nuance intelligence

India, land of opportunity. Obscene wealth, abject squalor, and everything in between.

I got to spend a week in Pune and Mumbai on business a couple of months ago. It was such a refreshing change from America, where everyone is miserable because they can’t find a job. I talked to a couple of sharp young twenty-somethings who told me they change jobs (on purpose!) a couple of times a year just to meet new girls. It’s no problem finding new jobs – there are tons, and companies give out raises and bonuses every year just to try and keep workers from jumping ship too frequently.

So does this sound familiar to you?

Me neither.

It was fun thinking about how I’d deal with that novel situation – high attrition due to high demand for skilled workers and a relative shortage of those workers. If you’re going to outsource to India, how do you handle the HR/communications challenges?

Well, you could try to create a workplace that’s too cool to leave. My ideas:

1) Have the nicest office around. Plenty of American and European companies open offices in Mumbai or Hyderabad or Pune and, in an effort to make the most out of what’s probably a cost-saving effort in the first place, choose dank cinder block rooms and furnish them with crappy old furniture and computers. Wouldn’t you rather work someplace nice? The people I met who had been in their jobs for a year or more mostly worked in nice offices with windows, clean new desks and modern computers.

2) Offer a career path without a glass ceiling. If you shipped in a white guy from the States to be the local boss, and you don’t have a reasonable, visible plan in place to put a local in that job eventually, why should anyone ambitious stick around? Make sure there are advancement opportunities, including the training that’s needed to set Indians up for success in those higher-up jobs.

3) Make your workplace a community. It’s easy to leave a workplace behind when it’s a place that you go five times a week to earn your paycheck. It’s hard to leave a place where you know and like the people around you, and you are doing fun, important things with them that make your life better and richer. Set up get-togethers for everyone in the office and make sure they can bring their families to some events, and that there’s good food to eat. Coordinate community service efforts that are meaningful to your team – and ask them to define ‘meaningful’ and ‘service’.

4) Make your company a good place to work. I know, I’m coming back to Daniel Pink AGAIN but he makes such an important point: people aren’t only motivated by money. Your employees in India, like their colleagues in America or Europe, want to do interesting work with people who they like, and they want some ability to self-direct and choose what they do. It’s not all about the money for them, either (although money might be a bigger motivating factor than we’re used to in the States…see #5.)

5) Ask. What does an American consultant really know about any of this, anyway? You can find out what you need to know about how to get your Indian employees to stick around…by asking them. Don’t let your employee research stop at the ‘engagement survey.’ You might get some data that shows your Indian employees are less engaged than those at the home office, but was that a surprise? Do some qualitative research in India and take the time to find out about what really matters to your workforce, before they all leave for better dating opportunities elsewhere.

When I first met Daniel Pinchbeck, about a year ago, and I heard he was working on a 2012 movie, I thought it would be another pedantic hand-wringing, or worse, like the recent The Portal, a Pink Floyd video gone horribly long.  However, Pinchbeck, the co-founder of Reality Sandwich and Evolver.net appears to have put together something more intelligent and practical, as this trailer suggests.

Perhaps you’re sick of the topic — it sure can be hard to take any given day.  But if you’re open to a rational discussion of the evolution of our species, this may be one channel to which you ought to stay tuned.

While I more fully organize my thoughts from the overwhelmsion of the energy of 1,200 buzzing brains at last week’s Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP), I came across my photos of the topics from what many people find to be the most interesting day of the conference, Day 3.

After two days of an over-stuffed, mind-numbing agenda full of heady topics and full-tilt hobnobbing, roughly a third of the group returns for a day with the agenda collectively created by the participants.  This process, called Open Space, was expertly facilitated by Jerry Michalski, and the session draws out the topics people want to discuss.  From tightly huddled six-person intensives to ranging 40-person explorations, the day exemplifies the open source spirit of the community, a yin to the bustling yang of the previous 48 hours.  The next three photos are images of the wall of topics that got discussed.  Since each person had already presented their idea by standing up on a stage and speaking to the topic for something like 45 seconds, you’ll just get a snapshot of each discussion.  For the full benefit, well, you had to be there.  Nonetheless, this should provide a peek into what’s on the mind of the most collaborative third of the thought leaders at the edge of impact investing.

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This was the year that social entrepreneurship crossed into the IT geek consciousness of South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), with the advent of Good Capitalist party (info, report). Good Capitalist, attended by nearly 2000 people, by some reports, was created by social media / social entrepreneur crossover star-child Martin Montero, aka the ubiquitous @montero in the #socent world on Twitter.  The party was celebrated with gusto by the social entrepreneurship community, heralding their acceptance by “the cool kids.”

Triple Pundit reported on a different angle of this intersection at SXSWi, and called it the “Big Green Disconnect” between tech and sustainability communities, saying “the few green related panels were under attended and often rudimentary,” suggesting that each community is talking a different language.  Our friend and advisor Bill Shutkin had a similar, less politic rant over dinner a few weeks back, along the lines of “do we really need another Twitter app while our energy and financial systems are in crisis?.” Both comparisons were predated by Silicon Valley tech guru Tim O’Reilly’s call in 2008 to “work on something that matters,” where he beat a drum of “create more value than you extract.”

So, now the meme has been released, and some cool kids in technology (largely a comfortable-if-not-affluent crowd from a global perspective) think social entrepreneurship is the next big thing.  Mostly, this is good.  Right? Continue reading

Topping a ten-day period of sustainability-inspired thinking pervading economic reporting in the gray-flannel-media, the old gray lady reports (PW req’d) that French President Nicolas Sarkozy initiated a shift in how the French government reports economic activity (story tip to three of favorite tweeters: @NurtureGirl, @kevindoylejones and @byrnegreen).

President Nicolas Sarkozy told the French national statistics agency Monday to take greater account of factors like quality of life and the environment when measuring the country’s economic health.

Mr. Sarkozy made the request after accepting a report from a panel of top economists he had charged with reviewing the adequacy of the current standard of fiscal well-being: gross domestic product.

The panel, chaired by two Nobel economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Amartya Sen of Harvard University, concluded that G.D.P. was insufficient and that measures of sustainability and human well-being should be included.

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Not only did I have a great flight on Virgin on my last trip overseas, but this image from the Virgin mothership is one of my favorites in a long time.  The image comes from their page about running a sustainable company, which is worthy of your attention, as well. (Amazing what an image search can turn up, eh?)

As part of our partnership with Innovation Network for Communities (INC), we spent a week in mid-July at the Social Innovation eXchange (SIX) with 120 social innovation leaders from 24 countries.

Our two-part report ran this week at the nuPOLIS blog.

• Part 1 covers our observations about the field of social innovation.  In short, the field of social innovation is in its very early days, and there is a significant need for more work and better organization to increase impact.
• Part 2 highlights the people, organizations and initiatives that caught our attention, and are worthy of further review.

In summary, it was a wonderful and enriching experience for which I am humbly thankful.  It has further enhanced our resolve to get to work here at home, creating and amplifying the social innovations that will change the lives of our communities, and ensure a sustainable future for our children.

We’ll be blogging deeper thoughts later, but tune in to the live twitter feed at #sixlisbon on Twitter.  Lots of great collaboration from 100 leaders in 24 countries.

Sitting in a conference room in Portugal, some 3,000 air miles away from home, we post a blog and prediction market about ethical travel.

As we wrote in our new feature at nuPOLIS,

Air travel is the most damaging form of travel when it comes to global warming — yet most of us “social change agents” depend on it for our professional work. It’s time to stop avoiding the practical and ethical dilemmas.

Please share your thoughts, and contribute to the collective wisdom on this challenging issue.