Wired to be Weird?

Journey of you and me

1. Human mind is fresh when born
2. Few days after you are born, the folks around you condition you (smile is an outcome of happiness, boy doesn't cry, so do not cry, a girl should not do this)
3. Because of extreme conditioning, you build your faith
4. You associate yourself with others of similar faith (things are fine till this)
5. You tend to believe that the person who you associated with is "good" because of what you experience with him (which is ok, but things start to go bad). Instead of you liking a quality or a task, you tend to like that person
6. Assume that the person exhibit some unusual behavior
7. Since you like that person, you are actually discounting the unusual behavior (which is not good) and if you like that person to extreme, you actually justify his behavior

And therefore - 

1. We are weird and as the result, we regress
2. We regress and feel bad, understand our hardware (brain - how it is wired) and try to change our software (thinking/awareness). We grow (a nice possibility)

Participation Vs participation

There are at least two meanings for Participation and it is most often misunderstood (again, most of the times at work)

Participation - Participate in decision making, take part in making something better and be part of some effort, take part in the learning process and try to make some meaningful contribution.

Participation - Claim ownership and be part of the results.

When we see more "Participation " than "Participation", then it is definite time to be vocal/bold. If you do not sow a seed or if you don't water/protect the plant, don't expect a fruit.

Workplace without Managers to Manage People

Have you thought about this - the machines do not have managers. Let us take a mechanical machine with moving parts. When there is a friction between moving parts, they just make a noise. The mechanic applies some grease between the moving parts and the noise goes away. The parts of the machine manage themselves and they make sound due to "wear and tear". (in this analogy, let us not treat this friction as conflict. think that the noise due wear and tear as natural phenomenon). Are we moving towards such a style of management - the management of working without supervision.

The world is moving towards self managed people. We have seen people especially seniors making hell a lot of noise about young generation (or Gen Y) in a hi-fi and not-so-easy-to-understand English. Well, the YOUNGistan is moving towards the realm of "self managed" and "self correcting" management. It is not only because they are highly intelligent than the previous generation and abundance of information being available to them but also due to the fact that they are brought up in a time frame of rapid changes. They adopt to the changes reasonably well (than the previous generation) and embrace it quite well.

Let me share couple of my experiences. I have been offering some guidance to an aspiring candidate and i would have spent not more than 30 minutes totally. The candidate now is a young IT professional. The most striking thing about her is that she is managing herself in every move and learning every bit through her exposure, a typical Gen Y. 

I have seen quite a few people right out of college, i would say, they are sparks and sharks. I heard a senior person having "30 years" of experience saying that this generation is a spark. That makes me to think that these people have ability to manage themselves quite well without having someone to manage them. In previous generations when there was no technological aid, the managers were teaching. Now, there is technology to do the teaching and these managers have to move up (the value chain). Gen Ys have enough skill to manage themselves and make their manager to be jobless (this will make managers to focus on some core business than mere people management).

Soon the guys are going to say - "rather than meeting over a conflict, let us meet over technology or business that makes sense to everyone". This generation and generations to come is going to put us in the orbit of "self managed" and "self correcting" style of management.

Isn't this what we want? Shouldn't we incubate such thing at workplace? 

My heart says "yes"

What do you think? yes or no or can't say :-)

Immature Managers - Reality With (lot of) Humor

Sometime back, there was new performance and career management initiative rolled out in one of the top IT services company in India. The management thought that they could institutionalize the new initiative during recession and they started implementing it. I would say that was a very bold and bright thinking from the part of the organization. We promote people who bring in results and we generally don't focus on experience or maturity part when promoting people. We promote people rather ruthlessly and without any basics thinking. Finally, we run entire organization to tinker them.

The idea of giving promotion in many organization is to just make most of the people happy in some way. Promotion is one of the ways. There is an ice cream seller goes on selling ice cream in a street. A kid, on seeing the seller, wants to buy one not knowing the effects of ice cream and his last week's viral fever. The mom says, "I will take to movie next Sunday". The kid keeps quiet. But giving promotion ruthlessly will have a serious effect on the growth of the organization. The guys who do not have basic human touch or  demeanor makes his team miserable. Either people run away out of frustration or it leads to mediocrity  through "suck up leadership". This is how a class b guy goes on to create class z guy. One of my friends tweeted this video. This summarize the reality but with good humor. Enjoy this video and think at the end :-)

Indian IT Industry - Be Sensible

I sit in interviews (of course, as an interviewer) and confidently say that we are ruthless. Most of the candidates say that they have multiple offers and they want to decide "finally". I know for sure that only small number of people are looking for learning and environment. Most of them use "money" to decide finally. But their decision was taken even before they started the job hunt which was settling in a company that offered more. A guy earns handsome in a company and he moves to another company with a minimum of 40%. IT industry is ruthless and senseless. The whole spectrum has become insensible, unsustainable, greedy and complacent.

With this rate of salary hike and job hunts, Indian IT industry becomes quite uncompetitive. I m not against hikes or salary revision. But my question is "how much". I don't know if someone deserves 20% hike every year and at the end of few years 40-60% in the form of job switch. So, every five years, the salary gets doubled. While I had a discussion with one of my friend/colleague who is heading a division, he accepts that we are ruthless and sees heavy competition from Russia, Ukraine and Thailand (many countries are at their tipping point). Either they do more getting same money or they do same at a much lower price. This shows that Indian workforce is becoming uncompetitive and unattractive.

So, this is right time for the top guys who are leading the industry to stop being selfish. Else, Indian IT industry, the TCSs, Wipros, Infosyss, HCLs will become history.

"Under the leadership" Disease - Grow up Guys

Leadership is again one of the most misused words. When someone brings results (even because of luck), we often say "under the leadership" we blah, blah, and more blah. Without understanding the meaning of "leadership", it is very pathetic and painful to see people (or so called leaders) assuming things on their own. I have seen and probably you would have seen many people around you who are just egocentric. The more they say "we", they more you find "I" in their words. Their "we" sound like "I". For them, the word "leadership" is pure material that buys them happiness, money, and promotion. What not.

When I see such people I seriously think that they will change next time. But the next time, they blabber much more (and in fact show excellent improvement in blabbering) about "under the leadership" formula. They fail to understand about leadership. Leadership is about passion, leadership does not know title, leadership does not see who sits in front of you, leadership is about making your people as heroes, leadership is about following when your followers are capable to lead, leadership is about integrity, leadership is about keeping up the words, leadership is about keeping up the time, leadership is about remembering your people when you are about to sleep (every day or forever), leadership is about empowerment, leadership is about listening, leadership is about being charismatic, leadership is about delivering, leadership is about working hard, leadership is about being accountable, leadership is about courage, leadership is about empathy, leadership is about coaching, leadership is about accepting others as they are, leadership is about silence, leadership is about big picture, leadership is minute detail. But surely leadership is not the commodity that you can sell.

Come on guys, grow up. Dont sell leadership for your personal mileage. The world is moving fast towards leadership innovation.

Distributive Leadership – Leadership rediscovered

Many of the modern day management concepts, tools and techniques have been discovered more than a decade before. The concepts primarily revolve around increasing the shareholders’ value, increasing the productivity of the employees and more or less everything drill down to revenues, net margin and profits. All the companies have strategies to reach their goals and achieve it quite fairly. Though, the ultimate reason for doing is business is to get material prosperity, however, it may not be worthwhile to think everything in terms of business/materials.

If your organizations or business unit is quite big, due to its size, the number of decisions made on an each given is enormous. If your organization is ultra big, obviously the number of decisions made in a year may not be infinity but may be close to that. The quality or quantity of business you do depends much on your strategy that you set for your people and decisions your people take on day-to-day basis. When your organization takes those decisions in huge numbers and the outcomes certainly shape the future of your company.

Few of the leaders and management teams have understood this and are trying to improve the decision making capabilities of their people. Few more companies are merely copying the good ones, doing something without knowing what they are doing. Is it enough if you give people the mantra of decision making? Is that sufficient to “make your company a truly world class”.

From my perspective, any organization is world class if it satisfies only one condition. If the organization has the ability to connect with its people by putting forth a vision and if the employees connect with the company through its vision, and if the vision connects the employee and its customer, it is truly world class. When the employee connects with the vision, whatever decisions they take automatically boosts the bottom line. When so many employees get excited by a mantra, there will be an absolute resonance and believe me, you will not have any competition and your people will make you truly a “blue ocean” company.

In my definition, the distributive leadership is the ability to bring a resonance in your company’s decision making process and it appears to others that the decisions are taken by its CEO.