To Fire or Not to Fire - That is the question

The biggest question plaguing almost every big IT business leader today is precisely that. Should I fire or more likely especially after the Tech Mahindra Audio Tape Gate scandal, how to fire without creating a scandal around it? The one person that needs to get fired sooner rather than later is the HR Head of Tech-M, that’s for sure.

Why this post? 

I am a big fan of Prabal Basu (he writes so well, he's a fellow alma-mater from London Business School and his articles are so spot-on on a wide range of topics). How can someone be so knowledgeable on such a wide-range of topics I always wonder. His article on the Tech Mahindra saga is interesting to say the least. He raised several important points including the impact of beliefs at the top on actual decisions taken by the middle management and how the culture change in Tech Mahindra due to HCL imports might have led to this.

My only point of contention is that this is a common dilemma that an IT manager or in fact any leader faces today and there are none around that are better than the others. With the current generation of millennial employees with limited loyalty, the only thing these companies can and should do is provide enough opportunities to train and challenge employees to utilize those opportunities to upskill themselves. Once that is being done, some hard decisions need to be made, they just need to be made. Of course, execute those decisions as humanely as you can do and that is really where the HR team needs to learn to put its foot down because that is their space.

I write today (thanks to a nudge from someone I respect a lot) to share some interesting anecdotes and experiences from my life. I've had my fair share of experiences both as an employee during the 2001 recession and as an employer in the recent past as we go through the ups and downs of trying to build a start-up with the right culture and the right kind of people. This post is more about my experience as an employer and I'll follow up with my view from the other side and the tough decisions that need to be made.

2000: The rise 

The Y2K Boom had made all the IT majors including the highly respected Infosys, TCS, Wipro and almost every IT company in Bangalore rich and greedy. They went about hiring with gay abandon especially at the entry level and what better place to get good talent in Engineering schools across Bangalore. Most of my 2001 batch (including friends across most colleges in Bangalore and as I heard later across India) got offers galore and were all excited about their bright future in the rosy IT sector. I for one had not one but two offers. Even though our college (UVCE) allowed only one offer per student, I'd gone through the PPR program at PESIT (an industry training program sponsored by a couple of companies including Yahoo, HP and Others) and through that I had got placed in Infosys. Everyone at home was over the moon since Infosys was really the star of the IT sector (largely due to its stock price) of course and in a few weeks, I even got placed in the one and only Lucent Technologies "Bell Labs" of Dennis Ritchie fame (Great pay, expectation of great work, tons of perks). I could not have asked for more. 

2000: The fall 

The recession then hit and man oh man, did the atmosphere on campus and across the city change. One by one, the companies started cancelling offers that they had made and / or indefinitely deferring the joining or in some cases suggested trainings and courses that we could take up (to skill ourselves up). Thanks for the advice, that's so kind of you, we all thought.

Back to my story, Lucent was at least clear in their thought process and cancelled its offer outright and well ahead of the others. Along with the nice letter intimating us about their decision due to changed circumstances, they gave a nice consolation sum. In hind sight, it is indeed funny. I got fired before my first day at work and I got my first severance package (a handy sum at that) without putting an hour of work. Post this experience, I realized that everything in life happens for a reason.  Infosys on the other hand sent a vague "joining date deferred" letter and left us on tenterhooks for nearly 8-10 months and for some of my friends, well over 15-16 months. We did receive a few more nicely crafted letters from their HR team every 2-3 months and kept us all hopeful. The offer finally came and while we were doing something productive in the time, many of us were happy to finally start our careers off or give it a boost. While there was a lot of bitterness about the whole affair, some of the bitterness came from the high pedestal Infosys and NRN was placed on by all and sundry including parents, uncles and aunts. Don't get me wrong. Infosys was an amazing experience for me. I spent the more time in Infosys than in any other company including my own company where we are nearing the 5 year mark. I made the best friends there and also learnt so much there that I have no regrets about losing 8-10 months. Like I said, in the long run, what is a few weeks or months.

NRN and the claims

The bitterness with the founders remains and it just creeps me out when I see the same founders of Infosys preaching about how they are holier than the rest. NRN in this article talking about what happened in 2001 says "Let me give you example of Infosys itself. When the market became very tough and it shrank actually in 2001. We all sat together with senior management and then we said: look let us make some sacrifice and ensure that we protect the jobs of youngsters. That time we had offered jobs to 1,500 engineers. Several companies were postponing the joining day. We said let us not do that, let us demonstrate the commitment to youngsters by senior people taking some salary cuts based on the disposable income as we go down the hierarchy and welcome those 1,500 engineers.”

Mr. Narayana Murthy is an honest soul and about that, I have no doubt. But then, unless I imagined what happened to me and 1000+ other friends in 2001-02, his recollection of the 2001-02 treatment that Infosys delivered to us and my own recollection is just poles apart. I'd love to know if it was just a honest mistake or was he misled into believing this is how it happened. You can forgive him for believing the stories spun by his and Infosys’ PR machinery as the holy grail.

My respect for him will go up manifold if he admits that he got his facts wrong. I do respect him, Nandan and others a great deal despite what we personally went through for he and his Co-Founders really showed us first time entrepreneurs the way and helped build that dream of starting something on our own.

Since it's already quite a long post, I'll hold off on my "own experiences as an employer" for another post.

Coming Up: The Bad and the Ugly - My experiences with letting people go and why that is necessary!

About the Author: 

Randhir Hebbar is one of the founders of Convergytics - a bespoke analytics consulting firm and is a leading tech entrepreneur who has worked with companies like Mu Sigma, Dell and Infosys Technologies Ltd. He has consulted with many large retailers, technology companies and telecom companies and is a highly regarded digital analytics consultant. He has spent over 17 years in the IT / ITES industry both as an employee and as an employer and loves nothing more than spending time with employees working with them to make a bigger impact on clients.

A Strategic Project with London Business School

I just worked on an interesting academic project to assess Dell's Analytics Maturity completed by 5 highly professional exec-MBA students from my alma-mater, the London Business School. I am happy that I initiated this project a few weeks ago after seeing a mail from a LBS Faculty seeking support from LBS Alumni for what really is an elective course. This is an course that involves students with a professor come in to a company in a developing country such as India and work on a strategic project for a week learning about the challenges of working in India as well as providing an outside-in perspective to the company on a key problem they identify. A month later, they present a more detailed report and recommendations on the problem or question posed.

While there was nothing path-breaking that came out (at least not yet) in terms of findings/recommendations, the glimpses of what we saw in the preliminary report impressed me with how well they had understood our business (Not one of them had a background in Analytics or working in India) and what they put together in terms of preliminary recommendations in 4 days of talking to people across the floor and reading Tom Davenport's "Competing on Analytics". In addition, this was a good outlet for the floor and some good recommendations came out. The leadership team of DGA now look forward to the final presentation and also agreed to work together with the school and the faculty on certain areas of their expertise (e.g. Research on Innovation).

A photo we took at the end of the presentation with the students, Pankaj Rai - Head of Dell Global Analytics and Alok Agarwal, Director of Marketing Analytics, a couple of my colleagues (Santosh and Praveen) who helped drive this project and a few Managers who attended the preliminary presentation.

L-R Standing (Praveen, Puneet, Sanjay, Pradeep Menon, Niraj, Pankaj, Viktor, Wael, Santosh, I and Alok)
L-R Sitting (Angeli and Kamila)

Linkedin Inmaps

I thought I'd use an illustration of my connections on LinkedIn Inmaps to emphasize both the power of Visual Analytics (A picture is worth a thousand words. Let's see if this blog-post reaches 1000 words :p) as well as talk further about what differentiates an analysis from a report.

Before I get into what this image reveals, I wanted to highlight a couple of things. This image is a unique way to represent very complex and large n-dimensional dataset. In the age of Visual Analytics and the popularity of various VA tools such as Tableau, Qlikview, Microstrategy and JMP, this is a neat neat way of representing really complex multi-dimensional data (All people who you are connected to and everyone they are connected to is probably going to become a Million rows x Million columns dataset. I am not sure if this visualization has looked at second level connections in which case the data becomes even more complex). Another key insight from this is the fact that Color is one weapon that we don't use often enough in projecting charts to represent multi-dimensional complex data.

This representation captures quite a few things and projects these insights in a simplistic fashion:

1. What are the various social/professional/educational networks you are a part off?
1. Big Clusters in different colors
2. I had 4 major clusters (HKUST/LBS on the West representing the global network largely based in HK and London , Mu Sigma and Dell on the East representing analytics in Bangalore and UVCE and Infosys/Gap on the South and North respectively representing the IT side of Me)
2. How well-connected are these networks?
1. Size of the clusters
2. HKUST is a large well-connected cluster and so is Mu Sigma. UVCE is much smaller and less well-connected.
3. Who are the people who are connectors across networks?
1. Dots that are between two clusters and of a reasonable size
2. Santosh Atre, Tapan and Navin D connects Infosys and Mu Sigma and Bharath Murali connects Bethany and Mu Sigma networks. Deepak GD connects PESIT Gang and HKUST.
4. Who are the key people in your network?
1. Size of the bubble indicates how well connected they are.
2. If you can identify 4-5 people in each network spread across different networks and stay in touch with them, it might be more efficient than trying to be in touch with everyone in your network. This does have a materialistic angle to connecting to people. But all I am saying is if you had to choose 3 people to get in touch with to get the scoop on what's happening in your school gang, this map probably gives you a good idea.
5. Who will be most useful when you have a unique need?
1. Possibly someone who is not very well-connected to any of your networks who appears to have a good network (Big Bubble).
2. Reasoning: They have good exposure to multiple people in possibly a different field or atleast a different network and will be able to connect you to a unique network of people that you don't have access to. This could be a distant cousin in the real estate broking space who can connect you to a builder friend who will help with building your next house.

Now that I've given you some key questions that get answered with that one image, is the image a report or is it analytics. It depends on who's talking about it (I guess). LinkedIn would call it the best analytics ever whereas someone who saw it but did not get enough context to what this was about or why it is important to him/her thought it was a useless report. While this definitely fits the bill of a Visual Analytics representation of complex data, it would be good analytics only if backed by reason why this is useful to the viewer, what the key insights are and what actions he should take based on the insights. Does this blog-post then qualify as good analytics? ;-) I'll let the readers of the blog decide.

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What really is Analytics?

I get this question so so often. I finally decided to dedicate a blog post to this oh so often asked question. I sometimes try and make an honest effort to make people understand and more often than not, give in and say yes to everything they describe analytics as just so that I don't need to give an hour long explanation and still not be able to make people understand. 


This reminds me about how when we first got into the IT industry, everyone assumed IT was all about Y2K and how we would all be jobless post 2000. I used to get tired of explaining that the industry wasn't going to close down so soon. It didn't help that the dot com bust happened exactly around that time making it even tougher for us to defend the IT industry and our reputations as IT professionals.


Coming back to the topic of this post, let's start off with what Analytics is not. 

1. Analytics is not BI even though there's nothing less intelligent about Business Intelligence practitioners/experts. 
2. Analytics is not Data Warehousing even though it was the most cutting edge technology/phrase a few years back and we all (including yours truly) aspired to be part of the DW brigade purely because of the demand in the job-market. 
3. Analytics is not Reporting even though it has a very critical place in the data-driven decision making space. They provide some really important data to analytics practitioners that if used well can save tons of effort for us.
4. Analytics is not about OLAP Cubes nor is it about Databases even though OLAP cubes are super-cool tools and can really help you do analytics. 

Now that we know what it is not, what is Analytics really? 

1. Analytics is making sense of raw data, identifying trends and recommending actions to people who either don't have access to the data, don't have the time/ability to make sense of the data or need help thinking of clear actions that can be taken based on the trends. 
2. Analytics is as close as one can get to Management Consulting without getting into BS land or Tell me what you want want to hear and I'll do so land (I know I'll have a few people ready to throw stones at me for this statement. But I'll still stand by it. For a long long time, Management Consulting has been about a few standard frameworks and making sure you use the frameworks to arrive at a solution that the customer wants to hear). Don't get me wrong the frameworks have its advantages and being in a nascent industry as analytics, we do have a fair share of opportunity to define some  useful frameworks.
3. Analytics is about using all of the existing reports to get a story and also drilling down further when required to identify the Whys of the trends. 
4. Analytics is about using every tool in the book (SAS, Omniture Sitecatalyst/Insights, Tableau, R, MS SSAS, Microstrategy and a million others) and every data source (Behavioral Data, Survey Data, Sec Research, Competitive Analysis among others), but with the intention to identify trends and make recommendations to leverage/overcome a trend. 
5. Analytics is about recommendations/insights that Change the Business (CTB) and rarely about Run the Business (RTB). 
6. Analytics is in short about enabling customer insights and data-driven decision making instead of gut based decision making.

These are my 2 cents on what I feel is the best way to define/describe Analytics. Have suggestions on a simpler/better way to explain what analytics is. Please feel free to share your thoughts below in the comments section or connect to me on Twitter @rhebbar or on Facebook.

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