"The Quick Vs the Dead" .... when does the defeat begin ??

Attended a top level day long “brainstorming session” of concerned executives of large successful corporation. Needless to say, the topic was how to stay relevant, get back the lost glories, innovate faster and be nimble in execution.

First two hours of the session was fairly chaotic.  An over abundance of knowledge and awareness on everyone's part, of whats wrong with the current system. That clearly showed “what we doing wrong” is what the smaller, nimbler players of today are "doing right". Our sense of inadequacy had one source. Comparison with what is helping the nimble to succeed.

One small fable of the wise started floating in my thoughts !

In a small swampy green patch of earth, lived a centipede. Very elegant in its walk and a slender, smooth body to navigate through the small holes of the ant hill - it never had dearth of food. The place had a long supply of small insects.

It owned that patch of earth.

One fine morning, after a bout of shower, when the centipede walked out of an ant hill, it saw new creature.

A small, happy, jumpy, frog with green shiny skin !

The centipede owned the land. Had a lot of confidence, to the level of arrogance. It saw ONE big weakness in the frog. 

Only four legs ??? How can the poor thing survive in this brutal world ?

However, before the centipede completed it thought, the frog jumped quickly, in a blink of an eye, threw it long tongue and captured many small insects in one swift move those were literally kept in the breakfast platter for the centipede.

The first reaction was fear. The fear of frog out there.
But that was not the real damage.

After licking its tongue and savoring the food, the frog came  to the centipede and said - “How do you even walk with those many legs ? Which one you put ahead of the other  ? How do you co-ordinate ? May be that's why you are so slow”.

That was the real damage. Something the centipede had done all its life and thought it did so well, was shattered in its brain.

Self doubts clouded it. Its 100 legs stumbled up in each other and it came to a stand still. Frozen state !!!

The patch of earth belonged to the frog.

Up until one day, the dying and starving centipede, got over its self doubt. Prized its own 100 legs, and innovated wings. 

The “Flying centipede” went in side the ant hill and haunted outside too as quickly as the frog did.

So, all large corporations with solid assets, when they are threatened by the quick and the focused,  need to remember 3 things.

- Do not under estimate the new and the nimble
- Do not be afraid and get in to a self destructive state of freeze
- And innovate something unique, not copy the quick


(Snippets from author’s pre-published book “Fables Ltd” - you may use these stories duly  acknowledging the source)

Diversity - A Poem

Team is not a herd
Glow in your own color,
And yet, form a collage-spectacular,
To make a beautiful Rainbow,  paint the arc with VIBGYOR

A team is a beautiful music
Not just one octave,
Tie not the strings together,
Not all notes are C’ Sharp in a guitar

Wear your personality, up your sleeve
And to conduct the best walk
Bring your most stylish avatar
All are not black cocktail gowns, in the closet of a super star

Talent Centric Performance Management

I see a lot of hullabaloo about the new ways of performance management in corporations.
The recent one making waves is “Deloitte’s” ( supposedly) radical new way of doing performance management.

I still believe the very fundamentals of “performance management” is being overlooked by the experts.

Let me narrate a story of a coconut farmer.

A coconut farmer in  a non-industrialised part of the world, had two critical employees. An elephant and a monkey.

The farmer employed the elephant to use its weight to rub against the coconut tree, shake it up, so the coconuts fall down.

He was happy selling the coconuts that fell down. A very nice way of plucking them without going through climbing up the tree (without any branches really to support the climbing).

The farmer had another employee, the monkey ! Who he employed to jump around in the yard full of dry shells of coconut, to soften them, so that he can sell them as coir-goods merchants.

When the business picked up, he was not really happy with any of his employees performance.

The elephant was shaking the tree, indiscriminately. The tenderer of the tender coconuts used to fall down. Such a waste !!!

The monkey was jumping around all day in a yard full of dry shells, but was not good enough to mash the shells of coconut to the likings of coir-merchants.

The farmer was not too happy with what he could produce and he put both his employees in a “PIP (Performance improvement plan)”.

A PIP that reduced the food given to elephant, so that it could reduce weight. And a plan that provided monkeys, ingredients to by jumpier.

None of them worked to improve the business.

Business was driving the farmer crazy, until one day a hermit was passing by and suggested him to change the role of the elephant and the monkey.

The monkey was trained to choose the ripe coconut and made in charge of plucking the right coconuts from the trees.

He was really happy climbing up the trees. The elephant, used its best talent, its gift, its weight to crush the shells of the coconuts in the yard, under its massive steps.

…and the farmer was happy !

There are two fundamental aspects to one’s contributions to business (a.k.a. performance).

The talent, the gift - each one inherently has !

1 Peter 4:10
“As every man hath received the gift”  - The gifts of grace, whatever they may be, are talents entrusted to individual Christians for the good of the whole Church;

And the love for the work one does -

“And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voice of the day and the voice of the night” - “The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran”.

So, whose responsibility is it to deliver the right performance ?

The positioning of each employee matters most in the the organization's performance.
And to create the optimal positioning we need to focus on 3 things.

1. Employees:  to identify what their talent truly is
2. The leadership: to see the talent, and find the fitment within the organization
3. And a system and a process to connect, the above two.

In the nature’s scheme of things, performance management is more of a leadership function than an employee function.

One can not provide feedback to the elephant to climb faster ( the coconut tree) , and expect it to improve its performance.

I would urge the organizations to look at this very simply. And help employees identify their talent, and  organizations to open its needs for verity of talents.


Its like electrical engineering - "impedance matching" with a social interface !!

Its just natural. Flow with it !!!!

Building "Innovative" teams

The term "Innovation" is over-discussed in every corporate literature you put your eyes on. It has been sliced, diced, analyzed by many, coming from diverse back grounds.
I have personally delivered many key note speeches, in verity of  employee forums, manager excellence forums, conferences etc.

So, when my company's Director of Work Place Resources, asked me to come in to his APJC WPR leaders meeting to talk through some of my personal journey through this, my first thought was, "One more innovation talk ??" !

However, that thought changed very quickly - I started realizing the the work place resources team is not same as the computer engineering teams and students I have been talking to.
They are architects, Operation Managers, Supply Chain managers, Hotel management and hospitality personals etc.

So the subject has to go deeper in to fundamental building blocks of "Innovation" or more importantly an "Innovating team  culture".

So, putting together all my successful personal experiments with building "innovative Work Culture" so far.

A lot of experts over-analyze and be very granular in defining "Innovation", and separating it out from "Creativity". While the fact is, one needs creativity to innovate.
And to most human beings, when they "create" something, that gets accepted / appreciated / utilized or implemented, it gives them a "high" !!

And that high can drive them to create the next thing.

So, many years ago, when I was searching for the right way to create the "HIGH" for a "TEAM", not an individual, I set myself through a long journey of experiments with the organization I have access to. After all, individuals can be creative / innovative, but not necessarily every one in a team can be so. And in that case, how do you create a culture of innovation that rises above individual creativity and becomes more of a team property ? Its definitely not any kind of a complete list. But the ones that work for my situations !!!

• Connect the team to the higher purpose
  • Three stone cutters were cutting stone under the blazing sun ! A passerby inquired the first one, "What are you doing ?". The person replied "Can't you see ? I am cutting stone ??". The passerby moved on and asked the second stone cutter the same question, and he got a different answer - "I am doing a Job, that end of the day feeds me and my family. I do not care what job as long as it continues to sustain me". The passer by moved on to the third person and asked the same question and he responded with a big smile "I am building the most beautiful stone monument that will make my city proud".
  • All of them did the same job, under same excruciating working conditions. But only one of them was connected to the "purpose".
• Size does NOT matter
  • Toyota records a million innovations in a year. Yes.. you heard it ! Million. These are ideas, implemented ! 2500 a day !! Well, it comes from every one making some change, any amount of change, small of big, within their scope. All valid ideas that moves the needle in the right direction even by an inch is implemented and credited as "innovation". This keeps the team in that perpetual "High". Ideas, small or big, if solving a problem of today (or tomorrow), cherish it.
• "Happy Whining Sessions" instead of "Innovation Camps"
  • An engineer who is very frustrated by the build time of a component, can look at the engineer in the next cube and see that he or she is also dealing with the same pain. Then accepts it as way of life and lives with the long build time !! He is bothered by it. But tolerating because every one else is tolerating it ! How do your get that "frustration" as positive energy and farm it across the team ?
  • I could be the first one to  suggest "whining" session as tool to innovate   However, be mindful about the adverb. Happy whining !!! In a team forum just complaining about the things that are not working and often leads to ideas to solve today's problems very effectively. Just take the resolve of NOT living with something that is bothering us, just because others are living with it. What this exercise does is brings the team awareness to the top of the mind problems, and practical innovations happen as ideas get crowd sourced in that forum. Be civil though BTW, this is going to be much cheaper way to building an innovative culture than going to those expensive "Innovation Camps"
• Celebrate "failures" (just like we celebrate success)
  • Some ideas die ! Period. But the spirit of idea originator does not have to. If the team subscribes the idea, puts energy in implementing towards it, and it still fails - get together, cut a cake and congratulate all who contributed to it, learn a lesson or two and move on to the next idea !
• Diversity of thoughts
  • I once met one of top choreographers of the our time. As we know, each choreographer has a signature style that they excel in. Contemporary, Hip Hop, Spanish etc. And most of them as very very good at what they do. However, a few of them remain fresh in what they produce for a long long time. When I asked this honorable choreographer, her secrets of staying fresh in her dance, she said "I get my work reviewed by a team of younger experts and take their opinion to shape it. The result is a fusion. And Fusion is an easy way to innovate". When I started thinking about it, I related this to last key 100 patents generated in Packet networking world, and most of them turned out to be some uniqueness that pre-packet era TDM communication system had.
  • Don't hire your clones. Make a Gen Y the reviewer of your ideas. Get a woman's prospective on your design. On and on ways of bringing in diversity of thought in to the teams work and innovation.
• Lastly, Share the idea to convert it in to an Innovation :
  • The core of any great idea comes from ONE Person. Its nature - the source is atomic ! There are NO TWO fathers of an idea. But the moment its out, it can morph in to an even better one. It can be improvised by others. The final shape of the idea can be way different than what was conceived by a person.
  • However, the originator's pride can be a huge hindrance for a great idea to see the light of the day ! Make others believe that they own a part of the idea. Its not YOUR idea that others are executing to. That's the quickest way to move from idea to an implemented innovation.

Stay Calm and Innovate !!