It’s a common occurrence in Corporate America: An entrepreneurial founder starts a successful business, builds it to a certain size and hands it over to a CEO to run. But then, when things don’t go well, the founder steps back in to take direct control of the organization. That, essentially, is what happened last week when Michael Dell returned to become the CEO of Dell, replacing Kevin Rollins. What will it take to turn Dell around? Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli is the director of the school’s Center for Human Resources.
Category Archives: Management
This is like TIVO for your work
But arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done. “This is like TiVo (TIVO ) for your work,” says the program’s co-founder, Jody Thompson. By the end of 2007, all 4,000 staffers working at corporate will be on ROWE. Starting in February, the new work environment will become an official part of Best Buy’s recruiting pitch as well as its orientation for new hires. And the company plans to take its clockless campaign to its stores–a high-stakes challenge that no company has tried before in a retail environment.
More at Businessweek
‘Panchatantra’ and its worldly wisdom
The Panchatantra is a collection of Indian fables, each fable taking the style of an allegory.The original text in Sanskrit is a mixture of prose and verse, with the stories contained in one of five frame stories. The introduction, which acts as an encompassing frame for the entire work, attributes the tales to a learned Brahmin called Vishnu Sharma, who used these stories to teach worldly wisdom to the three uninterested and dull-witted sons of a king.
Panchatantra means “five tantras” or ‘Five formulas’ and is divided into five sections of stories– “Loss of Friends,” “Winning of Friends,” “Crows and Owls,” “Loss of Gains,” and “Ill-considered Action.” The Panchatantra may have been written down as early as the second century BC, and numerous versions spread to Persia in the sixth century and to Europe during the middle ages. A German version in 1481, for example, was one of the earliest printed books.
Vishnu Sharma crafts a new world with the help of animal characters to create interest among his disciples and then uses a serialised, story-within-story approach to sustain it. He presents the means to achieve the the worldly wealth and pleasures. He extols the value of the worldly things unlike other fables like Jatakas.
But given the Hindu tradition of Kaama-Artha-Dharma-Mokasha (Desire, Money, Dharma and Salvation), and the to-be-king background of his disciples, he achives his goal in helping them to put their feet firmly first in the materialistic plane, thus laying the basic foundation for the young disciples to make their way up.
Written centuries ago and that too for youngsters, suprisingly, this book offers a lot to even to the grown ups in terms of understanding the human nature.
If you do not have the patience to read one of its English translations, you could always feast on the numerous Amar Chitra Katha comics.
Related links
Wikipedia
Panchantantra by Penguin
Amar Chitra Katha