I and J - Reflections on teachings of 'First Love'

Warning - The reading of this post needs some contextual background !

Consistency

October 1994

It is about 3 in the morning and I was not sure whether we were late for dinner or early for breakfast and the only thing my mind was wandering was what the guy was going to bring to eat and when will we go to sleep ( I have never seen anything outside of idly/dosa and was getting used to some 'hard chewing' with something called 'Roti'). Two persons (MKJ and MS) were in some heated technical discussion about which I had no 'clue' either that time or now. I was watching MKJ moving his 'silver ring' pensively up , down and closing the 'discussion' by uttering some thing like 'We have to be the best'. At that moment I was just wondering what kind of person is this. Here we are awaiting that desperate 'roti' in god forsaken hour and !!!!.  I had a feeling what the heck ???

October 2007

I was standing near MKJ's room and with certain degree of pride keeping a article of 'jB5 - Another Mobile Web Browser'. He silently sneaked behind me (I have realized that he has that ability to 'be present' everywhere) and in a microsecond gesture peeked at what I was reading and stuck out the 'Another', wrote 'The' and just kept going into his room. I had the same feeling what the heck ????
13 years have passed and the message has not changed. 'WE HAVE TO BE THE BEST'. I have seen this 'message' unconsciously being 'woven' into the DNA of whoever I have been closely associated with “I” (AT,Dr.G.,MS,RK). Sometimes I wonder whether these 'janmas' have no sense of 'appreciation' built into them, but over a period of time have realized that they 'Raise the bar' time and again.


Leadership

There are countless incidents that can be narrated but the message I have learnt is that very simple and so very hard to follow. The only way to Lead is 'By Example'. It is really as simple as that. No complex books/articles/analysis/surveys/behavioral studies.  During the troubled times of 2001 you could always see the lights on till 3 AM and when you see people working so hard you cannot go home and sleep over it.
The simple advantage here is that it is impossible to say 'NO' to that kind of leadership as you are sure that if you are not going to do it they will be doing it and you will never be asked to do 'something' that they themselves would not consider doing.


Being 'there'

You will always know that you had a room to walk in if you had any problem of any kind. No appointments, no outlook calendar accepting just walk in and walk out anytime. They have that innate ability to call you up sensing that you would be in trouble. Scheduled to Visit Israel during war time I get a call saying that 'If I did not want to go' ,'I do not have to go'. Whatever little hesitation I had in mind was 'cleared'. We were in a big mess in a customer site. The customer had threatened that if we did not achieve certain performance we would have get thrown out and three of us who were already there with all our knowledge and capabilities could take it only up to a certain level up but still not to the expectations of the customer. MKJ was recovering from some kind of operation. Well I have never known him to be ill so that news itself was surprising to me. Around midnight we were still out of ideas on how to meet the expectations and lot of nights were sucking the energy out of us we get a call from MKJ which said simple things 'I would have been there if the damned doctor has not put a stop to my travel. AT is on his way to Pune.  He will be there with you guys tomorrow '. AT came , did his usual magic and in the next couple of days a SMS was internally passed among all orange folks. "The J guys seems to have done it' !.That in a sense was a significant turning point in that 'Product' for many reasons but I consider that call was a defining moment to me because the words that were never said but actually intended  was 'Do not worry. We are not going to let you fail'.

Reward Failure

You get promoted when you screw up big time.
Doing the RightCD->WriteCD product CLI version I missed out doing a 'Close Session' in a particular path and this messed about 500 CD's. Each CD was expensive that time and data recovery was next to impossible that too in a mission critical document management software. The next thing I knew was Dr.G was in chennai with my 'Promotion' letter, took me out to a hotel near central station, got me 'DOSA' and never ever uttered a word about 'Me' Screwing up. But ‘Remember’ to own it up.

Out of the 'Box'!.

All problems have a solution. Be it solving the LPD TSR at AI in a novel way or giving way to the now 'etched in stone' worker queue or improving the performance of XML parser you always can find a solution when you step out of your stereotyped thinking. Well the 'box' here is your own mindsets and ‘Out’ is walking into Dr.G’s room and define the problem. But you will have to give him one night though. The next morning when you come to office you will have the problem solved and you will have one 'a.c','b.c' and 'c.c' ,….. giving the path ahead.


Use Humor

In a world where relationships are on the 'stress route' as we take ourselves too seriously. I have seen humor being repeatedly  used as a tool to 'defuse tensions' of any kind. That humor would be spontaneous, Instant and most times self deprecating. It serves as a wonderful antidote to our day to day miseries and gives a fresh perspective on the challenges that we face. Only talking to few people you feel lighter and if a person can do that with amazing consistency it speaks volumes about the person.

When you spend more than half your 'so called career' with a close set of people the emotions that we carry cannot be ever captured in text or speech.

I 'owe' to “I” for me being what 'I am today' and I have not 'hated' that. I owe many things but most of all for having persisted with me, nurturing the rebel with me, patient with my instinctive lack of integrity, and above all for allowing ‘me’ to be ‘me’. I am not sure if I am today like that but I can vouch for the past 13 years I have enjoyed a freedom of expression that I have never enjoyed elsewhere.

The feelings out of the memories that I have are deep and one day I would be able to refine the Journey from 'Osmanabad to Barcelona' in a more consumable form.

“I and J” shall remain my 'First Love'.  Those of us who have experienced ‘First Love’ might agree

“Like an old photograph
Time can make a feeling fade
But the memory of a first love
Never fades away.”

Also on the lighter side I would like to give a shehari or something (I know nothing of Hindi when I joined ”I”). I have troubled people many times with my constant questioning about vision , mission , Management by Objectives and related BS but one day it occurred to me 'Jab Kudh ka vision nahi eh tho Kudaah ka Vision kyun mangu!!.

Stay Tuned and Have Fun.

PS1 : Though I have moved onto "C' I am still learning from it and that shall be a different post at a different time. Anything takes time to have an lasting impact.

PS2 : The abbreviated forms of the names of people and companies are intended

PS3: Incidentally yesterday was MKJ’s daughter’s marriage and it was heartening to see all the lieutenants of the last two decades from all corners of the world ‘Being There’. ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’ !

Am I a Moron ?

There was a time when I decided to see a friend, got up and ensured I met him

There was a time when I waited for the rain, dashed out, got wet and knew how to have fun

There was a time when I waited for the night to have dinner on the floor with my family and exchange with each other the beauty and beast each day brought to me

There was a time when I could just lie down in the sofa and expect to get three square meals a day without anyone uttering a word

There was a time when I waited for the electricity to go, so I could rush out and meet all my friends and keep praying that the electiricty never comes

There was a time when everyone knew my favorite dish and would have it ready for me when I stepped in

There was a time when I loved the joy of travelling in the crowded public transport and the pleasure of sharing with anyone on anything

There was a time when I could say what I felt saying to anyone and not worry about it

There was a time when I believed that I am a product of chance and everyone is equal

There was a time when I used language to ‘communicate’

There was a time when I just did what my parents or elders asked of me

There was a time when I loved fractional coffee with my friends

There was a time when I worked long and felt I did so little

There was a time when I lived in a small house and still seem to have space to accommodate any number of people

There was a time when I had no money and still be absolutely thrilled about everything I did

There was a time when I celebrated winning and losing with equal fervor

There was a time when I needed to give no explanation on anything to anybody

There was a time when I was so sure of myself even when I had no clue of tomorrow

There was a time when I did nothing and I got everything

And I think now

Those were the times I did not possibly realize what a complete moron I was  

Or Am I Now ?

Stay Tuned and Have Fun

Factors Gating Innovation

Learning from CII Innovation Conference

Gravity

• Organizational Gravity

• Industry Gravity

• Country Gravity

• Cultural Gravity

  

Organizational Gravity

Walt Disney created history by creating the animation movie ‘Three Pigs’. The success was phenomenal. What was the natural way to repeat the success ?? PIGS – Part II happened and it bombed miserably at the box office. Walt Disney and his team came back to the drawing board , brain stormed extensively, they realized PIGS do make money and PIGS – Part III happened. Again it failed miserably. The gravity here is to stick to a success formula, what worked earlier is no guarantee that it will work in the future. Disney being Disney did not give up and then Snow white and the seven dwarfs happened. What are we doing to change PIGS to SNOW White ?? Break out of ‘More of the same’ approach. Local examples are Tata’s entry into jewellery by means of Tanishq and ‘Steel Retailing’ by Steel Junction

  

Industry Gravity

The circus industry was facing a big threat and it was on the verge of closing down. Cirque de Soleil redefined by using humans as performers. It uses a story line for each performance and made it into a format that can be taken to anywhere both in terms of physical mobility and in terms of emotional content offered to audience.

Country Gravity

Singapore when freed from Malaysia was in need of huge image makeover. They wanted to create the best airline in the whole world out of nothing. They could not afford new and stylish planes. Instead they decided to bring on something called ‘In Flight Experience’ and that turned the definition of passenger experience in flights completely 360 degrees. Singapore Airlines has managed to keep that leadership in ‘In Flight Experience’ from inception

  

Cultural Gravity

Samsung wanted to create the world’s best experience in consumer products. Culturally Koreans always took the best of everything from the best in the world (example : Best of designs from Italy,US) and assembled their product. Suddenly someone asked ‘ What is korean’ in this and that turned on the heat. They decided to be the best designers in the world and hired the best in the world to educate, train their people on design and today their products are competing among the world’s best in their design.

Some of the above are forces that we need to get out and when we say ‘Out of the box’ we need to think which of the above boxes we are stuck inside and then move on.

What some companies then do to get out of these gravity ?

Stay Tuned and Have Fun.

The Journey of the Accidental Leader

The Journey of the Accidental Leader - Steve Gladis

• No one knows what they are doing until they try
• You get what you give. So give a little first
• Build trust by character, competence, caring, commitment and consistency
• Change isn't easy, but if you do it right everyone wins
• You have to have a vision to make it come true
• If you want to create a positive culture, show people by actions what you believe in. Do not just tell them.
• Leadership is all about courage
• The long march begins with the first bold step
• Change will happen. Embrace it while sticking it to your core principles
• Leaders have a passion for people

Get the real stuff from the following link
The Journey of the Accidental Leader

Stay Tuned and Have Fun

Discovering Ourselves - 101 (Getting back to basics)

Introduction

I am sharing some of my thoughts on what some of the expectations that we probably need to have on our own self and expectation that some of our stakeholders would have in our existing and emerging leadership roles. Irrespective of what ‘we feel’ about ourselves and the environment around us these are some areas where we need to be conscious about. We probably are aware of what all is being said here and may be the master of our own self but these thoughts could be considered as reinforcement of what we are probably good at already.

Self-Discipline

This might look silly, but unless we get this one thing right, we will have difficulty in most areas of our professional and personal life. If I have to quote from Wiki, the definition is “Self-discipline refers to the training that one gives one's self to accomplish a certain task or to adopt a particular pattern of behavior, even though one would really rather be doing something else” . Our current lifestyle has probably spoiled or taken away something as simple as this over years. So in some sense we probably need to unlearn some of our acquired bad habits. I am personally an advocate of the philosophy ‘as long as work gets done’ why should I worry about anything else and in all probabilities that argument is a very fair and reasonable argument. But the counter argument is if we have a team looking up-to us then we have a fairly bigger responsibility than what probably we could have imagined.  We can be fairly sure that we will be seeing the adage ‘as we sow so shall we reap’ being lived upon.  One simple way to start cultivating this is by coming in office to time, clocking in the required hours and leaving in time. We could argue we are not machines, that we spend some weekends, we stay after office hours for emergencies, we take calls after office hours, but those are exceptions rather than rule. If they are rules then we have something more fundamental to correct and we should attempt correcting that. I am fairly positive that this one single thing will bring in more predictability, consistency into our own self and the teams we command. We can ignore this if we are working on ‘creating the next Google or face book’ though that requires a lot more self-discipline that what we generally are capable of pulling off. Please remember as someone said that discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments.

Managing Commitments

If we have said that we will do something on certain time to someone then we need to do it.  It is perfectly alright to say ‘NO’. The Infosys model of ‘Under Committing’ and ‘Over Delivering’ is not a bad idea. We build credibility and trust by doing that repeatedly and that thing we accumulate over years can be broken easily with one failed commitment. People would be tolerant once or twice of ‘failed commitments’ but subsequently they will fail to take us seriously.  Kindly remember that ‘someone’ can be ‘anyone’ that we made a commitment and they need not be people necessarily higher up in the hierarchy. Do not bring up last minute surprises to people whom we have committed as they would have made some commitments based on our commitments. In our roles we interact with a variety of stakeholders and all stakeholders are to be treated with equal respect. Please do not expect people to ‘whom we gave commitment’ to ‘babysit’ us in reminding about those commitments and also do not spend time in exercising our cerebrum on thinking about ‘excuses’. In my personal view nothing can get more embarrassing than that. If I have to summarize this is one sentence, please always remember ‘we are as good as our word’. PERIOD.

Creating Value

As we move along the hierarchy it is important to do ‘things right’, but we need to move from doing ‘things right’ to doing the ‘right things’. I am sure we would have heard this one thousand times but hearing it one more time will do us ‘no harm’. While it is important to retain and continuously strengthen our foundations and take the occasional pleasure in ‘yes, I fixed this bug today’, or ‘I solved this problem today’ or ‘I managed to avert a crisis today’ or taking that deep breath and saying ‘amma, no escalations today’, our real role is to shape a better tomorrow for us, our teams and the organization at large. This comes by serious, conscious and consistent investment in the following

·         Self

·         Team

·         Larger Picture

Investing in ‘Self’

Generally we seem to take our positions and growth for granted just because of the number of years we spend in an organization. In an economy where we live in the number of years we put in has ‘zero relevance’ and what probably has ‘relevance’ is ‘what’ has gone into the number of years. Unless we pay serious attention to how we ‘stay relevant’ we can be dead sure that we will float along till we sink. Nothing ever will guarantee our permanence except ‘continuous’ and ‘relevant’ learning.

Investing in ‘Team’

Swami Vivekananda said ‘Each human being is potentially divine’. I agree that we probably are not in the business of extracting divinity but we need to give a fair chance to each one in our team. This comes by investing quality time with them. We need to see their SWOT and work with them in ensuring a mutually enriching experience.  We are where we are because of our teams and we will be where we probably should be because of our teams. Unless we are willing to expend energy in terms of engaging our teams towards excellence, we will be mutually destroying each other’s aspirations. I would like to paraphrase some text from Jim Collins ‘Good to great’ book where he stresses that ‘The people come first’ in any kind of success that we wish to achieve. Here is a quick summary.

“First Who, Then What

The good to great leaders understood three simple truths. First, if we begin with ‘who’ rather than ‘what’, we can more easily adapt to a changing world. If people join the bus primarily because of where it is going, what happens if we get ten miles down the road and we need to change direction? We’ve got a problem. But if people are on the bus because of who else is on the bus, then it’s much easier to change direction: “hey, I got on this bus because of who else is on it; if we need to change direction to be more successful, fine, with me.” Second, if we have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away. The right people don’t need to be tightly managed or fired up; they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great. Third, if we have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether we discover the right direction; we still won’t have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”

Investing in ‘Larger Picture’

It is important to have a ‘point of view’ in the area in which we are working. That is an acquired skill as well. We need to understand where our product is heading, who is the competition, what is the ‘competitive advantage’ that we offer, ‘Productivity Metrics’, ‘Customer Satisfaction’ , ‘Quality Metrics’ ‘Elevator pitches’ and the equivalent. We may think this is not our job or why should I care, but if we do not care, we can be sure there will be very little people who will. Unless we are the greatest salesman of our work and are geared to back up that ‘sales performance’ with ‘product performance’ we will be bordering on the edges of fooling our own selves.

In the long run we would be remembered for the tangible and intangible value we helped create.

Managing conflicts

Conflicts are ‘necessary packages’ that we need to ‘exist’ with. At many a times we will find ourselves in situations where our values conflict with organizational values or we may be at cognitive dissonance with what we are being asked to do. A typical example would be the pressure to comply with bell curve in performance ratings. While there is no easy answer on these and similar type of conflicts what we need to ensure is that we have made our case without making ourselves or the others around us miserable. Debate is essential for society to progress and as long as we have done justice to what we believe is right, we should leave it at that. It is perfectly ok to disagree without being disagreeable. It is a chain of managing stakeholder expectations and though we pride about ‘Being Boundary less’ etc, in real life boundaries exist and we should learn to live with and respect those boundaries.  There are two sides to a coin and we should form our judgment only after seeing the two sides. The question we need to answer is ‘Did we do our damned best?’ to resolve conflicts in a ‘win-win’ manner.

Linear Programming

All management typically boils down to a problem of “Linear Programming’. We need to ‘achieve something’ subjected to ‘certain constraints’. We will never live in an ideal world where we are going to be given what all we need. We need to cultivate a ‘possibility thinking’ and evolve ‘there has to be a way’ before coming out with ‘how and why’ we cannot do certain things. We have to deal with a lot of ambiguity, be willing to do mid-course correction many a times and have an obsessive focus on results. We will be mercilessly judged by our ability to ‘Deliver on time, with budget and quality’.

Purpose of Existence

This might sound philosophical but we need to begin with the ‘end in mind’ as Stephen Covey would say. We probably are in a way lucky enough to be where we are and unless we spend our energies in meaningful contribution to us and everyone around us, we are in the danger of falling into the ‘also ran’ trap.

Conclusion

This note is just intended to share areas where we have to be probably aware in our existing and emerging leadership roles and for those of we who are already aware it can serve as a reinforcing function. This note would probably sound abstract without concrete examples but I am sure we all have plenty of real life experiences to fill in. Before writing this I thought how I would fare with respect to the above areas on a scale of 5 (1 – being low and 5 – being high) and the results are as below.

Parameter	Self-Score
Self-Discipline	4
Managing Commitments	3
Creating Value	3
Linear Programming	3
Purpose of Existence	1

We could probably as well share with me on what we think about my ‘self-evaluation’ and do this exercise on ourselves or amongst our peers.

Alvin Toffler’s said that “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”.  I hope we would be able to break free of our comfort zones in our respective roles, re invent ourselves and carve a future that has purpose .

Stay Tuned and Have Fun