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).