Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Taking Initiative

"Don't let school get in the way of your education."
- Mark Twain

I have been toying with writing this piece for some time now. One reason I couldn’t get it out of my system is because I have not been able to make up my mind whom am I addressing it to - the students or the faculty. So if you feel a little lost reading it there is nothing wrong with you. The idea is to convey that it is the lack of understanding, both on the part of the students as well as the faculty in business schools about the role of the teachers, which unobtrusively hinders developing the very traits we are trying to ostensibly encourage and develop in the future managers. The school comes in the way of education ever so surreptitiously.
MBA is not primarily about attending classes. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying you don’t have to attend classes or that you should not attend classes. In fact we expect you to have 100 percent attendance nothing less. Without learning what you will get to learn in the class you are not even ready to appreciate what you will need to learn outside the class. What I am saying is that though what you learn in the domain classes is the foundation on which you have to build the real you. MBA is not about attending classes it is about who you become because of your training in the business school. And who you will become will be determined by your character traits like creativity, tenacity, honesty, integrity, curiosity or willingness to learn, interpersonal skills, oral and written presentation skills, and many other important traits. Let us talk about initiative.

Stephen R. Covey in his seminal book, ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ says that,"The difference between people who exercise initiative and those who don't is literally the difference between night and day. I'm not talking about a 25 to 50 percent difference in effectiveness; I'm talking about a 5000-plus percent difference, particularly if they are smart, aware, and sensitive to others." As a manager one of the most important trait you ought to inculcate is the readiness to initiate action; to take responsibility and to get things done. It is called initiative. Business school students must seize every opportunity to demonstrate initiative and prove it to the faculty in general and to themselves in particular that they have it in them to get things done.

If the faculty cannot foster a ‘can do attitude’ in the students they will never become assertive and productive which means they are really not employable. One of the hallmarks of a good manager is that he or she knows the types of tasks that require permission and those that don't. Students need to be put through situations where they must exercise their discretion and learn with experience to distinguish between the two. It is so important for the teacher, trainer, mentor or facilitator, depending on what role the faculty sees itself in, to demonstrate extreme caution and desist from taking decisions for the student.

The faculty has to learn to stop talking and start listening and encouraging students to look for solutions to the problems they are facing. The faculty must ask them to come out with two or three solutions and then encourage them to choose one they think is the best option. The faculty should at best guide them and endorse their course of action or politely suggest looking for a better solution. I see so many trainers strut about pompously all over the place dispensing obsolete academic solutions and defeat the entire purpose of helping students to take initiative.

The worst thing about the faculty playing the oracle or letting unsuspecting students believe that they are the ‘be all and end all’ of all knowledge is not just that it kills initiative among students but that it puts a ceiling on their capacity to learn. It says to them, ‘thou shall go thus far and no further’. It limits them. It cuts off their wings before they have learnt to fly. The members of the faculty must consider themselves as just another resource like books and the Internet for the students to consult when they want to. The trouble the faculty can talk, and how. The faculty has to be trained to listen, listen, listen and listen and hold their horses (tongues). If they don’t do that they kill the initiative in the students. You kill the initiative you kill the manager.

Monday, March 23, 2009

The Company You Keep

A lot of things begin to fall in place once you decide to take control of your life. You become acutely aware of the fact that no one else but you will be responsible for where you will be five years from now. You begin to think about your future and begin to design it. You will realize that there will be two types of people you will come across in your life: one that will discourage you and tell you that nothing good can come out of your plans or your efforts and the others who will encourage you and say that nothing is impossible if you set your heart to it and are willing to pay the price. Which of the two categories of people would you like to spend your time with? Obviously, the latter.
It is important that you pick your friends carefully. Have you ever noticed that you tend to become like your friends? Their attitude, their mannerisms and behavior rubs on to you and slowly you loose your own unique personality and you become like the rest of them. Some old couples even begin to look alike. Not only do birds of a feather flock together birds that flock together slowly acquire the same feather. Like an eagle brought up in a chicken coop that never learns to soar high in the skies and acquires instead all the pedestrian traits of its co inhabitants; you will never live up to your potential if you do not surround yourself with people with positive attitude. You can’t choose your parents and you cannot do anything about the circumstances you were born into but you can certainly choose the friends you will spend time with and the kind of life you will lead.
If you will spend most of your time with people whose attitude sucks you will acquire the same attitude. A person with a negative attitude loses out many opportunities that will come his way because a negative person’s mind is closed to opportunities. A successful person is the one who got a chance and took it. It is up to you to decide which people will influence your thinking and then take positive steps to seek their company. After all where you will be after five or ten years depends on the books you read and the company you keep.
Whenever you embark upon a project or an adventure you want to be told you can do it. Such words of encouragement are vital and they will only come from people who have a ppositive attitude and are no threatened by your success. Such people will egg you on and on days,you are feeling low will listen to you and will inspire you with stories about other people who went through similar circumstances and finally succeeded because they never gave up. Negative people, on the other hand, will tell you how they themselves tried something similar and they failed and that you should give up as you don’t have any chances to succeed. Who would you rather listen to?
I am in no way advocating that you should not be realistic in analyzing your chances of success. You cannot be foolhardy and pursue an unrealistic goal. For example I will be absolutely foolish to set my self a goal of beating Usain Bolt or Asafa Powell in a hundred meter dash. So much for ‘whatever the human mind can conceive and believe it can accomplish’. One needs to be guided by the serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Yet your friends have a very powerful influence which at best of times the most independent amongst us cannot ignore. You need to be very careful about the friends you choose and the company you keep. Surround yourself with positive people; chances are you will always get positive results in whatever you do.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Price of Success is Not Negotiable

No one ever found himself on top of the Mount Everest taking a morning walk. It requires a dream, a goal, a strategy, training, practice, determination, commitment and execution of the plan to reach the summit. All these things are equally important. You can’t leave out anything or ignore even one of these. The price of success is not negotiable. You can add a few more things like focus, teamwork and good communication and interpersonal skills to the list depending on what field you are working in. As the Olympian's motto goes 'No pain no gain.

It is easy to admire a Sachin Tendulkar bat like a champion because he makes it look so simple. But people who know Sachin will tell you how disciplined he is and how long he practices in the nets. I have seen Jeeve Milkha Singh practice at the Golf Course in Chandigarh for hours on end when he was a teenager. One look at him and you knew here is a champion in the making. Navjot Sidhu’s rise to stardom as one of India’s best opening batsmen along with Sunil Gavaskar was a through the same route called hard work. I watched him practice in the Gymkhana Club in Patiala and would be amazed by his commitment and focus. Abhinav Bindra’s single-minded pursuit of his goal should be an inspiration for everyone and encourage us to set big goals and reach them.

All these sportsmen know that spectacular success is always preceded by not so spectacular preparation. There are times along the way when you could feel lonely and disheartened. What keeps you going at such times is if you visualize yourself at the victory stand and everyone in the stadium applauding you. So it is important for you to visualize your self as a successful person even before you are successful. I remember when I had set myself a goal to lose twenty kilos of extra weight that I had put on I visualized myself as having Mohammad Ali’s body. I even pasted a picture with his body and my face in my dream book. It took me a year to lose the twenty kilos and though I did not acquire the same muscles as Mohammad Ali I have never looked fitter in my life. To be able to say that at 57 is some achievement. Every time I wanted to give up my workout I would look at my goal and the visual and would be encouraged to spend those minutes on the treadmill. Age is no barrier to achieve what you set out to achieve as long as the goal is reasonable. We will talk about reasonable goals another day.

Focus on Stimulating Supply not Demand

The problem is not that so many economists have gone berserk, the problem is that the y are still at the helm of affairs trying to get the world out of a massive financial crisis which would not have occurred if they were not running the economy in the first place. One definition of madness is that you continue to do the same things and expect different results. Policy makers, in their effort to pull the world out of the global economic crisis continue to pursue the same policies which they pursued to bring it to a brink. Economies the world over have gone into tail spin and millions have lost their jobs because of the policies put in place by these worthies and they still continue to pursue the same policies and expect us to believe that the results this time around will be different. At best of times economists are known to be experts who will know tomorrow why the things they predicted yesterday didn’t happen today. Politicians all over the world have done precious little to boot them out and bring in people who are in touch with reality and the markets and are capable of keeping things simple.
One of the simplest lessons one learns when one begins to study economics or sociology or even psychology is that human beings have unlimited needs, wants and desires. I think that translates to mean that there is unlimited demand and that it does not need to be stimulated. But the ivory tower economists whether they are in China, USA, Europe or India, are busy advising their political masters to throw money out of the window by way of stimulus packages to boost demand. One of the easiest things to do is to spend money when you have it. USA perhaps has the money because all they have to do is get the printing presses to work overtime and as long as the world trades in dollars they have no problem in announcing one stimulus package after another. But it is not the same with countries like India. We do not have that luxury. We should be very wary of following the US lead and implement stimulus packages. We just need to go back to basics and remember demand needs no boosting. The solution for India and even the USA lies in focusing on boosting supply not demand.
Let us look at a few examples. Starting with basic needs for survival is there any way there will not be enough demand for food, fuel and gas. These things are mandatory and we have to buy them whatever the price. For other things which we call discretionary ‘wants’ and on which the health of an economy really depends; we will buy them when the price is right. Who wouldn’t buy all those items like an iphone, another car, a plasma TV, a handyman, if they were available at a price which is affordable for the consumer and profitable for the manufacturer. Demand will surface the moment the price dips to the right level. The problem is that manufacturers are unable to supply products at a price at which people are willing to buy. If the government was to focus on the supply side of the equation and help manufacturers improve their manufacturing facilities by giving them monetary incentives to implement technological improvements to boost supply at affordable price we will see the light at the end of the tunnel. The government could cut excise duties and other taxes. That will at least keep the factories running and keep people in jobs. By focusing on boosting demand by pouring money into the market the economists and the politicians, who are unfortunately in charge at the moment are, as a wit put it, hell bent on switching off the light at the end of the tunnel.
One of the reasons why products are not available at affordable prices is because a lot of capacities were built at a time when prices of everything were bloated because of the policies of the economists focused on boosting demand. Subprime crisis is a result of the effort to boost demand by putting money in the hands of people to buy houses who could not afford them. They obviously bought ‘assets’ at uneconomical prices meaning they overpaid. Similarly industrial capacities were built by unsuspecting entrepreneurs and are now realizing they spent too much creating them. The policy makers should focus on helping these owners who will obviously be capital constrained, to cut their losses and sell their assets to people who can make them viable at a price they are viable. The more they delay this worse will the situation become. The government should play an active role in identifying these assets and insure they do not sit idle or run unprofitably. Every asset is profitable at some price. The government should go all out to insure the transfer of assets which have become economically unviable because of the high price of acquisition of the current owners to new owners at lower economically viable price. This is where the government should be spending its money and not waste it in trying to artificially boost demand. The government has to help the market find its own level of efficiency and not try to impose its decision on it. No government can ever dictate the market. The best it can do is identifying the trend correctly and help it along and not go against the trend. There is no other reason to explain the failure of the massive infusions that the governments have made without making the slightest dent in reversing the tide of the current crisis. Let us face it the current owners who acquired their assets at a high price during an era of easy credit are now feeling the pinch and would want to get out and minimize losses. This will help create supply at lower prices and thus stimulate demand.
The current policies the governments are pursuing are the same as the ones they followed to bring on the financial Tsunami. By flooding the economies with massive amount of money in an effort to stimulate demand they are sowing the seeds of an even bigger disaster. Ten years from now they will be trying to stop an avalanche of inflation that infusion of money today will definitely trigger. The world economy will not emerge from the recession unless the price of goods and services falls to prices at which demand emerges. When you put unearned money in the hands of people the prices will go up, not down. Till the production houses start churning out products at reasonable prices the demand will not return. Focus on supply the demand will take care of itself.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

An Idea is Worth a Million

A picture is worth a thousand words and an idea worth a million bucks. We will talk about a picture another day and focus on ideas today. A story is told by Harold Ross, editor of New Yorker Magazine, in 1935 of a man who went into Coca cola offices in 1896 and said he had an idea which could help them make millions and millions of dollars and will reveal it to them on payment of $50000. The executive at Coca Cola was very amused and shooed him off thinking the man was crazy. Remember in 1896 the entire cash available at Coca Cola was just about 50000 dollars. It is still a very large amount today but It was huge then. The visitor persisted for many weeks before he was allowed to meet the founder and president of Coca Cola Company, Asa Griggs Candler. Back then aerated drinks were not sold in bottles. They were sold at soda fountains and one had to go to the retailer, usually a drug store, to drink the refreshing cola. After a solemn agreement had been drawn up the stranger forwarded a neatly folded piece of paper on which was the million dollar two-word advice.
“Bottle it.” It said.
The rest, as they say, is history..
The story may not be factually true. Even Harold Ross (A High school drop-out by the way) the founder of The New Yorker magazine in his note calls it a legend. A biographer of Candler tells us that he got the idea not for $ 50000 from a strange but free from his wayward nephew. Candler did not implement it for many years which might have helped the legendary “bottle it” story to spread and be accepted as one of those simple ideas that changed the course of an iconic company. Whether the story is factually true or not is not important here what is important is an idea can change your or a company’s life and implementing an idea and making it a commercial success can change the course of a company and make history.
An idea is at the root of a business plan. If you have an idea which you feel will help fulfill a need of a large number of people and you are passionate about it you will have a big business. So it is important to keep the ideas flowing. There are some naturally talented people who can, by simply looking at things or processes, see that they can and should be different or done differently. It is possible for mere mortals like us to too train ourselves to generate ideas. The first step to generate new ideas is to question the old way of doing whatever it is that you are doing especially if you expect different results.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Pessimists and Optimists

Interesting place to start introspecting. This post was not actually intended to be here. I wrote it as response to Ashish's post. I was too lazy to write another so here it is again. Ashish says he has been called a 'cynic' and a 'pessimist' by the two people who know him best. I have been at the other end of the spectrum most of my life. I do not remember ranting or ever play the blame game seriously as far back as I can remember.I might blame someone momentary but I think God built in me an automatic system to banish the blame almost immediately. Somewhere, I guess, I feel it is a sin. In fact I kinda use to loose my temper when someone around me would turn to whining and blaming.

I am a much more tolerant now to the pessimists, cynics and even the whiners of the world. I realise we need them all. They are the ones who look into the minutest details of everything important. They are the ones who organise major tournaments and events in the world.They insure governments function smoothly and trains run on schedule. In fact they are the ones who make those precise schedules in the first. They help make our dining experience a prized memory. Leave it to a reckless optimist and you are sure to have a nightmare to haunt you for the rest of your life. I wouldn't want a fiery flamboyant female to be my surgeon if I ever find myself on an operation table. I would actually run out of a plane if I learnt it was being piloted by an irrational optimistic bloke like me. We definitely need our cynics and pessimists to run the world. Of course they sometimes run it aground like they have done with meticulous precision with the beautifully planned sub prime lending. That of course, is another story.

But we also need the eternal optimists to make the world a beautiful, buoyant, wonderful rollercoaster experience we would like to talk about sipping tea on a wintry night in a camp in the hills into the wee hours of the night when we are old. We need our interesting storytellers and courageous adventurers who realise the dangers of their venture only after they have already jumped, head first, right into the middle of it. Otherwise who would write 'Old Man and the Sea' and who would have discovered America or India... and who would discover a new planet inhabited by people more intelligent and more advanced and more cultured than the earthlings. Without both optimists and the pessimists we would not have the bulls and the bears.
Yes I am a lot more accepting of the cynics and the pessimists of the world today than I was a couple of decades ago. As to being able to say 'no' I absolutely find it impossible to say so. Harpreet my wife, God bless her soul, used to say thank God you are not a woman or you'll always be pregnant.
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