Vikram Pandit, who took over as CEO of the deeply troubled Citi Bank in December, has been under pressure to declare which parts of Citi be jettisoned in order to make it profitable again. Pandit has been accused of being indecisive and ruminative, but considering the labyrinthine business of Citi, getting a handle on the business is bound to take time – leave alone coming up with an effective turnaround strategy. Though all of us may not have the kind of task Pandit has ahead of him, how can we get more value added productivity into our days?
In Are You Spending Time the Right Way, executive coach Melissa Raffoni outlines a three-step process for using your time more strategically. In summary she asks you to:
Break your responsibilities into strategic and tactical categories such as growth and improvement, managing people, and administration.
Determine how much of your time should be devoted to each category. “To answer,” she writes, “factor in the competing claims on your time: the activities that enable you to generate the most leverage, the company’s strategic priorities, and the short-term needs of your supervisors, direct reports, and customers.”
Make sure your conclusions align with the mission of our superiors and the company overall. Do you and your boss see eye-to-eye on where your commitments should be?
With this information in hand, Raffoni suggests you conduct an audit of how you actually spent your own time last week by looking at your calendar. Are your time commitments strategic? If not, learn how to box time and delegate to get the most out of your schedule, she says.

A recent article compares studies on groups of monkeys with corporate culture.

"The office and the jungle are surprisingly similar," says the report. "Both are ruled by stringent hierarchies, they are grounded in the need for co-operation, and complicated by the drive to compete.


"Add in the risk of hostile takeovers, a marketplace of favours and favourites, brazen opportunism and a long-held tradition of brown-nosing, and you can't tell the savannah from a forest of cubicles."

The magazine sets out five "rules of the jungle" that would apply equally in the office:
1. Don't take credit for work done cooperatively.
2. Stay on your boss's good side.
3. Don't bear grudges.
4. Be a team player.
5. Be a good boss by carefully balancing control, leadership and motivation.

Types of Leaders

Reading the review of Fidel Castro's autobiography - My Life in today's papers, I realised that successful leaders need to display two attributes Inspirational and Foundational. Some leaders may display both, while some one or the other. For instance Castro posseses both attributes while his alter ego Che Guevara was more of an inspirational leader, and less of a foundational one.

Castro as an inspirational leader - the book review reads - helped Che in fomenting revolution throughout Latin America and is now the exemplar of left-of-centre, anti US regimes.

As a builder, Castro built a complex, endurable and successful Cuban revolution through his qualities of acuity, an intellectual expansiveness, an almost pedantic attention to detail and, not the least, a generosity of spirit that allows accommodation.

So who is a better, more successful leader? Someone like Castro who displays both the attributes of being Inspirational as well as Foundational, or someone like Che who was inspirational, but not foundational? I believe Che - if he had lived and were to head a state - would have required a team which had foundational skills. A team of capable implementers inspired by Che would have been successful. But how about someone who has more of Foundational qualities - can someone other than the leader provide the inspiration for the team to be successful?

In the final analysis, I believe, it is easier for an inspirational leader to assemble a team of doers to lay the foundation for his vision, but slightly more difficult for a foundational leader to hire inspirational skills.

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.

Business Theories and Strategy Execution

For many companies, the month of April is the start of the new sales year. Hours, days, and months, of analyses, debates and heated discussions would have gone into the making of the marketing plan. Then would have begun the whirlwind tours of all the regions for the intensive briefing sessions, and finally now, the countdown started for the execution of the year’s plans.

According to the Webster’s Dictionary, the definition of the verb “execute” is “to carry out fully; to put completely into effect.” This sounds simple enough, but as most marketing managers would agree - exceedingly difficult to achieve! This is because, while marketing plans look wonderful on paper, the rub comes in their execution.

When you add personalities, politics and processes into the mix, the most brilliant marketing plans can grind to a screeching halt.

Read more: http://www.arurbizcoach.com/Bizmantras/bizmantras_april_06.htm

A good leadership practice!

Gudi Padva, or the arrival of the new year, was celebrated throughout Maharashtra on the 30th March.
On this day, in each home, the traditional gudi is put up -- a long bamboo stick, to which is attached a new silk cloth, a garland and a dangling neem twig. A silver or a metal pot is inverted onto this arrangement.
The gudi symbolises victory. It also indicates a wish for an individual to prosper materially and spiritually.
Some of the special sweets served on Gudi Padva are Puran Poli and Shrikhand.
and Aambe Dal and Sunth Paak. But the interesting thing is that before you start gorging yourself on the sweets, you are supposed to have a small portion of Neem leaves mixed with sugar and lightly roasted with ghee. The confection has a bitter sweet taste - much like life, which is a mix of bitter and sweet experiences! That also is the idea behind the ritual.

I think business leaders should take a portion of the neem confection everyday - just to remind themselves that their job entails taking pleasant, as well as unpleasant decisions. Something many leaders seem loath to do.

Sleep over this!

Researchers these days, seem bent on overturning our fondly held beliefs and practices! If you ever spent many hours agonising over the pros and cons of an important decision, you are now told to sleep over it or better still try getting yourself distracted! However for simple choices, such as between different towels, conscious thought will produce better results!

These are the findings of Professor Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam. Suggesting an explaination for the behaviour, the good professor says that out subconscious mind can deal with more facts and figures than our conscious mind. With easier choices, our brain has less information to process, and can make better decisions after giving a few minutes of thought.

Dabbawallas to Teach Six Sigma Precision

From a report in the TOI:
Gangaram Talekar and Raghunath Medge - two dabbawllas from Mumbai conducted a three day course in February for 500 executives and 1500 non-executives of Bhilai steel plant. The dabbawallas, who have earned the internationally acclaimed Six Sigma rating from Forbes magazine - making just one error in every 16 million transaction, taught the steel plant workers "accuracy, precision and delivering near perfect services and products".

The workshop, according to a steel plant official was an attempt to teach workers how the dabbawalla system worked and how their experiences could be utilised to reorient the steel plant's organisational hierarchy.

I was actually pleasantly surprised to learn that the two Mumbai dabbawallas have been delivering lectures at premier institutes like the IIMs, CII conferences, Symbiosis institutes, WTC, for the last six years!

Building Profits by Putting People First

“All workplace practices should be evaluated by a simple criterion: Do they convey and create trust, or do they signify distrust and destroy trust and respect among people?”
— Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his book,
The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First

If you used this simple test for trust in your own organization, how well would you fare?

Making Sales Reporting Rewarding for Field Staff

Non-compliance of field reporting norms by the field staff stems, I believe, from the management’s inability to secure their buy in. Reason - the disconnect between stated strategy and the activity indicators used in the formats. One of the functions of a reporting system is to drive desired behaviors and outcomes. If the reporting formats contain badly thought out indicators, salespersons become cynical ( if not confused!) and the system is likely to be manipulated.

Read more....

Of Breaking Rules and Broken Windows

Rudolf Giulani delivered the Sir Dorab Tata Memorial Lecture in Mumbai recently and taught the city a thing or two about leadership. Giulani's claim to fame (and rightly so!) is that as the mayor of New York, he got the city back on its feet after 9/11. Some of his thoughts:

Leadership can be at all levels - not necessarily at the top
It is not essentially the leader who always exhibits leadership says Giulani - it is a virtue that common men too exhibit when the situation calls. When the planes hit the Twin Towers in the morning, Steven Sillar, a fireman was off-duty, yet, he ran three miles against the fleeing crowds and traffic towards the inferno. He rescued many who were trapped in the burning buildings - but in the process lost his.

Think innovatively
Giulani was six miles away when the planes hit. He broke all rules of convential thinking to rush to the spot of the inferno, taking with him all the crucial heads of departments that ran New York. What followed was crisis management that swiftly united various wings of the city - an enduring method of facing an unexpected situation.

Prepare relentlessly for eventualities
Giulani was the butt of unkind American jokes when he initiated crisis management drills. Firemen, paramedics, police and others would periodically enact disaster management rehersals that critics interpreted as paranoia. On September 11, despite the scale of the tragedy, the drills may have contained the damage. "It is just a process of relentless preparation," says Giulani "the unanticipated will still spring up, but at least you will make fewer mistakes."

Fix the small things and the big things will take care of themselves
His Broken Windows Theory was one of his most aggressive ideas that met with wide resentment. Giulani beleves that controlling small signs of neglect (broken windows) and low level offensives will result in restricting the growth of more serious crimes. He went after the pettiest of criminals , made an example of them, and in the bargain reduced crime rates in New York by as much as 70%!

Just Do It!

"In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing." - Theodore Roosevelt

"You can't fix a problem by learning more about it" - Wayne Dyer

Many of us lack the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual strength to take action. Many of us also believe that "motion" is "action" so we end up engaged in lots of superficial "doing" that never leads to change...sort of "going through the motions".

As Indians, is our concept of time (Indian Stretchable Time!) and our philosophy of non-action (carried to an illogical extreme) to blame, in some ways, for our lackadaisical attitude to work execution?

The WIIFM Factor

Priti Mohile, a reader, responded to my article Metrics and Matrices in the February issue of Biz Mantras by wondering "how do we change the mindset of sales personnel to fill them (reporting formats) completely and the first line managers to analyse them?"

Sales personnel think of report writing as a chore and offer the excuse that time spent 'working' in the market as a more productive activity. If as managers, we have to make our reportees do what we want them to do, we must first tackle the WIIFM's (what's in it for me) factors. For sustainable results, managers need to make their reportees experience the benefits of filling the forms accurately and to post them on time.

This can be done in various ways, but here is how I did it; I called for a sales review meeting where the managers had to make their sales presentations in 9 formats. The formats were designed in a way that they helped them ( and the reviwers) trace the history of their achievements in a structured manner. The presentations required the managers to discuss important performance indicators such as Target to Sales achievement along with Inventory and Receivables, as also critical success factors such as the sales force attrition rate and delays in recruitment, among others.

At the end of the meeting, one manager remarked, "We were unguided missiles until now. Now we are guided missiles" - a powerful affirmation of the useful learning from the presentations.

Now that they have bought into the idea of the importance of generating (and acting on) certain critical data, I have designed the managers' reporting forms to include all the performance indicators which the managers had found useful in undertanding their markets.

The WIIFM issue of the managers has been successfully tackled. Now to move on to enforcing their compliance of collecting and filling up the information accurately, and sending in the reports on time.

And in that will lie the success of the initiative.

Creative Problem Solving

Just discoverd a great web-based brainstorming tool to help develop new ideas which, though meant for advertising creatives can be used by just about anyone! Whimsically called MouseBrains, it takes random word and associative word brainstorming techniques a little further by using predefined sentence structures (each one specifically designed to channel thinking in a particular direction) and also by incorporating details of the user's problem into the stimuli.

You simply need to provide MouseBrains with four pieces of input:

1. The product or service you're trying to sell
2. What your product or service can help people to do or be
3. The likes and interests of your target audience
4. Reasons why some people might not buy your product or service
   

Then click the "get brainstorming" button, and this e-tool displays a set of creative thinking exercises that incorporate your input. You can easily copy and past a question or scenario into a word processing document, where you can record your ideas and inspirations. If you need more stimuli, you can click a "refresh" button to display a new list of thought-provoking, often wacky stimuli.

Rajan, my friend from the ad world tells me you can do this with a Thesaurus or a dictionary too. Just open pages at random, pick out a word. Do itagain for another word. Then try to connect the two words...

Options for Pharma companies in India

Here is something I read today. I think it applies perfectly to the pharma industry situation in India which is in a state of flux after the onset of the new patent regime in 2005.

A firm has three options to survive.

First, become the low price leader and remain the low price leader. Drive all costs out of the product or process. (FDC Pharma?)

Second, become the customer intimacy leader. Know the customer and fill his or her every need. (Mankind Pharma?)

Finally, become a firm that creates new things, new ideas, new products and services people just have to have. (Innovators like Dr Reddy's and Ranbaxy)

My new blog

I started my management newsletter Biz Mantras a year ago to clarify and capture some of my experiences and reflections as a business coach to business owners.

Though the monthly newsletter helped conquer some of the 'demons' in my mind, I still had a problem - what do I do with stuff I read/hear/experience everyday, and which I feel should be the topic for the next Biz Mantras?

Ergo the blog Management Notes!