You are not a functional manager. You are a venture capitalist.

While I was at DigitalThink, I worked for @ErikSowa. Erik behaved more like a venture capitalist than a traditional functional manager. He looked at most of his team members as CEOs of their operations. He funded all of us with money, support, advice and contacts. In return he demanded and got the best out of us. He even came up with a brand name for the team - Solare.

Here is a simple example of his behavior. In 2001, When I wanted to create a customer extranet to improve collaboration with customers, he did not go to the CFO for his permission or the IT team for support. He just "funded" me with $35 a month so that I can get SharePoint workspaces going for about 35 customers, who together brought more than $25 M to the company. I just expensed the software cost every month and, in my spare time, ran the site myself with the entire company's customer collaboration running on less then 100 MB space hosted by Microsoft. It was the best return on IT investment ever. There are several more examples that I won't go into.

To contrast how efficient Erik was with deploying people and money, I want to point out that just a couple of years later the company spent more than $250,000 on a collaboration system, which was retired after a while without accomplishing much.

I was thinking about this experience a few days back and realized that every manager needs to have the same mindset, if he or she needs to succeed today. A good manager needs to identify what his team members are good at, give them what they want and let them excel at their work. If you are a person managing NetGen workers, I suggest you take the approach that Erik does. If you are an employee, I suggest you search for and find a manager with Erik's mindset. It is worth the trouble.

By the way, the team that Erik led, developed a CEO mind set. The Solare alumni now work at places such as InsideView, Zurich Financial, McKinsey, Infosys, Accenture,  FLUID and SAP. Thank You Erik for being our "Venture Capitalist".

Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable

Just finished listening to CD 2 of 3 of the book The Big Moo by Seth Godin and 32 other business visionaries.



The book is a collection of short essays by 33 successful business leaders. Has some interesting tips and advice. The main theme of the book is this. Stop trying to be perfect at work by following the rules written by others. Instead, start being remarkable and really useful for others. That is the only way to succeed.

My South Indian Cook Books and the Recipes I Use

I cook south Indian food at home. Apart from "Cook and See", the bible of all cooks from Tamil Nadu, I also find the book "Dakshin, Vegetarian cuisine from South India" useful.


The Plantain Poriyal from the above book is one of my favorites.

How a new hire is taking charge of the first 90 days in his new job

Recently a friend of mine accepted a job offer from a top consulting company. We spoke about the challenges of a new employee in a new large organization. We discussed the research done by two MIT professors on new-hire on-boarding.

After realizing the importance of connecting with people in the first few weeks on the job, he is taking charge of his on-boarding process to ensure that he can hit the ground running right from day one.

Weeks before his first day, he created a workspace and shared his thoughts and goals about the first 90 days at his job. He then invited his mentor from his new company to join so that he can connect him to the right people. He invited, the senior business partner who interviewed to review and comment on his goals. He also invited his former colleagues who supported him during his job change to join the workspace to support his first 90 days in his new job.

Since a major part of his job is implementing enterprise software he also invited his contacts who are product managers from enterprise software companies to advice him during the process.

He used @SAPStreamwork to create the workspace and take charge of his On-Boarding into his new job. You can too, for free. Streamwork is free for up to 5 activities.

Go ahead. Give it a try. Take charge of your on-boarding if you are changing jobs. It does not matter whether you are changing companies or changing jobs within the company.

PS: I will update this post to share more info about his experience.

How a hiring manager is taking charge of the recruiting process and getting the best talent for his team

One of my colleagues @MChewD is building a world class design thinking team to turbo charge the SAP On-Demand team. He is hiring product managers, smart technologists and design thinkers. He has to manage the hiring process for several open positions within his team. He is looking at both internal and external candidates.

To manage all the process without drowning in email and attachments, he has taken charge with an innovative approach. He created a workspace and invited his recruiters and 2 HR business partners  to join the workspace so that he can clearly articulate his hiring needs to them and help them find the best candidates for him. When he expands his team in Germany, he plans to invite his German HR partners as well.

He also invited one of his senior team members to join the workspace to help him review the candidates, rank them and eventually hire the best people. He told me that this has taken the multiple emails and multiple attachments out of the picture.

If you are a hiring manager tired of using email to manage the hiring process, give @SAPStreamwork a try. It is free for up to five activities. You just need one activity to manage your hiring process. You can invite recruiters within your company, contract recruiters who are not in your company's email system and friends outside the company who are advising you on the hiring process to join the workspace and help you out.

If you are a hiring manager, you know that hiring is a collaborative effort where your relationship with the recruiter and the HR business partner matters a lot. Managing this relationship via email is stressful. So, go ahead. Take charge of the hiring process, engage your recruiters and HR business partners and get the best people for your team.

PS:Streamwork home page will state that it is a decision support tool. Yes. It does that very well. But it can do much more than that.