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Friday, July 6, 2012

Decision… what's right isn't always popular... and what's popular isn't always right.

Chocolate or Ice cream…? McDonalds or Pizza…? Coke or Fresh Fruit Juice …? Life or Death…? Shortcut or Main road…? Drive down or take a walk…? Yes or No…? Hire or No Hire…? Good or Bad...? Buy or Sell...? Invest or Spend...?
We make tons of quick decisions and 90% of them unconsciously and very quickly…often we call them choices; most of them may be correct and most of them may go against us and hem-haw over in agony.
Our choices and decisions predominantly are based on our personality and the way we think, most of them have roots to our decision making skills we picked up subconsciously while we were kids. We choose many actions from our own experience, biases, opinions, memories…
I was talking to a very old friend of mine, and he asked me a funny question… “A company where an employee is currently working does not recognize his/her potential and the same person in another company when hired … is hired for a higher position and gets a pretty good hike… what the current company did not understand about him in past few years… the new company assessed in a 30min interview round and made a decision”….
Few days back I visited my stock broker and he quoted “Listening to others opinions and not trusting yourself - Most traders have failed numerous times. Put your boat in the water - The song goes, "Ships are safest in the harbor but that is not what ships are for…” now everything again boils down the decision, here it is to Buy or Sell a stock that is again an emotion that holds you back, fear and greed…
Here is an anecdote; you would have heard this story in your leadership trainings or in some seminars etc… pretty popular one on Which one will you choose?
A group of children were playing near two railway tracks, one still in use while the other disused. Only one child played on the disused track, the rest on the operational track. The train came, and you were just beside the track interchange. You could make the train change its course to the disused track and saved most of the kids. However, that would also mean the lone child playing by the disused track would be sacrificed. Or would you rather let the train go its way?
Let's take a pause to think what kind of decision we could make................
The first thought that comes to the mind and we might choose to divert the course of the train, and sacrifice only one child. You might think the same way, I guess. Exactly, I thought the same way initially because to save most of the children at the expense of only one child was rational decision most people would make, morally and emotionally. But, have you ever thought that the child choosing to play on the disused track had in fact made the right decision to play at a safe place?
Nevertheless, he had to be sacrificed because of his ignorant friends who chose to play where the danger was.
This kind of dilemma happens around us every day… especially the minority is often sacrificed for the interest of the majority, no matter how foolish or ignorant the majority are, and how farsighted and knowledgeable the minority are.
The child who chose not to play with the rest on the operational track was sidelined. And in the case he was sacrificed.
I was conducting an workshop at Delhi, the audience were members from DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation), AAI (Airport Authority or India) and ATC (Air Traffic Control). We had a very long conversation around this story and every one had his or her own opinion, to add more flavor to the discussion we introduced an additional emotional element …
Option 1: Now imagine the one who is going to change the train has his kid playing on the disused track
Option 2: Now imagine the one who is going to change the train has his kid playing on the active track
Few replied to sacrifice the kid and put the train on the disused track
Few were of the opinion that the choice that kid made to play on the disused track was right, why should he be killed for the ignorance of others
Few blamed that authorities / parents / teachers etc… for allowing the kids to play on the railway track
Few were worried on what would happen to the life of people in the train if we put the train on the disused track
When the above variables were introduced in the story,
Few were of the opinion and said I am not worried of anyone else but my kid…. (Emotion)
One of them said… it’s ok to sacrifice my kid for the sake of others again an Emotional decision.
One of them shared a technology tip that trains should have auto sensors installed
Someone told can we inform the train engine driver to stop the train
One of them told can we rush towards the kids and ask them to get out of the track
We never reached a conclusion; every decision has its own advantage and disadvantage…
While we work with people around us, we will far sure end up with conflicting situations and delay the decision making, sometimes we will get into a deadlock situation, every party involved in the decision making will be equally influential and will have his or her own opinion.
I faced a tough situation too, at some juncture did feel that enough is enough, let me go with the flow and continue with what is happening, any way it’s just my job and after few days I will move on. But my inner conscious did not permit me do this… again a decision dilemma, here is what I love the most, talk to someone when you are in such a situation, I fell back on my Mentor and talked to her and suddenly a spark aroused with two options… I have always noticed this, and you too would have come across, you know the solutions and sometimes due to stress or various other factors the mind simply stops working ... talking to someone helps brush the dust thats settled in....
1.       Continue the way we are doing now … find a quick fix so that the operations don’t get stalled
2.       Benchmark and understand the best practices across the globe and align the process accordingly per industry best practices…,
While option 2 is the best one to do for all the business process, often we don’t do a benchmarking excercise... for various reasons (time, cost, schedule slip etc...) and the learning from this incidence reinforced to stick to the fundamentals principles of quality… go by the rule book and follow the framework.
Quite often we get into this kind of situations where you don’t know the right process or the wrong process… end of the day we need to deliver the results to our customer… that’s what the customer is looking for… if a quick fix works … go ahead and put the fix in place and then on a long run mature the process and make it more capable.
All that I learnt is …   “That what's right isn't always popular... and what's popular isn't always right."

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Never Give Up… Execution tests your Excellence…!

This weekend I was talking to my mentor and discussing about my plans, I had committed to my manager for a deadline and am left with a very few days, I’m not sure if I will meet my deadline. While she shared with me a few strategies on what can be done to meet the schedule, how do we motivate people who roll up to us to execute the plans and so on… as usual ended the conversation with another beautiful story which I am blogging now to share benefits with you all that I derived from this story.
She told there are three insects that inspires her every time in a touch situation, especially when we may have to start things all over from scratch… She liked the bees because if a bear breaks their nest and steals their honey, they keep on building their honeycombs, making more honey. And she liked the ants because if the same bear destroys their nest, they also immediately start building their nest anew, working together for a common goal. And the spiders she liked because if their webs are destroyed, they start repairing the damage right away - or building a whole new, better one.
She said the lesson she had learned from these little insects was that the world may surprise us sometimes by destroying even our most carefully built plans, but if we choose to be ready to start all over again no matter what, eventually we shall achieve great results. We shall just have to start again, one step at a time.
Remember… just because you did not finish does not mean you will not finish at all.

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Sit awhile and think

The very best of the plans get delayed due to some event that was never expected while executing the strategy. Quite often we almost stop thinking and looking ways to crash the time line or do something to speed up the critical path etc…
I remember this story which my mentor once shared with me while walking me thru one of the biggest lessons in handling stress while execution… and am now updating the same on this blog…
An old farmer had plowed around a large rock in one of his fields for years. He had broken several plowshares and a cultivator on it and had grown rather morbid about the rock.
After breaking another plowshare one day, and remembering all the trouble the rock had caused him through the years, he finally decided to do something about it.
When he put the crowbar under the rock, he was surprised to discover that it was only about six inches thick and that he could break it up easily with a sledgehammer. As he was carting the pieces away he had to smile, remembering all the trouble that the rock had caused him over the years and how easy it would have been to get rid of it sooner.”
Things to learn from this story and remember while we are executing our projects…
1.    No matter how strong you have planned you will surely meet obstacles (Unknown Open Issues)
2.    Don’t follow the orthodox principle of time management of meeting the deadlines by crashing or focusing on critical path instead take a step back and look at the hurdle and see how to resolve it.
3.    While you do a resource planning always have one dedicated person in your team to wear a black hat and do a FMEA (Failure mode effective analysis) for every item on the work breakdown structure
4.    Last but not the least… if something goes wrong don’t get frustrated because of the criticism or conflicts and look for a quick fix (Just like in the above story where the farmer kept replacing the plowshares and assumed that there will be a huge rock and did not try to dig the ground to see how big the rock is)
5.    Remember you are the project leader and you have a lot of arms in your artillery to resolve all issues you are facing… and my experience says there is nothing like a time tested solution that works always… go ahead and explore any unorthodox way of tackling the issue at hand and will surely be successful
Execution is an art… a science… and a moment of truth… history proves that all good stories of execution are written only after one has done it successfully … no one knows if he / she will be able to execute and be 100% successful unless its completed.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

A Mouthful of Mind

It’s been a decade long experience working at different levels and in all these years no matter what level in the organization I stand it’s all about Execution…. Execution… Execution and Execution.
The recent stock market crash made me relook at the fundamentals of the companies whose stock price fell from the tops and recovered with the same pace but many a companies did not recovered even a 25% from the bottom.
RAM CHARAN and GEOFFREY COLVIN studied over a 40 different companies on the fortune 500 list which failed to deliver and came up with a conclusion that it all because of failure in Execution, one of the top the reason they pointed that leads to failure in execution is people problems. Ram writes in his book that the CEO’s just weren’t worrying enough about the right things:  execution, decisiveness, follow-through, delivering on commitments and so on… but my experience tells something beyond this.
I have met a lot of people at various levels, being in a consulting role gives you an opportunity to talk to a lot of people and based on what I discovered in the past decade listening and talking to a lot leaders thought of writing this blog and named it a “Mouthful of Mind”
The very important role of a leader is to communicate their vision, this does not mean that a Leader should be talkative… how often we fail to clearly communicate what is in our mind, believe me this is the toughest things to do. You can try this in your team, just walk up to your leader and ask him/her to explain his vision and how he plans it to achieve in the next three years. You will be surprised many of them will fail to explain the vision to you… it’s not that they don’t know but finding the right words to communicate is the vision is what bothers them… and some of the folks you too would have talked to will tell you a few jargons in a English statement which is less than two sentences and call it their vision… go back and ask to decipher the jargons and you will face a real tough time to understand what the leader wants to communicate.
Let me share what I learnt, I call this “SO WHAT PRINCIPLE” , this is a power mantra for execution excellence, remember execution required you to be prepared to do things at a ground zero level and so every time you face a question or a task or problem statement or a business case ask yourself or the one who is tell you SO WHAT…
Let’s take a day to day example that happens in all our homes… Your wife complains that the maid comes late …. ask her “SO WHAT” … then she will tell you the impact and then again ask her “SO WHAT” … she will tell you the pros and cons and how it effects … ask “SO WHAT” again… if she is in a good mood she will enumerate to you various circumstances and finally tell you the biggest problem or the very big Impact … here is the point … execution excellence is achieved by focusing on the biggest impact but how often we get caught as a so called leader in killing a lot of time focusing on trivial issues,
The bottom line is unless you can talk your mind out very clearly you will not be able to get the work done… my first mantra in execution excellence is “A Mouthful of Mind”…