Military to Civvy Street Transitions

Is "Command" a saleable skill?

2012-11-07T11:34:00.000+05:30

The reason I write about this is because many military officers are putting "command" down as a skill, strength or achievement in their resumes while seeking re-employment in civvy street. I guess the reason is that it appears to equate to leadership. Is it? While "military leadership" is associated with command (and therefore the reason for all the confusion), "leadership" in civvy street is defined more as a process of social influence in which one person can enlist the willing aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task."

Command as we understand it in the military is the exercise of authority at all levels in the military hierarchy, where the scope of the authority is vested in the rank held by the individual. The military understand this well and this is accepted as routine.

However in civvy street, "command" has an altogether different connotation. It is considered autocratic, associated with arrogance ("of power") and is placed at one extreme end of the spectrum of leadership styles.

At the other end is laissez-faire or free reign. In between these two extremes is where most of the present day corporate leadership styles permeate and the trend is most definitely to the right of the spectrum (see diagram above).

The work world is becoming more and more technically complex and knowledge resides with specialist employees. The management of such employees requires a different set of leadership attributes than the one normally used in the military. Approaches in the participative style, such as "consensus building", is almost alien in the military.

So, bottomline is that once you hang up your boots, hang up terms such as "command" too. Veterans who have already made the transition will understand what you have done without your having to spell it out. For the rest, the terms will either been totally alien, or evoke mirth!

That cannot possibly be your objective.

Reputation of Indian Corporate Houses

2012-10-10T16:23:00.001+05:30

An article in "The Globe and Mail" a Canadian media house website, titled "Toronto research firm rocks clubby world of India Inc." (read article), is revealing. It talks about manipulative accounting, poor disclosure practices, siphoning of funds, poor quality balance sheets and other gaping flaws in transparency at major Indian real estate, communications, and infrastructure firms including IndiaBulls, Kingfisher Airlines, DLF and Reliance among others.

The research firm specified in the article above is Veritas Investment Research Corp, which in relation to DLF, points to questionable related-party transactions, aggressive and conflicting accounting policies, self-enrichment and inability to deliver on promises, and a balance sheet stretched to the limit, with no free cash flow and no credible plan to de-lever its balance sheet. It further states that "If your investment decision incorporates management integrity, then bypassing DLF will be an easy choice."

The article further quotes from credible sources to isolate the problem, attributing it to concentrated ownership or controlling entities, such as family groups or the state, which makes it fertile field for tunnelling or diversion of wealth and other private benefits of control.

A must read!

References
1. Singh, Shalini; "Behind Robert Vadra's fortune, a maze of questions" The Hindu, New Delhi [Oct 08, 2012]; <http://www.thehindu.com/>
2. Nolen, Stephanie; "Toronto research firm rocks clubby world of India Inc.' The Globe and Mail, [Aug 21, 2012]; <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/>

On Nation Building

2012-09-17T20:25:00.001+05:30

I took a long break as I had answered most of the questions put to me over the years on the subject of military to civil transition. I ended with the suggestion of what I thought was the best way we could give back to the country post retirement. Many may argue that with 30 to 40 years of uniformed service, we will have done our bit for the country and that it was payback time. But if you think though this, you will see reason why you can do much more now that you are out of uniform than anything you may have done in the past. The reason is that, there are no limitations, no regulations, no army act and definitely no pondering the state of civil-military relations.

Over the next several posts, I will first develop my own concept of nation building. The prime objective is to create an nation-wide organization that will serve as a support platform for real leaders and statesmen. This organization has to be conceptualized, and then developed to a point where it becomes self-sustainable. It needs constant revitalization with fresh young minds and people with vision and leadership. It needs a sustainable revenue model. And it needs reach.

How do you develop such an organization from scratch? And what do I mean by a "support platform"? These are some of the answers I will seek and develop over the the next several weeks.

PS: I have started this endeavor under a separate blog. It has not reached a critical mass, but you can find it at Doodling with Politics.

The Business of Nation Building

2012-06-15T11:13:00.000+05:30

All this while I had been talking about the "how to" of military to civvy street transition. That was probably more relevant to those who chose to retire without a pension, either because you were short-service commissioned officers or those who resigned (<10 years of service) or retired prematurely (<20 years of qualifying service).

But what about those of you who have superannuated or put in the minimum of 20+ years required to qualify for a pension! Should you work for a corporate entity in the public or private sector?

The answer would depend on your interests, of course. And your financial situation. However, if you ask me, I will always suggest that you do anything, even setup your own business, but don't ever join a private sector company? At the end of the day, it is just not worth it.

Why?
Because you are so much more versatile than the private sector will allow you space for. They will argue that you do not have industry experience, that you don't have the pedigree of an IIT/IIM, that you did not possess the relevant skills for the job or often, that you are not adequately networked within the industry or the target market for them to consider you seriously.

They definitely don't see your versatility, they don't correlate the type of assignments you have had with the existing or emerging needs of the industry primarily because they don't understand what goes into those assignments. And they definitely will not acknowledge the fact that many of us who have succeeded in the private sector came from the same background and started from scratch.

So what should you do?
If it catches your interest, I will suggest you get on to the very critical task and unfulfilled task of nation building. Yes, the very same task of nation building that stopped a few years after our independence from British colonial rule in the summer of 1947. My best guess is that it lasted all of 10 years, after which petty power politics overtook nation building.

There is so much left to do. When George Orwell wrote "The Animal Farm", he was of course using it as a parody for the problems following the birth of the communist Soviet Union in the October Revolution. Our nation suffered a similar fate in the years post independence.

Orwell's' novel addresses not only the corruption of the revolution by its leaders but also how wickedness, indifference, ignorance, greed and myopia corrupts any revolution. It portrays corrupt leadership as the flaw in the revolution, rather than the act of revolution itself. It also showed how potential ignorance to problems within a revolution allowed the subsequent horrors to happen when a smooth transition to a people's government was not achieved.

What was the status of India on 15 August 1947. We were a collective of hundreds of princely states, some independent, with most under loosely administered British presidencies, residencies and agencies. This besides the several colonial enclaves controlled by France and Portugal.

Then, through a combination of factors, Vallabhbhai Patel and VP Menon convinced the rulers of almost all of the hundreds of princely states to accede to India. And having secured their accession, they then proceeded to, in a step-by-step process, secure and extend the central government's (read the Congress party's) authority over these states and transform their administrations until, by 1956, there was little difference between the territories that had formerly been part of British India an those that had been part of princely states. Simultaneously, the Government, through a combination of diplomatic and military means, acquired control over the remaining colonial enclaves.

Did the new "rulers" discard the old and usher in the new?

No. They inherited all the entitlements of the British Raj and the Princely states put together and set about perpetuating them for eternity both for themselves and for their progeny. A classic case of Orwellian deja vu! The new rulers were largely feudal lords, or vassals who assumed that they were the new lords, and as their entitlements and self-interests grew, India regressed.

For a time, starting from 1991, we were given to believe that India had finally awoken. Sadly, that dream too was shattered.

Personally, I don't believe that the India in which we live today is what our forefathers envisioned when they conjured up the dream called India. Given all indications, the nation state today is hell bent on alienating all of us. And events over the past several years have on reinforced this feeling.

How long should we allow this state of despair to continue?

Great countries are not born great! They are molded in the fires of hell before they wrought into greatness.

Will it be painful?
Like hell!

It is said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

If you wait, you will grow old and infirm and have leaking bladders or worse.
If you die today, you will still have a good looking body.
If there was a better time to act, it is now!

If you have served well, it is time for more sacrifices. This is a fight for our freedom from the "tyranny of the elected" and their blatant disregard for the common people of this country.

It is time to rebuild a nation once again.

As an aside, let me bring up a little story, an example of a simple action that differentiates a great nation.

As citizens, we are all aware that it is normal for nations to honour their soldiers. Read this letter written on Nov 21, 1864, from a President to a grieving mother on the loss of all her sons in battle:

Now contrast this act with the state of affairs in our nation.

In India, the establishment views soldiers with suspicion, they disregard their heroes and view their sacrifices with contempt. Can you even imagine a letter like the one above, written to the mother or father or spouse of a fallen soldier by one of our Presidents? Why is it like that?

This, of course, is just one aspect. Take any other aspect of governance and you will find nothing but systemic rot. The battle for change is yet to begin, but the signs of its relentless approach are everywhere.

This battle was sanctioned a long time ago, in the Bhagavad Gita, and in the following verses:

यदा यदा हि धर्मस्य ग्लानिर्भवति भारत ।
अभ्युत्थानमधर्मस्य तदात्मानं सृजाम्यहम् ॥४-७॥

...Bhagavad Gita Chapter IV, Verse 7

परित्राणाय साधूनां विनाशाय च दुष्कृताम् ।
धर्मसंस्थापनार्थाय सम्भवामि युगे युगे ॥४-८॥

...Bhagavad Gita Chapter IV, Verse 8

Whenever and wherever a decline of righteousness and a predominance of unrighteousness prevails; at that time I manifest myself personally, O descendants of Bharata.

For the protection of the denizens and the annihilation of the corrupt adversary and to fully establish righteousness once again, I shall reappear age after age.

Traditional Hindu belief points to the re-emergence of a person, a God.

However, many also believe what I believe.

That in the evolution of nations, there will be periods of such darkness that it will trigger the re-emergence of collective righteousness, of awareness, of consciousness and a reunification of purpose in its people.

The undercurrents are already palpable.

There is no doubt that this nation will have to go through the purgatory of a bloody revolution before it emerges with strong democratic ideals to take its place in the comity of progressive nations.

We are all out of uniform now. The bonds that once kept our arms tied and our voices gagged have long been cast off. We are citizens once again, free to voice our opinion, free to act, free to shape our own destiny. We are the people.

It is we who now need to step up and be counted. Collectively we have to make a difference. It is not about rebuilding an army. This fight is political - and it is not the dirty word as we had come to expect. Politics is nothing but a fight for hearts and minds.

I hope it will never come to a stage where we will feel the need to take up arms again. War's are violent by nature. Violence begets violence, and once begun, it is difficult to control.

But what is war, after all?

As Clausewitz said and we are all only too aware, war is a continuation of politics by other means.

So political strategy will have to include a means to deliver the right results - whatever form or shape that might take. After all, how does one bring to a halt the rampant loot by our elected representatives.

Fear!

Yes indeed. Fear is the key! No longer does there appear to be any fear of the law. Judicial processes have been deliberately underfunded and bogged down by overload. Justice is not delivered for years, nor is it seen to be delivered. There are innumerable cases in which people have fought for justice until their deaths - natural or otherwise.

And when the legal proceedings is directed at political heavyweights or has political overtones, where is the hope that justice will ever see the light of day? In such cases, subversion of investigative or even the judicial processes is the norm.

"Be the change you want to see", said the Mahatma.

Any movement for change will have to be political in nature. Politics is not an area of strength for soldiers. So what do we do that will make a difference? How do we select our aim, develop our objectives? What preparatory activities does it entail? What should be the form of organization, if any?

The start point will have to be an assessment of the strength and weakness of the existing system, the main political parties and other stakeholders.

Sounds logical enough. But what then?

Funnily enough, it is not as if the existing dispensation is not aware of what it takes to make this country great. They just don't have the strength of leadership to carry it through. And if we can work it out, this is exactly where we will succeed.

However, don't be under any misconception with regard to our background. It is a very different set of leadership skills and abilities that will be needed - that of wielding influence without authority, of consensus building and of tremendous personal sacrifices.

Then again, it may just boil down to the question of who will fire the first shot for the revolution in the making for so many years to reach a tipping point!

You are a born-again entrepreneur

2012-05-09T10:18:00.002+05:30

Come to think of it.
There is nothing about running a business that you don't know.

Yes, there will always be some startup hiccups.
And lots of questions, whose numbers are overwhelming initially.

You will need one friend - a good chartered accountant who is willing to spend sometime answering your questions.

Do you need to register your firm?
No - if you have a proprietary firm, where you are the single owner, you don't need to register your firm with the local registrar of firms (the CA will know). However, if you are in the products or services business, you will need a sales tax or service tax registration at some point. Products are generally taxable so you will need sales tax registration right at the outset. Service tax registration can wait until your annual revenue crosses eight lakhs. But check with your CA.

Other types of firms are: Partnerships (two or more partners); limited liability partnerships (LLC), a new form which gives you the privileges of a company in terms of limiting your personal liability to the extent of your capital invested in the business; and companies (private limited or public) that need to be registered with the Registrar of Companies and comes with a lot of statutory and regulatory baggage.

If you go to the GOI website, there is a section on Business covering the following aspects:

Starting a Business
Managing a Business
Growing Business
Business Financing
Indian Economy
Outsoourcing Industry
Legal Aspects
Taxation
...
etc

This is a good starting point for general learn and information.

The section on Starting a Business for instance, has the following details:

Creating a Business Plan
Making a Product Choice
Setting up Infrastructure
Naming and Registering a Business
Choosing a form of Business (that we discussed earlier)
Choosing he Location of the Industry
PRicing your Product
Regulatory Requirements
Financing a startup Business
Sourcing Process, Raw Materials, Machinery and Equipment
Hiring Human Resources

Are there any other websites that offer startup advise?
Of course. They are all over the web.

Small business Blogs, News, Tips and Tricks at the ZDNet Small Business Centre
Check out the Business Advisor Startup Document Centre for a selection of business and legal documents.
The US Small Business Administration website is a great resource for startup information. You can also join its local chapters for news and information for small businesses that are specific to a state.
The UK Federation of Small Business website is another great resource. It has a full sectioon of Business Support that speaks a lot on various topics of interests to entrepreneurs, for example:

A guide to business planning
Your seven-step, one-day marketing plan
How to research your market
How to find eco-friendly business ideas
...and so on

Why look at US and UK websites?
Well, who said you can startup only in India?

It is much more information than you will need at the outset when your attention should be on growing and stabilizing the business.

When you plan your cash flows, plan for at least 3 years to breakeven. So if that means you cannot afford a fancy office in a fancy business district, so be it. A garage or a corner of your own house will be a good place to start. The point is that there is a lot of preliminary work to be done that does not entail having a fancy office. Market research, for example, takes anywhere from 3-6 months or more, if you plan to do this yourself. The questions you need answered are:

What business should I be in?
Who are my potential clients?
What is their level of interest in the product/services I am planning to offer?

The 2nd question above is called Prospecting. It starts with identifying potential clients (usually from an industry directory, online business portals, business publications, et al), creating a preliminary list and then going out to meet them one by one.

The 3rd question above is called Trial Marketing. Whether you are in products or services, it is the only way you can gauge market response for your offerings. You will have to chalk up some preliminary wins to understand the competition and your pricing power.

Your answers go into what is called your Business Plan.
It's nothing but a variant of your Tactical Appreciation.

It does not matter if you don't have the resources to deliver initially. Go for it as if you have all the resources you need at your beck and call. In the software industry, we used to call it selling "vapourware" (instead of software).

Why do I need more than one win?
Well, besides the ability to gauge market reponse and pricing, you also need to understand your win rate. If you win one today, and the next does not materialize before 6 months, you may need to revisit question 1 above, again! If you hire and don't win adequate business to keep them immersed in work, you will run out of cash sooner than you can imagine. On the other hand, if you have too many quick wins, you may not be able to deliver and will loose some of your credibility in the market.

There are a number of other preliminaries, most of which entail some cash outflows:

How do I promote the business?
What channels will I use?
What marketing collateral will I need?
Where will I advertise?
What initial business processes are mandated?
What organizational assets do I need to build up to enable these preliminary processes?
What systems do I need to support the process?
Do I need a web presence? What should that look like?
What level of funding would I require to enable all these preliminaries?
What are my sources of funds?
What constraints do I keep in mind before I set out?
What is my exit strategy?

You would have considered questions from all domains of business: Sales & Marketing, Operations and Finance. All expenditure adds up to a sizeable sum per month that averages to a Run Rate. So if your initial capital is 10 lakh and your run rate is 80,000 per month, you know that you can last, at best 12 months (excluding contingencies). And right at the outset I mentioned that you need to last 3 years financially self contained to establish. Which implies that your ideal run rate should be about 25000 per month. If so, what needs to change in your plans? If you advertize less, it may have a direct impact on the time required to establish. If you hire less, it will have an impact on your ability to deliver. If you have to increase your hit rate (the rate at which you acquire clients), you need a large sales force. If you pay them less in order to hire more, you may not get the quality of talent required to deliver results. It is all a question of balance and trade-offs.

You have done this in a different context a thousand times in your career in the military. You have analyzed, planned, created your team and executed missions successfully. The procedure is the same. The principles are the same. You might say that you din't have to put your own money on the line. Really? How much of ammo did you carry? How many second lines did you have quick access to? Here, you and your small team are your 'F' and 'A' echelons. Your investors (which includes yourself) and well wishers are your 'B' echelon. Nothing has really changed, except some terminology and that is something that you will pick up on the way. In business, your money is your firepower.

And just like you started your career with small, self-contained missions, this is another small, self contained mission. If you don't have the appetite for small missions any longer (and I mean this literally), maybe you should consider retiring or taking up a job. We have already covered this ground in a fair amount of detail.

The intent should be to launch at the earliest instance, once you have factored in most of the information available. You will again never have all the information you need right at the outset. Uncertainty is the big cloud into which you will always launch. But then you are a trained leader and uncertainty is the environment in which you perform best. Take in all the information available, train hard for the mission, and once launched, go with your gut.

2012: Outlook for the Economy

2012-05-02T11:31:00.001+05:30

"The mania at the start of the 2010s was the big emerging markets, in particular the belief that the economies of China, India, Brazil and Russia would continue at the astonishing rapid pace of the previous decade. This was a unique golden age, unlikely to be repeated yet widely accepted as the new standard by which poorer nations should measure growth. The emerging-market mania began with China, which for two decades starting in 1978 grew rapidly, but erratically, anywhere from 4 to 12 percent a year. Then in 1998 China began an unbroken run of growth at 8 percent or more each year, almost as if the lucky Chinese number 8 had also become an iron rule of Chinese economies."

- Ruchir Sharma in Breakout Nations [Penguin Books 2012]

Ruchir goes on to state that the period from 2003 to 2007, at specially at its peak in 2007, 114 countries out of the 183 worldwide grew at over 5 percent, up from just about 50 countries over the past decades.

"This was the fastest, most all-encompassing growth spurt the world has ever seen. Even more unusual, these economies were taking wing at the same time that inflation, a constant threat in periods of rapid growth, was falling back everywhere ... This illusion, which in large part persists to this day, is fed by the fashionable explanation for the boom - that emerging markets succeeded because they had learned the lessons of the Mexican peso crisis, the Russian crisis and the Asian crisis of the 1990s, all of which began when piles of foreign debt became too big to pay. But starting in the late 1990s, these formerly irresponsible debtor nations cleaned up the red ink and became creditors, even as former creditor nations, led by the United States, began sinking into debt. Thus the emerging nations were poised, as never before, to take advantage of the global flows of people, money, and goods..."

The easy money of course, was the prime cause of the crisis of 2008 that started with the subprimes and cascaded across the economies of the west. By 2010, the now infamous "decoupling" theory was debunked as the BRIC bloc and Asian tigers caught the cold even if it was just a whiff! Confidence remained high well into 2011 that the economy would climb back to its high growth trajectory through prudent policies, but politics, cronyism, frenzied populism and greed overrode economic common sense.

In the present state of "policy paralysis", the counter intuitive monetary policy and with the downgrading of the outlook for the economy from "Stable" to "Negative" by Standard & Poor, there is little doubt in anyones mind that it would be a miracle, if we were to hit even the modest 7 percent projected growth envisaged by our finance minister. This economic deep freeze is expected to persist till general elections in 2014 irrespective of whatever positive spin Sachin Tendulkar's nomination to the Rajya Sabha achieves. Talk about wagging the dog!

With this background, what is the possibility of landing jobs?
The chances are slim to negligible.

So unless your second name is Tata, Birla or Ambani, and if you are sitting on the fence, you are better off continuing in service for a couple of years more. And for those of you who have just retired, attempting to maximize output from your kitchen garden would be a prudent step considering that the only thing in the country that is on the high growth trajectory is the price of vegetables!

Will we ever be a super-power?
Well maybe, but not in this century.

When we write the story of this century, it will be about how the political class in general, took a perfectly good thing, and flushed it straight down the toilet! And when our great grand children talk about it at the dawn of the 22st century, they will no doubt wonder, how a billion people, including you and me, just stood by quietly and watched it happen.

To not end on a negative note, and to get you thinking on what you should do (or should have done right from the outset) is to drop your entitlements pouch and put on your entrepreneur hat!

The country needs you! AGAIN!

General aspects of Creating a Resume

2012-04-25T10:15:00.001+05:30

Résumé, Curriculum Vitae (or CV) and Biodata are terms that are used interchangeably for a short document that summarizes your qualifications and work experience. There is a lot of material on résumés (REZ-u-may) on the web. Check out a simple google search on the term résumé. This blog is about the generic aspects of résumé. We will get to the specific aspects of how to translate military résumés into a civvy street résumé in a later blog. First the basics.

Definition
What is a résumé? Here is a description from Wikipedia:

A résumé (pronounced /ˈrɛzjʊmeɪ/ REZ-u-may or /rɛzjʊˈmeɪ/; French: [ʁezyme]; sometimes spelled resume) is a document used by individuals to present their background and skillsets. Résumés can be used for a variety of reasons but most often to secure new employment. A typical résumé contains a summary of relevant job experience and education. The résumé is usually one of the first items, along with a cover letter and sometimes job application packet, that a potential employer encounters regarding the job seeker and is typically used to screen applicants, often followed by an interview, when seeking employment. The résumé is comparable to a curriculum vitae (CV) in many countries, although in English Canada and the United States résumé is substantially shorter than CV.

Key Elements
If you break down a résumé, its key elements are:

Title

Contact Information

Content

Job Objectives

Career Summary

Competencies

Significant Acheivements

Work Experience

Academia (including certifications)

Template or Layout

Formatting

Keywords

The broad flow in 'contents' above is just a generic guideline and one does not have to follow it. It is always best to build a style that is uniquely YOU.

Keywords
Keywords have become important over the past decade or so, as increasingly, automated keyword scanning tools are being used to obtain a first pass shortlist. This is because the number of applicants are generally far more than can what be manually scanned. Remember, the first shortlists are generally done by professional headhunters who are required to do hundreds of scans a day and they don't want to waste their time going through the whole list of applicants.

Time over Target
If you make the shortlist, the recruiter scans your résumé to determine whether it is worth a second look. These preliminary scans take all of 6 seconds (yes, SIX seconds!!) on the average where your name, current title and company, current position start and end dates, previous title and company, previous position start and end dates, and education are casually perused (see article...).

The Network
It is little wonder then, if your résumés appear to be going down a blackhole. My own experience has been terrible (this inspite of spending a few thousand rupees to get it written by a "professional") and must set a record of sorts as I have not received a single response in over 10 years that I have had my résumé up on the net (on numerous job portals). The reason is simple. While senior management jobs are routinely posted on job portals, they are generally filled up through references. Period. So unless you have a strong network, the chance of getting a job through a portal is precisely NIL. Job portals are for those in their first few years of work. I would put 15 years as the outer limit beyond which, you will have to rely purely on your network.

Web Resources
Monster.com has an interesting section called "Resume Center" which gives good advice on numerous aspects. Here is a sampling on their current highlights:

Is Loyalty a Hindrance?

Handle your Work Haitus on your résumé

Writing your First Professional CV

Sample Job Objectives

CV Do's and Dont's

Complete guide on CV preparation

The Art of Superior Communication

10 top reasons why you need a Cover Letter

How to write an impressive résumé!

The complete guide on CV preparation for example, says that the most important attribute of a successful CV is that it clearly explains to the reader what it is that YOU can do for them, that your CV should be:

A well-presented, selling document [not a biography of your past work experience]

A source of interesting, relevant information

A script for talking about yourself

The purpose of your CV is not to get you the job.

Its purpose is to get you an interview.

The CV has to be written for the reader, so, as you write your CV, put yourself in the shoes of the intended reader.

So, how many CV's should you ideally have?
Many people are surprised to learn that they should have as many CV's as job applications, each tailored for the specific opportunity and in line with the job description provided. Even job portals allow you to create at least five selectable profiles (though only one selected profile is made visible by default).

Write for the target level
Another key aspect is writing a résumé suitable to the level in management. Résumés for say "fresh graduates" would obviously be very different from that of a person say 5-10 years of experience. If you are targeting a position that requires over 20 years of experience, it is a very senior role and the content and style of the résumé should reflect that level of experience. Your language is a dead giveaway on your suitability for the job. At junior levels, the emphasis would be on your relevant technical skills. As you progress in your career, the emphasis has to change from technical to managerial and then to strategic skills where the focus would be quantifiable in terms of numbers indicating your impact on the firms performance.

Before Drafting
So before you sit down to draft your résumé, do some preliminary work understanding not only the company or position for which you are applying, but also in researching the huge amount of advise and feedback on résumés available on the net. And also advise for career changers. There is no substitute for online research and networking.

Career Changers
All of us who move from the military to civvy street are career changers! Yes, even the flyboys! The article at the link below will help you in determining the best form, content and highlights on your résumé.

Here is a synopsis of the article from the monster.com résumé centre titled "10 worst mistakes career changers make":

Don't look for a job in another field without some intense introspection.

Don't look for 'hot' fields unless they're a good fit for you.

Don't go into a field because your friend is doing well in it.

Don't stick to possibilities you already know about.

Don't let money be the deciding factor.

Don't keep your dissatisfaction to yourself or try to make the switch alone.

Don't go back to school to get retreaded unless you've done some test drives in the new field.

Be careful when using placement agencies or search firms.

Don't go to a career counsellor or a career transition agency expecting they can tell you which field to enter.

Don't expect to switch overnight.

Eight Worst Mistakes
Here is another interesting article on the "Eight Worst Resume Mistakes". To summarize:

Not determining a target or goal for the resume
Not understanding the needs or interests of the intended reader
Focusing just on the "duties and responsibilities" of previous positions
Leaving off quantitative information
Forgetting to tell the reader HOW
Using passive language, repetitive statements or the wrong technology
Using gimmicks
Thinking that inflating or exaggerating past experiences will make your resume more effective

Job Portals
For those who can use portals, here is a sample list of Indian job portals:

Naukri.com

TimesJobs.com

Sampoorna.com

MonsterIndia.com

Shine.com

JobStreet.com
HeadHonchos.in

Portals like HeadHonchos provide facilitated search for a premium.

The point to note is that none of these cater for military officers retiring from service. However, some of the western economies like the US is very well organized and a number of services are available specifically for veterans. A simple google search will reveal a number of such service providers and portals. While they may not services for foreign army veterans, you can get a lot of pointers on the transition to civvy street.

For those of you with more than 15 years of work experience, LinkedIn.com is presently the best professional networking website available.

Other international portals

Global Executive Appointments: Exec-Appointments

Yakking to the media

2012-04-05T13:14:00.001+05:30

This question has been bothering me for a while and especially over the past several weeks in the latest series of unseemingly tiffs between the Army HQ and the Ministry. Retired officers of all hues and shapes have been appearing regularly on national television and spouting their personal opinions as if it were representative of the majority in service, as well as those who have retired and moved on to other fields.

The moot question is:
Should retired Army officers be speaking with the media at all?

At first thought, the answer is a definitive NO! After all, you are retired and have, hopefully, moved on with life. The services command strong loyalties, due to its brand image, its elitist exclusivity and the many experiences it affords to officers. So letting go is difficult. But that should be viewed as the challenge, not the excuse for clinging on as a devoted evangelist.

Besides, the Army too would have moved on from the time you left it. Those of us who have been out of service for a while, we may not be able to even fathom the degree of change that has occurred even in such fundamentals as priorities, values and culture of the services. It only smacks you in the face when you are confronted with the frivolous level of conversations at annual regimental get-togethers and station social events to which you are invited, not necessarily because your association is cherished, but because it is the done thing.

However, getting back to the question of addressing the media, a roaring national debate may be the best outcome of the events of the recent past. At the present stage of human evolution, with the existance of nation states as our current reality, military security is an essential component of national security and a national debate on it can only be for greater good, especially in a democracy where elected representatives of the people constitute the state. If they are not educated, how will they acquire the knowledge and leadership abilities needed to understand the form and function and to be able to direct their armies within the context of a nation state? It is definitely not something that you can pick up overnight or even in the short five-year cycle of elected government. Of course, there are specialists who can advise, but in the Indian context, they have so far, been kept at arms length and outside of the government as attached offices, like in the colonial days. So who advises the government on matters of military security? The career bureaucrat, of course, and god bless India!

The fundamental challenge lies in educating, with all due respect, a miserably uninformed populace. People in general, have no interest beyond the perfunctory and no clue about what the military it is all about. For most, it is a subculture as alien as an extra-terrestrial. Many of the better informed consider it no greater than a glorified form of "chowkidari at the border". And I am perpetually amazed as to the large number of officers, who after spending many decades in service, have little concept of the role of the services other than "guarding the border". When questioned, it is the most common refrain. And these are the very people who appear as representatives and experts on defence matters. They have lost the plot even before they first open their mouth on television to confirm it in front of a national audience.

Not that the audience notice it, provided you look the part or "fit the mental image" of their conception of the archetypical "fauji". If he looks the part, he must be the real thing! And it doesn't matter what you say, because more than 90% of the time, you speak in a strange alien tongue, using a vocabulary which only some very hardened veterans can comprehend.

Consider this: How often, in all the courses you attended while in service, did you discuss national security and its implications, or for that matter, issues relating to higher defence organization or military security policy or civil-military relations? Or even, organization of the Defence HQ or the MoD and its charter? Or defence budgeting and capital acquisitions for that matter?

Speaking to the media is a highly specialised skill that the services are yet to develop - and it is called Perception Management. Most of the media briefings, say even at old public institutions such the US White House, is done by a qualified and nominated spokesperson. All formation headquarters have some semblance of this function, at least in form. Yet, they are rarely utilized, appearing more in the exception rather than the norm, that too when the army is pushed against a wall to explain some public incident. Even formation commanders can, while attempting to make a statement, inadvertantly put it across in a form which, while appropriate within the military context, is ambigious and open to interpretation by the media and results almost invariably in a raging controversy. We have seen enough instances of it in the recent past. Media is ubiqitous and managing it is a threshold competency in the 21st century.

The media tends to assumes that once you have accepted the invitation to appear on a scheduled program, you are knowledgeable about everything there is to know about the services, and many of us get drawn into a discussion on matters concerning, for example, say a sister service, and make statements without an ounce of knowledge about such matters. The escape option of apologizing and stating that the question was "outside your domain of expertise" is there for the taking, but rarely adopted! Attempting to answer it, no matter what, is a typical untrained and amateur response.

Media programs are also presented in different formats, with each having its own set of rules that have to be understood. There are "rules of engagement" that are different for each of these formats. A statement that appears reasonable in one format, may appear ludicrous in another. If you are not prepared, you can easily be provoked into saying something ill-conceived, without understanding all of its potentially controversial ramifications. But rest assured, it will come back to bite you when you least expect it, and usually at another time, and in another context.

That is part of their brief - to catch you off-guard and reveal something that can then be twisted into a sensation, that in turn will generate more sound bytes and yet more sensation and controversy! One of the first things you get to learn about the media is that it is a double-edged weapon and can cut both ways in the hands of an amateur spokesperson.

So given the complex nature of perception management and opinion making in the national context, how many of us have the necessary expertise to comment? Besides, vocabulary and parlance matter a great deal. Especially in a panel discussion where the audience can make a comparative assessment of the constituent members. Many a time, the service representative comes away appearing like a rare and antiquated fossil from a prehistoric era, much to the distress and detriment of the entire community of veterans and serving officers.

A typical panel discussion

Bottomline - if you have to yak, please do some general reading up on the relevant subjects. Find out the agenda, the bias of the anchor, the background of fellow panelists and potential outcomes in terms of takeaways for the audience. Reflect on the subject matter, write about it, blog it and then, when the occasion arrives, speak in a parlance the general audience understands. There has to be a consistency, at least about the fundamentals. Samuel P Huntington's treatise "The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations" is a good starting point, especially in the context of recent events here in India.

Essential Reading

2012-03-29T10:36:00.003+05:30

Here are a list of books that you need to make a part of your library. And I will list these at random here. You can go through them in any order. These will be at the core of your re-orientation.

BUSINESS BIOGRAPHIES
Warren Buffet - Berkshire Hathaway
John Deere - John Deere Farm Equipment
Michel Dell - Dell Computers
Lee Iacocca - Chrysler
Raymond A Kroc - McDonalds
Jack Welch - GE
Jeff Bezos - Amazon.com
George Soros - Quantum Fund
Sam Walton - Walmart
Bill Gates - Microsoft
Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook
Anita Roddick - The Body Shop
Steve Jobs - Apple
Richard Branson - Virgin

BUSINESS HOUSES
Tata: Tata: The Evolution of a Corporate Brand by Morgen Witzel
Walmart: Walmart:The Bully of Bentonville by Anthony Bianco
Apple: Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky
IBM: Who says Elephants can't Dance by Louis V Gerstener
GE: Jeff Immelt and the New GE Way by David Magee
Boeing: Boeing vs Airbus by John Newhouse
Coca Cola: For God, Country and Coca Cola by Mark Pendergrast

MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORKS
The Balanced Scorecard by Robert Kaplan, David Norton
Strategy Maps by Robert Kaplan, David Norton
Alignment by Robert Kaplan, David Norton
Strategy Focused Organization by Robert Kaplan, David Norton

SUBJECT TREATISE
Economics by Paul Samuelson, William Nordhaus
Leadership in Organizations by Gary Yukl
Organizational Theory, Design and Change by Gareth Jones
Damodaran on Valuation by Aswath Damodaran
Principles of Corporate Finance by Brealey Myers
The Marketing Imagination by Theodore Levitt
Managing Human Resources by Wayne Casicio
Macroeconomics: Theory and Applications by GS Gupta

GENERAL MANAGEMENT BOOKS
Know-How by Ram Charan
10 Rules for Strategic Innovators by Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble
Fortune at the bottom of the Pyramid by CK Prahalad
The Agenda by Michael Hammer
The Dance of Change by Peter Senge
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES
The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan
The Return on Depression Economics and the crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman

MISCELLANEOUS BOOKS
Principle Centred Leadership by Stephen Covey
The 10-day MBA by Steven Silbiger
The Essential Advantage:How to win with a capabilities-driven strategy by Leinwand, Mainardi
Staying power by Michael A Cusumano
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

The objective is not to burden you with reading material. I have chosen only those books that I have found truly useful over the years. Some of them, like Paul Krugman's "Return of Depression Economics" are absolutely classic and a must read. Warren Buffets biography is a real eyeopener on one of the most influential minds in business, as is Alan Greenspan's book "The Age of Turbulence". These are all easy reads, like a novel. Others require quiet time, study and hours of reflection. "Damodaran on Valuation" is the definitive guide on valuation. Others like Stephen Coveys "Principle Centred Leadership" gives a different perspective that will aid you on your transition from military to business leadership.

Some of the books under the category 'Subject Treatise' are recommended reading at B-School. The books listed are from the list given to us at my alma mater, the XLRI in Jamshedpur. I did mention earlier, that unless you are a short-service commissioned officer, retiring after 5-10 years of service, there is no purpose served in doing a 2-year residential or 3-year executive management program at a B-school. Your experience is more than adequate to survive in civvy street, provided of course, you have prepared well. This reading list is just one more step in that direction. If you are still curious about business education, pick up the "The 10-day MBA" by Steven Silbiger to understand the scope of coverage in a typical B-school. Again, I am emphasising re-orientation programs instead of full 2-3 year programs. The book gives a synopsis and the terminology of many subjects including Marketing, Ethics, Accounting, Organizational Behaviour, Quantitative Analysis, Finance, Operations, Economics and Strategy. And as the author says "Written for the impatient student, The Ten-Day MBA allows readers to really grasp the fundamentals of an MBA without loosing two years wages and incurring a $100,000 debit for tutions and expenses." If anything, and like in the military, just consider it to be yet another glossary of must-know terms!

I will keep on expanding this list over time.
So do revisit this page as often as feasible.

I am a military leader. Why can't I be a business leader?

2012-03-22T12:42:00.001+05:30

That is absolutely the right question!

And if this is your attitude, you are already in a different league.

However, there is a caveat.

And the caveat is that you need to visualize leadership, not as an absolute (meaning, either you have it or you dont) but as a spectrum.

What the hell does that mean?
The question is more likely to be asked by Army officers in particular, as they generally tend to think of themselves as such kick-ass leaders as to be closed to any suggestion that there may be something more to learn about the subject! When you are jumping out into civvy street, an open mind is your parachute.

In the military, traditional leadership has been necessarily of the autocratic "command and control" type, especially in active operations.

However, you might have already realized that, either consciously or unconsciously, you changed your "leadership style" when dealing with peacetime routine. You tend to be more democratic and flexible, you are more open to solutions or view points of your team members and you encouraged participation. This is when you wear your "mentor" hat, so essential in nurturing future leaders in your organization.

Over the years, you would have also noticed that as the battlefield evolved and the environment became more complex, diffused and technologically advanced, your leadership style has also evolved. Your dependence on your subordinate team members has increased exponentially. Trust has become a key factor and your approach is more laissez-faire. You are increasingly compelled (and happy) to delegate authority for decisions, even though it is your neck on the line and the military continues to hold you responsible for their outcomes.

Many of us would have invariably run into the leader who is a stickler for rules and policies, which though appropriate in the context of administrative fairplay, has negative connotations when applied in situations where a fair amount of lattitude or discretion is the norm. When this "bureaucratic style" of leadership is applied indiscriminately, this type of leader is classified as an appropriate 'body part'. So much so, it has even inspired people to write books about them.

The bottomline is that there is a spectrum of leadership styles, each appropriate in a certain context, and this is important to keep in mind. In civvy street (infer corporate sector), there will never be a situation where you have to resort to the "command and control" style of leadership. It will be highly inappropriate and counter-culture. Even if you are an entrepreneur and own the company, you will never resort to the "command and control" style. As a matter of fact, you may find that in most of your leadership actions, you would seek to build a consensus, aligning, more often than not, with the style at the other end of the spectrum.

This is tough initially. Especially when in your assessment, a situation calls for quick and decisive action, you will find an appalling drift, sometimes even at the very top of the organization. Don't get your knickers in a twist, unless you are sure someone is going to get hurt. Don't even complain! And never volunteer to do someone else work. If you do volunteer, the chances are that a majority will think you don't have enough to do. Funnily, your proactive actions may even open up the possibility of your eventual redundancy!

So what should you do? I would suggest that you mention it, informally and in passing, to the colleague who is responsible, and then just get on with your work, even if it means allowing a very visible situation to deteriorate. There may be a method behind the madness that you may not quite understand yet, but make allowance for the person closest to the problem to get around to it. If you act, or complain, before this person has had a chance to address the problem, it may show him in poor light and he will never forgive you for it! On the other hand, if you referred it to him, offered to help, suggested how you might address it, but untimately left it to him to resolve it, he might well become your greatest supporter the next time your nuts are in the fire.

That's politics, you might say! Yes, indeed. And that's a strange world for soldiers! It's also good learning, and as the old song goes:

"If you're gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right.
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run."

On the other hand, you may continue to take the initiative and act decisively with your other dealings such as, with problems in your community, or personal life, or in support of social causes.

The emphasis here is on your mindset - specifically - your ability to adapt. Your leadership style has to adapt and be in consonance, not only with the group you lead, but also with the specifics of each situation. And the "life or death" situations in civvy street is most commonly associated with margins or market share. They do matter, but not in the way you have been trained to think.

The most common mistake leaders make is to maintain a single leadership style, without giving any thought to the capabilities of the group they lead or the attributes of the situation. This is especially significant when a task-typed leader is put into a different context. The such leaders tend to assume that what worked for them in the past will continue to work in the future, a classic case of "situating the appreciation" from your combat school days. It is no wonder then, that so many business leaders who have done extremely well for themselves in a particular field or situation, fail so miserably when they take up new assignments. The departures of Carly Fiorina from Hewlett Packard, Carol Bartz from Yahoo! and Jeff Kindler from Pfizer are a few recent instances that comes to my mind immediately. They all provide valuable lessons for us to learn.

This change in context is also the main reason why military leaders sometime fail in civvy street as their leadership style is so deeply ingrained or internalized, that they fail to even recognize the compelling need to adapt.

There are numerous biographical accounts of great business leaders and these must find place in your pre-retirement reading list. Not only are these books deeply insightful and revealing, they humanize these very accomplished individuals and give you a top level perspective on the day to day challenges of running some of the worlds most respected companies.

Developing your interests

2012-03-19T12:39:00.000+05:30

This is a really big deal and can consume a lot of your time as you get closer to the big day.

You now have many years of work experience. You are fully aware that all jobs have pros and cons and in general, if you had aligned your interests well at the time of joining, the pros have a sight edge over the cons, meaning, on balance, life's been good!

One good indicator of whether you are ready to hang up your boots is when your interest and enthusiasm for the job has been waning for SEVERAL years. Usually it happens post a major event in your personal life, like a debilitating injury, death of a parent or even marriage. These are usually inflection points in your life which can result in major changes in your priorities.

What then?

You then need to either reconcile or act! Both are tough. But sitting on the fence for too long will be detremental both to your interests as well as to the interests of the organization you serve, not to mention, your butt! And it may take months of reflection before you can determine what you can do with the rest of your life. More often than not, it will continue to remain hazy until you begin to act and move in that general direction. Usually a short-list of your interests may be a good starting point. Mine looked something like this:

This is fairly straight forward in the beginning!

However, I recommend that instead of my back-of-the-envelope demonstration, you could open a wire-bound A4 sized notebook to keep adding and then developing your ideas.

"Day sheets" are very useful too. What's that? This is nothing but a section in your notebook where you jot down anything of interest on any particular day. It may be something that you read in the newspaper that morning, picked up in a conversation, heard on the news, seen in a movie, overheard in a restaurant or seen in a hoarding while commuting to work. Or maybe even a dream, a vision or flash of inspiration! You may like to add newpaper/magazine clippings of editorials, articles of interests, job descriptions or whatever perked your interest. And once a week, you consolidate it to update your shortlist or timeline.

A section of your notebook could be dedicated to research on industries, jobs or job functions or even to the analysis of specific companies from their websites or physical copies of their annual reports you find lying around in the waiting areas of some offices or maybe at your "avid investor" friends' home. The annual reports, specifically, the section on "management discussion" provides a wealth of information about a company and its plans. By this, not only do you begin to understand the company but also you become acquainted with "management speak", the lingo of the top executives of the company. Along with this, it is useful to study the fiscal policy (Budget) documents published by the Ministry of Finance, news articles of your country's securities and stock exchange regulator and the monetary policy as laid out by the Fed or Reserve Bank.

India has the SEBI (sebi.gov.in), the RBI (rbi.org.in) and Ministry of Finance (finmin.nic.in). All documents pertaining to the Budget 2012 for instance is at the FinMin website indiabudget.nic.in. It is useful to go through both the "Economic Survey" and the "Union Budget" to get a good macroeconomic (read "high level") perspective.

In the US for example, the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) has the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retreival system (or EDGAR for short) which is an important source for researching public companies. Again, pick up a set of 5-6 companies from among the top fifty in the Fortune 500 list (search google or download the FORTUNE magazine webapp) and use EDGAR to retrieve the latest filings.

Say for example, you want to research GE. Find and click on the company search link in EDGAR and give the company name "General Electric" in the company name box. This will first give you a list of GE group companies. Locate the "General Electric Co" from the list and click on the CIK (Central Index Key) in column one. This leads to all the documents filed by GE. Pick out the 10-K (annual report) filing and click on the "Documents" button provided against it.Then click on the first document in the list that appears - the "10K form".

The second page of the 10-K has the table of contents. Your primary area of interest is Item 7 in Part II, that is "Management Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operation". Click on the link and read through the entire section. If you dont know the company, it is useful to start with Item 1 (Business) and Item 1A (Risk Factors). Item 11 (Executive Compensation) might be revealing in its own right!

I can assure you that no B-school can provide this kind of education. This is the real stuff for grown-ups, not the b-school mechanics - the theoretical stuff taught to the 20-something just-out-of-college kids with raging hormones and unquenchable thirst who appear to inhabit those campuses!

Will you understand all of the terminology used in these documents?

No chance!

At least, not initially. So read this in conjunction with common web-based investor encyclopedias like Investopedia (investopedia.com) or even generic ones like Wikipedia. Begin to take these first baby steps and very soon, you will find yourself getting comfortable with the language.

Much later, when you apply for jobs or are interviewing for one, the conversation will be very much along the lines of these management discussions. Interviews at your level is not meant to test your knowledge. That mode is for freshly coined graduate trainees. You will have done your homework, researched the company you are interviewing with well enough to understand where the challenges lie.

And if the person you are interacting with, can take away something of immediate value for the organization for the time he (or she) invests in the conversation with you, you have your foot in the door. If you cannot do this, don't waste their time. Or yours, for that matter! It will only mean that your re-education is not complete yet.

Coming back to our current topic, you now have your SHORTLIST! You have been researching and developing each item in your shortlist. It may take weeks or even months, but a picture will begin to emerge. And during this while, the more the number of people you meet and interact with (and I mean, outside the services), and with an open, inquiring mind (this is tougher than you can imagine!), the more developed your plan, timeline and options become.

Can you take people at face value?

2012-03-18T09:48:00.000+05:30

A good friend who had preceded me into civvy street once remarked that since I was planning to quit, there were two things I needed to keep in mind that would be hugely different from service at least in the initial years of re-building a career:

A. Don't waste your time playing golf with old army buddies! (sorry guys, the next round is on me!)
B. Don't take people at face value.

It is not just golf. It could be a dinner, lunch-time reunion or a course get-together. That represented an investment in time that you could ill afford. Playing golf with a potential client is an investment and you get to establish a rapport. Playing golf with an old buddy is fun! It is for you to determine what is worth your while.

I did not initially, understand the remark on taking people at face value. I was still in service at that time and I had never for a moment in my entire service career, have reason to question the motive or doubt the integrity of fellow officers. So what did he mean by this statement.

My education in this regard was revealing and I must admit, extremely expensive! It meant that your colleague in civvy street is not all what he comes across as! Nowadays, I have learnt to factor this into my assessment of each business relationship.

I think the best way to put this would be to re-state a story I heard a long while ago, about a non-conforming sparrow who decided not to fly south for the winter. However, soon after the weather turned cold, the sparrow changed his mind and reluctantly started to fly south. After a short time, ice began to form his on his wings and he fell to earth in a barnyard almost frozen. A cow passed by and crapped on this little bird and the sparrow thought it was the end, but the manure warmed him and defrosted his wings. Warm and happy the little sparrow began to sing. Just then, a large cat who was passing by heard the frantic chirping, and decided to investigate the sounds. As it cleared away the manure, it found the chirping bird and promptly ate him.

There are three morals to this story:

(1) Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
(2) Everyone who gets you out of shit is not necessarily your friend.
(3) If you are warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut.

I have hung up my boots? Now what?

2012-03-17T11:26:00.010+05:30

I am often surprised by this type of query from friends.

My response is "Good morning to you too!"

(Here my focus will be the external considerations, not the internal processes associated with retirement.I must confess that since I retired prematurely I have no clue about the whole gamut of service related post-retirement considerations starting with pensionary, medical and insurance benefits, PF, leave encashment, reserve liability and whatever! Each of these require careful analysis, planning and follow-up actions on your part. And don't make any assumptions on the competency of your unit/formation clerks to know the procedure well enough to execute it without errors.)

Actually the timeline of preparatory actions should have begun from the time you joined service as your date of leaving is preordained the moment you join. Service conditions and your own circumstances are unpredictable and it is best to be prepared early. If things work out for you beyond the age of 50 - great! Viewing that as a bonus attributable to chance will keep you in good health.

I would even go to the extent of recommending a services-industry tie-up for officers to intern with them for 2-months each year, right from the first year of service, so that they can familiarize and pick up industry specific skills (which incidentally will be useful even while in service). However, practically, you will need at least a full two to three years prior to retirement to get it right.

What I am suggesting is that you need to have a gameplan that starts at least good two to three years before you retire. Reducing this to a year or even six months, may expose you to unnecessary risk and uncertainty depending on your specific circumstances. Even if you thrive in uncertainty, your family may not have the same opinion. And the moment you get your retirement date, you should be in "outbound mode".

The first step is to list out your considerations. This includes place of residence post retirement, financial health and committments, insurance cover, spouse work attributes/location, schools/colleges for children, parents health considerations, proximity to siblings, etc. Determine the importance of each of these considerations.

Some considerations will be absolutely vital, others just optional or good-to-haves. It is useful to mark each consideration as vital, essential or just desirable! Do this BEFORE you determine your post-retirement work interests. The reason is simple. While in service, the service came first. Now YOU and the immediate family come first. Adapt your work around your conveniences not the other way around. Believe me, it is a huge learning curve!

Companies that are interested in you will respect your boundaries and hire you if they can accomodate these constraints. Conversely, if you don't layout these boundaries, you may well find yourself being shipped off to Timbuctoo as an advance guard of one, with little or no facilitation. A large company that I was providing consulting services to decided to close their Delhi offices and move all project resources to project locations. Non project resources had to move to their head office location in Mumbai. Many stalled for time, delaying their move to the extent possible, the sensible ones left the organization as the conditions no longer suited them. One of them, a GM, with whom I was working on a regular basis and who agreed to move was killed in a Naxal ambush in Jharkhand. He was just in his early 40's and had two young school going children.

I agree, that this is a risk that officers live with all through their service career, so what is the difference, you may ask? The difference is that the company doesn't give a damn. It will be considered as a distraction that has to be managed and disposed off as quickly as possible, put behind and forgotten. If the company doesn't give a damn, why the hell should you?

A lot of officers are too comfortable with the idea of a relocation at the drop of a hat. That is perfectly okay while in service. In civvy street, you should relocate only because there is something in it for YOU. Remember, "YOU come first", and with all due respect, screw Chetwode! I know of officers being happily shipped off to manage coal mining operations in Chattisgarh, leaving the family in Delhi. What you get in the field may be a lot of peace and quiet that you didn't bargain for and a motley bunch of drunks as co-inhabitants whose idea of a great evening is to sit around in groups in one of their rooms with a glass of IMFL in steel tumblers, with raw onion rings and green chillies as snacks and gossip about local politics! (If you were expecting to see an officers mess, you have been warned!)

Once you have been able to list out your set of considerations, begin to list out your qualifications, experience and interests. Use this as a basis to do a job search on common job portals. Depending on your experience, search for titles such as VP/GM/Head or even plain old "manager". Read through the job descriptions and associated titles. Check out the variations across industries. Then begin to identify and shortlist jobs that appear aligned with your interests. Discuss this with someone who may be working in that industry to refine your understanding of the requirements. Map your qualifications and experience to the job requirements. Identify and list the major gaps in your profile, if any.

Now, for each gap, determine whether there are programs offered by colleges and other educational institutions. A lot of the time, the problem will be that the programs are targeted at students seeking post-degree or early career qualifications, whereas what you will require is a re-orientation program. Luckily a number of B-schools have picked up the gauntlet and there are numerous programs being offered through the DGR. These are for six-month residential programs leading to a diploma/certificate.

Does pedigree matter? Yes, pedigree matters, but this has to be balanced with convenience. Sometimes, a program at a school located at your selected place of post-retirement residence would be more useful, as the school will have local industry links that will come in handy during placements.

The next step is to pull out your list of contacts. They are at the edge of a network to which you need access. Ninety-five percent of the time, opportunities arrive only through a network. The remaining 5 percent is just plain old bloody luck. The network is really that critical. And your network could be your school mates to officers who have preceded you into civvy street. Start getting back in touch with everybody. State that you are on the market for a new assignment and specify the date. Ask them whether you can send them your resume (and preparing this is a whole new exercise). Request an initial feedback on your resume along with their recommendations on structure and job possibilities. Ninety percent of them wont respond, but ask anyway. Re-iterate as often as possible without becoming a pain in the neck. You will be surprised as to how often people just simply forget, so reminders are necessary. And do everything possible to increase your network and get your resume out to as many of your acquaintances as possible.

Is there any point in sending your resume to recruiters? Nope. Unless they have got in touch with you and requested you for an updated resume, don't even waste your time. Its a black hole and you will not even get the courtesy of an acknowledgement. Of course, there are many categories of recruiters. Some, like Egon Zehnder for example, are a class apart. It will be worth your while to even engage in a discussion with any contact there.

Lastly, determine the time required to accomplish each of your preparatory objectives. Then plot all this information onto your timeline. Here is what a timeline looks like with high level milestones:

Once completed, your timeline will, of course, look a lot more cluttered. It will also evolve and undergo multiple revisions as your planning progresses and you work out the details. Review this plan with your family on a monthly basis. Keep them in the loop, since the transition is as relevant to them, as it is to you.

And for god's sake, be prepared to shell out some money for service providers for they don't run a charity. These may be those that provide resume writing services, an educational consultancy, a paid industry event or whatever form or shape it may take. Besides, if you want quality services, they invariably come at a price!

Task Typing Service Officers

2012-03-14T07:17:00.014+05:30

I read an interesting and very revealing example of a "task typing" (associating a category of resources based on past experience) job description for a "VP/GM Administration" of a regional television network recently that said that they needed someone who had:

"an MBA with work experience in a corporate setup with relevant years of experience (12-15 years for VP or 8-10 years for GM)"

"served the armed service for a minimum of 5 years".

From the advertisment, I could not decipher whether the company considered the service officer with 5 years of experience as qualified for both VP and GM posts, but that definitely appeared to be what the description implied.

More significantly, the opportunity for service officers was only for "Administration", and not for the other functions of "Human Resource", "Marketing" or "Production" that the same advertisment carried.

Why?

It is because service officers routinely tout their "administrative" capabilities without understanding that in civvy street, "administration" is about (and I quote verbatim from the job description) "maintenance of head office as well as regional offices, employee travel/stay arrangements, hiring of office boys, intercity travel, maintenance of office resources and vendor management". What is missing in that description is "etc...". Any guesses what "maintenance" entails? Yes indeed, it is the broom and mop routine. "Travel/Stay" arrangements? That makes you a go-between for an employee-travel agent transaction. "Office boys?" This is an India-specific feature. Office boys are a more dignified version of the ubiquitous "peon" in government offices. "Intercity travel?" Thats train/cab reservations for you. "Office resources?" That covers all expenses under "Printing and Stationery" as well as all cleaning material used in the offices to the toilets. And vendor management here refers not not to the esoteric practice of the procurement experts, but only to "handling" vendors providing the services referred to here.

The fallout has been that most companies in the private sector have task typed service officers into the "security" or "administration" streams, both of which, in the civvy street context, are more often than not, relevant only to PBORs. Yet, you will be surprised as to how many officers apply for these jobs just because the term "administration" appears to resonate with familiarity. What is probably worse, is that a lot of officers consider this as an easy entry point into the private sector. The intention is to facilitate a move into some other function within the organization while considering this initial assignment as some sort of acclimatization period to figure things out.

But that brings us back to the concept of "task typing", a term that has negative connotations in the management context, and ingrained into the management mindset for no greater reason than the inability or unwillingness to evaluate alternative capabilities. So now you have two hurdles to cross - one, the common perception of service officers as most suitable to certain preconceived categories of jobs, and the second, of the "tag" you picked up with your recent foray into an "administrative" function.

Another common misconception is of attempting to equate HR with "Personnel Management". It is not. The "personnel management" as practiced in service correlates to "leadership" as it applies to the line ("command") function (read "business managers"), and has nothing to do with the staff function of managing the acquisition-development-maintenance-transition cycle of employees.

It does not mean that innovative new approaches cannot be adopted for these "cost centres". If you take an informed decision, by all means, go for it. But do remember, that in the larger context, "administration" is a distraction that is of cursory relevance to the organization. And, god forbid, if your suggestions entail an increased outlay (and even if you manage to find a tenuous link from administration to the company's topline), you will probably be viewed with skepticism and disdain and people will wonder what all the fuss is about. It can get inordinately frustrating very quickly and as you find your preconceived avenues of career progression being blocked more often than not by a closed mindset, you will find yourself seeking the exit door. And now, you are not a newly retired service officer. You have a background in "administration", you have been task-typed for life! For those who reconcile to this state of oblivion, you may well find your desk in the basement, next to that of the security supervisor!

Should I pick up a job after retirement?

2012-03-10T17:40:00.007+05:30

Again, there is nothing stopping you from picking up a job after retirement. It is an individual choice, whether you wish to take the plunge or really hang up your boots, relax and tend to your kitchen garden, autobiography or grand children.

My recommendation again, will depend on whether or not, you are drawing a pension.

If you are drawing a pension, it gives you the flexibility and the time to think about it and wait for something to come by that fits your set of requirements (I will get back to what requirements later in another blog). If you are keen to get started, and especially if you have financial committments that cannot be met from the pension you draw, the earlier the better. But if your children are well settled, and you are comfortable and in good health, take a break and travel the world, catch up with your reading, re-discover yourself and your interests once again. Remember, that your interests may be nothing that you may have imagined it to be and you may well find that you need to re-invent yourself. This takes time as sometimes it is a question of chance and opportunity. It involves exploring your new environment, meeting new people or doing a professional course that may have picqued your interest. Try getting involved in activities where you can meet and interact with people, like your local RWA, a school reunion, a social group, industry event, trade show, golf club or even an NGO. Volunteer your time and energy and very often you may end up finding something you are passionate about or something you never dreamt of doing and would now never exchange it for any job in the world.

If you are not entitled to a pension, you may have no choice but to find something of interest that will challenge you and give you the kind of returns you expect. You will have to move quickly, often even before retirement to make this happen. If there is a one-to-one correlation between what you do in service and the kind of opportunities available outside, it is a relatively easy transition (for instance, like for our flyboys). If not, you may think of picking up another supplementary qualification (I would like to think of this as more of a re-orientation). B-schools offer a good six-month post-grad diploma program for serving officers through the directorate general resettlement. If you can land one of these, it is ideal, of course with some caveats. B-schools do not guarantee placements for your seniority level, so you may have to collectively take matters into your own hand. How? Here are three steps (a) tailor your resume (b) select a set of companies and determine points of contacts, and finally (c) plan a campaign and market your batch, just as you would any other product! Start early in the program so that you begin to get results by the end of the program.

Get your resume prepared by a consultant, or a friend who has done this transition in the past. It may cost you a penny, but rest assured, it is worth it. I have come across resumes that most faujis do, listing out all their command and staff assignments and courses done - ensuring thereby, that it heads straight for the bin. When you think about it, how does it matter to the company you target if you have "commanded a unit of 800 men in an extremely challenging terrain". Nobody out there understands any of this stuff anyway. The question in the head of someone reviewing your resume would be "What are the key words or punch points that indicate a fit to my job description?". Very often, it is a keyword search that sorts the first responses to a job advertisment. So your resume needs to be translated into the language of the industry. Service officers fit a number of profiles, and it may be necessary to draft more than one resume, depending on the type of role you are seeking. Let me assure you that you have absolutely no experience in crafting one. Leave it to a consultant, and remember, you will have to pay for it.

If you are senior management material, with 15-20 years of experience, then sending resumes to job advertisments is a lost case. It is only networking that will bring you the opportunities. Networking means meeting new people and having the opportunity to interact with them. These interactions should not be done with a narrow view to just position yourself (that is selling). Seek only to establish a rapport. If an opportunity presents itself, see whether you can contribute to add value. Ask questions that will enhance your understanding of what they do? Draw out the kind of challenges they face on a day to day basis. Instead of asking whether the company has plans to recruit in the new year and what kind of opportunities will be opening up, you could ask what new plans are in the offing, whether they are expanding into new sectors or geographies. Make use of all opportunities to network.

In all the open seminars or workshops I conduct in my line of work, I have made it a point to send a special invitation to all three service chiefs requesting nominations so that these interactions can happen while officers are still in service. More often than not, I draw a blank (and I respect that as chiefs are surely not thinking of what officers will be doing post retirement and there is little need for informal industry interactions of this nature.) But officers have attended these events in the past and while the benefits may not be immediately realized, the industry gets a sense of the capability and versatility of officers, and the memory sticks. I am sure that if these executives where to hire people in the future, a service officers resume will make the short list. There is no alternative to networking at this level.

The second thing that you need to do is to translate your pay into civvy street terms.This is important, both for job seekers as well as for those who will be involved in negotiating your salary. Find out in advance the typical salary structure in an industry. Map that structure to the one you have on your last salary statement. Those that cannot be mapped can be placed clubbed into a head called "special allowance". Your take home pay is not your cost-to-company(CTC). Figure out all the heads, convert it to "market rates" and then tally it. Again, it is useful to get help, wherever possible. This will at least help you understand what your CTC is in real terms, and help you peg the expectation at an appropriate level. Your new salary should be 20-30% more that your last drawn salary. You will be surprised as to how many officers routinely undersell themselves as they have not done this simple exercise. If you are not prepared for this stage of the interview, you will be the loser.

Should I use my rank while in civilian employment?

2012-03-09T08:18:00.009+05:30

While there is nothing stopping you from using your rank post retirement, my suggestion is that you don't use it, especially if you intend to work in the private sector.

Why?

Well, for starters, there is a real person behind the facade of the rank that we have long forgotten (or possibly been made to forget) when we joined the academy at the age of 16. Since then we have been Cadet, Gentleman Cadet, Lieutenant, Captain or whatever. These ranks or "titles" are fundamentally (and while in service, necessarily) elitist. They come with a set of responsibilities and expectations from the organization during your service. Once you leave the service, and specially if you pick up a job with a company in the private sector (we will come back to whether you should pick up a job at all, post retirement), the use of rank with your name is irrelevant to the job. It brings with it unintended baggage and has no meaning in the new life you have chosen.

Secondly, and at times, it works against you as it plays to the stereotype and your new colleagues will have strange preconceived ideas about your abilities and job fit. More often than not, you will get stupid questions starting with 'What is a fauji like you doing in "a-place-like-this"?'

Third, for our colleagues in civvy street, a Major is no different from a Major General. They have absolutely no concept beyond the stereotype depiction in feature films or from what little they get to see of the services during their lifetime. They will associate you with "guns", "borders", "march pasts", and quite amazingly, even "parties" and "liquor". They will ask why you don't have a "big moustache" or whether you have been in a war or whether you keep a gun at home, whether a subedar is senior to a major, the "department" you worked in while in service and even whether you have ever killed anyone! The list goes on.

It detracts from who you really are, what you represent as an individual and the skills that you bring to the organization. The worst torture possibly is to carry the baggage of being a Colonel or a General, and having to, with all due respect, play to the stereotype and "act like one" even after retirement.

So, drop it mate! Or at the very least, know where it is appropriate to use it and where it isin't. Loose the baggage and discover yourself and your new place in society once again as a common citizen. Trust me, even that is going to be a long journey. On the average, it takes about a year for every four that you have been in service (yes, including your time at the academies).

For some, it is already too late to change. They are stuck behind what they consider to be their entitlements - whether this takes the form of their rank, their moustache, their golf caps, their swagger sticks, miniature medals, regimental ties and unit badges - again with all due respect, for they represent a honest life led with dignity and honour. But no matter how far back into the past the glory days lay, they will attempt to hang on using every crutch available, and for as long as possible. My view is that this is probably because they are no longer able to separate the "individual" from the "entrapments of service", and that it has all unfortunately "gone to their head". In short, they appear to have forgotten the adage "old soldiers never die, they just fade away".

Quite surprisingly, despite the sea of ignorance about all matters military, our civvy street buddies are quick to pick up on the rank as if it is a qualifying criteria for jobs, irrespective of post retirement qualifications and experience you may have have picked up. I remember a conversation with the head of HR of a well known hotel chain requesting me to find a retired officer to head their security section (of course, it had to be security!). The mandate was that they had to "find some one at least of the rank of Major General, though a Lieutenant General would be ideal".

Though I passed on the opportunity to the DGR, I promptly recommended my old Subedar!

Sure enough, I did not hear back from him again! Much later, I heard that a Major General had indeed taken up the assignment. And of course, he is using his rank.

Topics

2012-03-08T01:37:00.002+05:30

Its been a while since I retired. And I worked full-time for just about 6 years post-retirement.
Its now been exactly 18 years since retirement so the challenges I faced post retirement are now happily, a hazy memory. So I will be quite happy to respond to any questions my guests here may have.

From the top of my head, I have written up the following list:

Should I use my rank while in civilian employment
Resumes? What are these and how do we correlate
You cannot take people at face value anymore
Dropping the attitude
Developing your interests
Is a management programs at a B-school helpful?
How do you find jobs?
Which job suits me best?
Networking
How much should I quote?

Business terminology

2012-03-06T17:06:00.005+05:30

Here are some civil-military term equivalents:

Administration - a term understood in the military as the day to day functioning of a unit or formation. In civvy street, this would be classified as "operations". The term "administration" is used generally to imply the functions of facilities (or utilities) management, transport fleet management, house keeping and other such. Some more traditional companies club "Human Resource Management" in administration, referring to it as a concatenated "HR and Admin". Here "admin" may be limited to facilities and housekeeping or may be expanded to refer to all cost centres (cost accounting units of indirect costs) including IT. The term "Business administration" used in B-schools includes the three mega functions of sales & marketing, finance and operations.

Operations - the closest equivalent is a "project", defined as an endeavour, with a definite beginning and ending, and intended to deliver a unique product, service or result. And like military operations, all projects have terms of reference (or constraints), usually expressed in the form of a budget or deadline.

Salesforce are the frontline troopers or the infantry and the use of terms such as "road warriors" and "in the trenches" in reference to this group is common. Sales are ultimately responsible for fulfilling demand, whereas marketing focuses on creating demand and managing the brand. "Rolling out the artillery" here could imply anything from big budgets, to bringing in the fat cats from the corporate head office face to face with the client, to putting up grand shows or events to impress the customer.

Finance is about sources and application of funds. Though finance is the prime responsibility of the board and the executive, the finance department is responsible for the implementation of decisions whether these pertain to investments, raising of capital, disposal of surplus (dividends, retained earnings), estimation of budget, management of cash, etc. It also deals with financial controls and the measures needed to monitor them. Accountancy refers to the process of recording, reporting and analysis of the financial transactions of the business for the purpose of communicating these to the management or other stakeholders.

Here is the tricky one. On the face of it, a majority of officers are not exposed to finance in the traditional sense. They may handle unit accounts of different types (accountancy), but are never concerned with raising capital. The trick is in considering "capital" as "firepower". Once you make this leap of imagination, correlate "ground" to "market" and "enemy" to "competitor" and you are all set.

The equivalence of the concept of "customer" was difficult to correlate initially, but when you consider it (and companies seek to deliver "value" to customers), you will quickly realize that you always had a customer and that is the "nation state" or indrectly its citizens through their elected representatives. The "value delivered" is "national security", or more specifically (as national security has a very diverse set of connotations), security against external aggression, with the caveat that in the 21st century, the role of the defence services too is changing rapidly (whether we are adapting rapidly enough is topic for a seperate chapter) and at the same time, getting rather nebulous with considerable overlap with other functions of the state (again a separate chapter).

The "value" can also be looked at as a "risk cover" as in the insurance business. Since "risk" is based on perception, it is difficult to quantify and therefore difficult to determine the "risk premium" (read defence budget) payable.

But lets get back to our discussion on the connotations of "capital". Consider this. You have "assets". You have "capital". Some of your capital went to procure assets. Assets are capacities, capabilities or just plain old reserves. Investment in capital assets (capital budgeting) requires strategic inputs, considering the time period for operationalization (or "commissioning") of each asset category. Here I am referring to the evaluation-procurement-commissioning cycle. An asset like a new CNC machine may be operationalized within a year. A thermal power plant may take 3-5 years from concept to commissioning. A new weapon system usually takes even longer. Defence purchase cycles are long and tedious affairs usually taking decades to finalize, to be delivered, for its tactics to be evolved and finally to be fully integrated.

At the unit level, you already have assets associated with a set of capabilities. In an operation (read "project"), specialized units are integrated into a cohesive body (the ORBAT). What is the function of this body? It is anything but "guarding the border"! Primarily, and at at whatever level in the organization, you are concerned with sources and application of available "funds"(read "capital"). You analyze "ground" and "enemy" (read "market" and "competition") and invest "capital" in the form of "deadly violence" to maximize return. As in business, you have strategic and tactical objectives. In civilian terms, you are both "director" as well as a "business manager" as you determine type and quantum of investment to maximize returns, and further, you are concerned with utilizing resources at your disposal efficiently to deliver short term objectives.

Did we inherit the "security" business?

2012-03-06T16:12:00.004+05:30

One of the toughest things to do to make sense of civvy street is to understand their terminology. I refer here of course, to business terminology. A lot of my civvy street friends often ask what I am doing in the field of management and systems consulting. To which, my question is "Which field do you feel I should be in?"

The answer surprises me for in ninety nine percent of the time, they would recommend the "security" business - which, as I have come to understand, is the provisioning of uniformed "security guards" to enterprises. The logic is that since we have been "securing the borders" and "securing the country", it should be right! Right?

Wrong. Firstly, the army does not secure the borders. If there were borders, they would rightly be secured by border police, the coast guard, as well as customs and immigration folks. The army is never deployed to a border except under exceptional circumstances or when a war is declared. And its been many decades since the last war.

Secondly, though units are responsible for "their own" security (for good reason) whereever they may be located, how often do officers get involved in this routine? Here obviously, I am not talking about operational deployments. The unit's JCOs/NCOs are perfectly capable of determining the strength and disposition required for securing the unit area.

Thirdly, security guards in the civilian context are all unarmed, and provide rudimentary functions of protecting, guiding, observing, documenting, and reporting usually within the premises of the enterprise and without any legal powers.

Any incident involving trespass, theft, injury or fatality would necessarily entail liaison with and co-option of local law enforcement, just as it is applicable to any other citizen. In other words, a security guard is just a citizen in a costume with no locus standi.

On the face of it, the security business it is all fairly simple and straightforward - a job that can be done well by anyone with good sense. Some background in police or security services may be useful, but not necessary.

My recommendation is to leave running security firms to JCO's and NCO's, if they consider this a reasonable outlet for their creative energies.

Returning again

2012-03-06T16:10:00.001+05:30

Blogger appears to have misplaced my last two blogs. No worries! I am back again with another attempt to ease the transition.