The Old Woman's Question

This is a story which sounds too farfetched to be true: it has just enough drama, heroics and dubious logistics to make it unlikely. But there is a lot of value in the idea it conveys, so let me narrate it.

Once, an old woman needed major surgery to correct a life-threatening condition. While on the operating table, as the hospital staff prepared her for anesthesia, she started chatting away with the doctors and nurses around her. She asked each of them a question: What exactly will you be doing during the surgery? She got a variety of answers:

1.       I will be cutting open your chest and enabling the surgeon to access your heart

2.       I will be administering the anesthesia and making sure you feel no pain

3.       I will be fixing the problem you have with your heart valves

4.       I will be sewing you back up after the surgery

5.       I will be monitoring your blood pressure and other vital signs

6.       I am just here to watch and learn

Each of them had a precise answer to give her, perhaps simplified to ensure that she understood what was being said. But the lady was still not convinced. She had one major concern, which she blurted out, presumably in all innocence: “Which of you is in charge of keeping me alive???”

Technically, you can say that the most senior surgeon in the room was in charge of the success of the operation. Or you can say the anesthetist was in charge of making sure she was floating comfortably between consciousness and death, until he/she was ready to pull her back to fully conscious life. They all knew their roles well, and did their best to explain it to their elderly patient. But somewhere during that effort they had apparently lost track of her priority to be alive at the end of the operation. In losing track of her priority, they may have lost her confidence as well.

How often do we do this in business? Aren’t there times when we get so engrossed in the transactional activities we are in charge of that—at least momentarily—we forget the bigger picture?

 

A lesson in thrift from a tube of toothpaste!

A bachelor—who lives alone in his apartment—woke up one Monday morning to find that his only tube of toothpaste was almost fully flattened out. That was the point at which he would usually have thrown it out and taken out a new one, but it turns out he had forgotten to buy any more, and so he decided to make the most of what was left. He used the end of his toothbrush to squeeze out a portion big enough to serve his need for that morning. He forgets to go shopping that day as well, and again manages to squeeze out enough toothpaste from the same tube for that night. This goes on for another four days. Finally, the weekend arrived and he had time to go shopping!

A friend of mine was telling me this story from his own experience, saying how lazy he was getting to be. But I was wowed by something totally different: look at how a tough situation brought out the best in him in terms of efficient utilization of available resources. According to that story, he normally wastes about one week’s worth of toothpaste in every tube, just because another one that is easier to use is readily available! Now, look at toothpaste as a mere metaphor and think about how often we do the same elsewhere in life, especially in the office.

Let’s say you have two pages to print, that you usually prefer one page per sheet of paper, and you decide to print only on one side. But when you have just one sheet of paper left to print those two pages, you will compromise and print on both sides of the paper. You decide to use the available resources more efficiently.

So why don’t you just do that all the time?

Need innovation, but afraid of bad results?

An interesting perspective on leadership came up during a discussion recently. Most people would agree that it is important for a manager to give a significant amount of freedom to his/her team members. That freedom - the metaphorical “space” which people can use for innovation – can go a long way in building employee engagement, as well as producing fantastic business results. 

However, what happens when a manager is willing to give that freedom in terms of strategy, but does not follow through with that commitment on execution? For example, if a manager gives you a very rigid report template and says “Let your imagination run wild, but I want the report to look exactly like this” does it actually help you? This half-baked approach would falsely convince a manager that he/she is giving his/her people the freedom to innovate, without producing the desired effects on the team because the freedom they are being given is only cosmetic.

A manager who is prepared to give his/her team the freedom to innovate on the job should also be prepared to see some interim results that are very different from what he/she wanted originally. Give your team some time, and the opportunity to create value. With the right people on the team, the results are very much likely to be fantastic. But one (or even a few) instance of not-so-good results shouldn’t cause the manager to give up. Patience, and the ability to look at the bigger picture without hasty conclusions, would pay rich dividends. Effectively fostering innovation isn’t the result of an isolated action, but a well thought out process applied at the right places and times.

Investing Your Most Precious Resource: 8 Unusual Tips on Maintaining Life Balance

There are thousands of metaphors you can use to illustrate the unending pursuit of balance in life. For instance, it is like chasing an outlaw who is the master of disguise. You think you’ve got him, but you never really know for sure. Or if you like sports, think of it as the goal post being left wide open and all you need to do is kick the ball in and claim what’s rightfully yours – the elusive trophy of Perfect Work Life Balance. As you run up to score, you are informed that the game has changed and so has your goal! You aren’t even playing for the same trophy anymore.

Whatever story you choose to relate to the concept, the facts remain the same. On one side of the world, we hear of a techie losing his life after a marathon 36 hour conference call, while in another continent, the average individual would kill for that kind of a career. There is no real agreement on what the average human wants in life, or what he chases all through it. In the beginning, you wouldn’t have had any real control over how these resources were managed. The choices were all made for you – whom you were born to, what name they called you by, whom you grew up with, which school you went to, and whether you had to work to earn a living. There were people around you who shaped your perspectives and convictions, whether you liked it or not. There is no second chance at growing up anyway. So let us try to fix things here and now.

1.     Stop calling it Work-Life Balance

 “Work-Life Balance” is highly inappropriate in today’s context, since it implies that “work” is not a part of life and portrays it wrongly as something that diverts your attention from life. Any sort of balance you hope to achieve in life must include “work” in some form or the other and it isn’t always in the most obvious manner. All through life you need to work – to earn a living, to sustain a relationship, to take life forward intelligently, or at least to utilize the resources you have at your disposal. “Life” as a term, as well as a model essentially covers “work” within its scope. So let us just call it Life Balance, and that is exactly what we should be trying to maintain.

2.     Be aware of the resources you have at your disposal

We are all born with specific amounts of certain resources– intelligence, energy, knowledge, creativity, money, influence, commanding power, popularity, credibility, respect and time to name a few. The quality and quantity of each depends on when and where the birth occurred, the genetics behind it, the star you were born under and of course, the manner in which you grew up.  Everything that happens to you later in life depends on how you manage these resources available to you. Work is only a process in which you spend resources like energy, time and at times money to increase one or more of your resources such as knowledge, skill or strength.

Investing the right amount of resources at the right places, based on your own priorities and objectives, will give you the returns you hope for. Some of them can be exchanged for others, but some of them are cost centers which need continuous investment. For instance, you can spend time to study and gain knowledge. The knowledge you thus gain, along with time, can be exchanged for money – that is what you typically do on your job. Similarly, you can spend time practicing a particular sport, and once you get very good at it, you are admired as a good sportsperson. Once you gather a good fan following, you have the credibility to make people believe what you say. When you use that credibility to sell products as a brand ambassador in return for a fee, you are in fact exchanging credibility for money. Respect and popularity are key enablers for most of the other resources, but they themselves depend on resources like intelligence, knowledge and creativity for sustenance.

3.     Recognize your key resource

The most vital resource you have at your disposal is yourself. You are essentially an amalgamation of several of the fundamental resources mentioned above, customized according to the conditions you live, work and spend time in. You are severely limited by time, and can also be only in one place at once in the truest sense. Yet, there is typically an intense demand on you, your time, your attention, your presence, your assistance and your efforts at all times. Intelligent spending of your key resource is a critical part of sustaining the business of life.

4.     Monitor how you spend your key resource

Typically, your life is divided between your family, your work, your social life and friends – each in its own way. Think of them as boxes, where you put a little piece of yourself in. None of them can be left empty.

 A very important box, which constantly demands a part of your life, is your own self. This box represents the time and other resources which you spend on yourself, either with the people you love or away from them all – whichever makes you feel better at each point of time. What should ideally go into this particular box is often divided amongst the others. But it is critical to give it an independent existence, and not merely as a pool to draw reserves from.

5.     Don’t use the clock to measure Life Balance

Achieving balance in life is not about how much time you spend at work, at home or elsewhere. How much time you need to spend at work depends on the kind of job you have. Some jobs need you to spend just a couple of hours a day or less, while others may need much more from you. How much time you need to spend with your family depends on the members in your family. If you are a single parent, you may need to spend more time with your children than if there was someone responsible to take care of them. How much time you get to spend with friends depends on the kind of friends you have and what you do together. If all your friends like to travel a lot, you may want to join them and that could take a lot of time and effort. If your friends meet regularly for sports or card games, you may want to join them in that too. How much time you need to spend for yourself depends on all the other things you spend your time on and how long it would take you to disconnect from it. There is no rule that says all these time intervals have to be equal. Just because you spend the same amount of time in office and home, don’t assume that they are both getting the attention they deserve. If your job demands more time than you can spare, then it may be time to look for another one. If your activities with friends are taking more time than you can spare, then it may be time to cut down a little bit and focus on other things. You want all of them to have an equal piece of yourself or your life – not an equal stretch of time!

6.     Confirm your priorities

There is no universally agreeable answer to the question of priorities of an individual. Only you are fully aware of your own priorities, and you can never be fully aware of another person’s priorities no matter how well he/she tries to explain them to you. This is because many of your priorities are decided by the subconscious mind, based on its calculations of investments required and the subsequent payoffs. Your conscious mind may not have a full grasp of this, and that is why explaining it to someone is not so easy. So the first thing you will need to do is to make a list of everything you want to do and get done – irrespective of the order of priority. Give yourself some leeway here and don’t bother too much about the “why” aspect of those priorities. Then, as a next step, you can apply your own logic to figure out which of those should be done first, what next and what last. At this point, feel free to bombard yourself with questions like Why should this be done now? What will happen if I don’t do it? Does this have more consequences for delay than the next one?

The biggest question you need to ask is: Is investment of yourself necessary for this task to be done; or can you have someone else do it with acceptable effectiveness? Saying No to this question in a few cases can make it much easier to manage your primary resource.

7.     Accept that there is a risk of retribution

In a perfect world, you would have the answers to every question that comes up and you would be able to happily cross off all items on your tasks list in order. But since we live in a more practical society, there may be times when you need to compromise on your perfect scores and settle for doing as much as you can. Of course, if you worry about having ten big things to do you probably will get nothing done. If you stop worrying and start on at least the little things, then you can cross them off the list and worry about fewer things left to do. But which ones do you do first?

Whichever tasks are most critical to the business (or the organization) deserve to come first on your list, assuming that you still want to be part of the organization for the long term. Next comes those tasks which will affect your personal credibility in case of delay or abandonment. The third and fourth categories depend entirely on the risk of retribution you are willing to take. Some tasks may create problems for you if they are delayed. Put them next on your priority list. Some other tasks are okay to be delayed, as long as you make sure you do them (or get them done). Let them take the last slot.

What happens to the other tasks? Do not abandon them! Just delegate.

8.     Visualize the schematic of life

Anyone who has learnt science in one form or the other would be familiar with Schematic Diagrams. Back in engineering college, we used schematic diagrams in place of more complex circuit diagrams, when we were unsure of what components went into each part. In the name of simplifying the illustration, we were able to hide the lack of thoroughness. What will a schematic diagram of life, as we know it, look like?

Think of yourself as a power source, or a generator supplying a finite amount of energy. Your personal life setup and professional setup are two engines that draw power from the source to deliver the critical outputs that you need to sustain life. If both the engines are turned on at the same time, the finite energy you have at your disposal is divided between the two engines and neither of them is able to work to its full potential and deliver to capacity. If you balance the loads, instead, and establish a good time-sharing/switching arrangement, both engines will be more efficient and can deliver the outputs you need.

Analogously, this means that if you try to think about work and personal life at the same time, you end up being unable to concentrate on either of them. If you set aside specific time frames for work and personal/social lives, and diligently stick to it by not bringing work home and not taking personal life to work, then you will be able to devote enough attention to both.

On the other hand, some people decide to avoid one of those engines altogether and try to keep the other one running all the time. True, that particular engine will run at full efficiency (until it is worn out), but you will have to settle for only half of the critical outputs you need to sustain life and do without the other half. Ultimately, this will take a toll on the power source itself, and eventually wear you out.

When bluffs and tantrums backfire

There are times when you meet a stranger and your exchange turns out to be less than pleasant. This can happen anywhere, like in a department store, a parking lot, a party or even on the street. The next day, when you walk into office, imagine your shock when he/she is introduced as a colleague who joined your office; or worse, your new manager! It isn’t entirely fictional, I happen to have heard of a couple of cases from the ‘victims’ themselves.

Another possibility is when a bluff/excuse you successfully pulled off once turns around and bites you at a totally inconvenient time. For instance, a Software Engineer had excused himself from a particular assignment away from his hometown saying he had to take care of his mother, who wasn’t in the best of health. Barely a few hours later, when an onsite assignment came up in the UK, the same person expressed interest.

A brief conversation took place soon after:

HR: Are you sure, don’t you want to stay back and take care of your mother?

SE: That’s ok, my sister is there at home. She can manage.

And believe me, this was a true story, narrated to me that same afternoon by the HR manager involved. Don’t ask me which company!

It is surprising how things turn around as fast as they do. And of course, I am not trying to preach you into a life of 100% honesty where every lie you tell needs to be accounted for. Just make sure you have nothing to be ashamed of.

You may be right. But as a manager, your job doesn’t end there

Do you remember the first time you became a manager? Or at least, do you have some expectation of what it will feel like when you do become one?

Suddenly, you are responsible for the actions of a lot of people. Your job is expanded from "get your job done" to "get your job done, ensure your team members do the same, co-ordinate all those jobs and deliver the result expected". Of course, that is putting it mildly!

They say the problem with most managers lies in the fact that they do not communicate well enough. When there is a conflict or a disagreement, chances are one party will be right in his/her observation. When a member of your team is right, his/her duty is to inform the manager and possibly show him/her how. The decision is then left to the manager. But when a manager is right, his/her duty doesn't end there. In addition to informing team members, they have to be convinced that this is the path to take and ensure that everyone is on board. Just knowing you are right does not add any value in the big picture.

The key here is to over-communicate. One cannot sit back and assume things will be agreed upon and followed by everyone on the team just because he/she was told to. It takes a lot of cohesion and understanding for a team to reach that level of maturity. That could tend to infinity (call upon those math memories). Until then, lack of adequate communication by a manager is the perfect excuse for employees to slack off!

Who is to blame if the client doesn't understand you?

At a recent client visit to our offshore center, a senior executive at the client side had a very far reaching suggestion to make for the business: To develop a common language, to describe the workload in terms of a tangible unit, which can be understood by both the client as well as the service provider

Let us consider a parallel example. Say you need to get your car fixed, and you take it to a garage. The mechanic studies it thoroughly and tells you the following problems:

1.       The engine needs some work

2.       The tyres need to be realigned

3.       The air filters need to be cleaned

4.       Etc

5.       Etc

At the end of a 10 minute long list, you nod your head and politely ask your mechanic, “So you think I can pick it up tomorrow?”. Expect a blank stare from him and at times, an expletive to follow depending on how exasperating you have been. The problem there is a lack of this common language. And of course, the mechanic is assuming that you know enough about cars to know how long each of these tasks would take to be completed.

And so, to cut a long story short, it is all about setting the right expectations…and a common language just makes that easier. Do you have one with your customers? Perhaps it is time to take the lead and work on one.

It would be unintelligent on the part of a mechanic to expect a customer to know what exactly his car needs. At the end of the day, a customer would want one thing – his car must run well, and should not have any problems. It is up to the mechanic to convert this need into the equivalent list of tasks. This is very much similar to how a team of software engineers translates a client’s business requirements into a list of technical requirements.

For this same reason, a customer cannot be blamed for wishing that his car be delivered in perfect condition at the shortest time possible. He just doesn’t know what is involved! It is up to the mechanic to explain to him that it may take more time – within reasonable limits. But the key is to have clarity in the expectations set. A customer doesn’t necessarily expect the mechanic to deliver the car in 5 minutes. But he would expect the mechanic’s expertise to be good enough so he can make a reliable estimate of the time to be taken and thereby set a clear expectation.

Similarly, when a client talks demands a particular deliverable be delivered within, say X number of days, the team can always inform him/her if that is not a realistic schedule. But this must be conveyed at the earliest point of time possible and not at the eleventh hour, so there are no unnecessary expectations. And of course, there might be technical experts on the client side who could blow the whistle if your schedule is too lax – so beware of that.

Fresh Eyes Peer Review

As I walked into office today, I found a not-so-little black book on my desk. Curious, I picked it up and glanced through the pages. Now let me clarify, there was no ‘Confidential’ mark on it and so reading it is not a violation of regulations. Anyway, I found that it was a copy of a case study submitted by an ex-intern with the team I worked for, who was trying to study the role of this function in a typical organization.

It was an interesting read, especially since it spoke in an external perspective about a function I am involved with on a day to day basis. The study was done about an year ago, before I was part of the team, and so it actually gave me some information about the recent history as well as some extinct service lines. I saw entertainment value in the exercise, but I am sure there is more to it than just that.

When you are facing a nagging problem on your project – one of those kinds where you are sure you know the solution, but just can’t place it – it is often useful to have someone else take a look at it. It is a form of external consultation, except that instead of a subject matter expert or some individual specialized in offering consultancy services, you depend on someone in your peer group who would have sufficient knowledge to understand the problem and suggest a solution. This cancels the effects of fatigue caused by repeatedly tackling the same problem.

Let’s call it a ‘Fresh Eyes Peer Review’. The most obvious shortcoming is the risk of confidentiality breach and therefore please be careful while applying it to sensitive projects. This is probably common practice in some teams, but might be useful to those who have missed out.

Assuming there is some problem to be solved, and that problem is a human error, there is a clear logic that applies to why the Fresh Eyes Peer Review is so effective. It plays on psychology, and I must warn you, most writers tend to take psychology as a subject to wax eloquent on, even without a good foundation on the subject – a science misunderstood by laymen, but that is a fact we can pick up on another day. Coming back to the topic, let me take you through why the Fresh Eyes Peer Review is generally so effective. And for that, let us consider the essential elements of such a peer review exercise:

1.    One is given the opportunity to express his opinion on another’s work/idea and possibly find fault with it

2.    One is able to comment on a project he/she has not put in an effort into building, and therefore has no stake in. This enables the reviewer to suggest disruptive changes and daringly innovative, fresh ideas

3.    There are no personal favorite elements in the project for the reviewer; so there is no reason for thoughts on the lines of “We worked too hard on that part, so let us not mess with it. We can change anything else”

4.    The reviewer has a potential opportunity to contribute to the project and is likely to make full use of an idea that has merit

Many of these points dwell on the personal behavior of people and some of them border on ego and selfishness. It is not a perfect world; and the intelligent ones have to be reasonable and expect some such elements in every professional. The really intelligent ones take this thought and leverage it for the success of the business – or any other endeavor you are part of. Now that is one more reason to use the ‘Fresh Eyes Peer Review’!

Flashback: An End to Outsourcing?

Outsourcing – a concept which took the world of business by storm a few years ago – is slowly becoming a more complex arena, say experts. In the beginning it was pretty simple: Certain business-related activities which are too expensive or cumbersome to be carried out in-house, is taken care of by an external agency specializing in the area. The primary benefits included specialized skills and cost savings – especially if the outsourcing is done to a foreign destination where labor and infrastructure are significantly cheaper.

Asia in general, and India in particular, has traditionally been one of the leaders in outsourcing destinations, primarily due to the savings in labor and availability of certain specialized skill sets like IT. However, this is slowly beginning to change, if recent trends in the industry offer a reliable clue. Take our own IT services scenario as an example - the increased demand for IT skill sets in Asia have driven up the costs incurred in hiring and sustaining an IT professional. Similar is the case with business infrastructure, where the costs have skyrocketed for the same reason. As a result, IT service organizations are compelled to drive up their prices and hence the companies wanting to take advantage of outsourcing are beginning to realize that there is little or no ‘advantage’ left!

Think of it as inflation: Costs drive up prices, which in turn drive up costs – to put it simply. This has recently begun to have significant effects on outsourcing. Last year, New Call Telecom, a British organization dealing in telecommunications, was in the news for recognizing this and actually taking steps towards this. The company has scrapped its plans for a call center in India, and instead set it up back home in Lancashire! Also, countries like Brazil, China and Egypt are the new contenders for ‘favorite IT destination’.

The IT outsourcing industry is changing fast. We, the people, must essentially change with it.

Social media: To trust or not to trust

We live in a world where a human being can seldom control his/her exposure to the public eye. It isn’t easy to keep secrets any more, and they say anything once posted on the internet lingers there forever.

I wrote earlier about how close we are to a world where a manager gets information about prospective employees from his/her colleagues and former managers (and vice versa), through leveraging social media. On the one hand, it makes it easy for a manager to do the screening process, and prepare himself and his team for the arrival of the new team member. Similarly, an employee can prepare himself before joining a new organization or a new team, based on the opinion of people who have had some kind of experience at the place. But this gives rise to two possibilities that needs immediate attention.

Firstly, whoever seeks opinions through social media must have a clear idea of who to trust and who not to trust. Untrustworthy sources can wreak havoc with the process and the seeker may end up with a grossly contorted result. Given the very nature of social media, a filtration process may not be that simple to implement effectively.

Secondly, as I mentioned before, it is said that anything once posted on the internet lingers there forever. We have read plenty of stories with the same moral, each citing a case where someone was terminated from a job/rejected at a job interview due to embarrassing photographs uploaded on a social networking site. In a business context, what is ‘embarrassing’ for an organization may be very different from what an individual might choose to keep hidden. The essence here is, social media may have drastically reduced our margin for error – one mistake made long ago may come back any time to haunt an organization or even an individual as long as it exists on the web.

Gathering intelligence using Social media

I was looking at a review for mobile app called Local Mind. If you are thinking of going out tonight, all you need to do is quickly open Local Mind and put a question across to fellow users who are already at this place you intend to go to. If so inclined, they can give you a real-time update on how the place is, what the crowd is like and even quick tips on the offers that are currently on. It is the social networking equivalent of calling ahead and checking with a friend what a place is like – except, your ‘friend’ base is suddenly expanded and you can get answers from the people who are at that place right now!

Stop for a moment and think – what else can this system be used for? The concept is really simple. Take something you do in everyday life, where you are likely to call a friend and check in advance, then do the same on a social network. We usually depend on the past experience of a friend, about how he/she felt about something/someplace he went to some time ago. This time, you are getting real-time updates from people.

How about doing the same when you are about to join a new project, under a manager you are not familiar with? Or on the other side, how about doing the same about a new team member who is about to join the project you manage? From one’s fellow team members and former managers, you can collect a lot of information, even though you really don’t know them personally.

Social media can do so much more for a business than branding it in front of potential customers and investors. The easy part is getting the answers, while the tough part is to choose from what you get! More on that in the next post

Coincidences and the Innovation Butterfly

At its simplest, an Innovation butterfly is the very initial cause for a particular instance of innovation. It may be a thought, a complaint, a protest, or even a rough sketch drawn playfully on a napkin while having coffee – something that seemed insignificant at the moment.

The mobile phone probably began with a thought by someone, who was stuck in the middle of nowhere, wondering “Now where do I find a telephone booth?”. Tata Motors claim to have hit upon the idea of an affordable car (which we now call the Nano) when someone noticed a family of four trying to balance themselves on a two wheeler. Start thinking of this scenario applying the extremes of pure logic, and you can break it into a number of vital pieces:

1.    Potential inventor drives by on a busy road

2.       Family of four gets on the two wheeler on the same road at exactly the same time

3.       The person (inventor) looks outside and sees them

4.       Visibility and weather conditions were good enough for him/her to see them and take notice

5.       He wasn’t preoccupied enough to let the sight escape his mind

6.       He/she wonders how the family can be helped out of this predicament

7.       He/she thinks of, or probably discusses with someone or hears about the possibility of building an affordable car, while this memory is fresh in his mind

Each of these 7 appear to be independent of each other and and are seemingly insignificant to the bigger picture. But if any one of them had changed, the inventor never may have noticed the family and may never have noticed a business need for such an invention. This is what is called the Butterfly effect, as applied to innovation. And each of these steps could be the proverbial Innovation Butterfly – a seemingly insignificant and possibly underrated beginning to a major event of Innovation. Theoretically, any event before these seven could have been a contributor, such as whether the family was going for a movie, or to visit someone at a hospital.

You never know what could start a revolution. Keep your eyes open for the next big thing, but most importantly, keep your mind open!

Innovation: Who is the best judge of ideas?

Great minds think alike. The greatest go ahead and patent it.

There is only one thing that hurts more than saying “Why didn’t I think of it?” after reading about a new invention. And that is having to say, “I had actually thought about it a few months ago and didn’t realize it was a good idea”. Around the world, it is estimated that the conversion rate of ideas to usable products is about 0.000002%. That means roughly 2 in every million ideas are taken forward to be fashioned into some meaningful product. I can assure you that’s a conservative estimate, and the real number is far less.

In any case, the gist of it is, a lot of ideas come to people and very few of them are worth pursuing. But then, what separates a good innovation ecosystem from the rest is how these viable ideas are identified and brought forward through a good judging process. In the million ideas, there may be 50-100 more ideas that are actually usable, but fall by the wayside because no one was able to appreciate the merit. Famous examples in technology are the mouse and graphical user interfaces, which were originally invented by engineers at Xerox, where they were both dismissed as ideas which are of no use to people. Other companies like Microsoft, Apple, etc swooped in and took it from them with minimal effort. Also think of the first few talent show judges who rejected Elvis Presley and The Beatles as not worth it.

Now that thought typically has two types of effect on the people of an organization:

1. Potential innovators gain in confidence, thinking their ideas may have more merit than others have been giving them credit for.

2. People in charge of filtering ideas may get more nervous, fearing “How can I reject an idea today, if it may come back tomorrow as a huge commercial success and mock me?”

So, does this mean that a culture of innovation will cause some not-so-good ideas to pass through the filter and generally lower the standards? Yes, but this would again indicate a flaw in the evaluation mechanism, rather than the idea generation engines. Do not let the former kill the latter. In the world of journalists, we often lament the many writers who have died on the editors’ table. This is more or less the same plague that has affected innovators of modern times.

Collaboration for Innovation: When and How does it Work Best?

 

The work life of a modern day professional has two key phrases in its description:

1. Continuous innovation and idea generation

2. Making oneself relevant to the business and the organization

These two key phrases are essentially tied to the concept of thought leadership. The Global CEO study by a major IT MNC showed up some telling numbers when it comes to innovation. 40% of corporate chief executive officers and other business executives suggested that employees are the primary source of innovation. About 35% attributed it to customers, while fewer than 20% suggested that ideas primarily come from internal R&D. The reason is pretty simple: At an employee level, there is tremendous amount of collaboration between unrelated thought processes. Customers may not have this luxury, nor will an R&D unit that works according to a predefined thought pattern – exceptions possible.

The first step in any major instance of transformation is when someone thinks about a situation and realizes there is a definite problem to be solved. Then comes the organized thought process and hopefully, a stage where a solution is found. But this poses a question – At what stage is an instance of innovation mature enough to be presented before the people?

If you have an idea, research upon it, build a prototype and present it, it works well for the business in the sense that it is a product that is ready to go. But in this case, you are depending heavily on yourself and your inspiration to get a product out. How often is this viable?

Several ideas that come to you may have been dismissed just because of the fact that you don’t know what to do with it. But someone else might have some excellent follow up thoughts on it, without ever having got the original spark. Collaborating at a very early stage of the innovation process will produce better results than working together on a prototype at a later stage – in terms of the number of ideas reaching the market and also the quality of the product created from the idea

Value creation for employees

Having touched upon value creation through loyalty and its importance in an organization let me round it off with a few more thoughts on the topic. I was having a conversation with a fellow USsociate, who asked me to shed some light on the other side of the coin – Value creation for an employee, by the organization.

I did mention it briefly in a prior edition, but let me elaborate on it a little bit today. It is analogous to the oldest instance of business transactions, which has remained essentially the same amidst all the economic evolution that has happened over centuries. The exchange of value for equivalent value in a different expression is essentially the root of any ideal transaction. On the part of the employee, the value transfer occurs through making use of his/her skills for some activity or result beneficial to the business. The organization running the business receives this value addition and instead, compensates the employee through some other expression of value.

Some of these expressions are more obvious than the others and hence are often mistakenly considered to be more precious than the others. For instance, tangible ones like the salary, bonuses, benefits, stock options, etc are very obvious to the employee. But certain other things, such as chances for learning and development, training options, the attention paid to the employee by the management and even the experience of working in the organization are also part of the value proposition, although they rarely get noticed. Surrounding yourself with quality people will naturally have a positive bearing on your own quality as a professional and as an individual. Working in a good organization is probably the perfect opportunity for this.

Look beyond the tangible value you get from an organization and also take into account what else you are gaining from your professional life.

Loyalty in the Value Proposition

 

In an interesting conversation that came up recently, one colleague was telling me about the value proposition between an employer and an employee. He opined: Loyalty is not one of the effects of a good value proposition. It is a critical component.

I must agree. What does an employee’s loyalty mean to an organization - is it measured by the number of years an employee works for the company? Or does it have more to do with whether the employee is willing to go that extra mile for the sake of the business?

Once upon a time, loyalty may have meant starting your career at one organization and retiring from the same one. But today, an employee is able to recognize the fact that he/she has so much more to offer. If you are a manager, take a look at your own team. How enthusiastic are they in the work assigned to them? Do they collaborate and share ideas to proactively increase the standard of their deliverables? And most importantly – would your team mates recommend your team, and the organization as a fine place to work?

Direct questioning is usually not the best way to do the measurement. The key here is subtle observation and… pardon me…. Reconnaissance! Effectively measuring this would offer you multiple advantages.

1.    It gives you an idea of the loyalty graph of your team members

2.    Tells you ways to increase productivity within your team and inspire people to perform well

3.    Gives you an excellent measurement of how you have been performing as a manager!

Building relationships at work

 

‘Building strong relationships’ describes a business model with some evident merits and perhaps a few demerits. The concept essentially points towards a sense of commitment and a certain level of freedom of operations.

The more mature a relationship between a service provider and a client, the more aligned the employees of each would be to the other’s business goals and processes. At the same time, there is less intervention from the client side and ideally, this drives up productivity at the service provider’s end. Selling is made easier, and there are certain advantages in hard times, such as in a recession; the client will think twice about cutting budgets in a long lasting engagement – of course, this is subject to compromises on both sides. In short, if the relationship is good, the business is good for both sides.

As an employee, who do you feel is at the other end of such a commitment: Is it the person who recruited you, the person who you report to, the head of the company, or some other individual? It can be anyone at all, as long as this one person made a difference in the individual’s life. The difference can be imparting some knowledge you won’t find in books, or it can be showing him/her how to think and work better, or it can even be about being there when you are needed the most. The significance is relative, and a third person may not be able to judge it. It is part of the personal connection.

That’s right. Many things in professional life are decided on the basis of this personal connection. Look at the members in your team and check – Have you made a difference in their lives?

Doing what the job demands…and only what the job demands

 

The relevance of an employee to the organization is too complex a metric to be decided on the basis of assumptions and depends on certain other factors. Some of these factors are directly under the control of the employee, while some others are driven by bigger wheels. That statement essentially points to another question – What can an employee do to ensure that he/she is relevant in his role?

Broadly speaking, every business in the world runs on the basis of a customer’s need, which it fulfills through its products, services or some combination of both. Whether the need is genuine or one created is another point of concern, but let’s not go into that now. In most cases, customers either purchase a product/service that fulfills their need completely, or they settle for whatever is available that best fulfills it. The same principle that applies to the relationship between the business and a customer also applies to the relationship between the business and an employee.

Typically, an employee who answers an advertisement for an opening, is expected to fulfill a specific need, which the employer is well aware of. An unfortunate trend in many cases is that the employee ends up doing exactly that – and nothing more. From the moment an employee begins working in an organization, he/she is knowingly or unknowingly part of a learning process. As an employee becomes comfortably familiar with the character of a business and its behavior, he/she also gets an insight into what other needs are remaining to be fulfilled. Some may be within your limits, some may not.

How Critical is a Critical Resource?

 What does ‘critical’ really mean at the end of the day?

I was having a chat with a friend of mine, who has a delivery role in a well known IT company. It was appraisal season, which is typically a precedent to salary revisions. Naturally, the conversation steered into hopes and expectations of ‘numbers’, as I am sure you know what I mean. The justification was clear in his mind: Critical resource means significant money. But I had a question: What does ‘critical’ really mean at the end of the day?

For an example, let us take a company ABC Inc which has, say around 50-100 accounts, each of which has several projects within them. Each project may have different teams within them. And that is just the delivery side. When a resource is critical to his/her team, is he/she automatically critical to the project? That would depend heavily on how critical the team itself is to the project. On the same lines, the project may or may not be critical to the account. And perhaps most importantly, are you fully aware of what the organization feels about a particular account and its bearing on the long term business plans? Maybe...just maybe...the organization is thinking about winding up the account you work for. So what will it look like if you walk in and demand a raise, just because you consider yourself to be a 'critical resource' on your team?

Think of it as a mathematical function. The absolute value of each term relies heavily on the coefficient attached to it. It is unfair to make an assumption about any coefficient unless you have considerable knowledge of the business and the future. The issue is relevance to the bigger picture.

Think about it, and you’ll see the principle applies to several aspects of life you would come across.

Knowledge Management for the New Generation

 

The ‘new generation’ of IT services – now that is a tagline we hear very often in various forums, within a company as well as external. It sure sounds flashy, and the phrase even gives us some kind of a self-assurance for the future, although a sizeable bunch of listeners don’t usually get the full implications of the term.

All right, I am not about to start a lecture on the origin of the term or what the real implications are for the business, but I want to drive a little bit of thought on certain aspects you are probably familiar with. ‘New generation’ does include new technology, new service lines and new standards for quality, but what is perhaps most significant is that there is a considerable amount of new people – new faces at the workplace.

With new faces on the workforce come new duties for the people behind each organization. The most obvious, of course, is to ensure that the new recruits are brought up to speed in terms of technical expertise. But the more important challenge is to make sure they are a perfect fit to the culture of the organization. This extends to how we deal with clients, how we manage external relations and how we project the image of the organization in the public eye.

A new employee – whether a fresher or a lateral hire – would have a set process in his mind. To modify the process according to the organization’s attitude, one would need to depend on precedent – a history of what was done in a similar situation. To open that door, there is only one key – Knowledge Management. Whether that knowledge comes from a veteran’s memory or a classified approved document, depends on the maturity of Knowledge Management in the organization.