Create Your Own Success Stories

The week of March 8th is abuzz with many organizations celebrating and conducting activities to celebrate the International Women’s Day. At a recently conducted National HRD Network (NHRDN) Pune event, Ms. Swati Ketkar, Co- Founder and Executive Director Harbinger Systems was invited as a speaker. The theme this year was, women entrepreneurs – the journey behind the success and what organizations are doing to facilitate women returning from a long break. The event had representation from across the industry, Ms. Sharmila Bhide, Co- Founder Calsoft, Ms. Dnyan Shah - SVP Business Head, Mphasis and Ms. Anita Panakkal Vice President,Human Resources Alfa Laval were some of the other speakers.

Swati spoke about her entrepreneurial journey.

It all looks very easy when one has reached the top, and as Swati spoke of her entrepreneurial journey and shared anecdotes of her initial days on how Harbinger Group was set up, I could only think of one thing “It takes 20 years of hard work to become an overnight success.”

As Swati shared her experiences with the packed audience from the HR fraternity, she spoke about how innovation, passion, leadership and alignment with the values of the company helped her a lot in making Harbinger a 600 people strong company that we are today. Out of this 37% of Harbingers are women. 

As she closed her presentation, Swati shared some thoughts for all ladies present in the room.

• Believe in yourself
• Don’t underestimate your own abilities
• Don’t hold back always
• Don’t be afraid of failure
• Make a difference
• Create your own success stories

Harbinger Group strongly believes in gender inclusivity and diversity.  Over the years we have gone back to the drawing board on many occasions to ensure that ladies are able to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Fifty percent of the board members and forty percent of the top management at Harbinger are ladies. This is undeniably higher than the industry average.

Just policies are not enough to draw and engage talent at any company, that is a given. One needs to feel that they are adding value, that there is someone who is willing to listen to them. 

In continuation with what Swati very strongly believes in, “Create Your Own Success Stories”, she has initiated “Dialogue with Women” where she meets groups of Harbinger ladies every month to mentor, motivate and listen to their success stories and help them to create their own success stories!

Celebrating Women's Day at Harbinger every day, by creating our own success stories!

Managing Strategic Knowledge

Two knowledge management researchers present a strikingly simple framework to visualize what organizations can do with their strategic knowledge assets. In Harvard Business Review (Jan-Feb 2015), Ihrig and McMillan suggest that every organization plot their knowledge assets along two dimensions – the extent to which the knowledge is distributed (undiffused to widely diffused) and the extent to which the knowledge is codified (unstructured or tacit to structured).

For example, a company may have proprietary expertise that is in key people’s heads (unstructured and undiffused),   proprietary process documentation (structured and undiffused), product usage guides (structured and diffused), and so forth.

The authors suggest four ways to manage knowledge assets, each visualized as a movement along the horizontal or vertical axis. 

Contextualize. Take some codified process and apply in new setting. For example, P&G uses its brand building process in new markets. This is indicated by an arrow pointing down vertically.

Codify. Make explicit the product knowledge – and leave process knowledge sharing informal – to protect against leaks. Combine people networking with knowledge codification to dig deeper into tacit knowledge. Use structured knowledge as hook to get to the right person. Codification is indicated by an arrow pointing up vertically.

Diffuse. Diffusion works best at the top where knowledge is structured. You can diffuse knowledge either inside the company (through apprenticeships and other knowledge sharing practices) our outside by licensing (the way Du Pont or  Harvard Business Publishing do) or by giving away strategically (the way Tesla does with patents, Adobe with the pdf format, and Mckinsey with ther Insights newsletter).

Gain insights from big data. This is the hardest to systematize, but successful examples include Rolls Royce (who use engine sensors for scheduling preventive maintenance), and Subway (who capitalized on low-cal trend). 

Harbinger Group Alumni Networker

I had the privilege to welcome a networking dinner for alumni and managers at Harbinger Group earlier this month. The place where this meet-up occurred was the lawns of YASHADA, a prestigious administrative training institute for government officers. Interestingly, I lived in a house right there on the campus a quarter century back, and so, it was the birthplace of Harbinger Group as well.

Image: Harbinger Alumni Meet 2015

As alumni started streaming in to join their hosts, conversation flowed and old memories of working together were rekindled. I have often wondered what it means to people to be Harbinger alum. Without any direct experience, of course, I offer these hypotheses:

1. First and foremost, it is a shared experience: a place and time in our youth. For many people, Harbinger was a time during their formative years, when they lived and worked with intensity, made their mistakes, and learned a lot. 
2. It also means a commitment to certain professional values: strong business ethics, customer-centricity, continuous learning,  gender diversity, and innovation. Harbinger was a place that shaped many of us, honing our professional skills, workplace behaviors and ethical values.

One of the alums summed this up well: I owe my professional career to this company. Another one said, it is such a wonderful idea to bring alums together! And then, as has happened many times before, others chimed in: why did we not do this before?

See you at a future event. Stay tuned.

Self-healing Systems

When we want to change something, should we do it in one fell swoop – or should we let it happen iteratively?  Should we build an elaborate mechanism of checks and balances that ensures that no mistakes are committed – or should we be lenient and let the system recover from mistakes?  These questions stem from one of the most fundamental challenges any designer encounters: should we design a complex system, or should we develop a simple system that grows organically?

Of course, the answer to this age old dilemma is KISS – Keep it Simple, Stupid!

Let me explain.  In one of our internal systems we keep the information of employees and their managers.  Our employees frequently move between projects.  It is necessary to keep track of who is managing whom in a timely fashion.  How do we do that? As the manager-direct relationship is not trivial, we had a process where the outgoing manager informs the HR department about release of their direct and the new manager requests that employee to be assigned to them.  Now the problem is that for the managers this is a chore.  And not one, but two managers need to synchronize their actions to make this happen.  The direct, for whom this change is very important – as her performance review is at stake – has no control over the process which routinely used to drag for days or even weeks.  The process had been designed to ensure that the changes, whenever they are effected, are always correct. But this process proved to be too painful for the key stakeholder, viz. the direct. 

We decided to invert the process completely. We now allow employees to change their managers by themselves.  The immediate reaction was of panic. Sacrilegious! How can you allow someone to arbitrarily change their own manager without any approvals? What if they play a mischief? If they mess it up what will be the consequences and who will clean the data? However, soon everyone reconciled to the simple “organic” nature of the change. Why would anyone play a mischief? If they do, won’t they get caught quickly? (We have notifications built in.) In case someone messes up – isn’t correcting it also simple?

The ability to spot an aberration quickly and letting it be corrected swiftly, as a part of the process itself, is the hallmark of a “self-healing system”. 

The celebrated Gall’s law (John Gall) states: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.  To further quote Wikipedia, this law is essentially an argument in favor of underspecification: it can be used to explain the success of systems like the World Wide Web and Blogosphere, which grew from simple to complex systems incrementally, and the failure of systems like CORBA, which began with complex specifications. Gall's Law has strong affinities to the practice of agile software development.

Gall’s law, fundamental as it is, is applicable to any field you could think of.  In fact, chances are you may already have used it – or may have seen it being used - somewhere. If that’s the case, can you share your experience? In any case, why not put the Gall’s law to use in our everyday life?

- Abhay Patil

Four Cultural Signatures

Recently I came across a book titled Corporate Cultures. This book, written by Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy, is a classic on the rites and rituals of corporate culture. The authors combine insights from anthropology, psychology, sociology and management into a work that outlines the effect of corporate culture on strategy and performance.

 Fig: Four Generic Cultures

In describing the various types of company cultures, Deal and Kennedy present four cultural archetypes.

•       Macho – A world of individualists who take high risks and get quick feedback on whether their actions were right or wrong

•       Work hard, Play hard  – Employees take few risks, with quick feedback. Culture encourages maintaining high level of low-risk activity

•       Bet-your-company – Years pass before employees come to know whether decisions paid off. Big stakes decisions. High risk, slow feedback.

•       Process – Little or no feedback, hard to measure what you are doing, so people concentrate on how it is done. When taken to extremes, it is bureaucracy.

Can you place your organization on this map? What kind of culture do you have? Personally, what kind of culture are you comfortable working with? When a person’s behaviors stick out as being different in your company, can you discern the cultural reasons?

Harbinger Systems Hat-trick

The year 2014 has brought another reason to cheer for Team Harbinger. For the third year in a row, Harbinger's name will feature in the FORTUNE magazine, thanks to a prestigious award. Yet again, the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals has named Harbinger Systems in its select list of global 100 companies.

The IAOP serves 120,000 professionals drawn from the $6 trillion global outsourcing industry. It uses an independent panel of experienced outsourcing buyers to pick the top 100 companies. The panel uses four critical characteristics: size and growth; customer references; organizational competencies; and management capabilities.

Our big thanks to customers, employees, suppliers and well-wishers for their unwavering support in the pursuit of Harbinger mission. Harbinger Systems is proud to be building some of the world's coolest software products in education, talent management, healthcare and other applications. Harbinger works closely with independent software vendors, including Fortune 500 global tech leaders, mid-size companies and start-ups. In close partnership with them, we use our expertise in security, mobility, cloud and web technologies to develop and test great products.