the hidden half
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A perceptive look at why the world's women remain hidden and how they can shineTRANSCRIPT
TR AC K TE C H N O LO GY B U I LD B U S I N E S S S HAP E S E LF
Volume 01 | Issue 02
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A 9.9 Media Publication
Volume 01
Issue 02
February 2012150
I BELIEVE
Plan, Manage, Execute Pg 06
THOUGHT LEADERS
Managing Social Media Risks Pg 70
VIEWPOINT
The Growth of Data Growth Pg 72
A special section on leadership designed keeping in mind the evolving information
needs of CIOsPage 23 to 37
A perceptive look at why the world's women remain hidden and how they can shinePage 38
HiddenThe
Half
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CTO FORUM 210x280(TRIM) 213x283(BLEED)_25feb2012
1February 2012
editorialyashvendra singh | [email protected]
Woman Power It is time we realised and leveraged the huge
untapped talent of women.
journey is the lack of adequate coaching, training and mentor-ship. This is especially crucial for women in the mid-carriers as these are decisive years in their leadership journey.
Progressive countries have acknowledged the importance of tapping women talent. Norway in 2003 passed a legislation that obliged publicly listed compa-nies to reserve 40 percent of the seats on their boards for women by 2008. Spain passed a similar legislation in 2007; France fol-lowed suit last year.
It is time India paid heed to these developments and came up with similar laws. It is time we leveraged the huge untapped talent of women. It is time we broke the glass ceiling once and for all!
Let me start with a big thank to all of you for the
tremendous support extended to CIO&Leader. Your warm appreciation of the inaugural issue not just affirms that we are heading in the right direc-tion; it also spurs us to further raise the bar in offering you valuable content.
Into the second edition of CIO&Leader, we decided to take the issue of leadership one step further. While our first cover story discovered the personality types of leading CIOs, for this cover story we decided to focus on women and leadership.
ditional approach of leading by commanding absolute author-ity is passé. The emerging leadership model emphasises on shared leadership. Women, inherently tuned to unite families, can easily slip into this leadership model. Their empa-thetic and flexible nature and better interpersonal skills com-pared to men hold them in good stead to emerge as leaders.
Despite such important con-temporary leadership attributes, why do majority of women fail to scale the summit in the cor-porate sector?
As our cover story details, there are several factors respon-sible for this. One of the most prominent being the challenge to maintain work-life balance. Several corporates boast of providing working flexibility to women employees. In most, however, such practices are not institutionalised.
Another hindrance for women in their leadership
The reasons were several and compelling. The biggest was the fact that despite a large number of women enter the corporate sector, the percentage of those that made it to the top remained stubbornly low. In fact, we were able to count top women tech-nology decision makers in India on our finger tips!
At a measly 5.3 percent, the number of women directors in Indian corporates is abysmally low. This despite the fact that they bring to corporates value, skills and management style unique to them.
We at CIO&Leader feel the tra-
editors pick38
Their Rightful Place Under the SunOrganisations have begun to adapt their work ethos for women but more light needs to be shone on multiple issues
2 February 2012
february 2012
Cover Story 38 | Their Rightful Place Under the Sun Organisations have begun to adapt their work ethos for women but more light needs to be shone on multiple issues
38
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COPyRighT, All rights reserved: Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from Nine Dot Nine interactive Pvt Ltd. is prohibited. Printed and published by Anuradha Das Mathur for Nine Dot Nine interactive Pvt Ltd, Bungalow No. 725, Sector - 1, Shirvane, Nerul, Navi Mumbai - 400706. Printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt ltd. A-46-47, Sector-5, NOiDA (U.P.) 201301
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regularS01 | Editorial08 | EntErprisE
roundup
3February 2012
ColumnS featureS
06 | i bEliEvE: Plan, Manage and execute Datacentre migration should be done in such a way that the business continues uninterrupted
25 | top Down go beyonD being a Cio Subramanya C from Hinduja Global Solutions talks to CIO&Leader about what it takes to be the 'Tech CEO' of the IT department
28 | leaDing eDgeHow leaDerS kill meaning at work Most executives don’t act as though progress matters
32 | tHe beSt aDviCe i ever gottake riSkS to reCeive rewarDS Manikkam VSHead IT, Henkel CAC shares the best advice he ever got
33 | me & my mentee foCuS on iSSueS, not perSonalitieS
35 | opinion Creating a winning Culture There are many qualities and skills that that a leader needs to learn to become a great leader
37 | SHelf life tHe Soul of leaDerSHip At the heart of this book is the idea that leadership emanates from the core of our being
70 | thought lEadErs: Managing Social Media RiSkS The need is to have a robust risk management framework that can adapt to changing business environment
72 | viEwpoint: the gRowth of data gRowth My Digital Contrail
18 | bEst of brEEd: doeS cloud Mean the end of taPe? Some cloud service providers go so far as to say their solutions eliminate tape. Is it true?
66 | tEch for govErnancE: encRyPtion: a BuzzwoRd, not a SilveR Bullet Consider four encryption components on the server side
06 72 70
3226
28
18 66
my Story26 | LeADeRS ZAP,NOT SAP V S Parthasarathy, group CiO, Mahindra & Mahindra talks about his views on leadership
SpeCial leaDerSHip SeCtion page 23 to 37
4 February 2012 4thectoforum.com 07 MONTH 2010 cto forum
a QueStion of anSwerS14 | iNNOVATe DURiNg CRiSiS Debdeep Sengupta, head – enterprise Sales, SAP, india, talks about the need for enterprises to innovate during crisis
Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj SinhaPrinter & Publisher: Anuradha Das Mathur
EditorialExecutive Editor: Yashvendra Singh
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advisory PanElAnil Garg, CIO, Dabur
David Briskman, CIO, RanbaxyMani Mulki, VP-IT, ICICI Bank
Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCo
Raghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of IndiaS R Mallela, Former CTO, AFL
Santrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla GroupSushil Prakash, Sr Consultant, NMEICT (National Mission on
Education through Information and Communication Technology)Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero MotoCorpVishal Salvi, CISO, HDFC Bank
Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay
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This issue of CIO&Leader includes 12 pages of CSO Forum free with the magazine
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58 | nExt horizons: techS dRiving it into tRanSition Some technology and cultural hot spots to pay attention to as we move through this year and beyond
advertisers’ index
iOmega IFC
Schneider 5
Check Point 7
Datacard 12 – 13
VMWare 55
Riverbed IBC
Microsoft BC
This index is provided as an additional service.The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.
62 | no holds barrEd: cyBeR weaPonS BiggeR iSSue than cyBeR waR Eugene Kaspersky, CEO, Kaspersky Lab talks about the growing threat of a cyber war
14
58 62
©2012 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, InfraStruxure, StruxureWare, and APC are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Schneider Electric India Pvt. Ltd., 9th Floor, DLF Building No. 10, Tower C, DLF Cyber City, Phase II, Gurgaon - 122 002, Haryana, India. Phone: +33 (0) 1 41 29 70 00 • 998-4108_IN-GB
Download White Paper #107: ‘How Data Center Infrastructure Management Software Improves Planning and Cuts Operational Costs’.Visit www.SEreply.com Key Code 15884p Toll Free 1800 4254 877/272
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An always available, efficient data centre What’s more, StruxureWare for Data Centres communicates in real time with the leading virtualization platforms: VMware vSphere™ and Microsoft® System Centre Virtual Machine Manager. The software’s built-in automated response capabilities ensure that virtual loads always have healthy host environments. With your VMs on healthy hosts, you can focus on running your data centre more efficiently. The software also gives insight into PUE/DCiE trending over time, enabling you to make intelligent energy management decisions. With StruxureWare for Data Centres planning and reporting capabilities, who’s the company hero now? You are!
APC™ by Schneider Electric™ is the pioneer of modular data centre infrastructure and innovative cooling technology. Its products and solutions, including InfraStruxure™, are an integral part of the Schneider Electric IT portfolio.
The strategic bridge between your data centre and your business? You.
Now, make informed decisions about your infrastructure:
> Plan proactively for needed capacity.
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> Streamline workflow management of your IT physical infrastructure to improve your business agility and availability.
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> Visualize change/capacity scenarios to improve your bottom line.
> View your current and historic PUE/DCiE and energy costs of subsystems to make intelligent energy management decisions.
Only StruxureWare for Data Centres enables a healthy, business-driven data centre
> Executive summary
How Data Center InfrastructureManagement Software ImprovesPlanning and Cuts Operational Costs
White Paper 107
CTO_Forum_Magazine_0221_15884p_IN.indd 1 2012-2-24 9:29:32
6 February 2012
Plan, Manage and Execute Datacentre migration should be done in such a way that the business continues uninterrupted
currentchallenge
ensuring a smooth and seamless datacentre migration
mission-critical reasons why such a move makes sense. The benefits of carefully planned and executed datacentre migration go well beyond what meets the eye of the user or customer. I believe, to bring in a seamless datacentre migration there are certain stages that need to be followed. These are as below. Stage 1 (Planning & Design): Define the scope and size of the project; plan, agree and allocate resources & budget; agree key determining factors, limitation, (network, security etc); undertake a risk analysis and complete due diligence activities; create project plan identifying the critical path & key resources; complete inventories of existing systems and interde-pendencies; identify future system requirements (pipeline for growth); create a step-by-step decommission-ing, rebuilding equipment plan, including health and safety proce-dures; determine interim equip-ment requirements to keep systems operational during the migration; devise a contingency plan to include illness, accidents and damage to equipment; define connectivity requirements and allocate adequate time for new connections; LAN design/ WAN detailed diagram. Stage 2 (Pre Migration): Check for readiness of racks, power circuits, cage and biometric reader; ensure back-up systems are in place & oper-ational; Data Backup (prior to migra-tion); check that transportation and buildings can cope with equipment size and weight.Stage 3 (Migration): Review deploy-ment teams' tasks and timelines; plan new space configuration and reference racks; install and test new data cabling (certification to be issued); ensure all identified pro-cesses and procedures are followed; checking on connectivity between hardware equipments; test network and application components.
Datacentre migration is often regarded as a purely technical, almost trivial side-project, to be delivered by existing IT staff alongside their day jobs. With core business services reliant on IT, a datacentre migration can expose the business itself to a significant degree of risk. Yet change is inevitable, and as the business grows, companies may find there are
I BelIeve the author has over two decades of experience in building information technology
solutions to drive business growth
By JayaBalan suBramanium CTO, Netmagic Solutions
8 February 2012
story InsIde
Worldwide Smartphone
Sales Soared 47% in Q4,
2011 Pg 10
million smartphone units sold worldwide in 2011
Volume Alone is Not Big Data: Gartner the research firm says that the data warehouse dBMs market is undergoing a transformationAccording to Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant
report for the data warehouse DBMS market, intro-duction of big data is causing transformational chang-es for both vendors and enterprise users.
The supplier side of the data warehouse database management system (DBMS) market consists of those vendors supplying DBMS products for the database infrastructure of a data warehouse and the required operational management controls, says Gartner.
This market is specific to DBMSs used as a platform for a data warehouse. It is important to note that a DBMS cannot be used as a data warehouse — rather, a data warehouse is deployed on a DBMS platform, says
Gartner. A data warehouse solution architecture can use many different data constructs and repositories. The definition of this market is changing and a DBMS will become only part of the overall market definition as the logical data warehouse continues to grow in acceptance.
A data warehouse DBMS is now expected to coor-dinate virtualisation strategies, as well as distributed and/or processing approaches such as MapReduce, to handle one aspect of big or extreme data situations.Volume alone is not Big Data. From 2012 onwards, defining the size of a warehouse will become less important and information asset access will become more important.
472data BrIefIng
EntErprisEround-up
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9February 2012
Microsoft released nine new security bul-letins fixing 21 vulnerabilities in all sup-ported versions of Internet explorer and the Windows operating system, Microsoft office and .net/silverlight in its February Patch Tuesday release.
QuIck Byte on securIty
Dassault Systèmes Acquires netvibes Intelligence technologies to enrich 3d experience platformdAssAult Systèmes has announced the acquisition of Netvibes, a company offer-
ing dashboard intelligence technologies to enrich 3D Experience platform.Netvibes is an internet platform that delivers a holistic snapshot of any key infor-
mation related to ‘my company’ or my ‘personal interest’. Netvibes offers an easy and fast way to create personalised dashboards for real-time monitoring, social analytics, knowledge sharing, and decision support.
Netvibes helps Fortune 500 brands such as the Coca-Cola Company and the US Department of Energy or advertising agencies like Universal McCann to monitor, analyse and understand everything inside and outside their company in real-time with dashboard intelligence, connecting critical information for better decision-making. All companies today face the challenge of adapting to the increasing speed and volume of information coming from multiple enterprise systems and the real-time Web.
With the acquisition of Netvibes, Dassault Systèmes reaffirms its belief that virtual worlds can improve the real world. Integrated into Dassault Systèmes’ 3D Experience platform, Netvibes will help customers reveal critical information such as consumer sentiment, brand image or the adherence rate of early adopters.
The low-cost Aakash tablet PC will be made completely indigenous and its production base diversified, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal said. He said the IITs and the ITIs are onboard on development of the device which has so far reached out to a handful of students.
— Kapil Sibal,
Union Minister for Sci-
ence and Technology
“We are planning to create eco-system for end to end development of Aakash in India. This will create enor-mous opportunities for R&D institutions, developers, elec-tronic production houses.”
They SAiD iT
KApilSibAl
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10 February 2012
Worldwide Smartphone Sales Soared 47% in Q4, 2011 total sales in 2011 reached 472 million unitsWorldWide smartphone sales to end users
soared to 149 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, a 47.3 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. Total smartphone sales in 2011 reached 472 million units and account-ed for 31 percent of all mobile devices sales, up 58 percent from 2010.
Smartphone volumes during the quarter rose due to record sales of Apple iPhones. As a result, Apple became the third-largest
mobile phone vendor in the world, overtak-ing LG. Apple also became the world's top smartphone vendor, with a market share of 23.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, and the top smartphone vendor for 2011 as a whole, with a 19 percent market share. "Western Europe and North America led most of the smartphone growth for Apple during the fourth quarter of 2011," said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner. "InWestern Europe the spike in
Mobile cloud traffic to account for 71%, or 7.6 exabytes per month, of total mobile data traffic by 2016, compared to 45% in 2011
iPhone sales in the fourth quarter saved the overall smartphone market after two con-secutive quarters of slow sales."
The quarter saw Samsung and Apple cement their positions further at the top of the market as their brands and new prod-ucts clearly stood out. LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Research In Motion (RIM) again recorded disappointing results as they struggled to improve volumes and profits significantly. These vendors were also exposed to a much stronger threat from the midrange and low end of the smartphone market as ZTE and Huawei continued to gain share during the quarter.
Worldwide mobile device sales to end users totaled 476.5 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, a 5.4 percent increase from the same period in 2010. In 2011 as a whole, end users bought 1.8 billion units, an 11.1 percent increase from 2010. "Expectations for 2012 are for the overall market to grow by about 7 percent, while smartphone growth is expected to slow to around 39 percent," said Annette Zimmermann, principal research analyst at Gartner.
In the fourth quarter of 2011, Nokia's mobile phone sales numbered 111.7 mil-lion units, an 8.7 percent decrease from last year. "Samsung closed the gap with Nokia in overall market share," said Cozza. "Sam-sung profited from strong smartphone sales of 34 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011. The troubled economic environment in Europe and Nokia's weakened brand sta-tus posed challenges that were hard to over-come in just one quarter. However, Nokia proved its ability to execute and deliver on time with its new Lumia 710 and 800 hand-sets. Nokia will have to continue to offer aggressive prices to encourage communi-cations service providers (CSPs) to add its products to portfolios currently dominated by Android-based devices.”
Apple had an exceptional fourth quarter, selling 35.5 million smartphones to end users, a 121.4 percent increase year on year. Apple's continued attention to channel management helped it take full advantage of the strong quarter to further close the gap with Samsung, which saw some inventory build up for its smartphone range. Apple's strong performance will continue into the first quarter of 2012 as availability of the iPhone 4S widens.
gloBal tracker
Growth in Mobile Cloud Traffic so
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11February 2012
india pC market Declined 6.5% in Q4, 2011 hp worst hit
talEo
O racle has entered into an
agreement to acquire taleo
corporation, a leading provider
of cloud-based talent manage-
ment for $46.00 per share or
approximately $1.9 billion, net of
taleo’s cash and debt.
taleo’s talent Management
cloud helps organisations
attract, develop, motivate and
retain human capital to improve
performance and drive growth.
together, oracle and taleo
expect to create a comprehen-
sive cloud offering for organisa-
tions to manage their human
resource operat ions and
employee careers. the combi-
nation is expected to empower
employees and managers to
effectively manage careers
throughout their entire employ-
ment, enable organisations to
retain talent and optimise costs,
and improve the employee expe-
rience through faster on board-
ing and better collaboration with
team members via social media.
the board of directors of taleo
has unanimously approved the
transaction. the transaction is
expected to close mid-year 2012,
subject to taleo stockholder
approval, certain regulatory
approvals and other customary
closing conditions.
“human capital management
has become a strategic initiative
for organisations,” said thomas
kurian, executive Vice president,
oracle development.
the combined desk-based and
mobile pc market in India totaled
nearly 2.5 million units in the fourth
quarter of 2011, a 6.5 per cent decrease
from the fourth quarter of 2010,
according to gartner, Inc.
“the hard-disk drive (hdd) short-
age due to the floods in thailand
significantly impacted the desktop
market which declined 18 percent
citrix has announced the general availability of Citrix CloudStack 3, the first release of the open-source cloud platform under the Citrix brand.
CloudStack is claimed to be the world’s most successful platform for public clouds, power-ing over $1 billion in revenue for more than 85 large-scale production clouds, including some of the biggest brands in the industry. With the new CloudStack 3 release, Citrix brings the power of Amazon-style clouds to customers of all sizes. For the first time, enterprise customers who want to
Citrix launches open Source Cloud Platform called cloudstack3
fact tIcker
year-on-year in the fourth quarter of
2011,” said Vishal tripathi, principal
research analyst at gartner. “white
boxes (including parallel import),
which accounted for 45 percent of the
overall desktop market, registered a
32 percent decline in the quarter com-
pared to Q4 2010. Mobile pcs, with
a 12 percent increase from the fourth
quarter of 2010, were able to stop a
further decline of the pc market.”
In the fourth quarter of 2011, lenovo
and dell recorded 28 percent and 11
percent growth respectively, while
hp declined 26 percent compared
to fourth quarter of 2010. Multina-
tional brands contributed more than
half of the total pc shipments in the
fourth quarter of 2011 with shipments
from acer, dell, hp and lenovo, the
top 4 vendors, representing 53.1 per-
cent of the market. local vendor hcl
accounted for 5.5 percent of pc ship-
ments in the fourth quarter of 2011,
with 34 percent year-on-year decline
from the fourth quarter of 2010.
build clouds the way the world’s most successful clouds are built, can quickly and easily transform virtualised datacenter resources into automated, elastic, self-service clouds.
Citrix CloudStack is a key component of the Citrix cloud computing portfolio, providing cus-tomers with solutions that make it easy to build new clouds, connect to existing cloud services, and deliver any cloud with the best security, per-formance and reliability.
Since its introduction, CloudStack has rapidly become the leading commercial open source platform for building, managing and deliver-ing highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds for a wide range of customers such as Datapipe, Edmunds.com, IDC Frontier, Nokia Research and Zynga.
CloudStack is designed to ensure organisations can build production cloud environments on a platform designed for economics, elasticity and scale. It is not a traditional enterprise server vir-tualisation platform with cloud-like management layers on top. Rather, it was designed from the ground up as an open, multi-hypervisor platform to help customers build public and private clouds the way the world’s most innovative clouds are built – simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient. New capabilities in CloudStack 3 focus on openness, flexibility and completeness.
Citrix is also unveiling a Citrix Cloud Commu-nity Program, which introduces over 2,200 prod-ucts and services that are Citrix Ready verified to work with Citrix cloud solutions. The program showcases hundreds of leading technology com-panies and service providers who are partnering with Citrix to build the largest cloud computing ecosystem in the industry.
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advts.indd 58 3/23/2010 2:32:15 PM
India Strategy: For the Indian market, Sengupta will be focusing on areas such as applications, analytics, cloud and mobility
A Q u e s t i o n o f A n s w e r s | D e b D e e p s e n g u p t A
14 February 2012
DebDeep Sengupta | SAP
Innovate During Crisis
In a conversation with Ankush Sohoni, Debdeep Sengupta, VP – Enterprise Sales, SAP India, talks about the need for enterprises to innovate during the time of crisis, and how they can get the edge by deploying real time analytics
What is SAPs HANA strategy for large enterprises?
We are seeing a significant amount of momentum from customers specifi-cally in adopting innovate and cutting edge technology. Technology just for the sake of technology does not mat-ter, but what really matters is the fact that a technology can help you figure out a solution to your problem and help your enterprise in a certain way.
Every technology is good or bad depending on how customers are using it - that is the context. Given the economic fluxes in recent times we have seen that a lot of customers have involved themselves in strate-gic initiatives while looking at the bigger picture and thinking ahead.
That is one of the key learnings that our customers have had. Knee jerk reactions are a thing of the past and there are two to three aspects of dealing with a scenario depending on the kind of business environ-ment– Brick and Mortar, Retail or Banking. This typically defines busi-ness growth and innovation.
Most CEOs are concerned with growth and how to improve opera-tional skills. We have seen a lot of business models in many businesses and what has come under common thread is customers who do not innovate in terms of customer seg-mentation, product strategy are not successful in tough times. One of the key learnings that have happened in
recent economic times is that, if you don’t innovate whether you’re a large player or a small player it is difficult to sustain through a moment of cri-ses. We have seen this as a common thread among various customers and accounts. SAP’s real time analytics have really paid off well, because the customer is using the technology to leverage their own internal business innovation process. We find that customers are pretty happy – because our philosophy and theirs are very similar – because be it in tough economic times or in the good times – innovation is crucial. This is why we have seen major interest in our technologies like HANA and In-Memory computing.
D e b D e e p s e n g u p t A | A Q u e s t i o n o f A n s w e r s
15February 2012
What opportunities exist in the large enterprise market?
HANA scenarios are not being built by SAP but by customers. I’ll give you an example. If you look at a company like Essar – they are very diversified being into oil and gas, metals, technology and so on. With a technology like HANA, customers can innovate no matter what indus-try they are in. In downstream oil and gas marketing, a business that Essar is in, there are quite a few sce-narios which will be very applicable.
Wherever the customer requires high end analytics, HANA will be very applicable. Most customers are adopting technologies like HANA to get that competitive advantage. That’s where we are seeing trends. If you look at what Google has done. If I need to know anything about anything, I just Google it. Similarly within an enterprise if I need to know my financial account-ing information it shouldn’t be too difficult to process. Today technolo-gies like HANA are making this as simple and fast as possible so as to provide data at any given time in real time. Data can come from social networks, excel sheets and so on. So HANA kind of brings things togeth-er, and looks at real time insights.
How are you planning on bringing more customers on
board?Well we are looking to evangelise our platform, but at the end of the day a customer is only going to take what they need. Of course it’s a dif-ferent thing that we know that this technology can be utilized by the customers in many innovative ways, but currently the market seems to be hungry for solutions of this kind. Another thing about our HANA platform is that it becomes very easy to scale. The beauty of In-Memory computing is that systems are extremely fast, flexible and scalable. This is a huge value add for our cus-tomers and for any one who needs information in an enterprise. We do
organisation. Using Sybase we are focused on mobility. We are looking at how we can enable internal and external processes.
The second aspect which every CIO is looking at is building a cloud strat-egy. The question of which of their processes they will have in-house and the one’s they will give to third par-ties is plaguing most CIOs today.
Most users are very seriously look-ing at analytics. If I look at the west, they do not depend upon the CIO or the IT department for daily reports. They look at reports themselves and slash and dice data using tools. It is impossible for IT departments, to keep up with speed and keep drilling into data. In India this trend is catch-ing on too. We want to be in a posi-tion where we can help build these platforms for Indian enterprises and enable everyone who needs access to information to have access to plat-forms like HANA.
not believe that people need to wait for data. We bring data to them when they want access to it. The funny thing is customers today are coming to us and asking us how they can utilize HANA effectively within their enterprises, as opposed to us going to them and showing them its value.
What else does SAP have brewing for the Indian mar-
ket?We will focus on a few areas, such as applications, analytics, the cloud, mobility. We are not just an appli-cation company but a provider of platforms. Today there are a billion mobile phones in the country. The question is how can I take advan-tage of that as a business. How can I open up to new consumers that I haven’t been able to reach before using mobility as a platform. Mobil-ity is a top of mind concern for every customer. Every customer is evalu-ating mobile strategies for their
“Customers are adopting technologies like Hana to get that competitive advantage”
there is a
significant
amount of
momentum
from customers
specifically
in adopting
innovative and
cutting edge
technology
those who do
not innovate in
terms of customer
segmentation,
product strategy
are not successful
in tough times
Most users are
seriously looking
at analytics
thIngs I BelIeve In
A Q u e s t i o n o f A n s w e r s | D e b D e e p s e n g u p t A
16 February 2012
18 February 2012
Best ofBreed
Thriving by Embracing Disruptive Practices Pg 20
FEaTurE InsIDE
Does Cloud Mean the End of Tape?
some cloud backup and recovery service providers go so far as to say their solutions eliminate tape. Is it true?
By Dick Fordham
With the rapid maturing of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services enabled by the convergence of virtualisation, highly efficient disk-based backup technology and high bandwidth networks, enterprises can now design disaster recovery (DR) strategies driven by their core business objectives -- instead of doing it the other way around.
After all, how many companies can actually afford to be out of business for the several days it
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19February 2012
s t o r a g e | B e s t o f B r e e d
could take to retrieve tapes from storage and then restore systems, applications and data if tape provided their only backup?
Today’s disk- and cloud-based backup and recovery solutions support modern day business continuity and DR requirements by storing customer data on multiple mir-rored disk systems from which almost any virtual or physical replacement server can be quickly repopulated. In the event of a disaster, companies can resume opera-tions in a matter of hours or even minutes. Emphasising these advantages, some cloud backup and recovery service providers go so far as to say their solutions eliminate tape.
The cloudBut does the cloud really mean the end of tape?
No. While no dynamic or data-intensive business can depend solely on tape for acceptable backup and recovery, this year’s highly publicised cloud services failures such as at Google and Amazon demon-strate that neither can one depend solely on the cloud.
Tape can still fill an important role in many companies’ DR plans as part of a hybrid disk-cloud-tape solution; one that assigns different tiers of data to the storage technology that best meets an organisa-tion’s varied recovery point and recovery time objectives.
At a minimum, such a solution employs tape for economical and secure long-term retention and archiving of data that does not require the immediate access of higher cost disk storage. After 50 years, time for a better approach
Traditional IT disaster recovery models have been constrained by the limitations of tape backup technology. For decades, companies backed up data to tape on their own premises on a weekly basis, with daily incremental backups to capture changes, and then rotated those copies through off-site storage. In case of disaster, the appropri-ate tapes would be delivered by truck to a disaster recovery facility, where the backed up data would be copied from them into an exact duplicate of the production data center infrastructure. If a company was lucky, this process could be completed in a few days.
Longer recovery points and times and the cost of duplicate hardware were not the only drawbacks to this traditional approach.
The model was strategically upside-down in that a company’s DR efforts could deliver only a speed of recovery that was tactically achievable rather than what was strategically necessary.
Disk backup systems provided a signifi-cant advance over tape, enabling more fre-quent snapshots of ongoing operations and much shorter recovery times. Under such continuous use, disks are also much more reliable than tape. But disk storage systems, in particular high-end storage area networks required by the largest organisations, can be costly. And they are not portable like tape, requiring some other method of replicating backed-up data to an offsite location.
This obstacle was overcome through the combination of several enabling technologies.
First was advanced deduplication and compression that reduced the backup foot-print, helping to contain storage hardware requirements. Next was the availability of high bandwidth networks that increased the practicality of transmitting these com-pressed backup files to remote backup facili-ties or service providers. Finally, virtualisa-tion eliminated the need and cost to exactly replicate production data center hardware at the DR facility.
Companies can now meet their backup and recovery requirements in a variety of physical-to-virtual, virtual-to-virtual, virtual-to-physical and traditional physical-to-physi-cal configurations.
These technologies have now given rise to cloud backup and recovery: the provision of software, platforms and infrastructure as a service to enable an integrated backup and recovery process, accessible from anywhere, at any time, via any carrier. In a complete reversal of the old tape-based model, cloud backup and recovery enables a strategically-driven DR approach in which an organisation can set a minimum
acceptable time for accessing data and resuming operations following a disaster.
For organisations seeking shorter recov-ery point and recovery time objectives, cloud backup and recovery fills the gap between the matter-of-minutes recovery delivered by costly, high-end SAN replica-tion and the multi-day recovery achiev-able with tapes and trucks. Cloud backup and recovery provides same-day recovery, restoring business operations in hours as opposed to days or even weeks, with as lit-tle as 15 minutes of data loss all at a lower cost than tape-based processes.The death of tape is greatly exaggeratedSo has the cloud eliminated the need for tape, as some service providers claim? Not at all.
Just ask the 150,000 or more Gmail customers who would have lost data were it not for tape. When Google’s February 2011 update of storage software went awry, it not only emptied users’ accounts but also rendered Google’s redundant cloud-based copies unavailable. Google was, however, able to restore users’ data from offline tape backups.
Unfortunately, many customers of Ama-zon EC2 cloud services didn’t fare as well when a network change in April 2011 led to a failure that disabled some high-profile sites for days and left many customers with permanent data loss.
Since tape is not mentioned in any media coverage of the failure, one can only assume that the same type of tape backup that saved Google customers’ data was not available at Amazon.
Replication of backed up data to redun-dant, mirrored physical or virtual storage systems is a disaster recovery best practice, but only if the multiple backups are them-selves not vulnerable to the same threat. As unlikely as the simultaneous failure of all backups may be, one important role for
Cloud backup and recovery provides same-day recovery, restoring business operations in hours as opposed to days or even weeks
20 February 2012
B e s t o f B r e e d | s t o r a g e
tape in the era of the cloud is as the ultimate backup for data that resides, well, who knows where?
A hybrid solutionAs demonstrated in the Gmail recovery, secure offline storage is the minimum role that tape should play in a hybrid backup and recovery solution that combines on-site disk backup, physical or virtual cloud-based storage and tape.
Tape can also remain an effective and economical back-up choice for platforms hosting an organisation’s less-than-mis-sion-critical data. For lower tier data for which longer recovery times are acceptable, tape can be a more affordable solution than disk. A hybrid backup and recovery solution allows IT to devote the appropriate resources to different tiers of data, assuring that high priority data can be made available in the least amount of time, while lower priority data is restored as needed.
Tape is clearly the most economical and possibly the technically superior choice for long-term storage and archiving, especially for organisations subject to any of the esti-mated 10,000 regulations covering data retention, integrity and security. When tape is used for long-term storage, most problems
associated with it become non-issues. Tapes stored in environ-mentally controlled vaults with-out being continually handled, mounted, read and written to deliver extremely high reliability.
For the quality and com-pleteness of their own service (if not for the customer’s own peace of mind) a service pro-vider should offer the option of tape backup as additional assurance that in the event of a disaster, the customer will
achieve a complete recovery.The choice and design of a backup and
DR approach should always be driven by an organisation’s actual recovery require-ments: How little data can we afford to lose (recovery point) and how quickly must we
be back in business putting that data to work (recovery time).
For some organisations, only the fastest SAN-based replication will suffice. Others will be well served by the latest cloud back-up and recovery services.
But in addition to achieving the fastest possible recovery, organisations also need effective redundancy in their backup pro-gram to assure that the data required for recovery is available when it’s needed.
As the volume of backed-up data eventu-ally grows, disk storage can become too costly to provide that redundancy. A hybrid solution that includes regular backup to tape can provide customers a cost-effective combination of today’s most advanced back-up technologies with the proven longevity of tape stored securely offline.
—Dick Fordham is Director of Corporate Strat-
egy for Recovery Point, a leading provider of
Disaster Recovery services.
—This article has been reprinted with permis-
sion from CIO Update. To see more articles
regarding IT management best practices, please
visit www.cioupdate.com.
70%of Businesses
reported schedule overruns and 64% reported Budget
overruns on migrating to neW
storage technologies
Thriving by Embracing Disruptive Practices
these are uncertain times, and changes bring both frustra-tions and opportunities to organisations that are working to sustain stability long enough to return value from the previ-ous round of changes.
It’s a delicate balance to hold on to in a chaotic environ-ment, but one that can be sustained if, oddly, you’re willing to let go.
There has been a lot written about disruptive technologies or revolutionary innovations (e.g., mass produced automobile, plastic,
inexpensive laser printer, compact disks, the Internet, e-mail, digital cameras) that displace existing technologies and create new value networks at the expense of sustaining or evolutionary technological improvements. However, the IT revolution’s impact on business products, marketing vehicles, and customer demands has also had a powerful influence on IT practices.
Ignoring these revolutionary changes while focusing on shorter-term evolutionary changes like cloud computing may leave many
recognising the forces of change allows leaders to adjust their position to leverage what seems like chaos, but is actually a pattern in a bigger context By Donn DiNunno
21February 2012
m a n a g e m e n t | B e s t o f B r e e d
organisations and project management offices behind the times. Not because of failing to adopt technological advances, but by failing to align with and leverage emerging and revolutionary work practices.
Here are some of the fundamental process and best practice changes that IT organisations must contend with to remain com-petitive and relevant to their customers:Requirements cannot be “captured” - The repeatable and defined process principle is flawed. There is no repeatable/defined organi-sational environment due to cost and schedule pressures coupled with quality and productivity requirements. Capturing these require-ments and then delivering them is impossible when they are not well defined and keep changing. The changes affect the architecture, the solution, the process, and the skills needed to deliver a solution.Risks cannot be mitigated - In truth, even a few small unknowns can greatly influ-ence an outcome. Know-ing which uncertainties to avoid, manage, mitigate, transfer, or accept assumes knowledge that doesn’t exist. By the time a risk is identified to be proactively handled it is already an issue and the best reaction is to hope it will become overcome by events.Planning is a waste of time and resources - Planning becomes a casualty of a chaotic environment. Not only do plans change, but the plan becomes hard to follow, difficult to keep up to date, and expensive to enforce or verify in a changing environment. Fre-quently, the belief that time spent planning is time not spent getting things done is a valid complaint.Technology is a constraint - Once technology is adopted by an organisation, it often becomes a constraining structure that restricts the opportunity space of the user instead of extending human capabilities. The solution becomes difficult to change, and the investment becomes a commodity that must be replaced before it returns value.Value cannot be measured - The quest for proof of the value of IT investment is fruitless when an IT innovation must become ubiq-uitous to be of value. And as a commodity that is readily available to competitors, it is no longer a competitive advantage. Users are doing things today that would not have been attempted before, but like inflation the measure of performance is also raised for everyone. And besides, tracking performance is demoralising to the workforce being monitored as well as to the control analysts who have to collect
data while the auditors’ findings reveal little that isn’t known already about what needs to be corrected.
If such changing conditions are here to stay what happens to any semblance of governance, controls, manager assurance, demand management, or predictive analytics? Loosening up on rules doesn’t mean abandoning them altogether.New road conditions ahead -New operating practices are needed to survive in this chaos. Fortunately, past best practices are not entirely obsolete. Activities such as market research, innovation, architecture, project management, engineering and organisational change management are still required. But virtual teams, tele-working, social media, agile organisations, collaborative cultures, participative management, and practices that embrace change are the
disruptive influences that must become embedded into the fabric of leading organisations.
These revolutionary changes are a result of a surge in individual freedom; not necessarily because more opportu-nities are available, but because people of all ages are seeking something bet-ter, or at least something different. There is a general unease and a feeling of discontent or of being off-centered and a willingness to do something about it.
Loyalty to one company and working towards a career is no longer an expectation. The blurring or industry boundaries has diluted brands, and the ups and downs of the market has eroded con-sumer confidence.
Recognising the chaotic forces in the organisation is the first step toward adopting and adapting best practices that balance the forces of change against the value of sustaining existing approach-es. Looking for new approaches and abandoning successful ones when they become easy for competitors to imitate is the strategy for sustaining success.
For example, perhaps the eight hour workday and getting paid for punching the clock is no longer an effective means of compen-sation. Replace salaries with a pay-for-services approach based on a work breakdown structure (WBS) cost loaded and assigned to a virtual team. Individuals charge time to deliverables, but when esti-mated cost is exceeded pay is suspended until a newly negotiated WBS is established based on evaluated outcomes.
The necessary changes are as tailorable as there are different organi-sations. If planning is too detailed then accept less formal plans. If the
Even a few small unknowns can greatly influence an outcome
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organisation is risk averse then find ways to allow more risky but par-allel endeavors that diversify and balance scenarios. If measurement is costly then raise measurement up a notch and eliminate measures that are stable and no longer valuable for decision-making.
Finding the right balance is easier said than done. Root cause analysis is an effective tool for exploring the alternatives to embed and leverage changed practices.The revolution reveals itself - What might the new practices look like? Planning is replaced with self-directed teams who propose what needs to be done, and timebox what has not been done. Risk management is replaced with scenario discussions that focus on what is important as opposed to urgent. Mea-surement is limited to collective outcomes. Technology is applied as flexibly as is practical, but how work gets done is not enforced, and CIOs won’t be put in a position of selling technology to the organisation. Assurance is lowered in constructing products and when validating a result. Solution acceptance comes earlier as customers take ownership in shaping the solution.
Targeted training will be a key factor in keeping staff and in establishing a workforce that can survive the chaos. It is ironic that when so many people are look-ing for work that employers in most fields face increasingly severe shortages of qualified, willing workers. The shortfall is most obvious in the 18-24 age range -- the population group most expected to fill the entry level jobs.Getting the chaos under control requires a multi-layered approach:
1 Modernise leadership and governance boards to stay attuned to flexible work practices.2 Change the corporate culture to the kind of place people want
to work.3 Loosen up rules to motivate individuals and strengthen the rela-
tionship between employees and their immediate supervisors to build up workforce longevity.4 Empower workers with a clear sense of mission.5 Become more adaptable, agile, responsive to shifting circumstances.
6 Support a well trained workforce.7 Get closer to customers (e.g., focus groups, cross-selling,
satisfaction surveys, targeted marketing, transaction analy-sis, customer maps).
The balancing rule is to ignore the hype that precedes evolutionary change and listen to that inner voice of reason that looks at the broader value chain. When a pendulum swings back the world is always in a slightly different position, but recognising the forces of change allows leading managers and organisations to adjust their position to leverage what seems like chaos, but is actually a pattern in a bigger context.
—Dr. Donn DiNunno is Quality Director at EM&I, whose consultants specialise in
the areas of strategy, governance and engineering.
—This article has been reprinted with permission from CIO Update. To see
more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit www.
cioupdate.com.
50%cost reductions
that enterprises can realise By integrating
communities into customer support
“I suppose leadership at one time meant
muscles; but today it means getting along
with people.”—MahatMa Gandhi
23February 2012
SpecIal
leaderShIp SectIon
CIO&LEADER This special section on leadership has been designed keeping in mind the evolving role of CIOs. The objective is to provide an eclectic mix of leadership articles and opinions from top consultants and gurus as well as create a platform for peer learning. Here is a brief description of each sub-section that will give you an idea of what to expect each month from CIO&Leader:
An opinion piece on leadership penned by leadership gurus. Plus, an insightful article from a leading consulting firm
The article/interview will track the leadership journey of a CIO/CXO to the top. It will also provide insights into how top leaders think about leadership
This feature focusses on how CIOs run IT organisations in their company as if they were CEOs. It will comment on whether IT should have a separate P&L, expectation management of different LoB heads, HR policies within IT, operational issues, etc. This section will provide insights into the challenges of putting a price on IT services, issues of changing user mindset, squeezing more value out of IT, justifying RoI on IT, attracting and retaining talent, and competing against external vendors
Cross leveraging our strong traction in the IT Manager community, this section will have interviews/features about IT Managers and CIOs talking about their expectations, working styles and aspirations. In this section, a Mentor and a Mentee will identify each other’s strengths and weaknesses, opine on each other’s style of functioning, discuss the biggest lessons learnt from each other, talk about memorable projects and shared interests
Featuring a top CIO/Technology Company Head and the best guidance/recommendation he received with respect to his personal or professional growth. The advice could relate to dealing with people, managing personal finance, and balancing work and life
A one-page review of a book on leadership
top down Me & MY Mentee
MY StorYleadIng edge 2826
25 3332
37
the beSt advIce I ever got
ShelF lIFe
24 February 2012
I n t r o d u c t I o n
Go Beyond Being a CIO Subramanya C from Hinduja Global Solutions talks to CIO&Leader about what it takes to be the 'Tech CEO' of the IT department
unit, he cannot restrict himself to providing only technology solutions. I, therefore, get involved in business as much as possible and play an active
role in making decisions that will have an impact on my business. It is impor-tant for me to define the roadmap looking ahead so that I can innovate and offer my customers better solutions. There are challenges too donning the hat of a business unit head. One of the most important steps of becoming a 'Tech CEO' is to accept the fact that most of the time you will be out of your comfort zone, while trying to understand the business and playing around in an area where you don’t know much. However, one has to leave the core area of expertise and face new challenges. Without this, there is no evolution or growth – both of which are extremely important from a leadership perspective.
If we talk about expectations, things have changed. There was a time when CIOs needed to provide RoI studies before making a decision to purchase a particular technology – in most cases an ERP. Today enterprises are dependent on so much technology that they themselves understand the need for technology. In fact today a lot of requests for technology implementations come from the business side. This gives the CIO a chance to offload core technology work to juniors and participate in strategic conversations with other C-Level executives.
A CIO in today's enterprise cannot be an isolated unit. He has to take the onus of running a lean IT organisa-tion and servicing the organisation in more than one way. This is even more important in an ITeS company like mine wherein a CIO has to realise that his role is crucial in driving the organisation.
For a CIO, the important thing to remember is never to fall into the trap of restricting business practices. There are times when technology decision-makers are afraid or hesitant of change. However, it should be the other way round. For a technology leader, it is very important to go out of the comfort zone and try new things that can chal-lenge him.
One thing that I do is to participate more in the busi-ness side of things. Participating in discussions with the board and helping the organisation realise the value of IT as an enabler and game changer is very important. For someone to run his department as a separate P&L
top downSubraManYa ccto, hInduja global SolutIonS
25February 2012
In a candid interview with CIO&Leader, V S Parthasarathy, Group CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra talks about his view on leadership and what it takes to create a vision for the future
V S Parthasarathy serves as Group Chief Information Officer and Executive
Vice President of Finance M&A at Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. Parthasarathy has varied experience in corporate finance, international operations, mergers & acquisitions and business planning. He has been with Farm Equipment Sector of M&M for almost 8 years and led various critical corporate functions. Before M&M, he worked with Xerox India for 14 years.
What in your view is being a leader all about?
The key thing about being a leader is creat-ing a vision for the future. If you have it in you to excite people, they will follow will-ingly. The other thing about leadership is setting goals that will take the company or the unit or even yourself to the next level.
Leadership is not about doing — it is about enabling others to do. It is about cre-ating the right environment for others to achieve. So here we have spoken about cre-ating vision and goals. However, giving peo-ple an environment that empowers them to willingly follow your vision is of the utmost importance. It is not about monitoring or forcing something down people’s throats. It is about expressing what you want done and
letting them figure out how by giving them the right environment.
Leadership is like the two banks of a river. The river flows and if it isn’t for the banks, it dissipates. As Rabindranath Tagore said, “Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.”
How does one create this vision that you are referring to?
Leadership is about leading from the front. It’s about showcasing what’s important. If I am saying that the customer is impor-tant — leadership lies in demonstrating the same. Leadership is also about making yourself quickly dispensable. If you don’t create tomorrow’s leaders from today’s pool of talent, you will be at a stage when you will start becoming a burden on the entire sys-tem. Your inability to move will become the bottleneck in the system and will choke the entire pipeline.
This is all on the front of drive and goal.The other aspect is what people really mean to you. The key thing is how much time you spend on people development and empathy. If I take care of my people, my people take care of my customers and everyone together
takes care of my value creation. None of these happen automatically.
My biggest achievement is not what I did in the past, but how many MDs and CEOs I have helped create. That’s my legacy. The other dimension is ethics. Being fair and being perceived as fair are equally impor-tant. This is the difference between being a manager and a leader. This is about stand-ing for something important. A leader will always say something that can help pull you up — not push you down. The zap factor is important. A good leader can zap you in such a way where you come out thinking you can conquer the world. A traditional manager will sap you and drain your energy.
What was the point in your career that transformed you from a tech-
nologist to a technology leader?I had the privilege of coming into a technology area through general management. My first tryst with IT was when we thought we would open a new business channel for Xerox — a BPO for Xerox worldwide. We were one of the first companies to implement ERP using a Cobol base. So I had the good fortune of being able to move into it. But you may also ask the question a little differently. When did
Leaders Zap,not Sap
MY StorY v S parthaSarathY
26 February 2012
v S p a r t h a S a r a t h Y | I n t e r v I e w
51 The key thing
about being a leader is creating a vision for the future
2 Leadership is not about doing – it is about enabling others to do
3 Giving people an environment that empowers them to willingly follow your vision is of utmost importance
4 If I take care of my people, my people take care of my customers and everyone together takes care of my value creation
5 My biggest achievement is not what I did in the past, but how many MDs and CEOs I have helped create
poIntS
I move from being a chartered accountant to a general manager? So the key thing is that people either have a natural aptitude, and some people strive towards the opportunities that are dealt to them. So if you don’t take the effort to cross over you will always remain a functional head. For example, when I was first asked in Mahindra and Mahindra to make a strategy for international operations it was for the tractor line of business. They were looking
for a person to head it. I took a few interviews of candidates but my bosses asked me if I could do it considering I knew the intricacies of the business. And I said why not — I will. If they could trust me I would do my best.
But there is always a huge risk when you decide to leave your comfort zone. In my case from a functional head to a creator of profit. When the opportunity comes you have to take the risk. The fear that you will
drown in between will exist but you must have the strength to give it your all.
Aptitude is not accepting restrictions on what you are being dealt and wanting more. One has to have a solution mindset and it has to come from within. How does one develop this? Well if you have a role model in mind — you have a direction and a path that you want to take. In addition to this, the only thing that remains is luck!
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How leaders kill meaning at workAs A sEnIOr executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organisation who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle, found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most impor-tant is making progress in meaningful work.
Even incremental steps forward—small wins—boost what we call “inner work life”: the constant flow of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that constitute a person’s
reactions to the events of the work day. Beyond affecting the well-being of employees, inner work life affects the bottom line. People are more creative, productive, committed, and collegial in their jobs when they have positive inner work lives. But it’s not just any sort of progress in work that matters. The first, and fundamental, requirement is that the work be meaningful to the people doing it.
In our book and a recent Harvard Busi-ness Review article, we argue that managers at all levels routinely—and unwittingly—undermine the meaningfulness of work for their direct subordinates through everyday words and actions. These include dismiss-ing the importance of subordinates’ work or ideas, destroying a sense of ownership by
switching people off project teams before work is finalised, shifting goals so fre-quently that people despair that their work will ever see the light of day, and neglecting to keep subordinates up to date on changing priorities for customers.
But what about a company’s most senior leaders? What is their role in making—or killing—meaning at work? To be sure, as a high-level leader, you have fewer opportuni-ties to directly affect the inner work lives of employees than do frontline supervisors. Yet your smallest actions pack a wallop because what you say and do is intensely observed by people down the line. A sense of purpose in the work, and consistent action to reinforce it, has to come from the top.
Most executives don’t act as though progress matters. You can do better
tereSa aMabIleleadIng edge THE AuTHOr Is Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of
Business Administration, Harvard Business School
28 February 2012
Four trapsTo better understand the role of upper-level managers, we recently dug back into our data: nearly 12,000 daily electronic diaries from dozens of professionals working on important innovation projects at seven North American companies. We selected those entries in which diarists mentioned upper- or top-level managers—868 narratives in all.
Qualitative analysis of the narratives high-lighted four traps that lie in wait for senior executives. Most of these pitfalls showed up in several companies. Six of the seven suffered from one or more of the traps, and in only a single company did leaders avoid them. The existence of this outlier suggests that it is possible for senior executives to sus-
tain meaning consistently, but that’s difficult and requires vigilance.
This article should help you determine whether you risk falling into some of these traps yourself—and unknowingly dragging your organisation into the abyss with you. We also offer a few thoughts on avoiding the problems, advice inspired by the actions and words of a senior leader at the one company that did so.
We are convinced that executives who sidestep these traps reduce their risk of inad-vertently draining meaning from the work of the people in their organisations. Those lead-ers also will boost the odds of tapping into the motivational power of progress—some-thing surprisingly few do.
Our survey showed that most executives don’t understand the power of progress in meaningful work. And the traps revealed by the diaries suggest that most executives don’t act as though progress matters. You can do better.
Trap 1: Mediocrity signalsMost likely, your company aspires to greatness, articulating a high purpose for the organisation in its corporate mis-sion statement. But are you inadvertently signaling the opposite through your words and actions?
We saw this dynamic repeatedly at a well-known consumer products company we’ll call Karpenter Corporation, which was experiencing a rapid deterioration in the inner work lives of its employees as a result of the actions of a new top-man-agement team. Within three years of our studying Karpenter, it had become unprof-itable and was acquired by a smaller rival.
Karpenter’s top-management team espoused a vision of entrepreneurial cross-functional business teams. In theory, each team would operate autonomously, managing its share of the company’s resources to back its own new-product innovations. During the year we collected data from Karpenter teams, the annual report was full of references to the company’s innovation focus; in the first five sentences, “innovation” appeared three times.
In practice, however, those top managers were so focused on cost savings that they repeatedly negated the teams’ autonomy, dic-tated cost reduction goals that had to be met before any other priorities were, and—as a result—drove new-product innovation into the ground. This unintended, de facto hypocrisy took its toll, as a diary excerpt from a longtime Karpenter product engineer emphasises:
t e r e S a a M a b I l e | l e a d I n g e d g eIL
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29February 2012
Today I found out that our team will be concentrating on [cost savings] for the next several months instead of any new products. It is getting very difficult to concentrate on removing pennies from the standard cost of an item. That is the only place that we have control over. Most of the time, quality suffers. It seems that our competition is putting out new products at a faster rate. We are no longer the leader in innovation. We are the followers.
This employee’s work had begun to lose its meaning, and he wasn’t alone. Many of the other 65 Karpenter professionals in our study felt that they were doing mediocre work for a mediocre company—one for which they
had previously felt fierce pride. By the end of our time collecting data at Karpenter, many of these employees were completely disen-gaged. Some of the very best had left.
The mediocrity trap was not unique to Kar-penter. We saw it revealed in different guises in several of the companies we studied. At a chemicals firm, it stemmed from the top managers’ risk aversion. Consider these words from one researcher there:
A proposal for liquid/medical filtration using our new technology was tabled for the second time by the Gate 1 committee (five directors that screen new ideas). Although we had plenty of info for this stage of the game, the committee is uncomfortable with the risk and liability. The team, and myself, are frustrated about hurdles that we don’t know how to answer.
This company’s leaders also inadvertently signaled that, despite their rhetoric about being innovative and cutting edge, they were really more comfortable being ordinary.
Trap 2: Strategic ‘attention deficit disorder’As an experienced leader, you probably scan your company’s external environment con-stantly for guidance in making your next stra-tegic moves. What are competitors planning? Where are new ones popping up? What’s hap-pening in the global economy, and what might the implications be for financing or future market priorities? You are probably brimming with ideas on where you’d like to take the
company next. All of that is good, in theory.In practice, we see too many top managers
start and abandon initiatives so frequently that they appear to display a kind of atten-tion deficit disorder (ADD) when it comes to strategy and tactics. They don’t allow suffi-cient time to discover whether initiatives are working, and they communicate insufficient rationales to their employees when they make strategic shifts.
Karpenter’s strategic ADD seemed to stem from its leaders’ short attention span, perhaps fueled by the CEO’s desire to embrace the latest management trends. The problem was evident in decisions at the level of product lines and extended all the way up to corporate strategy. If you blinked, you could miss the next strategic shift. In one employee’s words:
A quarterly product review was held with
members of the [top team] and the general manager and president. Primary outcome from the meeting was a change in direction away from spray jet mops to revitalisation of existing window squeegees. Four priorities were defined for product development, none of which were identified as priorities at our last quarterly update. The needle still points north, but we’ve turned the compass again.
At another company we studied, strategic ADD appeared to stem from a top team war-ring with itself. Corporate executives spent many months trying to nail down a new market strategy. Meanwhile, different vice presidents were pushing in different direc-tions, rendering each of the leaders incapable of giving consistent direction to their people. This wreaked havoc in the trenches. One diarist, a project manager, felt that rather than committing herself to doing something great for particular customers, she needed to hedge her bets:
The VP gave us his opinion of which target candidates [ for new products] may fit with overall company strategy—but, in reality, neither he nor anyone in our management structure knows what the strategy is. It makes this project a real balancing act—we need to go forward, but need to weigh com-mitments very carefully.
If high-level leaders don’t appear to have their act together on exactly where the organisation should be heading, it’s awfully difficult for the troops to maintain a strong sense of purpose.
Trap 3: Corporate Keystone KopsIn the early decades of cinema, a popular series of silent-film comedies featured the Keystone Kops—fictional policemen so incompetent that they ran around in circles, mistakenly bashed each other on the head, and fumbled one case after another. The title of that series became synonymous with miscoordination. Our research found that many executives who think everything is going smoothly in the everyday workings of their organisations are blithely unaware that they preside over their own corporate version of the Keystone Kops. Some contribute to the farce through their actions, others by failing to act. At Karpenter, for example, top manag-ers set up overly complex matrix reporting structures, repeatedly failed to hold support
“Our survey shows that most executives don’t understand the power of progress in meaningful work.”
30 February 2012
l e a d I n g e d g e | t e r e S a a M a b I l e
functions (such as purchasing and sales) accountable for coordinated action, and displayed a chronic indecisiveness that bred rushed analyses. In the words of one diarist:
Last-minute changes continue on [an important customer’s] assortments. Rather than think through the whole process and logically decide which assortments we want to show [the customer], we are instead using a shotgun approach of trying multiple assort-ments until we find one that works. In the meantime, we are expending a lot of time and effort on potential assortments only to find out later that an assortment has been dropped.
Although Karpenter’s example was egre-gious, the company was far from alone in creating chaotic situations for its workers.
When coordination and support are absent within an organisation, people stop believ-ing that they can produce something of high quality. This makes it extremely difficult to maintain a sense of purpose.
Trap 4: Misbegotten ‘big, hairy, audacious goals’Management gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras encourage organisations to develop a “big, hairy, audacious goal” (BHAG)—a bold strategic vision statement that has power-ful emotional appeal. BHAGs help infuse work with meaning by articulating the goals of the organisation in a way that connects emotionally with peoples’ values.
At some companies, however, such state-ments are grandiose, containing little rel-evance or meaning for people in the trenches. They can be so extreme as to seem unattain-able and so vague as to seem empty. The result is a meaning vacuum. Cynicism rises and drive plummets. Although we saw this trap clearly in only one of the seven companies we studied, we think it is sufficiently seductive
When coordination and support are absent within an organisation, people stop believing that they can produce something of high quality
and dangerous to warrant consideration.That company, a chemicals firm, set a
BHAG that all projects had to be innovative blockbusters that would yield a minimum of $100 million in revenue annually, within five years of a project’s initiation. This goal did not infuse the work with meaning, because it had little to do with the day-to-day activi-ties of people in the organisation. It did not articulate milestones toward the goal; it did not provide for a range of experiments and outcomes to meet it; worst of all, it did not connect with anything the employees valued. Most of them wanted to provide something of value to their customers; an aggressive revenue target told them only about the value to the organisation, not to the customer. Far from what Collins and Porras intended, this misbegotten BHAG was helping to destroy the employees’ sense of purpose.
Avoiding the trapsSpotting the traps from the executive suite is difficult enough; sidestepping them is harder still—and wasn’t the focus of our research. Nonetheless, it’s instructive to look at the one company in our study that avoided the traps, a creator of coated fabrics for weatherproof clothing and other applications. We recently interviewed its head, whom we’ll call Mark Hamilton. That conversation generated a few ideas that we hope will spark a lively discus-sion in your own C-suite. For example:
When you communicate with employ-ees, do you provide strategic clarity that’s consistent with your organisation’s capabili-ties and an understanding of where it can add the most value? Hamilton and his top team believed that innovating in processes, rather than products, was the key to creating the right combination of quality and value for customers. So he talked about process
innovation at every all-company meeting, and he steadfastly supported it throughout the organisation. This consistency helped everyone understand the strategy and even become jazzed about it.
Can you keep sight of the individual employee’s perspective? The best executives we studied internalise their early experiences and use them as reference points for gauging the signals that their own behavior will send to the troops. “Try hard to remember when you were working in the trenches,” Hamilton says. “If somebody asked you to do a bunch of work on something they hadn’t thought through, how meaningful could it be for you? How committed could you be?”
Do you have any early-warning systems that indicate when your view from the top doesn’t match the reality on the ground? Reg-ular audits to gauge the effectiveness of coordination and support processes in areas such as marketing, sales, and purchasing can highlight pain points that demand senior management’s attention because they are starting to sap meaning from your people’s work. In Hamilton’s view, senior executives bear the responsibility for identifying and clearing away systemic impediments that prevent quality work from getting done.
Hamilton’s company was doing very well. But we believe that senior executives can provide a sense of purpose and progress even in bad economic times. Consider the situation that then–newly appointed Xerox head Anne Mulcahy faced in 2000, when the company verged on bankruptcy. Mulcahy refused her advisers’ recommendation to file for bankruptcy because of the demoralising signal it would send to frontline employees. “What we have going for us,” she said, “is that our people believe we are in a war that we can win.”7 She was right, and her convic-tion helped carry Xerox through four years of arduous struggle to later success.
As an executive, you are in a better posi-tion than anyone to identify and articulate the higher purpose of what people do within your organisation. Make that purpose real, support its achievement through consistent everyday actions, and you will create the meaning that motivates people toward great-ness. Along the way, you may find greater meaning in your own work as a leader.
This article has been sourced from the McKinsey Quarterly.
31February 2012
t e r e S a a M a b I l e | l e a d I n g e d g e
ALL Our lives we make decisions about dif-ferent things like what clothes to wear, what college to go to, what car to buy, what food to cook, what movie to watch and so on. We make these decisions based either on our own knowledge or based on someone else’s advice. Everyone has family members, friends and colleagues. They often influ-ence our decisions due to the fact that they know more about certain things than we do. Besides that, we often read and listen to what other people say about various things on TV and radio in a form of advertising and that also influences our decisions.
Advice that we get can be either good or bad (truthful or untruthful) and may lead to certain consequences either good or bad depending on what decision you will make based on someone else’s advice. You can choose to take it into consideration or not, but there are times when you have to make a certain decision, so some advice can only help.
Different people live different lives and choose different things to do in life, differ-ent clothes to wear, etc., but when it comes to one single most important decision in their life, many people agree that there are only a few pieces of advice that matter the most and are usually provided by the closest friends and/or family members and sometimes even from your boss.
Best career advice from my boss is that you have to take risks to receive rewards. To enjoy life in the moment and not worry so much about all that work you need to get done. In other words, don’t be a workaholic. Take breaks; worrying does you no good.
about IT operations, read books, attended classes, spoke to people and did a computer management course. I was able to setup an IT dept in my company with 7-10 software programmers working under me and also successfully installed the MRP system with Sybase and UNIX.
Hence, I would like to state that due to my boss’s advice, I am what I am today — a suc-cessful IT person with good knowledge on computer operation and also able to guide people down below on various technical aspect of IT operations. I am also being recog-nised and rewarded for my various IT imple-mentations and have been able to take a place in the IT world and grow to great heights. —As told to Varun Aggarwal
The most important work behavior is hav-ing a great attitude, which would encourage people to work with you, and which would help you to succeed.
I started my career in the Finance depart-ment. After working with my boss Uday Thakurdesai for 12 years, in the year 1992 he suggested me to look into the aspect of setting an IT department which was quite new during that period and non-existent in my earlier company.
Since I did not have any background in IT, I was reluctant to take up the job. However, my boss encouraged me to take the risk. He said, "I am pushing you in the river, either you swim across to safety or get drowned." It was a big challenge for me. I learnt all
ManIkkaM vShead It, henkel cac
Take Risks to Receive Rewards
the beSt advIce I ever got
32 February 2012
Mentorarun guptagroup cto, ShopperS Stop
Mentee
krIShnakuMar avanoorgeneral Manager – ItShopperS Stop
What do you look for in a mentor/mentee?GupTA The primary factor is someone who is
willing to explore new opportunities and willing to work towards it. S/he should demonstrate awareness and acknowledgement of learning required towards improvement of skills. If s/he is interested in develop-ment, I am always happy to help them uncover the path towards success.AvnOOr An ideal mentor is one who believes in my capabilities and a subject matter expert who can guide and articulate solutions.
How do you identify and prioritise areas where you think your mentee needs to focus on for
further professional development?GupTA Identification and prioritisation is a gradual pro-cess. It is not a diagnostic process like a blood test which unearths clear attributes that require mediation. Soft skills and behavioral change is a combination of mul-tiple traits that need to be worked upon. Sometimes it is about what a person should stop doing rather than start doing. What a mentor gives is not always what the men-tee takes away. Professional development is then based on visibly demonstrating those behaviors that matter in the eyes of others. It takes a while before people recog-nize the change and thus continuous feedback is impor-tant to measure progress.
Do you think your mentor spends enough time with you? How do you think your mentor
could contribute more towards your professional growth?AvnOOr Yes. A mentor who is committed to the process is a must. There is no quick fix solution; both parties have to spend quality time. Honest and timely feedback is critical in the process.
How do you think your mentee can take on more responsibilities and take more/bigger
decisions?GupTA I believe that the mentor has to give the free-dom to fail to the mentee. Micro-managing every task or incessant feedback will create a scenario where the mentee will stop thinking and start depending on the mentor for every little step. If success is achieved, it calls for celebration; the lack of success is not failure, it is a lesson to be imbibed and not repeat the same mistakes again. Krishnakumar has over the years changed for the better, bringing a new perspective to situations and always tak-ing on new challenges. I am extremely happy with the progress and consider him an asset to the team.
Are there any conflicts between you and your mentee/mentor? If so, how do you resolve
them? If not, what do you think is the secret of your smooth working relationship?GupTA Every relationship has conflicts; we have had conflicts and overcome them by focusing on the issue rather than personalities. Sometimes the conflict has
Focus on Issues, Not Personalities
Me and MY Mentee
33February 2012
“There are no hidden agendas, we work with a clearly defined goal and
objective.”
“Critical and key issues are discussed and decisions are
taken after mutual consultation.”
also been with respect to other team members we have similarly worked towards addressing them, a few times as a tripartite meet-ing. The secret of our smooth working relationship is the acknowl-edgement on both sides of ability, capability and the need to prog-ress that is mutual. There are no hidden agendas, we work with a clearly defined goal and objective. AvnOOr We have very cordial and informal relation. Critical and key issues are discussed and decisions are taken after mutual consultation.
What are the two or three key things you have learned from your mentee/mentor?
GupTA Krishnakumar is very diligent and explores multiple facets that continuously surprise me. His interest is wide and varied and he is extremely focused on new technologies. Every discussion brings new opportunities for me to learn something. So whenever we explore new technologies, he is my first choice in the team to review fit to our enterprise.AvnOOr Effective communication, especially communicating bad news, is very important during crisis management; Keeping solu-tions simple especially the usability of the applications are very important for the overall success of any IT project; Managing user perceptions and improving soft skills is important for career growth.
What are the challenges and constraints for a mentor/CIO to devote more time and effort for the development of
their immediate juniors?GupTA I believe that time will always have to be found based on pri-
orities. Pressure will always be there, the mentor has to consciously invest the time. The mentor should never brush off any conversa-tion or get into a discussion with other things occupying him/her (multi-tasking); mentoring requires full attention and being present to the discussion. It is more about listening rather than finding solu-tions to every problem.
Development is however the responsibility of the mentee. If s/he does not take action then there is no progress. I believe that it is a waste of time if the mentee is not interested in changing self but always finds others responsible for his/her challenges.
Please share your views on the role you think a CIO can play in mentoring IT managers and take them to the next level.
GupTA The CIO as the senior most leader of the IT team is always looked upon by the team as someone to emulate. S/he needs to lead by example and be available for discussion and coaching to the team. The wealth of experience can benefit the team and s/he should be generous in giving.
If the CIO is insecure in his/her position, even this is visible to the team and this may lead to the good people leaving.
What are your views on the need for a mentor for IT managers in realising their full potential?
AvnOOr Mentoring dramatically increases one’s own chance for suc-cess. It is crucial for business and career success. Having a mentor helps to improve one’s reach and business contacts and contribute to conceptual and technical knowledge. —As told to Sanjay Gupta
34 February 2012
M e a n d M Y M e n t e e | a r u n g u p t a & k r I S h n a k u M a r a v a n o o r
davId lIMopInIon
A MOnTH ago, we concluded a global poll of 1000 people of whom 20 percent were C-suite executives, 20 percent vice-presidents and 60 percent mid-level professionals. We polled them on what they believed to be the five most underrated leadership skills. So here were the five skills we identified as being underrated:
Negotiating skills Managing expectations and performance Creating a winning culture at work Winning buy-in Strategy implementationNow guess which leadership skill topped the poll eas-
ily, winning more than half (53 percent) the votes?If you guessed creating a winning culture, you were
right. It was followed by, at a distant second place with 22 per cent, managing expectations and performance.
We talk about culture in the workplace all the time. So, what is it that makes it so powerful and effective? There are essentially three reasons why creating a culture that works for your organisation is critical. And I will share what I believe makes a winning culture in a typical office context.
1 Cultures Drive BehaviourContrary to popular belief, we become influenced by our peers far more than we would like to think. Cialdini’s work at Arizona University shows that far from being the individual we think we are, we are heavily influenced by what others think and do. This boils down to our innate need to be accepted into a ‘tribe’ or, in this instance, workplace. Having a culture that rewards the right behaviour or approves it, is a powerful motivator. No one likes to be the odd one out.
Cultures also can motivate us to work harder, espe-cially when everyone else is doing so. A long-standing joke shared by my clients at Accenture is that when a member of the team is seen leaving the office at 7pm, he or she is often met with the comment, “So, having an early day, are we?” The Accenture culture upholds excellence and hard work.
2 It is free Like it or not, most cultures that are allowed to develop organically cost no direct fee to the company, but can create immensely profitable attitudes that emerge from the culture. This could be a culture of work excellence or a culture of punctuality. No contrived incentives plan can be as powerful as creating the right kind of culture in the workplace.
My good friend and fellow professional speaker, Ron Kaufman, was best-known as being an expert in cus-tomer service. However, as he elevated his expertise and know-how in this area, his company created its propri-etary ‘Up! Your Service’ methodology. It is now creating impact in the area of service culture leadership, a subtle but massively different kind of solution. While customer service training only gets you so far in terms of skills and mindset, creating a culture that makes people want to go the extra mile in servicing their peers, colleagues and customers is a mighty powerful thing.
3 You rarely have to police a cultureOnce set up right, there is no need for guidelines, irk-some office rules and constant reminders to let a culture do its work. You just need to follow certain behaviours and reinforce the key culture messages to keep the cul-
Creating a Winning Culture There are many qualities and skills that a leader needs to learn to become a great leader. Some of them are rather underrated
about the authorDavid Lim, Founder, Everest Motivation Team, is a leadership and negotiation coach, best-selling author and two-time Mt Everest expedition leader. He can be reached at his blog http://theasianne-gotiator. wordpress.com, or [email protected]
35February 2012
ture ticking along. Like a large stone ball, it takes a while to get moving but once it does, the amount of energy to keep it going will be minimal.
So, how do you get around to creating such a winning culture? A culture is based on a combination of shared values, supportive behaviours and a range of outcomes defined by the group embracing the said culture. A win-ning culture is one, which aims to beat the competition, champion its product and cause and attract more like-minded people to its ranks.
a) Assess: Look around your workplace and ask yourself if there is a definitive workplace culture. If you do not see one, that could actually be good news, as you may be able to start one. But if you do not start one, one may develop anyway, and it may be one you won’t like. Assess your group’s goals, values and specific observ-able behaviours that support the team reaching its goal with a set of values you can be comfortable with. A highly driven sales team, for example, may be tempted to champion less than ethical practices and turn a blind eye to corrupting influences in order to reach their goals. Certainly, it is a winning team mindset. But do they also embrace values that work for everyone?
b) Identify: Many people and teams operate on a helio-tropic basis – they gravitate, like sunflowers towards the sun, to actions, behaviours and people that they admire. You can identify people in your workplace who are glit-tering examples of such behaviours. These are your cul-ture champions. Nurture and encourage them to keep repeating those winning habits. These can be as simple as helpfulness, going the extra mile for colleagues, speaking up at meetings and being punctual. Eventually, these habits will spread to others. If you think you can win faster by getting people to set ambitious goals for themselves, then ask yourself if your system supports such champions in terms of recognition and rewards. Often it is not even monetary rewards but a kind word by yourself or your peers, that works wonders. One of my leadership heroes, Sir Chris Bonington, who has led countless mountaineering expeditions, related a striking example of a winning culture. As a guest member of the 1985 Norwegian expedition to Mt Everest, he could observe first hand the attitudes displayed by members of this national team that was attempting the peak for the first time for their country. Each member was interviewed about their respective ambitions and inter-ests. One, in particular, was interesting. When asked if summitting Mt Everest was important to him, he said: “Yes, it is very important for me to be able to get to the top.” Then he paused, and said, “But more importantly, that one of us gets to the top!” So even in the short time frame of a two-month long expedition that took a year to plan, a culture of encouraging other teammates to be as, if not more successful than themselves, created a superbly harmonious and collegial atmosphere. Many of that team succeeded in reaching the top, and more than 25 years later, they are all still on exceedingly good terms with each other.
c) Celebrate: Take time off with your team after an office win to remind them implicitly or explicitly to keep doing those things that bring victory. Many people I know have left good jobs because the manage-ment kept forgetting and failing to recognise those attitudes that brought past success.
If any of you are interested in getting the rest of the results of the global poll we did, contact me and I hope this will help you develop your own winning culture.
DAVID LIM IS A LEADERSHIP AND NEGOTIA-TION COACH AND CAN BE FOUND ON HIS BLOG http://theasiannegotiator.wordpress.com, OR subscribe to his free e-newsletter at [email protected]
Many people and teams operate on a heliotropic basis – they gravitate, like sunflowers towards the sun, to actions, behaviours and people that they admire
IMA
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36 February 2012
o p I n I o n | d a v I d l I M
The Soul of Leadership At the heart of this book is the idea that leadership emanates from the
core of our being By sanjay Gupta
“In EIGHT areas of your life you have the power to be guided by your soul,” says Deepak Chopra in this slim but significant book: “Thoughts, emotions, perception, personal relationships, social role, environment, speech and the body.” The bottomline is that in all of them our behaviour affects the people we lead. If we evolve, so will they, he avers. And that's the basic premise on which Chopra builds his concept of leadership that is soul-driven rather than one that exploits people or their insecurities.
Given that the very term 'soul' is attributed more to religiosity than spirituality, it might put off readers not in a mood for religious sermons or some such. But Chopra clarifies what he means by this word within the first few pages. “When I talk about the soul, I'm not referring to the soul as defined by any particular religion...I believe the soul is an expression of an underlying univer-sal field of consciousness,” he says.
Equating the soul with 'awareness', Chopra writes that at the soul level you are seamlessly connected with everything in the universe, to the
silent domain from which all matter and energy spring.
In keeping with this explanation, the book often dips into the realm of spirituality or philosophy of the Paulo Coelho kind. At the same time, however, it does detail the principles of leading from the soul and provides useful tips to any leader willing to look beyond personal aggrandise-ment or material gains.
For one, Chopra hands the reader a sort of map by spelling out L-E-A-D-E-R-S, with each letter of the acronym unravelling what it means to lead from the soul (L = look and listen; E = emotional bonding; A = awareness; D = doing; E = empower-ment; R = responsibility; and S = synchronicity).
Recognising the two overriding themes in our lives as 'needs' and 'responses', he says, “As a leader [of a group], if you are aware of the hier-archy of needs [referring to Maslow]and their responses, you will be able to continue to respond effectively as the group's needs move up the scale from basic to increasingly spiritual.”
At times, the book tends to get a bit heavy and repetitive. But thankfully,
Chopra has peppered it with some interesting anecdotes and titbits. He points out that the word 'inspiration' is derived from the same Latin root as 'to breathe' and 'spirit': “When you inspire others, you motivate them to breathe together in the same atmosphere.” Tales such as the one from his own childhood in Jabalpur in a newly-independent India, in which Nehru, passing by in his motorcade in front of his house, tossed his lapel rose towards his mother (who thus acquired a special status in the neighbourhood), make for interesting reading.
Then there are the inspiring stories of two entrepreneurs-leaders who created and nurtured two completely different but similarly 'soul-connect-ed' organisations (Jeremy Moon of Icebreaker and Renata Black of Seven Bar Foundation).The Soul of Leadership could be dis-missed by some who cannot bring themselves to believe the ideas of universal connectedness, but it will be lapped up by the many who are hun-gering for something far beyond the clinically logical or transactional.
“The most important thing for a leader is to respond to people's hierarchy of needs — from the basic to the spiritual.” — deepak chopra
ShelF lIFe
As a global leader
and pioneer in the
field of mind-body
medicine, Deepak
Chopra transforms
the way the world
views physical,
mental, emotional,
spiritual, and social
wellness. He is a
prolific author of
over 65 books with
nineteen New York
Times best sellers
in both the fiction
and non fiction
categories.
about the author
37February 2012
Ima
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38 February 2012
C O V E R S T O R Y | w O m E n l E a d E R S h i p
Anytime is the right time to talk about ‘women and leadership’. But the fact that this month marks Women’s Day, makes it all the more fit-
ting that we dedicate this issue of CIO&Leader to the rise of women...and more often, the lack of it.
My gut tells me that we are closing in on the “tipping point” on this one. The attitude of women has been among the most dramatic changes of the past decade. How they think — about work, family, motherhood, suc-cess, work-life balance, division of roles and much more — has undergone a shift so fundamental that almost nothing else has kept pace. Neither men nor the social fabric; neither infrastructure nor corporate structures; neither families nor other support systems. Everyone is struggling to make sense of the change.
The simple fact is this: women make up half the world’s population. And despite huge strides, they are still way behind in contributing to wealth creation in the tradition-al economic sense of the word. Simplistically, more often than not, this is on account of choices they have to make between motherhood and work, family and career, etc.
Several of the successful women one interviews on this issue say that they have never looked for “special” treatment as women. They do what everyone else does and get their due. My question is with regard to “what everyone else does”— the current norm of work ethos. It is designed to respond to men and their situations. If we are committed to promoting the deserved participation of women at work, acceptable terms of work ethos need to alter or expand. Working from home, flexi-hours, crèches — they need to be viewed as important tools for a bal-anced work environment, not as “favourable” to women. And their impact needs to be measured to see if they need to be supplemented or replaced by other approaches.
My favourite example to explain what I mean is around western/European menu cards. As an Asian vegetarian, till 10-12 years ago, I had to find some way to carve out a meal for myself from a menu that was decidedly non-vegetarian and suited to the European palate. As Asia and its needs have been recognised, and its importance appre-ciated, menu cards the world over have vegetarian and Asian options. Not equal, but certainly a start.
Women don’t need to try and fit the age-old work norm. We need to define an extended ethos that works as well for women as it does for men. Only then will corporations and the world be able to benefit from the latent but obvi-ous potential of women.
Fortunately, the conversation has changed to reflect this. I was chosen a couple of years ago to go to the US on a programme for 25 emerging women leaders under 40. I met a large number of women in politics, government and business and was struck by the fact that the issue of women in the workforce has taken centre-stage, and conversation is around ‘How do we leverage the strengths that evident differences between men and women bring to the table’? How do we facilitate ‘equality of options’ and not equality interpreted as ‘sameness’? How do we enhance the menu options for women to get to leadership positions but not necessarily in the same way as men?
The collection of articles in our cover story hopes to cap-ture facts and opinion in equal measure. We intend that it brings the issue onto your radar — it is as much for men as for women to think about and action. Would you make a start, as you read this, by examining how your organisa-tion scores on diversity — women colleagues, women in top management, women on your Board?
Only then will the ‘woman half’ of the world find its rightful place under the sun...
Their Rightful Place
Under the Sun...
Organisations have begun to adapt their work ethos for women but more light needs to be shone on multiple issues By Anuradha Das Mathur
39February 2012
w O m E n l E a d E R S h i p | C O V E R S T O R Y
By Sanjay Gupta
A significant number of women achieve academic success but very few get to the point of realising their full potential. Why?
Whenever one thinks of women leaders, a handful of names come to the mind: Marga-ret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Meg Whitman,
Indra Nooyi, Carly Fiorina, Sonia Gandhi, among others. The names vary, depending on the context in which they are taken and the perspective of the person doing the recall. But the point worth noting is that, despite the fact that examples of brilliant women leaders have existed throughout recorded history, they are way too few com-pared to instances of men leaders. And this observation is true irrespective of the field chosen – be it politics, busi-ness, or indeed technology.
A world that has been primarily ruled and dominated by men (despite women being one half of the population) may not see anything wrong with that. But a mod-ern, globalised society that upholds the ideals of equality and fairness knows this is not right, just not right. The dispropor-tionately low representation of women is no longer acceptable – not only to women themselves but an increasing number of men as well. At least that is what has come across consistently in our interaction with leaders across segments in India, most notably in business and technology.
In our view, this is one of the most glar-ing issues in leadership and, therefore, we at CIO&Leader chose to do a cover story on women and leadership in
Women Leaders:
one of our inaugural issues. Now, we can either talk about the symptoms or try and find the cause. We have tried to take the latter approach, as we believe that sustainable solutions will come only when we address the cause. So, why do we see only a few women leaders around us when there is an ocean of talented women out there? Is it because of education? Is it because of the environment at the workplace? Is it really true that women prefer to give up careers in favour of family as they go up the corporate ladder? Or, are there other factors, perhaps a combination of factors, leading to the situation?
Let us examine these questions in a little more detail before we dare to take any overarching view on the ques-tion of women and leadership.
Getting educatedThe beginnings of recorded human history were marked by the single biggest factor of brute force. Those with the muscle and the power to fight won battles and reigned over the goods – cattle, farms, precious metals... Even in agrarian and industrial societies, the power-driven para-digm – attributed to and demonstrated mostly by men rather than women – carried on the male momentum.
However, in a post-agricultural and post-industrial world that is increasingly dependent on information, and communication and managerial skills, the balance has begun to tilt. More and more women are getting educated and acquiring the requisite skills for employment beyond the 'muscular' work that dominated the past.
As a result, the gap between the number of men and women in educational institutions is reducing – stunning-ly, in some cases, to the extent where women students outnumber men. According to an article published in The Atlantic, for instance, for every two men in the US who got a college degree in 2010, three women did the same. The situation is certainly not as optimistic in all countries, but there are encouraging signs — at least in most devel-oped and several developing nations.
With education as a focus area, the Indian government, too, has been trying to improve women's enrolment at
Companies in india reported utilisation of teleCommuting programme in a Catalyst survey
11%
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various levels. As per data from the Department of School Education & Literacy, from 13.8 million boys and 5.4 million girls enrolled at the primary level in 1950-51, the number rose to 69.7 million boys and 61.1 million girls in 2004-05. In upper primary, the enrolment increased from 2.6 million boys and 0.5 million girls to 28.5 million boys and 22.7 million girls – which means, of the total, 44 per-cent of girls were enrolled in upper primary.
Curiously, this proportion of girls in education is either maintained at the same level or even improves when we go to the higher levels of education. So, in 2009-10 the percentage of female undergraduates in science was 41 percent of the total enrolment. This figure for postgradu-ates in science was slightly better, at 45 percent for girls, in the same year. These statistics imply that when it comes to different levels of education, females are just about to catch up with their male counterparts.
Most of us can recall the headlines from newspapers after school board exams: 'Girls perform better than boys yet again.' Or, 'Girls outdo boys in Maths and Science in Class XII.' But what happens thereafter?
Entering the workforceWhen it comes to the workforce, however, the picture begins to change drastically. Participation of women in the labour force in India stands at a lowly 34 percent – the lowest among the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies. A UN report says that in 2010, women’s labour force participation rates remained below 30 percent in Northern Africa and Western Asia; below 40 percent in Southern Asia; and below 50 percent in the Caribbean and Central America. The gap between partici-pation rates of women and men has narrowed slightly in the last 20 years but remains considerable.
Obviously, this gap comes in the way of women's visibil-ity in the workplace even at initial levels. This is particu-larly acute in a field such as technology which, tradition-ally, fewer women have opted as their chosen domain of work — despite improving enrolments in science courses and several scientific studies disproving the myth of women not 'suited to' maths and science.
Career growthThere are no easily available statistics available on the proportion of middle-level women employees and manag-ers in Indian organisations. But the proportion of women who join various organisations comes down as they move to middle, senior and board positions.
There are several — and, often, complex — reasons for this. One of the commonly cited points is that women in India tend to give up their jobs and careers much more readily and in greater proportion to, say, women in the US or advanced economies. But is it really true? And even if it were true, the root causes remain to be determined: Is it the traditional mindset or are there other factors?
What is not under debate, however, is that women have to do much more work than men. According to a UN report titled The World's Women 2010, the total work burden — considering paid as well as unpaid work — is higher for women than men in all regions of the world. In many countries, employed women spend an inordinate amount of time on this “double burden,” as they typically continue to assume most of the responsibility for domes-tic work. Certainly, this factor impedes women's career growth in varying measures.
Reaching the topBut the contrast in men and women in the context of the organisation becomes most visible when we look at top management and leadership positions. Globally, women occupy just 17 percent of the positions when it comes to representation in parliaments or ministries. Among the CEOs of the top 500 corporations in the world, only 13 are women.
The situation is even more stark in India. Data from Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), a pro-democracy organ-isation, reveals that India ranks 98th in the world in rep-resentation of women in government. According to a joint corporate survey by the Forum for Women in Leadership (WILL Forum India) and consulting firm KPMG, as of 2009, women in India accounted for a mere 4.8 percent of the total population of directors and 2.5 percent of the total segment of independent directors among the compa-nies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
Again, there's no specific data on the number of senior women executives in the technology function in India. But in our experience at CIO&Leader, what is unam-biguous is that while there are some obvious names or visible women CEOs and CIOs, the number is not reflec-tive of the women talent that exists across the hierarchy in most organisations.
Dwindling numbersClearly, the proportion of women making it as leaders in government, business and technology is much, much lower in the context of either their education levels or the initial number of women entering the workforce.
In the corporate environment, it is not that companies do not realise the importance or need to include more women at middle and senior levels, but somehow the results are not showing. According to a report by Catalyst, a nonprofit that aims to expand opportunities for women and business, 68 percent of companies in India have formal strategies for women’s advancement in place—yet these programmes lack elements crucial to their success, including metrics and indicators to measure their impact, hold managers accountable, and engage men in advanc-ing women to leadership.
In a press statement on the report, Nancy Carter, senior VP of research at Catalyst and a visiting scholar
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at INSEAD, notes, “Programmes and policies alone are not enough—accountability matters too. For these pro-grammes to be effective, it’s necessary to connect goals with results.”
For instance, while three-fourths of the companies sur-veyed by Catalyst had flexible work programmes, only 11 per-cent among them reported greater than 25 percent utilisa-tion of telecommuting. And only 7 percent reported greater than 25 percent utilisation of reduced work/part-time work programmes. Clearly, a gap between intent and results.
The WILL Forum-KPMG survey also throws some light on why fewer women make it to the top. Only 43 percent of the respondents strongly agreed with the view that men and women actually have equal opportunities to grow in their careers and/or rise to positions of top leadership in the corporate sector.
It is also quite possible that a vicious cycle of old atti-tudes and fixed mindsets impedes women's chances of playing leading roles in business or technology. This is what psychologists call 'the stereotype threat.' If women
Consider some key findings of a study, Off-ramps and On-ramps: Keeping Women on the Road to Success, released jointly by the Center for Work-Life Policy (CWLP) and Harvard Business Review in 2005 (off-ramp implies a break in work).
According to Sylvia Ann Hewlett, President of CWLP and a co-author of the report, “Many talented, committed women take off-ramps but an overwhelming majority [93 percent] can’t wait to get back in.” However, according to the report, many find this more difficult than they antici-pated. Only 74 percent succeed in rejoining the workforce and only 40 percent return to full-time jobs.
But there's a more telling aspect of the report that sheds light on the women-friendly policies and culture (or lack of them) at organisations: 95 percent of the off-rampers would not consider going back to their previ-ous employers.
One of the key reasons why many women who take a break to look after children or elders choose not to return to work even if given a chance is the lack of an institution-al support infrastructure – especially in a country such as
India where nuclear families and dual-earning households are new (but rapidly growing) phenomena.
Extent, not intentSeveral organisations across the world are demonstrating and focusing on women's contribution to all hues of society, includ-ing growth, development and wealth cre-ation (see snapshot on Page 66). So even
though a number of factors are holding women back from realising their full potential as leaders, things are bound to change for the better.
Signs of these changes are already visible – one of the most prominent being the rising levels of overall educa-tion and the growing acceptance of women at the work-place. In fact, there are organisations that are following global best practices in hiring and nurturing a diversified workforce (including a higher proportion of women) or going a step ahead and introducing pioneering employee-friendly policies.
IBM, for instance, goes beyond hiring and retaining women talent and professes to extend efforts “to build-ing the women leadership pipeline.” (The company recently appointed a woman, Virginia Rometty, as the CEO.) Consulting firm Deloitte is said to have initiated a programme, called Mass Career Customisation, which allows employees to adjust their hours depending on their life stage.
Such initiatives, coupled with women's own resolve to keep the transformation, is undoubtedly a change for the better. It's not a question of if, but when; not intent, but extent.
Many women take off-ramps but an overwhelming majority
can’t wait to get back in
are traditionally perceived as 'weak in maths and science' or 'lacking business acumen,' – even though scientific studies may have discredited such perceptions or shining examples may exist of inspiring businesswomen and sci-entists/technologists – it creates a negative and persistent downward spiral for them.
Another reason often given for few women middle managers moving on to executive positions is the discour-aging odds in their performance appraisals. A Wall Street Journal blog quotes Vikram Malhotra, McKinsey's chair-man of the Americas, as saying: “Middle-management women get promoted on performance, while middle-management men get promoted on potential.” This implies that some women may have to work even harder than their male counterparts to get promoted to the same positions.
But that's just one aspect of promotions. It is believed that most women themselves opt out of promotions and stick to middle management in order to achieve better work-life balance. Or they take a mid-career break so as to spend more time with their family. However, there are many complex fac-tors at play here and some of the old popular perceptions are giving way to on-ground research and new thinking.
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The time is ripe to address the core issues affecting women's leadership growth — rather than worry about 'fixing the women'
A vivah Wittenberg-Cox is CEO 20-first, a con-sultancy that works with progressive companies interested in diversifying their leadership teams
and optimising both halves of the talent pool and both halves of the market — the female and male halves. 20-first works with CEOs, executive committees and managers to build gender ‘bilingual’ organisations. The firm’s renowned Building Gender Balanced Businesses programmes and suite of online tools help companies harness the talent and market opportunities of the 21st century.
Avivah is also author of the best selling books How Women Mean Business: A Step by Step Guide to Profiting from Gender Balanced Business [Wiley 2010] and Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution [Wiley 2008, co-authored with Alison Maitland].
Here we present a selection of Avivah's blogs that talk about why we must change the old question of 'fixing the women' to one that deals with fixing the companies that fail to adapt to women's styles; the need to make execu-tive committees more gender balanced; and her impres-sions of what Indian organisations are doing to promote women leaders.
FROm 'Fixing wOmEn' TO 21ST CEnTURY COmpaniES All around the world, companies are launching gender initiatives. But the attempts of many of these firms are well-meaning, but inefficient. Our own report, the 20-first Womenomics 101 Survey, showed that almost 70 percent of the top companies in Europe don’t have any women on their Executive Committee. The reason for this glacial pace of change is that they are trying to apply a band-aid to an issue that calls for a systemic review of the business model.
Fixing the
Real issues
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox CEO, 20-first
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The problem is with the single-model career path and relentless up-or-out cultures that are common in many highly homogeneous business models. These companies won’t become more gender balanced until their model evolves into something more gender bilingual.
The problem is that the people at the top, who have risen through the old system, have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. They have absolutely no incentive to change the system. The idea of adapting the model that has benefited them to accommodate a greater number of women is laughable. At least while they can still find men (and a minority of women who adapt to the masculine norms) ready to do what they did, they see no reason to change things.
We are “prisoners of a paradigm”All this, however, is unconscious. We are all, for the moment, what Professor Gary Hamel calls the “unwitting prisoners of a paradigm.” Most of these senior managers may truly believe that women aren’t making it to the top because of something they lack such as time, competence, and style. They are still asking a 20th century question: “What is wrong with these women that they are not mak-ing it to the top?” We would suggest that the 21st century question is: “What is wrong with this company if we are not able to promote the majority of our high-potential tal-ent to the key positions and what is that doing to the qual-ity of our talent?” These two questions yield very different answers – and lead to very different solutions.
‘Fixing the women’The first step most companies take, even before thinking about the issue, is to look at what other companies are doing, and then craft ‘action plans’ to do at least as much. This trend is exacerbated by rating agencies and various accreditation or award bodies who evaluate these initia-tives based on a list of criteria that usually involve a list of what they like to call ‘best practices.’
In the past decade in North America, and now roll-ing around the world in an American-led wave, you can see the results. Company after company and almost all the professional services firms are creating women’s
networks, mentoring programmes for women, and coaching and leadership training for women. All are fine pro-grammes, and the delight of consult-ing firms like mine. They are popular with most women, happy to have some developmental focus. Having run many of these for a number of years myself, I know just how empowering and energis-ing they can be.
The only problem is that I’m not at all convinced they work. Or at least not in isolation. The focus on women in compa-
nies leads to a host of unintended consequences. And the intended consequences (usually more women in leader-ship) have not been proven.
These ‘fix the women’ strategies unconsciously encour-age women to conform more closely to the dominant masculine norm and culture.
Women are very ready to agree that they don’t do enough networking and self-marketing. And the senior men who are invited to introduce these sessions as ‘supporters’ and ‘champions’ are perfectly content to acknowledge that women need a little extra help in order to be truly ready in some distant future for leadership roles. That way, companies discover, everyone is happy. The women are happy as they have a sense that they are overcoming handicaps. The men are happy because it confirms that women have handicaps.
Questions to askI would pose some other questions to the leaders of the companies launching these approaches. Here are a few:
Do you really want to encourage half your workforce to spend time learning and adopting the communication styles preferred by men?
Have you carried out client and customer satisfaction surveys to see how appreciated are the different talent on your staffs?
Are you promoting to the top positions the people that your customers and peers evaluate as top performers or those that today’s managers prefer for their availability and expressed ambition?
All the literature on career management is still about managing in a traditional, 20th century pyramid-style organisation, with everything it implies about the unwrit-ten rules of the game, and the predominance of ambition and internal competition.
Before we transform the new, still-different culture of female talent into pseudo-male behaviours, it might be worth understanding the consequences of our actions.
Time is running outWe are at precisely the point in history where companies are dreaming of new leadership competencies, new col-laborative cultures and newly innovative minds. But the lag time in embedding these new ideas into the corporate DNA risks costing us the opportunity of a whole half of the talent pool whose authentic styles seem naturally aligned with these new needs.
In the course of researching for my new book, How Women Mean Business: A Step by Step Guide to Profiting from Gender Balanced Business (Wiley, Spring 2010), I have interviewed many progressive male CEOs who have started transforming their companies in order to attract and retain the best talent, female and male.
For example, Damien O’Brien, CEO of the executive search firm Egon Zehnder International, is clear about
Companies in asia and 68 perCent in europe have no women at all on their exeCutive Committees
82%
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the importance of gender balance. “More and more clients around the world just expect us to field gender balanced teams,” he says. “If they look at our website and see a lot of grey-haired, white males, a lot of them would not find that very exciting on many dimensions.” However, such leaders who are clear about the need for change are rare.
The critical challenge for the majority of companies is to refrain from ‘fix the women’ policies and to start embracing their differences. With their different and complementary skills and perspectives, women may be the solution to companies adapting to 21st century talent and market realities.
gETTing REal abOUT gEndER balanCEPotential vs RealityBusiness leaders, economists and the media are contrib-uting to a growing chorus: acknowledging the economic opportunities in improving the gender balance in busi-ness. But there remains a wide gap between recognising the benefits and actually implementing the reality.
Potential firstRecently, the argument that women rep-resent a huge business opportunity in terms of talent and markets is heating up.
Newsweek ran a cover story (Sept 21, 2009) called The Real Emerging Market that states that “in the last few months, economists, consultants, and other busi-ness types have begun to track the rise of a new emerging market, one that may end up being the largest and most powerful of all: women.”
Goldman Sachs published a report in August 2009 called The Power of the Purse. It says that “over the next five years, the combined impact of growing gender equali-ty and the emerging middle class will be seen most clearly in China and Russia, and to a lesser extent in Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia.”
Then Harvard Business Review chimes in with a fea-ture on The Female Economy reminding us, in case we haven’t heard it enough, that “women now drive the female economy… control about $20 trillion in annual consumer spending, and that figure could climb as high as $28 trillion in the next five years. In aggregate, women represent a growth market bigger than China and India combined — more than twice as big, in fact.”
Now, the reality (and how to measure it)So have companies acknowledged this shift… and its impli-cations for their customers, products, services and images?
Not yet, is the short answer. Products and services still don’t fully understand or respond to the women that women have become. And employers have not adapted their cultures and systems to the massive arrival of women in their talent pools.
There has been a lot of attention over the past 5 years on the gender balance of corporate boards. It’s time to move beyond this level. The real indicator is the gender balance on the Executive Committee – the core metric of competitiveness.
Introducing 20-first's Womenomics 101 SurveyThat is why we have launched a new annual report: 20-first’s Womenomics 101 Survey. To get down to basics.
The core metric: Executive Committee gender balanceEvery year, this will list the top 101 Fortune Global Com-panies in each key region and reveal the gender balance of their top teams, providing a crucial snapshot of their true success in this area.
Why this metric?The focus on the boardroom has been helpful in raising the visibility of the gender issue. It was an easy-to-under-stand and easy-to-measure reading of gender balance (or the lack thereof) in business. Yet it is not the best indicator of how gender balanced a company actually is in 2009. Nor of how gender balanced they will manage to become tomorrow.
As companies have discovered, it is much easier to appoint a woman or two onto a corporate board than it is to actually groom a woman for power and have her prog-ress through the traditional, internal route to the Execu-tive Committee.
Boards are oversight bodies. They do not actually run companies. So getting more gender balance at board level does not have a very direct impact on the gender balance of the organization as a whole.
It’s time to look deeper into companies, and find metrics that distinguish those serious about gender balance from the rest. That’s what Womenomics 101 proposes to do every year from now on.
“The critical challenge for companies is to refrain from ‘fix the women’ policies and to start embracing their differences”
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Key findingsUS Leads: The US is ahead, with just over half of the com-
panies surveyed having one or two women at this level. The American companies with the highest number of women on their executive boards are: Kraft Foods, WellPoint, Macy’s, Allstate, Pfizer, and Wells Fargo.
Europe and Asia Lag: Both Europe and Asia have barely embarked on the gender journey. 82 percent of companies in Asia and 68 percent of companies in Europe have no women at all on their Executive Committees.
Women promote women: Only a dozen companies out of 303 achieved a critical mass percentage of 30 percent women on their Executive Committees, which studies have shown is significant if companies want to create more effective lead-ership teams. They are all US-based and three of them are run by women CEOs – WellPoint, Kraft Foods, and Archer Daniels Midland.
Lack of Women in Operational Roles: The majority of women promoted to the Executive Committees of the sur-veyed companies are in support roles (76 percent in the US).
whERE ThE wORld'S TOp COmpaniES STand20-first's Global Gender Balance Score-card 2011
In this 3rd annual survey, the 20-first Global Gender Balance Scorecard looks at a single measure of progress:
the gender balance of the Executive Committees of the TOP 100 companies in three key regions of the globe.
Most of the world’s top companies have embraced the idea that corporate governance through all-male boards is a thing of the past. Our 2011 survey finds that 74 percent of companies in the US and 68 percent in Europe now have at least two women at board level, as many have pro-gressed beyond the token “one.”
However, as 20-first has long argued, boards are not the best metric for evaluating the actual gender balance inside companies. Instead, the gender balance of the Executive Committee is a much better indicator of progress, as it looks at the executive team actually running the business.
If we look at Executive Committees of these top com-panies, the data shows that companies have not achieved the same progress as they have in balancing their boards. 59 percent of US companies have at least two women on their Executive Committee. Europe is far behind with 20 percent and Asia lags with only 4 percent.
Globally, 90 percent of Executive Committee positions in our survey sample are filled by men, with only 10 per-cent by women.* Our 2011 Global Gender Balance Scorecard evaluates where companies are in balancing their Executive Com-mittees. The scorecard segments companies into one of 6 categories: Asleep, Token, Starting Smart, Progressing, Critical Mass,and Balanced.
The full report below describes what the top companies have achieved to date on their gender balance journey.
how women mean business
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Key findingsUS Leads. The US leads the way with 59 percent of
companies having at least two women on their Executive Committees. However, upon closer inspection the picture is not quite so rosy. Of the 1,227 Executive Committee members of America’s Top 100 companies, only 205 (or 17 percent)are women and 1022 (or 83 percent) are men. The majority of these female Executive Committee mem-bers are in staff or support positions (145, or 12 percent of total)such as HR, Communications or Legal, whereas only 60 women (or 5 percent of total) are in line or operational roles.
Europe Struggles. With only 20 percent of companies having at least two women on their Executive Commit-tees, the overall picture shows that European companies are still struggling to make progress in gender balancing their top teams. Of the 938 Executive Committee mem-bers of Europe’s Top 100 companies, only 78 (or 8 per-cent) are women and 860 (or 92 percent) are men. Again most of these women (56, or 6 percent of total) are in staff or support roles. Only 22 women (or 2 percent of total) are in line or operational roles.
Asia Lags. With only 4 percent of companies hav-ing at least two women on their Executive Commit-tee, the overall picture is one of significant imbalance. Indeed,compared to the 926 men (98 percent) on Execu-tive Committees in Asia, there are only 14 women in staff roles (1.5 percent of total) and a mere 6 women in line or operational roles (0,6 percent of total).
indian wOmEn mEan bUSinESSTraffic, Mumbai-styleIt is appropriate to end 2009’s blogs with a look at India. A huge and rising power, India is a record-breaker across the board, and the global crisis has only accelerated the shift eastwards. India’s size and the speed of its economic growth are breathtaking. The pace of change can –- lit-erally –- be heard via the incessant car horns that blast throughout the day and night here in Mumbai. Loud and chaotic, the traffic is a visual symbol of the story. From carts to Rolls-Royces, a dozen epochs are trying to negoti-ate the run-down roads all together. Noticeable to a gen-der balance obsessive like me, is the relative absence of women at the wheel. But judging by the conference I just attended here, this will change as fast as the rest.
Participating in the launch of a conference called Women Mean Business, the brainchild of The Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, was a myriad of contrast-ing personalities. The appetite and energy unleashed by one of the first such conferences in India was palpable. A huge yet bursting ballroom packed with several hun-dred women (and hundreds more who had to be turned away for lack of room) listening and sharing is a hugely
inspiring sight. Cherie Blair’s graciousness, goodwill and modesty (‘this is the first conference I’ve ever organised!’) as well as her connections drew a stellar programme of major Indian role models: a huge cross-section of people from corporate leaders and movie stars to the sheriff as well as the mayor of Mumbai (both women).
Kiran Bedi, police officer and former head of India’s largest prisonKiran Bedi, police officer and former head of Mumbai’s largest prison, set the tone. A tiny woman with immense energy and charisma, she is India’s first and highest rank-ing female police officer (and a former tennis champion).
A believer in ‘positive aggression’, she exhorted the crowd to decide what they wanted and to go after it. ‘Change the status quo of what is irrelevant.’ She herself had transformed Indiai’s largest prison, with no money and no resources -– just a massive shift in approach, high-ly emblematic of the kind of paradigm shifts that women often bring to their leadership roles. She knew she would never be able to manage 10,000 violent male criminals on her own. So she opened her jail to a myriad of NGOs with whom she partnered, enrolled the detainees in a transfor-mative vision of rehabilitation and got them all to…medi-tate! The turnaround has been phenomenal.
‘A believer in “positive aggression”, Kiran Bedi exhorted the crowd to decide what they wanted and to go after it. “Change the status quo of what is irrelevant.”
“India has the chance to learn from what other companies in the West have done on gender balance”
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Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Managing Director of BioconKiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the Managing Director of Biocon, also illustrates this shift to new management approaches. She founded one of India’s first biotech companies back in the 70’s, long before the industry became fashionable. She had wanted to be a brewer like her father, but after studying in Australia, she found that women were not welcomed into management in the brewing industry in India.
So she turned an obstacle into opportunity, and set off into the uncharted territory of biotech. She started off with a team of 80 percent women scientists who were attracted to her as a female role model, while most men were not convinced that biotech was a safe career bet. Some 30 years later, she runs one of the world’s big bio-tech companies with 4,000 employees, 40 percent of them women, and some $500 million in turnover.
‘I went from using yeast in beer, to yeast in insulin,’ she laughs. ‘My vision was to keep Indian scientific expertise in India, and to move the country from imitation to inno-vation. I’ve accomplished both.’
I had the pleasure of chairing a panel discussion that included several other powerhouse women:
Naina Lal Kidwai, the head of HSBC in IndiaOne of the many women who happen to work in finance in India. (The conference was opened by Chanda Koch-har, the head of ICICI, India’s second largest bank).
Vinita Bali, the CEO of BritanniaOne of India’s leading food companies, she successfully steered the company into a health and nutrition strategy, adding vitamin elements to its products, pushing the company to its highest ever growth rate (22 percent).
Nandita Gurjar, the head of HR for InfosysInfosys has now partnered with Cherie Blair’s Foundation to do more, much-needed research on women in business in India.
India’s gender balance recordCorporate India has been more tra-
ditional in terms of gender balance than one would have thought given women’s long-standing role in Indian politics. Yet Grant Thornton has done research showing that 15 percent of the country’s senior executives are
women, not far from the US figure of 20 percent. Many of the country’s leading businesswomen are the daughters or wives in large family business empires. And while the country as a whole may not be good at
educating its daughters, the elite offer them top-flight global education.
Meritocracy at ICICIBut there are signs of change. Except on the crowded roads, things are moving fast in India, and this confer-ence begins the laudable effort of showcasing what is working. KV Kamath, the Chairman of the Board of ICICI, says he has simply ‘unshackled’ women, removing all the obstacles that are in their way. As for the rest, he says, ‘they take care of themselves.’ He has 12 women on the 20-person board that he chairs. ‘I don’t see them as women,’ he insists, ‘I see them as talented executives.’
Balanced recruitment for men and women at BritanniaVinita Bali at Britannia has done a bit more. While
swearing that she is simply being gender neutral, she has clearly and unequivocally introduced a mandatory 50/50 male/female candidate slate for every job. That makes the choice, she says, truly gender neutral. She says she communicates a lot, explaining the rules of the game, and standing firm. She says once the rules are clear, they don’t cause dissent. What she really seeks to establish is a ‘clear, transparent meritocracy’ where everyone knows the rules of the game –- and the playing field becomes truly level for all.
India can leapfrog ahead in gender balanceThe challenge is to bring the men along too, convinced and convincing about the need for change in this area. Above all, they need to be convinced of the business ben-efit of gender balance; and the quicker the better. Very few men were present at the conference in Mumbai. But let’s not wait to get the guys to see the light.
India has the chance to learn from what other com-panies in the West have done on gender balance and avoid costly and less than effective ‘fix the women’ programmes. In doing so, it could jump straight to man-agement gender bilingualism focused on the economic opportunities of balance.
Given the level of energy and ideas unleashed by this first women’s conference, India would have a lot to gain. The playing field, like the roads in India, will need a few more conferences like this one. The transformation ahead is a massive one.
—For more information about Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and 20-first, visit 20-first.com and WHYandHOWWomenMean-Business.com.
of all job roles in britannia industires are mandated to be filled by women
50%
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48 February 2012
Companies around the world are recognising the true value of including, mentoring and promoting more women By Ester Martinez & Gyanendra Kashyap
A Huge Untapped
T he working-age population in the 15 to 64 age group in India is expected to reach 915 million by 2020 and to a staggering 1 billion by
2030. More importantly, half of them would still be under the age of 28 in 2030. This broadly constitutes India’s much trumpeted demographic dividend, which is often lauded as its competitive advantage over the long run.
The demographic dividend story may be a good selling point for investments, but seen through statistics and the reality of women at work, it paints a contrasting picture.
Statistics from the National Sample Survey Organisa-tion show that while labour force participation rates have fallen for both men and women, the decline in the rate is much sharper for women in the 15 to 59 age group. In the five years up to 2010, the work participation rate of women has been on a decline, coming down by 6 percent since 2004-05. Interestingly, in the decade from 2000 to 2010, the population of women aged 15 years or more increased by 86.5 million but only 8.9 percent of them joined the labour force. It is ironic that during a period of economic growth, the dependency ratio has increased instead of decreasing. Women form close to one-half of the human resources of the country and the sheer decline in their work participation undermines India’s demo-graphic dividend theory.
Most organisations in India are under-utilising and, in some cases, downright ignoring the other half of the tal-ent pool: women make up 42 percent of college graduates in India; Census 2011 pegs the effective literacy rate for
females at 65 percent. As talent becomes the most valu-able resource for businesses, it makes sense to invest in women and leverage on the “gender dividend.” With less than 25 percent of women in India as a part of the work-force (compared to 50 percent of men), they represent a huge untapped potential.
Reports from research bodies and media corroborate that women representation in the IT/ITeS workforce ranges from 24 to 26 percent at entry levels and gradually declines as one moves to middle, senior and board levels. For new-age private-sector banks, women at the entry level form roughly 20 percent of the workforce.
As per a UN report, India’s annual GDP growth could jump 4 percent if women participation rates were raised to 70 percent, closer to that in many developed nations.
Efforts by companies in attracting and retaining women take a beating when one looks at the recent NSSO figures that point to the declining participation ratio of women. While the data can be looked at from a positive perspec-tive to conclude that the decline in women's participation in the workforce is primarily due to women choosing to educate themselves for longer periods instead of joining the workforce at the very first opportunity, other corol-laries can neither be overlooked nor ignored. In India, it is quite intriguing that despite increasing levels of higher educa-tion in women and the talent crunch across industries, the women partici-pation ratio in total workforce has declined.
A number of socio-cultural and labour market factors could also be responsible for the decline in women's participation.
Organisations have begun building a business case for ‘gender dividend’ by creating equal opportunities by widening the talent pool. The last generation of workplace innovations introduced policies to support women with young children, internal networks to help women navi-gate their careers, and flexible work options which broke down structural barriers holding women back from enter-ing the workforce. While these must continue, a flexible and innovative workplace which appreciates the needs of women employees would go a long way in creating a nurturing ecosystem—in which talent can thrive and the organisation can reap the benefits of demographic as well as gender dividend.
—Ester Martinez is Managing Editor at People Matters. She can be reached at [email protected]. Gyanen-dra Kashyap is Research Editor at People Matters. The com-plete article is available at www.peoplematters.in.
potential
Most organisations in India are under-utilising or downright ignoring the other half of the talent pool
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49February 2012
A new approach to leadership can help women become more self-confident and effective business leadersBy Joanna Barsh, Susie Cranston, and Rebecca A. Craske
How Talented
women Thrive
Women start careers in business and other professions with the same level of intelli-gence, education, and commitment as men.
Yet comparatively few reach the top echelons.This gap matters not only because the familiar glass ceil-
ing is unfair, but also because the world has an increasingly urgent need for more leaders. All men and women with the brains, the desire, and the perseverance to lead should be encouraged to fulfill their potential and leave their mark.
With all this in mind, the McKinsey Leadership Project — an initiative to help professional women at McKinsey and elsewhere — set out four years ago to learn what drives
and sustains successful female leaders. We wanted to help younger women navigate the paths to leadership and, at the same time, to learn how organisations could get the best out of this talented group.
To that end, we interviewed more than 85 women globally (and a few good men) who are successful in diverse fields. Some lead 10,000 people or more, others 5 or even fewer. While the specifics of their lives vary, each one shares the goal of making a difference in the wider world. All were willing to discuss their personal experiences and to provide insights into what it takes to stay the leadership course. We have also studied the academic literature; consulted experts in leadership, psychology, organisational behaviour, and biology; and sifted through the experiences of hundreds of colleagues at McKinsey.
From the interviews and other research, we have distilled a leadership model comprising five broad and interrelated dimensions (exhibit): meaning, or finding your strengths and putting them to work in the service of an inspiring purpose; managing energy, or knowing where your energy comes from, where it goes, and what you can do to man-age it; positive framing, or adopting a more constructive way to view your world, expand your horizons, and gain the resilience to move ahead even when bad things hap-pen; connecting, or identifying who can help you grow, building stronger relationships, and increasing your sense of belonging; and engaging, or finding your voice, becom-ing self-reliant and confident by accepting opportunities, and collaborating with others
We call this model centered leadership. As the name implies, it’s about having a well of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual strength that drives personal achievement and, in turn, inspires others to follow. Centered leadership also works for men, though we have found that the model resonates particularly well with women because we have built it on a foundation of research into their specific needs and experiences.
Centered leadership emphasises the role of positive emo-
MCKInsey LeAdershIp ModeL CoMprIsIng fIve broAd And InTerreLATed dIMensIons
MeAnIngHappiness sig-nature strengths
purpose
MAnAgIng energyMinimising Depletion
Restoration
posITIve frAMIng
Self-awareness Learned Opt-
mism Moving On
ConneCTIng Network Design
Sponsership Reciprocity
Inclusiveness
engAgIng Voice Onership
Risk Taking Adactability
your personAL And professIonAL
ConTexTIMpACTPresence Resilience Belonging
preCondITIons:Intelligence
Tolerance for change Desire to lead
Communication skills
50 February 2012
tions. A few characteristics particularly distinguish women from their male counterparts in the workplace. First, women can more often opt out of it than men can. Second, their double burden — motherhood and management — drains energy in a particularly challenging way. Third, they tend to experience emotional ups and downs more often and more intensely than most men do. Given these poten-tially negative emotions, centered leadership consciously draws on positive psychology, a discipline that seeks to iden-tify what makes healthy people thrive.
Meaning‘To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?’
Meaning is the motivation that moves us. Without mean-ing, work is a slog between weekends. With meaning, any job can become a calling.
It starts with happiness. Positive psychologists (includ-ing Tal Ben-Shahar, Jonathan Haidt, and Martin Seligman) have defined a progression of happiness that leads from pleasure to engagement to meaning. Katharine Graham, the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 enter-prise (the Washington Post Company), said, “To love what you do and feel that it matters — how could anything be more fun?”
Why is meaning important for leaders? Studies have shown that among profession-als, it translates into greater job satisfaction, higher productivity, lower turnover, and increased loyalty. The benefits also include feelings of transcendence — in other words, contributing to something bigger than your-self generates a deeper sense of meaning, thereby creating a virtuous cycle.
Shelly Lazarus, the chairman and CEO of the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, described how she “just followed [her] heart, doing the things that [she] loved to do.” This sense of meaning inspired her, early in her career, to jump from Clairol to Ogilvy. Lazarus commented that everyone she knew thought that her decision to go from the client side to the agency side was a strategic move. But “it wasn’t really like that,” she says. “I just loved the interaction with the agency because that was the moment I could see where the ideas came to life.”
People seeking to define what is meaningful can start, as one interviewee put it, by “being honest with yourself about what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing.” Build-ing these signature strengths into everyday activities at work makes you happier, in part by making these activities more meaningful. Although there is no simple formula for matching your strengths to any single function, you can look for patterns in jobs that have and haven’t worked out and talk with others about your experiences.
The connection between signature strengths and work can change because priorities do; sometimes, for example,
a job is better than a calling, especially for young mothers. Our interviews show that this ebb and flow is natural and that the key to success is being aware of the shifts — and making conscious choices about them — in the context of bigger goals, personal or professional.
Managing energyActively managing energy levels is crucial to leaders. Today’s executives work hard: 60 percent of the senior executives toil more than 50 hours a week, and 10 percent more than 80 hours a week. What’s more, many women come home from work only to sign onto a “second shift” — 92 percent of them still manage all household tasks, such as meal prepa-ration and child care.
We’ve found that work–life balance is a myth—so the only hope women have is to balance their energy flows. This means basing your priorities on the activities that energise you, both at work and at home, and actively managing your resources to avoid dipping into reserves. Burnout is a reality for men and women alike, but for women who can opt out, so too is throwing in the towel.
Centered leadership draws on positive psychology, a discipline that seeks to identify what makes healthy people thrive
But work doesn’t have to be exhausting. Mihály Csíkszent-mihályi, a founder of positive psychology, studied thousands of people, from sculptors to factory workers. He found that those who frequently experienced what he called “flow”— a sense of being so engaged by activities that you don’t notice the passage of time — were more productive and derived greater satisfaction from their work than those who did not. Further, it energised them.
Zia Mody, a top litigator in India, described how she gained energy from a life that most people would see as exhausting. Even when her three daughters were young, she put in 16-hour days to prepare her cases. A woman among thousands of men at court, she lit up as she told us, “I love it! I love winning. I love being in court. . . . It excites me — I cannot tell you how much.”
One useful tactic is to identify the conditions and situ-ations that replenish your energy and those that sap it. Self-awareness lets you deliberately incorporate restorative elements into your day. It can also help you to space out your energy-sapping tasks throughout the day, instead of bundling them all into a single morning or afternoon. A particularly useful tip, we have found, is to give yourself
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51February 2012
time during the day to focus without distractions such as blinking lights and buzzing phones. Your productivity will benefit several times over.
Positive framingThe frames people use to view the world and process experiences can make a critical difference to professional outcomes. Many studies suggest that optimists see life more realistically than pessimists do, a frame of mind that can be crucial to making the right business decisions. That insight may be particularly critical for women, who are twice as like-ly to become depressed, according to one study. Optimists, research shows, are not afraid to frame the world as it actu-ally is — they are confident that they can manage its chal-lenges and move their teams quickly to action. By contrast, pessimists are more likely to feel helpless and to get stuck in downward spirals that lead to energy-depleting rumination.
Martin Seligman, a psychologist who was an early pro-ponent of positive psychology, found, for example, that optimists are better able to deal with the news that they have cancer. Confident that they can handle the prognosis, they immediately start to gather facts and dive into treatment plans; pessimists, on the other hand, become paralysed with fear. Seligman also shows optimism can be learned, an insight that underlies positive framing.
Positive framing and positive thinking, we would empha-sise, are two different notions. The latter tries to replace adversity with positive beliefs. The former accepts the facts of adversity and counters them with action. Talking yourself into a view contrary to the facts has a temporary effect at best.
The experience of Andrea Jung, the chairman and CEO of Avon, suggests how useful positive framing can be. In late 2005, Jung recalls, she found her company in a decline that temporary factors could not explain. Recognising that she was the leader who had created the strategies and the team responsible for the downturn,
she listened to the counsel of her executive coach and promptly “fired herself” on a Friday night. The fol-lowing Monday, Andrea showed up at work as the “new” turnaround CEO. She proved herself to be a “glass half full” optimist, and the recovery plan her management team adopted after a quick diagno-sis led to a steady improvement and a return to growth.
If a meeting goes badly, for example, you should limit your thoughts about it to its temporary and specific impact and keep them
impersonal. It helps to talk with trusted colleagues about the reasons for the poor meeting and ways to do better next time. These discussions should take place quickly enough for you to make a specific plan and act on it. You
should also undertake some activity that will restore both your energy and your faith in yourself.
ConnectingPeople with strong networks and good mentors enjoy more promotions, higher pay, and greater career satisfac-tion. They feel a sense of belonging, which makes their lives meaningful. As Mark Hunter and Herminia Ibarra have noted in the Harvard Business Review, what differentiates a leader from a manager “is the ability to figure out where to go and to enlist the people and groups necessary to get there.” Yet not all networks are equal. Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist who studies social belonging and rejec-tion, believes that men tend to build broader, shallower networks than women do and that the networks of men give them a wider range of resources for gaining knowledge and professional opportunities. This theory is a matter of substantial debate among academics. Our experience with hundreds of women at McKinsey, however, offers additional evidence that women’s networks tend to be narrower but deeper than men’s.
The experience of Dame Stella Rimington, who in the late 1960s joined MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence organi-sation, offers an example of the power of broad networks to get things done. Rimington, later the agency’s director general, says “women were definitely second-class citizens” in those days. They weren’t allowed to do fieldwork, for example, yet “many of the women were completely indistin-guishable from the men: they had the same kind of educa-tion.” She continues: “So we women — there were quite a few of us by then — we sort of ganged up and did a kind of round-robin thing and said, ‘Why is it that we have a com-pletely different career than men who are exactly like us?’ And for the first time, the powers that be started to scratch their heads because they suddenly had to find an answer. . . . And in the end, of course, they decided that they would have to promote a few women.” She later concluded that “no one of us would have asked that question on her own. We were supporting each other, and there was power in the many.”
The leaders we interviewed also talked about the impor-tance of having individual relationships with senior col-leagues willing to go beyond the role of mentor —someone willing to stick out his or her own neck to create opportunity for a protégée. Such a person is what Ruth Porat, a vice chairwoman at Morgan Stanley, called a “sponsor.”
A number of studies have shown women who promote their own interests vigorously are seen as aggressive, unco-operative, and selfish. An equal number of studies show the failure of women to promote their own interests results in a lack of female leaders. Until one of these conditions chang-es, sponsors, we believe, are the key to helping women gain access to opportunities they merit and need to develop.
Porat explained how a managing director took a chance on her when she was a second-year associate, asking her to present to a client’s board of directors. “The consumer client
or fewer administrators and managers in india are women
03%
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52 February 2012
wanted a woman to be present. I had never been in a board-room, let alone presented in a boardroom. ‘Sink or swim,’ he told me. ‘You’re in.’ I still remember to this day a mistake I made and that it was, overall, a good presentation. He took a real chance on me.”
One surprising thing we learned as a result of talking with female leaders was that they often fail to reciprocate and find expectations that they should do so distasteful. A senior partner at McKinsey noted men naturally understand that you must “give before you get,” but women don’t. This tendency combined with the sometimes awkward sexual politics, real or perceived, between senior men and younger women, makes it harder for women to find sponsors.
Yet women can learn reciprocity. To start, it’s important to assess your comfort level with the people you know through work, as well as how influential they are professionally. Most women we’ve worked with typically find that the colleagues they are close to are not influential—and vice versa. Explicit planning and some risk taking are needed to change this.
One approach is to provide and ask for help on a regular basis. Finding ways to forge connections through interests outside of work is another. Over and over, we heard, “Make it personal,” in the sense that others will get along with you more easily if they see your human side. You can express this in all kinds of ways at work, without inappropriately blending your professional and personal lives. The female leaders we interviewed acted on this insight both to find sponsors and to build networks.
EngagingMany people think that hard work will eventually be noticed and rewarded. That can indeed happen—but usually doesn’t. Women, our interviewees repeatedly told us, need to “create their own luck.” To engage with opportunities by taking ownership of them, you must first find your own voice, literally. Julie Daum, a prominent Spencer Stuart recruiter who specialises in board placements, told us that even senior women on boards still lose out by not speaking up: they hang back if they think that they have nothing new to say or that their ideas fall short of profound.
One senior woman we interviewed told us how she learned to join in: “Every Monday, we had a senior-manage-ment meeting. In the beginning, I just listened. I learned from the guys because they were all there. And after a while I started to speak up. You did the work, so you’ve got to talk about it. And I did.”
Women who want to grow as leaders should also take ownership of their professional development. Mary Ma, Lenovo’s former CFO, said she drew inspiration from using the Japanese auto industry as a metaphor, reshaping herself to become more competitive by identifying what she had to change and then actually changing it. As Ma noted, she didn’t complain to her boss or to her colleagues but rather looked inward to see how she could be a more effective leader. Instead of waiting for someone to tell her what to do, she took a systematic approach to self-improvement.
Engagement is equally about risk taking. The women we interviewed accept risk as a part of opportunity. Some have the confidence and courage to dive in; others use analytic problem solving to assess risks and then proceed to action. Shona Brown, Google’s senior vice president of business operations, described how she handles opportunities and the risks that accompany them. “I’ll use a skiing analogy because I like to jump off cliffs,” she says. “But I generally jump off cliffs from which I’m relatively confident I’m going to land—or if I don’t, it’s not dangerous.” Brown said she enjoys risk. “I like to be at that point where you’re about to jump. Your stomach is kind of going ‘woo’! It’s not so simple that you’re sure you’ll succeed. But you’re not in a life-threatening situation.”
Our interviews have shown us that to embrace opportu-nity, people must often take sharp detours and that the risks of unexpected changes commonly seem more obvious than the benefits. Reaching out to others — not to avoid mak-ing decisions yourself but to learn the best outcome from change can often help you see opportunities in the right frame and decide whether to go for them.
Within McKinsey and in the corporate world, our work on centered leadership continues. To understand how men and women practice it across tenures, industries, and regions, we are interviewing and launching large-scale surveys —again, with female and male respondents.
Our research is exploring the hypothesis that today’s leaders can become even more effective through the model of centered leadership: a shared purpose with deep meaning for the people involved, explicit aware-ness and management of energy, positive framing, strong informal and formal networks, and the collabor-ative creation of opportunities. In time, we hope to help increase the number of female leaders significantly by giving them the tools to build leadership skills for any playing field.
A number of studies have shown women who promote their own interests
vigorously are seen as aggressive, uncooperative, and selfish
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53February 2012
Straight TalkCandid views from four top corporate women
on issues related to leadership
Whether men or women, there are good as well as bad professionals – just as there are brilliant ones on both sides. In my own experience I have not felt any difference between men and women leaders in terms of professional competence. However, women tend to have a higher priority for the family as they usually have more caring responsibilities. And contrary to what many people believe, as children grow up they need you even more. How women are able to balance the two also depends on the kind of organisation they work for. Fortunately, men are now increasingly supportive – and there may come a time when women won't have to give up their careers because of work-life issues and we'll see more women leaders emerge.
I think the key differentiators for women leaders include soft skills, an inclusive leadership style, higher EQ, steady performance, ethical conduct and corporate governance practices. As a woman leader, I personally face no challenges but, generally speaking, women have to face the challenges of traditional mindsets and resistance to change, besides social and cultural biases in some industries. The view of most women leaders is that the business case for women in leadership is not recognised and therefore there is a lack of proactive action for their professional development. Also, there is a need to have more women in senior leadership positions at board and CEO levels to drive change. Mentoring for women professionals by top executives and diversity programmes initiated by organisations would go a long way in bridging the leadership gap for women.
The biggest challenge and difference between men and women leaders is that women have to create acceptance within the organisation. There could be cases wherein subordinates don’t take women in leadership positions seriously. To manage this issue, women need to be both aggressive and understanding at the same time. Aggressive so that their peers and team members don’t take them for granted and understanding so that they are able to relate to the issues of their colleagues. Women leaders are also different from men leaders when it comes to balancing the roles at home and office. While at office, a woman could be strong and dynamic but at home she has to bow down as she transforms into a wife, daughter or mother.
When it comes to women leaders, I feel they are more honest and have the capability to handle multiple tasks. This trait to handle multiple things is not limited to Indian women. Even in other countries where it is not the primary responsibility of women to manage home, they are able to balance both home and office. These traits come naturally to women. Besides, women are more articulate than men, a characteristic which is very important in the field of IT.
preet dhupar, CFO, BBC Worldwide
vandana Avantsa, CIO, Motherson Sumi
urmil Khurana,Regional Director – Finance, South Asia,Starwood Asia Pacific Hotels & Resorts
puneet Kaur Kohli,Director - IT, Infrastructure & Service Operations, Motricity
C O V E R S T O R Y | w O m E n l E a d E R S h i p
54 February 2012
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differenceWe at CIO&Leader believe that creating
an ecosystem or environment where women can realise their full poten-
tial – on a global scale and in a significant mea-sure – is a huge undertaking. One that requires the dedicated efforts of a number of individuals and organisations rather than any single entity. There are hundreds or, perhaps, thousands, of others all over the world. So this selection is cer-tainly not exhaustive – but it is our sincere hope that the stories you see here will encourage you and your organisation to BYOD – Bring Your Own 'Device' – for unleashing the connected, collective power of women
The Center for Talent Innova-tion: A non-profit "think tank" based in New York City, has emerged as a thought leader in diversity and talent management, driving ground breaking research
and seeding programs and practices that attract, retain and accelerate the new streams of talent around the world. CTI's flagship project is the Task Force for Tal-ent Innovation (formerly the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force) -- a private sector task force focused on helping corporations leverage their talent across the divides of gender, generation and culture. The 71 global corpora-tions and organisations that constitute the Task Force--representing 4 million employees and operating in 190 countries around the world--are united by understanding that the full utilisation of the talent pool is at the heart of competitive advantage and economic success. The think tank’s founding president is Sylvia Ann Hewlett. She is the author of nine Harvard Business Review articles and 11 critically acclaimed nonfiction books including Off-Ramps and On-Ramps.
We present a few organisations that are doing their bit in driving positive change for women in various ways
Making a
goldman sachs: With the belief that investing in education for women has a significant multiplier effect, leading to more productive workers, healthier and better-educated families, and ultimately to more prosperous communities, the
leading global investment banking, securities and invest-ment management firm kick-started 10,000 Women. It is a five-year initiative to provide a business and man-agement education to underserved female entrepreneurs in developing and emerging markets. The program is designed to drive greater shared economic growth, lead-ing to stronger healthcare, education and greater prosper-ity in the communities where it operates.
56 February 2012
Catalyst: Founded in 1962, Catalyst is the leading nonprofit membership organization expanding opportunities for women and business. With offices in the US, Canada, Europe, and India,
we count as members more than 500 companies, firms, business schools, and associations from around the world, employing millions of women. Our global lens and regional reach allow us to provide our members, the media, and the public with information and coun-sel on creating workplaces that enable women and their employers to succeed. Catalyst’s work is rooted in its research. It studies women and men across levels, functions, and geographies to learn about women’s experiences in business, barriers to their career advancement, and individual and organisational strate-gies leading to success. Its reports, often cited in inter-national media, reveal the challenges and opportunities for organisations and women at work globally. It has an extensive compendium of diversity and inclusion prac-tices that provides models for change.
The Cherie blair foundation: The Foundation was set up in September 2008 in response to Cherie’s experiences meeting women around the world and the realisation that, with the right support, women can overcome the challenges they face and play an important part in the economies and societies in which they work and live. The foundation feels women who are financially independent have greater control over their own and their children’s lives. Economic security gives women a more influential voice in tackling injustice and discrimination in their communities and wider society.
Yet women entrepreneurs around the world still lack the business skills, technology, networks and access to finance they need to be successful in the long term. The Foundation provides support in these four key areas so that women can grow their businesses and create employment opportunities. Working in partnership with local organisations, the Foundation develops pro-grammes that build confidence, capability and capital in women. Given that women tend to invest 90 percent of their income back into their families, investing in women isn’t just good ethics, it’s sound economics.
20-first: One of the world’s leading gender consultan-cies, 20-first works with organisations that seek to move from 20th century mindsets, management styles and marketing approaches into more progressive 21st century forms – and to stay first at the game. Thus it’s name. 20-first works with progressive global companies around the world interested in responding to both halves of the market and optimising both halves of the talent pool – the male and female halves. 20-first works with CEOs, execu-tive committees and managers to build gender ‘bilingual’ organisations. The firm’s renowned ‘Building Gender Balanced Businesses’ programmes and suite of online tools help companies harness the talent and market opportunities of the 21st century. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is CEO of the consultancy 20-first. She is author of HOW Women Mean Business, A Step by Step Guide to Profiting from Gender Balanced Business and co-author of WHY Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution.
Women in Technology International: Carolyn Leigh-ton founded Women in Technology International (WITI) to help women advance by providing access to - and support from - other professional women working in all sectors of technology. WITI started in 1989 as The International Network of Women in Technology and, in 2001, evolved into The WITI Professional Association, the world's leading trade association for tech-savvy women. Today, WITI is the premier global organisation empow-ering women in business and technology to achieve unimagined possibilities. With a global network of smart, talented women and a market reach exceeding two mil-lion, WITI has powerful programmes and partnerships that provide connections, resources, opportunities and a supportive environment of women committed to helping each other. Along with its professional association of net-works throughout the US and worldwide, including Hong Kong, Great Britain, Australia, and Mexico, WITI delivers value for individuals that work for a company, the govern-ment or academia, as well as small business owners.
w O m E n l E a d E R S h i p | C O V E R S T O R Y
57February 2012
58 February 2012
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At a recent round table in Ports-mouth, New Hampshire, EMA solicited inputs from a number of local IT managers, executives and professionals on topics of interest.
While the range was wide and varied -- from end-to-end e-mail and mobility, to APM and service management, to change, configura-tion and asset management -- the No. 1 out-standing request was what might be sum-marised as the transformation of IT towards a more service centric organisation.
In parallel, EMA asked its analysts for
Here are some technology and cultural hot spots to pay attention to as we move through this year and beyond By Dennis Drogseth
Techs Driving IT into Transition
How to Manage the BYOd Quandary Pg 60HORIZONS
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their predictions about what 2012 might bring. The range of prognostications, while focusing more on “hot technologies,” was also directly relevant to this notion of “IT in transition,” in which cloud, analytics, information sharing, the spread and com-moditisation of IT services through mobile access, heightened security challenges, are all coming into play.
So based on all this collective wisdom here are some of the technology and cultur-al hot spots to pay attention to as we move through this year and beyond:
Big Data (business and IT) - Business Intelligence (BI) is pushing out to just about every area of the enterprise, including IT. And with this comes challenges in how BI data is shared, including mobile access with its bandwidth challenges, as well as more complex policies for role-related access when roles are so diverse.
The notion of an IT data warehouse dra-matises this challenge within just IT and may ultimately (and inadvertently) set back in motion debates about a singular data warehouse or a data mart. When signifi-cantly more than 40 percent of respondents in a 2011 survey claimed they had a data warehouse as part of their service manage-ment strategy much of this turned out to be back end investments to shore up everything from CMDBs to advanced per-formance analytics for enriched capabilities in trending and analysis over time. So the truth is that while “Big Data” is by conven-tion monolithic, its roles and deployments are becoming more varied as the need for more competitive business models fueled by more responsive and/or business-trans-forming IT services continues to accelerate.
Advanced threat intelligence (also driving Big Data) - As targeted threats continue to increase in number and sophistication, the requirements for better information gather-ing and data-driven security become inten-sified. These requirements go far beyond looking at isolated denial of service or mal-ware issues to broader situational analysis. As managing simple threats and Mission Impossible terrorist scenarios begin to blur, patterns of human behavior need to be linked more aggressively to technical pat-terns and behaviors.
Advanced management analytics - The relationship between some of the “rocket
science” level performance man-agement capabilities far more familiar to the operations bridge than the enterprise marketing team are another source or criti-cal advancement in 2012. These are too easily lumped into the application performance man-agement (APM) market, which, as it’s been reconstituted by some analysts, creates a kind of inflated junk-food vision of cross-domain service manage-ment much like the giant Stay Puft marsh-mallow man in Ghostbusters.A more effective way of breaking out these analytics might be:
User experience management (UEM) - Along with application performance issues, UEM provides the ultimate metrics for service level management (SLM), as they are by definition the most business impactful (e.g., latency, consistency, acces-sibility, relevance and all the aspects of user interaction with application services). UEM can also project outward into business process impact, transaction to business outcomes, and other related business and user behaviors (e.g., which applications are people really using to accomplish which business tasks?)
Executive dashboards – These will begin to thrive in 2012, especially when service models can assimilate all these analytics (including data warehouse analytics) in ser-vice context.
Application discovery and dependency mapping - This and discovery in general are once again “hot” as the CMDB moves outward into a federated systems of opti-mised sources for everything from clas-sic configuration management, to active release and change management, to asset
management, and service impact management including data center consolidation and the move to virtualisation.
Melds - Capacity planning, performance, and business impact are all beginning to inter-sect in analytic “melds” across domains with both real-time and historical/trending values.
Application-aware network management - This has been around for a long time and
rarely gotten the respect it deserves. But in true cross-domain service management, the power of these many “application-aware network management” solutions (typically leveraging flow, packet analysis and other related technologies) can be as powerful as some of the hotter top-down solutions getting most of the attention today. As I used to say when I ran the network manage-ment practice, "the network is the ocean upon which everything floats" and this includes VMs.
Predictive analytics in support of automa-tion - While automation deserves its own heading, the relation between predictive analytics and automation technologies from workload automation (WLA) to IT process automation (or run book) will continue to transform the automation landscape. Another, and not unrelated transformative factor will continue to be service modeling from the CMDB/CMS as modeled interde-pendencies and the policies around them will begin to advance in defining automa-tion routines and associating them with larger processes.
Cloud - The perverse catalyst, cloud com-puting is advancing more effective solu-tions for dynamic insights across domains from APM to optimising the virtualised
As targeted threats continue to increase in number and sophistication, the requirements for better data gathering and data-driven security become intensified. These requirements go far beyond looking at isolated malware issues to broader situational analysis
75%Of All cuSTOmER
INTERAcTIONS, THREATEN TO uNdERmINE THE
cuSTOmER'S AffINITy fOR bRANdS IN 2012:
GARTNER
60 February 2012
N E X T H O R I Z O N S | T E c H T R E N d S
infrastructure and network. Endpoint vir-tualisation will continue to be another key growth area. Cloud is also offering new opportunities for flexibility and scalability in terms of on-demand compute power for delivering everything from BI solutions to advanced business service management (BSM) capabilities. So, as ven-dors become more cloud-savvy, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) continues to mature, watch for more and more ser-vice management solutions leveraging the scalability and flexibility of cloud for their own computing needs.
Mobile - Workforce mobility is no longer about just working at home, as smartphone and tablet form factors are forc-ing IT to adjust to a whole new array of pres-sures in everything from asset management, to performance and configuration manage-
ment to, inevitably, security. Mobility and the “consumerisation of IT” will also require new process and compliance guidelines as well as ongoing technology innovation.
The Cultural transformation of IT - As I believe most of you know all too well dramatic technology advantages in service management don’t occur just by installing pricy software, reading the instruction manual, and then going off to celebrate with a beer (but wouldn't that be nice!).
These initiatives require cultural and process change, which means that of course they require your commitment and attention. Look for a growing
focus on Lean IT, i.e., applying the rigors and disciplines in terms of metrics from manufacturing to IT governance.
A related “hot area” is unified demand management (UDM) as IT professionals
get saturated by fragmented and often effec-tively undocumented requirements, making daily life in IT more like trench warfare than running a business.
And, of course, I have to stress the trans-formation of the CMDB towards a more federated, model-centric universe as in my view single biggest revolution in ser-vice management yet as the CMDB/CMS becomes redefined as primarily a system of reconciliation versus a single, physical data store. I’ll be writing more on this in my next column based on fresh (Q4 2011) dialogs and research. —Dennis Drogseth is VP of Boulder, Colo.-
based Enterprise Management Associates, an
industry research firm focused on IT manage-
ment. Dennis can be reached at ddrogseth@
enterprisemanagement.com.
—This article has been reprinted with permission
from CIO Update. To see more articles regard-
ing IT management best practices, please visit
www.cioupdate.com.
How to Manage the BYOD Quandarythe It consumerisation challenge can be a way to address the big picture tasks of It operational strategy By John Lytle
Employees of large business enterprises are increasingly bring-ing iPads, iPhones, Android, and other devices to the office and using them for work-related purposes. This trend, the consumerisation of IT or the bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon, has CIOs concerned, and rightly so.
The proliferation of personal electronic devices in the workplace raises some immediate and urgent issues around corporate policy, infrastructure, and applications. While immediate action is essen-tial, the best approach to BYOD may lie in the context of long-term strategy, one that turns the challenge into an opportunity to optimise the enterprise’s operational environment.
CIOs need to recognise the changing nature of the workplace; spe-cifically, the evolution of the mobile worker into the virtual worker,
for whom location is irrelevant. Whereas once, new employees were issued a laptop, and more recently a Blackberry, today the expecta-tion is ubiquitous wireless access to any information, from any location, at any time. While that expectation creates a challenge, the upside is to encourage and enable that desire to work, and to allow employees to be far more productive and valuable.
Enterprise security, which is hard enough to get right without the added requirement of ubiquitous access, is probably the central over-riding concern around the BYOD phenomenon. Corporate boards do not want critical IP being inadvertently made available to the wrong people. More specifically, no CXO wants to be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal explaining how their critical data got exposed.
Recognising the potential risk, enterprises are investing significant
40%Of RESpONdENTS IN A 2011 SuRvEy
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resources in this area. Initiatives around defense-in-depth, identity management and multi-factor authentication are receiving highly specialised and qualified resourcing.
While the security challenge posed by BYOD can appear overwhelming, the key to success is to isolate and manage specific criteria such as identity, devices, and presence. For example:
Identity - From a policy perspective, the employee’s role within the organisation, as well as the screening and over-sight procedures associated with that role, dictates who is allowed access to what, in terms of applications, data, and network segmentation. Based on these criteria, user profiles can be defined.
Devices - CIOs must understand and address the differ-ent ways that a corporate asset, a smart device owned by the employee, and a public device will be used. Specifically, how will data be used and transmitted on each type of device?
For example, if a user at an internet cafe accesses corporate systems on a publicly used PC (not a company asset), the policy may be that they cannot edit or download documents.Further, when that user is finished, the public PC must have its browser cache wiped of all session files, etc.
A corporate asset would be handled differently, with more privileges, while a BYOD device that meets certain mini-mum protection levels would have a third set of privileges.
Presence - This involves managing the interplay between users, devices, and sessions. What is the employee’s user profile and what level of access is allowed? What kind of device is being used? Is the session being established within the secure network, or through an external connection?
Another set of considerations revolves around the question of support. If they haven’t been already, CIOs will be tasked with providing mobile access to company information. Sup-port of mobile devices is much more difficult with character-based legacy applications rather than browser-based applications.Meanwhile, telling the folks in the boardroom that they can’t access sales figures on their “executive jewelry” devices isn’t a viable option.
The right approachA successful strategy focuses on simplification and standardisation; specifically, on reducing application access complexity to the low-est common denominator. For user devices, that lowest common denominator is a browser-based user interface be it Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc. This means that browser limiting applications may require the UI layer to be switched to a virtual Windows session simply to make the application available to any platform.
In terms of implementation, simplification is again the watch-word. Start small, with “super users” or subsets of users to run pilots. Use email access to any platform as a starting point, and Web enable everything.
Another imperative is to rationalise the application development platform. Having fewer technologies in place for application develop-ment reduces costs in many ways, and significantly simplifies the user access issues.
The consumerisation issue also affects infrastructure, and the
network’s perimeter security is a particularly critical concern. The influx of mobile devices could impact the entire network strategy. CIOs need to consider the question in the context of how to manage “data in motion.”
CIOs are increasingly concerned about building their operational defense plan, about managing their legacy applications and rationalis-ing their portfolios. They’re looking for a good understanding of over-all staffing and support costs, and how to pull together their shared services and sourcing strategies. Ultimately, they need to understand what they’re spending and what they’re getting.
In this larger context, the IT consumerisation challenge can be a way to address the big picture tasks of IT operational strategy. So, rather than a putting out the fire exercise, the imperative to effectively support mobile devices can become part of a strategic plan to transi-tion the enterprise from where is now to where it needs to be.
—John Lytle is consulting director at Information Services Group (ISG) company
Compass, a leading independent sourcing data and advisory firm.
—This article has been reprinted with permission from CIO Update. To see more
articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit www.cioupdate.com.
CIOs are increasingly concerned about building their operational defense plan
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62 February 2012
In an exclusive interaction with Varun Aggarwal, Eugene Kaspersky,
Founder and CEO, Kaspersky Lab talks about the growing threat of a
cyber war and the changing security landscape across the world
What frustrates you the most in the work to keep cyber criminals at bay?
Governments do not cooperate and this is the biggest frustrating point in cyber crime investigations. When we get into a successful investigation and start getting more and more data about the cyber criminals, it often happens that the criminal is in a country which refuses to cooperate and it gets impossible to arrest the cyber criminal.
Sometimes, when FBI is involved in such investigations, they wait for the criminals to leave the country for vacation, considering they have enough money for international vacations. Then FBI arrests them while they are on their vacation abroad.
The good news is that Interpol is now going to introduce the Internet divi-sion of Interpol in Singapore in 2014.
“Cyber weaponsbigger issue thanCyber war”
63February 2012
E u g E N E K A S P E R S K y | N O H O L D S B A R R E D
How do you see the state of security in India? Do you think
India has the capability to launch a cyber offensive?Unfortunately, India needs to do a lot more to improve the awareness in the country about IT security. There are still a lot of big security incidents impacting India, the biggest one being Stuxnet that stuck very few countries including Iran, India, Indo-nesia and Russia.
In terms of capability, India is cer-tainly capable of building a Stuxnet like cyber weapon. However, cyber weapon is a bigger issue than cyber war. If this year we see another mili-tary attack like Stuxnet, we’ll see more such attacks. While I’m not sure about it, I can sense that’ll happen. It could be India against Pakistan. I’m afraid that countries that have close military conflicts will use cyber weapons to hurt each other because they can do this in a silent way. The victim, in such cases cannot ascertain who is behind the attack. We still can’t say for certain who was behind Stuxnet. While there are enough indications to suggest who was behind Stuxnet, there are no proofs to support that.
How can the threat of cyber wars be mitigated?
The discovery of the first state-spon-sored malware programs – Stuxnet (2010) and Duqu (2011) – has dem-onstrated to us all the new capabili-ties that can be applied in conducting cyber-espionage, cyber-sabotage, and potentially even cyber-warfare via the Internet. The danger shows itself in the technical might of military soft-ware able to inflict damage on large industrial installations and a lot more besides, and also in the element of surprise: both Stuxnet and Duqu were found only by lucky accidents, but had both been operating long before their discovery.
A degree of panic that began to be felt in 2010 due to the discovery of the Stuxnet worm led to several nation states deciding to equate use against them of cyber-weapons with real,
“traditional” acts of war with bombs and bullets. Then in 2011 practically all large countries of the world have showed their readiness for the creation and use of cyber-weapons - albeit off the record. All this testifies to the fact that we find ourselves at the dawn of a new era - the era of cyber-warfare.
The best solution would be to cre-ate an International Cyber-Security Agency (ICSA), which would act as an independent global platform for international cooperation and trea-ties on non-usage of Cyber-Weapons, and cyber-security regulation for critical infrastructures. ICSA should also investigate incidents and combat Cyber-Terrorism.
ICSA will not eliminate Cyber-Weapons completely, but it will improve the current situation a lot. The most vulnerable parties (i.e. developed countries with high Inter-net usage) will benefit from the exis-tence of ICSA most, and should be the first ones to support it.
I was talking to government offi-cials in London, Davos, Munich and US. At the moment, UN supports the idea of ICSA. We would be working with United Nations’ ITU depart-ment (the telecommunications arm of UN). I hope that we’ll have some progress this year.
How do you see the evolution of cyber criminals?
Most people today have multiple devic-es and in future, people will switch from computer to mobile phones. They are already doing this. Right now, however, there are lot less malware on the mobile compared to the desk-top, but that’ll change very rapidly. In the future, consumers will get rid of desktops because for an ordinary con-sumer, they’ll only have devices such as tablets, mobile, PS3 etc. Computers would stay only at the enterprise level. Once this happens, cyber criminals will switch to two categories. One cate-gory will still infect Microsoft Windows and enterprise environment, while the other part of cyber criminals will infect only mobile devices.
Whenever the source code of a malware is stolen or published, many variants of the same malware start to appear on the Internet. Hackers are often not able to write malware code themselves. So, they use the pub-lished source code and modify them a bit to launch attacks.
What key difference do you see between hobbyist hack-
ers of 20th century and hackvists of today’s time?Computer hooligans in the past used to spread malware just for fun. Hacktivists on the other hand, use malware as a tool to protest. Hacktiv-ists do not develop their own mal-ware. Instead they use open source tools such as Low Orbit Ion Cannon to attack the victims. The motivation is highly different and therefore, the behavior is also different.
“Unfortunately, India needs to do a lot more to improve the awareness in the country about IT security.”
DOSSIER
Company:Kaspersky Lab
EstablishEd:
1997
hEadquartErs:
Moscow, Russia
rEvEnuEs:
$600 million (2011)
EmployEEs:
2,400 in 29 countries
64 February 2012
CTO Forum hosted a conference to discuss the evolving security landscape in the enterprise
their environment in the cloud, and how they can exercise greater control over their data flowing over the mobile devices and roaming users.
Jonathan Andresen, Director-Product Marketing,Asia Pacific, Blue Coat Systems opened the discus-sion by highlighting the fact that over 44 million people in India have a Facebook account and that is actually second larg-est for any country outside of US. A year ago, Facebook users from India were just
In a world that is constantly changing and evolving at an unprecedented rate, it’s difficult to keep pace, espe-cially when it comes to selecting tech-nologies that can help your enterprise
move forward.Technologies like cloud computing and
mobility have been around for some time now, but the real challenge is knowing how to secure these channels of information flow. Today, more CIOs are concerned with trying to implement the right technologies while making sure there is no loss of data or exer-cising control over their employees’ devices.
In light of these important challenges, CTO Forum in association with Blue Coat Security organised a conference where Jonathan Andresen, Director-Product Marketing,Asia Pacific, Blue Coat Systems and Sunil Dhaka, CISO, ICICI Bank talked about how organisations can secure
Increasing usage of social networking and the concept of Bring Your Own Device requires a unified security approach for an enterprise
Delegates carefully listening to Jonathan Andresen while he talks about the growing threats in social media
Anuradha Das Mathur, Co-Founder and Director, 9.9 Media addressing queries from the delegates
EvEnt
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The crowd was intrigued to learn about some of the techniques to manage multiple devices in an enterprise
Ambarish Deshapande, MD-India Sales, Blue Coat Systems interacting with Anuradha Das Mathur, Co-Founder and Director, 9.9 Media during the conference
One of the delegates interacting with Sunil Dhaka, CISO, ICICI Bank
half of this number. This number consti-tutes of over 54 percent of online Indian population. “Facebook is also becoming a platform,” he remarked. “All the content that we have on the Internet would soon be available on Facebook. Facebook is add-ing Skype, for example and soon people would be able to do everything they need to do on the Internet using just one url, that is Facebook.”
Andresen opined that most companies select just one option when it comes to handling social networks. They either completely block social networking, losing out on potential opportunities to reach out to customers, do promotions. All Fortune 500 companies have well-defined Facebook marketing strategies.
“The second option they choose is to allow all social networking sites, which can expose you to productivity loss and malware attacks. Over 40 percent of all malware attacks take place via social net-working platforms,” Andresen said.
Sunil Dhaka, CISO, ICICI Bank opined, “Rather than talking about what’s next, it is about how to enable business in most secure manner. Organisations would need to accept that access would need to be provided to business (as technologies such as social networking are business drivers), and enable access to Internet in the most secure manner.”
Therefore, instead of blocking every-thing or allowing everything, you need to control it. “At Blue Coat we are not just controlling access to social networks but also securing them. For example, we can block all the gaming applications on Facebook while allowing everything else,” Andresen said.
Hybrid security unifies all of your users and all of your locations with a similar type of security, similar policies and secu-rity for all users. Blue Coat offers security
appliances, security as a service over cloud and also hybrid security. According to Andresen, it is much more effective for you to have an appliance at the gateway in your major locations and use your cloud to protect mobile users and remote branches.
Cautioning against a restricted access regime, Dhaka said, “No organisation is going to have the luxury of unlimited resources. Therefore, security teams would be hardpressed in administering and implementing security controls and organisations would need to handle and match the threats facing them with their existing teams.”
Anuradha Das Mathur, Co-Founder and Director, 9.9 Media said, “For those who
haven’t already embarked on a journey to open up their doors to social media and mobile devices in a secure way, hybrid security represents a huge opportunity.”
Talking further about the next wave in securing smartphone and tablet usage in enterprises, Dhaka said “While many organisations are already allowing employees to access corporate emails over their smartphones and tablets, in the next step, people would start asking their devices to be trusted devices in the corpo-rate network and that’s where CIOs and CISOs need to step up to ensure that your mobile device management is up to the mark and keeps up to the challenge.”
66 February 2012
TECH FORGOVERNANCE
Building Security Portfolio Around Attack ScenariosA robust, cost-effective security portfolio based on attack analysis results in robust compliance over time By Danny Lieberman
choices we make everyday are shaped by habits, not conscious decision-making
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I POintS5
there is a
fundamental
disconnect between
IT operations and
security operations
it is essential that
IT and security
communicate
effectively regarding
the types of
attacks that their
organisation may
face
it and security
need a common
language to execute
their mission
compliance control policies
is not the common
language we need
the ongoing process of “reverse-
engineering” is the
root cause for a
series of additional
problems
There is a fundamental disconnect between IT opera-tions (built on maintaining predictable business processes) and security operations (built on mitigating vulnerabilities).
Business executives delegate information systems to IT and information security to security people on the tacit assumption that they are the experts in information systems and security. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
In the current environment of rapidly evolving types of attacks (hacktivisim, nation-state attacks, credit card attacks mounted by organised crime, script kiddies, com-petitors and malicious insiders and more…), it is essential that IT and security communicate effectively regarding the types of attacks that their organisation may face and what is the potential business impact.
If you have any doubt about the importance of IT and security talking to each other, consider that leading up to 9/11, the CIA had intelligence on Al Qaeda terrorists and the FBI investigated people taking flying lessons, but no one asked the question why Arabs were learning to fly planes but not land them.
With this fundamental disconnect between two key maintainers of information protection, it is no wonder that organisations are having difficulty effectively pro-tecting their assets – whether Web site availability for an online business, PHI for a healthcare organisation or intellectual property for an advanced technology firm.
IT and security need a common language to execute their mission, and I submit that building the security portfolio around most likely threat scenarios from an attacker perspective is the best way to cross that valley of death.
There seems to be a tacit assumption with many execu-tives that regulatory compliance is already a common language of security for an organisation. Compliance is a good thing as it drives organisations to take action on vul-nerabilities but compliance checklists like PCI DSS 2.0, the HIPAA security rule, NIST 800 etc, are a dangerous replacement for thinking through the most likely threats
in our experience, building a security portfolio on attack scenarios has two clear benefits: A robust, cost-effective security portfolio based on attack analysis results in robust compliance over time.
Executives related well to the concepts of threat modeling / attack analysis. Competing, understanding the value of their assets, taking risks and protecting themselves from attackers is really, at the end of the day why executives get the big bucks.
to your business. Let me illustrate why compliance con-trol policies are not the common language we need.
PCI DSS 2.0 has an obsessive preoccupation with anti-virus. It does not matter if you have a 16 quad-core Linux database server that is not attached to the Internet with no removable device nor Windows connectivity.
PCI DSS 2.0 wants you to install ClamAV and open the server up to the Internet for the daily anti-virus signature updates. This is an example of a compliance control policy that is not rooted in a probable threat scenario that creates additional vulnerabilities for the business.
Now, consider some deeper ramifications of compliance control policy-based security.
When a QSA or HIPAA auditor records an encounter with a customer, he records the planning, penetration testing, controls, and follow-up, not under a threat sce-nario, but under a control item (like access control).
The next auditor that reviews the compliance posture of the business needs to read about the planning, testing, con-trols, and follow-up and then reverse-engineer the process to arrive at which threats are exploiting which vulnerabilities.
Other actors such as government agencies (DHS for example) and security researchers go through the same process. They all have their own methods of churning through the planning, test results, controls, and follow-up, to reverse-engineer the data in order to arrive at which threats are exploiting which vulnerabilities.
This ongoing process of “reverse-engineering” is the root cause for a series of additional problems:
Lack of overview of the the security threats and vulner-abilities that really count
No sufficient connection to best practice security con-trols, no indication on which controls to follow or which have been followed
No connection between controls and security events, except circumstantial
No ability to detect and warn for negative interactions between countermeasures (for example – configuring a
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T E C H F O R G O V E R N A N C E | s E C u R i T y
Encryption: A Buzzword, Not a Silver BulletConsider four encryption components on the server side By Danny LieBerman
In order to determine how encryption fits into server data protection, consider four encryption components on the server side: passwords, tables, partitions and inter-tier socket communications.
In these 4 components of a application / database server encryption policy, note that some countermeasures are required (for example one-way hashes of passwords, while other such as encrypting specify table columns may or may not be relevant to a particular application).1 .Encrypted password storageYou must encrypt passwords. It’s surprising to me how many Web sites don’t bother encrypting user passwords – a case in point is Uni-versal Music Portugal, in which 160 e-mail addresses and clear-text passwords were dumped on the Internet.
What is more surprising is the confusion between encryption and hashing.
Don’t use AES for encrypting passwords in your MySQL or Oracle
firewall that blocks Internet access but also blocks oper-ating system updates and enables malicious insiders or outsiders to back-door into the systems from inside the network and compromise firewalled services)
No archiving or demoting of less important and solved threat scenarios (since the data models are control based)
Lack of overview of security status of a particular busi-ness, only a series of historical observations disclosed or not disclosed. Is Bank of America getting better at data security or worse?
An excess of event data that cannot possibly be read by the security and risk analyst at every encounter
Confidentiality and privacy borders are hard to define since the border definitions are networks, systems and applications not confi-dentiality and privacy.Threat scenarios as an alternative to compliance control policies
When we perform a software security assessment of a medical device or healthcare system, we think in terms of “threat scenarios” or “attack scenarios”, and the result of that thinking manifests itself in planning, penetration testing, security countermeasures, and
follow-up for compliance.The threat scenarios are not “one size fits all”.
The threat scenarios for an AIDS testing lab using medical devices that automatically scan and analyse blood samples, or an Army hospital using a networked brain scanning device to diagnose soldiers with head injuries, or an implanted cardiac device with mobile connectivity are all totally different.
We evaluate the medical device or healthcare product from an attacker point of view, then from the manage-ment team point of view, and then recommend specific cost-effective, security countermeasures to mitigate the
damage from the most likely attacks.Threat scenarios consider asset values, vulnerabilities, threats and
possible security countermeasures. Threat analysis as a methodology does not look for ROI or ROSI (there is no ROI for security anyhow) but considers the best and cheapest way to reduce asset value at risk. —This article is printed with prior permission from www.infosecisland.com.
For more features and opinions on information security and risk management,
please refer to Infosec Island.
75mnTHE AmOuNT OF
mAlwARE dETECTEd iN 2011. mAliCiOus
siTEs NEARly dOublEd, wHilE mObilE mAlwARE
CONTiNuEs TO GROw
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or MS SQL database. You’ll end up storing the AES key somewhere in the code and an attacker or malicious insider can read the key by opening up one of your application DLLs in Notepad++ and read that key in a jiffy and breach your entire MySQL database with a single SELECT statement.
Database user passwords should be stored as MD5 hashes, so that a user (such as a DBA) who has been granted SELECT access to the table (typically called ‘users’) cannot determine the actual password. Make sure that different instances have different salts and include some additional information in the hash.
If you use MD5 encryption for client authentication, make sure that the client hashes the password with MD5 before sending the data on the network.2 .Encrypt specific database table columnsThe PostgreSQL 9.1 pgcrypto module allows certain fields to be stored encrypted. This is especially useful if some of the data is sensitive for example in the case of ePHI where the Web application needs to comply with the CFR 45 Appendix A Security rule. The cli-ent software provides the decryption key and the data is decrypted on the server and then sent to the client.
In most cases the client (a database driver in an MVC applica-tion such as Ruby on Rails or CakePHP or ASP.NET MVC is also a server side resource and often lives on the same physical server as the database server. This is not a bad thing.3 .Encrypt entire data partitionsEncrypting entire data partitions has its place. On Linux, encryption can be layered on top of a file system using a ”loopback device”. This
allows an entire file system partition to be encrypted on disk, and decrypted by the operating system. Many operating systems support this functionality, including Windows.
Encrypting entire partitions is a security countermeasure for physi-cal attacks, where the entire computer is stolen. Research we did in 2007 indicated that almost 50 percent of large volume data breaches employed a physical attack vector (stealing a notebook at a hotel checkin desk, hijacking a truck transporting backup tapes to Iron Mountain and smash and grab jobs where thieves know the rent-a-cop walkaround schedule and break in and steal desktop computers.
On the other hand, once the volume is mounted, the data is visible.4 .Encrypt socket communications between server tiersSSL has it’s place, although SSL is not a silver bullet countermea-sure for Microsoft Windows vulnerabilities and mobile medical devices vulnerabilities as I wrote here, here and here.
SSL connections encrypt all data sent across the network: the password, the queries, and the data returned. In database client-server connections, relational database systems such as Post-greSQL allow administrators to specify which hosts can use non-encrypted connections (host) and which require SSL-encrypted connections (hostssl). Also, clients can specify that they connect to servers only via SSL. Stunnel or SSH can also be used to encrypt transmissions.
—This article is printed with prior permission from www.infosecisland.com.
For more features and opinions on information security and risk management,
please refer to Infosec Island.
ThoughT Leaders
"Corporations are now beginning to accept and understand that social media is not just a passing fad but a revolutionary phenomenon"
Shree ParthaSarathy is Senior
Director, Enterprise Risk Services, Deloitte
India
Shree ParthaSarathy |
Organisations typically adopt social media for the following purposes: Collaboration - Considering the fact
that we live in a flat world, project teams are geographically dispersed and often work virtually over email and phone. Teams work efficiently and effectively in such scenarios, however they lack the social interac-tion which often results in lack of team bonding and team work. Hence there is an increasing adoption of vir-tual environments and social media in today’s corporate environment. The internal social networking sites bridge the gap created in the virtual environment and team members are now actual people with faces and real life rather than just an email or a voice on the conference call. Decision Making – Consider-
ing the geographically distributed work force and inability for senior management to be communicating with all levels of employees through traditional means, social media can bridge the gap by providing employees anywhere in the world, the ability to communicate with the senior management and contribute
The use of Social Media tools is exploding in popularity across the real and virtual worlds. Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube and other social networking tools are experi-encing sustained growth rates way above anything seen in new technol-ogies previously.
Blogging has moved from a cult following to full acceptance and use by mainstream media; and Wikipedia now far outstrips any conventional encyclopedia in both its breadth and depth of information. One of the rea-sons for this is the Millennial Gener-ation (or Gen Y). This generation has grown up with technology and is very comfortable with instant communi-cation technologies, such as email, texting, IM, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. which is made possible through use of the internet. The lack of this environment makes them uncomfortable since they feel more comfortable with communicat-ing through this medium than face to face communication.
We have also witnessed the unprec-edented power of social media and its influence on geo-politics – change
of governments, in the recent past. As social media continue to trans-form the world, the other genera-tions are playing catch up and the business community is starting to take notice. Corporations are now beginning to accept and understand that social media is not just a passing fad but a revolutionary phenomenon that will transform the way business is done in the global economy. This phenomenon can be equated to the rise of the Internet in the 1990 and how it has transformed and flattened our world.
Used strategically, social media offers organisations an unprecedent-ed opportunity to actively engage employees, customers, suppliers and other interested stakeholders and benefit from their collective ideas, knowledge and experiences.
A recent University of Massachu-setts study indicates that over 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies have public blogs, 35 percent have an active presence on Facebook / Twitter and that these numbers are grow-ing at a rapid pace as organisations continue to embrace social media.
Managing Social Media Risks A robust risk management framework that can adapt to changing business environment is key to organisations looking to embrace social media
70 February 201270 February 2012
a recent university of Massachusetts study indicates over 25% of Fortune 500 companies have public blogs and 35% have an active presence on Facebook / Twitter.
their ideas, thoughts and suggestions for improving the environment and also be able to participate in decision making. This creates an inclusive environment and gets everybody to contribute anonymously or otherwise Foster creativity, innovation and
collaboration both through internal sources as well as external sources Enhance customer, employee,
extended enterprise and stakeholder interactions Leverage additional channels to
increase recruiting, brand awareness, sales and marketing, emergency management etc.
Social media risksAs with any new technology / trend, social media also presents a unique set of challenges and risks to organi-sations. By combining new technolo-gies and methods of engagement, social media can pose new risks to organisations and magnify exist-ing ones. Some of the key risks that social media presents include: Amplification of existing informa-
tion technology risks such as viruses, malware, privacy, security and unau-thorised applications Reputational and brand impact
because of disgruntled employees or customers going viral on social media resulting in Increased ability to perform social
engineering Loss of intellectual property or
enterprise information because of malicious intent or un-intentional disclosure of information Impact to productivity due to extend-
ed time spent by employee on social media tools during working hours While organisations can reap the benefits from the many opportu-nities that social media presents, they must do so in a risk intelligent manner that is aligned with strat-egy and appropriately manages the associated risks. Organisations could begin by asking the following questions:Is your organisation taking advan-tage of the unparalleled communi-
cation and stakeholder engagement opportunities presented by various social media platforms?”“Have strategies and policies that address the risks and opportunities posed by social media been devel-oped and communicated?”“Are appropriate controls in place to manage your emerging risks created by social media (including reputa-tion, security, privacy, disclosure and human resources)?”“Does your organisation have suf-ficient and appropriate resources, skills sets and capacity to monitor, assess and take advantage of the constantly evolving social media landscape?”“Are you aware of what customers, employees and competitors are say-ing about you online?”Once you have answers to the above set of questions, it becomes easier to determine if your organisation is ready to embrace social media in a more mainstream manner. Despite the many specific risks intro-duced by social media, organisations must also evaluate the growing risks of doing nothing – of not embracing social media. A prime example of the need for balance is human resources. While organisations initially worried about potential productivity losses, the new worry is that restricting social media access may deter can-didates. Many organisations have embraced social media as one of the key channels to identify, attract and engage new talent.Organisations can adopt the follow-ing five step approach to better man-age the risks posed by social media.1 Develop a social media strategy that is aligned with your organisa-tional objectives and goals and is con-sistent with your corporate strategy.2 Define a governance structure for social media with clearly established roles and responsibilities.3 Perform a risk assessment to iden-tify risks inherent in the organisa-tion’s social media strategy.4 Develop and implement the key risk management practices such as
social media policy definition, com-munication and enforcement; period-ic training and awareness to employ-ees on risks of social media etc.5 Implement a process to proactively manage what is being discussed about your organisation in the social media space.
Risk management is a balanc-ing act: Organisations must be positioned to quickly identify and capitalise on the emerging oppor-tunities presented by social media while appropriately managing the associated risks. It is essential that organisations self-evaluate and understand their risk appetite before assessing the potential opportuni-ties that social media presents. A robust risk management framework that can adapt to changing business environment is key to organisations looking to embrace social media and explore the endless opportunities that it presents
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VIEWPOINT
About the Author: Ken Oestreich
is a marketing
and product
management
veteran in the
enterprise IT and
data centre space,
with a career
spanning start-ups
to established
vendors.
Although I’m not a Big Data afi-cionado, I’d recently been struck by a few statistics from the IDC Digital Universe study: It is estimated that in 2011, 1.8 Zettabytes of informa-tion was created, 75 percent of which comes from individuals.
So, just where does all of this data come from? And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that each one of us kicks-off a near constant massive stream of data that gets stored somewhere, even if only transiently.
In our seemingly innocuous day, we surely generate more data than we consume, some of which is captured by others, and only some which we might be privileged enough to retain.
Thus I sat down to think about a typical “digital contrail” that I might generate. While I really can’t quantify exactly how much stored data is creat-ed from each transaction, simply ball-parking the numbers would seem to support the Digital Universe claims.
Sources of my “Digital Contrail”
I make a cell phone call: Phone loca-tion tracking data (i.e. from towers) created and tracked by the carrier;
smart metering data collectionUsing entertainment: Uploaded pho-tography and video; sales pattern data and DRM data Go to the doctor’s office: Medical imag-ing, EMR data, reports, other recordsSomewhere in the background: With everything I do, there are surely secu-rity systems, kicking-off background data processes and analytics DB’sAlso somewhere in the back-ground: Every service is sourced from a data center, where all data (including device data) is surely replicated and backed-up, including log files.
So, now I’ve convinced myself that “the data’s out there”. I’ve created scads of data in the past 24 hour stint and fortunately (or unfortunately) it’s all recorded in different repositories. But now I begin to wonder - what *if* some of these structured and unstruc-tured data streams were re-construct-ed, mashed-up and analysed? That bit makes me both nervous (from a privacy and security perspective) and excited (from a Big Data and person-alisation perspective).
phone log files; data created and stored by multiple mobile apps and their own hosting infrastructures I browse the web: Site tracking; clickstream storage; site analytics; Email storage, including replication on devices as well as replication in geographical-mirrored data centers.Driving my car: Location-based tracking by RFID tags at toll booths; unique instrumentation dataGo to the bank: data streams initi-ated and stored from a simple ATM withdrawal; security analysis of bank-ing transaction patterns; audit and verification trails for individual trans-actions; mirrored/backed-up data within the bank’s data centerGo to the store: data streams initi-ated and stored from a simple credit card transaction; product inventory changes; buying patterns stored and allocated to individual affinity dis-count programsBrowse an online store: All of the above, plus clickstream storage and analysisPlan some travel: Airline reservations & pricing systems; airline tracking databases; TSA flyer database updatesAt my home: Electricity usage via
The Growth of Data Growth My
Digital Contrail
KEN OESTREICH
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