It
will be 5 years since I have come back to India on 1st of
January 2012. In being a part of the Indian Industry for the last 4+
years I feel very fortunate. Fortunate for the experience of getting
a chance to make good without safety nets and a system that taught a
basic sense of professionalism and a belief that you can make a
difference to this world and yet come out ahead for yourself (I am
fortunate for many other things in life but for this is relevant to
the topic at hand). I have realized that inculcating the sense of “Do
one thing and do it better than anybody else in the world” to
my team and giving them a passion and sense of commitment without
taking short cuts has become the most important role at every place
that I work here in India. I believe that this is one area where we
can see the world and have the exposure and in turn give back to
building the ‘next gen’ India.
About
six months ago Jawahar (CEO of PES
Institutions)
came up with this brilliant idea to have me mentor 5 students and
just work with them for 6 months. I was intrigued and we started a
pilot program of internship at Vantage Agora where the kids worked
part time with us and went ahead and built the mobile version
of Vantage
Agora’s back
office dashboard solution on the HTML5/Sencha framework http://m.vantageagora.com or http://dashboards.vantageagora.com.
This product was build and is being used by most of our customers
today.
While
the product itself is a good outcome, the bigger impact has been made
in the area of professional development to these kids. During this
process we enhanced our induction program “We are VA” to include
a ‘Detox’ (Short for detoxing of the societal bias) where as a
team we came up with a set of rules for getting from being a student
to a professional. We went ahead and created a movie clip to each to
convey what they should take away from each rule. I have listed some
of these rules to give you an idea is need to shepherd the next
generation from their own perspective and a series of 1-1s.
- Think like a CEO. Everything that you say is a promise. It is measured by how you act.
- Put people over things: Get the right people on the bus and let them drive the bus
- Build trust and give back: Pay if forward
- Look sharp, feel good, do good. People will remember you (We talked a lot of professional appearance, how to dress, speak, write, etc.)
- Have fun (We created manual dashboard that had measures of good, bad, terrible, bad+terrible, and broke the needle in terms of stupid things we all did. Anyone in the team could give each other the award. I was on the ‘Broke the Needle’ once. In the end the kids converted this into a software to have it used for the futureJ!)
- Have a positive “Can Do” attitude (When the chips are down and your back is to wall at VA we call it “Show time”)
Now
that we completed the internships (one of them has joined VA) we
still meet on weekends for a morning run where we go through and find
out how they are doing in their careers and how I can help them in
any way possible. I have taken a feedback from them on the difference
we made from the program and they believe that this was not available
in schools or at home and that it been helpful to them in being
better prepared for their work and career.
Thank
you Jawahar and team! I believe this is the first step. From the
progress made in the first step it holds promise. The next step is to
get more people to mentor/teach in this system and work with Jawahar
help and bring it into the main steam education. That should be funJ!
If you are interested please reach out.
About the Author
As the founder of Vantage Agora (VA), Harsha has been instrumental in the growth of the company since its inception. Harsha has over 20+ years of experience in consulting, Enterprise Social Networking, Business Intelligence, and Process improvement. His work with companies such as Fidelity, American Airlines, I2 Technologies, etc, has made him an Expert in Business intelligence and Process improvement.
Harsha has developed a patent pending 'Enterprise Social Network – VA Club', Harsha also has 4 process improvement patents.
Harsha graduated MBA from southern Methodist University (SMU) Dallas, a masters in Computer Science from Louisiana State University (LSU) Baton Rouge, and a Bachelors in Engineering from Bangalore University (BU).
About Vantage Agora
Vantage Agora (VA) is a global provider of back-office solutions, custom IT services and consulting services for companies in the insurance, finance, and healthcare sectors. As a SAS70 Type II audited company, Vantage Agora utilizes advanced data processing and quality control systems on a secured network to ensure efficient, comprehensive management of back-office functions such as payroll, accounting, financial and administrative tasks. Founded in 2004, Vantage Agora has offices in Cleveland and Dallas.
Know more about Harsha and Vantage Agora.
