HR should stop doing politics – D Shivakumar

Excerpts from the Q & A session between Pankaj Bansal, Co-Founder & CEO, People Strong and D Shivakumar, Group Executive President – Corporate Strategy & Business Development, Aditya Birla Management Corporation Pvt Ltd at AIMA’s 15th National HRM Summit 2017.

D Shivakumar, Group Executive President - Corporate Strategy & Business Development, Aditya Birla Management Corporation Pvt Ltd. at AIMA's 15th National HRM Summit.

D Shivakumar, Group Executive President – Corporate Strategy & Business Development, Aditya Birla Management Corporation Pvt Ltd. at AIMA’s 15th National HRM Summit.

When we reimagine HR, what do you think should HR stop doing?

I think HR is very important and should evolve with the times. I talk to a number of people across the industry, and I would say that in many organizations, HR is seen as a political unit. Why do people feel that? First HRs should rid themselves of politics. HR has a lot of confidential information, HR should not trade in that. The HR department should be staffed with people who can maintain high confidentiality. The biggest problem in every company is that people say HR people blabber, and hence they do not trust them. So the dividing line between a good performer who needs to be promoted and somebody who doesn’t need to be promoted etc. is becoming a problem.

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HR will be dead by 2020 – Vineet Nayar at the 14th National HRM Summit

The 14th HRM National Summit of AIMA featured some of the top HR professionals and delegates from Industry, Government, Media, and Academia.  Below is an excerpt from an enlightening speech by Mr. Vineet Nayar, Founder, & Chairman Sampark Foundation and Former CEO, HCL Technologies at the 14th National HRM Summit on the topic ‘HR Organisation in the Age of Automation’.

Vineet Nayar addressing 14th National HRM Summit

Vineet Nayar addressing 14th National HRM Summit

When I talk to HR community I am reminded of a CEO I met a few years ago. This was the CEO of the company called Kodak and especially people of my age would remember that each one of us had a Kodak moment of our life where we took very selective photographs because you could take only a few photos at a time. The world was different at that time, it has changed now. And When I met that CEO I asked him “Didn’t you know that the digital photography will make Kodak, as a company, obsolete?”. He told me that he knew about it at least 10 years before. I am an advisor to the McKinsey Leadership institute when I met the McKinsey team which was involved in advising Kodak, I asked them that if they knew ten years in advance that Kodak was about to die why didn’t  they do something about it. They told me that they did  a very interesting research, over 6 decades, of the companies who lost their market share and there were two conclusions: Anybody who loses market share or becomes obsolete knows at least 5 years in advance that they are going to become obsolete and the only reason they become obsolete is because they don’t do anything about it. So they were the part of the gang that became obsolete.

So one thing I would definitely predict is that the HR is going to be dead by 2020. The three megatrends change happening in the world will make the HR job obsolete.

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TV Mohandas Pai talks about ‘Automation’ at 14th HRM Summit

AIMA organized its 14th HRM National Summit on 1st December 2016 at New Delhi. The Summit featured some of the top HR professionals and delegates from Industry, Government, Media, and Academia. Over 250 professionals from across India participated in the Summit.

Below is an excerpt from a very informative speech by Mr. TV Mohandas Pai, Sr. Vice President, AIMA and Chairperson, Manipal Global Education Services at 14th National HRM Summit on the topic ‘Jobs in the Era of Automation’.

Mohandas Pai at AIMA's 14th National HRM Summit

Mohandas Pai at AIMA’s 14th National HRM Summit

” For the last many years AIMA has been holding the HR summit and every time we chose a cutting edge topic, primarily because we believe in the power of ideas. Ideas have moved civilizations, ideas have moved societies, and we believe at AIMA that we must be at the cutting edge with new ideas looking at what is happening in the world and that’s why we’ve chosen this very important topic – Jobs in Era of Automation.

 Automation has been there for a pretty long period of time starting with the invention of the steam engine. Imagine the world before the machine was invented. The world was based upon labor, human muscle, and animal power. And the wealth of a nation depended upon the size of the population. So China and India, were the richest countries and the greatest countries in the world because they had very large population. And in the mid 18th century China-India made up to 45% of the world GDP and there was trade from Europe with the rest of the world. But then a very singular event happened in the Great Britain when the steam engine was invented and suddenly you could use kinetic energy for motive power and create the machine which could do the work of many human beings, particularly where there was heavy use of human or animal power. And it meant that the heavy work and heavy lifting suddenly could be done very differently, it could be repeated, it could be standardized, and that set off a chain of events which changed the face of civilization on the planet.

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