nav analyst, 1-4 years exp, Chennai

nav analyst, 1-4 years exp, Chennai: JVS SOLUTINS - Perform all daily functions to compute the NAVPostings, verification of source data, calculations, storage & publication of information Analyzing system reports for variances/resolving discrepancies,

Help a Perfectionist Succeed - Management Tip of the Day - January 23, 2012 - Harvard Business Review

Help a Perfectionist Succeed - Management Tip of the Day - January 23, 2012 - Harvard Business Review

10 Forces Shaping the Workplace of the Future

1) Transparency and trust: Employers that articulate and demonstrate accountability to their promises will be the most likely to attract and retain talent. “Authenticity and transparency, aka honesty and truthfulness, are the new communication standards for the future,” said Sara Roberts, co-author of Light Their Fire and president/CEO of Roberts Golden, an organizational change consulting firm.

2) Out-tasking: Outsourcing is passé, but it will continue. Outsourcing will be joined by out-tasking, which farms out small projects and tasks to specialists and generalists. Organizations will need to evaluate risks associated with agreements with individuals who they may never meet. Making sense of online reputations will be a new core competency.

3) Contracting: Contractors are no longer independent entities. They will be seen as extensions of the firm. Organizations will need to understand their competencies, value-alignment, reputation and other intangible attributes.

4) Contract-to-hire: Contract-to-hire may provide the balance between renting talent and filling a role. With knowledge becoming more specialized, contracting makes sense because the contract firm can offer better competency development models, career paths and mentorships than an organization’s occasional need for a particular role. If an organization wants to test a new market, experiment with a new technology or evaluate the difference between insourcing and outsourcing, hiring a contractor may be the best answer. If this idea works, contractors who do it well would be offered jobs. If it doesn’t work, the company has localized and minimized its risk.

5) On-boarding: As organizations stretch their boundaries, on-boarding will become more global, and as they coordinate better between work and life, more intimate. It won’t be limited to going over insurance forms, disclosing policy and getting a computer set up. It will include discussions about where and when people work, what skills people have and what skills they need, how to get along with people in other generations and how to work with people from different cultural backgrounds and those with various work arrangements and relationships.

6) Parallel promotions: Becoming the boss may not be in most people’s future, because being a boss may not be a job. With the world moving toward networks and away from hierarchies, employees will need to appreciate learning opportunities and new experiences as they move laterally through the organization. Organizations will need to realize that hierarchy represents reporting relationships, but that people get work done through the parallelism of networks, which are a source of value.

7) Hire-to-automate: Knowledge workers and information workers will encounter more automation as the decade unfolds. Computer operations roles will be the first to fall, but anything that involves repetitive analysis involving patterns eventually will be automated.

8) Business continuity: Organizations need to develop active and passive means to gather and vet knowledge, rapidly disbursing it and looking for changes, improvements and discontinuities over time. They will need to learn what to forget as well as what to remember. Organizations that focus too much on automation and efficiency in lieu of human relationships may find their efficiencies and increased productivity stifle their ability to remain relevant.

9) Demographic shifts: Demographic shifts during the next decade won’t be limited to millennials figuring out how to work with baby boomers. Demographics shifts will create new markets in Africa, South America and Asia as younger populations become wealthier and more consumers driven. “Young, highly-skilled and technically proficient talent from emerging markets has the potential to offset retirement and succession issues generated by the aging workforces of Europe, north Asia and North America,” said Rob Salkowitz, author of Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing the World from the Bottom Up.

10) Virtual work: Today, virtual work is something most people experience as an alternative to the traditional workplace. Letting people stay where they are will drive down hard infrastructure costs as organizations realize they don’t need as many buildings and all but eliminate moving expenses. It will, however, drive up the need for social network management skills and for clear and transparent communications. It won’t be as easy to assert culture or managerial will on a virtual workforce, so people will need to be more proactive about defining work outcomes and expectations, and communicating status and changes. Organizations that learn how to foster and nurture virtual relationships will find that capability a competitive differentiator in the decades to come

In all of these shifts, performance management becomes a major issue as people decrease their physical work interactions. How organizations measure performance will become more isolated and more virtual as well, which may require a complete rethinking of performance management. The End Result’s Spiegel said “organizations aren’t paying enough attention to the disruptive nature of the new working relationships. We have already reached a point where most performance management systems are disconnected from the work people do, and the way they like to be rewarded.”

Link to the article: http://articlesandreports.blogspot.com/2012/01/10-forces-shaping-workplace-of-future_18.html and http://talentmgt.com/articles/view/10-forces-shaping-the-workplace-of-the-future/1

Ballast: A Tool for Finding Work-Life Balance

by Sabina Nawaz and John P. Williamson

An endeavor that goes belly-up after a big launch is a failure, a disaster. That's exactly what happened to the Vasa, envisioned to be the grandest ship in Sweden's fleet, because it lacked the proper balance. In August 1628, the Vasa began her maiden voyage in a calm harbor. But as soon as the ship emerged from the city's lee, a gust of wind filled its sails. The ship heeled sharply. With the next gust, open gun ports took in water. The Vasa sank only 400 feet from shore.

Today's leaders often must navigate unpredictable seas. The many demands on a leader's time vie for priority, including the need to live as a human being outside one's leadership role. Thus, many leaders find themselves out of balance with their personal values and priorities.

Leaders will agree they need more balance. But most leaders find this elusive — they strike a balance for a moment or a day or a week, until the next crisis hits, which it inevitably does. Balance begins to sound like a platitude, a "nice to have" that doesn't jibe with reality.

The tool leaders need to find balance is ballast. Ballast is a heavy substance that can be moved around to help maintain equilibrium. Ballast, when well-designed, brings stability and control to a ship. Its genius is in its flexibility — a crew can move ballast depending on the challenges they currently face.

Many factors led to the Vasa's early and expensive demise. The top-heavy ship was structurally flawed. And there was no chance of overcoming this problem since she also carried insufficient ballast. This left her with little fortitude for her real-world voyage into the winds and sea. Each person has to find their own source of ballast. It's the attention you devote to the most important areas in your life — the actions you take to create stability in the midst of turbulent seas.

Here are three steps to add ballast to your vessel:

1. Identify what's at your core. Ballast sits in the belly of the ship below the waterline thus lowering the center of balance. If you stabilize this region, you stabilize the entire ship. What does stability look like for you? Identify the key values — intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual — that guide your work and life — the "four corners of your core."

2. Distribute the ballast based on need. It is important that your ballast remains stable during a storm. A crew maintains this stability by dispersing the ballast to port, starboard, bow, and stern depending on changing conditions. Learn where you need to move ballast around the corners of your core.

Sam, a manager at a non-profit, had been heads down on a project for three straight months. To cope, he had thrown his regular health regime overboard. After the project ended, he had trouble regaining his energy. He realized that he needed to shift some of his ballast from the intellectual to the physical corner. He restarted his morning runs and that was all it took. Where you place ballast is a personal choice. When deciding where to disperse it, consider your internal desires, the external environment, and your top priority goal. In Sam's case, he realized that when he was low on energy, it was hard for him to pay attention to his family or his job.

3. Stack ballast where you can. If you're struggling to find balance, you are already tight on time. You may not be able to have a date-night, complete an hour-long workout, and practice Swedish because you just relocated to Scandinavia, all in discrete chunks of time in a single day. However, you and your partner might be able to run together while egging each other on in Swedish. Now you've managed to simultaneously disperse ballast in the emotional, physical, and intellectual corners of your core.

Each of us has turbulent situations to navigate through work and life. When you are vigilant about your conditions you can apportion your ballast accordingly. What adjustments can you make that will bring stability to your core?

About The Authors: Sabina Nawaz spent 14 years at Microsoft. She runs a global executive coaching business. John P. Williamson is the President and CEO of

The Ripples

A man was sitting by a lake. He was throwing small pebbles into it from time to time. A young boy happened to cross by. He was intrigued to see that after every few minutes or so, the man would toss a pebble into the lake.

The boy went up to the man and said, "Good pastime, this stone throwing, he?" "Hmmm," said the man. He seemed to be deep in thought and obviously did not wish to be disturbed.

Sometime later, the man said softly, "Look at the water, it is absolutely still."

The boy said, "Yeah, it is."

The man tossed a pebble into the water and continued, "Only till I toss a pebble into it now do you see the ripples?"

"Yeah," said the boy, "they spread further and further."

"And soon, the water is still again," offered the man.

The boy said, "Sure, it becomes quiet, after a while."

The man continued, "What if we want to stop the ripples? The root cause of the ripples is the stone. Let's take the stone out. Go ahead and look for it." The boy put his hand into the water and tried to take the stone out.

But he only succeeded in making more ripples. He was able to take the stone out, but the number of ripples that were made in the process were a lot more than before.

The wise man said, "It is not possible to stop the movement of the water once a pebble has been thrown into it. But if we can stop ourselves from throwing the pebble in the first place, the ripples can be avoided altogether! So too, it is with our minds. If a thought enters into it, it creates ripples. The only way to save the mind from getting disturbed is to block and ban the entry of every superfluous thought that could be a potential cause for disturbance. If a disturbance has entered into the mind, it will take its own time to die down. Too many conflicting thoughts just cause more and more disturbances. Once the disturbance has been caused it takes time to ebb out. Even trying to forcibly remove the thought may further increase the turmoil in the mind. Time surely is a great healer, but prevention is always better than cure."

The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives

By ERIC JACKSON
Sydney Finkelstein,
the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College,
published “Why Smart Executives
Fail” 8 years ago.

In it, he shared some of his research on what over 50 former high-flying
companies – like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Rubbermaid, and Schwinn – did to become
complete failures.  It turns out that the senior executives at the companies all
had 7 Habits in common.  Finkelstein calls them the Seven Habits of
Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives.
These traits can be found in the leaders of current
failures like Research In Motion (RIMM), but they should be early-warning signs
(cautionary tales) to currently unbeatable firms like Apple (AAPL), Google
(GOOG), and Amazon.com (AMZN). Here
are the habits, as Finkelstein described in a 2004 article:
Habit # 1:  They see
themselves and their companies as dominating their
environment
This first habit may be the most insidious, since it appears to be highly
desirable.  Shouldn’t a company try to dominate its business environment, shape
thefuture of its markets and set the pace within them?  Yes,but there’s a catch.  Unlike successful leaders, failed leaders who never question their dominance
fail torealize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances.They vastly
overestimate the extent to which they actually control events and vastly
underestimate the role of chance and circumstance in their success.
CEOs who fall prey to this belief suffer from the illusion of personal
pre-eminence: Like certain film directors, they see themselves as the auteurs of their companies.  As far as they’re concerned, everyone else
in the company is there to execute their personal visionfor the company.  Samsung’s CEO Kun-Hee Lee was so successful with electronics that he thought he
could repeat this success with automobiles.  He invested $5 billion in an  already oversaturated auto market.  Why? There was no business case.  Lee simply
loved cars and had dreamed of being in the auto business.
Warning Sign for #1:  A lack of respect
Habit #2:  They identify so
completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their
personal interests and their corporation’s interests
Like the first habit, this one seems innocuous, perhaps even beneficial.  We
want business leaders to be completely committed to their companies, with their
interests tightly aligned with those of the company.  But digging deeper, you
find that failed executives weren’t identifying too little with the company, but
rather too much.  Instead of treating companies as enterprises that they needed
to nurture, failed leaders treated them as extensions of themselves.  And with
that, a “private empire” mentality took hold.
CEOs who possess this outlook often use their companies to carry out personal
ambitions.  The most slippery slope of all for these executives is their
tendency to use corporate funds for personal reasons.  CEOs who have a long or
impressive track record may come to feel that they’ve made so much money for the
company that the expenditures they make on themselves, even if extravagant, are
trivial by comparison.  This twisted logic seems to have been one of the factors
that shaped the behavior of Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco.  His pride in his company
and his pride in his own extravagance seem to have reinforced each other.  This
is why he could sound so sincere making speeches about ethics while using
corporate funds for personal purposes. Being the CEO of a sizable corporation
today is probably the closest thing to being king of your own country, and
that’s a dangerous title to assume.
Warning Sign for #2: A question of character.

Habit #3:  They think they have all the answers
Here’s the image of executive competence that we’ve been taught to admire for decades: a
dynamic leader making a dozen decisions a minute, dealing with many crises
simultaneously, and taking only seconds to size up situations that have stumped
everyone else for days. The problem with this picture is that it’s a fraud.
Leaders who are invariably crisp and decisive tend to settle issues so quickly
they have no opportunity to grasp the ramifications. Worse, because these
leaders need to feel they have all the answers, they aren’t open to learning new
ones.
CEO Wolfgang Schmitt of Rubbermaid was fond of demonstrating his ability to
sort out difficult issues in a flash. A former colleague remembers that under
Schmitt,” the   joke   went, ‘Wolf  knows everything about everything.’  In one
discussion, where we were talking about a particularly complex acquisition we
made in Europe, Wolf, without hearing different points of view, just said,
‘Well, this is what we are going to do.’”  Leaders who need to have all the
answers shut out other points of view. When your company or organization is run
by someone like this, you’d better hope the answers he comes up with are going
to be the right ones.  At Rubbermaid they weren’t.  The company went from being
Fortune’s most admired company in America in1993 to being acquired by the
conglomerate Newell a few years later.
Warning Sign for #3:  A leader without followers.
Habit #4:  They ruthlessly
eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them
CEOs who
think their job is to instill belief in their vision also think that it is their
job to get everyone to buy into it.  Anyone who doesn’t rally to the cause is
undermining the vision.  Hesitant managers have a choice: Get with the plan or
leave.
The problem with this approach is that it’s both unnecessary and destructive.
CEOs don’t need to have everyone unanimously endorse their vision to have it
carried out successfully.  In fact, by eliminating all dissenting and
contrasting viewpoints, destructive CEOs cut themselves off from their best
chance of seeing and correcting problems as they arise.  Sometimes CEOs who seek
to stifle dissent only drive it underground. Once this happens, the entire
organization falters.  At Mattel, Jill Barad removed her senior lieutenants if
she thought they harbored serious reservations about the way that she was
running things.  Schmitt created such a threatening atmosphere at Rubbermaid
that firings were often unnecessary.  When new executives realized that they’d
get no support from the CEO, many of them left almost as fast as they’d come on
board.  Eventually, these CEOs had everyone on their staff completely behind
them. But where they were headed was toward disaster.  And no one was left to
warn them.
Warning Sign for #4:  Executive departures.
Habit #5: They are
consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image
You know these CEOs: high-profile executives whoare constantly in the public
eye.  The problem is that amid all the media frenzy and accolades, these
leaders’ management efforts become shallow and ineffective. Instead of actually
accomplishing things, they often settle for the appearance of accomplishing
things.
Behind these media darlings is a simple fact of executive life: CEOs don’t
achieve a high level of media attention without devoting themselves assiduously
to public relations.  When CEOs are obsessed with their image, they have little
time for operational details. Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski sometimes intervened in
remarkably minor matters, but left most of  the company’s day-to-day operations
unsupervised.
As a final negative twist, when CEOs make the company’s image their top
priority, they run the risk of using financial-reporting practices to promote
that image.  Instead of treating their financial accounts as a control tool,
they treat them as a public-relations tool. The creative accounting that was
apparently practiced by such executives as Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling or
Tyco’sKozlowski is as much or more an attempt to promote the company’s image as
it is to deceive the public: In their eyes, everything that the company does is
public relations.
Warning Sign of #5:  Blatant attention-seeking.
Habit #6: They underestimate
obstacles Part of the allure of being a CEO is the opportunity to espouse a vision.

Yet, when CEOs
become so enamored of their vision, they often overlook or underestimate the
difficulty of actually getting there.  And when it turns out that the obstacles
they casually waved aside are more troublesome than they anticipated, these CEO
shave a habit of plunging full-steam into the abyss.  For example, when Webvan’s
core business was racking up huge losses, CEO George Shaheen was busy expanding
those operations at an awesome rate.
Why don’t CEOs in this situation re-evaluate their course of action, or at
least hold back for a while until it becomes clearer whether their policies will
work?  Some feel an enormous need to be right in every important decision they
make, because if they admit to being fallible, their position as CEO might seem
precarious. Once a CEO admits that he or she made the wrong call, there will
always be people who say the CEO wasn’t up to the job.  These unrealistic
expectations make it exceedingly hard for a CEO to pull back from any chosen
course of action, which not surprisingly causes them to push that much harder.

That’s why leaders at Iridium and Motorola (MMI) kept investing billions of
dollars to launch satellites even after it had become apparent that land-based
cellphones were a better alternative.
Warning Sign of #6:  Excessive hype.
Habit #7: They stubbornly
rely on what worked for them in the past Many CEOs on their way to becoming

spectacularly unsuccessful accelerate
their company’s decline by reverting to what they regard as tried-and-true
methods. In their desire to make the most of what they regard as their core
strengths, they cling to a static business model.They insist on providing a
product to a market that no longer exists, or they fail to consider innovations
in areas other than those that made the company successful in the past. Instead
of considering a range of options that fit new circumstances, they use their own
careers as the only point of reference and do the things that made them
successful in the past.  For example, when Jill Barad was trying to promote
educational software at Mattel,she used the promotional techniques that had been
effective for her when she was promoting Barbie dolls, despite the fact that
software is not distributed or bought the way dolls are.
Frequently, CEOs who fall prey to this habit owe their careers to some
“defining moment,” a critical decision or policy choice that resulted in their
most notable success.  It’s usually the one thing that they’re most known for
and the thing that gets them all of their subsequent jobs.  The problem is that
after people have had the experience of that defining moment, if theybecome the
CEO of a large company, they allow their defining moment to define the company
as well – no matter how unrealistic it has become.
Warning Sign of #7:  Constantly referring to what worked in the
past.

The bottom line: If you exhibit several of these traits, now is the time to
stamp them out from your repertoire.  If your boss or several senior executives
at your company exhibit several of these traits, now is the time to start
looking for a new job.
[Jackson was long AAPL at time of writing]

medical savings account

MSA. An account into which tax-deferred funds are contributed. The money from this account can be used to pay for a variety of the individual's medical expenses, such as aninsurance copay or deductible. This account is often used by people who are self-employed, so the funds are contributed by the individuals, either for their own use or their employees, if they have any.