How to make a SWITCH...when change is hard

Another good book read by me written by Heath brothers on how to change when change is hard. The analogy used in this book with RIDER and ELEPHANT  strikes well with the subject.

Rider is more rational and elephant is more to do with emotional aspects of the change. Both needed to make the change, as rider presents analysis of the data and elephant provides the energy to execute the change. With analysis we can solve the problems, but not make the change until elephant is taken care. Elephant wants short term gains, its lazy and  needs motivation to move forward. Think about if rider and elephant disagree, we get to a road block, well temporarily rider can get his way through authority but it does not last long.  Most of the times actually elephant overpowers the rider and that is where I had a realization that "Self Control is exhaustive". 

I liked the some of the example given in the book Jon Stegner  - Glove Story, Dr Donald Berwick -IHI saving 100,000 lives in 18 months and Jerry Sternin who fought malnutrition  in Vietnam without any major structural changes.   


What Rider needs Direction  - a Clarity - a goal or objective- what to be done.
  Very often we look at the negative aspects of the problem or phenomena while solving , but we often forget that we need to look for the solution where problem started or figure out where are the bright spots  and follow the bright spots.  I relate this theory to our famous " ZAP the GAP", find the bright spots in terms of high performers and compare them with low performers and follow the high performers.

Rider some times requires to script critical steps required to move forward, remember he is controlling the elephant, which is looking at short term gains to keep motivated. Every change needs short term mile stones, where you can stop and celebrate small successes to keep switch going. 

Its not just the objective and moves, we need to point rider to the destination and why we need to go there. Remember in our earlier change topics talked about the " Shared need" and buy-off required from stake holders.
  In another article of Kotter and Cohen states that  the change sequence is not Analyse - Think - Change, its is actually See - Feel - Change.  Now  tough part is actually motivating the elephant.....

People need to see what they do not see normally and they need to find the feeling, then change will be easy. For example a customer satisfaction scores at different centers, or  Display  of gloves purchased by different departments at different price points as in Glove Story. When change seems big, it also appears to the elephant that it is hard, unless otherwise you shrink the change to appeal to the elephant to make the critical small step.

Elephant needs lot of motivation, human psychology tells growing mind sets make change easier, what it means if you think "no matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially and you can always change basic things about the kind of person you are".
In business world we  ignore or reject growth mind set, we always think Plan -Act, but can we insert two stages in between - Practice and Learn. Well time to go takes precedence rather than wait and learn approach. This is where, most of the product developers actually skips the tests before go to market. We know what kind of buggy products then we throw to our customers.


Its not all about Rider and Elephant behaviors, lot times tweaking the environment makes things easier for both. lot of times changing orientation of  factory or Office can yield desired results. When situation changes, the behaviors also change , so focus on changing the situation.


When behavior is habitual, it's free and does not tax the rider. Building habits, requires identifying the vital behaviors and action triggers. Remember "Stop the Line" Concept in Toyota production example, where an employee habitually pulls the trigger when he sees the defect in manufacturing. Some times the visual management helps to create habits or divert to desired behavior.  

Rider and Elephant in perfect sync

Finally, the social pressures or social motivation is another biggest change agent for human beings. While we are shaping the path towards the destination, we need to rally the herd.  Help spread the behaviors, look for early starters or identify the people who are Influencers to get the switch going.   

Failure Tolerant Leader

"The fastest way to success is to double your failure rate" -Said by IBM's Thomas Watson Sr.
"Failure is the stepping stone for success" - an old saying...
" We reward failures and great leaders accept their mistakes openly "- said by Jack Welch in one of his key note...

Well they are talking about right kind of excusable mistakes, not the lazy, callous, half hearted attempts.

Failure tolerant leader knows that failure is an integral part of innovation and encourage right kind of mistakes in non punitive environment.
I am trying to unfold my learning from Harvard business review article by Richard Farson and Ralph Keys and trying to share some of my mistakes done in professional life.
These leaders move beyond success and failure, they understand that mistakes are inevitable when launching innovation initiatives and look for building the knowledge gained from these mistakes. A scripted, controlled environment would never allow  space for innovation, innovation leads for a change and change leads to a transformation and to create the game changers.

When a failure occurs, these leaders get engaged, analyze the mistakes, ask illuminating questions, think whether these mistakes could have been avoided. They consider the risk part of their strategy, they build exit strategy for allowing mistakes. This would help people to be more collaborative, respect each other idea, open curiosity about  lessons learned.

New Ideas are most likely to emerge in the work place when leaders treat steps in the innovation process, those work and those that don't, with less evaluation and more interpretation. The Failure Tolerant Leader don't praise or penalize, instead they analyze. Human psychology states that either excessive praise or excessive punishment ruins a person's motivation. This requires engagement with employees in what they do, showing interest and giving feedback, without undermining the professional relationships or without presuming to be pals.

Notion of encouraging mistakes may seem to be alien to some of us, but it earns a great empathy and respect from employees.Again it is not about allowing sloppiness in organization, its about learn to fail intelligently and forward toward success.

Creating this kind of culture nurtures the collaboration among employees to innovate, share information. This also allows to tap the imaginations of those who are not adept at creating visibility, introverts and core talent. This creates for an environment of opportunity to further innovation, where competition  stiffed creativity, openness and honesty.

Failure Tolerant Leaders emphasize that a good idea is a good idea, whether it comes from Management gurus or an obnoxious coworker.what really going on these groups is courage enhancement, by creating an atmosphere of safety and reducing the pressure to succeed, thus giving people confidence to share ideas. These leaders send clear message that constructive mistakes are not only acceptable but worthwhile. Employees once feel inhibited now suddenly feel free to express ideas, frequently contributing to the innovations that drive the company success.

I did three mistakes in my life and which led to innovation and bring potential of people, otherwise could not have been known.

Mistake 1: While i was in Sprint RPG India, we were short of Disk Space for our operations. I took initiative of loaning the disk from my previous organization and augmenting capacity, otherwise those days it might have taken at least 3-6 months to procure. Well after bringing the disk, I found out that the controller of Tandem K100 Series does not support Tandem K1000 series Optical Fiber Disks (per Tandem  TAC). Hum...this created an opportunity to invent new way of interfacing...after 48 Hours hard work, I could interface the drives and give ample space for our customers store their data. How i did is irrelevant, but it paved Tandem to discover that they can interface this way too and for me lot of learning.

Mistake 2: While we launching first In bound call center in GE, we had to send FAXs over the networks to India from various customers. Those days, we still used Satellite connections and we were just installing CISCO ATM (IGX platform). After migrating to CISCO IGX, the faxes were failing intermittently, post analysis we discovered  that the IGX DSP chips are not designed to support a satellite delay of 500ms. CISCO had to redesign their DSP chips to cater those latencies and moved forward in to developing countries where satellite connections are predominantly used. Win -Win...Innovation and Learning.

Mistake 3: In my previous company, one of the engineer by mistake pressed the RED button (emergency shutdown) thinking it is Door open button in of the data Center. oops, that made some 3000 servers to shutdown immediately. Well after that 300 heroes born and they worked literally 72 hours to bring them up in a controlled fashion. This procedure has become one of the best disaster recovery plan and brought out the potential of those engineers, who otherwise a silent sergeants. 

I would say these are three great turning points in my professional career which paved for to be success.

Failure tolerance is to think about learning and experience not about success or failure and that's the key to coming up with break through products and processes: Viewing mistakes for the educational tools and as signposts on the road to success.

Leadership Lessons from India

I got a bunch of papers from Barry Cioffi, President Cioffi Assoc. Inc, who is my best friend and management guru with tons of experience in the Industry. When I opened, I found the below article papers...
 Reference: Harvard Business Review - Article by Peter Cappelli, Harbir S, Jitendra and Michael U.

  I liked it ....most of the traits straight from the gut of authors.........I realized still SUN is setting in the east. India is only known to the western world as cheap labor, but not as a land of leaders.
 I thought, I add my bit of Curry to the Spicy Indian leadership food...to digest better.
 India is a largest democratic country, 7th largest in geography and 2nd largest in population with multi talented and multi cultured with 1.18 billion people and one of the ancient destinations for many countries for tourism, education, commercial and spiritual interests.
Indian leader's approaches often grew out of their long experience with surmounting obstructionist bureaucracies; crumbling, antiquated infrastructure; and inadequate education, health centers, and other social services. Growing up in hardship and uncertainty gave many leaders an ability to persistently improvise around obstacles.

They do not get disturbed by uncertain events, they keep an even keel….they also tend to be more innovative and creative as a result.

I thought I would line up some of the leaders, who pioneered a change in the industry not only In India, but also made an impact globally. These leaders are apolitical and more from corporate world.

Ratan TATA: A house hold name – back bone of Indian Industry, touches every corner and every life of an Indian. His one of IT division TCS among the TOP IT companies with a social mission with sight on a common man. (NANO car at $2000 is the recent revolution)

N.R. Narayan Murthy: Pioneer for the software industry, who is founder of Infosys – ; believed in building the talent and also with a social mission. Most of the Infosys offices house campuses with accommodation/ training facilities

Azeem Premji: Soaps to Computers – Founder of WIPRO, another revolution in software industry again with social mission (Currently he heads Wipro Foundation).

Shiv Nadar: A philanthropist and business man, founder of HCL technologies, NIIT, which transformed Indian industry by building the talent and creating a $4B IT services business from hardware. His CEO Vineet Nayar believes strongly "employee first and customer next"…a radical view.

Devang Mehta: Founder president of NASSCOM – a pioneer for bringing IT companies on to common platform for a cause  of revolutionizing IT Industry and contributing to policy making.

Pramod Bhasin: A founder of financial services business in India for GE and built a conglomerate of BPO business (Genpact).

Raman Roy: Fondly called the father of BPO industry, found GECIS, which is first call center business out of India, which has become now main stream earning of many middle class families.



What is common across all these leaders...they are charismatic, lead India way, focus their energies for an inclusive growth and pioneers in IT industry for a new concept or innovation, which also made social impact.When authors interviewed most of the India leaders, they termed themselves as and in order of priority.

1. Chief input for business strategy
2. Keeper of Organizational culture
3. Guide, teacher, or role model for employees.
4. Representative of owner and investor interests.

Interestingly share holders interest is the last priority contrary to most western leaders.The leaders of India's biggest and fastest growing companies take an internally focused, long term view and put motivating and developing employees higher on the priority list than short term share holder interests.
Some of the traits of the Indian leaders are

• A stark difference in focus –more strategic than spending time in understanding wall streets, media/investor relations.
• Motivating employees – The open, transparent communication, down to earth attitude, transforming from manager to messenger – a community architect and a linking agent.
• Creating a sense of mission – Goal oriented, thrives for excellence and profound investor in social causes. Thrives for inclusive growth, touches lives of employees, breaks barriers and connects at personnel level.
• Engaging through transparency and accountability - Builder of employee commitment, encourages openness and reciprocity. Look after employees with high emotional quotient and extends connections to families.
• Empowering through Communication – Translating engagement in to actions, challenging the status quo. Empowering them to solve their own problems, act more as facilitator rather than controller of destiny.
• 
  
  Investing in Training – Every leader believes in building the talent from fresh, Invests days to months to years in employee development, shaping attitudes, managing the culture and internationalizing.

The explosion of the Indian economy following the reforms is though well known; but it exposed them to international competition and forced them to rapidly develop world-class capabilities. Leaders who had built their advantage on low cost labor abruptly found passion for quality.

Well Indian companies posted double digit growths even tough times, because "they born tough".

CKP – Three Famous Managements Mantras

Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad (August 8, 1941 – April 16, 2010) was a globally known figure who was consulted by the top management of many of the world's foremost companies. His research specialized in corporate strategy and the role of top management in large, diversified, multinational corporations – Source WIKI

 

An ardent fan of Sanskrit, some of his contributions are very close to Hindu Mythology, his company name was "Praja" and strong believer of " Manava Seve Madhava Seva" means....who serves people, he will be automatically closer to the god. Isn't it reflect ing every religion's philosophy.

I have not read his books/articles, but unconsciously liked his workings on the famous three

• Core Competency
• Bottom of the pyramid
• 
  
  Co-creation

Core Competency

A core competency is a specific factor that a business sees as being central to the way it, or its employees, works. If we extend the wiki definition a core competency can be a specific to an individual or a state or a country, something that other person, business or country cannot easily build. When you drift from core competency, one needs to be sure that over a period of time which would develop as the core competency.

Let us see some Examples...

.........Can a Doctor run a factory instead of a hospital?

..........Can Sachin play basket ball and can he be the legend?

..........Can Pepsi produce computers and be the market leader?

Well these are possibilities, but not sure those people/organizations would give their 100% heart in to it i.e. a deep commitment. So, you find very few people with multiple core competencies.

 

Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP)

BOP in economics simply means poorest people in the society or the foot Soldiers in an army or front line employees at the bottom organization hierarchy. This idea might have born out of Indian economy in those days for CKP. He preached to focus on at BOP, felt that it would turn countries or organization to a super power or leaders in the markets.

BOP can also bring an impact to social life by eradicating the poverty through profits.

Let us look at no of examples today.

1. 
   
   Micro Credit – small amount of loans banks are giving to poor people.
   
2. 
   
   All Hair Care products started selling few rupee sachets (Shampoos, Oils available now in small packages etc)
   
3. 
   
   TATA NANO – Tata understood this concept very well – he brought NANO/Water filter to sell at BOP.
   
4. 
   
   eChoupal - is an initiative of ITC Limited (a large multi business conglomerate in India) to link directly with rural farmers for procurement of agricultural / aquaculture produce
5. 
   
   Cell phone companies are bringing pre-paid cards with small amounts led to a boom in Indian market.
   

Co –Creation

Co-creation is a form of market or business strategy that emphasizes the generation and ongoing realization of mutual firm-customer value. It views markets as forums for firms and active customers to share, combine and renew each other's resources and capabilities to create value through new forms of interaction, service and learning mechanisms. It differs from the traditional active firm - passive consumer market construct of the past.-Source WiKi

Well this is not developing products or services by taking feedback,

It is like a car manufacturers produces car customized to a specific customer or segment of customer with active participation of customer.

Customer Idea forums contributing to a product design

Open Source Software giving full access to source code and empowering customer to change at will.

This philosophy can also be applied in organizations for its employees. Employees design their own salaries and benefits. We can go on........

With this theory, the value will be increasingly co-created by the firm and the customer, rather than being created entirely inside the firm. Co-creation not only describes a trend of jointly creating products. It also describes a movement away from customers buying products and services as transactions, to those purchases being made as part of an experience.

This also paved a way for inclusive growth, where corporates are focusing on a growth with social impact.

CKPs journey from Coimbatore to Harvard via IIM Ahmadabad ...influenced many lives.

Govt. of India honored him with Padma Bhushan award in 2009...

He is a great philosopher and teacher..whom India produced in the recent past.

Operations Management - Service Industry perspective

Operations management is an area of business concerned with the production of goods and services, and involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as little resource as needed, and effective in terms of meeting customer requirements. It is concerned with managing the process that converts inputs (in the forms of materials, labour and energy) into outputs (in the form of goods and services).- Source Wiki

Perfectly said by Wiki...applies not just to Mfg industry even more often to "Services" Industry too. Services can be in terms of IT , Hardware support, Software product support or an Infrastructure Management Support (IMS).

Here, let us limit our discussion to IT support not developing products, but I will try to make as much as analogy with Mfg industry so the criticality of this function is well understood.
It just that in Services the raw materials are human beings, inputs are customer queries, customer requirements, customer problems and produced output is the customer service.

The Essential parts of Operations Management are

1. Production Planning - Systems requirement, Head count planning, Process mapping, defining the SLAs, Success measures etc. Lack of this process in the business, the organization crumbles when an exceptional event occurs.

2. Procurement of raw materials - Staffing forms an essential part of this process. Understanding the skills required and acquiring the skills through the processes is an art.

3. Training - Building the Talent and Skills required to perform the job. Building the talent with-in and outside. Academia plays an important role in building the talent outside an organization. However should have adequate programs to build the talent and nurture the talent.

4. Service Management - Service Management can as simply as adopted best from ITIL, the Service support and Service design. Incident, problem, change etc etc.. It is also essential that which process you would like to build more rigor for ex. Change Management would be critical in IMS, however problem or release management could play an important role in Software/Hardware product support industry. I am adding here two other sub processes the management books do not talk...is Flow control Management and Interface Management.

5. Quality /Process Management - The key deliverables of this process is to assure and control the quality. In the service industry now you have various standards to adopt, to mention 6 sigma, Lean, TQM, ISO 9000 etc., but it depends which process to adopt based on where you want to focus on the defect reduction. This process responsibility to establish right measures to measure the defects and outputs.

6. Inventory Management- Quite often people forget this process and create a stampede for other processes. This means ensuring the raw materials supplied (People backfills ), Systems procured , Facilities capacity(Power, Seats , Transport etc..) and IT infrastructure (network, Servers, Tools, Applications). This is also a whole game of supply chain management. Retention of the People forms another critical function of this, as Industry is plagued by this virus due to lack of good supply chains.

7. Distribution Channels: This could vary based upon whether you are captive or outsourced or established some channels to take the output or service to customers. As somebody said establishing distribution network is to find a web of culturally fit allies or partners. if the marriage does not work, divorce is inevitable and this could impact entire organization life. Hence, choosing the partner is at most important task.

8. Management control process: Management control and coordination includes a broad range of activities to ensure that organizational goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient fashion. This is where you need managers for managing the processes and people to produce the desired level of output or service.

I have mentioned something about Flow control and Interface (hand-offs) sub processes as part of the Service Management. Flow control is to ensure subsequent outputs are moved faster as input to the preceding process. "Speed" is essential here and delay can cause immense impact to customer service. A LEAN can be used to eliminate the delays and Non Value Add steps in the process.
Second is Interface Management - is control mechanism or process steps to ensure there is fine hand off between two processes without loss of value generated in the previous steps.

"When you try to pull just one thing out of the Universe, you find it attached to everything else." --John Muir

Most of the Operations in Service industry measures the success by means of three important outputs 1.Customer Satisfaction 2. Employee Satisfaction 3. Productivity or efficiency of operations

As long as one is ensuring these goals are improving time to time, those organizations reach new heights in terms of service.

NASSCOM Summit

Recently I attended the NASSCOM leadership conference and there were about 600+ delegates from 20 countries, where 140 speakers lectured. Those who don't know NASSCOM is an association of IT enabled and IT Software/Hardware industry setup to promote the growth of IT industry in India. In India there were about 2.3 MM people employed in this industry and brings $Bs of Forex to India.

Despite the recession this industry seen at around 5.1% growth....

During recession....Industry is expecting new directions to

• Re-Invent
• Re-Design
• Re-Build

Requires because there is a change in demand, change in supply and change in the market...in order to sustain industry is expected change in Technology, change in R & D, change in Business models and change in Execution.
As IT infrastructure technologies  driven by Virtualisation, Mobile and Cloud computing  are leading to a commodity service.

The big key message from seminar is

"Disruptive Innovation" 

and make Innovation as culture.

To adopt innovation, need a greater alignment between Front end and Back end  and also promote an inclusive growth.
 Some analysts are predicting that

• Asia & EMEA markets are converging and emerging stronger
• Need for  resource efficient and green solutions
• New Corporate boundaries - Open innovation, extended supply chain, Web of Partners( who are culturally Fit).
• Stronger need for Globalization and productization of services
• More important is changed competition -ex Google vs IBM

The earlier Customer used to be the King...apart from that now the recession made even CASH as the king..or queen..
But Industry is still promising, just required to be grounded with realities, focus on building high performance teams and take advantage.

The other thing organizations need to do is
OUTSMART - with ideas, innovation, vision
INSPIRE - Ambition, Focus, Innovation to
DELIVER -every one plays and are accountable with an attention to process quality and authenticity.

An organization can emerge stronger in profits, market cap and share with solid revenues if they nurture INNOVATION as a culture and execute with sharper focus.

LOVE 'EM or LOSE 'EM

This is an Wall Street Journal Best seller.. by Beverly and Sharaon... They preached about 26 best practices to retain best employees..

In these challenging times, I thought this is the best book to read and these practices are applicable to every manager/leader. But one thing I most liked is

" LOVE' EM or LOSE 'EM"




True...my Ex Bosses used to preach (Raja/Warun)..how to make .... " HAPPY PEOPLE"

...I pulled the strings... HAPPY PEOPLE  make HAPPY CUSTOMERs and evnetually HAPPY ORGAINZATION.

So, Why people leave ...lot of us think Money...never....its all about those Five reasons invariably we find..

Boss, Recognition, Job Satisfaction, Rewards and  Development in an organization.

Money is an hygiene factor, but not the only factor...change your thoughts an employee thoughts from "Entilement" to Earning mode...

so guys why wait with holding  breath....those 26 engagement strategies are ABCDEFG......RSTUVXYZ....

1. 
   
   Ask Whats Keeps You - do you know what they want?
   
   
   
2. 
   
   Buck It stops here - who's in charge of keeping them?
   
   
   
3. 
   
   Careers  Support growth -are you building their future?
   
   
   
4. 
   
   Dignity Show Respect-do they know that you respect them?
   
   
   
5. 
   
   Enrich Entergize the job-do your people leave to find the growth and challenge?
   
   
   
6. 
   
   Family Get friendly - work life balance, avoid your employee chose between family and work!
   
   
   
7. 
   
   Goals Expand options -there are five lateral career paths other than up!!
   
   
   
8. 
   
   Hire Fittest -make a match or start from scratch, fitment not hurting the existing..
   
   
   
9. 
   
   Information Share it!- do u have it? or do u hoard it?
   
   
   
10. 
    
    Jerk Dont be one -r u one?
    
    
    
11. 
    
    Kicks Get some -are we having fun yet? create fun at work!
    
    
    
12. 
    
    Link Create connections - if you build them, they will stay!
    
    
    
13. 
    
    Mentor Be one - are they learning from you?
    
    
    
14. 
    
    Numbers Run them - calculate the cost of loss !
    
    
    
15. 
    
    Opportunties Mine them - will they find inside or outside?
    
    
    
16. 
    
    Passion Encourage it -help them find the work they love ; without leaving
    
    
    
17. 
    
    Question Reconsider the rules- which will you keep rules or people?
    
    
    
18. 
    
    Reward Provide recognition -which matters more praise or pay?
    
    
    
19. 
    
    Space give it -are your people on the short leash? provide innovation!
    
    
    
20. 
    
    Truth Tell it -the truth hurts or does it?
    
    
    
21. 
    
    Understand Listen deeper - when you tune out, you lose out and they move out!
    
    
    
22. 
    
    Values Define and align -what matters most?
    
    
    
23. 
    
    Wellness Sustain it -are you sick or tired? 
    
    
    
24. 
    
    X-ERS and Other Generations Handle with Care - they are different, can you keep them?
    
    
    
25. 
    
    Yield Power down -Give it up! empower them to make right decisions..
    
    
    
26. 
    
    Zenith Go for it - test your retention engagement index!
    
    
    

Go through ...these see what extent you can build to keep good people with you!!