"Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that is enough" - Robert Heller
Let us say that you arrive at a splendid idea for the next path breaking app in ecommerce. You immediately show it to your friends. They dissect it to the core and tell you it will not work. Hmmmm Now you face a tough decision. Do you go with your guts or your friends’ scientific reasoning? Do you want to go with your gut? Why not? When you look at your statistics, they split the data exactly in the middle. Your gut has worked 50% of the time while the other 50% times it has got it wrong. So what should you do? This analysis, which is based on the past events, certainly seems to be sound and justified. Just wait ... Your gut has only helped you in making many of those dicey decisions which, at some times, looked unsound. When you look at the history, many of the unsound things have only become disruptive hits. Sound ones never do disruption. Dhoni going to Joginder for the last over, Netflix and the other OTT options, Ola taking on the unorganized taxi market, to name a few. So what am I finally saying? The challenge is not in trying to convince those who are in search of soundness to change their minds. The challenge is to only ask them to do a complete gut check to decide whether they should defend their instincts and then do it. Agree with me, what’s your gut feeling?
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Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shores -- Andre Gide, French Novelist Men have always been perceived as people who are uncomfortable or who don’t share their emotions. But they have always felt that sharing emotions is not masculine. Call them as egoistic, unwilling to share, inconsiderate or what not. It seen many a time, men have to console themselves all alone. I am not blaming the other sect, but the ecosystem has portrayed masculinity differently. Crying, compassion, emotional feelings etc as not masculine. Men have a large barrier to overcome to seek help for the problems. For men, sharing their personal issues with a friend or a family is a great hurdle. Leave the therapist for now out of the picture. Why go any further than this classic example. Imagine a male in a car and lost. By lost let me say he has a little direction orientation disability. I mean hopeless and utterly lost. Even in this situation, the person is incapable of stopping his car and asking for directions. Men always feel they should know how to get to their destination and get embarrassed when they don’t. Men have always felt guilty to accept problems. Even when they knew someone else is having a bigger problem than theirs. What rationale is this? Men use the rational that unhappiness is not comparative. The Old Arabic proverb which states “I complained that I had no shoes until I met a person who had no feet”. Even after knowing this, men still do not share. Is there hope? Men have always been termed as people without compassion or with very less. Might be the currency of compassion is a limited resource, with the woman as a finance minister. [Not talking about the current regime at all]. One of the main reasons men don’t share according to me is the pride. The pride will turn angels into devils and it is only humility which makes men as angels. Even after so many years of evolution, some men have misplaced their priorities. They have hung on pride and left humility at bay. The only provenance that I have is that I am also a male. So is there no way out? To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace - Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup The people who work for you are the lifeline of your business. It doesn’t matter which industry you are, it’s the same. There is a very sacred relationship: employer-employee one. It has to be positive for both of them to be successful. It is a very sad state of affairs. This relationship deteriorates as the business stabilizes or scales to the next level. Might be that they get comfortable for their own good. They got distracted by other priority tasks. Whatever the reason, the worst thing they can do is to come across like organisations that don’t care. This is where the rubber meets the road, the employee decides on whether to stay or move on. The moment the employee exercises his veto power, the caring reappears magically. This does not come without a warning. There are several indications which come up. Let me list the top 4 and the most important one:
The list is endless; I accept, but these symptoms are easy to detect and stop the system from getting rot. Why should we do that? Isn’t it too expensive? In today’s cutthroat business world, Organisations do not care about you. They cannot take care of you. All the employee motivation and employee engagements are only on paper and theory. No one has time to put in place, even the first few lines of that policy. Let me take a very simple case, does the bank care about you. NO, they only want your money. They don’t care about you, it’s the plain truth. Neither does your hospital or your company cab service. Does your car dealer really care about you when they ping you for a service reminder? I am surprised that people get amazed when they discover this. Why this amazement? It’s because they are people, simple human beings. What does that mean, they can care. People care for people, but I do not think organisations can. It’s only when demands and regulations (Red-tape bureaucracies) get in the way caring fades. So do I mean to say that Organisations cannot care? No, I definitely say they can care. Then how? If the organisation can fill in caring people at sensitive posts. Simple, fill them in with people and get corporate out of the way. The caring culture will germinate and sustain for a long time. There is a simple way to get into this habit. When you free up your employee to behave like people, caring culture germinates. As opposed to looking at them as pure profit maximising machines. If done so, caring can’t help but grow. So let us put ourselves in the corporate shoes and think for a moment. In the short run, not caring saves money and brings profits. Don’t bother improving the facilities, let the cubicles become smaller. Don’t worry about those small customers, etc. It may seem to work, but only for a short time. They may be busy. Hiring people and improving infrastructure costs money, effort and time (Triple constraints) So what is my conclusion? In the long term, caring pays multifold by itself. Those organizations which put extra efforts, go the extra mile are always rewarded. Their reward is Sustainability and Loyalty. Finally, not to mention that caring makes us more humane, it’s worth it. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. - Michael Porter (American academic) This famous host - Monty Hall who in fact ruled the primetime network with "Let's Make a Deal" in the 60s and ran for more than 30 years has left some serious lessons that matter for every entrepreneur or strategist in the corporate world. Who would have thought that a simple game show could inspire an entire group of statisticians & mathematicians with PhDs to run massive experiments to uncover the truth. The Monty Hall problem confused people for decades (it even confuses me now) So let me explain what is this and then look at the confusing part. Monty Hall asks you to choose one of three closed doors. One of the doors hides a prize and the other two doors have no prize( or goats). You state out loud which door you pick, but you don’t open it right away. Monty opens one of the other two doors which you did not pick, and there is no prize behind it. At this moment, there are two closed doors, one of which you picked. The prize is behind one of the closed doors, but you don’t know which one. Monty asks you, “Do you want to switch doors?” The majority of people assume that both closed doors are equally like to have the prize. It appears like the door you chose has a 50/50 chance. Because there is no perceived reason to change, most stick with their initial choice. Now comes the Monty Hall problem or the time to shatter this illusion with the truth! If you switch doors, you double your probability of winning! (Statistically proven) What!? (Even I was in a shock the first time I heard it) The correct solution to the little game is for the contestant to always switch doors to the remaining door (more on that in a second). The problem is that the solution is entirely counter intuitive even for an experienced educated person. This is because the people see the original option as an entirely independent event even when subsequent revelations are on offer to them. The main argument is that Initially I had 1 out 3 as the probability and now it has become 1 out of 2 after one door was opened. And if you also thought the same, then you are wrong!!! I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is in not trying. - Jeff Bezos As the financial year comes to a close, we all start to evaluate what you have achieved during the last year. You assess your achievements, KPI, career and the teams who worked for you and very soon you come to the conclusion: IT SUCKS. At the start of the year it was full of promise and now at the fag end of it all looks wasted and fatigue. You start to hate your job. Does this sound very much like you? As an executive and career coach, I have listened to hundreds of such stories over a 100 times. Passionate hard-working folks who mostly are thwarted by the management when they come to me, I give them the universal solution - "Be your own boss" The moment when they hear this advice, the backtracking starts. When I say to them, why not put the money in your idea, work it out for some time and then test the results. The backtracking excuses starts to flow:
So what does entrepreneur mean? It means choosing one solution which you think works, you start to work much harder than when you were as an employee, get paid very less initially and have exponential stress levels with unforeseen uncertainties and very less family time. Trust me, it’s very scary and if you think not - then you are really stupid. The next logical question is - if it’s so scary why do it? The main reason is that it earns something which even money can't buy - FREEDOM. Freedom to have no one to blame, freedom to choose your time, freedom to plot your own course, freedom to change the world for the better. But there is something that comes along with FREEDOM as a free package. |
AuthorVasudevan is a Leadership Mentor and an Executive coach. I run an online website geared towards helping creative entrepreneurs and future managers to build their dreams. Archives
June 2023
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