Global Leadership and Managerial Competencies of Indian Managers

A review of the literature on the qualities of effective managers, leaders and world class or global manager indicates a good degree of consistency in the qualities required to be called a global manager. In these days when mergers and acquisition have become common and national boundaries are crossed with ease in acquiring new businesses and setting up new businesses it is necessary to understand and acquire the competencies needed to be globally successful leader. This paper identifies 25 such qualities from a 360 feedback survey of 762 senior and top level managers from manufacturing, services and pharma sectors combined with those from a mix of organizations belonging to two leading business houses of India. An analysis of the open ended assessments given by nearly 7600 managers indicated the most frequently perceived strengths and weaknesses of Indian management. Job knowledge comes out as the most frequently observed strong point of Indian managers and this cuts across various sectors and business houses. Communication, team work, and hard work come out as other strong points of more than 20 per cent of Indian managers. Short temper, open-mindedness, and inability to build juniors are the most frequently mentioned areas needing improvement. Vision, values, strategic thinking, decision making skills, risk taking, innovativeness, ability to learn from mistakes, learning orientation and self renewal efforts, and cross cultural sensitivity are other qualities lacking in Indian managers to be called as global managers. These qualities are either not exhibited dominantly or are not received bye fellow managers. Future management education and management development programmes should focus on these qualities to prepare Indian managers to be world class managers.

Impact of 360 Degree Feedback: A Follow-up study of Four Organizations

A large number of organizations have been using 360 degree feedback in India as leadership development intervention. This paper is based on the feedback of 43 participants from four companies where the 360 Degree Feedback program was initiated. The study was done using a questionnaire method. The results indicated that there has been an overall positive impact reported of 360 Degree intervention on ones professional life after 360DF. More than 60% of the participants report that they visited 360DF data every quarter. 24 participants reported that about 50% of their action plans prepared at the end of the 360 intervention were implemented. At least 30% of the action plans were achieved by 6 of the participants and 2 participants reported achievement of all their action plans. The participants also reported that the RSDQ model based 360DF tool provided detailed insight covering various parameters of one’s role. The participants also recommend that with more periodic follow up and review sessions (every quarter) anchored by internal HR and more focus and seriousness among the participants to work on the action plans will result in using 360 DF for change and growth

Is Past Performance a Good Predictor of Future Potential?

Both assessment centres and 360 degree feedback have become very popular new era HR tools. With human resources gaining strategic importance combined with raising costs of talented managers and their scarce availability, organizations are left with no alternatives than identifying and grooming talent from within. This has led to the increased use of assessment centres and 360 degree tools for developing leadership competencies. Some times 360 degree feedback is used as tool for career development and succession planning. Sometimes assessment centres are used as predictors of fast track managers. However research on the predictive ability of ACs or 360 degree feedback is scant. This study is based on data gathered from three organizations that have conducted assessment centres as well as 360 degree feedback. In all three organizations ACs and 360 degree feedback were used as development tools. In all these organizations competency mapping was done and common competencies were identified using behaviour indicators. Competencies were assessed by external assessors and by their seniors, juniors, and colleagues on the same competency model. Results showed no definite patterns and lead to the conclusion that past performance as assessed by 360 degree feedback predictor of future potential as assessed by the assessment centres. The findings seem to be valid irrespective of the nature of competencies assessed and across various categories of employees. Given the lack of correlation, caution is necessary while using the data for promotion and succession planning exercises.

Effect of plant growth regulators on flowering behavior of cashew cv. Vengurla-4 grown in the hilly tracts of South Gujarat

A trial was conducted at Subhir and Chikhalda locations in Dang district of South Gujarat, India to assess the effect of Ethrel, NAA and GA3 on the flowering behavior of cashew cultivar Vengurla-4 during 2013-14. Three concentrations each of GA3 (50, 75, 100 ppm), Ethrel (10, 30, 50 ppm) and NAA (50, 75, 100ppm) were applied as foliar sprays 20 days before blossoming and 20 days after full bloom in twenty year old trees of cashew cultivar Vengurla-4. Trees sprayed with 50 ppm Ethrel had significantly the highest number of flowering panicles per squaremeter (13.09), number of perfect flowers per panicle (87.11) and sex ratio (0.24) across locations and in pooled data. However, this was at par with 10 ppm Ethrel which emerged as the second best treatment of the trial. This study demonstrated the potential of Ethrel in improving various flowering parameters of cashew which are important determinations in increasing nut production

Horizon effects with surface waves on moving water

Surface waves on a stationary flow of water are considered, in a linear model that includes the surface tension of the fluid. The resulting gravity-capillary waves experience a rich array of horizon effects when propagating against the flow. In some cases three horizons (points where the group velocity of the wave reverses) exist for waves with a single laboratory frequency. Some of these effects are familiar in fluid mechanics under the name of wave blocking, but other aspects, in particular waves with negative co-moving frequency and the Hawking effect, were overlooked until surface waves were investigated as examples of analogue gravity [Sch\"utzhold R and Unruh W G 2002 Phys. Rev. D 66 044019]. A comprehensive presentation of the various horizon effects for gravity-capillary waves is given, with emphasis on the deep water/short wavelength case kh>>1 where many analytical results can be derived. A similarity of the state space of the waves to that of a thermodynamic system is pointed out.Comment: 30 pages, 15 figures. Minor change

The prediction of fatigue using speech as a biosignal

Automatic systems for estimating operator fatigue have application in safety-critical environments. We develop and evaluate a system to detect fatigue from speech recordings collected from speakers kept awake over a 60-hour period. A binary classification system (fatigued/not-fatigued) based on time spent awake showed good discrimination, with 80 % unweighted accuracy using raw features, and 90 % with speaker-normalized features. We describe the data collection, feature analysis, machine learning and cross-validation used in the study. Results are promising for real-world applications in domains such as aerospace, transportation and mining where operators are in regular verbal communication as part of their normal working activities

Fighting Against Forgetting:Remembering the Places Where My Relationship With My Father Came Into Being

When cancer took my dad’s last breath, I was left with the fear that all the dark memories of our relationship might crowd out and overshadow some of my delightful son–father memories. Haunted by the fear of forgetting all those “good” memories, focusing on where they were created, I write into being some of the beautiful moments I want to preserve. Providing examples from my work of memory, the purpose is to show that we do not need to start with dark backgrounds before brighter futures can emerge. What happens when only mundane, beautiful memories are preserved is also considered.</p

Parallel Perceptrons, Activation Margins and Imbalanced Training Set Pruning

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11492542_6Proceedings of Second Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2005, Estoril, Portugal, June 7-9, 2005, Part IIA natural way to deal with training samples in imbalanced class problems is to prune them removing redundant patterns, easy to classify and probably over represented, and label noisy patterns that belonging to one class are labelled as members of another. This allows classifier construction to focus on borderline patterns, likely to be the most informative ones. To appropriately define the above subsets, in this work we will use as base classifiers the so–called parallel perceptrons, a novel approach to committee machine training that allows, among other things, to naturally define margins for hidden unit activations. We shall use these margins to define the above pattern types and to iteratively perform subsample selections in an initial training set that enhance classification accuracy and allow for a balanced classifier performance even when class sizes are greatly different.With partial support of Spain’s CICyT, TIC 01–572, TIN2004–0767

Constraint propagation equations of the 3+1 decomposition of f(R) gravity

Theories of gravity other than general relativity (GR) can explain the observed cosmic acceleration without a cosmological constant. One such class of theories of gravity is f(R). Metric f(R) theories have been proven to be equivalent to Brans-Dicke (BD) scalar-tensor gravity without a kinetic term. Using this equivalence and a 3+1 decomposition of the theory it has been shown that metric f(R) gravity admits a well-posed initial value problem. However, it has not been proven that the 3+1 evolution equations of metric f(R) gravity preserve the (hamiltonian and momentum) constraints. In this paper we show that this is indeed the case. In addition, we show that the mathematical form of the constraint propagation equations in BD-equilavent f(R) gravity and in f(R) gravity in both the Jordan and Einstein frames, is exactly the same as in the standard ADM 3+1 decomposition of GR. Finally, we point out that current numerical relativity codes can incorporate the 3+1 evolution equations of metric f(R) gravity by modifying the stress-energy tensor and adding an additional scalar field evolution equation. We hope that this work will serve as a starting point for relativists to develop fully dynamical codes for valid f(R) models.Comment: 25 pages, matches published version in CQG, references update

Acute kidney disease and renal recovery : consensus report of the Acute Disease Quality Initiative (ADQI) 16 Workgroup

Consensus definitions have been reached for both acute kidney injury (AKI) and chronic kidney disease (CKD) and these definitions are now routinely used in research and clinical practice. The KDIGO guideline defines AKI as an abrupt decrease in kidney function occurring over 7 days or less, whereas CKD is defined by the persistence of kidney disease for a period of > 90 days. AKI and CKD are increasingly recognized as related entities and in some instances probably represent a continuum of the disease process. For patients in whom pathophysiologic processes are ongoing, the term acute kidney disease (AKD) has been proposed to define the course of disease after AKI; however, definitions of AKD and strategies for the management of patients with AKD are not currently available. In this consensus statement, the Acute Disease Quality Initiative (ADQI) proposes definitions, staging criteria for AKD, and strategies for the management of affected patients. We also make recommendations for areas of future research, which aim to improve understanding of the underlying processes and improve outcomes for patients with AKD