The Young & their interests We put ‘The Young’ as a customer category and spelled out what interests them. When time came to identify the industry/sector, we found that we had to scratch our heads a bit. This is significant. KEY POINT – The boundaries between industries and sectors are disappearing or getting blurred. Certain industries or product/service categories are fighting for survival itself examples – music industry, mobile service providers, movie halls, publishing industry, retail shops. This is because of disruption caused by technology. Disruption – Examples Netflix/ rentals ; Internet movies/ theatre screenings ; Uber/ rental cars & ownership itself ; Amazon/book stores ; itunes/Spotify / Rhythm house ; Kindle/ Printed books; Mobile apps/ television viewing ; Online booking/ travel agencies ; Paytm/ card-swiping. Bottomline is that a company can move into an entirely different product line or service category. is the most famous example. If watching television via app catches on, ‘television’ as a product category gets wiped out. Hotels will struggle big time if one house in every street decides to become an Air B&B partner. E-commerce…
How to be an Employee : Peter Drucker’s classic career advice
Being an employee is an art, says Drucker. And he says getting fired from your first job may be a good thing! Isn’t that interesting? Peter Drucker wrote on this topic almost forty years back. The Basic Skill He starts off by asking, ” What can you learn that will help you in being an employee?” The answer, unsurprisingly, is communication. Drucker calls it a basic skill which very few students bother to learn. This one basic skill is the ability to organize and express ideas in writing and in speaking. For Drucker, an early start is beneficial. ” The foundations for skill in expression have to be laid early : an interest in and an ear for language; experience in organizing ideas and data; in brushing aside the irrelevant; in wedding outward form and inner content into one structure; and above all, the habit of verbal expression. If you do not lay these foundations during your school years, you may never have an opportunity again. You should take courses in the writing of poetry and the writing of short stories. Most…
Followers leading the way
Followers can now force the establishment to back down. Liverpool football club decided to jack up the highest stadium ticket prices for next season. In a synchronized move, 10,000 fans exited the ground during a premier league match featuring liverpool. The message went out loud and clear. The club owners scrapped their plan. The Energy & Resources Institute ( TERI) in India decided to elevate R.K.Pachauri to the newly created post of executive vice-chariman. Mr. Pachauri, a feted environmentalist, had earlier been accused of sexual harrasment and a case was on. In a co-ordinated move, 20 students wrote to the Vice-Chancellor and said they would not accept their convocation degrees from a person involved in a sexual harrasment case. Pachauri was on a long leave before due to this case. He decided to not attend the convocation and is reportedly going on leave again. Why he was elevated inspite of his situation defies understanding. Facebook decided to make use of its overwhelming captive followership among Indian citizens and lobbied hard for Indian followers to support its Freebasics initiative. Amazon has…
Donald Trump : Using absurdity as the trump-card
It is very interesting to note a change in perception. When Donald Trump declared his presidential ambitions, it did not surprise anybody. Trump has a boisterous and headline-grabbing reputation. He also has loads of money. The political establishment braced itself for a Trump cameo. They felt Trump would create a splash, act as the curtain-raiser for the presidential election season and bow out of the race. After all, Trump is an outsider with no experience in politics. He has a me-centred approach that politicians need to hide. If you listen to Trump speak, you can make out that far from hiding it, he flaunts the me-centred approach. Trump goes for broke and is a deeply divisive, polarizing and incendiary figure. And yet, there he is, very much closer to the republican nomination. And now, everybody is thinking, how can he still be around. This, after every possible outrageous action that would have buried another presidential hopeful. Even if he doesn’t win from here on, his progress so far merits serious introspection. How has Trump reached so far? In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.…
Living with your work-identity
In a play being staged in Italy, the actor was hooded and being hanged. Something went terribly wrong and he was being strangulated for real. There was a medical practitioner in the audience who noticed his bodily struggle and rushed in. The actor died in the hospital later on. Without the medical practitioner, he would have died on the stage itself. This got me thinking about our work identity – to what extent is it a part of our social life. For doctors, there is almost no social life independent of their work identity. Everywhere they go, they stay doctors. Once upon a time, they were invited to mark themselves as doctors on rail ticket requisition slips. This is very handy in times of a medical emergency on board the train; or a flight for that matter. Doctors might be on a honeymoon, but their Hippocratic oath will take precedence over their wedding vows if somebody needs immediate medical attention. Such is the nature of their work. On the opposite end of the spectrum is an intelligence agent, more commonly understood…
A green office lawn gives me the blues
“Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.” – Jonathan Swift, Gullivers travels As I walked past the lush green office lawn, I felt nothing. Here was this pristine, manicured and lush carpet of grass. So well maintained. Why did I not delight in the beauty of the whole thing? I soon realized. The sameness of it all put me off. All offices that have the luxury of surrounding space have a green lawn. A majority keep it completely off limits to maintain the picturepostcard look. What does it convey? What does it instill? Just across the lawn behind the glass facade are people being asked to deliver on disruptive innovation. As they sit across their desks or move towards the window, they see a patch of green being kept the same. It is a hallowed piece of turf – sacred, not to be trampled…
Becoming better at leadership development
In a previous post , we explored why organizations do not do well in leadership development. The sum total of the argument is as follows : The very context that is created for leadership development harms the effort. Five aspects of this context are 1)Predictable hierarchy 2) Internal competition 3) Sure wins 4) Hi-po retention, and 5) Organization as an ossifying shell. A predictable hierarchy poorly correlates with the work-positions where success is being achieved. Internal competition for the race to the top is further preventing authentic collaboration. Sure wins are scripted to reinforce leadership development as a self-fulfilling prophecy. These sure-wins discourage real risk-taking. The result is that high performers ( Hi-po) are retained in a manner that does not result in cutting-edge self-development. All this while, the organization serves as the protective shell against external impact. The leaders-to-be stagnate under this shell. What can be done? Leadership development efforts need to be structured for 1) risking failure, especially on the outside. 2) receiving every stage, ongoing feedback from an external environment. We begin with the organization. 1) Stop being a protective shell and push…
Why organizations underachieve in leadership development
The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same – Colin R. Davis A recent report pointed how India Inc. spends so much on leadership development and succession planning, and still ends up importing CEOs from the outside. This is especially true of the technology sector. A lot of money and resources are going down the drain. Why does this happen? My assertion is this : The very context that organizations create for leadership development within their walls is dragging them down. Leadership development efforts are structured for 1) ensuring self-contained internal success. 2) escaping every stage, ongoing feedback from an external environment. And this creates a spiral of inconsistencies that feed off each other and jeopardise leadership development. We will examine five inconsistencies that flow from how leadership development efforts are structured for ensuring success and escaping feedback from an external environment. 1) A Predictable hierarchy that has no bearing on unpredictable success. Leadership development requires a set hierarchy, a ladder with clear rungs visible to everybody from the bottom up. People need to see how they are going to…
Beautiful Movie Scenes – The Miracle Worker
Anne can see what Helen cannot see. That is no surprise. Helen was left both deaf and blind by an illness when she was a nineteen month baby. Anne can also see what Helen’s sighted parents can’t see- they are dooming her to a life of forbidding darkness; the darkness of not being able to express anything because she cannot make the simple but indispensable connection between a word and what it stands for. Even if Helen has wool in her hand and you spell wool with fingers, there is this primordial understanding needed of the word meaning the object. Without this understanding, absolutely nothing is possible. Of course, achieving this is too ambitious a plan for Helen’s parents to give it any importance. For them, it is impossible to make Helen learn so that she can communicate. After all,”It’s less trouble to feel sorry for her than it is to teach her anything better.”And that is something Anne cannot accept at all. Anne doesn’t hold back in words or actions.As she would say to Helen’s parents later,”I don’t think Helen’s greatest…
The Pathankot terrorist attacks – learning points
The January 2016 terrorist attacks at the Pathankot airforce base offer many thought-provoking points, especially by melding two perspectives , namely that of an organizational analyst & a strategic analyst. Defining Success How does one define success? If damaging precious military hardware and inflicting heavy casualties was their definition of success, do we count it as our success if we thwart this specific plan? The underlying question is, do we let terrorists and their masterminds decide the name of the game? Or do we flesh out a different definition of success? This question has larger implications. An impactful terrorist attack is used by terror sponsors to radicalize and recruit people to their cause. Every plan to counter such an attack must seek to nip such a possibility in the bud. We can create such a plan only if we have a strategic definition of success, in addition to the tactical one being used in foiling the specific terror attack. When you define success in strategic terms, you think about how you can bolster capability for the long-term. You think about how…