CONFLUENCIA – 2011, Day-2

The day started with full enthusiasm and we all took our seats of the lecture room before time to have an inspiring guest Lecture. The eminent speaker of the day was Mr. Hardik Shah, presently working as an Associate Professor at Adani Institute of Infrastructure and Management. He is a passionate academician, researcher and trainer in HRM and OB area.

Dr. Shah started with his presentation on the topic “Strategic Resource Management”. The discussion started with a very basic question, “What is Strategy?”. To this Dr. Shah gave a very brief and apt definition; he explained that Strategy could be defined by three terms- Focus, Product and Service Differentiation and Cost Leadership. He then gave an important concept of Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) explaining that Sustainable competitive advantage allows the maintenance and improvement of the enterprise's competitive position in the market. It is an advantage that enables business to survive against its competition over a long period of time.

Continuing with the discussion on Strategy, Mr. Shah explained that strategy can be grouped in three levels – Corporate level, Business level, and Unit level. He further detailed that corporate strategy is basically the board level strategy which is executed at the topmost level. Secondly the Business level is executed at the middle level and Unit/plant level focuses more on actual operations.

Dr. Shah further elaborated Strategic partners role of HR giving insights of HR role in an organisation. He explained the importance of HR department by stating that today most of the public sector units( PSU) have HR as their Directors. Further stating HR responsibilities he said that following are the possible roles assumed by HR – Vision, Strategy, Goals, Policies, Process, Procedure. He finally explained the HR structure focus area by a flowchart diagram having four segments namely, Acquire, Engage, Develop and Reward.

He, then, continued his discussion on HR Strategy by stating key factors playing an important role. He explained that these four factors can be divided into four categories – Vertical Growth, Business Diversity, Talent Strategy and leadership and Culture.Next, he elaborated different strategies in HR department. First being Talent planning, he explained that the most important role of HR is to ensure quality of people hired as employees are the biggest asset of any company. Second is Aligning and Managing expectation. Third is to develop organisation structure by constantly enhancing internal growth. Last being alignment of compensation to performance. Summing up the HR strategies, he lastly explained three important pillars of HR in an organisation which were process, opportunity and people.Towards the end, Dr. Shah concluded the discussion by giving us a practical example of NTPC – Business Excellence Model 2010.

Lastly, Dr. Shah gave two important concepts of Competency and Triple Bottom Line. He stated that competency is a conglomerate of knowledge, skills and Ability (KSA) and Triple Bottom line consists of society, turnover and profit.

The discussion concluded with an open ended questionnaire round wherein all students got the chance to have their doubts cleared and finally Mr. Shah left the podium with the huge round of applause for giving such a vivacious and informative talk on Strategic Resource Management.