The Zen of Business

This is the first of a series of my LinkedIn posts about operational performance management in Services. As part of my job, I get to advise and work with companies on their daily operations and several aspects of business through the COPC Performance Management Framework. I get to see a lot of interesting things, from a vantage point that is insightful as well as amusing. It is my endeavor to share some of these insights and, also the fun, without sounding preachy. For this purpose, I will employ one chart at a time for each post and try to weave the narrative around it. Hopefully this will also help in data appreciation among the readers. The first one here is about the distribution of performance among team members. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01 Batting for the Middle Order Very often, we see that the performance management in a team or an organization at large is done by management and leadership through what is ...

Being a management consultant necessitates one to listen to all sorts of cock-and-bull stories - almost on the verge of it being a professional hazard. Yet, of all the crap things that I have heard in the last one and a half decade, none is so consistently painful and for so long as the theory of adult learning styles - you know, the 'visual', the 'auditory' and the 'kinesthetic' learning styles. Part of my job is to facilitate learning for these 'adults' in various parts of the world, and mostly in a corporate environment, and mostly to the peril of these adults. Apart from that, I also provide vocational learning sessions for young students in business schools, as well as high school children in secondary grades. So you can see that my audience comprises of  a spectrum of age groups, and having done this for a reasonable time now, I can assure you that you have never heard of anything as lame as the theory of adult learning. Agreed, maybe when the...

While I was going through my archives, I stumbled upon this correspondence I had with a very good friend and colleague Deb a few years ago in 2008. While the communication is a bit dated, I believe the subject is still topical, and I thought it might be a good idea to show this exchange the light of the day. The first part is the question Deb asked me, although paraphrased, and the second is my (rather cynical) response to it. I hope you would like to read it for what it's worth. Best - Shreekant ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hiring Six Sigma professionals Deb: ".... [Shree], I am having a problem with Six Sigma. [...] Maybe sometime we can chat about black belts?  .... I have become very biased in my thinking of the certification and I would love to hear from someone I trust to help me understand how a black belt thinks about project planning and execution. I am at the point now that ...

Like one of Douglas Adam's characters in the Dirk Gently series, I truly believe that the time spent in commuting is better spent in doing something worthwhile, so you can multitask. And just like the fellow in the story used to record his thoughts on a tape recorder and then have his steno type them out for him later - here is an attempt to write a post through a dicta-phone while driving from Delhi to Gurgaon and then converting it to text. Many times my students and other people ask - what should I read. What should one read? .. A lot of times I give some perfunctory answer and let that question pass. Or sometimes I give a very generic response to this question. But mostly I am not very comfortable when confronted with this kind of a question. And although I have always had this sense of discomfort, I was not sure why it was so. Recently, again, one of the students asked this question, and I decided to think a little bit more about it. Now when I started thinking about it, ...

The TIME magazine is an interesting establishment. You write to asialetters@timeasia.com - hoping that you will have your letter published in the subsequent issue, but that does not happen. Forget about that. You don't even get an acknowledgement or rejection - even after you ask them multiple times. Anyway, this post is about my reaction to an article in TIME, not the magazine. I was on my way back from one of the customary trips to China, when I came across this article about the employee retention challenges in China ['China's Talent War', May 28, TIME]. It was a deja-vu moment. Replace 'China' with 'India' and turn the clock back 5 to 10 years (or even keep the same timeframe), and you will find an almost exact article in some of the archives. It is rare to find an article in TIME magazine with such palpable lack of real research - apart from what can only be considered as coffee-table conversations - or of reference to any published material o...

It is one thing for people to say 'do what you like and get paid for it, so that every day at office will feel like a vacation'. It is quite another to actually find a profession that you are passionate about. Most of us spend our lives in writing software, or sending invoices - or most likely - writing software for sending invoices. In effect, we usually spend days in writing emails, making phone calls, and attending meetings. There are reasons for this. Firstly, most people do not know what they are passionate about most of the time. Ask any person, especially the one who is preparing for a job interview or for an MBA entrance exam, and pat comes the grammatically incorrect reply: "listening music". Whoever invented this phrase deserves to be in the list of Nobel laurets. This is the most you can get without giving any real information or even any real thought to the question - what do you like to do? I mean, what kind of music? -- Any kind! -- Any specific genr...

It was a perfectly useless afternoon – like the one that Lin Yutang urges you to spend in a ‘perfectly useless’ manner. The chilly winter breeze of Northern India and its accomplice the dense soupy fog had made commutation redundant and I was confined to stay at home. It was then that I turned to my old bookshelf, rummaged some of the lesser accessed shelves and blew away dust from atop some of the volumes and made a nice pile on the center table. I had read some of these works partly earlier a long time ago, and the others I had kept for leisure reading. It was like meeting a handful of school friends once again after years – not at the planned alumni meeting, but while you are out shopping your week’s supplies – by sheer chance. I pulled out a mid-sized volume with a yellow cover that shows a man playing flute by the river and a few others listening to him, leisurely resting on the nearby rocks and trees. It was ‘The Importance of Living’ by Lin Yutang – a work I had discovered i...

John Mingers. Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis. New York: Plenum Press, 1995. xvii + 246 pp. I. Introduction A. Topic of the book This is an introductory yet comprehensive text about a process called Autopoiesis – which means ‘a process whereby an organization produces itself’ . The book is meant to be an introduction to the large body of work in this field, usually referred to collectively as the ‘autopoietic theory’. This theory was developed by two Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, since the early 1960’s as a result of their work on visual perception and the organization of the living (Maturana and Varela, 1980). Autopoiesis means ‘Self creation’ – a circular process in which components of a unity participate in processes of production, which in turn produce the components (pp.12). Maturana and Varela contend that all living systems are autopoietic – i.e. they have a circular, self-referencing and self-creating o...

What to expect from a well-formed argument? I have always felt that when two disciplines of knowledge come together, great learning comes out of the exchange. And this is true irrespective of the nature of the disciplines. Take for example this instance when I was thinking about forming a hypothesis for a client of mine during an audit assignment, when I came across this little article on gemology in my hotel room in Cairo. The article was about unique properties of diamond and how diamonds can be classified. It talks about four aspects of diamond that qualifies a superior diamond from inferior ones – these are called the four ‘C’s of diamond classification. They are: Color, Clarity, Cut and Carat. And then the article went on talking about the different aspects within the four. But this got me thinking. Just like a diamond, don’t the same four parameters apply to anything else – say, an argument you put in front of your clients or colleagues, or a hypothesis / conjuncture that y...

What should be the appropriate attributes for Supervisors and Frontline Management? We are in a knowledge economy. And more important for service based industries, we are in a ‘people’ business. It is cliché to say that people are our biggest assets and when they walk out of the door every evening, our greatest challenge is to ensure that they return the next day morning. Of course, of all these assets, the most valuable are the frontline. There are no two ways about it. They are the ones earning bread for us, and they are also the ones who are directly responsible for the product you are making and / or service that you are providing. However, it seems that most challenging job is that of the supervisors and frontline managers of these frontline staff. And this is also one of the weakest links in the successful operational performance of an organization. The movement from frontline staff to frontline manager is the most important movement for any individual’s career. There is a...

What is the underlying message? One of the most famous passages from Alice in Wonderland is when Alice asks the caterpillar where a road leads to, and to which the caterpillar asks Alice where she wants to go. Alice replies by saying she does not want to go anywhere particular. On hearing this, the caterpillar says, ‘… then it does not matter where this road leads to’. If you do not know where you want to go, then it does not matter where you are going. In the daily rut of transactions, it is very easy for anyone to lose sight of the bigger picture. The same happens with me. While teaching on various topics, providing consulting, conducting operational and process audits of different types of programs across different industries in different time zones, and traveling from one airport to another, with an occasional stopover at home to let my wife know I exist, it is sometimes possible to lose sight of what is the basic, fundamental underlying message that one is trying to convey to ...

What is the idea behind ‘The Zen of Business’? While working on various projects and assignments at work – which invariably have something or the other that has got to do with different business processes, their design, definition, management and improvement – I always come across situations where I feel it would have been nice to refer to something – either to validate my thoughts or to get a stimulus into finding some solution. I usually get this reference by looking around, or through some of the books that I keep handy on the flights and travel. And believe me; the books may have nothing to do with management. They can be on diverse topics ranging from art to philosophy to religion to literary fiction. The last good breakthrough that I got was while reading Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’. But I think it would be nice to have one repository where one can dig into. It is with this idea that I am proposing to start this blog. I hope that it will be entertaining and useful to others, l...