy now", "Do you need more than others?" from the representatives of those functions and got horrified. We have learnt to take care of the external service encounter and even somehow track those "moments of truth", but when it comes to cleaning our own house, the dirt gets swept under the carpet.

What most managers forget is the mirror concept: the way you handle issues inside the organization get projected or "mirrored" outside, and the customers can palpably feel the attitudes of the staff. In the past 10 year all of a sudden all HR Managers have become "Strategic HR Managers" because without the word "strategic" it's less fun, but the essence has not changed much: internal service is still suffering. Seems like the issue is in the lack of accountability and recognition once again. Perception plays a great role too: as long as the organization perceives the functions as "service" and "less important", people working there will behave accordingly. Recognizing the value those functions are bringing and making that appreciation visible will change the game. Easier said than done, but the industry has some examples to boast of. Nokia has been great with structuring their business/function relations, as well as some other big players, mostly those that depend greatly on their external customer interaction, because... what goes around, comes around...

Career Fair - still more about the fair than the career

Today was the last day of my exams (Term 2) and the first day of the Career Fair at IE Business School. The preparation for this exceptional event started a while ago and our Career Services were working extra hard to schedule the events, invite the companies, sort of prepare the students to face the enemy and create the buzz with all other resources possible. Well, the tent is up, the recruiters are there, there are some students roaming around, asking questions and lavishly distributing their CVs, but will it be any use?

How successful are career fairs for candidates anyway? For the companies? Who benefits at the end of the day? The trust is that, when it comes to business schools, the companies presented there are all known to the students through the numerous cases we have brushed through. Today, talked to a Dell representative I had a feeling that I had more background knowledge on the Dell operations management practices that she did. So, the candidates know what companies there are, which industries they represent and what opportunities there are to be offered... generally.

Second point: the recruiters are there only to paint the broad picture and present no more information than is available on the company website. Have you ever witnessed a situation during a career fair, when a recruiter told you, "We have the job just for you!"? True, there are opportunities, which are not obvious and the company representatives can point you in the right direction, but snatching a job offer just like that is improbable.

Next, if you are a star candidate, you are already known to most companies through the headhunting network. Best business school students are known and are on the market. Thus, unless you want to get loaded on company leaflets, pens, calendars and other usual paraphernalia, think why do you need to be there?

Finally, if you have decided to attend --- SHINE! Wear your best smile, make sure your make-up isn't flaking, print your CV in color and on quality resume paper and employ all the charm you have. It's 80% presentation, 10% talent and 10% luck. You must get noticed.

The psychology of change management

Companies can transform the attitudes and behavior of their employees by applying psychological breakthroughs that explain why people think and act as they do.

Emily Lawson and Colin Price

Over the past 15 or so years, programs to improve corporate organizational performance have become increasingly common. Yet they are notoriously difficult to carry out. Success depends on persuading hundreds or thousands of groups and individuals to change the way they work, a transformation people will accept only if they can be persuaded to think differently about their jobs. In effect, CEOs must alter the mind-sets of their employees—no easy task.

CEOs could make things easier for themselves if, before embarking on complex performance-improvement programs, they determined the extent of the change required to achieve the business outcomes they seek. Broadly speaking, they can choose among three levels of change. On the most straightforward level, companies act directly to achieve outcomes, without having to change the way people work; one example would be divesting noncore assets to focus on the core business. On the next level of complexity, employees may need to adjust their practices or to adopt new ones in line with their existing mind-sets in order to reach, say, a new bottom-line target. An already "lean" company might, for instance, encourage its staff to look for new ways to reduce waste, or a company committed to innovation might form relationships with academics to increase the flow of ideas into the organization and hence the flow of new products into the market.

But what if the only way a business can reach its higher performance goals is to change the way its people behave across the board? Suppose that it can become more competitive only by changing its culture fundamentally—from being reactive to proactive, hierarchical to collegial, or introspective to externally focused, for instance. Since the collective culture of an organization, strictly speaking, is an aggregate of what is common to all of its group and individual mind-sets, such a transformation entails changing the minds of hundreds or thousands of people. This is the third and deepest level: cultural change.

Linking all of the major discoveries in programs to raise performance has effected startling changes in the way that employees behave

In such cases, CEOs will likely turn for help to psychology. Although breakthroughs have been made in explaining why people think and behave as they do, these insights have in general been applied to business only piecemeal and haven’t had a widespread effect. Recently, however, several companies have found that linking all of the major discoveries together in programs to improve performance has brought about startling changes in the behavior of employees—changes rooted in new mind-sets. Performance-improvement programs that apply all of these ideas in combination can be just as chaotic and hard to lead as those that don’t. But they have a stronger chance of effecting long-term changes in business practice and thus of sustaining better outcomes.