Follow the path of highest enjoyment and blow the lid off

If I am always comparing myself with other human beings, I will either suffer from ego or jealousy

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 sown. At this juncture and a part of this chapter if I do not talk about Mr. Jack Welch of GE it will be a big negligence on my part.

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, he 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.

The spirit of “SME”

Be early, you can make your mistakes while it is cheap!

Whether we have recession or the economy is booming, Subject Matter Expertise (SME) is the key to our success. If we cannot keep upgrading our SME, we are not going to weather the storm and in good times we cannot take advantage of the available talents.

We need to spend energy on effectively learning and evaluating our own skills and SME, however, without appropriate measurement methods, these efforts can be useless. SME is a collection of knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics that define effective performance for a job. SME is important and relevant way for executing the objectives that need to be developed both personally and professionally so as to be able to capitalize on our performance in life.

It was during that time the great naturalist Charles Darwin put forward his theories on “The survival of the fittest” and “The origin of species be means of natural selection”. His theory of evolution” shook the whole world. It was his SME that gave strength to Darwin to stick to his stand when the whole community was against him. It was because of the quality of SME that he did not deter from his stand. Time proved him right.

Throughout history, almost every culture has had art, pottery, sculpture, poetry, dance and music as a personal SME. The desire to master SME is not limited by era, nationality, creed, sex and nationality. When we realize SME needs to become a habit an activity we integrate into our dreams and we

1. Continually recognizing what is vital for us and we are not dim, or even inaccurate, view of what is really important to us.
2. Our believes firmed up with willpower, action with heart and a sincere desire to serve the world
3. Able to see the current reality more clearly and not to be stuck because we keep pretending “All is well”.
4. We are acutely aware of our ignorance, incompetence and development areas.
5. We are able pursue emotional development to attain full potential of ourselves and SME.

David Ogilvy had three guidelines which he claims inevitably lead to success: Work twice as hard as other people; Work on jobs you enjoy most; Keep working and learning; do not even think about retirement His book Ogilvy on Advertising is a general commentary on advertising In early 2004, Adweek magazine asked people in the business ‘Which individuals - alive or dead - made you consider pursuing a career in advertising?’ and Ogilvy topped the list. The same result came when students of advertising were surveyed. His best-selling book Confessions of an Advertising Man is one of the most popular and famous books on advertising.

As an example, it is the beautiful house that you seek to own at the end, not the brick laying and cementing work. But, you need to remind yourself that, all the brick laying and cementing work is part of what makes that beautiful house in the end. Every little bit you are learning (SME) now counts toward realizing that end vision. It is just easy to lose sight of that because you are caught up in the daily micro-tasks that keep coming, one after another.

The problem starts when your SME starts slipping away from you. So keep going back to your SME (both physically and mentally). Surround yourself with things that reminds you of your end goal, it could be some vision board, pictures of others who have achieved the same goal, objects that represent the goal, etc.

Finally Subject Matter Expertise (SME) will eventually help achieving your dream to become a reality.