Mir Moiz’s Weblog
Life is meaningful, only when one wishes to make it. We are creatures of time and we’ll wither away in it. The little moments of joy we find and create are all that will live with us.Archive for HR
Major Global Workforce Crisis!
Rainer Strack is a Senior Partner and Managing Director at the Boston Consulting Group, where he is the global leader of the HR topic. He has written numerous articles about human resources, such as on HR controlling and people business in 2005 and on demographic risk management and strategic workforce planning in 2008, both published in the Harvard Business Review.
Listen to him on the emerging global workforce crisis by 2030.
Managers and Subordinates
The need for group oriented work (multiple hands) lead to the conception of hierarchies. As management practices evolved they stipulated a wide array of techniques and best practices some of which survived mainly over the past 200 years of industrialization and were solidified into best practices and recommended techniques. A lot of authors and writers have delved into the merits of people management and notable scholars and academics have highlighted upon mistakes and pitfalls.
The simple fact due to which the subject still eludes perfection and continues to demand dress ups is because since the past 200 years business runners have been trying to fit people into boxes they do not want to fit into.
Its a constant circus like trying to cage a Squirrel that very quickly finds a way out through a crack or an opening acting before one can think properly.
People are thinkers, all of them – educated ones and uneducated ones. Education can uniformly provide them with life’s stimulus that helps them evolve their ways but the ways are already there naturally.
People naturally form communities and find ways to do things and most importantly – build things.
When one human being tries to box in another human being there is natural resistance. The approach in the past more aptly followed in the oriental cultures was to walk with them and reason. That is not what industry followed for the past 200 years. Europeans and Americans mechanized the machines and then they tried to mechanize humans to fit the boxes. This approach is evident in the way of life and its core nuclear family structure. There were a number of short-term gains but then there were major long-term losses too.
Today the world is far more different than ever before. We eat, wear, feel, effect and reflect globally. The interdependencies are multifaceted and multi-tiered borrowing from diverse experiences and the stimulus is growing exponentially.
For this world the old models will not do, we need evolved ways and newer means to handle human creation and development.
© MIR
Core Competency and Specializations
In this growing corporate world of cogs and gears we have an ever increasing desire to make things and people modular. So long as we speak about things – its ok… To add people in to the mix would be a mistake.
People are not designed with a repetitive nature. They appreciate discipline but not repetition. People can think, review and analyze. So long as people can do all that at work they become efficient but when a manager or a lead limits those capacities for short-term tacts and gains for the ease of control or quick deliverables – the approach bears very bitter fruits in time.
To make your people efficient at work – make the things they do modular, but not them. You will win them over.
© MIR