People at Work & Play

After the Perth Test triumph, sports enthusiasts were treated to a great match of tennis by 21 year old Sania Mirza. She gave a tough fight to the more experienced and vastly superior Venus Williams in the third round of the 2008 Australian Open.

She is the highest ranked female tennis player ever from India, with a career high ranking of 27 in singles and 18 in doubles. She was ranked 31st in the singles category and 18th in the doubles category in the WTA rankings of January 7, 2008,

In a match where the scores don’t quite reflect the stiff opposition put up by Sania, she lost 6-7, 4-6 to the 8th seeded Venus Williams , who is the reigning Wimbledon champion. At one stage, Sania was leading 5-3 in the first set.

Sania lost out because her serves were very poor compared to the 195 km. p.h booming aces delivered by Venus Williams.

Though she lost the match, Sania won the admiration of the viewing public for a spirited performance.

The Indian selectors have taken what I believe is a bold and welcome step. They are looking to the future for the traingular One Day series featuring India, Australia and Sri Lanka in Australia starting in February.

Of the ” seniors” only Sachin Tendulkar remains. The team has no Dravid, no Ganguly and not surprisingly for one-dayers, no Laxman.

The team: MS Dhoni (Captain), Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh (Vice Captain), Harbhajan Singh, Robin Uthappa, Gautam Gambhir, Irfan Pathan, S Sreesanth, RP Singh, Ishant Sharma, Rohit Sharma, Suresh Raina, Dinesh Karthik, Piyush Chawla and Praveen Kumar.

It’s good to see the accent on youth. We miss Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman but must get used to not having them around forever.

The timing of the team selection is debatable. They have one more Test to go at Adelaide next week. It will be interesting to see what Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman do in what could well be their last match in Australia.

Let’s hope they leave in glory.

India’s IT majors face a challenge of employee productivity says an article in the Economic Times. The Big 3, TCS, Infosys & Wipro added as many as 57,554 people in 2007.

However, rising staff costs and the appreciation of the rupee, amongst other factors, have affected their average employee productivity. As far as turnover per employee is concerned, only Wipro showed an improved performance from the same period last year.

The average turnover per employee for the 3 companies dropped marginally to Rs 5.75 lakh in the October-December 2007 quarter, from Rs 5.79 lakh in the year-ago period.
Wipro’s average turnover per employee rose to Rs 6.80 lakh in the third quarter of this fiscal, from Rs 6.13 lakh in the year-ago quarter. However, TCS and Infosys recorded a dip in their average per employee turnover to Rs 5.58 lakh and Rs 4.99 lakh, from Rs 5.85 lakh and Rs 5.35 lakh respectively.

The average per employee net profit of the three companies also declined to Rs 1.23 lakh in the latest quarter from Rs 1.30 lakh in year-ago period.

The combined net profit of the three companies rose 19.1 per cent to Rs 3,411.67 crore in Q3 of this fiscal from Rs 2,864.50 crore a year ago.

Their total revenue rose 25.4 per cent from Rs 12,679.73 crore to Rs 15,904.18 crore during the quarter under review.

At the same time, the total employee strength of the three firms stood at 2,76,662 people at the end of December 2007, against 2,19,108 in December 2006.

When we had our routine meeting, the young manager was looking a bit “down”. From our subsequent conversation it emerged that one of his senior colleagues had roundly criticized him during one of their group meetings.

Along with the bouquets come the brick bats. There will always be some amount of criticism, irrespective of what you do. As we used to say” You can’t keep everyone happy”. Some may be delighted at your decision while others may be derisive about it.

I recommend what Marjorie Brody has to say in a Princeton Review article on dealing with criticism:

“Everyone finds himself or herself on the receiving end of criticism from time to time. When this happens, the most important thing is to remain calm and fight the natural instinct to become paranoid or defensive.

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