Continuos Learning for a professional

The need for continuous learning in an on-going job or career stems out of the fact that additional degrees or diplomas would stand good in job promotions. A working Executive MBA is today considered a must for those aspiring to be a VP or GM or Head of a business unit.

If you were a CEO or MD, would you hire a person who had done a similar MBA as a full time student and had experience using that knowledge to good use in a previous company or promote a team member who did an Executive MBA? Mostly the first option would be the choice. An outside candidate is expected to bring in some fresh ideas that resulted in success as compared to an insider who is constrained by organization’s operational limitations and hierarchy. It is a challenge for the insider to wriggle out of them and prove himself or herself.

An on-premise management degree is a serious business ( if done in a good university) with exposure to a no.of real time case analyses and mock decision making exercises alongwith stiff competition from peer students, make a candidate better suited for a top job than an insider.

Additional degrees or qualifications do help the insider to go up a notch or two in hierarchy but not right upto the top. Some organisations want the insiders to be made ready for a top role and gets them to be guided / trained by an experienced coach rather than hiring an outsider at high cost. It is somewhat ok to groom a person in this method to encourage inside talent,but the art of right decision making cannot be coached by an expert as he or she cannot be privy to the organisation’s ground realities and tactics. A coach at best can outline the options that lead to the right decision and it is upto the promising leader to make that call. Also the coach offers insights in management decision making process or leadership grooming based on his or her own experience ( either in the same industry or in a different industry) and that is done over a 4-6 month conversational exchange. There is no doubt this coaching exercise makes the insider open the eyes to the realms management methods and improved personal attributes.

If you intend staying in the same job, augmenting your skills is vital to keep your mind engaged with new information. But hoping that it will leap frog you in the corporate ladder of your organisation in the short time then you may have to face disappointment. If getting an additional degree helps you to land on a better job, then go for it.

What is your experience? Feel free to share your views and thoughts 😊

#management #learning #coaching

Are you a leader or a coach or a mentor?

A Leader sets up a vision and leads a team to achieve it. Not everyone matches his / her speed.

A Coach understands a person’s strength and channels it to deliver the objective. He lets you perform on the stage by not being with you.

A Mentor provides valuable inputs at intervals in a person’s journey to realise his or her true potential. He never travels with you but is a lifelong companion.

Choose one or all the three based on your purpose of engagement. If you follow a Guru, don’t bother about choosing one, for he leads you on the right path, helps you if you are struck at a place, he hones your skills and he is a life time companion.

Work Ethics and Personal Ethics – Are they different ?

I don’t think work ethics and personal ethics are different. The way we organise our personal lives is no different than how we do our jobs at the work place and at the public place.

It is a culmination of values that had been told or taught to us in our childhood and adolescence. Moral values and ethical practices are so important that we must pass them onto the younger generation to turn them into responsible adults and citizens. There are plenty of ways to spoil the young minds through cinema, social media but there are only a few ways this could be done right.

This moral education is missing in our school curriculum and teachers too don’t have time to impart the children these values.

A responsible society needs to create avenues of educating adolescents through value educating lectures or debates. This is where the role of social organisations become important to take up the mantle to train young minds.

Wish more people like us ( parent, teacher, educational administrator, social worker and Psychologist) are prepared to contribute to this yeoman service of creating better citizens for tomorrow.

#education #valueeducation # #ethics

Poverty is a creation of politics

More people are getting into murky politics because it is the best way of making huge money irrespective of what you had studied or who your ancestors were. We have seen,for generations, politicians were richer than entrepreneurs and the trend is growing shamelessly unabated.

Every government says it is committed to wean away money from politics but the politicians manage to clandestinely work with government machinery and law enforcement that are supposed to uphold law and justice.

A recent post in this website said there is poverty when politicians are getting richer day by day than industrialists and entrepreneurs. How true this is!

We fancy jobs in governments and are prepared to spend to make our way through the gutters of political boundaries that are controlled by politicians. Agreed there are a few saints in politics but their voices are stifled by the goons that serve the masters.

We spend in thousands and lakhs of rupees to get our work done as ‘ speed money’ and are also one of the root causes as partners in crime in spreading the disease in our community.

#poverty #politics #lawenforcement

Does strategy need to be short sighted or far sighted?

A leader always has this question to the board of directors and it varies with people, business and external environment.

Many decades back, the purpose of a business was to serve the people with a good product or service encompassing the highly valued ethical business practices and corporate governance. The vision or strategy was for a longer period of time that needed sustenance, resilience and concern for the consuming population and in general, the humanity and nature. Over the decades, as the innovations became rapid, new products and services got developed, consumption by population increased and economies grew larger, a long term strategy had to suffer in execution and sustainability of the business. Agility was the need of a business enterprise and that was slow on adoption due to slow technology adoption and execution methods.

Over the succeeding decades, a business strategy had undergone many changes and today we talk about meeting mostly the expectations of business analysts, investors and share holders. That means how to accelerate the growth of the business and maximise the profits. Obviously this has its own challenge as business leaders tend to achieve this singular objective with a strategy that is short sighted in vision and execution. There is nothing wrong in working towards maximising profits but there are methods and ways to realise it in a short term. In fact the emphasis today by many thought leaders is towards building a strategy for short term due to the demands of security, rising competitions, regulations, geo-politics and technology disruptions.

Business leaders, when adopting a short term strategy, must not look at maximising profits alone and rather focus their own energies and that of their boards towards handling the disruptive trends in macro and micro environments. They must ensure they keep the environment, sustainability of business and corporate governance ( ESG) always in sight respecting social and national and global mandates.

This short term strategy needs to be a transformational one to take on the new challenges and opportunities to drive the Next Generation and to offer immediate term benefits. It may be necessary to set a target date to achieve the objective and then work backwards to develop and execute actions in successive steps. These actions would need to be towards transforming the technologies that are in use in the business, understanding ESG mandates and creating capabilities to deliver these transformational changes. The time frame could be 6-8 years depending on the hierarchical nature and the size of the business that is being driven.

In conclusion, a business must now look at strategy in shorter intervals of time and create ( or seek) capability to execute all those actions that satisfy all the stake holders of business.

Anger Management

When you are angry, you are just a character in someone else’s story. But when you let your anger go, you reclaim your own story and become your own protagonist again.

How often we have seen careers or relationships are ruined due to anger that go uncontrolled. It is the primary reason why some people could not achieve what they had set out for. It clouds our thoughts and we don’t think in a rational manner. Consequently the actions we take in those moments may not be the correct ones.

Everyone gets angry at trivial and justifiable things but we know how anger management plays an important element in shaping us what we are and defining our character in dealing with people.

Psychologist prescribes many anger management techniques as a part of a therapy when it is considered as a mental disorder impacting one’s way of life for a longer period of time. But let us dwell on only occasional mood swings due to anger that are not harmful to us and to others. In our day to day professional and personal lives they may help to balance our relationships with colleagues and relatives.

Meditation is one way of practicing anger management and it requires proper guidance from experts. There are other simple techniques as listed below:

Anger Management Techniques

1.Count to 20 before saying anything.

2.Leave the room for several minutes, or hours, if necessary, before discussing sensitive issues that may provoke your anger.

3.Write out a response to a problem before tackling it orally or in debate.
This will give you time to think about the best approach to a problem rather than responding with random anger.

4.Keeping a diary (journal) and writing about negative emotions to get them out of your system.

5.You may also want to keep a pet, since studies show that petting a dog or cat, for example, helps to reduce blood pressure levels and harmful substances in your system that can damage blood vessels if left unchecked.

6. Talking over situations with a trusted friend and venting to a therapist.

Ref: https://lnkd.in/esiZAe-X

Conviction and Compromise

Conviction ( a strong belief) and compromise don’t go together.

Many great accomplishments were done by people who had convictions in what they had believed in. A small detergent / chemical manufacturer,Dhirubani dreamed and nurtured his business to become a colossal of a company called Reliance Industries that catapulted the surname Ambani to sky high. Friends having the same zeal and goal got together with Rs 10000 loan from one of the wives and established the biggest start-up this country has seen in Infosys. They have grown their businesses with a clear objective of becoming a leader in their industries.

On the other side of the fence, we have seen leaders or founders faltering from their grand vision, getting into debt traps and falling hard from the pedestals. Compromises on business ethics, over ambition, poor customer expectation management and financial irregularities drove high fliers like Kingfisher Airlines and Jet Airways to fail. Similar fate happened to Onida to disappear after being a top seller in TV business. Nano had an early death in spite of it being an affordable car on crowded Indian roads.

People tend to dilute their efforts to sustain their vision that they had strongly believed in. Such compromises by leaders in organisations or a society leave a deep scar on their persona and their failures turn into case studies in business schools.

Conviction in a cause or belief for the right reasons may get you into trouble at times or be inconvenient to others. Eventually it presents a fruitful outcome. That belief also makes the followers to adapt to a similar path and thus it becomes infectious. Compromise is a short cut to fast track your process to reach a goal or accomplish an objective but the outcome always has flaws that cannot be reversed.

Clarity in conviction gets one to the top and be respected.

#conviction #compromise #leadership

Why do we glorify everything as “the greatest”?

These are the some of “the greatest” that we hear:

Dad,Mom, Parents, Friend, Leader, Boss,Country, Political Party, Actor, Sportsman, Organisation and so on…

Greatest is not a permanent stature to any of them mentioned above as it keeps changing in one’s perception over the years. They have created an impact that has got them that adjective. It is just a recognition and honour one is bestowed with. There are living examples of many eminent persons having that tag as they continue to inspire people around them. There have been many role models in our different phases of life and they don’t stay long as such.

Once we tag someone as ‘the greatest’, he or she always has still some scope to improve and that’s how they stay true to that word for a long time. It is a precarious position to stay contented with that title because as you stay basked in that fame, you fail to stay relevant to what is going on around you. Nobody is ‘the greatest’ for ever because they have been constantly improving in what they think, do and advocate.

It is dangerous for you to get tagged as ‘ the greatest’ because staying there long without continuing to make impactful actions that appeal to your people or community, gets you into complacency that pushes you down the pedestal and the admirers or followers look for someone who is afresh in thoughts and actions.

As a motivating tool, it is good for all of us to strive and work towards to be called ‘the greatest’, but it requires unrelenting hard work and right methods in our actions towards a really true and noble objective. Nobody sets out to be ‘the greatest’ and it is the people around you who labels you ‘ the greatest’ after seeing your actions and accomplishments.

Do you cheer up your friends and siblings?

Cheering up for your friends and siblings is a virtue not everyone possesses. It is a nice feeling to get perked up when your shoulders are down after you fail in an examination or in a competition or in a venture.

Only a few parents spend more time on the children and understand the failures of their wards as much as they appreciate their success. Most of the other parents fail to recognise the potential or talents of their children and help them nurturing them to bloom. Instead they scold the children for not living up to their expectations and getting peeved off when they score poorly feeling low amongst other parents. They put constant pressure on their kids and turn them into timid introverts afraid of even attempting any new initiative.

On the contrary, siblings and friends always stand up for what you have or haven’t done. They recognise that their bosom pals do have talents that have to come out. Doing it in a public forum or amidst other family members are like oxygen and you feel you own them a great deal of gratitude and thanks. Such friends are rare to get in today’s world of fierce competition and they stay close to you by being a part of your highs and lows for many decades.

Moving away, we see appreciations of people and performers dwindling down in public forums or concerts or speeches. Somehow we have picked up this trait from our elders mostly in our younger days and we just nod our heads or are feeble in our claps when someone does well on the dais. We do the same in our communications too in WA or Facebook or Insta. We are not generous in recognising a genuine achiever. We fail to acknowledge such efforts that otherwise lifts up the morale and focus of the achiever to perform better in his or her area of specialisation.

The society needs achievers to progress in every sphere and they need to be encouraged all the time to be an inspiration for many young minds to emulate and boldly tread on a path of success and fame.