Fast or Far

The other day I was listening to Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and he started of with a quote from Africa - "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, take a few people with you".

How very true. Don't we see that happening every day at work? Someone sitting up there in an ivory tower makes a statement and expects everyone down in the trenches to follow him / her with immediate effect because this new policy / process / system needs to be implemented quickly. Resources are mobilized and we get into the execution phase and find that we are inundated by issues. Why does it happen? Did we not plan correctly? I think what really happens is the real buy-in (taking a few people with us) did not happen.

We have seen this happen time and again, technology or a business process does not cause the bottle-neck. It is the people who cause the bottle-neck and in the same token it is the people who are responsible for the success of an endeavor. How can the same entity be responsible for the success and the failure?

So, the next time you are embarking on a new goal for your organization - are you going to go all alone and run fast towards your far-reaching goal or you are going to spend the time, get all the major stakeholders with you and all of you go towards the far-reaching goal together? Think about it!

A Spanner in the Wheel

I have been preparing for a marathon run for a long long time. Over a year actually. Every thing that could go wrong went wrong. Busted knee. Job change. Timings going wrong etc. etc. Anyway, my half-marathon is on 10/14/07 and I have been ramping-up perfectly well till last night. I have had a bad bad bout of allergies which has got me worried if I can recover in time for the race.

Okay. All of this is good. How does this fit into my blog of business talks?

You plan for a big huge transformation project with teams working over a year across continents. You have checked and cross-checked everything before you begin your home-stretch and then "it" shows its ugly-head. Something out of the blue. Like my allergies. Something totally unplanned for which might derail you. What do you do? How do you recover with less than 96 hours before prime-time?

Is there a clear answer? A magic bullet that will make all your troubles disappear? Never ever. If someone promises you a magic bullet, well then you are in fantasy land.

This is what I think really needs to happen to manage situations that hit you out of the blue just before D-Day: Evaluate, Review, Evaluate, Execute. I see that happening all the time, executives get nervous and start having status meetings multiple times a day to review the situation. I agree you need to do this if you are fighting a war but in the business world, as Jack Welch puts it, go by your gut. Evaluate your various options including aborting the project. There is no harm in reviewing this as an option. Once you have reviewed the impacts of each option, evaluate one more time the final chosen option(s) and execute. I cannot stress any more on why you need to execute perfectly. There is no room for error.

During all these activities never ever lose control. Be calm and be in control.

Anyway, the next time around, you suddenly find a spanner in the wheel, are you going to panic or going to attack the problem or going to live with the problem? Think about it.

Comebacks

This morning while driving to work I heard an interesting piece on the radio. A tree that is over 2600 old and was believed to have been "dead" for over 30 years was sprouting new leaves since the past week. This tree was burnt in a wild-fire, was struck by lightning and was believed to be dead since then.

This got me thinking - as executives do we ever face such scenarios' - companies thought to be bankrupt come back stronger, executives serve a jail sentence and come back stronger. We read about this and leave it there. Have you ever sat and wondered what does it take to stage a come-back? Did Martha Stewart think differently to come-back after her prison term? How did IBM turn-around from the early 1990's? What did Apple Computers do to come where they are today compated to 15 years ago?

We need to think like winners in our mind. The recipe for success is very simple. Think long, think hard and execute flawlessly.

Any shortcuts to this makes it difficult or virtually impossible for you to stage a comeback and put you into various false starts. Once the cycle of false starts begins it takes a super-human effort to break that cycle. I see this everyday even for smaller issue-resolutions. Teams do not think long and hard and try to provide a solution to the customer, which fails, so another band-aid solution is provided which again fails and so on. Eventually, the customer is tired of us and we then begin our plot for the "comeback" or regaining our credibility.

The next time around, your team fails in something and you begin the turn-around, are you just going to put out the fire or are you going to analyze why you failed in the first place? Think about it !

Life-Work Balance

There are tons of published material on Work-Life balance. Tons of printed material and 100's of GB of electronic material. However, I think there is a fundamental issue in the way it is expressed as Work-Life balance because it means that "Work" comes first and then comes your personal "Life".

Have we as executives ever wondered that by improving the "Life-Work" balance we can improve the moral of the team. I was meeting a few friends over the weekend and a couple of them were quite demoralized. As I was talking to them, I gathered that they had challenging work, were leading teams and delivering results however they were always on conference calls while at home and during the weekends. They were hardly spending time with their family and friends. Their "Life" was out-of-balance since their "Work" was made the top priority.

I thought that once if their executives saw this group of demoralized managers who were delivering results today but would not be able to do this for long they would do something about their "Life-Work" balance. As executives, it is our primary responsibility to ensure that the team's support structure ensures success.

So, the next time around, you are faced with a team that is demoralized due to a project / product failure, I am sure you will perform a "Lessons Learned" session with them however will you also look at the "Life-Work" balance support that you had provided which resulted in the result that you got? Think about it !

Process

I was thinking the other day about the need for articulating processes and procedures in a company. Why do we need to do that? Is the company not functioning without the documentation? What is the value-add (or ROI) for investing the time and resources on documenting processes? As an executive have you ever explained this need?

Every organization has their own silos of knowledge. In a typical start-up more of the action is performed at the spur of the moment and as the organization-grow in terms of human-resources than revenues is when you feel the need to have documented processes and procedures.

Now for a very large organization, you again need these sets of processes and procedures documented because there is a human-turnover. If you had a static workforce which never ever left the company, gave them instructions once and let them do their jobs everyday for the rest of their lives then we would not ever need such processes and procedures.

The question however is what is the ROI for a company that has never invested in documenting processes and procedures? How do you calculate the ROI in this case? Remember, there is always an ROI for an investment. The ROI can be tangible or intangible and may be spread over many many years or in some cases over a lifetime (for example the Green Company revolution - more in a later blog). With that being said, break the ROI if it is spread over many years into some form of short-term strategic initiatives and some long-term strategic initiatives and use these as the measure to communicate to the larger audience the need to develop documented processes and procedures.

There is no magic bullet - you need to invest time and document your policies / processes and procedures in order to build a long-term healthy company and update them periodically to be current. Period.

So, the next time around, you find some holes in the processes of your company, instead of letting it go, how are you going to use that to use it to help your company grow? Think about it !

Problem of Plenty

Do ever have such a problem? A problem of plenty? I would be highly surprised if the answer is "NO".

As executives we are always faced with multiple choices. Our days are filled with multiple, concurrent activities and we have a constant stream of choices to make, decisions to make.

But what do you do with the Problem of Plenty?

It would be wrong to say that ignore the other options that come our way and just focus only on one priority or take. We can never be successful when we do this (BTW, as executives whenever we make a statement using "NEVER", we are generalizing which is a wrong thing to do). Anyway, the point is very simple - train our mind to evaluate all the options, tasks and arrive at a decision rapidly. Remember, our mind goes as fast as we want. At the same time, there are moments when we have to put some challenges at the back-burner and reevaluate the current issues at hand and work through them.

I always have thought that it is so wonderful to be a captain of an commercial airplane or a brain surgeon or a heart surgeon - You have hundreds of passengers that have entrusted their lives to you and as a captain you have to coordinate hundreds of activities as the plane lands or takes-off. Same for the surgeons, peoples lives depend on the activities that these folks perform and believe me - these folks have a "problem of plenty" going on in their own minds.

So, the next time around, you are faced with multiple choices to make at the same moment in time, are you going to get overwhelmed or are you going to go with the flow and take a decision and move-on? Think about it !

Excuses

Its been a long absence from the Blog world. Let us see which excuse should I pick - dog ate my blog-notes, busy at work, lazy to post a blog, did not care to post a blog or all of these. Not sure which to pick.

So here is the challenge - you and/or your team has a tight timeline for a work-product delivery. There are regular check-points and everything looks green as an emerald. However, 48 hours before the end of your timeline something blows-up and you know for sure you cannot recover and deliver in the 48 hour window. So, what is the excuse you choose?

I see it at various levels of organizations where workers across the rank and file are searching for excuses. It is very easy to see when a manager or an executive starts of as "We were on target however..." and there comes the excuse. Why do we have to search something else to blame and not ourselves for the poor planning and execution. Such mishaps bring out the real leaders because a real leader, irrespective of their rank in the organization, is resilient and has a clear strategy to accept the mistake and bounce back even if it means looking at a revised timeline.

Back to where I started from, where was I all this while? I was busy at work and too lazy to post a blog.

So, the next time around, you hit a road-block just before your project delivery date - are you going to look for excuses or going to stand-up and admit that you messed-up? Think about it !