Article: Learnings from conference notes...

Well, its possible to learn from anywhere! Lets see if an old set of conference notes can still inspire!

The NHRD conference took place on the 19th, 20th, 21st of October/04 at the Tata auditorium at IISc. The theme of the conference was "Emerging Asia - An HR trend". Sasken was silver sponsor for this event. (The platinum sponsor was Reliance Infocomm, and there were many other companies as gold and silver sponsors.) Some of these companies had put up stalls at the venue marketing their services.

Sasken was represented by various members from HR and line managment. KSG Shankar represented Quality and Operations.

Day 1
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We started with registration and we were all given a kit containing various material which importantly included: -

1) 'Emerging Asia', a heavy book containing a compendium of papers by various contributors on HR trends in Asia. It includes a paper by Prof. Balaji, one by ex-Sasian Pallab Bandhopadhyay, and some by Prof. TVR Rao who is a very eminent member in this field and many others who are probably as eminent but not known to me. Sasken is a sponsor for this book and there is a writeup about Sasken on the cover.
2) 2 magazines: 'Human Capital' and 'Academy of NHRD newsletter' which contain various articles of interest to the current HR trends in India.
3) Statement of the 'Code of Conduct' for HR professionals. The code of conduct was released in this conference. This work on the code was triggered by reports about unholy nexuses between head hunters and industry HR professionals.
4) Some well designed marketing catalogues from 2 local management schools in Bangalore, who showcased the portfolios of their students. These students also played a big role in organising the conference and did a good job of it. It was a win-win arrangement and we could think of this if we are organising something.

The day started with an inaugration by PGR Sindhia, who is the Karnataka minister for industries and infrastructure. Contrary to general expectations of a politician's talk, his speech was extremely well planned and focussed. He urged the industry to come up with suggestions to stall the rural-urban exodus, make strategies to outsource work to rural areas, and also devise ideas for educational qualifications below the SSLC levels.

Dr. Santrupt Mishra, national president of the NHRD gave a crisp introduction to the why the conference: to understand the possibility of a leader in Asia, to appreciate the regional perspectives and enable a collective reflection on the issues. (My takeaway here was that the purpose of any conference is to enable collective reflection)

Som Mittal of HP Globalsoft fame, underlined 3 things that are happening in Asia. That the Asian economies have proved themselves to be resilient in spite of SARS, currency fluctuations et al, globalisation is a reality and demographics (which seems to be a hot topic common to many speakers) indicates interesting trends for the Asian population. He ended with a small story where a young student overnight works out unsolved math problems just because he didn't know they were impossible.

The Pathfinder award was conferred on ICICI head K.V. Kamath for his outstanding contributions in the field.

Gurcharan Das, spoke on 'INDIA'S FUTURE'. He called himself a cheerleader for India Incorporated, and that was what his talk was about too. He presented data on the economic, political and social growth indicators in India, mostly from the World Bank Research website. He explained his enthusiasm and vision for India's future, inspite of all the governments, this was very inspiring to hear and many of us were left with a great deal of feel-good factor about India after this. He compares East Asia to a tiger, China to a dragon and India to a Wise Elephant.
According to Mr. Das, every manager is an HR manager and should have only 2 items in the appraisal form: Produce results and Build the organisation. He recommended reading 2 books: 'From Good to Great' by Collins and 'In Search of Excellence'. I have more notes on his talk if you are interested.

Mr. Prasanjit K. Basu, is an Asian economist researching exclusively on Asia. He spoke in detail on the economic and business scenario in Asia. He had plenty of economic data to present about China, Taiwan, India and the rest of Asia and his insights were extremely interesting. Particularly he explained the trade related equilibria that existed between US-China, China-(rest of Asia) and China-Europe and also demonstrated why China would never go to war with Taiwan and how India would benefit if that really happened! He explained how China's short term financial outlook is that of 'financial feet of clay' what with more than 50% of non-performing loans as against 30% in India (going by most stringent standards). He called India a 'stealth miracle', because there is no record of a democracy with 150 mn plus people with a sustained annual real GDP growth of 5.9% over a two year period. Mr. Basu concluded with some demographics data on how China's working age group would reach a productivity peak in 15-20 years time, whereas Japan would consist of a lot of older people, especiall women over the age of 80, which meant healthcare is likely to boom there. In the Q&A session, he advocated that India should try to attract investments from overseas Indians in Fiji, Guyana, Trinidad, US and Europe where they were present in large numbers.

The afternoon session was woken up by Rajiv Narang's high-energy presentation on Innovation. He gave numerous examples of companies that faced extreme odds of 'mindset gravity' to achieve great results. The key to great achievements is by 'generating escape velocity by posing huge challenges'. One must look beyond traditional incremental goal setting to creative impossible-type challenges. In the Asian context, the greatest fear is that of personal risk, hence one must remove escape buttons and burn bridges that pull us down to normal mode. Some of the examples of companies he gave are Divya Bhaskar, India, that revolutionised the thinking on the newspaper market; Independent Liquour, New Zealand; Smart Telecom; Phillipines; Tanishq, India; Grameen Bank, Bangladesh which brought about a micro-credit revolution that a Citibank might never think of and ITC's e-chaupal initiative.

Key takeaway: Conformism and hierarchy are the two great mindset gravity factors for Asia which cause 'idea poverty'. We must remove these inhibitors if we are to innovate. Also, ideas do not get killed in Asia, they run the risk of dilution, which we must guard ourselves against.
Kandhavel P., a civil servant from the Singapore government showcased the Singapore government as an organisation that competes with the private industry in terms of professionalism and a high degree of responsiveness. He explained the HR policies for government employees, with significant aspects being variable pay tied to performance, 100 hours of training per year to ensure continuous learning, and a host of policies wrt rewards/penalties that encourage highly responsive behaviour.

Ravikant from Tata Motors Ltd, showcased the Tata-Daewoo story of in sequence of how they turned around to achieving domestic growth, international growth and to becoming a true multinational.