Aug 24 2009

When we were sleeping ….

Category: Globalization,Leadership — Surendra Reddy @ 4:37 pm   Comments (0)

…. a massive earthquake reduced the financial world to rubble. First, Globalization changed the business landscape – intensified global competition energy constraints, and politically instability will keep the tectonic plates keep shifting all the time. Second, the global economic crisis also challenged the long believed notion of market’s invisible hand serves as an instrument to correct the imbalance. Uncertainty is an opportunity for those who are prepared. Third, more and more government regulation is creeping into corporate governance. For foreseeable future, government is going to take a keep interest in how businesses are run. We all need to learn new skills and mind-set that will allow us to partner with government than fend it off. Finally, we, human beings, are fundamentally irrational and motivated by unconscious cognitive biases. Even after we emerge from the recessions, our, as consumers, behavior is now shifted more towards thriftiness and desire for simplicity.

When the economy recovers, do you think things will be back to normal as usual? Would like to hear your views and experiences dealing with crises, managing crises, and managing collaboration and innovation without loosing our competitive edge.

Share your views, experiences and stories.

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Aug 22 2009

Do You Twoodle?

Category: Leadership,Learning — Surendra Reddy @ 5:16 pm   Comments (1)

What a week! I have been struggling this week (and many weeks, may be months, before) to focus on too many problems – there are way too many problems. Some problems are breeding new problems. I am less than pleased with Status Quos or Sacred Cows. Nor happy with mediocre results. Since I left Oracle in 2003, I can’t settle for anything less than exceptional. I set my bar so high. All these inspire me to take the road less travelled by. This weekend I am going to force myself in a meditative state to force my mind to gather together conscious thoughts from all that is happening around me and vast unconscious information to create something radically different. I know I need to slow down and give my mind a chance to let creative juices flow in.

I know I have been living in my analytical mind and missing out on the creative musing that opens up to new ideas. It is a beautiful Saturday morning. I took a long walk. When I go on a walk, my mind leaps ahead of my educated incapacities and present me with vivid images and ideas out of nowhere. There is no doubt that walking alone leaves the mind free to observe and dream. I believe it is more important that we get out and walk whether alone or not. If you are suffering from too much of educated incapacities, take some one with you for a walk to enable you to see something unusual or particularly interesting(not just gazing at things – open your mind and heart to see things not visible to your naked eye). Sharing these things can add to our experience. Pick a walking partner who will allow quiet spaces along the way. Or simply walk alone.

This is something I do all the time. If I can’t solve any problem, I take a long walk and come back and to my surprise I can find a better solution. If I get stressed up, I take a long walk. I love to see my mind wander and come back with random bits and bytes of ideas. I am wondering all the time how should I create a space for my alpha waves in my brain and stop letting my brain take a ride on theta (drowsiness) and delta (deep sleep) waves. Walking with constant inflow of new images and ideas, give us new thoughts that nourish us. It replenishes our over tapped creative well and gives us a sense of whatever you call it. We are reminded we are a physical being who is part of something far greater. It opens our senses to the world around us and to the world within. We become larger than we were, something more. We see with perceptive eyes. We become aware of our self in the greater scheme of things. We create a fertile ground for fostering creativity, imagination, and compassion.

I am sitting in my backyard and carefully listening to the bird chirps. Every time I sit and listen to bird chirps or watch bird fly in formation, that generate huge burst of alpha waves and inspires me to wander all over the place I never wandered before. What a great refreshing morning? I can see grass grow. I can smell the things I can’t smell before. Though clouds out side pulls me back into the musings of Cloud computing, I am trying to control my thoughts to stay with me and listen to my heart.

I have a very bad habit of journaling. i write everything that comes to my mind. I let thoughts come in without an immediate purpose or with any pressure to accomplish. I write something. It doesn’t matter if I grumble about something – planning my next week or describing a view out side of my library room window musing at the mountains. I believe that writing let go of those unresolved things that fill my mind. It then gives me a tool for gathering my insights and dreams as well as sorting things out. Sometimes regrets and irritations would dominate most of my notes. As I let those accumulated latent energies to flow out, then I started to create more room for appreciation of the beauty around my creative thoughts and me. I am reading through volumes of these notes and started to see solutions to most of the problems I have been trying to solve for weeks, if not months.

I feel so relaxed! Go twoodle (I coined this term meaning “act of taking a long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering without using Twitter, Google, and Web searching to generate bursts of alpha waves to simulate creativity, imagination, and compassion“) then?

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Aug 20 2009

Leaders in the crisis

Category: Leadership — Surendra Reddy @ 2:54 pm   Comments (0)

According to McKinsey(McKinsey August 2009), Many executives have found it difficult to look beyond addressing the short-term effects of the crisis. More notably, satisfaction levels are markedly lower when executives rate their overall performance. Relatively few executives are pleased with their performance when it comes to positioning their businesses for growth, retaining and attracting talent, and developing leaders—areas that are important for their companies’ chances to thrive after the crisis. Carving time out of operating routines to address these issues will be a key to recovery. Further, satisfaction levels drop even more dramatically when respondents rate the performance of their bosses. Twenty percent of C-level and senior executives and 30 percent of middle managers aren’t at all satisfied with their superiors’ performance—another indication of middle managers’ overall lack of connection to their current companies.
Areas of concern to executives include:

  • Maintaining good relationships with external stakeholders, shareholders
  • Controlling financial and operational risk
  • providing inspirational leadership
  • Retaining, attracting talented people
  • Positioning company for growth
  • Developing people’s leadership capabilities so they can manage crisis
  • Downsizing to cut costs

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Aug 06 2009

No Sacred Cows: They Trample Innovation and Graze Productivity and Profits.

Category: Leadership — Surendra Reddy @ 5:30 am   Comments (0)

Companies today are working in an environment of incredible change. The customer base is shifting, technology is constantly changing, margins are shrinking and competition is stiffer. Whether change is abrupt or gradual, the rules that once worked have become outdated. Ignoring that reality is so devastating. The key to success is change readiness. Forget about re-engineering, downsizing and all those other fast-track panaceas prescribed for corporate ills. The first step to change is to identify and eliminate the “Sacred Cows” – all those hallowed practices, dead ideas, pet projects, outdated policies, unnecessary policies that don’t work anymore.

I can find Sacred Cows everywhere in offices and in the minds of people. Sadly, we continue to worship our sacred cows. Herds of sacred cows grazing on profits and choking off productivity. They are trampling creative and innovative thinking, inhibiting quick response to change and costing money and time. I see people reluctant to come out of their comfort zones- they knew so much about what they knew and they were last to see it differently. This intellectual inertia causes us so many problems in our ability to see things differently as well as our ability to respond the vibrant changes in the market place quickly.

Educated incapacity is an acquired or learned inability to understand or even perceive a problem, much less a solution. The more expert the person is, the less likely that person can see a solution when it is not within the framework he/she taught to think. When a possibility comes up that is ruled out by the accepted framework, an expert is often less likely to see it than an amateur without the confining framework. Everyone suffers from educated incapacity because everyone has a stake in the status quo of his/her discipline. We have a stake in what we know. We are paid for what we know. If we thought it all was going to be made irrelevant tomorrow, we would feel threatened. Everyone can get up to speed on the learning curve, the real problem is that we have trouble getting up to speed to forget. How can we change this? Spotting your sacred cows and rigorously probing into its trajectory makes you challenge those established notions. It immediately opens our minds to alternative ways of thinking that make more sense.

Creating Sacred Cow Free Culture

  • Think about the big, important problems and focus on doing work that matters. Don’t get bogged down in the minute details and the short-term view.
  • Regular reflection and lateral thinking about ideas, solutions and product and evaluate how that fits in with reality.

It’s surprising to notice that how often people miss the critical facts that could make all the difference. We may be so biased to get information only from the people with the same point of view. Start questioning or rigorously probing any preconceived notions or past experiences(educated incapacities) or refusal to confront a problem because they can’ see a solution. New ideas and new thinking start to emerge.