manage well

Revolutionaries are a restless lot. In a way, they are like the ‘shooting stars’ in an organization – they are seriously outnumbered by the hundreds of twinkle-twinkle little stars, they enter an organization with tails-on-fire hurry, and (try to) change everyone and everything around them within the short time span that they are there, and then they burn out (or just lose interest when the work they set out for is either accomplished, or get bored when it doesn’t get accomplished) and just move on. They don’t have a lot of time, patience or socialistic motives making small changes here and there, or to make elaborate plans and do surveys, investigations and pilots, and so on. They would rather be out there in the middle of heat, dust and all the adrenalin-pumping and chest-thumping action than be found napping in a death-by-powerpoint meeting full of naysayers who believe it is their fundamental right to protect the status quo.

While some are born revolutionaries, some people don that role for some phase of their professional life. Irrespective of whether you are one or not, chances are that you might be reporting to one, or working with one, or managing one such person sometime in your life. I would even bet that sometime in your career, you might find the need to shift gears and play that role. These ideas have helped me over the years, and I hope they help you as well:

Continue reading ‘Ten Commandments for Revolutionary Change Agents’ »

Change is painful, especially when you have to change yourself. However, in reality all change is really about – changing yourself ! When people ignore this simple and timeless truth, they start accumulating a lot of ‘rigidity’ – growing at the rate of one day at a time, until that years-of-accumulated-and-hardened-behavior becomes a Frankenstein’s monster and an inseparable and indistinguishable part of themselves ! So much so, that they don’t even see that as the problem. I read somewhere that it takes an average of 21 days for a practice to become habit. I think the same must be true for negative change – i.e., refusal to adapt to changes around us. And in, perhaps, as little as 21 days, we just fortify ourselves against the impending and growing change around us. When that happens, another fantastic thing happens. Since we are out of tune with the system, there is a real danger of the system rejecting us. To preempt that from happening, we reject the system ! We criticise the environment around us, we comment on people’s behavior, we become cynical of changes, we are uncomfortable with others enjoying their newfound happiness…and we defend our own stand tooth and nail….and become even more rigid in that process. There is one thing as maintaining your values and convictions, and quite another to be rigid. A hairline separates them, and any judgment is as subjective as any other one. In reality, one person knows the right judgment – you.

The trick, of course, is to view every small, delta, incremental change as something as trivial as driving you brand-new car on a dirt road in the country. Just as you would slow down at every hump or look out for potholes, and chickens and dogs trying to cross the road, so should you in real life.

Mac Anderson is Founder of Simple Truths who make lovely self-help books. In a post, he shared a wonderful story:

Continue reading ‘Change yourself, not the mirror’ »

Zeonbia is a great book by Matthew Emmens and Beth Kephart that you can not only complete in under an hour, you probably want to read it once again right away – to get a better flavor of the simple yet powerful story of Moira who must find a way out of the chaos she encounters day one of her job and no one is quite willing to help her.

Zenobia is story of our times which is such a hard-hitting truth. I would say Moira is lucky (or rather willing to challenge status quo ?) in the sense she is able to see that there is a problem – a majority of us do not evey realize there is a problem at the workplace. Of course, of those sharp minds who are able to figure out there is indeed some problem, some try to find a solution, get ridiculed like Moira, and very few among us mortals really succeed like her. Of course, Moira is not a superwoman or a super-employee, if you will. She is a normal person, who is shocked at the ‘toxic energy’ (to borrow from FISH, another great book) at Zenobia and though not expecting such a state of affairs, nevertheless tries to do something about it. The fact that she succeeds eventually is not important, at least to me. What is important is to undertake every business opportunity as an adventure – as is rightly the theme of this fable.

The book also subtely revisits a long standing debate – when in deep crisis, are outsiders better or insiders. Outsiders come with no baggage, are immediately able to spot the issues and without any sentimental attachments to things around them, call the spade a spade. The insiders, though have obvious advantages in terms of knowing the system well, etc. are often found so much ‘in’ the system that they hardly can see what is wrong with it – just like the frog who gets slow-boiled to death in a pot of water without realizing that the water was getting hotter all the time, albeit too slowly for immediate discomfort.

Continue reading ‘Do you know your Zenobia(s) ?’ »