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 !

Vacation

I was recently reading an article somewhere on how more and more of the work-force carries their cellphone / laptop / blackberry etc. etc with them on their vacation. If that was not enough, a large population actually checks their email while on vacation. To complete the story, quite a few of them actually join conference calls while they are on vacation.

Having said all this, picture the other side. As executives we promote the concept of implementing self-sustaining generic processes which are not "individual dependent" and also implement systems to remove the "human dependency" which basically implies that we implement process where A SPECIFIC person does not need to be involved in completing a process, anyone or someone can fill-in a slot when THE SPECIFIC person in not available.

Something is not correct with this picture - because we contradict ourselves. We try to achieve self-sustaining, scaleable processes and at the same time we are so dependent on specific individuals that a mere mention of a vacation puts us into "who is your back-up mode"? It does not end there - for the folks who go on a vacation supposedly without a Blackberry or a laptop or a cellphone they are always worried - "how is the work going on"? Think of it like this - will the IRS stop functioning if you left planet earth today? What about GE? Will that function if you died today (if you are an employee at GE or IRS? Of course they will continue to exists. So then, why is vacation a big deal for us as managers / executives?

So the next time around, someone on you team is planning a vacation - are you going to ask for their contact information while on vacation or are you going to use this as an opportunity to implement a process that is not person specific? Think about it !

Banana

Ever heard anyone use this metaphor in the business world? Not really. But I think that the shelf-life of a banana is the same to that of technology available today. And that is where business can use this parlance of a banana.

Think of it like this - As executives we spend long hours discussing new business processes and then use technology as a lever to implement and streamline these processes. By the time we implement these technology-enabled processes, well, the core-technology has evolved and we are back to the drawing boards either trying to retrofit the newer technology to existing process. Most of the time, across the world, the major push-back is due to the fact that there are process-changes in companies and quite a few of these changes are driven by the fact that there is new technology available to better perform the work.

Why do companies keep chasing the infinite - implement technology only to yank it out later because it has become out-dated and has a shelf-life of a banana? Here today, gone tomorrow - with that as an open secret, we as executives need to address current problems in efficiencies because if we do not do it, our competitor will. We need to adopt the latest greatest technology and then be prepared to accept and implement the changes that come with any technology.

So, the next time around, you are evaluating a new technology are you going to ask yourself and the technical provider - how new is this technology or how old is this technology? Think about it !