CMS Business School, Jain (Deemed-to-be University)’s Department of HR and OB had organized its first talk of the “From the horse’s mouth: CHRO Speak Series” on 21 June 2019. Mr. C. Mahalingam (Mali) an HR professional with over 30 years of experience in the Corporate in leadership roles, currently Chief Consulting Officer with Mali Mahalingam Associates specializing HR consulting, executive coaching and delivering custom-designed leadership development programs.

Mr. Mali discussed the famous HBR Case Study of Google Inc - “Project Oxygen” which talks about how the decision of the two founders to do away with managerial roles stating “Managers don’t add value” in 2002 led to disaster and how Mr. Prasad Setty (ex-VP Capital one) and Mr. Neil Patel were inducted into Google Inc.,  to restore the faith and reinstated the belief in Managerial Roles , spoke about the OKR (Objectives and Key Results), important of causation in analytics, 5 logical steps that any analytics projects would have to consider and the eight distinct behaviour (7 inspiring leadership behaviour and last one being technical competence behaviour) that is identified by Google to pick people for the managerial roles. Quoting the book “Learning in action” by David A Garvin, he said “Project Oxygen” a HBR Case Study is THE case study that is used widely today to understand and teach ANALYTICS.

He then spoke about the changing trends in Performance Management System. He discussed the Deloitte case study and stated that today the Business Manifesto is moving towards agile manifesto. Talking about the  change in Deloitte PMS, he said that they have moved to a short 4 choice based questions through which any manager can  complete the performance appraisal in just 5 minutes as against 200 million hrs that get wasted during PMS. Which in-turn, meant that the focus has shifted to the leader and future rather than the team member and the past. “Check-in” App, that is used widely by all employees, where they have a quick 5 minutes discussion on how the last week went for the employee and what is the help he / she requires from manager, which has shown significant improvement in both Performance and engagement level.  “Everyday Bias”, “Power”, “Focus”, “Nine lies about work” were few books he referred to be read.

He concluded his session by emphasising that if one has to stay current and relevant in the Market whether corporate HR or Academic, they have to continuously read the case studies / articles or management books.