HR- An integral part of business success

Long gone are the times, when the HR department performed only basic functions like hiring, employee record maintenance, and of course giving out the pink slip to people. HR has evolved in recent times to become an integral part of business today. Heading an HR Consultancy firm, and having spent my entire career in management consulting, I have witnessed this transition from close quarters. Today HR has become a mainstream business function and helps in formulating and implementing the company’s strategies through human resource activities.

In business the only thing constant is the change and to survive in this competitive world, organizations have to constantly keep innovating, introducing new strategies and implementing them to drive business. Innovating entails fresh ideas, new systems and processes- which can be introduced by the right people.

Manpower is one of the critical aspects of businesses. To get the best out of people and to motivate them, it is important to have out-of-box HR systems & processes to encourage and drive innovation. HR should indulge in smart hiring, provide R&R’s wherever applicable and work towards retaining talent.


Companies can promote innovation by hiring HR managers who would create networks of managers charged with encouraging new ideas. This kind of decentralized team can identify promising new concepts and prioritize them so that they receive the attention they deserve. This will also help in creating a culture that supports innovation. In addition; not having a widely understood system-wide process is also not conducive for innovation. To build sufficient diversity into the process it is important to have innovative suggestions from employees. It is also important to have a proper training and coaching program for innovations teams and an idea management system in place.

There are many "corporate events" or actions that can impact a company's culture, processes and ways of doing business. If HR is to help improve innovation in a corporation, it must identify the corporate events that are likely to have a negative impact on risk-taking and innovation driving activities. Some of the events that might have a negative effect are: New Hiring, New Managers, Failed Orientation programme, Mergers & acquisitions, Restructuring or layoffs, Outsourcing. In addition, success limits risk taking.

A string of successes can build up employee egos, drive groupthink and contribute to a sense of invincibility. The sense of invincibility in turn creates complacency as employees develop the perception that “innovations have always come along the past". HR has to work twice as hard in successful organizations to keep "egos" down and to “forget the successes of the past". After identifying these aspects, the HR must monitor and attempt to eliminate or moderate the negative effects.

The Human Factor- A Milestone Reached, But Miles To Go

It was one of those moments in life when you feel proud of the hard work that your team has done, and the due recognition comes your way. I am talking about the Asia Pacific HRM Congress 2010 held at Hotel Taj Residency in Bangalore, where The Human Factor magazine won the prestigious “Magazine of the year, 2010” award.

The conference was held on the 3rd and 4th of September, 2010, and was a melting pot of influential people from the world of HR across the private and public sectors. Eminent people like Mr. Bhaskar Chatterjee, Mr. Saugata Mitra, Dr. Y. V. Verma, Mr. Pramod Sadarjoshi, Mr. Neelmani Singh, Dr. Bhaskar Das, Mr. S. Hajara, Dr. Santrupt B Misra, and Ms. Leena Nair graced the occasion.

Amidst such eminent personalities, The Human Factor received the prestigious award. As I sat there, watching the award being announced for our magazine, my heart swelled with pride and joy. It has been two years, and I congratulate my team for all the hard work that every member put in to achieve this success.

Print was the first form of mass media, and till date it continues to be the medium of choice to reach out to people. It was only natural that we started a magazine that would bring the opinions, practices and thoughts of industry leaders within the pages of a consolidated cover. This helped us to stand on the shoulders of giants in the corporate world and leverage their experience and career paths. The magazine sought to provide inspiration to students and information to academicians and other professionals in the industry. It became a platform for sharing and knowledge gathering.

Consistent, dedicated and focused efforts throughout the past two years have finally reaped results. I am glad we have been recognized and our work acknowledged. This recognition just paves the way for greater things.

As the Chief Editorial Advisor of the magazine, I want to thank all those who made this success possible- especially our contributors and several thousand readers- without whose valuable inputs and unflinching support, this feat would have been impossible.

1. Businessandecenomy.com

2. Outlook Business

Intrapreneurship: A way to success

Innovation, I have always stressed is the only way for an organization to stay afloat and ahead of its competitors. It is important for an organization to encourage an atmosphere of innovation amongst its employees and continuously strive to find new ways of conducting business and developing products. It is infact, a key factor in ensuring the survival of a company.

I remember an idiom in this context, that we were taught as children, “united we stand, divided we fall”. Instead of one or two persons trying to find out the best practices to surge ahead of competition, it is better to let all the employees of the organization work independently on developing new ideas.

An entrepreneur is a person who has a new business idea and launches his own venture to give shape to the idea. An intrapreneur does pretty much the same, only within the confines of an organization. He/she thinks up new ideas for new products, and with the help of his employers, develops the idea and launches the product.

Intrapreneurship grows from the seeds of an atmosphere of innovation in a company. It is not only the research and development department’s job to contribute to new ideas. Rather, an organization needs to invite ideas from its employees and partners to help drive it forward. Engaged employees are most likely to contribute to those innovations.

There are three types of employees: a. Engaged, b. Not-engaged, c. Actively disengaged. It is the first category of employees that works with passion and feels a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.

An intrapreneur, or corporate entrepreneur, needs to envision and create an idea and also create the right team within his company to successfully launch the new products. One of the best known stories of successful intrapreneurship is of the 3M Post-It Notes, discovered in 1974.

Post-It Notes till date continue to be one of 3M’s top-grossing products. 3M’s success story proved that intrapreneurs can provide a fantastic boost to your company’s bottom line. They increase motivation and empowerment among employees, fostering an atmosphere of engagement, besides adding to your revenue stream.

I believe in innovation and allowing an atmosphere of innovation to prosper. Being an intrapreneur myself, I understand its importance, and I would suggest businesses to encourage innovation within the organization for a wholesome growth.

Blue Ocean Strategy

When Google was launched in 1997 as a search engine, Reliance Communications in 2001, the services they offered were unprecedented. They had come up with business ideas which had never been heard of, and thus never had had a market for the same. But once the search engine caught the imagination of the people and the telecom giant made it possible for the common man to use mobile phones, it created a vast market, and untapped potential waiting to be captured all the while.

These companies used the Blue Ocean Strategy which focuses on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for your customers. It is essentially a vast ocean of opportunities, with plenty of space to expand and sail where you want. There often is no competition, and even if there is any, your product is such that it makes the competition irrelevant, because it can’t touch you. Here demand, customers and growth are yours for the taking. There is no benchmark set for you as per the industry rules and you travel along a road and leave behind a trail which others can only follow. The BOS is about navigating your organization into a vast potential market where it can achieve rapid growth and dramatically increase profits.

Blue Ocean Strategy as we know it, is contradictory to the Red Ocean Strategy where industry boundaries are defined and accepted and the competitive rules of the game are known. Companies try to outperform each other in a cutthroat competition with the aim of grabbing a greater share of the existing demand. Prospects for profits and growth are reduced with the market space of red oceans getting crowded. As opposed to this the BOS creates demand in the market space for its products. Some blue oceans are created well beyond existing industry boundaries (for example Google), whereas most are created from within red oceans by expanding existing industry boundaries (for example Reliance).

Though the term Blue Ocean is an analogy to describe a wide, untapped potential market and seems like a promising idea for businesses, it always entails a risk of the idea being backfired since its untested waters that the business ventures in. let’s take the case of Google’s latest innovation Google Wave. The web application software for real-time communication and collaboration was hailed as a new wave (pun not intended) in online and real-time communications. But it backfired for the company, as it didn’t receive as much enthusiasm and support from Google fans as the company would have liked. It resulted in the company dumping the product only recently.

It is not always possible for companies to come up with new ideas to tap potential, untouched markets, and this is where the red ocean strategy is in action. Pepsi and Coke are the two largest players in the soft drink business, where each tries to grab the other’s customer base. It is a classic example of red ocean, where the rules are set and the competition is cut throat. It is about staying a step ahead of your competition, as opposed to making your competition irrelevant in BOS.

How did Apple know exactly when to launch the iPod, when we were all going around showing off our cumbrous CD players, carrying them around with a number of CD’s when we were going on a long trip, to listen to a wide range of songs? Apple came up with its mini music player, where you could feed hundreds of songs and which was also easy to carry around. Another example of the BOS would be Facebook, which changed the way the world looked at social networking.

As I said earlier in my post, it is not always possible to tap into an untouched market space, and often it is the red ocean way that companies have to follow. But to sustain themselves, companies spend huge amounts in R&D, to plan ahead into the future, by dint of which they can create new ideas and venture into the vast ocean of market space, and making competition irrelevant.