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Creativity is not a talent but a skill that needs to be nurtured and encouraged, and to be a successful organisation there is a need to set in motion the ‘Cycle of Engagement’ (CoE). 

It’s no secret that channels to reach out to the market or customers are widening and so are the challenges to address the market segment or customer. The ‘mantra’ to stay ahead in today’s competitive world is to be innovative. Innovation is a product of creative thinking; if creativity is about realisation of imaginations to ideas, then innovation is about production or implementation of an idea. Creativity is not a talent but a skill that needs to be nurtured and encouraged, and to be a successful organisation there is a need to set in motion the ‘Cycle of Engagement’ (CoE). 

CoE is a self-sustainable process where creativity feeds into Innovation, which on implementation becomes the capability of an organisation, and a motivated employee with freedom to express newer ideas and creative thinking culture leads to further creativity and innovation.

Why Creativity?

The three stakeholders of innovation are the Customer, Organisation and the Employee.  Creativity leading to innovation goes much beyond better product/services for a customer or higher market value for an organisation or better remuneration for an employee. But, in fact, creativity brings in the culture of trust, openness to new ideas, room for expression, sense of ownership among the employees. It also provides opportunity to work on weaknesses and to identify opportunities in the most unexpected place or way. 

Nurturing creativity will help in bringing flexibility within the organisation. Dusting out cow webs of the brain, clearing one’s thought process and getting them to focus on problem solving. Gone are the days when employees used to clock-in and out of their jobs; today employees demand to stay employable and not just being employed. Hence, challenge to retain is not just in paying a right remuneration but also in engaging them adequately. For an employee today, it is given that they would get paid for their skill, but what is expected out of an organisation is the opportunity for them to be part of the innovation process. If there is a great level of focus on creativity and motivation within the organisation any innovation becomes an expertise and the organisation in turn becomes hungry for more innovation. 

Even though there is no real flip side to nurturing creativity at work place one should be aware that it could lead to chaos and at times due to many owners and many unproductive ideas, it is crucial to approach the management of creativity in a very orderly fashion. 


If one has to create a more creative workplace the five important aspects are:
Information sharing and openness to newer ideas 
An organisation has to be more transparent and forthcoming in communicating and sharing information with its employees and equally be open to idea that may be different than what has been done so far.

Committed Leadership
Good organisations represents good leadership, no organisation can be successful with bad leaders and great employees or great leaders but bad employees in both the cases it’s a leadership failure.

Positive employee motivation 
Nurturing creativity is not a one-time activity, or a HR policy, employees should be motivated enough to invest time and mind to come up with fresher ideas.

Opportunity to pursue Ideas 
The proof of the pudding is when it’s eaten; only if an idea is put to production will there be realisation of it, if there is a great idea there has to be a support system to give the employees an opportunity to pursue it to its logical conclusion. 

Rewarding productive creativity 
The most important aspect of nurturing creativity is to actually reward the idea that is implemented or put to production, this also encourages other employees in the organisation to be more creative and solution oriented. 

Since creativity is the root of innovation, it’s vital for all types of organisations – small, medium, large, global, local to endorse a creative atmosphere, harnessing newer ideas and giving space for employees to flourish. And it would be the most innovative way to get a good return on investment.

The author is Co-founder and Director, TeamLease Services
http://hr.itsmyascent.com/article.aspx?sectid=5&contentid=2011022520110225134238358cb7bfd86http://hr.itsmyascent.com/article.aspx?sectid=5&contentid=2011022520110225134238358cb7bfd86

Most people in India don’t have access to sanitation.Therefore should Parliament enact a Right to Bathrooms Act? A right legislated is not a right delivered. If legislation guaranteed outcomes, then 420 million people in the nation’s labour force would be earning the minimum wage, enjoying Provident Fund security, pension and health insurance coverage. But India’s labour laws don’t apply to 93 percent of the country’s work force. In fact, our labour laws are so irrational that they are unenforceable.

Unfortunately, the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act), which became law on April 1 last year, threatens to drag education legislation in the direction of India’s labour laws. The RTE Act is not only unenforceable and will fail to improve learning outcomes, it will also breed corruption.

As state governments start codifying RTE Rules, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the RTE Act will impact capacity, cost and competition and generate corruption and confusion. As a company at the exit gate of the education system — TeamLease has hired an individual every five minutes for five years but only 5 percent of the youth who came to us for jobs — we recognise that fixing the school system (the prepare pipeline) may yield better socio-economic returns than fixing the vocational system (the repair pipeline).

The RTE Act timetables the extinction of 25 percent of India’s 1.5 million schools that are ‘unrecognised’. These mostly low-cost schools are an entrepre-neurial response to parental choice — the antibiotic reaction to dysfunctional government schools chronicled in The Beautiful Tree (Penguin, 2009) by Dr. James Tooley, professor of education at Newcastle-upon-Tyne University, UK. Our demographic dividend — 1 million youth will join the labour force every month for the next 20 years — would have already become a nightmare if these low-budget unrecognised private schools had not substituted for absconding state government teachers during the past 20 years. And while many of these budget private schools may not deliver quality, they do deliver value for money. Plus a bad school is better than no school at all. Turning the ill-considered advice of a beheaded French queen to the public on its head, this provision of the RTE Act in effect says: “If you can’t have cake, don’t eat bread.”

The unfortunate outcome of enacting the much-awaited RTE Act will be higher school fees. The Act micro-specifies salaries, teacher qualifications and school infrastructure. It stipulates that schools in Delhi that don’t pay teachers a minimum salary of Rs.23,000 per month will not be accorded recognition, and mandates that primary teachers must have a two-year education diploma. This means that 33 percent of teachers currently employed in the national capital will have to be fired. Moreover, RTE specifies that every school must have a playground with the Delhi state government specifying 900 sq. yards and some others considering 1,500 sq. yards.

Then there’s the controversial s.12(1)(c), which requires all K-XII schools to reserve 25 percent of capacity in pre-school or class I for poor children from the neighbourhood. This provision will require massive cross subsidisation because state governments propose to reimburse way below tuition fees. The Karnataka state government has capped its reimbursement at Rs.7000 per student per year. All this micro-management of schools — to the delight of teachers and real estate companies — will hit middle-class parents who will be obliged to pay higher tuition fees to accommodate poor neighbourhood children, hard.

Competition has been a major driver of higher quality and lower tuition fees in higher education. Currently there are 200 engineering colleges in south India with less than ten new admissions this year, and more than a third of B-school seats in Gujarat are vacant. This forces colleges to reduce fees, guarantee internships and embed soft-skills learning into their curriculums. On the other hand the RTE Act hinders competition by making it impossible for school managements to reduce tuition fees and compete on price. This means stagnant capacity, and reduced competition. In short, schools won’t have student-clients, but hostages.

Many other questions arise from the provisions of this ill-conceived, interfering legislation. Does changed evaluation under RTE mean no exams? How will mid-day meals be provided to poor neighbourhood children forcibly admitted into private schools? Where will these children go after they complete class VIII? Will the 75 percent parents-dominated government school management committees have the power to hire and fire teachers? Why has the Act abolished school managements’ right to detain or expel students in classes I-VIII? Can children be equal and excellent simultaneously?

The only saving grace of RTE is that it’s badly designed legislation that will barely be implemented as it’s impossible to implement effectively. But should we really be banking on a double negative to encash our demographic dividend? The most important pre-natal decision an Indian child makes is of choosing her parents wisely. Sadly the RTE Act makes this choice even more important.


(Manish Sabharwal is the Bangalore-based founder-chairman of TeamLease Services Pvt. Ltd)

http://www.educationworldonline.net/index.php/page-article-choice-more-id-2603

Posted: Tue, Feb 8 2011. 10:37 PM IST

Manish Sabharwal

The execution deficit matters more than the fiscal deficit to the demographic dividend. The budget must focus on expenditure reforms rather than expenditure.

The 2011 budget will be presented by a politician with an economist as prime minister. This contrasts with the 1991 budget that was presented by an economist with a politician as prime minister. But “bees saal baad” is also an interesting point to reflect on economic reforms and increase the effectiveness in government spending. Economic reforms—and Union budgets —are not about fiscal deficits, government spending or goofy rich guys buying Mercedes cars, but creating what Sunil Khilnani calls the “infrastructure of opportunity”. This involves fixing the 3Es (education, employability and employment) so that the most important decision a child in India makes is not choosing their parents wisely.

At a personal, company or country level, there is nothing wrong with spending money you don’t have as long as it creates outcomes such as capabilities or assets. But converting spending into outcomes requires execution—life in the fourth decimal place of goal setting, conditional resources, capability building, performance review, punishment and reward. This is particularly relevant to the 3Es and this budget must shift focus from strategy to execution. From expenditure to expenditure reforms. From poetry to plumbing.

Is money spent, outcomes delivered? Are rights legislated, rights delivered? Has the Rs. 108,000 crore spent on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) delivered a right to work? Will the Rs. 50,000 crore annual Right to Education (RTE) spend improve learning outcomes now that we have licked the enrolment problem? Will Rs. 100,000 crore required for the Right to Food Act move the needle on malnutrition and hunger? More people in India have cellphones than bathrooms; should we have a right to bathroom Act? Or should we try unpacking, understanding and replicating how the telecom revolution—however dirty it’s birthing—accomplished what it did?

Many people in India are unemployed, unemployable, underemployed, and illiterate not because of inadequate government spending—you don’t repair leaky pipes by turning up the water pressure—but because of poor outcomes from government spending, no legitimacy for private sector participation, and lack of sustainable frameworks for public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the 3Es.

The finance ministry does not control every ministry, but the golden rule is that who has the gold rules. It must start attaching strings to money provided. It must insist that 100 days under MGNREGS morph into an apprenticeship programme that leads to measurable skills.

It must insist that wages under MGNREGS be capped at levels that make it a safety net, not a hammock. It must provide money for RTE only if it funds students not institutions, does not timetable the death of 25% of India’s schools, and reduces ambiguity that will breed corruption. It must insist that all state and Central skill programmes comply with the operating principles of the National Skill Policy by 2013 to qualify for recurring funding. It must expand the allocation of open architecture programmes like the Modular Employment Skills of the ministry of labour, but insist on transparent operations by linking payments to Aadhaar. It must create competition and capacity by enabling PPPs in schools, industrial training institutes, employment exchanges and higher education by allowing government money to be made available for private delivery. It must insist that the ministry of human resource development end the adverse selection among education entrepreneurs—mostly criminals, politicians or land mafia—by scrapping the requirement that all schools need to be non-profit on paper even though 90% of school capacity created in the last two decades is for-profit.

It must insist that we delink the mindless and backdoor application of the Sixth Pay Commission government teacher pay scales to private school teachers that is leading to higher fees. Finally, instead of singling out a single university or college for a large grant, it must make an allocation of Rs1,000 crore for creating 20 community colleges in every state as PPPs. These community colleges would create a mezzanine layer by offering two-year associate degree programmes with employers at the heart of academics, admissions and certification. States would make joint applications with private partners and the most innovative proposals—a modified version of the successful US race to the top programme—would be funded.

The spectacular increases in India’s 3E spending are a child of economic reforms. This spending could have been done differently but was better than doing nothing. But the next wave of public policy impact does not lie in higher or lower spending, but smart spending that drives metrics, operations and performance management. This is not a lack of vision or ambition but a grounded view of where sustainable, scalable and tangible change comes from.

The author is chairman, TeamLease Services.

Respond to this column at feedback@livemint.com

http://www.livemint.com/articles/2011/02/08223755/Bridging-the-execution-deficit.html

MANISH SABHARWAL

Tuesday, Feb 01, 2011 at 0007 hrs IST

Delhi University meets only 4% of its revenue from student fees. The Right to Education Act needs an incremental Rs 40,000 crore commitment from state governments. Enabling the 84 million youth that suffer from some degree of unemployability needs Rs 4,90,000 crore. We can’t even estimate how much it will take to re-skill the millions that need to move off the farms to non-farm livelihoods or subsistence self-employment to decent wage employment. And taking children to education substantially increases costs, so we have to take education to the children.

I’d like to make the case that the next wave of impact in human capital lies in financing innovations. We need to move beyond rhetoric—“companies should manufacture their own employees” or “money is not in shortage”—to creating sustainable, scalable and effective public-private vehicles for student financing. This solution must confront the market failure in skill development; high attrition makes employers unwilling to pay for training but they are willing to pay for trained candidates. Candidates are unwilling to pay for training but ready to pay for a job. MFIs or banks are unwilling to lend for vocational training unless a job is guaranteed. The government wants to pay for outcomes and has not figured out how to do that effectively, efficiently or honestly. And training companies are unable to fill up classrooms because the students who need skills can’t afford their courses.

The broad contours of the solution are emerging; we need to create a market in collateral-free student loans or third-party financing at the entry gate of education, which can be repaid with the salary from the job the student gets at the exit gate of education. Employment at exit gate is critical to creating a viable, scalable and sustainable model. This is why innovation—and solution—lies at the intersection of employment and employability. Viable models will involve some form of PPPs and this is challenging because the government has developed experience in hard infrastructure like roads, power plants, etc, that are hard to build but easy to operate. But PPPs in education and skills—soft infrastructure—are easy to build but hard to operate. So, PPPs in soft infrastructure require high level of contracting skills and trust that are in short supply. But there are four possibilities:

State asset banks: A large part of training cost goes to infrastructure. State and central governments control large chunks of land that could be put into a common asset bank, which could then be made available to the private sector, for training, on leases at low rentals. The continuance of these leases must be structured as conditional on training outcomes.

State skill vouchers: Making government money available for private delivery is difficult to do but is the only way to create competition and gather information about outcomes. We need to shift state money from financing institutions to financing students. Giving skill vouchers to children who can’t afford to pay for their training but can redeem these vouchers at skill centres would expand capacity.

State-financed private apprenticeships: Job creation programmes like NREGA are neither creating assets nor creating skills. Reimbursing private sector employers for stipends would create the sustainable and self-healing vehicle of ‘learning while earning’ and ‘learning by doing’. Expanding non-farm job creation in rural areas is a key public policy priority that could be accelerated by modifying NREGA to include 60/90/100 day apprenticeships with private employers.

Employer reimbursements or apprenticeships: Private companies may be not able to pay for training upfront but are willing to create reimbursement programmes for students who pay for training themselves. Many are also willing to create apprenticeship programmes under which the stipend will cover the costs of the course paid by the student. Unfortunately, the Apprenticeship Act of 1961 ensures that India has a limited number of private apprenticeships (2,50,000). Legislative changes shifting our apprenticeship regime from push to pull would create an elegant solution at the intersection of financing and delivery.

Innovation scholars have the 10/10 rule; a decade to build a new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience. We have spent the last decade on building a fertile ecosystem for skills delivery, but scaling numbers and outcomes in the next decade requires a new financing thought world—not more cooks in the kitchen but a different recipe. As the Planning Commission writes the 12th Plan and many state governments consider expenditure reforms, it’s time to unpack financing from delivery. We could also consider a modified version of the ‘Race to the Top’ programme of the US under which the central government funded innovative programmes of states. We need to use financing as the lever that forces the ecosystem—candidates, governments, employers and trainers—to work together in finding new models at the intersection of employment and employability.

http://financialexpress.com/news/column-who-will-pay/744261/0

Manish Sabharwal
Wed, Feb 24 2010

The budget season is always the time for big ideas and unfair expectations. Debates about what this Budget needs to tackle have included direct versus indirect taxes, privatization, infrastructure, market failures, social security, financial market regulation, education reform, and the many other alibis for India’s poverty. We seem to broadly agree on priorities, and all the ideas are on the table. In fact, they are falling off the table. So despite what economist John Maynard Keynes said about the paramountcy of ideas, I believe the next phase of Indian public policy impact lies in plumbing and execution.

One of the biggest mysteries in Indian public policy is how to get something done when everybody who matters in the government agrees with you. How can we get teachers to show up in government schools? How can we create competition for government services that don’t have clients but hostages? How can we get roads built? How can we make a vocational training market relevant so it leads to a job? How can we get the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) payments to create assets that raise productivity or skills that create an employability corridor? How can the goods and services tax (GST) implementation eliminate the inter-state border checkpoints? How can the new education regulatory authority manage the quantity-quality trade-off without regulatory capture? How can employment exchanges match job seekers with employers and lubricate migration? How can we get doctors and medicines to show up in government hospitals? India has the most e-governance pilots in the world, but how can technology truly revolutionize the citizen interface?

Fundamentally, why are we not moving from outlays to outcomes? Because the first phase—the phase of big ideas—in Indian reform is over. We need a shift from debating which train to build to keeping the trains running on time. Identifying a problem, verbalizing the solution and spending money is not the same thing as solving it. Reducing the transmission losses between intent and action requires shifting away from generalities and big-picture strategy. This is sabotaged by a skill mismatch among public policy staffers—not just the Indian Administrative Service—who have a fear, contempt or aversion for operations. The resistance to or ignorance of an operational perspective—life in the fourth decimal place—by current public policy staffers does not recognize the need for a skill transition. But any entrepreneur can testify that if you convert a high-energy, ideation-heavy start-up into an institutional, process-driven company too early, you take away its birthright. But if you make the transition too late, you take away its destiny. Globally, there is an interesting resurgence in the recognition of managing over leading because too many leaders are detached from the messy process of managing. So they don’t know what is going on beyond pronouncing performance targets which are supposed to be met by whoever is doing the real managing. But the hectic, fragmented, never-ending world of managing has huge rewards: getting things done. As Stanford University professor James March says: “Leadership involved plumbing as well as poetry.”

Shifting to execution recognizes that the state must be efficient to be effective. This requires retooling how the civil service is currently hired, trained and promoted: It needs to become more a deliverer of public services rather than a dispenser of advice. New units for performance management, innovation and review are needed. The government must raise its decision-making metabolism by reducing the number of ministries, defining jurisdictions and creating forums for conflict resolution and trade-offs. Formalizing and motivating lifelong learning by linking it to individual advancement must be accompanied by a revamp of the entry-level government academies at Mussoorie, Hyderabad, Nagpur and others, so that they increase focus on imparting skills such as technology, project management and contracting. Lateral entry must be institutionalized to access specialized skills over patrician generalism; would we really want a former fertilizer or food secretary running the Unique Identification project?

We have a clear vision—eliminating inequality of opportunity. We have a clear strategy—inclusive growth. We have clear strategic Plans—the 11th one. But do we have operating plans? As writer Joseph Campbell says, to find something new we have to leave the old and go in quest of the seed, the germinal idea that will have the potential to bring forth that new thing. India missed its tryst with destiny, but has made a new appointment. Economic reforms are not about rich guys buying fancy cars but about creating access to healthcare, power, education, training and jobs. This needs execution; breaking down our big goals into bite-size pieces, getting people with the right skills in the right places, project management, rigorous periodic reviews and goal-aligned performance management that creates a fear of falling and hope of rising. Only then do we convert growth to poverty reduction and meet our destiny.

http://www.livemint.com/articles/2010/02/24210732/From-strategy-to-execution.html

Manish Sabharwal
Mon, Sep 20 2010

In the late 1970s, China decided that the best way to reduce poverty was by exporting manufactured goods. So it created a business environment where one could take land without asking, true labour unions were prohibited, wages were capped, people needed licences for urban migration, multinationals were serenaded and there was over-investment in world-class infrastructure. Given that the size of China’s economy recently crossed Japan’s, the results are obvious.

India’s performance at exporting goods hasn’t been exciting, and we need to fix our low investment and employment in organized manufacturing for exports. However, while the jury is still out, there is interesting early evidence on whether India’s domestic manufacturing and consumption can be called a model and will be as effective in reducing poverty as China. As my favourite communist said, it does not matter if a cat is black or white if it catches mice.

Political, economic, non-governmental and business actors all seem to agree that the only sustainable way to reduce poverty is through improving individual productivity. I will argue that the last two political reform triads ofroti-kapda-makaan (food-clothing-shelter) and bijli-sadak-paani (electricity-roads-water) did not increase individual productivity as much as a current triad—the unique identity (UID) database, cellphones and bank accounts— will.

There are two reasons for this. The first is obvious: the two earlier triads were elegantly and intellectually conceived, but poorly executed. They failed because of the small role allowed for the animal spirits of private entrepreneurship. Consequently, the long tail of India’s geography of work—more than 4,000 towns and 600,000 villages—did not become fertile soil for non-farm job creation of any globally competitive standard.

But India’s labour market has transformed substantially over the last 25 years. In fact, to paraphrase Rama Bijapurkar—we now have three Indias—India I is lucky; India II serves India I; and India III is unlucky. I am intimately familiar with the first India because I belong to it—I chose my parents wisely: They live in a city, taught me English, got me an education, fed me and kept me healthy. I am now intimately familiar with the third India because my livelihood depends on creating transitions or pathways for labour market outsiders—less-skilled, less-educated people trying to move out of agriculture or subsistence self-employment, people from small towns, women coming back from a maternity break, and so on. But I only became aware of the reality of India II on my latest trip to my parents in Kanpur.

Kanpur has almost no organized employment. But while transferring my mother’s phone number directory to a new phone, I found she had two different numbers each for a generator mechanic, plumber, water tanker, electrician, driver, carpenter, compounder, milkman, florist, air conditioning mechanic, as well as for a security firm, housekeeping, laundry, vegetable delivery, grocery delivery, medicine delivery, fridge service, mobile recharge and much else. My mother insisted that she had negotiated a two-hour turnaround —we corporate types would call it a service level agreement—with all these people: If the primary vendor goofed up, she could always call the secondary one.

As you can see, India II is highly labour-intensive. It is also, unfortunately, unorganized—India UnInc., as Professor R. Vaidyanathan of IIM Bangalore calls it. But the new triad of UID-cellphone-bank account substantially increases its productivity.

More importantly, this triad enables individual transitions from India III to India II, and from India II to India I. Cellphones massively enable personal productivity. Third-generation (3G) mobile services, the UID project and a mindset change at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will enable mobile banking. UID will allow employee benefits such as pensions and health insurance to be linked to a person rather than an employer. It will enable the creation of a loan market for vocational training, or government skill vouchers, that will enable workers to upgrade their skills. Most importantly, UID will hopefully convince RBI to replace its good-intentioned but disastrous know your customer (KYC) norms that lock out migrants and poor people from opening bank accounts. For them, KYC norms are “kick your customer” norms.

Our demographic dividend hoopla has focused on more youth entering the labour market. But we won’t reduce absolute poverty unless we raise the productivity of existing workers and informal employers. The biggest innovations around UID usage will emerge from private energy in financial services, telecom, education, employment, employability, healthcare, services and benefits. This grass will grow at night while the government sleeps. In fact, UID has the potential to create or enable an application library that can beat the Apple App store in terms of impact.

So, unlike the triad of bijli-sadak-paani, where the state played the pivotal role in delivery, regulation and financing, our new triad of UID-cellphone-bank account will be enabled by government regulation and supervision, but will largely be driven by private entrepreneurship. This triad is India’s most effective public-private partnership; it not only gets government money to those who deserve it, but also increases the productivity of our labour force gracefully, substantively and immediately.

http://www.livemint.com/articles/2010/09/20201635/A-new-labour-productivity-tria.html