What Matters For The Class of 2008?

Today’s “Times of India” makes reference to a recent survey conducted by A C Nielsen. “Campus Track T Schools 2008″ covered 3800 students of engineering in India graduating next year. The Class of 2008.

We are told that for a majority of students, the top 3 factors considered for choosing a job were:

• Technical soundness ( presumably, technical strengths of the organisation)
• Salary ( easily understood)
• Opportunities to work in growing sectors ( presumably, in “hot” areas of technolgy etc. )

Expectations were for a compensation package as high as Rs.9 lakhs per annum. In some cases this repesents an increase of 50 % over the last year.

About 71% of the students intend to do an MBA. 56 % of the graduates of the country’s top 130 engineering institutes plan to leave their first job in a maximum of 3 years.

My take: Shorter time frames for employment are the order of the day. This makes employee engagement more crucial. In simple terms, success comes through making every day count. Generate the maximum engagement through higher understanding of what really matters to employees.

Politically correct language.

We are in the age of “politically correct ” (PC) language. Not “Blacks” but”African Americans”, not “man hours” but “person hours”, not “sex” but “gender” and the list goes on.

“Politically correct language is humourous in its seriousness” says Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

There is no doubt that we must be sensitive in the use of language such that it does not offend any one. However, are we in the process making language more tedious? Does a “dishonest” person feel better at being called “ethically disoriented”? Is a “fat “person any less fat by being referred to as being, “circumferencially privileged”? Would a “clumsy” person become more adept by being described as “uniquely co-ordinated”? Is a short person “vertically challenged”? Should the 33rd President of the United States, have been called Harry S. Trueperson?

On July 20, 1969 on landing on the moon, Neil Armstong said some thing which has become immortal” A small step for man, a giant step for mankind”. As an article I read somewhere said: ” Would he, if he were to do the same thing again, today say:” One small step for a person, one giant movement for all persons regardless of age, sex, religion, creed, national origin, physical limitatation or lifestyle preference”(edited to remove offensive content)?

Generalist Vs Specialist

In a lighter vein, what is the difference between a Generalist and a Specialist?

Generalist: as he grows knows less and less of more and more- until he knows virtually nothing about everything.

Specialist: as he grows knows more and more about less and less- until he practically knows everything about nothing.

Perspectives

Here are a few quotations we have used from time to time in our Corporate presentation:

• “The greatest difficulty lies not in persuading people to accept new ideas, but to abandon old ones” John M. Keynes
• “There are no great people in the world, only great challenges which ordinary people rise to meet” William F. Halsey, Jr.
• “If people like your treatment they tell a neighbour, if not they tell a neighbourhood”
• ” Learning is a life long process of keeping abreast of change, the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn” Peter F. Drucker
• “Two things that people want more than sex and money…recognition and praise” Mary Kay Ash
• ” Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion, too wakes up. It must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter what you are, gazelle or lion, when the sun comes up, you better be running”

Tragedy at Virginia Tech

We are getting used to the extent of the tragedy at Virginia Tech. The way 32 people were killed without meaning left us numb.

Blame the gun laws in the US or the stress of modern day society that in an extreme leads one to acts of madness such as this.

A chilling picture emerges of Cho Seung-Hui, the killer, himself a student and resident at Virginia Tech. The South Korean gunman who killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech university had lived in the United States for 14 years but neighbours and fellow students said they knew very little about him.

Before committing the worst shooting rampage in modern U.S. history on Monday, Cho Seung-Hui left a rambling note lashing out at ‘rich kids’, ‘debauchery’ and ‘deceitful charlatans’ on campus, the Chicago Tribune reported yesterday. “You caused me to do this,” Cho wrote, ABC News quoted law enforcement sources as saying.

Our hearts grieve for the families of those who lost their dear ones in this shocking tragedy. We are particularly sad for the family of Prof. G.V.Loganathan whose brilliant career as an academic was brought to such an abrupt end. We grieve too for 26 year old Minal Panchal who probably had a brilliant career as an architect ahead of her.

Email Errors

Email is second only to the telephone in terms of the number of worldwide users. You and I are sending more emails than ever before. Ever wonderered how many emails are sent every day all over the world? VeriSign’s estimate indicated that email queries alone are about 2.25 billion per day. However, due to caching, email queries may be only a fraction of the number of emails sent.

In 2001, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted the number of emails sent each day would exceed 36 billion by 2005. We probably sent more emails than they thought because in 2003, they said we had already reached 31 billion emails per day!! IDC expected this figure to double by 2006. While one can’t be too sure, ( the figure is perhaps lower than higher) we probably send 62 billion emails the world over per day.

Although huge amounts of business get done over email, many errors continue to be committed. These reflect poorly on the sender as well the sender’s organisation. Here are a few of the more common errors.

I recently received a mail with so many abbreviations that I couldn’t understand half of what was written. It was sprinkled with ?4Us, IACs, IMHOs, apart from the rash of Smileys and ended with a cheerful BFN. The young person who wrote that mail saw no difference between business email and chat.

By way of feedback, which was asked for, I steered the person to an article in About Management which says that business email is not a teenage chat room.

It’s A Goal !!!

Most of us have dreams. Of success. Of accomplishment. Of results.

Unfortunately, for many, dreams remain dreams and are not translated to purposeful actions. As John F. Kennedy said: “There are costs and risks to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction”.

To move thoughts and desires to actions, we need goals. The more specific the goals, the better focused we can be in striving to achieve them.

There are many sites with information on how to go about setting goals and tracking goal achievement. Amongst many, I found Superviva to be quite different and interesting. Check it out for yourself. It helps you think not only of work goals but also things you always wanted to do.

You could be on your way to achieving significant goals in your life and gaining huge amounts of happiness in the bargain.

Learning Goals

Tags

Learning Goals, self-development

“What you do every day should contribute to giving your life meaning. If it doesn’t, why are you doing it?” – Don Hutcheson

When did you last set for yourself-learning goals? Many of us have become complacent with success that we forget that we need to constantly learn to remain current and competitive.

Ask yourself: What did I learn new today? What did I learn new last week? What did I learn new last month? What did I learn new last quarter?

If the answer is nothing, you are as good as dead. Not literally, of course, but swamped in a fiercely competitive environment which has no time or place for mediocrity.

Learnings need not be restricted to your field of specialization or expertise. Indeed it is a good idea to have learning goals in related areas. For example, it makes eminent sense for a Project/Program Manager to learn more about business and profitability apart from the essentials of Project/Program Management.

As the American author, Napoleon Hill tells us” Procrastination is the bad habit of putting of until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday”.

Don’t procrastinate on this one!

Too Busy To Notice You’re Too Busy?

Found very interesting reading in today’s “Times of India” in an article titled Are you “Too Busy To Notice You’re Too Busy?” by Alina Tugend.

Are you merely busy or CrazyBusy asks Dr. Edward M Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of “CrazyBusy: Overstretched,Overbooked and About To Snap”? Being crazy busy is about keeping a frenetic pace that seems largely self-imposed, unnecessary- and unenjoyable.

Dr. Hallowell writes about how he crossed into the dark side from busy to crazy busy when he got mad at a rotary phone when staying in a vacation house. Unable to use a cell phone, he was driven nuts waiting for the dial to return to start. Then calming himself, he timed how long the dialling actually took place: 11 seconds. “What a fool I had become” he writes” I had become a man in a hurry even when I had no need to hurry”.

Some of the 26 reasons listed By Dr. Hallowell for becoming crazy busy include:

1. It is so easy with cellphones and Blackberrys being a touch away
2. It is a kind of high
3. It is a status symbol
4. We are afraid we will be left out if we slow down
5. We avoid dealing with life’s really big issues by running from task to task
6. We do not know how not to be busy

Dr. Hallowell is an authority on ADD. Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (AD/HD) a condition resulting in symptoms of inability to maintain attention, impulsive behaviors and/or motor restlessness.

Interestingly, the way we answer and receive emails is seen to be a cause for being crazy busy.
Mike Song, co-author of “The Hamster Revolution: How To Manage Your Email Before It Manages You” found in his survey of 8000 employees in major corporations over 3 years that most say they spend about 40 % of their workday on email activity. 75 % said their colleagues used the “reply all” function far too often. Yet only 15 % said they felt they themselves did so!

As Song says” Emails put other people’s priorities in your lives”. If we do not manage this – I call it – “necessary evil”, we could easily end up being crazy busy- sooner than later.