ICFAI Business School (IBS) Hyderabad held a business conclave on the topic “Emerging Business Models – Opportunities & Challenges for HR” on December 19 at Hotel Taj Deccan, Hyderabad.
Five senior HR professionals spoke at the conclave before an elite audience of over one hundred HR professionals from national and multinational organisations, as well as start-ups. The five panel speakers were Mahesh Joshi, CEO, Apollo Home Health Care, Sudhakara Moorthy, Vice-President – Human Resources, Tata Projects Limited, Sunil Sankar, Vice-President – Human Resources, CA Technologies, Suresh Anabolu, Chief Human Resources Officer, GVK Biosciences Pvt Ltd, and Rashmi Deshpande, CEO, Crafting Capability Pvt Ltd. All the speakers laid great stress on two very critical aspects; ethics and values must permeate all aspects of business, and business needs to engage with society by showing a sense of corporate social responsibility.
In his address, Mahesh Joshi differentiated between offshoot and de novo business models and emphasised the need for both back-end and value systems to be strong in an organisation. He also drew attention to the need for HR to be more agile and engaged in the present scenario. The HR function, in his opinion, should become a facilitator instead of a driver and its biggest challenges would be attracting and retaining talent.
Sunil Sankar emphasised the importance of HR and its use of technology to transform business. He foresaw that creation of methods for self-learning would be the biggest challenge.
In his perspective, Suresh Anabolu stated that every organisation is revisiting its way of doing business today. He characterised the changes in models as being based on differentiation or disruption with the latter posing much greater challenges.
Ms. Rashmi Deshpande summarised the panel’s views by saying that youth, the spirit of entrepreneurship, and technology are impacting the way business is done. The biggest challenge is handling the young and the best strategy would be to follow the African policy of ubuntu – ‘we are because I am’.
S V Seshaiah, Director of IBS Hyderabad, initially welcomed the distinguished gathering and said that “The business environment today is in a state of flux. Traditional models of doing business are under siege from new models facilitated largely by technology and improved connectivity. Patterns of doing business are gradually changing from conventional, linear models to disruptive non-conventional models across a wide spectrum of businesses. In turn, these changes present a host of opportunities for managing people but also present hitherto unseen challenges. The conclave was organised to connect these dots in the new business paradigm and draw insights from HR managers who have the challenging task of managing people resources keeping the larger business context in mind.”
Seshaiah further said that SMAC (social, mobility, analytics and cloud) will be impacting the business ecosystem today, and emphasised the need for a transformation of the HR function from ‘boredom to the boardroom’. The HR function will be a critical success factor driving future business growth, and the role of technology cannot be underplayed.
Senior HR leaders, functional heads, consultants and business heads from as many as 75 organisations spanning the industries and fields of IT, ITES, manufacturing, pharma, biotechnology, healthcare, hospitality, utilities and automobile sectors were present for the conclave.