Professionals never work long hours. They love their work, play, sleep anything you name it. They are well adjusted to work and after work activities. Professionals think from the point of customer. Professionals are smart,not over smart.
Hey, Stop comparing. When are we going to get away from this habbit.
This is a very good article suggesting us to bring a professional edge to the jobs we do no matter where we work and what we do. Why cant you guys just take it the right spirit and move on with life.
India is fast losing competative edge to China and other low cost countries. To counter that instead of companing, IT & BPO professionals should sacrifice their personal life for work. They should work more and when they are home instead of partying and watching tv should constatly be thinking about how to make the work more better and productive. When that alarm rings, you should get out of bed with "Yes another day of hard work that I am going to do. Wish there were more than 24 hrs in a day and wish I could sleep less." Now that is what we investors in big five firms are looking from people of India. Instead I see whining all around this board. What a downer. How can these people give priorities to life, wife and doing nothing? Lazy people like this are drain and will stop India's progress. Look at China, people are working 14 hrs a day with no vacations, that is what Indian workers need to be doing. Good for India, good for us investors. It will be a win win situation for all.
RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by usermame on Jul 31, 2007 03:21 PM Permalink
life is not "all work". ' Quote '" How can these people give priorities to life, wife and doing nothing?" 'Unquote' - If you dont give priorities to your personal life, then you will never be happy in life. you wife, children will leave you and you will have no one to bring happiness in life. Why should everyone work like slaves(14-15 hrs and no vacation), just so that the a few people can make huge amounts of money? I do not agree with that, it is just exploitation. It should not be at the cost of an individuals life. There are several important things in life one has to do, work is just a part of it. If you want to read an interesting article click on following link
RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by Vishwajeet Sukhija on Jul 30, 2007 01:21 PM Permalink
Respected Mr. Bapat You have a right to express your opinion. But in order to gauge your opinion can we have a little background about you with respect to your education,ancestorial roots,current profession. This would help us understand your point more better. You opnion has recieved huge response and mostly in a negative direction. But I would like to see something positive in what you say and hence would appreciate if you can throw some light on your background.
RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by Shantanu Bapat on Jul 31, 2007 07:45 AM Permalink
I am not sure what is wrong in what I said. Companies are run for profit and not for charity. A bell curve model makes people 1)productive 2)competative and it rewards performers over slackers. This is just fair. A person working 14 hrs a day, out of love of job and delivering best product needs to be rewarded over others. The bottom 10% in any organization are drag and should be replaced with young fresh blood hounds coming out of college. Think about this, a amitious, fiercely competative person will see him/herself getting promoted evry 2-3 years with salary doubling every 2-3 years as well. A bell curve will assure 10% at bottom are fired at all levels and 10% at top are promoted. Top30% at any level get all bonus and raises. This is how productivity is increased without asking people to work more explicitly. BTW, I live in US and settled here long time back. I work in Finance field and represent group of investors. This happens to be the question I will raise with management next time I am in India, in investor relation forum with management. From, what I understood management liked the idea and had been thinking about it for sometime. For investors it makes more sense to reward the best and get rid of bottom 10%. The stock price is what determines value and bell curve gives exactly that.
RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by R Sreekumar on Jul 26, 2007 10:07 AM Permalink
Dear Mr. Bapat,
While your broad point is understood and I completely understand what Jack Welch did in GE, I think, your idea will work only in a prison where you can subjugate people to do your bidding.
What people in China are doing is under inhuman and insensitive environments. And please dont eulogise China which has such a bad record on human rights violations; where the government kills foetuses if the parents already have one; where the government injects iodine injection to the temple of a new born if its parents already have one child.
Why dont you people - the so called big 5 investors join the pool of workers in India and work more than 14 hours a day, compromising your family life and obligations to your children?
In China, how many people have a well-off lifestlye after working 14 hours a day in sub-human conditions? How much profit is shared with them by their masters? And as they say, all work and no play makes you a dull, dumb and ultimately a dead person. And you people are looking only at your profit margins. In the west, people stop working dot at the 8th hour whereas only in India you expect, demand and threaten people to work for 14 hours a day or more to make up for the lack in your incompetency and un-willingness to work for more than 8 hours a day. Are you willing to work like that and have no holiday, no time and space to rejuvenate your spiritual faculties?
Anyway, your entire attitude seems to perpetuate a subjugated labour force an
RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by Kishor C on Jul 30, 2007 05:35 PM Permalink
R Sreekumar, I fully agree with you, I think you are absolutely right.
RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by Karthik R on Jul 26, 2007 07:58 AM Permalink
agreed sir, but shouldn`t an employee decide his lifestyle and his needs? there is something called as work life balance may be your B scholl skipped that chapter. As the articale clearly says it is not about selling it is about professionalism, if your concern was we indians need to be a tad more profession al i would agree on that but not on the fact that employees should stop whining! 14 hours of a chinese is still not equalant to 8 hours of an indian! tell me frankly do investors actually care about employees ? or do investors think of business all day without switching on their TV sets? all that matters to the BIG FIVE as you call is quarter results and nothing else!
Please do not discriminate Indian workers like this...we deserve a lot more hence we keep whinning. if it wasn`t for the strong workforce that india has the "bigfive" would have never set their foot back here again.
RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by Shantanu Bapat on Jul 26, 2007 08:15 AM Permalink
A Bell Curve appraisal created competitiveness in workers. GE did the same in US and was very effective. Essentially at every level each worker is compared to his peer. They are ranked based on how much they deliver. The most contributing gets rank 1, next rank2 and so on. The top 30% should be rewarded with all the raise and bonuses that would have gone to all earlier, next 60% get nothing and bottom 10% a cut in salary. Any one falling in bottom 10% two times in a row should be fired.This discrimination is done at every level. So not only coders, but Project Managers are compared against Project Managers. PMs fired get replaced by those who come in 10% at level below. Those getting fired at lowest level get filled with aggressive, yound blood fresh out of school.Here is what happens. (1) PMs now motivate their employees even more aggresively to work, else they may fall in bottom 10%. PMs are being measured on how much they can extract work.Favoritism and liking factor goes down as PMs are more concerned with amount of work delivered. (2)Coders become fiercly competitive. They become aggressive and productive.The top 10% get rewarded for their effort.Lazy people get fired eventually."Kachara safh hota hai". (3)Hard workers get all money. Compensation for the performers, door for the slackers. Jack Welch was the first one to intriduce this in GE. The GE stock had a record run with record profits.
RE:RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by ravi on Jul 26, 2007 02:35 PM Permalink
I think u know very litttle abt GE. Talk to any GE employee. Talk to a guy who is working in GE and is having enough credential to work for the top companies. (I guy from a C grade college may think that GE is heaven and he achieved it by fortune but a top notch professional may think differently) You will understand what is what. In GE India its the Indian concept that works. More licking more benifit. Chk that out!
RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by Nischal Ever on Jul 26, 2007 04:31 PM Permalink
India is not GE mate. Nor can Americans become Indians and Vice versa. Games of the rule are set by people of the region not companies.
RE:RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by tallsam on Jul 30, 2007 10:30 PM Permalink
Bapat, Before you comment, just get the fact right. The GE example that you mention is based on Welch's theory of Differentiation. This has got nothing to do with "kachara saaf hota hain". The distribution is: 10% - The Stars (are appreciated & rewarded) 70% - The most imp task force, consisting of many who are trying to hard to get in the top20 (read benefit for the co) 10% - relook into their profile (no salary cuts0 And this is has got nothing to do with your school of thought. All teh above differentiation is implemented with specific process of appraisal.
As for you thinking of more work-hours - its useless. Any sensible manager would say - 8hours of productive/innovative work is much better than 14 hours of robots.
RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by Karthik R on Jul 26, 2007 11:25 AM Permalink
ur point is valid and taken..but what are you trying to prove? are you not following a model that the entire globe knows? where is your creativity or knowledge which investors are looking for? or are your peers just as good as you so that you go scot free and still get to be on the upper curve of the performance sheet??
Following an exiting path is easy..what makes one like Jack Welch is by making or creating a new path for the rest of the world to take notice and appreciate!
From the statistics which you have provided it clearly indicates that monetary increase eventually gets the best of the workforce..are we not talking about professionalism here or is it about performance bonus??
Chances are the ppl in the top % as you mentioned may be achievers in the true sense but what is the guaranteee that he/she is a proper professional with overall subject expertise?
Well if you did have something like that..i am sure you would have been much popular than a mere blogger like me!
no hard feelings mate..i am just speaking on bahlaf of my fellow brothers who keep whining all the time like me.
Last but not the least..india is not loosing the competitive edge to other countries..it is just that other countries want to emulate India`s success..and when they offer labour at low rates to gain lost ground..BIG FIVE will abandon other operational centres in India.
So you see the point here..there is nothing related to professionalism here just pure $$$ thats what investors are bot
RE:IT and BPOs should adopt these.
by Krishna Padmanabhan on Aug 04, 2007 02:15 PM Permalink
Such appraisal techniques are very good in theory!! Think of applying these in an environment of specialists, like for example, skilled engineers. Do you think you can keep on removing 10% every year and get a new 10% in? The company will close down. A major organisation in India that I worked for tried this, and gave it up after two years, as they were threatened with a depleted skill base that impacted business. The application of the technique is fraught with biasing factors and impracticability. Companies can apply them where the cannon fodder principle is easy to follow - like in sales, where a sales person can be easily replaced by another sales person, or a non-specialist project manager can be replaced by another non-specialist project manager! And, where it can be and ought to be applied, the 10% principle is almost never applied - that is at the band where non-specialist top executives sit. Most of the waste resides there. This is not only true of India, but across the world.
Something is thought of by Jack Welch, which may be suitable for a certain set of conditions at a certain point in time. To apply that universally is myopic management. Across the world, HR is fond of jargon, and the newer the jargon is, the more enthused HR guys become about it. Any appraisal process should go to fundamentals.Recognise contribution and merit every year, and punish consistent non-performance. Don't get hung up about what Jack or some management guru says icluding percentage
Good article - not limited to salespersons per se. This can and should be emulated in other professions as well - like nursing, BPO and even software (yes, we have customers, too), brokerage, govt offices (this is just a wish as of now).
I Personaly feel it very good... But as the Indian Strategy many told it to be wrong - the best thing would be that starts from urside - see the whole world will change - though that speed would be slow - but something get changed - thanx
Guys honestly you all tell me what would have been the situation of the customer in a shoe store in india.. In his 1st point he had written that the sales person apologised for making the customer wait.. this is quite obvious in US UK like countries... In india how many of then apologise after doing an accident ? Imagine you are driving properly as per rule.. one lorry or bus driver comes so close and shakes your driving...you just ask him about this while driving... APOLOGY WILL BE IN TERMS OF ABUSE in this nation... Rather than sorry sir.. i should not have come this way... it would be...U go to hell what bothers me ????
2)How many professionals are knowledgeable in india... In how many profession job is based upon knowledge here.. Its the caste and reservation which occupies post which needs knowledge and communication not the talent !
3) how many sales person care for the right product to be sold for the customer... 99% of the sales ppl see thro that their product is sold out that too by telling high prices and fake functioning... How many push duplicate in the name of sony, philips , Aiwa etc ? IS this quality not generic among our sales ppl ?
4)What do our sales ppl teach us ? How to be harsh and abusive to ppl ? Hw to cheat others ? Hw to cheat customers money ? is that all ?
Think if this article is applicable to india...
I am not abusing this nation.. but we should learn all this from other countries.. which will never happen in india
RE:ZERO PROFESSIONALISM IN INDIA !!!!
by Hema on Jul 27, 2007 12:43 PM Permalink
I agree to this partially, but when it comes to generalizing it then its incorrect. Other countries have a lot and are learing a lot from our country.
RE:ZERO PROFESSIONALISM IN INDIA !!!!
by Manish Varma on Jul 25, 2007 06:41 PM Permalink
Sorry friend Idisagree with you.Go to company showrooms of good brands and shops like Shoopers' Stop or Lifestyle, the sales people are well-mannered and take due care of the shoppers without being intrusive.
RE:ZERO PROFESSIONALISM IN INDIA !!!!
by Dragon Cares on Jul 25, 2007 06:27 PM Permalink
well said. Just visit a Textile showroom in the cities like Chennai or Mumbai; ask the salesman/woman to show us various designs? see, what you will get. They will treat you as though you are an unwanted guest in their home; not even a friendly smile on the face, not even a respectable words, they will throw some 5 to 10 dresses and ask you to select from them; they will not listen to our request to show more dresses. Every time I go to these showrooms for festival dresses, i am really getting fed up with these sales personnel. Worst thing is, show owner never cares about the customers needs, only concentrate on couting the money he is receiving. It's our peoples' attitude that need to be changed. Until then, dont expect professionalism in sales/marketting in our country.
