The December edition of the NASSCOM Emerge Friday 2.0 talk held at Taj Deccan on 16^th December 2010, had Hari Thalapalli, the Chief Marketing Officer and Chief People Officer of Mahindra Satyam, addressing the gathering on ‘Effective business across cultures’. The forum began with everyone in the packed hall accepting that culture has become an integral part of the corporate world, yet ‘Culture’ as a concept is often misused. Hari defined Culture as a synchronization between what is said will be done and what is being done.

Talking about culture within the organization, Hari highlighted the importance of questioning. Organizations must encourage their employees to ASK. Encouraging them to ask questions empowers them to think individually. Indian culture has inculcated in us over time the notion of ‘respecting’ our elders, i.e., their word is final and not to be questioned. And this has led to Indians being viewed as subservient. Unfortunately, this has trickled down and penetrated into our corporate culture as well. As an organization you want to be known as adaptable but not rigid or subservient. Moreover, every individual member of the organization represents its culture.

What I found interesting was the fact that it’s in the first 90 days of a person’s job that she makes an impression of the organization. Organizations should maintain the impression created through the recruitments even after it is done. Hari illustrated this with a typical HR-Recruit instance. If the HR team believes its job to be over once the employee meets her manager, the employee develops an impression that the organization cares less about its members and more about its output. Instead, the impression should be that the organization cares equally about its members and output. It’s all about synchronization of what is said and what is done.

Speaking of working across international cultures, we often stereotype a region’s culture. “The American culture is very open”; “Italians have great style”; and we believe that every American or Italians fits the bill. However, it’s not always so. For an organization it is essential that they look at people and other organizations independently but within the culture. Organizations go out of their way to embrace other’s culture and practices, but a question raised by a member of the audience was, how far is too far? When do we stop being ‘flexible/accommodating enough’? To this Hari said, “When you get hurt”. That is, when you have to forego your personal values is when you stop.

Hari also spoke about change and its effect on organizations’ culture. Change is an inconvenient truth that organizations have to deal with. You can either make change happen, or watch change happen, or be the victim of change. Culture changes over time. While some changes happen gradually over a period of time, some are sudden. Either way, trying to fight it will do you more harm than good.

Being just an intern and very new to the corporate world, this discussion highlighted for me the new direction of the corporate world. Hari brought a lot of global experience and the audience was very responsive in sharing their own international experiences. It was interesting to sit amongst and listen to entrepreneurs and senior executives talk about the errors and corrections made by their companies.

Key Highlights:

• Culture should be a synchronization of what is said and what is being done
• You want to be known as adaptable but not rigid or subservient
• Stereotyping cultures maybe easy but not necessarily reality
• You can either make change happen, or watch it happen, or be the victim of change

“It is our nature to be social”

Last week as I spoke at the NASSCOM Emerge Friday 2.0 and while sharing my experience on the Causeaneffect.org NGO initiative, it dawned onto me that social media has always been around, only its importance has accentuated in the last few years. Attending conferences all over the world and presenting the case of social media and the experiences of iridium Interactive, it was pretty apparent that social media has no barriers across countries, it is a unified digital revolution that has been transforming our lives, only under different names since more than a decade. How has it changed our lives has not been introspected yet.

Here are the some of the reasons how social media has changed our lives and why we should make the most of it.

1.       It has made us more social, we know a lot more people than we would a few years back.

2.       Larger networks- college friends, school friends, people we meet at social occasions, relatives, and friends met though friends, this used to be our typical networks, social media has exponentially increased our networks.

3.       More vocal about your thoughts- Forums, blogs, tweets, status updates are allowing us to speak our mind, wondered why? Because we know we will be heard by some or many.

4.       Enhances PR skills- you do not have to take PR lessons to talk to people on social media.

5.       Converse with like minded people on these social networks.

6.       Get in touch with thought leaders, influencers and even people who inspire you.

7.       Reconnects with old connections- People you have lost in touch with since a decade can be traced from any corner of the world (provided they are on these networks themselves) on the wide world of social media.

8.       Your virtual network is always ready to help. All it takes is to put forward a question and there you will have experts recommending the best to you.

9.       Ease of companies to get in touch with their consumers and vis a vis.

10.   Looking for a job or looking to hire someone, your professional network helps you find the best fit.

Social media brings out the extrovert you. All that matters in social media is your network, communities, connections and finally your discussions with them. Social media has reduced distances both for individuals and companies.

Have you seen a change in your social profile by social media, do post what you have gained from social media.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

Image Source-Rosaura Ochoa from Flickr

About a year back iridium Interactive launched NASSCOM EMERGE blog for NASSCOM, a platform for SMEs to interact and share their thougts and ideas with each other and the organization. Nasscom Emerge recently celebrated its first birthday, completing a very successful and fruitful year overcoming a lot of opposition, resistance and hiccups. Read on to know more about the journey and what they have to say about Iridium.

August 3, 2007 is the day that the NASSCOM EMERGE blog first made an appearance in the Internet space, opening up a new platform for NASSCOM’s SME members to interact with each other and the organization.

It was a year ago, when overcoming significant internal opposition and initial hiccups, that the blog went live and received its very first hit. Not everyone was convinced about the relevance of the platform and even more circumspect about the kind of feedback it would generate about NASSCOM. However, the concerns were set aside as we were keen to share with our members the kind of exciting work we were doing within the “Emerging Companies” space. We wanted to keep them regularly updated about our activities and encourage them to share in their outcomes.
The idea was to reach out to our membership and gain vital feedback about the initiatives we had launched and how we can improve upon. While a step in this direction had already been made with our website, www.nasscom.in was inadequate and did not facilitate a two-way communication between NASSCOM and our members.
The blog was also an effort to create a platform for industry leaders to share their insights and experiences, to talk about what had worked for them and what had not and advise startups and entrepreneurs about how to leverage Best Practices to build success stories.
Having completed a year, we are delighted to share with you that the blog is an unmitigated hit. It has generated considerable excitement among our members and is being actively used by them to stay in touch with other companies and voice their opinions on a host of issues impacting SMEs. Leading industry practitioners have been interacting with other bloggers through this medium and guiding them about how they can achieve their goals. In less than a year, almost 153 opinions and articles have been posted on the site, with more than 223 comments in 21 categories, with atleast two to three updates going live every week. Over 30 people have been regularly contributing very valuable content to the blog and kick starting debate and discussion on contentious issues. The blog has been generating considerable traffic, with 65,000 page views every month.
The good news is that we are extending the frontiers of the blog even further. Besides providing a detailed view of events that are organized for Emerging Companies by NASSCOM, we have even begun posting video recordings of activities on the blog, so that viewers can get a first hand look and feel of the event. A major pat on NASSCOM’s back is the visibility that the blog is gaining within the market. Recently, India’s leading national business daily, The Economic Times carried an article on the blog and highlighted its unique features.
It’s been a great year and we can now look forward to even more exciting initiatives on the EMERGE community and the Web2.0 initiatives. Once again, we’d like to thank to all the contributors and our web partner –
iridium Interactive who have supported us in pursuing our objective to reach out to the membership community. We look forward to your continuous support and your best wishes for the future!
Warm regards,
Avinash Raghava
NASSCOM EMERGE Blog admin