No time for beauty; but time for duty will make you stately

'Success in life to be determined by our contributions' - Dr V V Rao

According to unseen archives, the ballerina expressed a dying with that Anna Pavlova remains be returned to Russia after fall of communism. So, the dancer condemned by Soviet officials as ‘The darling of wicked capitalist audiences’.

Anna’s image was one of fragile genius, a woman whose gossamer body and delicate beauty enchanted millions of people around the world and revolutionized ballet. In fact, Anna was a hard worker who made a virtue of physical weaknesses. “Success depends in very large measure upon individual initiative and exertion, and can’t be achieved except by dint of hard work. It was a grueling schedule.

She spent most of her life on trains and in hotels and actually invented and early version of the modern pointed shoe to make toe-work less taxing when she danced. 

According to one story, the doctors offered to save her life with an operation that would have damaged her ribs and left her unable to dance. Anna Pavlova chose instead to die on Jan 23^rd, 1931. Before dying, she performed some of the movements from ‘The dying Swan’, which she had danced more than 4,000 times.

Jay W. Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a pioneering article in the Harvard Business Review, 1958, which established a model of time’s impact on the performance of an organization. Using ‘industrial dynamics’ a technique originally developed to direct shipboard fire-control systems Forester tracked the effects of time delays and decision within a simple and representative business system consisting of a factory, its warehouse, a distributor, and a retailer. 

The numbers are the delays measured in weeks in the flow of information and product from one level in the system to another. In this example, the orders accumulate at the retailer for three weeks, are in the mail for one half a week, are delayed  at the distributor for two weeks, go back in the mail for another half a week, and need eight weeks for processing at the factory and its warehouse. The finished product then begins its journey back to the retailer. The complete cycle takes 19 weeks.

The customer does not often see a 19-week cycle. That is because inventories are held at various levels-to deceive the customer into thinking that responsiveness of this system is much faster than 19 weeks.

Underlying the operations of every company working like its spine is a system. For example, what does it take for an aeroplane manufacturer to receive an order, process the order, produce the plane, deliver it and collect?

What are the steps that bank goes through in processing transactions, coordinating with branch operators, collaborating with branches, and delivering timely and accurate cash decisions?

How does an automobile manufacturer design a new vehicle made up of thousands of different component parts and manage the daily flow of orders and shipments with suppliers and assembly plants?

In fact, what Honda and other variety-driven companies pioneered and made structural changes in their operations that enabled them to execute their processes much faster than before.

A basic test of management’s understanding of the systematic nature of its business is whether or not it is caught in the organized effort loop. All businesses must do a good amount of organized effort for future to be sure they are ready to make the value.

What is that I am driving you through these examples and narrations?

The unknown inventories, process effectiveness, customer awareness and delivery to the requirements come only from a deadly hard work not by any means of short cuts.

Every strategist, whether in business or war or industry or other arenas, understands the value of organized, coordinated effort. Any modern railroad bridge is an excellent example of the value of organized effort, because it demonstrates quite simply and clearly how thousands of tons of weight borne by comparatively small group of steel bars and beams.