Keep your shirt on

Learn more, More will Rise, Rise will Shine - Dr V V Rao

What are they good at? What are their talents? What are their souls’ urges? What are they like when they are at their best? When we help people find good in others, people will enjoy being led, they will be more receptive, enthusiastic to our opinions and guidance.

Learning: Hitler had a powerful and aggressive ally, Japan. He knew that Japan was considering attacking either the North (they had a non declared border war with Russia then in the Far East), or the South (against South East Asia and the US). He did not bother to try to coordinate his invasion of Russia with Japan or even inform them. If he did, Japan would stay at war with Russia for 8 more months and that alone would be enough to keep the large Russian forces in the Far East until the German army advanced all the way to Moscow by December 1941. Instead, the uninformed Japan signed a non-aggression pact with Russia just two month before Hitler invaded them, and as a result, when the exhausted and frozen German invaders reached Moscow and thought that Russia had no further reserves, they were massively attacked by fresh Russian units who had been transferred from the Japanese border in the Far East.

There are moments in our life when we are forced to work with people who have irritated every fiber of our very being. We did not like them because they exploited people; they were arrogant, abusive, loud and combative. And yet, we knew they were the ones who had some amazing talents and therefore, it was a privilege that we got the chance to work with that person and learn something which we did not know earlier. When that person moves away, we cease to miss that person, rather miss their unique skills and talents.

A prominent periodical wrote about the ‘amazing’ career of a successful business woman. What made her success all the more remarkable was the fact that she had had no previous business experience. So she had been asked to outline the principles upon which she had built her business. When she submitted the article, the publisher exclaimed, ‘Astounding, these ideas are not new but their application is unique’. Would you mind telling me where you got them? She then smiled and said, from my colleagues who are the subject matter experts of their own field.

There are many avenues, ideas, talents, skills and competencies in each person you come across in your life. It is only you who can and has to recognize them with an open mind and spirit.

Heroes in our minds

Be a hero

Most of the stupendous leaders do possess neither prominent physical appearance nor vigorous personality. What distinguishes them is the clarity of thought and persuasiveness of their dreams, the depth of their dedication, and the extent of their candidness to continually learning more. They do not ‘have the answer,’ yet they seem to instill self-belief in those around them that, together, ‘we can learn whatever we need to learn in order to achieve the outcome we truly craving.’

Leaders work to build up conceptual and communication skills. Some other leaders strive to pay attention to and be glad about others and their dreams. Some use other approaches. But all are committed to working on their own growth, to ‘struggling to become a human being.’ [Roger Saillant]

Each leader think in a different way, truly valuable leaders seem to come to a shared approval of the power of holding Vision and concurrently looking deeply and honestly at current certainty. People who are truly leading seem rarely to think themselves in that way. Their focus is habitually on what needs to be done, larger ideas in which they are operating. There is always the hazard, especially for those in leadership positions, of becoming ‘heroes in their minds.’ [Bryan Smith]

James Hargreaves led a simple existence, working in the cottage industry that spinning was in the first half of the eighteenth century. His whole family was involved in spinning and weaving. In the Hargreaves’s home, fiber was spun into thread, and thread woven into cloth. In 1764, he built a machine to be operated by one person, which would spin several threads at once. Initially, it had eight spindles, but Hargreaves saw that the machine could handle many more. Hargreaves’s machines nick named after his wife Jenny, was an instant hit with the merchants and entrepreneurs.  Inevitably, others involved in the industry saw the development as a threat to their employment. In 1768, as spinning mills multiplied, Hargreaves’s neighbors attacked his house and destroyed his machines. Hargreaves took his family to Nottingham, where he founded a smaller version of the spinning mill that transformed the industry, one of the major stepping stones in the Industrial Revolution.

‘As businesses, we must be the change we want to see in the world. This will mean that most everything is up for change: our products, our process, our business models, how we manage and lead, and how we are with one another. It is not likely that we can change just bits and pieces and shift the whole’ [Roger Saillant]

It is easy to get lost in thinking about big issues such as climate change, corruption, to feel and think that there is nothing we can do, and may be even that there is nothing anyone can do. Yet big issues are not just big and they are very much right here. We are the carriers of the whole change, leadership and our own dreams to accomplish.

The building block process inside IBM: In response to a highly dynamic IT market place, IBM has defined as reference architecture for each of its product lines, categorized by major market segments. At the highest level, this architecture defines the target market, the competition, and life span of the product platform. At the design level, engineers carefully isolate product functionality and define standard interfacing.

In our real life when we come across complex scenarios and situations as a leader we need to isolate, recognize and keep our Vision intact within our thoughts and deeds to move forward. 

At each small success we should not become our own heroes in our minds.  

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.

Why there is a LIMIT to grow?

Powerful learning proportional to direct experience

The most important and useful learning comes from direct experience. Indeed we learn eating, crawling, walking and communication through direct trial and error – through taking an action and seeing the consequences of that action; then taking a new and different action.

But what happens when we can no longer observe the consequences of our action?

When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon? It becomes impossible to learn from different experiences.

Example 1: A high tech company grows rapidly because of its ability to introduce new products. New products grow, revenues grow, the R&D budget grows, and the engineering and research staff grows. Eventually, this grown current technical staff becomes increasingly complex and difficult to manage. The management burden often falls on senior engineers, who in turn have less time to spend on engineering. Diverting the most experienced engineers from Engineering to Management results in longer product development times, which slows down the introduction of new products.

Here when the senior engineering staff no longer can observe the consequences of their actions learning would eventually stopped and developing cycles get elongated.

Example 2: When a professional organization, such as consultancy firm grows very rapidly when it is small, providing outstanding solutions, results, promotions and opportunities. But firm gets larger, its growth level slows perhaps it starts to saturate its market niche. Or it might reach a size when the senior consultants are no longer working and interested in doing the direct jobs.

Here too when the senior consultants no longer can observe the consequences of their actions learning would eventually stopped and solutions providing cycles gets longer and consulting organization becomes non-profitable.

Limits of growth is governed by our direct experiences and actions, we must make an effort to learn more from direct experience then and then we grow further in any field otherwise we will be “A boiled frog”.

If we place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to jump out and it may be successful in doing that. But if we place the frog in room temperature water, now if we gradually turn on the heat source slowly the water temperature raising frog may enjoy the warmth and after some time frog will do nothing until he is unable to jump out of the pot.

Through time we generally start working on indirect things like the frog where we do not add any direct value, experience and we are not aware of the consequences of the indirect actions, which will lead us to “LIMIT OUR GROWTH”.

So we must recognize all those situations, contexts and scenarios when our actions are too distant from direct experiences we must refrain and put an effort to gain more direct experience and “NO LIMIT TO OUR GROWTH”.