Wednesday, November 24, 2010

HR, The TASKMASTER

Is HR equipped with the requisite skills to face India Inc’s many unprecedented challenges head-on?

In the life of any nation, company or individual, movement is life and stagnation is death. So, as long as companies are growing, they are fully alive. Organizations must move continuously from one process to another; from one strategy to another strategy and from one structure to another. So as long as we are renewing these kinds of things and re-looking at them, that’s where growth and achievement comes in. If you see the analogy of a rocket, as it moves form one orbit to another, two things happen - it discharges used fuel and adds new fuel on its way. Even organizations must believe in creative destruction. They must destroy something to create something. Today, you will see the growing importance of the power of innovation and the power of thinking for the first time ever. These two things can provide much more accelerated growth. If you look at all the great organizations, it shows that ideas are going to be the real engine for growth. Unless you have got the ideas, the resources cannot be mobilized. Resources are no more the issue. Ideas are the issue.
   Also, conducting and managing a business is now like fighting a war. It’s a very different kind of war; it’s very complex. In a war, you usually know who your enemy is. But here, you don’t know your actual enemy and actual territory. This means that we don’t need managers now. We need managers with a streak of a warrior. HR is the only function where building capabilities takes place – building capabilities of the organization and individuals. And that’s why HR will have to build organizations and continuously move from one curve to another. Building people, grooming people, preparing them, building different kind of mindsets, defining roles and making them understand what kind of society and landscape is going to emerge, become extremely important.

The author is Padmashree Dr Pritam Singh, conference Academic Director, Professor of Eminence, MDI Gurgaon and former director IIM Lucknow and MDI