People & culture make the organization successful- Novartis HR Head

Ravneet Bhanot, Head, Human Resource, Novartis GDD India shared her thoughts on the significance of people and culture in an organization. The senior HR industry leader also shared how HR can bring new value to the business in times of disruption. Read the edited excerpts here.

In an exclusive conversation with People Matters, Ravneet Bhanot, Head, Human Resource, Novartis GDD India shared her thoughts on the significance of people and culture in an organization. The senior HR industry leader also shared how HR can bring new value to the business in times of disruption. Read the edited excerpts here.

How do you create a common culture in Novartis, an organization which is spread across the globe? 

The importance of culture can never be undermined especially for a pharma organization like ours that is at the forefront of innovating medicines to meet unmet medical needs of patients worldwide. Drug development takes a collective effort. It is, therefore, imperative that we have a common culture across all our functions, divisions and geographies that binds people together and drives them towards our common objective of developing breakthrough treatments.  Our cultural aspiration for everybody at Novartis is to be Inspired, Curious and Unbossed. 

We follow a three-pronged strategy to bring cultural aspiration to life. The first is shaping the organizational structures for effectiveness, efficiency, and agility and to reduce multiple layers and bring in more simplicity in the processes. Second is to hire, train and retain high quality, diverse talent capabilities that meet the demands of today and future. The third is to align the individual’s objectives with that of the organization’s because we strongly believe that personal transformation alone can lead to organizational transformation. 

What have been your core people strategy drivers?

Our strategy is based on two key pillars. One is People and Culture: Build a single consistent Novartis employee experience. We believe in creating and promoting #OneNovartis culture. We want to have an inclusive culture that leverages the diverse strengths that our associates bring across different teams and geographies. 

The second is more focused on the business - Organization and Talent. The business landscape evolves with the market. As HR, we need to have the foresight to prepare a workforce that is future-ready.  We need to have an organizational structure, operating model and workflow that can adapt to the rapid changes. We have made sure that all our divisions are more integrated and not operating in silos. As the business model evolves - we have to make sure that we are hiring people with the right mindset and capability. 

How can HR bring new value to the business in times of disruption?

The operating models of pharma are constantly evolving. HR has a crucial role to play in these disruptive times. We need to have the right organization model, capabilities and culture that enables science-based innovations and delivers positive outcomes. Creating an organizational structure is essential which is extremely agile. 

In addition, keeping in mind the emerging need for personalized medicine, we need to enable our associates to understand and embrace these disruptive technologies. HR plays an important role in defining the talent strategy to support long-term strategic business objectives based on future organizational talent needs and the dynamics of the external talent market. 

What steps is Novartis taking to build an environment that supports creativity, collaboration, the performance of their associates? 

To build a creative, collaborative and high performing organization, there are a few levers one must keep in mind. One is definitely culture- we want our associates to be inspired, curious and unbossed. And as I had mentioned earlier, in order to encourage continuous learning and enable our associates to stay ahead of the scientific advances being made across various fields, we have invested in platforms like LinkedIn Learning and Coursera so that our people can have all the learning opportunities they want at their fingertips. 

We reimagined our performance management system wherein we said that we do not want our people to focus on individual objectives in silos, but we really want them to move towards a collective objective. We encourage our people to be more collaborative and work together towards our common goal of improving and extending patients’ lives. As HR, we are making sure that the kind of people we are hiring in the organization are more aligned with the new culture that we are trying to inculcate. 

What are your key focus areas for the financial year 2019-20?

Our culture aspiration will also continue to be our focus in 2019-20. We aim to ensure that everybody at Novartis knows, applies, experiences and sustains our culture in their daily activities. 

To ignite this cultural transformation, we have started our efforts with our leaders. There is a strong correlation between the levels of active engagement in culture change by leaders and the willingness of associates to make a personal change. We want to develop leaders who are self-aware and be aligned with our cultural values and principles so that they act as role models for our associates.

Secondly, we want to activate teams and engage associates by creating awareness about our cultural values. Every quarter we are conducting a survey – ‘Our Voice’ to hear from our associates on what is working and what is not. We want to empower them to ‘fix one thing’ that could lead us closer to our cultural evolution.

Thirdly, we want to improve experiences. Our reimagined performance management system is designed to help us move from individual goals to team-based ones, enable spontaneous robust feedback – with the principle from “anyone, any time”, while building a strong coaching culture. We want our associates at all levels to be the catalyst for change in this year and beyond.

Source: People matters 24 Sep, 2019

The Strategy Behind TikTok’s Global Rise

Few tech startups have taken off as quickly as Beijing-based ByteDance, the creator of the highly popular 15-second video app, TikTok. In just two years, TikTok has emerged to rival companies like Netflix, YouTube, Snapchat, and Facebook with more than one billion downloads in 150 markets worldwide and 75 languages. On the app, homemade videos showcase everything from comedy to lip syncs to dog grooming tips that users create and share on their phones. The scrappy, goofy, fast-moving content has hooked young audiences around the world.

Since little translation is required, TikTok reaches well beyond other successful Chinese apps such as Tencent’s messaging app WeChat, which is ubiquitous in China but mostly used elsewhere among Chinese communities keeping in touch with people back home. Chinese entrepreneurs such as ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming are showing that they can succeed in an openly competitive market internationally rather than only in China where the Great Firewall regulates the internet and blocks access to several U.S. social media sites. His strategy of dual versions of Tik Tok – one for China’s internet censored market and another for the rest of the world – could be a new model for other digital content companies aiming for such global reach – including China-based digital startups with new ambitions to venture out beyond the home market. Their story may also hold lessons for American companies who have watched similar ventures into China meet serious constraints.

From the start, Zhang, a former Microsoft engineer and Chinese serial entrepreneur, had the goal of running a borderless company. Zhang, 36, is among a new generation of home-grown Chinese tech leaders with an international vision inspired by the early success of China’s tech pioneers of the late 1990s such as  Robin Li of Baidu, Jack Ma of Alibaba, and Pony Ma of Tencent. ByteDance has a valuation of $78 billion ─ one of China’s 86 “unicorns” in 2018. Its backers span top-notch venture capitalist firm Sequoia Capital China, Japanese tech conglomerate Softbank Group, U.S. private equity investor KKR, Chinese investment firm Hillhouse Capital and corporate venture unit SIG Asia.  As a privately financed digital content startup founded by a tech entrepreneur, ByteDance has a different relationship with the Chinese government and its grip on state-owned conglomerates. But in going global, the China-originated ByteDance could encounter heightened distrust and scrutiny especially as security concerns have enveloped Chinese telecom giant Huawei in readying the launch of its fifth generation, high-speed networks internationally.

In August 2012, five months after founding ByteDance, Zhang launched his first mobile app, Toutiao or Today’s Headlines, an AI-powered daily curated feed of news content personalized to users. In 2016, Zhang added to his product lineup by introducing a video sharing app, Douyin, for the Chinese market. He rolled out an overseas equivalent of the Douyin video app, dubbed TikTok, in 2017. That same year, ByteDance paid an estimated $900 million to acquire Musical.ly, a social video app based in Shanghai with more than 200 million users worldwide and a large following in the U.S. The deal combined TikTok’s AI fed streams and monetization track record with Musical.ly’s product innovation and grasp of users’ needs and tastes in the West.

After ByteDance folded the four-year-old Musical.ly into TikTok, and rebranded it to a single application under the TikTok name in August 2018, the combined app immediately gained some 30 million new users within three months. The app makes money through ads and from the sale of virtual goods such as emojis and stickers to fans.  An easy-to-use interface combining click-baity news and entertainment with powerful AI to precisely match users rather than recommend content based on their viewing habits and “likes” have fueled the app’s success.  The homegrown content has become prevalent, particularly among rural and poorer residents in China, India, and other emerging markets where access to other digital entertainment options has been limited. In China’s smaller cities and the countryside, where state-owned, stodgy media has dominated, the new ByteDance content apps are especially popular.

Zhang has also built upon China’s desire to make AI a priority in the race for global tech dominance. He describes a mission to “combine the power of AI with the growth of mobile internet to revolutionize the way people consume and receive information.”

Venture partner Connie Chan at Andreessen Horowitz in San Francisco wrote in her blog that the AI powered apps at ByteDance go to an extreme not common yet in the West. TikTok uses the app’s algorithms to decide which videos to show users, dictates their feed entirely, and learns their preferences the more one uses it. This is different from Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, which use AI to recommend posts rather than send feeds to users directly, she notes.

The company actively scouts for international content trends from an office in Los Angeles. Over the past few years, ByteDance snapped up Los Angeles–based Flipagram, a video and photo creation app set to music clips, and invested $50 million in Live.me, a livestreaming app in Los Angeles that is majority owned by Chinese mobile app developer Cheetah Mobile. Additionally, ByteDance acquired News Republic, a global mobile news aggregation service based in France, from Cheetah Mobile for $86.6 million. ByteDance attempted to buy a major stake in U.S. social news aggregator Reddit from Si Newhouse’s Advance Publications but lost that deal to Tencent, which swept in with a $300 million co investment in early 2019.

Facebook faces a serious global rival from China in TikTok. In 2018, TikTok ranked fourth worldwide as the top non-game app downloaded, at 663 million behind only Facebook at 711 million and its related apps WhatsApp and Messenger, SensorTower data shows. TikTok’s inroads in India and its young, mobile-savvy population is a big reason it’s soaring. About one-quarter of TikTok’s downloads come from India. TikTok added 188 million downloads in the first quarter of 2019, surpassing Facebook at 176 million, but trailing WhatsApp at 224 million and Messenger at 209 million.

In late 2018, Facebook launched its own short-format video version, Lasso, which is widely considered a knockoff of TikTok. Aimed at teens, Lasso can only be accessed through Facebook or Instagram, and so far is limited to U.S. access. Lasso was downloaded by 70,000 U.S. users within four months of its launch in November compared with nearly 40 million users for TikTok in the same time period, according to app analytics firm SensorTower.

TikTok’s rise has also brought a string of regulatory problems. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission slapped TikTok with a $5.7 million fine for failing to get parental consent before collecting names, email addresses, and personal information about children users under the age of 13.  In India, lawmakers briefly banned the app this past April from being downloaded on Apple and Android, for encouraging “cultural degradation” among youth. The ban was lifted a few weeks later when ByteDance lawyers successfully argued that its system screens offensive content and prevents nude videos to be shown, and is continually being upgraded to identify troublesome videos and develop more personalized content recommendations.

Despite regulatory and other challenges, ByteDance is building an empire of apps for a new generation and challenging the borders drawn around traditional digital content. If ByteDance can continue to fulfill its mission of becoming a borderless company with game changing technology, it may lead to the creation of other borderless companies and will influence other tech innovators from emerging markets to venture out too. Ultimately, this trend will create a fuller range of digital offerings globally for consumers and businesses.

Source: HBR SEPTEMBER 13, 2019

Hire Leaders for What They Can Do, Not What They Have Done

Fifty years have passed since the publication of The Peter Principle, but its rule still applies today. “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties,” noted Laurence J. Peter, the educator behind this famous work. His theory postulates that most competent people are promoted until they reach a position that is above their skill level, at which point they cease to grow.

Academic studies show that promotions are still largely a reward for past performance, and that organizations continue to assume the attributes that have made someone successful so far will continue to make them successful in the future (even if their responsibilities change). This may explain why there are still a large number of incompetent leaders.

Organizations that wish to select the best people for leadership roles therefore need to change how they evaluate candidates. The next time you are filling a managerial position, ask yourself three questions:

1. Does the candidate have the skills to be a high-performing contributor or the skills to be an effective leader?

The performance level of individual contributors is measured largely through their ability, likability, and drive. Leadership, by contrast, demands a broader range of character traits, including high levels of integrity and low levels of dark-side behaviors born out of negative attributes likes narcissism or psychopathy.

The difference between these two skill sets explains why great athletes often end up being mediocre coaches (and vice versa), and why high performers often fail to succeed in leadership positions.

We all know that the most successful salespeople, software developers, and stockbrokers have exceptional technical skills, domain knowledge, discipline, and abilities to self-manage. But can those same skills be used to get a group of people to ignore their selfish agendas and cooperate effectively as a team? Probably not. Leaders do need to obtain a certain level of technical competence to establish their credibility, but too much expertise in a single area can be a handicap. Experts are often hindered by fixed mindsets and narrow views, which result from their years of experience. Great leaders, however, are able to remain open and to adapt, no matter how experienced they are. They succeed because they are able to continually learn.

This has been proved in many situations, particularly in the area of sales. A recent academic study of over 200 firms found that performance as a salesperson was negatively correlated with performance as a sales manager. If you promote your number one salesperson to management, you create two problems: You lose your top salesperson and you gain a poor manager.

2. Can I really trust this candidate’s individual performance measures?

The most common indicator of someone’s performance is a single subjective rating by a direct line manager. This makes measures of performance vulnerable to bias, politics, and an employee’s ability to manage up. Although peer-based and network-oriented performance management is growing, it is still in its infancy. As a result, performance measures may not be as reliable as you think.

This is likely why women still tend to be promoted less than men, even when their performance is identical. Many organizations promote people into leadership positions because they “create the right impression,” even if their actual contributions are minimal.

If you ask yourself the above question, and the answer is “no,” take some time to think about what good leadership looks like at your company. Are you looking for leaders who can drive great results? Bring people together? Listen and develop others? Or are you looking for leaders who can connect, innovate, and help evolve the business? Every company needs different types of leaders at different times, and someone who performs well in their current role may not be the right person to help you reach your most immediate goals.

3. Am I looking forward or backward?

The secret to selecting great leaders is to predict the future, not to reward the past. Every organization faces the problem of how to identify the people who are most likely to lead your teams through growing complexity, uncertainty, and change. Such individuals may have a very different profile from those who have succeeded in the past, as well as from those who are succeeding in the present.

Avoid promoting entirely based on culture fit. Although you may have good intentions in doing it, it often results in a lack of diversity of thought and outdated leadership models. In today’s ever-changing world, businesses are expected to grow as fast as the technologies surrounding them. Their models must be in constant transformation. What worked in the past and what is working in the present may not work at all in the future. Companies, then, need to get more comfortable thinking outside the box. This means taking “misfits” or “people who think differently” and placing them into leadership roles. Give them support and time to prove themselves. This is just one way to deepen your leadership pipeline.

You should also take an extra look at the people who “may not be ready,” and analyze them on the basis of their ambition, reputation, and passion for your business. Often the youngest, most agile, and most confident people turn into incredible leaders, even though their track record may not be the best. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the most successful CEOs in decades by many measures, had almost no business experience before he started Facebook. Steve Jobs had not run a large company before Apple, yet he had the insights, connections, and drive to make it a household name.

It’s time to rethink the notion of leadership. If you move beyond promoting those with the most competence and start thinking more about those who can get you where you want to go, your company will thrive. In other words, start considering those who have high potential, not just top performers.

Source: HBR 27, 2019

Is Recession coming.... few signals we should know

Everyone is discussing recession, So the question is whether the recession is in sight now. There are a couple of indications of financial downturn that can, when consolidated somehow or another, demonstrate a recession is brewing..

Yield curve inverts

When interest rates on short-term government bonds surpass the interest rates for long-term government bonds, business analysts state that yield curve has inverted. That is an indication of cynicism among financial specialists, and it's a solid expectation of economic downturn. In fact, the last five recessions have been preceded by a yield curve inversion, in spite of the fact that it doesn't imply that recession will happen right away.

Unemployment rate rises

There's a stream down impact that happens in a down economy: People quit spending money, which means organizations don't work out quite as well. Organizations cut a portion of their workers. If a lot of businesses are doing this at the same time, it makes it harder for those laid-off folks to find new employment. In the event that the joblessness rate goes up, it's a sign that things aren't looking incredible.

GDP drops 

Gross domestic product (GDP) is, to put it plainly, the size of the economy. It's regularly determined by seeing purchaser spending, business speculation, and fares.If that combined measure dips significantly, it’s bad news.

Stock market tanks

When the stock market declines quickly—like when you see a headline about the "most terrible day of the year," or something gloom and doom—this is on the grounds that numerous financial specialists aren't sure about the economy and they're auctioning off as much stock as they can. If the stock market dips over and over, on a close regular routine, it's an indication of trouble.

Some recent developments, which we should also know are

Acceleration in US-China levy war 

Eighteen months prior Donald Trump started his "America first" crusade with a battle about steel dumping. The US president forced 25% import duties on steel against China, the EU, India, Canada and Mexico.

Easing back US development 

Trump inherited a buoyant economy and gave it a sugar surge of personal tax reductions and corporate giveaways. Outstanding development a year ago incited the US national bank, the Federal Reserve, to increase interest rates to calm things down.

Long recession in Germany 

Angela Merkel’s finance minister, Olaf Scholz, has raisd desires for a €50bn (£45bn) lift to the German economy to head off an imminent recession. The economy shrunk just barely in the subsequent quarter – 0.1% – yet is hope to endure a second and bigger drop in the second from last quarter.

Chinese debt crisis

China, more than the US, has been the additional gear for the worldwide economy since the 2008 financial crash, but the country is in the throes of a full-blown debt crisis.

Brexit

The uncertainty surrounding Britain’s future and whether it remains inside the world’s largest trading bloc or swims alone has already damaged investment and GDP growth.

Other countries performance 

A string of countries are currently in recession or have recently suffered a contraction. India's Auto sector is going through a great recession which is resulting in massive job losses. Iran faces a blockade by the US and is unable to sell its oil or access the financial markets easily. Argentina is weighed down by enormous debts and Venezuela, despite holding the world’s largest oil reserves, is in political and economic crisis.


The bad news is that recessions are pretty inevitable, meaning sooner or later, one will land. The good news is that the economy eventually recovers.