The HR Continuum 2008 was inaugurated by Prof S Bhargava of IIT Bombay. He emphasized the relevance of the central theme of the continuum in the present context of the rapidly evolving corporate world. The Keynote Address was delivered by Mr Krishnaswamy Ramkumar, Group Chief Human Resources Officer, ICICI who took the audience through the world of mergers and acquisitions from a human perspective. He cited examples from the ICICI stable and told about the various issues faced by the parent organization after a merger. He implored the gathering to look at M&A; from an institution perspective than from a narrow financial perspective. He further added that M&A; is mainly a marriage of minds and it has to be structured properly to create growth and value to the merged entity.
Mr Vijayan Pankajakshan, Director HR, Chep Logistics India Pvt. Ltd presented the next session on aQuest-getting most value beyond the tangiblesa, where he stated that the deal value increasingly seemed to have no direct correlation to the physical assets/infrastructure. The key intangibles namely quality of human resource, track record of the human resource and availability and cost of similar home grown talent are being valued more.
Next on the line was Mr Rajiv Phadke, Executive Director, HR and Corporate Communications, Angel Broking who brought out the point that organizational restructuring has to do more with the explosive growth occurring. He specially elaborated on the mergers and acquisitions from the financial sector angle and gave examples from his own experiences.
Mr A Thirunavukkarasu, Head-Corporate Human Resources, Vedanta Group, shared his experiences of M&A; from the view point of the Vedanta Group. He gave the audience a glimpse of how Vedanta resources handle inorganic M&As; across the world. He gave his insights on the policies which are followed by Vedanta resources to manage and retain talent across its various business units.
The last talk of HR Continuum 08 was delivered by Mr S Srivathsan, AVP-HR, Sony Entertainment Television, a SJMSOMite himself .He entertained the audience with anecdotes from his life, from his 10 years of experience in the media sector. He shared his insights about the career opportunities in media sector and gave a birdas eye view of the challenges which are faced by the media in retaining talent.