By leading the BJP to a thumping majority in the recent Lok Sabha elections, Narendra Modi & his core team have scripted a success story worth studying. The victory was not unexpected, but its margin invites positive exploration. How did they pull it off? Does this story have something to offer students of leadership & organizations? Let us dive in leaving aside both political affiliations & political grandstanding. People all over the country were deeply discontent with the Congress. But that does not mean electoral victory was a cakewalk. The political scene has too many players of various hues & colours, each owing its emergence to a cause or a support base that lends itself to mobilising power. How could Narendra Modi & his team break through the clutter in such a fractured polity? Four key actions stand out. Sustaining & building upon the Core Foundation – What is the one thing that made it possible for Narendra Modi to take charge within the party & establish primary credibility with voters? Take this one thing away & Modi did not…
Infosys: Making sense of leadership & organizational challenges
When the numbers accumulate & a trend is discernible, we can make a conjecture or two. The current CEO of Infosys, S.D Shibulal has said that at 18.7%, the attrition rate has reached uncomfortable levels. He considers this to be more worrisome than the exit of nine senior executives, quite a few among them being C-suite contenders. Both instances are of course, related. No two ways about it. Why is Infosys facing so many challenges? A significant part of the answer lies in the decision to rotate the top-leadership among all company founders. This is the primary conjecture. Let us trace the journey from then to now. Emotions have a big role to play.We are all emotional beings.The story of Infosys is cherished corporate folklore.It has inspired millions of success stories in India. We rightly revere people like Narayan Murthy for their integrity-bound achievements. Founder-owners make tremendous sacrifices in the cause of their enterprise success. It is their baby. The world invariably respects their commitment to safeguard their baby. Keeping the top-position in the company founders circle was a reflection of…
The Most Powerful Words for Guiding Human Resource Development in Organizations
In the fewest possible words, can we get a guiding principle for developing people in organizations? In my search for something that works, something not necessarily lofty, but nevertheless validated by success, I can think of no better one than the one below. Every organization develops people. It either helps them grow or stunts them. – Peter Drucker The power in this profound observation escapes the casual reader. Make no mistake about it. For those who haven’t yet grasped the significance of these words, there is a new world waiting to be born! These are the most powerful words for any leader in any role to really reflect on, be it CEO, HR Head, L&D Head or a Business head. What makes them so powerful? They illuminate a truth we seldom consider & act upon. Our most over-used cliché is that people are our best asset. We accept that developing people is the key to organizational success. But do we really think that by not helping people grow, we are stunting their growth? To stunt is to permanently impair the ability…
The efficiency-effectiveness motif
When you fit bulbs onto lamp-posts along the vast stretches of an express way, the way to get the job done quick and fast is one after the other. The bulky crane-like contraption of a vehicle lumbers along as if nodding in agreement. Hardly something to think about in this set procedure. Indisputably efficient and alarmingly ineffective. Why so? Read on. The efficiency and effectiveness motif is well-recognized by most in business and social enterprises. Peter Drucker laid it out for us. Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. He then admonishes us by saying “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all ” Effectiveness is the real deal. When the bulbs are fitted in a row, they start with the same shelf-life. They will blow out at more or less the same time, and plunge that patch of road into dangerous darkness for fast-moving traffic. The focus on effectiveness here leads us to the question, “What is the purpose of setting up these lamp-posts? What is the right thing to do in going…
Using Plato’s wisdom to recruit
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. – Plato Is it such a preposterous idea to arrange a game of sport for fresh recruits? Especially in college campuses where there are grounds available. Of course, not. A carefully chosen sport easy for anyone to play, difficult for the solitary star to win all alone, and requiring total team participation at all times. When we play, we cannot but be our true selves. And here for the HR recruiter, the wisdom of another age-old saying is a very good parameter to go by – “And it does not matter whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” And God help the ‘smart’ recruiter who goes about publicizing that! How many companies make the effort to get it right the first time? From the immune system in our body to the immigration counter at the airport, we can learn how critical it is to allow only the positive, healthy entity to get inside. Once they get in, it…
When the employee simply doesn’t get it!
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair A classic instance is company exhortation to the employee to share his know-how. You are touted to be a manager-in-the making, a leader of men, a generous star-performer, a team member to the core and what not. Come the next downturn, the insecure employee traces his vulnerability to his giving ways. And when the lay-off happens, in his mind, he contributed to his own redundancy by sharing his knowledge about the task. He is scarred by the interpretation of his experience. Another instance, a senior executive asks who is willing to take charge of the critical project or assignment. Why does no hand go up? Can they not understand the rich rewards that await success? But, what does the job depend on? The job depends on not taking risks! Companies are dimly aware of how they have set it all up. In a game perceived to be zero-sum, the employee will drag his feet from creating the perfect job…
Traffic woes & Organizational response
Traffic congestion is assuming nightmarish proportions in all big cities. And yet, how many organizations believe it is a crucial part of the ecosystem in which they function? And how many reconfigure how they work in response? Adaptive companies see an opportunity to redesign work – flow, demonstrate faith in the work force by creatively exploring flexible work-practices. Staggered work timings, Work-from-home, Virtual collaboration are just a few. The shift occurs when you look at the challenge in terms of effectiveness rather than mere efficiency. When you are effective, you ask, ‘ What are the right things to do in the face of such traffic woes that dent employee energies by the time they reach the workplace?’ Efficient ones will ask, How can we do the usual right? ‘ The usual means – getting employees to be on time at the designated work hour. What holds leaders & decision-makers back? Familiar reasons – Loss of control & predictability. The Routine is so comforting! And yet, so much is possible if only we are willing to cast aside the routine. It…
Why communication skills training is so much more than just working with individuals?
What is effortless for us to initiate takes concerted effort to do well. Take breathing & sitting. We breathe on autopilot. Hardly think about it. It barely registers how we sit. We slump into perceived comfort which is anything but that. We all know that there is a mindful breathing practise that makes us breathe better among other things. We all know our spinal health depends on a healthy sitting posture. We never get down to doing both unless we suffer some pain. Is communicating any different? We all can talk & hear wilfully; to fill the silence. And lo & behold, we are all communicators; so we think! The results do not deliver what we communicated for. This is especially true in organizations. Information is the currency of organizational transactions. Is there any other? When people envision & share, plan & co-ordinate, market & sell, organize & implement; they are always communicating information in some form or the other. Due to its all-pervasive nature, organizations rarely disown communication skills as a learning need. They attribute most problems to lack…
Uncovering Process in Cricket. Uncovering Process in Organizations.
When we witness a cricket match, what is visible to us is the real action. We see batsmen bat, bowlers bowl, and fielders field. In a mammoth run chase featuring a match-winning partnership, batsmen pace their innings, calculate wickets in hand, keep the required run-rate under control, and score big at the right times. In the post-match interview, the winning batting pair reveal how they went about it. The say, “We broke up the 300 run target into multiples of 50. We will score 50 runs six times is what we told each other. We decided to play out the main strike bowler without taking risks. We created these 50 run milestones, quietly celebrated them and refocused ourselves for the next 50. This kept us going and when the win was guaranteed, we got a bit careless and got out. The others came in and finished off the game” What did we see? We saw runs being scored. We saw the powerful hitting, the fours and the sixes. But there is no way we ‘saw’ how they really did it.…
The size of a newspaper reveals news like no other!
Do you ever wonder how the standard newspaper size came to be? Freek Vermeulen, author of “Business Exposed:The naked truth about what really goes on in the world of business”,asked this question at Guardian, UK’s premier newspaper company. Curiously enough, nobody seemed to know. He continued to ask anybody and everybody in the newsprint industry and nobody had a clue! Britain has a well-preserved history.Freek dug into archives at public libraries. After combing through the pages of history, he came up with a stunning answer! In 1712,a taxation law was introduced to tax newspapers based on the number of pages they carried.Newspaper wanted to pack more info in less pages.And thus the standard newspaper size was born! This tax law was abolished in 1855. And yet, for more than 300 years now, the standard newspaper size has remained the same! Customers did like a smaller format: more convenient to hold and carry.Rarely have they been asked & though there have been instances of newpapers trying out smaller formats, the standard size rules! This size is also more expensive to produce…