Looking forward to TechHR 2015 this week #TechHR15
I’m privileged to spend a day in Gurgaon this week at the People Matters TechHR Conference. I keynoted the inaugural event last year on Why Human Capital Must Fuel Digital Transformation and I came away learning far far more than what I talked about.
The event last year was spectacular. Back then my biggest take away was the Heart and Hustle in Indian HR. I closed with this:
During the time when I grew up and later, interned in India, organizational behavior was extremely hierarchical. You spent the first ten years of your career keeping your mouth shut and “learning”. My time spent with a lot of young professionals during this trip suggested that this age-old management culture is starting to loosen up. It was so gratifying to see high-energy young HR professionals provide incredible insight into the kinds of HR policies that they not only want to prescribe but a culture that they want to thrive in themselves as career professionals. The passion to improve the world of work came through, the ideas were fresh and cutting edge, and they questioned everything. I just couldn’t get enough of this.
I hope to see the same love and passion for the topic. People Matters Editor-in-Chief Ester Martinez and team have done a phenomenal job this year with another incredible global speaker line up.
This year, I’m excited to join a keynote panel on the coming Gen Z to the world of work. I’m not a big fan of over sensationalizing the needs of each demographic. But what is absolutely a worthy intellectual challenge is how to design for a multi-generational workforce and making sure that knowledge flows up stream and down stream. The founders of the most transformative and disruptive organizations such as Uber or FlipKart or even Zappos built incredible organizations with common sense, good instincts, and yes, surrounded by some of the most experienced advisors. Our own team here at SAP is widely multi-generational and I’m convinced that if you have the inclination and the right technology in place, incredible learning goes both ways.
As someone who builds and sells products very closely aligned to the business of improving Human Capital Management this is obviously interesting content. SuccessFactors has over 30 million subscribers and with over 17 million SAP Jam subscribers and a leading market position, we learnt a lot from our customers, whether that’s by designing for true integrated learning or fixing tragically broken performance management process. But perhaps more important are how this shapes one’s own management theories. It does so for how I look at my own business. This isn’t just about HR for HR folks.
This very intimate conference gets to the core of the sport that is talent performance and I’m hoping to bring some of the lessons we’ve learned as we watched how customers drive transformative workforce initiatives. The best minds in the region are at this event and so it’s a treat to slurp up incredible experiences.
You can register here if you haven’t. It’s totally worth your time if you are in the area. And if you’re elsewhere, follow @peoplematters2 and #techHR15 on Twitter.
See you in Gurgaon later this week.
