5 Stolen Recipes to Do and Become

A recipe has no soul, You as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe.” - Thomas Keller, chef, writer, restaurateur.

Every artist gets asked the question, "Where do you get your ideas?" The honest artist answers, "I steal them."

Here are a 5 stolen life recipes to which I have added my soul (aka my learning spin) to;

1. Adapt to the times

Restaurateurs today, realising that food is not the only carrot drawing diners in are giving more emphasis to the design and giving their places a makeover. Attention is being paid to the decor, layout, music. lighting, the clean fragrance (of herbs or fresh coffee and bread or wood charring in a clay oven) comely staff. All of which come together very nicely to pull in the customers. Ultimately however, as Chef Solomon says, as good as the decor maybe, it will be the food which will pull in the customer.  

Know when to focus on targets, when to pay attention to emotions and when to focus on the changing needs of customers. Be sensitive to the ecosystem and respond accordingly, taking care to never forget your essence.

2. Connect to the environment

When we think of the word 'food', we only think of nutrition, says chef Pankaj Walia. But the truth is our connection with food is deep and spiritual; something that our ancestors realised and respected. Archaeology professor Dr Kurush Dalal recommends slow cooking to establish the connection. Slow cooking, he says, recognises the connection between plate, people, planet and culture; things we have forgotten to correlate these days while munching on fast food."

People, planet and culture - each, some, or all three, are integral to our every action. Recognising the connection between our actions and their impact on the three, can help us become more conscious and connected to our environment.

 3. Connect to the Universe

“You’ll find a sense of calm overtaking you as soon as you pray or sprinkle water around your food before your meal," says Prof. Kurush Dalal. That time - even if it is for a split second - makes you appreciate the world, its wonders and the food on your table. It connects you with the Universe.”

Ritual or ceremony is a celebration, a tradition. Through these rites we re-live, re-enact, honor, remember, and call forth ancient spiritual teachings, tradition and divine spirits. Studies show that they are good for people’s physical and mental well-being. They help make life seem predictable, under control, and meaningful.

4. Have a hobby

Money isn't  the only thing stock market man Ramesh Damani kneads. He has a thing for dough which made him seek out baking and attend a week's bakery course in Paris. Asked for the similarity between brokers and bakers, Damani's reply is, "Both like the feel of dough....and both (investment and baking) need a lot of patience."

A hobby is an echo of the soul, and if you are following your heart, so can be your profession. Seek answers within, discover the parts between your profession and your hobbies which are similar, or support the other.

6. Play your cards wisely

"I realised my face was never going to be my fortune," says  Prahlad Kakkar, ad guru. "(So) I decided to impress ladies by tickling their palate - good food, full-bodied wine, candlelight and my storytelling powers are a lethal combination.  It has always worked. Food is much more than fuel for your body."

Remember what Randy Pausch said, "we cannot change the cards we are dealt with, just how we play the hand."

CALL TO ACTION

Now that you have a bunch of recipes to choose from, make your choice, put the ingredients of your choice into the pot, marinate in a thick sauce of motivation for a few days. Then light the fire of your passion, stir in a good dose of determination and serve. 

Bon Apetit!

Hi-5s to Your Business Improvement

Every day, newspapers and TV news channels in India keep telling us of the dark clouds of political uncertainty in West Asia and North Africa, unemployment in the US and the Greek debt. And then there are the ominous whispers that more news – bad of course – on the debt front from Italy and Spain. Are things really that bad? Is it all gloom and doom?

The Economic Times recently surveyed 22 CEOs of large businesses to rank 10 issues on a ‘headache scale’ of 1 to 10, where 1 stood for the ‘least headache’ and 10 for the ‘worst headache’. The most important conclusion of the study was that in India, consumer demand would continue, that top line growth would remain intact and that we can weather a global crisis. This will come as good news to all those business leaders who may have started to grow jittery, hearing all the global bad news. So then, what does Indian business need to worry about - if at all? It is the high input costs which could end up hurting their profits. And it is this situation of shrinking margins that is likely to give business heads, especially from the SME sectors, sleepless nights. And sleepless nights, as we all know, can lead to rash decisions. So what should they do to deal sensibly with the current situation?

In my experience of working with owner-managed businesses I have noticed that most, if not all of them, are so deeply operationally involved in the day-to-day managing of their businesses that they rarely give time and thought to put in place a long-term directional view of their businesses. Renny Thomas, of McKinsey & Co attributes this neglect to the fact that up until recently, India was in a period where lack of a meticulously planned strategy did not matter as much since the growth areas were obvious. But with increasing competition from Chinese and other foreign competitors, coupled with shrinking margins, business heads have realized that it is no longer enough to go with the flow. It’s time to move beyond the present and start planning the future with purpose and intent and desired results in mind.   

So where do you begin? Here are five ways to kick-off your change process:


1. Assess Your Company’s Current Status: Put everything on the table, both the good and the bad. Include areas of the business you are proud of and problems you wish would just go away. Address issues relating to staff, products and services, location, profitability, and new business development.

Hi-Fives to Your Business Success



2. Review The Past: Look carefully at your past marketing efforts, successes, and failures. If you are running a marketing program but cannot justify its expense with increased sales, consider cancelling it or placing it on hold. Successful marketing turnarounds stop the bleeding quickly.



3.  Analyze Competitive Activity: Often, a new entry in a market will use new marketing techniques and follow new thinking to achieve sales that you didn’t know were possible. Evaluate objectively, to achieve a successful marketing turnaround, you must do what is best for your company.

3. Rethink Your Business: Keeping your learning from the earlier three steps in mind, think again, about current customers, competition, industry changes, and technology. Rethink your business model. Many successful businesses have managed to stay successful by moving with the times. They saw that the needs of their customers were changing and acted accordingly. Be flexible to adjust to new opportunities and challenges.

5. Be Quick. Act quickly on your plans to marry the short-term to the long-term. Speed and flexibility are essential in turning a company around.

And don’t give up - giving up too early may result in your falling short of the great success your business was destined for.Act consistently and diligently on the five ways and you could have success dancing on the palm of your hand!

And in case you need help; I have more than10,000 hours of Buisness coaching experience of supporting business-owners such as you. I can help you reach your business goals faster, achieve higher and become stronger! For contact details click on Contact tab above.

Is Your Organization Future Ready?

One of the foundations of business improvement strategies is to align business activity against organizational objectives, customer requirement and business strategy. However, very often, this alignment does not exist and the reason? The teams do not know what the organizational goals and objectives are! 

Evan Apfelbaum, of the Kellog School of Management, once asked a a group at a top American consulting firm what the goal of the team was. He got eight different answers! Which was exactly my experience with the findings of a survey I carried out recently. The survey, conducted on a client’s key executives, was to gauge the organization’s ability to focus on and execute their most important goals. One of the questions in the questionnaire was, “If you know any of the top three goals of your organization, please list them..” To this, 22% said they did not know the top three goals, The rest responded as follows:

 

Goal #1

1.      It should be system driven

2.      Be the biggest ....supplier in India

3.      Number 1 in world.....

4.      Achievement of target set by..... for year

5.      Sound customer base

6.      To be #1 and capture 80-90%.... market in India

7.      Brand image

Goal #2

1.      Individual responsibility for ...  success

2.      Educate the customers

3.      Customer satisfaction through technical assistance

4.      Best customer service

5.      Sales target

Goal #3

1. No compromise on quality product
2. Stand with the competitors with good profit margins
3. Fastest and profitable subsidiary of .... India
4. Collection

This diversity of  views on the goals of the organization is one of the most common occurrences in teams that don’t perform well – if people are not focussed on that one common goal, it becomes difficult to achieve the purpose that it has been assembled for.

According to Locke and Latham, clear common goals affect individual performance through four mechanisms. First, the goals direct action and effort toward goal-related activities and away from unrelated activities. Second, they energize employees. Challenging goals lead to higher employee effort than easy goals. Third, goals affect persistence. Employees exert more effort to achieve high goals. Fourth, goals motivate employees to use their existing knowledge to attain a goal or to acquire the knowledge needed to do so.

In the case of this particular client, as a first step to bring about alignment in business activity, we recommended and executed a Visioning workshop, along with some more initiatives based on other findings of the survey.

Clear common goals that everyone understands, are critical to every organizations business success. They provide organizations with a blueprint that determines a course of action and aids them in preparing for future changes.

Is your organization future ready?

Reference: Encyclopedia of Business 2nd Edn.

The evolution of a leader

There are three types of work which get done in an organization:

1. Transactional work such as; Administrative and Order taking, and which benefits individuals.
2. Tactical work which is  Solution focused and benefits employee work groups.
3. Strategic, or long term work which is:
• Linked to one or more business goals
• Solution-neutral in early stages
• Requires multiple solutions or tactics to be implemented
• benefits business units or perhaps the entire enterprise

The emphasis of an individual on each type of work shifts as he rises from an executive position to a managers position and finally becomes a leader. While executives are focused on the Transactional, the emphasis of activities shift to more of the Tactical when he becomes a manager. And finally, when he rises to the leadership position, his focus moves to strategic activities which are long-term in nature.

The activities define the evolution of  an executive to a leader. However what happens, and this is more so with entrepreneurs, the nature of activities are more often than not, restricted to the first two - the Transactional and the Tactical. Why is this so? In my experience with my clients, it is because the entrepreneur/leader does not want to move away  from the activities which he likes to do, or else finds himself comfortable doing. There is the risk of failure lurking somewhere in his mind.

Leaders could take a lesson from the leadership style of Kumaramangalam Birla. He leaves all day-to-day operations to his professional managers and focuses only on Strategic thinking and activities. Except when the occasion demands - which is when he has to prove a point, or show his people that something they believe cannot be done, can be done. As happened when Birla overruled his managers  and took the risky decision to buy Novelis for $6billion. Since the decision was his, he took it upon himself to prove to his managers that it was right. 

The Economic Times has a very interesting  account of the turnaround story

Importance of Core Values

In a recent issue of the Corporate Dossier , Ed Cohen, the ex-chief Learning Officer at Satyam Computer Services reveals an interesting factor behind the downfall of the founder and Satyam, and its founder Byrraju Ramlinga Raju - the absence of defined core values. Since its inception in 1987, Raju had outlined the purpose of Satyam Computers as 'AICS Delight' (an acronym for Associates, Investors, Customers and Society at large) and this certainly seems to have worked for him in the golden years of Satyam's growth. He won several awards and honours including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Services in 1999, Dataquest IT Man of the Year in 2000, CNBC's Asian Business Leader - Corporate Citizen of the Year award in 2002 and E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2007.

But, according to Cohen, AICS wasn't enough and the company needed core values. Reason - the articulating of core values would create a conscious choice with a deliberate choice around the core values. The lack of core values coming down from the top, resulted in their being defined from the middle and bottom line and these core values defined at the lower levels, stood the company in good stead when the crisis hit. So even though Raju and Satyam were synonymous in the minds of his employees, when the failure happened and the initial shock had subsided, everyone responded with 'How can we save this? How can we pull it together? We have responsibility to our customers, employees investors, even to society.'

In this crisis situation, the 'AICS delight' mission statement would not have helped - the delight had gone out of the window with the scam revelations. It was only the core values defined at the lower levels (Cohen does not tell us what they were), that the risk of the company going bust was mitigated. People started planning scenarios of various possible arising situations and drafted a 30/60/90 days start-stop-continue plan.

A company's resiliency is sorely tested during a time of crisis and Cohen talks about the 'heart' the people of the organisation showed during the crisis. One of the 'heart' factors was surely the core values.

Leadership lesson: A company's core values shape the culture and define the character of a company. They guide the behaviour of it's employees and the way decisions get made.

Have you defined the core values of your company? And if you have, are you making sure they govern your own, as well as the actions and behaviours of your employees?

The Leader's Call

One day Mullah Nasrullah and his friend went to an eating place to feast on fish. They ordered two pieces of fried fish from the ‘fresh catch of the day’ menu and when the order arrived, Mullah Nasrullah immediately picked up the larger piece and put it on his plate.

His friend was shocked and exclaimed, “Mullah, how indecent of you, don’t you know it is considered bad manners to do that?”

“Alright,” Nasrullah responded, “what would you have done?”

“Taken the smaller piece” said his friend.

“Well, here you are!” said Nasrullah dropping the other piece on to his friend’s plate.

What Mullahji had done was to take an intelligent call on his friend’s “socially appropriate” response to cleverly have the larger piece of fish for himself.

Entrepreneurs too have to take an intelligent call, but of a different kind – when to be hands on and plunge into the day-to-day operations, and when hands off and trusting their managers to deliver.

An interesting example, and one entrepreneurs can learn from, is of the the way Kumarmanagalam Birla dealt with his ambition of taking over Novelis, a company 4 times larger than his, and the how, having bought it over, he dealt with the subsequent turnaround.

The Economic Times has a very interesting article on it.

http://tinyurl.com/3y99y5l

The Revival

It has been more than a year and half since I last posted on my blog and the reason for the revival lies in a recent meeting I had with a client.

At the meeting, I suggested that at the beginning of every month he describe to me five new things he has learnt in the past month. This, I said to him, would be a great way for him to anchor new learnings. As an afterthought, I said I too would share my learning with him. Easier said than done, I realised, because I do not have the habit of noting my thoughts and insights - and worse, promptly forget them the next day.

Hence the revival of my blog - to pen my insights.