NS Rajan joins as the head of HR for the Tata Group and other HR consulting movements

English: Logo Tata Group (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The HR Consulting market in India is in a state of churn. NS Rajan (Blog, Twitter) who built the largest HR consulting practices in India, is joining the oldest and one of the most sprawling Indian conglomerates (which makes everything from salt to steel to software (with a revenue of $100 billion) the Tata Group as group chief Human Resources Officer and will be reporting to the new Chairman, Cyrus Mistry.

The HR Consulting industry in India is seeing a churn. Ganesh Shermon who was Rajan's counterpart in KPMG has also left, and the Mercer India head Nishchae Suri is replacing him.

Mercer's Rajiv Krishnan is joined E&Y as HR Advisory Partner in October and is seen to be Rajan's successor.

Eight months ago Smita Anand (ex-Hewitt HR Head) joined Korn/Ferry in India whereas Dhruv Prakash who was heading India Leadership Consulting at Korn/Ferry left in November to be self-employed.

Related articles

• Cyrus begins transition at Tata Group

The #PhilipsHRTalks videos on Personal Branding by @Anand__Pillai

So at Philips we launched #PhilipsHRTalks this week. What is it, you ask? Well here's Yashwant Mahadik explaining it

The first #PhilipsHRTalks was delivered by Anand Pillai, the Chief Learning Officer of Reliance Industries Ltd. You can listen to his whole talk on how you can leverage your uniqueness to build your personal brand.

Do share the videos with others if you find them useful :)

It's great that smart learning professionals are already leveraging it. See this tweet :)

Reverse Mentoring about Social and Digital

In my new role as a "digital and social" subject matter expert in HR, I was approached by two senior (non-HR) leaders of the firm to be a "reverse mentor" to them in the "social and digital" domain.

What is Reverse Mentoring?

As Krish Shankar of Bharti Airtel says in this article:

This concept, being increasingly adopted by savvy, new-age organisations, turns the old paradigm of mentorship into a higher and more effective collaborative effort. The clincher here is that the younger person becomes the mentor and the seasoned senior professional the mentee. Typically, the mentee has more overall experience (as a result of age) than the mentor (who is younger), but the mentor has more knowledge in a particular area and therefore reverses the conventional relationship.
Clearly, the modern-day notion of an exchange of ideas and knowledge has changed, especially after the phenomenal expansion of the social networks, and the digital and mobile marketing platforms, blurring the rigid and accepted norms of relationships between individuals, teams and organisations. Today, an exchange of ideas is no longer restricted to an inner circle of influence, the purview of designations and age.
Reverse mentoring can re-energise older employees, keep younger workers engaged and improve relationships between the different generations in the workplace. For example, junior mentors can help managers understand how to motivate and retain young workers. They can also share first-hand knowledge of a younger customer base — critical for companies aiming to tap the youth market.

So yes, it has been an interesting experience in my first few mentoring meetings. Will blog about more experiences soon :) 

Speaking at the #SBS2013 on 23rd May, in Mumbai

A break during the Dachis Group Social Business Summit in Austin, TX (Photo credit: Lars Plougmann)

When I started my career in the social business consulting space, there were two firms I was following closely. One was Altimeter Group the analyst firm started by Groundswell co-author Charlene Li with superstars like Jeremiah Owyang. The other was a firm that started off as a consulting firm, but has since become a social analytics product firm - The Dachis Group, fou.nded by Razorfish founder Jeff Dachis.

Three years ago Dachis Group launched a series of events called The Social Business Summit. This year in 2013 the Social Business Summit comes to India, on 23rd May.

Here are the details. And I am proud to be a speaker at the event. Hope to see you there :)

What can HR do to create value? #IndiaHRChat with @IndianYash on what it means

Was an interesting Twitter chat today on HR and value creation and how it is different from value addition and what competencies HR people need to exhibit to create value.

Here are some tweets (in reverse chronological order) on the discussion.

Impact of Social Media on Talent Acquisition and Management

Today I was invited to speak at the People Matters Talent Acquisition Conclave at Gurgaon. This is the presentation I made.

People matter tac 2013 from Gautam Ghosh

The following are the Tweets from the session

Personal Branding talk at #PhilipsHRTalks by @Anand__Pillai

Here are the Tweets from the event, storified!