The Digital Nomads

“The Millennials view of success isn't necessarily a house, a well paying job and a (white) picket fence. There's a huge shift towards defining success as working in terms of things that one truly believes in, and appreciating experiences over material possessions.” - Karoli Hindriks, owner Jobbatical, a site for digital job hunters on a global scale.

INSIGHT
In the 60’s and 70’s too, Western youth were looking for what they believed in. They were the drug-induced  peace-seeking nomads. In the present globally connected times the Millennial digital nomads earn their way through experiences.

See the Vision, Feel the Vision

In July ‘15, Bill McDermott CEO, SAP, met with an accident and lost the vision in one of his eyes. He is now back at the helm and says, “I am living proof that vision is not what you just see but it's what you feel and how you make other people feel.”

Insight
To the leader's mind’s eye, the promised land he wants to take his flock to, is clearly visible. But it is  only when he FEELS the promise of the destination he is leading them to, that he can carry his people with him.

Energy of Motivation

“Success is never owned; it is only rented -- and the rent is due every day.” - Author Rory Vaden

Insight
Success can either inflate our ego, or it can inflate our motivation to do even better. The first is least desirable.  The second, motivation, can create positive energy which should go into defining new priorities that emerge from the strength and the consequences of the success to create a new balance. #Connect2Coach

Focused Motivation

"To compose, I need to be happy and to have free mind space, " says A.R. Rahman the Oscar winning music composer. While Leander Paes, who won the US Open Mixed Doubles title along with Martina Hingis says, "if I can keep Martina happy,  if I can keep her relaxed,  the tennis I don't even have to worry about. "

#MyLearning
Focusing our motivation results in our single-minded immersion and harnessing of our emotions into performing and learning. The emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.

9 Thoughts to Craft The Leader In You

Though much of the art and science of leadership remains unchanged over time, it needs to be crafted to suit the needs of the current environment. The following stories of contemporary leaders and views of leadership gurus, should give you food for thought to craft your individual leadership style and craft it to suit your time and context.. 

1.Reinvent Yourself  

"Companies fail or are successful because they either get or miss market transitions", says John Chambers, CEO and Chairman of Cisco. ..."What Cisco has done is that we compete on market transitions, not against competitors...We have reinvented ourselves five times"

Reinventing is not a necessary evil to be undertaken to undertake to survive. Being inquisitive - a hankering to learn new things, can lead to seeing the world of work as an opportunity and make it easier to adapt - a quality essential in the present times.

2 Give your people permission to fail

"One of the saddest things that happen with creativity...I think sometimes it isn't expressed because of fear," says Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel. "Everyone is born very very creative. But at some point it can be scary to do something new." To overcome this fear, Snapchat encourages the idea of 'failing fast', since it's better that those failures happen in private before being released on users.

3.Play for Win-Win

Unlike Steve Ballmer, Satya Nadella is clear that times have changed and he is taking tough decisions. For him,  competition is not a zero sum game. Just because Android wins does not mean Microsoft loses.  If Android wins great. I'll also put Office 365 on Android so it can be a win - win,  it doesn't have to be a win - lose.

3. Make the right life choices

"There is nothing like work-life balance, there is only one life", believes Padmasree Warrior, former CTSO of Cisco. Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman Of Microsoft India, agrees with her wholeheartedly. "You live life the way you want it. Life is about choices," he say

4.Practice brevity in communication

A Microsoft research reports that the average person's attention span is just 8 seconds, a second less than that of a goldfish.  For humans it used to be 12 seconds in 2000. Abundant reason why CEOs and you and me, need to communicate well internally and externally in the most effective manner.

5. Surround yourself with the best people

Leslie Gaines-Ross, Chief Reputation Strategist usually gets involved worn CEOS in their first 100 days  that they  build up their credibility quickly. And this what she tells them, in that order - listen to customers, surround yourself with the best senior management and communicate with the board.

6. Make your knowledge 'future ready'
"Half-life of knowledge is getting shorter and shorter with new breakthrough technologies and discoveries," says Management Guru Jagdish Seth, Management guru.."Therefore old perspectives and evidence are no longer relevant.We need to develop or discover new perspectives which are suitable for tomorrow's world"

7. Tailor your communication to the audience

Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik explains how in the Gita, there is a three way communication between Krishna the speaker, and three receivers; Arjuna, the seeker of knowledge, Sanjay the transmitter of the knowledge  and Dhritirashtra, who is eager to know only the fate of his sons. This, Devdutt observes, is aimed to draw attention to the complexity of any communication. Are people around you interested in what you are saying (Arjuna),  are they merely memorising (Sanjay), or are they just disinterested or even suspicious (Dhritirashtra)? 

Tailor your communication accordingly.

8. Be Considerate of your people

On his last journey from Guwahati to Shillong for a speaking engagement, the late president's car was being escorted in front by three soldiers travelling in a Gypsy. Seeing one of them standing throughout the journey, Kalam repeatedly asked his aide to request him to sit down, but his aide was not able to get him on the phone. At the end of the journey, Kalam invited the soldier to his room, shook hands with him, thanked him and enquired whether he had eaten.

9. Appreciate - Motivate

Debutant Actress Ruhi Singh says, "When you enter the sets of (film director) Madhur Bhandarkar's film, you hear words like 'jalwa' (charisma/luster/ splendor) and 'aag laga de' (be on fire) which is a driving force for us. I had to shoot a waterfall sequence in the night, and it was freezing cold. But I could only do it because (Madhur) makes sure everyone feels comfortable before filming." 


Call To Action
Time to craft your own leadership recipe? Set the fire going!

Communicate to Motivate

Debutant Actress Ruhi Singh says, "When you enter the sets of (film director) Madhur Bhandarkar's film, you hear words like 'jalwa' (charisma/luster/ splendor) and 'aag laga de' (be on fire) which is a driving force for us. I had to shoot a waterfall sequence in the night, and it was freezing cold. But I could only do it because (Madhur) makes sure everyone feels comfortable before filming. "

#Viewpoint
Good leaders communicate to #motivate. They channelise the desire and energy of their people to achieve things they know must be done for mutual success.

Starve your doubts. Believe

When he first approached his boss at Kuoni India, with the idea of offering visa processing services to the American embassy in 2001, Zubin Karkaria met with understandable skepticism. Theirs was the toughest visa regime, with more processes and documentation than any other country. But Kuoni had nothing to lose in letting Karkaria  try, and when he did submit the proposal - the Americans said yes! Today, the visa services operation has turned into a global money spinner. It has captured 50% share of the market and contributes to 60% of Kuoni’s FY14 profits.

5 Ways to Never Give Up

What do you do when a project you have invested everything on - your blood, sweat, tears, mind and heart - proves to be a failure? Why, just get up, dust yourself and get going again, of course! Here are five stories I have gathered of how some people did it. 
1. Take pride in past success
Dustin Brown ranked 102, on beating Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon, but losing his very next match to Viktor Troicki. 
"It doesn't matter if I lost or not, no will ever be able to take that (beating Nadal) away from me."

2. Respect failure
Howard Schultz after a major setback at Starbucks.
"Celebrate failure, learn from the failures, and not hide from mistakes". He also spoke of the bottle of Mazagran, a coffee drink he helped launch in the 90's. It proved be a spectacular failure. He now keeps a bottle of the drink on his table, to remind him to do a reality check on his success when he's up, and equally - never give up, when he's down. 

3. Reconnect with your passion.
Filmmaker Deepa Mehta on the failure of her film 
'Monsoon' at the box office. 
She remembered her father, who, when told about her decision to take up filmmaking, had encouraged her, but cautioned her about life's unknowns, "You make a film because you have incredible passion and because you want to tell a story. If it does well, good. But if it doesn't, you can't do anything about it, but you've had the satisfaction of doing something honest." 

4. Reframe strategy
Satya Nadella on how he handles the failure of the Windows OS for mobile phones. 
Competition for him, is not a zero sum game. He believes, "Just because Android wins does not mean Microsoft loses. If Android wins great. I'll also put Office 365 on Android so it can be a win - win, it doesn't have to be a win - lose."

5. Keep the spirit
After Edmund Hillary's great, but failed attempt, at scaling Mount Everest in 1952.
Though he regarded himself a failure. He did not however, lose his spirit. At a function organized to recognize the attempt, people greeted him with thunderous applause. Hillary, walked onto the stage, balled a fist at the picture of the mountain and said, "You beat me the first time, but I’ll beat you the next time, because you’ve grown all you are going to grow… but I’m still growing."  

He beat Everest on 29th May 1953.

The Awareness Framework

Awareness precedes choice and choice precedes results. - Robin Sharma

When Paul O'Neill arrived as CEO at Alcoa, he didn't hold his troops to criteria that CEOs commonly use, such as profit margins, sales growth rates, or share appreciation. His singular standard: time lost to employee injuries. By focusing on just one  highly impactful habit, O’Neill managed to create change at different levels of awareness within the organization, the company's annual net income went up by five times and its market capitalization rose by $27 billion.

The Awareness Framework can help us understand the deeper and wide ranging implications of the focus on safety:

1. Task Awareness: Empowered employees began to offer suggestions and accidents were immediately brought to the attention of executives. As a result, the accident rate declined — ultimately to about 5% of the national average.

2. Situational Awareness:  Workers realizing that the management was keen to examine and improve every inefficient and dangerous manufacturing process, increased  communication among employees. Line workers offered suggestions to improve efficiency, and the company underwent a renaissance.

3. Emergent Awareness: Employees started recommending business improvements that otherwise would have remained out of sight. One day, a low-level employee made a suggestion that quickly worked its way to the general manager. Within a year, profits on the product doubled. By creating patterns of better communication, a chain reaction started that lifted profits.

4.  Self Awareness:  ''Paul came in and got us to do things we never thought we could do,'' says L. Richard Milner, head of Alcoa's automotive unit. The safety habit influenced every part of the employees’ lives - how they worked, ate, played, lived, spent, and communicated. Employees’ thoughts, feelings and  beliefs and their attitudes and reactions to changes in the environment improved. Their attitudes to people around  having a different point of view also took a turn for the better. Hard-core, ladder-climbing, capitalist executives turned into soft, feel-good samaritans, adept at identifying, co-opting, and shaping behavior patterns to increase profits.

By creating awareness around safety, O'Neill unleashed a pattern with the power to start a chain reaction. A reaction that improved a host of processes in the organization, created a employee-friendly environment, aligned people to the company’s goals and increased profits.

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Backing Your People

An industrialist complained to Modi about a few bureaucrats who he felt were "not working properly and should be changed." Modi's rejoinder was scathing: "You manage your company, and let me manage my government."

 Leadership Lesson :
Standing up for your people instils in them the confidence to take initiative, undertake and innovate in their duties.