This post is specifically to record what I used to feel before undertaking this course and how I feel now after I have gone through this course (course mentioned in the subject).
At the beginning periods of my career whenever I tried to evaluate behavior of mine and others in specific situations and always drew to the conclusion that rules, legal and societal, influenced the way people behave. After spending few years in the manufacturing firm and having gone through mutiple business cycles I modified my inference that incentives are what that matter. But after coming to ISB and when I look at things in retrospective I realized that apart from rules and incentives, private valuation and utility also matter and that there is a strong interaction between all the four aspects.
People who can influence these aspects rather than getting influenced are the ones who drive change and the ones who create opportunities and turn situations favorable. This is a very interesting realization for me because I can to certain extent now explain the "luck factor."
Also as I started working in 1994, I happened to see the drastic changes that the industry and job market went through.
Let me focus on the job market. When I started the struggle was to get a good job and then to hang on there and if necessary make one or two hops in entire career span. There were very few who changed industry verticals and even fewer who made functional role changes. Coming to the current situation,getting the first job is difficult even today. If you are fortunate enough you get placed directly in campus, otherwise you have to go through a lot of struggle to get the first break. But the similarity in situation changes immediately after that. The moment you get a good break the search for another job intensifies. This is partly fuelled by booming opportunities, to certain extent by organizational practices and to a great deal by the confusion in the candidate.
I forgot about another striking similarity and that is the dearth of good candidates. As I was part of HR department, I could closely see that even today there is a shortage of good talent and then there is a lot competition to hire the best talent. May be this is one factor that drove up the pay packages for campus offers. Organizations have a big challenge to choose between fresh talent and experienced hires. Both these pools create different set of challenges and HR departments are struggling to take a call. While you can hire a decent candidate from the open market who might be desparately seeking a job and is better prepared to do whatever the job demands, the challenge is that you have to sift through a great amount of applications. On the other hand you can easily hire a bunch of young telented guys directly from the campus but the chances of them joining you and later sticking with you is a big challenge. But most of the companies that I had an opportunity to observe, both as an insider and an outsider, follow the market trend and are in a mad rush to hire. There is increasing demand from the business and HR has to deliver. No one has time to measure which method is effective and which one is not. Everyone is trying to follow the best practices of the market and only few know what the real best practices are.
Coming back to the course, I feel that this is a very important course and is exposing everyone to the real issues that mankind is facing as a race. There inter and intra species related issues and it is very important to understand them and then to see how one can influence them in a positive way. I was very happy to hear from Prof. Shiva Kumar that experts whould interact with the political leaders and influence them to take right kind of decisions. Prof. Shiva Kumar is a Member of India's National Advisory Council and it is great to hear from him about how things are shaping up.
Finally, it's time for me to get back to Term 4 and start working on the take home exam and the MGTO assignment. For now it's Adios.
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