A Phased Approach to Goal-Setting

David Berg, COO Carlson Hospitality and Travel Co. uses a phased approach to goals; Core goals are the short term success measures for the next 12 months where he puts the maximum amount of his resources. Optimization goals are those where success measures 12-18 months out and where he puts a modest amount of resources. The Transformation goals are ideas to explore with impact beyond 18-24 months, here he puts a small amount of resources.

#MyLearning
By giving our goals labels that indicate the meaning they have for us, we invest them with a clarity and urgency that can shape the nature of our priorities, and extent of our responses.

Picture: mattaboutmoney.com

Why a Coach?

Vishal Gondal bought different fitness bands and apps to keep fit but none helped him achieve his goals.
Till he met a coach.
The coach began asking him for his data and started tracking what he was doing and how he was doing, on a regular basis. With this regular tracking and monitoring by the coach - who wouldn't meet him on a daily basis - he managed to remain committed to the daily targets. His learning; technology alone cannot achieve fitness goals, human interface and engagement is equally important to achieve necessary results.
#Learning
If fitness goals are hard to achieve on one's own, what of life and business goals? Being on our own and lacking the expert advice of a coach results in limited engagement with our goals, limited reinforcement and limited motivation and therefore,  failure to achieve them. Ultimately It is not about setting goals, it is about how much of an impact their successful achievement has on the health of your business and the happiness of your people.

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!

Analyse Your Business

Raghoo Potini shared some key insights from the Book "Flash Foresight" By Danil Burrus, which I thought was a great framework for analyzing one's business. 

"A flash foresight is a classic eureka! moment, like Newton's discovery of gravity after watching an apple fall from a tree . Actually the Flash Foresight triggered by the application of one or more of seven simple principles covered in the book .Let me cover two big ones.

TRIGGER #1: START WITH CERTAINTY: There are two distinct kinds of change that we can use to find certainty:1. Cyclic change2. Linear change
Cyclic change: provides us with all sorts of certainty .When it is autumn, you can predict that, within six months, it will be spring. Humanity has identified more than 300 distinct cycles that allow us to predict the future accurately. 
Linear change: A simple example of linear change is your age. Your life progresses in one direction. No matter how well you take care of your health, you are not going to start aging backward. Linear change is where the real action is, precisely because it is not a repeating pattern and therefore creates entirely new circumstances and opportunities. 

Hard trends and soft trends: A hard trend is something that will happen; it is a future fact. A soft trend is something that might happen; it is a future maybe. Here's an example about Hard trend and soft trend. The 78 million Baby Boomers are now flooding health care system in the US. Again, notice where the hard trend is, and where it isn't. The increasing numbers of Boomers who will need medical care as they get older is a hard trend, because those numbers are fixed and cannot be changed. But the projected shortage of doctors and nurses to provide that care is a soft trend, because it is something we can change if we see it and decide to act on it.Action:  

Make a list of all the cyclic changes that are affecting your business. Make a list of the linear changes that will have an impact on your life. Make a list of all the hard trends that are taking place in your industry, so you know what you can be certain about. Make a list of all the soft trends that are taking place in your industry, so you can see what you can change or influence. Ask yourself, "What do I know will happen in the next few weeks, months, and years? And how can I innovate to take advantage of what I now know for certain about the future?"

To anticipate the world ahead, Lets see some hard trends in technology space .To anticipate the world ahead, Lets see some hard trends in technology space .

Dematerialization. As technology improves, we are reducing the amount of material it takes to build the tools we use. For example, laptops are getting smaller, lighter, and more portable, even as they become more powerful.   Virtualization. This means taking things we currently do physically and shifting the medium so that we can now do them purely in a virtual world. Using software, we can now test airplanes, spaceships, and nuclear bombs without actually building them. Virtualization has transformed the world of business. Amazon is a virtual bookstore, and eBay is a virtual yard sale.   Mobility. With the advance of wireless technology, we are rapidly becoming untethered from everything. Our mainframe computers became desktops, then laptops, then palmtops, then cell phones.   Product intelligence: Imagine you're driving down the road, and a light blinks on your dashboard: One of your tires is about to go flat. Your GPS speaks up: "Service station with an air hose in three miles; take the next exit." How does your car know this? It's intelligent. It has smart tires, and it's networked.   Convergence. Filling stations and convenience stores converged in the 1980s; in the '90s, so did coffee shops and bookstores. Today, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and information technology are all converging. Products are converging, too. The modern smartphone is an e-mail device, a camera, a video camera, a music player, a GPS device, and more. Action: Ask yourself, What problems will my company be facing in the next few weeks, months, and years? What problems will our customers be facing?" Then look for creative ways to solve those problems before they happen.

TRIGGER #2: ANTICIPATE: When a competitor offers lower prices, you are forced to change how you do business. Being preactive means putting yourself into opportunity mode, looking at problems before they occur, and then preventing them from happening in the first place. It means, instead of reacting to change that happens from the outside in, creating change from the inside out.

These five technology trends all the result of three interlocking hard trends. The first digital accelerator is processing power. The second digital accelerator is the growth of bandwidth, the third digital accelerator, storage."

Leaders as Role Models

One of the most important components of leadership is to be ambassadors of the values the organization stands for. In these day of a powerful media, where everything that prominent leaders do, gets either flashed on TV, or splashed in print, leaders have an especial responsibilty to symbolize the values of the organization they lead. Three prominent leaders, who, according to me,  manage to do this most effectively are; Vijay Mallya of the UB group, Rahul Bhatia of Indigo Airlines and the Dalai Lama, who needs no introduction.

Vijay Mallya, calls himself the King of Good Times and he symbolizes this image to the hilt! He owns - among other things -  a luxury yatch, a personal aircraft which boasts of a Picasso as part of it's beige and cream interiors, and a fleet of classic and antique cars. Wine, Women (his Kingfisher calendar featuring a bevy of beauties is well known) and Wealth sums Vijay Mallya's lifestyle. It also aptly reflects his moniker as the King of Good Times and pay huge dividends to his companies - liquor company UB, Kigfisher airlines (now in dire staits, financially) and FI and IPL teams, among others.

Rahul Bhatia is the founder of low cost Indigo Airlines.  While Mallya personifies a high flying lifestyle of luxury, Bhatia does the opposite  - he lives up to his companies values of a low-cost functional airline. At a recent meeting of owners of airlines and their CEO's with the Prime Minister of India, he drove down in a Santro driven with his CEO at the wheel. All the others came in expensive chauffeur driven cars. At the recent Economic Times awards for Corporate Excellence (he got the Entrepreneur of the Year Award), in a sea of suits, he was the only one dressed in a waist coat.

The Dalai Lama, the much respected Buddhist leader says his religion is 'kindness'. His ready laughter and child like quality help to reinforce the image of a benign soul. Both in his actions and utterances, he comes across as a simple person and the very epitome of kindness. He was the recipient of the1989 Nobel Peace Prize and his acceptance speech clearly reflected his values. "Although I have found my own Buddhist religion helpful in generating love and compassion, even for those we consider our enemies", he said, "I am convinced that everyone can develop a good heart and a sense of universal responsibility with or without religion."

Being a Role Model to Your Organization's Employees

By the very nature of their high profile roles, leaders such as Mallya, Bhatia and the Dalai Lama have the overarching responsibility of living up to their image more to their external customers. But how about leaders whose compulsions to role model are different? What can leaders whose responsibility lies primarily with their own people and organizations do to fulfill their responsibilities? They can reflect their own and their organizations desirable values with actions such as: 

1. The goals and performance standards they establish.
2. The values they establish for the organization.
3. The business and people concepts they establish.

Successful organizations have leaders who set high standards and goals across the entire spectrum, such as strategies, market leadership, plans, meetings and presentations, productivity, quality, and reliability.

Values reflect the concern the organization has for its employees, customers, investors, vendors, and surrounding community. These values define the manner in how business will be conducted.

Concepts define what products or services the organization will offer and the methods and processes for conducting business.

These goals, values, and concepts make up the organization's personality or how the organization is observed by both outsiders and insiders. And it is this personality which defines the roles, relationships, rewards, and rites that take place, that the leader has to role model.

Useful resource: Sample chapter from the book The Leader as Role Model http://tinyurl.com/bnv2jz8

On Why CEO's Procrastinate. And What They Could Do About It

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

                                                                                                   - Tillie Olsen

From my years of coaching CEOs, one of the important understanding is that the first and most prominent challenge for CEOs in the pursuit of their goal is - procrastination. In other words, getting started on the key priorities that will make their biggest ideas a reality.The reason for the procrastination? The threat of uncertainty.

Timothy M. Pychyl, who specializes in the study of procrastination has an explanation for this on his blog. According to him, people when faced with a task about which they are uncertain on how to proceed, experience negative emotions and threats to self. To cope with this experience, they end up delaying the task, escaping the negative emotions and rationalizing the choices they make. I have had CEOs come up with all kinds of excuses for not implementing the tasks they had committed to. Excuses such as "I cannot think beyond a three months planning horizon" (to delay their long-term planning exercise). Or "My customers insist on speaking only to me and not my subordinates" (to avoid delegating to them). Or even rationalizations such as the executive in the cartoon below.

 What such CEOs are doing is that instead of self-regulating their behavior to stay on task such as mustering their creativity to make a plan of action, they self-regulate their emotions. Mood for them, takes precedence. While useful in the short-term in terms of mood repair or protecting self-esteem, this short-termism can have serious long-term consequences for their companies. Consequently, they end up undermining their company's, as well as their own performance.

Strategist and author Kaihan Kippendorf, is right on target when he says that most CEOs invest their energy at any one time on four initiatives:

1. Wastes of time: hard-to-execute ideas that would have little impact on their achieving their goals. 

 
2. Tactics: easy-to-execute ideas that will not significantly impact their success. 

3. Winning moves: easy-to-execute ideas with huge impact. 

4. Crazy ideas: difficult-to-execute ideas that, if you could figure out how to make them happen, would really make a difference.

Investing Time Wisely

If they have the best interests of their companies at heart, and wish to invest their time and energy more efficiently, CEOs should practice the following.

• Dump the Wastes of Time and focus energy on more productive activity.
• Execute the Tactics or the easy-to-do stuff of the second , but bear in mind that they are not strategic priorities.
• Attend to the Winning moves NOW.
• Instead of dismissing the Crazy ideas as "go to the moon" ones, spend their time figuring out how to make them feasible.

To begin practice, they should ask themselves two questions: 

( i ) If I successfully executed this initiative, what impact would it have on my ability to achieve my goals? and 

( ii ) How easy is it execute this initiative?

An an even better way; they can get themselves a Business coach who can support them to question themselves in sifting and weighing their options and estimating chances of success. And most important - remember the commitments they made to themselves!

To know more on how I can help you, check out my website http://arurbizcoach.com/

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.

How clear are you about your 2011 goals?

 A recent  issue of the Economic Times, had an article, "India Inc Has A Dream For 2011", in which prominent captains of the industry spoke of their personal and business goals.

Having just completed a workshop on "The Effective Manager" for a client, of which effective goal setting was part, I was curious to analyze the goals for their "SMARTness". SMART, as many of you  may know, is an acronym for Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Timebound. How well had the captains of industry fared when it came to setting SMART goals for 2011? I decided to analyze the goals of two of them - Vijay Thadani, CEO of NIIT and Venugopal Dhoot, Chairman of the Videocon group of industries. Here is what they had said:

Vijay Thadani: "I sincerely want to reduce the schoolgoer's burden and make their bags lighter by a tenth. Our school solutions division, NIIT eguru, which works with 15,000 schools, could help children carry tablets instead of books, and we can achieve this through customised offerings. My second resolution is to reach 20m more learners this year and take the count to 50m as NIIT turns 30 this year. Cutting across verticals, from corporates schools, colleges individuals and the government, I want to double the target which took the company three decades to cover."

Venugopal Dhoot: "I see 2011 ushering in social well-being  and economic prosperity for the aam Indian. Poised to become the world's fastest growing economy, the coming decade will see the rise and rise of India towards becoming a superpower in its own right. Not through just material power, but through 'soft power', that is, the ability to influence and impact the world through its unique culture, values, policies, and institutions. In such a context my New Year resolution will be to do my bit, both at personal and industry level, to drive this 2020 vision forward."

For the purpose of analysis, I decided to score them on each of the SMART parameters on a scale of 1-10, where 1 was very vague, and 10 very specific. Here is how the fared:

Score             Name	Specific	Measurable	Action oriented	Relevant	Timebound
	Who What Where Why When	How much? How often? How many?		How important is it to your business?	By When?
Vijay Thadani	10/10	10/10	10/10	10/10	10/10
V.N Dhoot	2/10	3/10	3/10	5/10	6/10

Here's my rationale for my scoring:

Specific: Vijay Thadani (VT) 10/10, Venugopal Dhoot (VD) 2/10
VT: We see that VT has covered all the important bases for this parameter - What (reduce the school goers burden, double the target), Why (make their bags lighter), Where (in 15,000 schools and across verticals), When (by the end of the year).
VD: He has resolved to "do his bit" - vague enough to get a score of 2/10.

Measurable: VT 10/10, VD 3/10
VT: VT's resolution answers the How much? question specifically (make school goers bags lighter by a tenth, reach out to 20m more learners, double the target achieved in 3 decades),
VD: VD's resolution to "do his bit" is just a resolution and no more. How can such a subjective target be measured? He therefore scores 3/10 on this parameter.

Action-oriented: VT 10/10, VD 3/10
VT: His resolutions on this parameter are totally action oriented because they are both specific and measurable. He talks about cutting across verticals, from corporates, schools, colleges, individuals and government to double his target.
VD: He wants to drive forward the 2020 vision of making India a superpower in its own right by influencing its ability to influence and impact the world through its unique culture, values, policies, and institutions by doing "his bit both at the personal and industry level".  How action-oriented can that be?

Relevant: VT 10/10, VD 5/10
VT: NIIT is in the business of training and education and his resolutions aimed at the school goer and other verticals are entirely relevant to his business.
VD: Here I have been a little more generous with my scoring by giving VD 5/10 - the only reason being that in the broad sweep of his resolution, he also talks somewhere about doing his bit to help India impact the world through its institutions. One presumes by institutions he means his own group of companies.


Time-bound: VT 10/10, VD 6/10
VT: Clearly all his 2011 goals, except for the doubling of sales, are aimed for achievement by end of 2011 hence a 10/10.
VD: The saving grace is that the resolution is at least time bound - by 2020 (for whatever it is worth), and hence in this parameter VD gets the highest score of 6/10!

All of us make New Year resolutions and many of us make them more as a ritual, only to forget all about them a few days into January. If one is serious about acting on one's resolutions, it helps to set SMART goals. For then we can :

1. focus our attention and action, 
2. mobilize our energies towards their achievement, 
3. increase our persistence, and 
4. encourage development of workable strategies 

towards the successful  attainment of our goals.

And by the way, any guesses about who between Vijay Thadani and Venugopal Dhoot is better placed to achieve his goals for 2011?