FIFA 2022 World Cup finals: France vs Argentina. What a game. One of the best finals ever witnessed. There are few management lessons that can be inferred from the match:
1) Big players deliver during the big games and this is why they are paid the big bucks. All 11 played well but the big guys deliver more. There is always commotion amongst the rank and file in your organization about pay disparity on the same grade. One or two may get paid higher based on potential and delivered results or past achievements. But if you do not perform to potential or not delivering consistently, then you are shown the door (case in point C Ronaldo). Michael Jordan was paid big bucks because he delivered consistently for Chicago Bulls.
2. It is always the team that matters first. Both Messi and Mbappe not only scored goals but also were involved with many assists that went into the goal post. This is the trademark of great team player, however big they are. Individual greatness is not revered if the team fails.
3. Around 10 minutes before the first half , the French coach did two substitutions. Till that time, it was all Argentina. France were just in the field, doing nothing much. It take a good coach to recognize the inertia being built up to re-organize the team. Constantly re-balance your team for optimum and desired results. After that, the last 10 minutes of the first half France came back strongly and for the rest of the game.
4. Always look for the right moment to strike, especially when the competition is sitting on glory- after about 80 minutes of play, Argentina was slightly relaxed at 2-Nil and seeing this lethargy, MBappe strikes twice within 100 seconds to equalize and drag it to extra-time. And they did it again near the end of second half. Always be aware of your competition and suit your response accordingly. This is why organizations do competitive analysis but this has to be done regularly to change your game.
5. When it comes to penalty kicks, it can be anyone’s game. But anticipation is key. The better goal keeper either by plan or by luck anticipates where the striker would hit and goes to that side. It happened during the second hit of France – it was prevented by the Argentinian goalie. Take informed risks, and have mitigation plans in place.
6. Pressure makes one choke. Experience does matter when it comes to handling pressure. All five strikes are doing the same job – hit the ball to the goal. Some people freeze (like the third hit by France which hit the goal post and went away) and others deliver.
7. Incidentally, Argentina lost their first league match to Saudi Arabia. Many pundits started writing them off. Two things : (i) Never under-estimate the opponent – even the weaker team can cause an upset (ii) It takes will and effort to bounce back and eventually win it. Yes, it is possible. Never let setbacks ruin your day. Keep on trying till your succeed.
Great to see two equal teams fight till the end.
Author: admin
Resolutions – make them work
It is that time for RESOLUTIONS when a new year starts. Again, as in any goal, make them SMART.
I would always recommend dividing your precious time across three facets, and make each of them meaningful to you:
(i) Life – Family and friends
(ii) Work (and wealth) – your profession, save for a rainy day
and (iii) Health – taking care of it and keeping yourself in the best shape
Your hobbies, sport activities, gym, moonlighting, travel, religion, spiritual enlightenment, etc would all fall into one of these buckets.
But be wise to spend good percentage across these three depending on your priorities
Fancy Job Titles
Ridiculous to see such titles as Senior Associate Director, and Senior Assistant Vice President. What do these titles mean and what would be the responsibility of such titleholders. Honestly, it is a big joke, but for making the person happy with a Director or a Vice President as the suffix, and the prefix is laughable to say the least. And I can infer the deep and bad hierarchy in these companies which literally tells me they do not believe in flat hierarchies and hence efficiencies, and thus not an attractive company. Time to change now. Get rid of these titles – Director and VP, that is it. Let the folks earn these titles instead of getting accommodated in intermediate career rungs
Understand your customers
“The purpose of any business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going” – Theodore Levitt
Simply put, focus on market pull and not technology push. You need to show how to acquire new customers and what problem of theirs is your product or solution solving, that simple. Understand customers first and what they want and when, and deliver it to high quality.
Chin Mudra and about fingers
A noteworthy derivation about life, The Supreme and meditation, interpreted from Skanda Purana:
The Thumb stands apart from the rest. It is not in the same group as the other four fingers. Without the Thumb, the other four fingers cannot be totally functional . Hence the Thumb represents The Almighty.
The Fore finger or the Index finger signifies Life. Middle finger signifies Ego and Pride. The Ring finger signifies karma, dead or feat (can be good deeds or bad deeds) – it is the process of doing. The small finger or Pinky signifies Maya or Illusion.
God creates us and we all want to go back to bad through Moksha Mukthi – highly possibly only through good deeds and meditation. So, one has to keep the ego, bad deeds and illusions away from one’s life. Chin Mudra in Yoga is the touching of Index finger-tip with the Thumb – “life” joining with “God” – this is the basic pose for meditation.
So, when one meditates, we keep the Ego, Karma and Illusion away. This is when you become one in peace.
Some more tit bit on Ring finger: This is the finger associated with Apollo, the Greek God of Love and romance. This finger is also associated with the moon. The Romans believed the vein in the Ring finger on the left hand ran directly to the heart – “Vein of Love”. This is why wedding or engagement rings are worn on the left hand Ring finger.
The Bulls and the leaders
My extrapolation from a statement in Jeffrey Archer’s book when it comes to quality of senior leadership at the top of any organization: ” Only the suffix differentiates between the Bulls and the Bullshitters “. So true, lots of very ordinary guys who speak quite well with great Powerpoint skills are able to reach higher rungs of any organization, suppressing the awesome talent with real substance that are there inside the very same organization.
What is motivation and discipline?
Motivation is a thought, a realizable dream, a potent desire to do something because of some reason. It is NOT the act or action itself. Having just motivation is not enough. Being motivated is a good start.
Discipline is when you act on the dream and make it a reality. Discipline is when you take concrete steps to realize the thought or the dream. Discipline over time becomes a habit.
Great entrepreneurs have discipline as a key strength – they take an idea to fruition, or create a successful business.
Success = Motivation + Discipline + risk management
Discipline is what makes motivation happen. Say for example, one is motivated to join the gym but nothing happens unless you get to the gym regularly to push your body around which is where discipline is needed.
Digital Transformation – what is the buzz?
Over the past couple of years, with more focus on efficient ways of working, lots of buzz being seen around Digital Transformation (DT). Lots of job opportunities exist in this space, asking for relevant experience, and this short overview just would give one the confidence you have done enough or bits and pieces, that fits under the enterprise DT umbrella.
Lots of innovations and technological advances that have been happening around our environment over the past decade or so, each with tremendous potential, are all being integrated under one umbrella of Digital Transformation, a must have in any Vision statement of companies worldwide, an end-to-end goal to realize and a tool to smartly compete and go ahead in engaging and delighting customers.
According to HBR and Salesforce, DT is a new mantra of using DIGITAL technology to increase customer experience, better and improve existing business processes or invent new ones, create more efficient, automated processes to bring about a new WoW (Way of Working) and a total operational change within the company. Although it may be one person who may be tasked with this DT journey inside any corporate, it is the joint and cohesive effort of all stakeholders to create a new way of doing things more apt for the even changing market requirements and business conditions, which in turn results in awesome customer experiences.
There are three main ingredients behind any Digital Transformation:
(i) (Digital) technology that is data centric, and is about “modernizing the legacy”
(ii) Business Processes – ‘automating the repeated tasks’ and ‘simplifying the flow’.
(iii) Customer experience – delivered real time, to create better business value
Much to the popular perception, the IT department does not solely own this transformation. Their ability to drive changes depends on the business unit’s willingness to adapt newer technology to deliver better value to their customers. Although this enterprise transformation is pivoted around IT per say (IT team headed by a CIO with a CDO and a PMO office), the positive changes would be seen only with the business units it would cater and hence they need to champion this effort end-to-end to realize tremendous gains with the full sponsorship of the top leadership team. This eventually leads to a data driven decision making across the organization and more fruitful culture evolving that stitches this belief and trust together. I am always of the belief that culture is a derivative effect of how things get done within the company and this acts as a glue fabric that makes effective team work with an end purpose in mind. After all this transformation, or as the transformation is bearing fruit, you would also realize a subtle change to a drastic change by within the company on the ways of working.
What are the new digital technologies that make DT happen? To name a few buzzwords doing the rounds presently, we have Internet of Things (IOT), analytics and business intelligence, Machine learning and Artificial intelligence (ML and AI), Automation (RPA), Cloud (be it private, public or hybrid), Augmented and Virtual reality AR/VR(a much needed enhancement to how manufacturing, education and healthcare does things now), Blockchain, Big Data warehouses and data lakes, Edge computing, etc One must be able to use most of these technologies, join them through a flow chart flow and see how the entire company can benefit from using them to deliver better business value.
Changing legacy systems within any organizations is never easy. If it is not broken, why fix or change? There can be a lot of criticalities and complexities involved in changing any infrastructure and systems, which has to be understood and approved, after which there has to be a roadmap that introduces changes in phases till the entire benefits gets reaped. It is not about adding a new incremental change, but about a total revamp of existing to something newer and scalable that delivers better results and offer flexibility.
With remote work slated to be the norm going forward due to this pandemic, transporting oneself for group meetings, account for logging-in and clocking work hours, sharing designs as a method of development, educational experiences of students, etc would all be something we would look forward to through VR/AR. With Bring your Own Devices (BYOD) and smart phones and tablets getting into the computing space and not only restricted to communication, cyber security would be a concentration area for corporates to work so that no disruption occurs in their operations. Manufacturing floors are monitored remotely from elsewhere, thanks to many sensors attached there and video cameras fitted across, which has led to lesser downtimes and higher manufactured volumes within corporates.
All these digital technologies are centred around the new ways of generating and receiving data from many sources, in large volumes, at a great speed and verifying the truthfulness of these data to derive good intelligence from them. Big Data and Analytics, and Business Intelligence, have been the fulcrum of many banking and healthcare companies now for the past few years in realizing how data can be interpreted to offer better services to their customers and patients. It is no more the classic databases but rather the newer data lakes and warehouses which contain not only the structured data but also the unstructured data like text, images, video from which actions are being taken real-time (like chat boxes for customer support, and tele medicine for administering remote surgeries and health consulting, or object detection in autonomous vehicles). If you have the entire organization taking decisions based on true data, I guess a significant transformation has been brought in place.
Processes, ‘the needed evil’ in many companies, deliver a consistent way of doing things and they get updated regularly to make them more efficient. You must be able to connect various activities happening in various teams together to make something of value, and this is possible only with established processes within the organizations. Radically re-engineering existing processes, and automating repeatable tasks (RPA – Robotic Process Automation) are happening, benefiting both Time to Market (TTM) and better efficiencies. Given the COVID pandemic lessons, it is imperative for companies to think about remote work as a permanent option (not all work of course, can be done remotely – lab support and manufacturing for example needs to be at the work place) and start changing human resources policies and processes accordingly.
No business would get sucked into any change, the primary premise of any transformation and hence it is imperative to quantify the before and after with a significant business value that looks rational and real. This business value can be quantifiable with increasing productivity or efficiency, increased revenue numbers, good customer scores, and better TTM, to name a few and any or all of these would certainly invoke interest to any sane business leader. As long as you have satisfied customers (first) and delighted customers (next), one can get an edge over any competition and this can just translate to better $ numbers. Customer experience starts from time you got them hooked, to engaging them throughout your combined journey to meeting all commitments with high quality consistently.
Stitching the technologies, data driven approach, efficient processes and better customer experience effectively is a test for the resilience for many companies and doing this together as a whole team would be the mission that makes this transformation happen. Choosing the right technology for every problem and integrating them all as a whole needs a good technical team to be the backbone for this transformation. Most companies fail because they do not have right talent to make the transformation happen, or they do not invest much in their own people. The only way to can get the entire organization to buy into this transformation is to show proof through smaller gains in phases and including all of them to be part of this journey.
In conclusion, anybody who is into such IT transformation is accountable for the technology transformation of all the systems of the organization to support growth of the business and increase operational efficiencies. A senior role like the CIO is to champion and drive organizational and technological changes by building and maintaining strong relationships with all the appropriate business teams, thus partnering with them to serve their customers better in a more agile manner.
With proper collaboration with the entire organization, they should be able to identify solutions, prioritize roadmaps and deliver to commitments, with all the stakeholders in the loop. It means modernizing the IT infrastructure to support good user experience, automate repeatable processes, and at the same time keeping security and scalability as a critical feature that cannot be compromised. Through AI powered Bots, aim to get maximum contactless sales and service for the organization, and create unbelievable user experience by maximizing real-time decisions (for example through awesome APIs and microservices, any organization can drive their e-commerce business along with a stable logistics backend).
Drive a culture within the organization that makes data drive all the decisions. One should be on top of innovations by conducting business digitally and experimenting with the changing digital trends and audience preferences.
The author comes with 25+ yrs of experience and is an active consultant and a trainer, an information seeker, and a yoga enthusiast.
Numbers never lie but Liars use numbers
As my friend Chandroo says ” Numbers never lie but liars use numbers”. This is what present media does, wanting us readers to form an opinion based on what they want to write or sell – they all have a bias and they present adequate data to validate the bias. They will never report the other side that does NOT sell. Unfortunate to see us always getting opinionated just reading one side of any story.
Unfortunately, it is the same formula that works in corporate world as well – the guy or gal who presents his or her agenda and backs it up with biased data to support it usually gets to fulfill the agenda. (s)He will not expand too much on the downside but tries selling the upside. Great if it benefits, but bad if it derails the organization.
Biases always drains one’s emotion and makes one look bad as enough homework is not done to see both sides of the story. Politicians play on those emotions, stock trading relies on these emotions, not on actual data.
Disruptive forces in Education system
The education delivery at the school and colleges is going through some disruptive changes globally, thanks to COVID. This semi or complete overhaul was long coming, and we better use this opportunity to sharpen newer ways to deliver education by enabling technology and Internet.
A few thoughts:
– no more big schools with many classrooms – a good lab infrastructure, a few class rooms with good media capability with a huge exam hall, some vocational training rooms, administration rooms and a big playground is what one should have going forward.
– no more standard time for education – may be a shift system, each shift catering to a bunch of classes to be the norm
– Hybrid system to begin with – definitely possible in all metros of any developing countries as well, where students come to school twice a week and other three days have virtual classrooms. Very similar to how the future workplace would look like.
– a great digital library membership for all students – get all reading materials online
– Skill based training – incorporate vocational courses like carpentry, automotive repairing, electrical technicians etc. from middle or high school. All Do It Yourself sort of programs – DIY
– Exam systems to be totally changed – constant evaluation through the year. Work out the ‘cheating part’ to deliver intermediate exams and tests online and have final tests and exams at school. Make the exams open ended so that students get to apply what they learnt. This is the time to enable this.
– Evaluation tests replacing all competitive tests across the country (esp. India) for Engineering, Medical, Law, Applied science, Management or any other profession which is good for both government and private colleges admission. Takes away the stress from the students. This has to be enabled so that private colleges do not impose more tests for admissions
– Admission to central universities first and then state government colleges and only then to private colleges – this should be sequence so that private colleges do not try to fleece the students to join early before they get better colleges later. Very rampant, misused and waste of hard earned money of parents. During the competitive evaluation, have students give 10 preferences of where they want to get admissions – both government and private.
– enable all teachers to be able to deliver education online in a consistent form.
– Have core subjects and one or two electives that students can choose from middle school.
– Promote home schooling and issue guidelines for the same
No more big campuses, much lesser stress, hybrid physical-virtual classes, constant evaluation through the year, and admissions streamlined. This can be done even starting 2022.