HR novelist

ICE PEOPLE

Jyothi Menon

She has ideas that may seem old fashioned to some. Loyalty to the employer is something that a person need not be ashamed of, she argues.

"It might be part of western culture not to uphold loyalty to employers as a commendable trait. But in the Indian context, loyalty to the company must be cultivated and encouraged," says Jyothi Menon, who's been head of human resources at Lason India, the BPO company, for almost a year.

Menon, 36, has put her pen where her mouth is and written her first book The Power of Human Relations-The Art of Leading People to Leverage Profitability.

The book is a HR tome masquerading as a novel. "The central character in the book is a young and brash CEO, who decides to leave behind his laptop and mobile phone and head for his ancestral home. There he meets his grandfather and gets a fresh perspective on dealing with people," she says.

Published by Pearson Education, the book's foreword is written by Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies.

An engineer who succumbed to the call of HR, Menon's 11 years in HR and the wealth of experience that came with it helped her write the156-page book in two months. "When you know what you want to say, writing is not an issue," she says. She wrote the book between jobs, after she quit Computer Associates (CA).

If it is HR at work, it is HR at home too. Her husband, Bobby Menon, also a former CA employee, is now the HR head of logistics firm SembCorp Logistics (India). Menon leaps in hastily to say: "No, we did not meet at CA. We keep discussing HR practices and making notes all the time."

Naturally, Menon won't stop at just one book. Two more books are in the offing. A book on BPO in India will co-authored by Pradeep Nevatia, managing director, Lason India. She's planning the second one on the steps in conducting interviews.