“An organisation must continually reinvent itself by getting ideas from its employees,” insists Huffmire. He cites Gary Hamel for the counsel that rather than downsizing, and squeezing the last ounce out of costs, an organisation must be able to reinvent its existing industry and develop innovative strategies by listening to employees at all levels, by listening to customers, and through cross-functional teamwork.

As an alternative to downsizing, the book speaks of cutting back on hours of work per week, or reduced salaries. “For example, Intel had a ‘10 per cent solution’ when it was faced with the possibility of downsizing in the mid-1980s. It gave all of its employees a 10 per cent reduction in salary.” One other option is to offer voluntary retirement incentives.

The author exhorts organisations to realise that employees are the most important assets, not liabilities. “Provisions must be made to select them carefully, develop them to be competent in their current jobs and be ready for future promotion, and to find ways to retain these valuable assets when changes in the business environment create difficulties.”

Right read during the current turbulent times.

Text telephony is a technology area that is unfamiliar to most people, write David Hanes and Gonzalo Salgueiro in Fax, Modem, and Text for IP Telephony ( www.ciscopress.com).

“Used by the hearing and speech impaired to communicate over the PSTN (public switched telephone network), this technology is becoming more prominent in today’s IP (Internet Protocol) world.”

The book has photos of the early TTYs (teletypewriters), which were used by businesses such as telephone and media companies to relay printed text, and the 1964 modem of Robert H. Weitbrecht, a deaf physicist, which solved the connection problem between TTYs and PSTN.

Interestingly, two people who helped Weitbrecht with the development of his acoustic coupler were also deaf: James C. Marsters, an orthodontist, and Andrew Saks, a businessman. Both these people provided moral, financial, and engineering support to Weitbrecht, the authors narrate. “They were also keen visionaries. Marsters first proposed a national TTY network for the deaf and Saks envisioned a TTY relay service to bridge the gap between deaf and hearing telephone users.”

Recommended addition to the techies’ shelf.

One of the most powerful combos in the open source arena today is the PHP/MySQL combination, declares Vikram Vaswani in How to do Everything with PHP & MySQL ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). He highlights how users can “benefit from the cost savings that accompany community-driven software, and also leverage off the immense number of freely available PHP/MySQL applications to reduce development and deployment time.”

For starters, PHP — a computer scripting language originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 — stood for Personal Home Page, informs Wikipedia. “PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a Web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output. It can be deployed on most Web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge.”

Vaswani is of the view that PHP’s popularity is due to its unique distinction of being the only open-source server-side scripting language that’s both easy to learn and extremely powerful to use. Unlike most modern server-side languages, PHP uses clear, simple syntax and delights in nonobfuscated code, he reasons.

MySQL, “with roots going back to 1979, when Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius created a database system named UNIREG for the Swedish company TcX,” is now dubbed ‘the world’s most popular open-source database.’

The author describes it as “a high-performance, multi-user relational database management system… designed around three fundamental principles – speed, stability, and ease of use – and freely available.”

For the hands-on user.

What does Richard Branson always do? Scouring around a bargain, as he acknowledges in Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a global entrepreneur ( www.virginbooks.com).

And he “can usually track them down where someone has produced too much of something and isn’t selling enough even to cover their costs.” It was thus that Branson spotted a bargain all over the telecom industry. “The big mobile phone operators had paid vast sums upfront for their mobile infrastructures – now they needed to pull in revenue, and so were keen to lease time to others.”

Virgin Mobile was launched in partnership with T-Mobile, as “one of the UK’s biggest ever start-ups, employing more than 500 people with plans for another 500 jobs within two years.” City analysts Investec Henderson Crosthwaite Securities valued the business at 1.36 billion pounds, though Virgin Mobile was yet to make a penny, recounts Branson. “We had the seed money. We had the confidence of the analysts. Now we needed to prove ourselves. Fast…”

A racy grab to pep you during the week.

While the extension of IT (information technology) has undoubtedly reduced workers’ control in some jobs, it has increased it in others, writes Gerald Mars in one of the essays included in Corporate and White-Collar Crime, edited by John and Leonard Minkes ( www.sagepublications.com). “Increase in the control over strong Grid/Donkey jobs — as in call centres and electronic assembly firms, for example — encourages deviance, particularly resentment fiddles,” adds Mars.

The ‘grid’ in reference is about the grouping of occupations as donkeys, wolves, hawks and vultures, in the Grid/Group Analysis or the DCT (dynamic cultural theory).

The bureaucratic Wolf-packs (strong group/strong grid), for instance, value order, discipline, and control, the author elaborates.

In contrast, the competitive, innovative and corner-cutting Hawks (weak group/weak grid) appreciate independence, autonomy, and freedom to transact.

Mars finds that the number of Donkey jobs has increased, with the globalisation-driven technology imposing constraints on workers — as in call centres, and in electronic component assembly plants.

“Donkey job holders, sometimes called Fatalists or Isolates, characterised by both isolation and subordination, are in the paradoxical position of being powerless if they accept the constraints they normally face, or powerful — that is, disruptive — if they reject them.”

Through an anecdote, Mars cautions that IT can increase the power of such workers who, if resentful, can be disruptive and be prone to sabotage.

“I recall a receptionist in a large chain hotel whose job was subject to considerable bureaucratic controls.

On his last day with that employer he used the hotel’s computerised booking system to ‘add’ 50 extra rooms to its database. These were duly booked out – and generated chaos when expectant guests arrived to claim their non-existent rooms.”

Highly instructive material.

Tailpiece

“The boss announced at the staff meeting that we could work only for half the month.”

“Did you protest?”

“No, there was an immediate consensus, though we kept haggling over whether our pay would be the same or be increased!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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