Sunday Posts

In the last 24 hours, I had two very contrasting experiences with air travel, which, I believe, illustrate how to (and not to) compete globally. The first event happened around yesterday afternoon. My Sister and Brother-in-Law, along with their 5 year old daughter, turned up at the Delhi airport for their 530pm flight to Kolkata. Indigo, an Indian airline whose principal claim of differentiation is based on their punctuality and professionalism, informed them that the flight is late, delayed by an hour or so. As they checked in, though, the flight continued to be delayed. By the time my sister started talking about this in WhatsApp, it was already around 9pm. I, with many experiences with delayed flights, almost casually commented that the airline must have been taking good care of them! To my surprise, it turned out that not only the airline has not been able to confirm when the flight would leave, they did not offer food, any place to stay, and their ground staff has simply dis...

Steve Jobs' death certificate says that he was a 'high tech entrepreneur'. Indeed, but he is more than that: He is an entrepreneur's entrepreneur, an icon, a representative of a generation that is now passing. In his famous Stanford commencement address, he talked about his feeling that 'he dropped the baton as it was passed on from the earlier generation of entrepreneurs'. He was not just a carrier though: He was one who redefined the game. An entrepreneur exists to solve problems. Steve Jobs was not a technology whiz or a finance guru. Steve Wozniak talked about his 'instinctive feel' of what the people wanted from technology. That makes him a rare genius, because most tech entrepreneurs don an evangelical garb and preach to people on technology. Steve Jobs seemed to have turned this evangelism on its head and became people's voice in the world of technology. That's where he made a difference. Indeed, he famously said - 'it is not custo...

After a long time, my life returned to normalcy yesterday. An after-office pub trawl lasted till 11pm, not because of the quality of the wine - I was merely on Guinness for a belated St Patrick's Day celebration - but because of the quality of the conversation. Indeed, it was mostly office stuff, to start with. It was about the urgency to construct a vision, something concrete and achievable, yet something that breaks the cycle of trivialities that seem to engulf our work. That way, we are at an interesting point. We are affiliated to a couple of universities, and we run their courses. The recent audits and examination boards went well, and everyone is jubilant that we seemed to have met our objectives. However, to me, this is just the starting point and not the end. To my colleagues who had a more public sector background, satisfying the very high standards of the regulators and the accrediting bodies is the goal, an end. To me and the colleagues coming from private sector trainin...

Changing organizations can be a thrilling, all consuming, life enhancing experience. It is not easy, and often it may look quite scary. But, if one's convinced about the pay-off, not just in money terms but the value one would create, every bit of the trouble seems worth it. But, then, there is nothing straightforward about it. As I told a colleague recently, everything is culturally grounded. This is something management gurus often don't get it, because they are not inside an organization. It is often easy for consultants to see and do things to change an organization, because they see and work from outside. If they have the mandate, they can follow the cold logic of management rationality. However, this de -personalizes the organization, as the logic employed can be only of money and shareholder returns: Such re-engineering can only end up with a narrow focus on stock value at the expense of everything else. Changing from inside, though difficult, can be more rewarding, in t...

Next time I need to ship something, I won't use Fedex . This is because of a simple error made by the person who attempted delivery of a package to me yesterday and left a Sorry We Missed You card. The error is that instead of writing the Airway Bill number on the card, he wrote my phone number instead. It did not take me long to recognize it. But, then after a maze of phone calls to different call centres and depots, I realized how de -humanized the system has become, and how this simple error can not be rectified. Now, the package has to be sent back and the original sender has to contact me again. What a waste of energy, time, every resource and disruption even, of businesses and even business relationship. I can think of a whole story plot that can come out of it. Even a possible title, Fedex fails to deliver. But, this isn't funny. I am trying to laugh because I don't have a choice. There was no point being angry with anyone. The Call Centre workers could not do anyt...

As a part of my work on the Leadership Programme, I came to realize that one of the more important aspects that one needs to understand about leadership is what leadership is not. I have been reading Warren Bennis and his warnings about Pseudo -leadership is very real: I do think the world is full of pseudo -leaders and the big problems we face comes from the failure to call the wheat from chaff a lot of times. To start with, take the distinction, following Max Weber, between Power and Authority. Weber argued that POWER is about the ability to force people to obey, whereas the AUTHORITY is when one is obeyed without having to resort to force. In real life, however, this distinction gets blurred and too many people confuse the two. This happens on both sides of the table, incidentally; those who obey sometimes mistake the power - the senior person's ability to fire or punish the junior person - as some sort of automatic authority, and those who are in the driver's seat someti...

In India, I met several people this time who talked about the requirement to create leaders. Not Netas , of course, India has no dearth of them. People I spoke to were speaking from a purely business perspective - they thought they needed staff who can cope with uncertainty, handle independent responsibility, be entrepreneurial at work and stay the course despite difficulties. One has to take such realizations in perspective - not just of the current gloomy economic climate, but also of the unique staffing challenge in India, where, it is thought, that the Senior Management talent is high quality and low skill manpower supply is abundant, but there is acute shortage of Front line service executives, Middle Managers etc. And, this is where the leadership skills, defined by the four dimensions mentioned above, are critically required. The Indian businesses today are inextricably caught between the global recession and an undying confidence in the prospect of their businesses. Recently, a...

Managing in India is changing, partly because India is changing, but also because of the recession. The big change, of course, is that the power has shifted away from the employees to the employers. The party, which continued for a decade and resulted in some steepest rises in the white collar salary anywhere in the world, is finally over. While this may sound like a good thing to small entrepreneurs and business managers, the current situation is definitely hurting and creating new management challenges that must be dealt with. I have seen the recession from close quarters in Britain. However, I think Indian labour markets are a bit different, not just because we don't have social security but because professional lifestyle is relatively new in India. Job loss is traumatic in any society, but it is far more traumatic when there is an element of humiliation involved and the people around you - family and friends - fail to stand by you. A big proportion of India's service sector...

Cricket is a great game because it always delivers the unexpected. Just as it did, a few minutes earlier, when Sourav Ganguly , playing his last innings, was foxed first ball by Jason Krejza , the rookie Australian off-spinner. A duck in the end - Sourav was so incredulous that he did not take down his pads after he went back to Pavilion . The crowd, which cheered him in, stood up for him on his way back, sportingly, and greeted him as a hero as they always did. It has indeed been a long journey for Sourav , one of the most colourful cricketers in our generation. He came in with public doubts about his temperament. He performed, and forced himself in the team, in the face of a consistent whispering campaign in the media. I do remember watching his whole first innings in Test Match cricket, at the Lord's, where he scored a balanced, well-composed century. Another century in following test, as well as a few wickets through his part-time bowling, sealed his place in the team soon t...

Yes, to Prince Phillip, a tribute is due on his 87th birthday. A representative of a generation living in an empire in their imagination. Read some of his famous observations here: http://news.uk.msn.com/prince-philip-greatest-gaffes.aspx?cp-documentid=6740352&imageindex=15#6740352