Nerves of steel

Nerves - 765

Today is after all, the only day you can truly be sure of and it is also the only day you have control over. When Churchill learned of this he made a decision: the Bismarck had to be sunk. His staff officers advised him this could not be done. The logic of the moment showed the British obviously lacked ships, aircraft, and fire power to do the job… But all the negative talk did not discourage Churchill. He was determined and he closed all the escape hatches. He was 100 percent committed to sinking the Bismarck. And it was sunk.

To move and win now leads to a good sense of urgency. This will help you tremendously in developing a true sense of urgency concerning your goals and to becoming more effective every day. Do qualitative work every day, make everyday a success and inevitably your whole week, month, year and life will be a success. One day at a time is still the golden rule to live by.

John is the kind of guy you love....

He is always in a good mood and always has something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, ‘If I were any better, I would be twins!’ He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, John was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation. Seeing this style really made evryone curious, so one day friends went up and asked him, ‘We do not get it! You cannot be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?’ He replied, ‘Each morning I wake up and say to myself, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or ... you can choose to be in a bad mood. I choose to be in a good mood.’ Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or...I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.

Several years later, he was involved in a serious accident, falling some sixty feet from a communications tower. After eighteen hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, he was released from the hospital with rods placed in his back. About six months after the accident, when someone asked him how he was, he replied, ‘If I were any better, I’d be twins. Want to see my scars?’ when friends asked him what had gone through his mind as the accident took place. ‘The first thing that went through my mind was the well-being of my soon-to-be born daughter,’ he replied. ‘Then, as I lay on the ground, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or...I could choose to die. I chose to live.’ He continued, ‘the paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the ER and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read 'he is a dead man'. I knew I needed to take action.’ And eventually he survived. [www.cfs. purdue. edu] In your path for winning you are the head honcho who takes care of the entire proceedings of your execution. Every day we have the choice to live fully. If you desire to live the life of your dreams, you must acquire a sense of urgency to accomplish tasks, a sense of urgency to live your dreams and a sense of urgency to get things done. One has to be on the attacking side of the equation rather than on the waiting side of things. Time and life are anonymous. Both are gifts that need to be utilized optimally. When you waste one, you automatically waste the other. So value your time greatly. It is the most important indicator of how you are utilizing your life to become a ‘Hollow to Halo’ and accomplish your dreams. 

Sense of urgency is the impetus to winning while false sense of urgency is the pebble in the shoe. – Dr. V. V. Rao

Inability to distinguish between the vital and trivial will rock the boat

Vital & Trivial

Prioritize the vital action rather than spend time and energy on the trivial issues, setback, shortfall and you will make good progress. One should not prepare to win a life time dream with a cloak and dagger way.

A real sense of urgency backed up with the capability to prioritize your goals, and actions to succeed in life. One also must be able to distinguish between the vital and trivial details.

Many a times, people waste a lot of their energy and time on the trivial details and in the bargain lose focus of what was vital and had to be done and thereby delay the progress which results in setback in progress and probably enthusiasm in taking the issue, thought and idea to its logical conclusion and success.

Unless we use systematic tools for prioritizing task and activities, we may end up arriving at some wrong decision and prioritization. The following tools - used independently and / or in combination, would therefore positively be helpful in effective prioritizing:

1.       Cost-Benefit analysis

2.      Force Field analysis

3.      Risk Priority Number analysis

4.      Return on Investment analysis

5.      Critical Path analysis

6.      Pareto analysis

Vital and trivial distinction can be based on the some more of the following causes

·         Reduction of risk

·         Avoidance of loss

·         A means of entry to new arena

·         A means of obtaining more money, wealth and fame

·         Removal of competitive environments

·         Obtaining new ideas

·         Obtaining talented people and talents

A true story:

At 12:16 a.m. Aug 28, 1991 a car subway train on the Lexington line beneath New York City jumped the track and crashed in the subway tunnel. When such an emergency occurs, the New York City transit author immediately appointed a project master to oversee the handling of disaster rescue and repair activities to bring the normalcy. The prioritization of phases to accomplish the project were

Phase 1: Respond to injury-get people out of danger, provide needed medical care, remove bodies and ensure that no victims remain in the debris.

Phase 2: Secure the area-simultaneously with phase-1, eliminate other threats to life and property by disconnecting power, providing emergency lighting and ventilation, stopping other trains from entering the area, keeping non-relevant pedestrian and vehicular activities.

Phase 3: Initiate command facilities-concurrent with phase 1 and 2 set up, activate command and coordination structure for all emergency activities.

Phase 4: Remove debris-collect and remove the elements and debris of the accident which would hinder rescue, clean-up, or repair.

Phase 5: Remove damaged equipment-use cranes and other to remove heavy items movement and large equipment removal, cutting the steel frames.

Phase 6: Facility repair,

Phase 7: Test the facilities and

Phase 8: Clean up. As work progressed through the next three days trains began running again.

[S Nacco, ‘PM in Crisis Management at NYCTA: Recovery from a major subway accident,’ PM Network, Feb’1992]

Normalized conclusion:Once you start recognizing, practicing and distinguishing difference between vital and trial parts of a plan, activities it will be a good feather in your cap. That will lead to a higher success rate of all your dreams.

Follow the path of highest enjoyment and blow the lid off

Path of enjoyment

The easiest and most loving ways to complete a dream is to give yourself alternatives for what you want to do. On the other hand, try and give yourself the flexibility over what to do, it becomes like a big adventure.

You get to decide what you like to do best, and you can do it. It excites you because you have an element of choice.

This is the path of highest enjoyment – doing what makes you feel happiest at the moment. When you do so, you automatically become productive and proud about yourself and feel good about the work you have accomplished.

Following the path of enjoyment is an apple of your mind’s eye.

We have heard about when we do not attach ourselves so passionately to the action and it results into a failure you were not attached because you were not enjoying. That is pretty clear. Yet we do expect in our lives greatest results. We are convinced that we reap only what we sow.

Early priorities: Thomas Edison founded GE in the year 1878. When the 45 year old Welch became CEO in 1981, the US economy was in a recession. To leverage performance in GE’s diverse portfolio of businesses, the new CEO challenges each to be ‘better than the best’ and announced for a radical change over in the next five years. But as GE managers struggled to build #1 and #2 positions in a recessionary environment and global Japan’s industrial pressure during that time GE freed up $ 11 billion by selling more than 200 businesses also made 370 acquisitions investing more than $21 billion. Internally Welch’s insistence that GE become more ‘lean and agile’ resulted in highly disciplined de-staffing process. As he continued to chip away at bureaucracy, Welch next scrapped GE’s laborious strategic planning system and corporate planning. The budgeting process was re-installed by scrapping the just internal documenting process and he instituted a comparison with external similar industries. In the span of 8 years he de-staffed 59,000 salaried and 64,000 hourly positions.

The second stage: By the late 1980s, most of the GE restructuring was complete and now major work on rebuilding process started. Both management operating system and supporting management hardware instituted.

Best practices: Welch’s relentless pursuit of ideas to increase productivity resulted in the birth of related movement called ‘Best Practices’. Simple principle of ‘How can we learn from the other companies that are achieving higher productivity than GE?’. For example one of the auditors explained: ‘When I started 10 years ago, the first thing I did was count the $5,000 in the petty cash box. Today, we look at $5 million in inventory on the floor, searching for process improvements that will bring it down.’ Then he focused on ‘Developing leaders’, ‘Going global’, ‘Boundary less behavior’, ‘Achieving the impossible’, and ‘Service business from 15% to 75%’ from 1981 to 1999 with his relentless initiatives, changes, and improvements built the confidence back in the company.

The Six Sigma Quality Initiative:When a 1995 company survey showed that GE employees were dissatisfied with the quality of its products, processes and services. GE adopted the Six sigma model at the annual general meeting, Welch announced that in the first two years of Six sigma, GE had saved $750 million and the DNA of the organization towards quality and productivity has been institutionalized. Jack Welch glowed with pride at GE Annual Meeting in 1999. For the first time GE revenue exceeded $100 billion, operating margin was all time high of 16.7%, and earnings per share had increased over 14%, the fortune poll of US corporate executives had voted GE the country’s ‘Most admired company’ for the second year running, and the Financial Times had named it the ‘Most Respected Company in the world’ in the year 2000 Jack Welch retired at the age of 64 years.[ Strategic Management, Gregory G Dess, G T Lumpkin, Marilyn L Taylor ]

For about 20 years, Jack Welch managed the company from a level of survival to a $100 billion company. It was only possible because he was enjoying and loving what he was doing year on year, he was open to new practices, ideas, talents, techniques and robust behaviors. He finished most of the initiatives, targets, aspirations and developments he had started and more importantly he was able to leave behind so many valuable lessons for the future generations.

Concluding reminder: Finish what you start

We always feel better looking at inferior people and snug as a bug in a rug

Snug as a bug

‘I am perfectly capable of deciding what is best for me, my family and my career.

I do not need outside guidance.’ Sounds like a rebellious early teenager. It is actually our complacency talking in the head.

We like living in our safe and secure place; a place with no personal and professional growth or no force pushing us to make positive changes in our life.

A place we believe is the ultimate so we remain in a jungle of complacence this happens to all of us. We have been enjoying a stable life at that level for a very long time. Our superiority complex makes us compare ourselves to an inferior person and become complacent. This can easily happen at any level, the trap is still the same and the script is almost always going to be similar. We have subconsciously decided that there is no need to make further changes, no need to push ourselves to make further growth, and now we can just sit back, prop our feet up, and enjoy our current level and ignore our weak link and live with complacency.

Michael Jordan, one of the world’s best basketball player, has a winning attitude. In high school, he was out from his school team obviously that did not comfort him. He missed more than 9000 shots in his career. He lost almost 300 games, at least 26 times he missed the winning shot in the final games, however he never stopped shooting the baskets and winning the games for the team and for himself. We have to watch what we are doing closely while we are grinding anything on a grindstone. And the only way you can do that is by keeping your nose to the grindstone. Simply we cannot be successful without real hard work.

Taking Usain Bolt as an example, Usain Bolt did not happen in a day. It has taken tons of hard work, dedication and pain at every moment of journey to reach that level of excellence. He broke his own personal records again and again.

‘You have got to understand with great clarity what you can do better than any other company in the world,’ as per author Jim Collins.

Star Bucks CEO Howard Schultz realized this just before he directed company resources in what may have been a disastrous direction. Schultz envisioned Starbucks as the internet coffeehouse of the world. You would be able to order specialty coffees, cappuccino machines, even pots and pans. But before he tried to move the aroma of freshly brewed latte to the internet, he considered his next important action. According to one writer, ‘It is as if he woke up one morning, rubbed his eyes, sipped a strong Sumatran brew, and said to himself, ‘Wait a minute, I sell coffee!’

The internal true ‘sense of urgency’ took him to revenue about $2.4 billion within two years of business started in the year 2001, [J. Creswell, ‘Remedies for an Economic Hangover,’ Fortune, June’2001] and he showed us the path for ‘Hollow to Halo’.

In Hardwood Groves

The same leaves over and over again!

They fall from giving shade above

To make one texture of faded brown

And fit the earth like a leather glove

Before the leaves can mount again

To fill the trees with another shade

They must go down into the dark decayed

They must be pierced by flowers and put

Beneath the feet of dancing flowers…

We always feel better looking at inferior people and deviate from our winning path.