Leadership 101 - Leaders Aren't Faint Hearted

Mistake make the man perfect. Not only it makes us perfect, it also makes us strong and gives us opportunity to test our integrity. It was two months after I assumed lead, I made a miserable and bloody mistake. But I was able to sail through with much ease simply because I accepted that it was my mistake (I made others 0% accountable). Since I openly and unconditionally accepted my mistake, my natural response was fierce. When you make a mistake there are two options

1. Bury that mistake thinking that no one sees and be passive as if nothing has happened. When you do this the possibility of you learning something is nil. And you will ditch not only yourself but also the people you trusted you. The trust between you and the stakeholders will decrease and ultimately seize.
2. Stand up like a kinder garden kid with a lot of enthusiasm and accept that "I am the culprit" and own it 200% and make a damn honesty effort for a steeper recovery or probably a vertical recovery. Your stakeholders will be proud of you. They will trust you more and finally they will be loyal to you. That is how you build relationships.

Choose the second one because it takes a great deal to stand up when you are in tight corners.

Leaders Aren't faint hearted.

Two more blogs

It is great feeling to share one's learning in the form of presentation, training, discussion and writing. Now, I have started two more blogs to document my learning, express my thoughts and validate it and give some food for thought for you. Yesterday, I registered as PMI member and this means that I will be taking up PMP in near future. That is going to be a steep learning curve needing discipline. I have a started a blog on Project Management and for the next few months I will be posting on PMP and occasionally on other aspects of Project Management. The blog address is http://tinythoughts.grabyourfreedom.net

Many of us will be willing to earn money and multiply it taking some risks by investing in stock markets directly or indirectly. I primarily started to play with stocks not to earn money (but I dont know why I started to play). After playing for a while, I made tiny losses and huge losses before making small profits. But overall, the learning was great and it taught me how to shield oneself from others emotions. Believe me, stock market is a place with low emotional intelligence and if you can continue to make profits consistently, you are really maturing. So, I am planning to do research on stocks/technical analysis/reading charts. I will be posting few to start with at http://finance.grabyourfreedom.net

Two more blogs to our portfolio

Tiny Thoughts
Value Investing

Leadership 101 - Respect Your Juniors Twice You Respect Your Seniors

It was a gathering. A senior executive was standing in a podium and crowd were following the usual protocol - putting the mobile phones on mute. Another scenario. It was a meeting, the same senior guy was talking to his juniors and all the folks are listening. Suddenly, the phone rings and the guy (one of the juniors) just asks the permission to speak (as a courtesy). The same junior guy speaks to his teammate (who is junior to him) and picks up the phone without showing any courtesy.

For God sake suck up your senior but at the same time do not ditch your juniors. Show them courtesy and show them they are worth showing that courtesy. It makes them happier, it provides enough motivation to be your ambassadors, they become the sales guy of your idea and they adore you to pieces and all of a sudden you become their role models. Two (rather three) things that are important

1. Show authentic courtesy
2. Respect your juniors twice you respect your seniors

This will redefine the trust between you and your juniors. This is one of the things I learned during my journey in pursuit of leadership.

Leadership 101 - Goodness Comes Through You (not from you)

I recently read somewhere, "Employers do not pay employees, they are just mediators, it is customers who pay". This can very well be applied to leaders leading a team. All bosses and particularly if you are someone's boss need to remember that you are not giving prosperity and growth. You subordinates earn it and the growth/blah-blah comes through you and not from you. This is true. Since this is truth, it needed not be twisted or you need more examples. The truth is so simple and straight forward.

But the moment when you feel that you are the giver and everything originates from you, no one can stop your downfall and the state of your team will be pathetic. You may not crush your team initially but slowly you will. To be a leader, you need to understand your boundaries and one such boundary is "knowing that all goodness come through you and not from you". This is first thing I learned when I started my role as a leader two years back. Thanks to Zig Ziglar.

You happen to be there, you do nothing more than that. Your duty is to add value and add more value to your team.

Be a follower, then a leader is a possibility

Many of us (I should say most of us) are both leader and follower in everyday life - may it be at work or personal life. At work, we are boss and subordinate to someone and in personal life same is the case. So, we cannot shy away either from leadership or being follower. In order to be at best in both leadership and follower role, we need to understand the factor that connects both leader and follower.

A bad follower cannot be a good leader. Let us say it again - A bad follower cannot be a good leader but can be a good manager. The leader and follower relationship is two way lane. First, the leader should be highly self motivated, highly intellect and give respect to his follower. When a follower has such leader, first he respects his leader, then loves him and finally draws inspiration from his leader. From respect to drawing inspiration is a gradual, study and time consuming process. When the follower reaches a point, then the follower becomes a leader. A follower needs to spend at least one cycle of respecting his leader, loves his leader and having him as a source of inspiration to become a leader.

So, the leadership starts at being a faithful, honest and great follower.

Leadership 101 - Good things should end to spawn better things

It has a three successful association and for the past three years has been such a learning - technical, leadership and emotional intelligence. The three years long relationship with my client comes to end. We have completed the mission quite successfully and our openness in learning gave us successes throughout the journey. It is good to complete a project but it is very painful to miss people. But life just goes on and it will.

I would like to split my tenure into three - first half with technical challenges, next six months with leadership challenges and the final part emotional intelligence challenges. Overall, the past three years taught me - need for patience, walk the talk, building high performance teams and kindling the servant in you. But now, it is time to say goodbye to all the folks who helped me to sail through this journey with a lot of learning. Come on guys, our time is over. Let us party.

In the next few posts, I will be writing on my experiences which shaped my thinking, elevated my performance and kindled my interests towards management more specifically in learning strategy.

Get the basics right - Fix the root cause, not symptoms

Some say, "We are following world class processes to deliver software with quality and in time". Is it the processes that deliver software? Isn't it people? When you want to deliver great software, you got to have great people or at bare minimum you should make great people. Because any great things can be delivered by great people. Mediocre people just deliver mediocre stuffs. Mediocre people with world class processes is just waste of time, false baptism and false hope.

Great people do not need processes, because they know how to do it but they may take different approach - the alternate approach is not usually mediocre, they are just different but equally efficient and effective. If you want organizational transformation, processes won't help you, tools won't help you. You got to make employees great by transforming them. The other methods sucks and usually fails. If you really want to build a world class teams, focus on right things, get your priorities right and do it always - transform people.

Don't drive focussing too much on rear mirror

Just in case, if you are successful in the past, you do not need to necessarily be successful in the future. The future may be very different. Would you ever drive only by seeing rear mirrors? Rear mirror just helps you to keep you checked. The present and the past successes are just like seeing through rear mirrors. It is something like sugar written on a paper and utmost it breeds complacency. But seeing through the future is different ball game and exciting too.

There are two ways that one can do to learn how to pierce through the future. Go through some websites and go through some presentations of people, memorize few words to appear that you are educated. Then you address a gathering rather blabber something. This one particularly works well when you have authority and up in the hierarchy. Many folks are made to sit like a ducks and they hear you duck quacking - quack, quack, quack. Irrespective of the time slots given to you, you just quack. The second way and often least preferred route is to make whole heart attempt to learn seeing through the future from the scratch. The second method is worth taking and equally rewarding.

When it comes to a vision, it has to so compelling and the strategy built has to be forward looking and motivate people to give their full. Don't blow the old trumpets which never worked, people are clever sometimes to recollect your tune as they heard it many times. No vision/strategies can be so compelling than creating a future. So, don't drive people to look backward but just encourage them to look forward because the past is irrelevant.

Competing for the future - Chapter 1

It has been quite a while after I started to read "Competing for the future" by Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad. I have read through the first chapter twice and planning to read few more times before moving on further. The first chapter just sets the context of whole of the book and brings out the importance of reinventing the industry by regenerating core strategies moving beyond restructuring and reengineering. The first chapter emphasizes the very need of organization transformation in the light of industry transformation against organizational transformation to just catch up with the competitors. The former is blue ocean and the latter is read ocean. The first chapter gives a lot of examples of companies like IBM, Sears, Xerox on why they failed and HP, Wal-mart on why they were successful. I certainly feel that I have invested in a good book to improve by business knowledge. More posts to come on other chapters.

Work on Plus Factor - 3 + 3 = 6

When we were kid, we were fine, we were able to understand and get true learning. We learned that three plus three makes six ( 3 + 3 = 6). We were so curious on "plus". Whenever a simple math was given to us, we were so excited to solve the math. We were focused on the method rather than the result. The method, when properly thought out and done, it leads to proper results. We were so much immersed in the true learning. But as we grow, we tend to forget the "plus" factor - the experience, excitement and thinking. This is because of that we are overly focused on the results leading to fear or greed.

We need to go back to elementary school to relearn the importance of "plus" factor - the experience, excitement, thinking and joy out of true learning.

Reskill or be ready to be irrelevant

People used to say that "Change is Permanent". But when you closely watch the change, we will understand that change is not permanent. Let us consider the penetration of technology in our everyday life. Few decades before the penetration of technology was slow and not that rapid. But today, we have so many new markets, so many new products and people often surprised by the technological change. By the time people get accustomed with one technology, it becomes irrelevant and people feel that they are left behind. So, in today's fast paced technological life, we cannot say "no" adapting to change as we may need to completely renounce technology (which no one is ready). Even the change changes rapidly with more acceleration than the previous day.

The same is the case with an organization because the organizations are also built on top of technology and it cannot isolate itself from outside world. If the organizations want to leverage the maximum from the change, it is highly essential that the organization goes for reskilling everyday. The individual need to forget the technology/concepts that became irrelevant and should start learning new things that are widely adopted.

The only way that the organization can be competitive is by reskilling its employees. So, reskill, reskill, reskill.

Leading a change - My Views

There was a fire breakout in a community and all the people living in the community work hard with the firemen to put off the fire. The fire extinguish operation went on for almost 10 hours and finally all were allowed to get into their homes. The community felt that such fire accidents were painful and now they were able to manage with fire since it happened for fifth time in a row. Now it had become a growing problem. The community also had an association and they planned to meet on Sunday to talk about the recent fire accident and put an end to such accidents by adapting fire prevention measures. Sunday came, they met and installed fire prevention funds diverting association funds and collecting additional money from each home owners.

If you look at this case, this is a change and on a contrary to the popular belief - the people will be against the change, the co-operation was tremendous. The people were willing to co-operate and more inviting to the change. How people co-operated? It is because of one thing that connect the change and the people who adapts to the change which is permanently putting off the fire. They were happy that they no longer need to spend sleepless and painful nights/days with dreadful fire. The one thing - the very purpose of the change has to be powerful and the other things like communication, branding, piloting, feedback comes next (but certainly important).

If you are leading a change, if you can find a single idea that interconnects people and connect people with the change, the change will be successful. Else, it suffers and digs it own grave.

Stop being a Bozo, be Sensible

The world revolves around me and how can it revolve around the sun. I am the leader, possibly because I am more experienced (probably few more days) than you and you got to think as I expect you think, I will give a dot and you have the freedom to stand and if you are intelligent to play within the dot and most important thing is that you have to update me, when you do anything. Welcome to the world of old generation. This concept of leadership is old, probably only few hundred years when we lived with animals. We say arsenic is silent killer, but this is sick leadership and dreadful than arsenic. It kills people shaking their self-confidence, spoiling their creativity. It helps to create herds not organization.

I think, "sick leadership" should have been a conspiracy against an organization. It is clearly a trend and starts with an idiot who has more power and end up misusing his power. While he misuses his/her power, some class B sees it and there comes the perfect understanding. This class B again creates many class B when Class B reaches a threshold gives way to Class C. The sick leadership will appear to give great results but it just gives wrong hopes. The term follower has often misunderstood. The follower has a different meaning than a slave and a happy slave can never be a follower. The follower connects with leader for a common and noble purpose. The leader has a different meaning than bozo.

Stopping being a Bozo, be sensible.

What leader got to do - Identify and Delegate

If you are idle chick, you will served as soup - you will be chicken soup for someone's dinner. As more Gen Ys are supposed to join as workforce, it is very important that a leader understands the typical attributes of Gen Ys. There is a intelligent Gen Y in my team. He uses his mobile and says that I will send status report in SMS. I can hardly understand what he types and I am totally incompetent before his SMS English. After sending SMS, he justs laughs at me. But he completes his job well and inspires others with his workmanship.

It is not only life style that is different, the apporach towards work changes between Gen X and Gen Y. All intelligent and focussed Gen Ys aspire to become project managers within 5 years and the important point is that those people are willing to stretch. They look work as place to learn, they want their managers to be their mentors. In this scenario, one needs to exercise atmost care in spoting the talent and grooming it. This is unusually difficult because they expect to grow faster. For the modern day manager and particularly Gen X managers, it is going to difficult to keep up the pace with Gen Y's expectations. One needs to spot the talent and wait no time to delegate it to next level. Delegation has been there in dictionary and management books for a very long time but it is the time to put that into practice. Else, the leaders job will be difficult in handling Gen Ys.

The leader's job is to identify talent, delegate work and move on to take up something big. This has to be a never ending loop :-).

Which Skill to Unlearn?

You call it moving out of comfort zone or unlearning or new responsibilities, whatever you call it, do it in action. Moving out of comfort zone remembers me of one of the rituals done in Hindu mythology. The people who seek enlightenment (often elderly people) used to go on pilgrimage to various parts of India. The places and temples various based on customs, culture and so many other factors. But generally people never miss certain places like Kasi, Rameswaram. As a mark of renunciation, the people generally leave something (some food or vegetable) at Kasi in the river Ganges and they should never consume the food in their lifetime thereafter. My grandmother also visited there and left a vegetable which liked the most. All my relatives were asking her why did she leave that because she cannot eat that vegetable in her lifetime. She said, she had enough of it and this is right time to renounce. Those words make sense to me now.

As a human being, we are quite comfortable in doing something. By doing that "comfortable thing" we never get something new. When you do not do something new, you will not get something new. The first thing one got to do is unlearn the skills that we are overly confident and take up something which is knee trembling. If you feel that learning will uplift you, unlearning will super-lift you. It is imperative that we, the human being should master the art of unlearning to realize our potential. Other may call it a risk, but for us it is way of life. The human brain should always be stretched for simple reason to show that you have brain and have been using it constantly :-)

Being Irrelevant - State of Outsourcing

Right from Globalization and the day when outsourcing came to mainstream in the name of software exports, Indian IT industry has been revolving around a single business model. I give you "1000000" hours and you give X dollars. To start with, the business model of this kind may be apt and for a matured industry and some may comment the industry has saturated, it may be unhealthy. I would say the industry has not saturated but the business model has saturated. There are two questions that needs to be answered

1. How will the buyer of the service know that the service provider has in fact worked for X hours? Is there a mechanism? While one may argue that both the buyer and provider will have "mutual trust", but is "trust" alone sufficient? If you are a much capable service provider how are you going to show that you are in fact delivering more in X hours? How is it reflected in your revenue?

2. It is pretty reasonable to ask for warranty when you buy electronic gadget of $20 (or even less). In most of the cases, it comes with one year warranty. This means that when you go to shopping mall and buy something, you expect that it will work well at least for a year without you requiring to pay additional cost. But when you are spending huge dollars in outsourcing, don't you need to push some risk to service provider.

With the current model, the software is never seen as product but software development activities are seen as service. The buyers need to shift their focus from buying service to buying product and this can only happen with a different business model. With the help of new business model, the buyers will be able to push some risk to the providers and at the same time the providers will be able to get increased compensation for their products. This also gives flexibility to buyers as they can focus on multiple products and geographies.

If you look other industry, for example, energy industry, the companies have already started to think about charging customers based on the amount of output that is produced not on amount of input used. This is the right time for us (Indian IT Industry) to get away from old business model and take up something which shows signs of maturity.

Google Chrome - Ambitious Project

Few days back Google announced a new operating system and the announcement did not stir any reactions from Microsoft. Google is trying to push SaaS as next generation de-facto technology and today it is trying to build tools to wrap around which can be later used to push the technology further to its advantage. On the other hand it seems like Microsoft (and most of the other companies) lost their fuel to do something for next generation. I believe Microsoft will never come out of outdating technology. Its strategy will be revolving around its core products MS Windows, Office and other similar products. But Google is trying to change the field by taking a giant leap on how computing and data is stored.

We are already witnessing trends of moving towards cloud and SaaS. I believe Google's intention and strategy is not to outsmart Microsoft but to take computing to next level. Another advantage to Google is that it is going to release Chrome as open source which may eat up Windows marketshare over a period of time as more and more applications made available to work on Google Chrome. Rather than selling applications, Google business model would be selling services. Let us hold the breath until later half of next year to get the feel of Google Chrome.

India and China - Propellant of Global Economy

The dream of India to become global economy propellant may soon come true. India, together with other developing economies in the region especially China, may drive the growth of global economy. As the time passes on, these developing economies are becoming more relevant to propel prosperity. This month's Harvard Business Review comes with a sweet news and alarms the global organizations to watch out for top ten trends - India and China being one among them.

While the consumer spending plummeting all over the world, post recovery, the consumer spending in India and China will be heading higher. US continue to be in the top followed by China at the second position. European countries will occupy the third position and fourth place by Japan. India will be the fifth country. China, India and Japan (Asian countries) put together will have consumers who are ready to buy products. What does it mean to us? It means that Asian countries will have new level of influence and responsibility to propel global economy. All the developed nations will be willing to do business with Asian countries and we will see "protectionism" will be underplayed and we will again step into controlled liberalization. We are going to see more liberal voices and policies soon.

Necessity to "Think" and "Think" long

Amidst global economic recession, there are many areas that undergo transformation. People started to think and the thinking is response to shock due to recession. People are thinking about spending and they are going small - small apartment and small pizza. While the lower in consumer spending may impose a threat, I believe "the small pizza" is going to be healthy over a longer term. As long as the small pizza gives me nutrients and satisfaction, it is always good. The next thing that organizations should work out is how to survive and do business in the changing business environment. The companies should rethink, be attuned to changing environment and customer spending patterns. Being attuned to changing environment is more relevant now as the current change is rapid and huge. I remember reading in one of the articles that with the current environment even "the change is not permanent". The change is changing rapidly fast.

When you think in short term and that too for a low paced change, the strategy will not be sufficient even for few years. So, it is absolutely essential for organizations to have holistic view of uncertain environments such as climate change, government policies, economic growth, globalization with protectionism, rising prices, the roles of developing economies and many more factors. With the whole a lot of uncertainty, we, the human beings, either renounce modern life and go back to jungle or "think" properly and "think" keeping centuries in mind. Think to work with nature and not against it for simple reason that nature creates man and man is part of the nature. Nature knows how to "check and mate" something when it goes beyond a point (learning from the first chapter of GST by Gerald M. Weinberg)

Example of thinking long term. I m currently reading "An Introduction to General System Thinking" by Gerald M. Weinberg. It is so easy to think now about climate change and water depletion. It is impeccable and needs great foresight to think about climate change some 25-30 years back when the book for written. One needs to have great brain and great heart to think like that.

Worldclass Reference Points - Fight with them

Today, my friend Rajkumar and I had to attend another friend's marriage and as usual we talked about something, some mediocre people who always expect that the world should/will revolve around them (sharing our miseries). Neither they speak convincingly nor think thoughtfully. It was utter waste of time and probably be used to chew one's ego. If you make earnest try to drive home a point, I bet you will fail rather miserably. Silence is the language that you should speak.

Next we have talked about two thoughtful people. When Rajkumar talked Gerald M. Weinberg and James Bach, both of us were excited, spoke passionately and striking the thoughts in resonance. When you argue with thinkers either you become a student or become a teacher and there will be solid learning for both (On a contrary, when you have difference of opinion with mediocre people neither you nor the other will have any learning).

Today, my friend Rajkumar taught me an important lesson "Fight with worldclass reference points". Teachers are all around, Worldclass reference points are all around, you got open your eyes to see them. Thank you Raj.

Collaboration is injurious to growth

1. "Whole is more than sum of the parts".
2. Together, we can do great things

and you can find so many decorative statements and words with hidden agenda. Collaboration and Team work have been misunderstood by many people. Let us take the first statement "Whole is more than sum of the parts" with an example. When you have ten people and if all the ten people work as a team, the team is likely to produce better results. Fair statement. When you have ten mediocre people and all of them show mediocrity, won't the result be uber-mediocrity?

Next, we need understand that each one of us are not always foolish and not always intelligent. In every decision, we show enough immaturity before appearing mature and in some cases we never appear mature simply because we never think sufficiently and we hardly go deeper. When someone says that he understood, it really means that he has started to understand.

With a blurred vision and improper thinking, I don't think collaboration will be a useful exercise. Thinking is fundamental. Without thinking, it is like erecting building with foundation. So, collaboration without thinkers and the decisions made by pseudo collaboration are going to be simply waste of time (now you know why politicians make bad decisions :) ). Being able to think, think right with systemic view, understanding the deficiencies in one's thinking are primary ingredients to even think about collaboration. Getting ready to collaborate had to start well before collaboration. "Being able to think" is required condition to get started with collaboration. Collaboration of non-thinkers is injurious. Remember the story of Paramartha Guru and his disciples.

Why companies fail to out-think?

I am running two steps per second and my friend is running at three steps per second. I feel that it should be pretty easier to catch him up in next few seconds and I keep running. I don't focus on the things that I should be doing and I m thinking to beat him. My friend keeps running at his own pace and so do I. After an hour, I find my friend quite a distant apart and no more reachable in two steps. We, the human being, fail to appreciate the importance of daily improvements and we realize the havoc only when the difference is huge. Then, we blame technology, processes, economy, education system, neighbors, society, politicians and everything. When you don't think about future, you cannot have future and in future you will be history.

With this thoughts in mind, I am going to open the book of "Competing for the future" by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad.

How can we give little extra?

While many organizations are working on increasing their employees productivity and ask for little extra, only very few people have the guts to give little extra. They understand the significance of giving - giving little more respect to the teammates, giving little more care that they deserve, giving little more attention to their accomplishments, giving little more thought to their prosperity. All these little extra things when mixed with high volume of authentic willingness, then, leading will be equivalent to parenting and the team will be equivalent to family.

When a leader honestly sign up to work for the elevation of his team, without anyone's knowledge and to everyone's surprise, the team will work for the leader's agenda. But everything starts with little extra things in a specific order - little extra care, little extra attention, little extra feedback, little extra recognition and finally expect the little extra effort. So, you got to give many things to get that little extra effort. But all those little extra things are worth giving.

Before you ask someone, can you work extra, you ask yourself that have you given all those little extra things that you ought to give.

Learned, so what? - Learn to Unlearn

It is almost seven years in Software Industry. When I look back, I made a pretty decent ride learning several new things in my career. Though I feel that I could have done more, it was decent accomplishments. I thought that I was a quick learner but later understood that I learned only what was needed. Anyways, there were no major issues. If there is one lesson, it would be "learning and unlearning".

I feel that the experience is nothing but interrelating ideas and generalizing them, storing them and keeping in memory for easier access, keep expanding this knowledge base and field of application. Once it is stored at a general level, the specifics are no longer needed. You need facts only till you understand or make out ideas/concepts and burning it in your long term memory. Once that is done, you can forget the facts. Only when you understand the facts, the concepts or ideas can be generalized and burnt in the memory. I will go to an extent of saying that this "forgetting" is needed, else, throughout your life you may need to process really a hell a lot of data. This forgetting can be called as "unlearning". So, it is important that you learn and it is much more important that you unlearn it.

Learning and Unlearning makes you a perfect intelligent human being. So, the next time when you are learning, make sure that you unlearn it after sometime :-)