D. Murali

Shelf downloads.

D. Murali

Here is a book ‘dedicated to all of India’s BPO and call centre men and women who took the leap of faith into a new industry, braved the initial chaos and growth pains, weathered the outsourcing backlash, fought their circadian clocks to work the nocturnal shifts, endured envious and often misguided public perceptions and ultimately prevailed, thrived and even triumphed to cement India’s position as the outsourcing destination in today ’s knowledge economy’ — True Stories from India’s BPO & Call Centres, compiled and edited by Sudhindra Mokhasi ( www.landmarkonthenet.com).

Adopting a ‘chicken soup’ format, the book brings together 150 narratives to give readers a peek into the industry. The first story, ‘Going, going, gone,’ is about the last call of the day that an agent takes after troubleshooting technical issues with ISP (Internet service provider) customers for almost nine hours. “Mr Doe had called in because his Internet was not working and he was unable to go to a particular Web site. He started the call with a profanity and I knew it was going to be a terrible ending to the day…”

Sandwiched between ‘Old love’ and ‘Dr Love’ is an account from a technical support agent, thus: “To resolve any issue, we needed critical information such as the version of the software they were using and the version of Windows installed on their computers, etc. So when this chap called in saying he was unable to view any Web pages, I naturally asked him the version of the ISP software that he’d installed. ‘8.0,’ pat came the answer. ‘What’s the version of Windows that the computer’s running?’ was my next question and his answer left me guffawing. ‘Windows Macintosh.’”

The author concludes by wondering if the prayers of all the millions of users had been answered!

Right pick for the weekend.

The single most significant invention of Thomas Alva Edison was his creative method, says Alan Axelrod in Edison on Innovation: 102 lessons in creativity for business and beyond ( www.josseybass.com). Edison shattered two enduring and pervasive patterns of production, the author observes. “The first was the long-held and rarely challenged belief that industrial production was incompatible with individual craftsmanship. The second was that invention was essentially born of inspiration and furthered by genius and was therefore entirely unpredictable.”

The ‘invention factory’ of the iconic inventor, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, combined laboratory, workshop, and factory, and it employed ‘scientists and craftsmen who were expected to solve the problems Edison set for them, but to do so in a democratic and informal atmosphere that allowed them the space to exercise their own initiative,’ informs Axelrod.

He notes that Menlo Park was far more a community of craftsmen than it was a factory town, harking back to an era before the advent of mass production. “Within the culture of craftsmanship that Edison fostered, he encouraged his workers to be ‘muckers.’ It was a term he and his men borrowed from the British working class, and it was related to the verb phrases ‘to muck in’ or ‘to muck about’ – in other words, to fool around, to have fun.”

Recommended read for the creativity-hungry.

Many centuries ago, when most people did not know how to read and write, do you know who did the reading, writing, and number work? The ‘scribes,’ says Edward de Bono in Intelligence Is Not Enough (Westland). “Everyone else got on with the daily business of living and working. So education was intended for these scribes. When education was opened to everyone, it still kept a curriculum, and mission, based on educating the scribes.”

The equivalent of scribes will soon emerge in today’s society, he foresees. “These will be ‘information masters’ and their profession will be to access the Internet and other information sources to prepare information packages for their clients.”

The author cites the example of ‘Young Enterprise Europe,’ which had one-and-a- half million youngsters in Europe, Russia and Israel who set up mini-businesses while still at school. “One year the top prize was won by a team of twelve-year-old boys who designed a ‘one stop’ wedding site on the Internet. You could order the hall, the music, the food and everything (except the bride) at one place.”

Such ‘operacy’ (or the skill of doing) is not what scribes are generally good at, the author rues. “Intelligent people are excellent at analysis and understanding but not so good at designing and carrying out action. This may be because they are more comfortable with analysis. This may be because their intelligence allows them to see more risks than others in action and they do not want to take these risks.”

Pithy insights.

Most people who try to cram more and more into their hours feel ‘shocked’ at how quickly time passes, says Don Colbert in Stress Less ( www.magnamags.com). “They aren’t enjoying the minutes as they are lived, and then one day, they awaken to realise with sadness that they have missed out on a great deal of enjoyment,” he bemoans, in a chapter on ‘building margin into your life.’

An enlightening anecdote he narrates is of his vacation in Colorado. “One day we were all playing putt-putt golf, and during the entire eighteen holes of the game, one of my friends was on his cell-phone. That was nearly three hours of talk time! He called various people, including his accountant, and several people called him.”

The author confesses that he couldn’t help but overhear some of the phone conversations, while playing golf together. “And I discovered that most of the conversations were little more than ‘small talk.’ There was nothing major that needed discussing and very little ‘business’ being conducted… It was as if every minute of every waking hour had to be spent ‘doing’ something that was perceived as being productive…”

Such ostensible ‘busyness’ is not relaxing, says Colbert. Being ‘busy’ is not a sign of success, he cautions. “A few take pride in being busy. They tend to push themselves to the point of exhaustion, trying to cram more and more activities, meetings, commitments, and friendships into an already tight schedule.”

Highly instructive.

KM or knowledge management can be a great asset, assures Gabriele Suder in International Business ( www.sagepublications.com).

She explains how KM becomes a skill when business intelligence enables it to share the most relevant and highly targeted information (not be biggest quantities but the best quality) filtered for the interests and needs of particular users. “Technology provides portals, meta-data, filters, citation clauses, peer-to-peer mechanisms and taxonomies to ensure quality and support knowledge mapping efforts adopted to the business process.”

An example mentioned in the book is of BMW, with 5,000 workers engaged in Research and Innovation Centres that are organised in project teams for car and motorbike development.

“World- and team-wide domain-specific knowledge can be accessed through its IT and Web-based Knowledge Centre with information collection, organisation, secure distribution and collaborative features, using Yellow Pages, semantic networks, search engines, eyes (monitoring), agents and knowledge trees for overviews…”

Concise and comprehensive.

Tailpiece

“When I applied predictive analytics to the electoral data, after de-duping…”

“You got a hung result?”

“No, the machine just hung up, even before completing the program!”

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