As a recap of the last blog, let me start from there. Those who have followed the startups and their ecosystem for a while have always wondered. Like me about why many of them fail. Many of them have a good product-market fit, a good process in place, sound financials and yet they fail. The reason for those is present in the previous blog "Let's see the correlation".
Let me start from where I left. In the previous blog, I stopped at this message. Yes, it is very much possible to predict the time and the team size for a startup to fail. When the trajectory of the business will take a sharp U-turn. Let me show you how? Mathematics provides a lot of input for leadership and decision-making. It is not used as wise in the current context. The most common reason for start-up failures is bad organizational design and development. And one of the reasons why we often do a poor job of that is the subject’s inherent immeasurability. It is very difficult to predict the success of the measure - in the short term. Consider as an example, the stance which we take on many actions is not good. Consider on training or on infrastructure investments or organization culture. Also, consider restructuring or new technology. Is it actually making our business function better or worse? Worse, it plainly costing time and money to an otherwise neutral effect. Organizational complexity exists but the important one is the metric or data availability. In most cases, the data which is available is inadequate to make decisions. For example, it’s not enough to say that a bad organization will show up with bad revenue sooner or later. It's true that it will, but revenues are lag indicators like the iceberg warning. As soon as the captain goes down the deck, it hits you. So what do we do if we cannot measure? My advice is that if you cannot measure it fine but at least we can still model it. Qualitative models deal with cause-and-effect, relationships, and relativity. They are powerful in aiding our decision-making and understanding of the organization. Stop beating around the bush, where is the math? How can you predict the slump? Before I go there, wanted to only say this small concept. In mathematics, an environment has the Markov Property. The property manifests if all data required for a decision is available in the current state. In plain English, it means that we do not need to know the history to make a decision at the current moment. For example, in a chess game, we do not need the history of the game to access our possible next moves. Of course, some history is fine but all I am stating is that it is NOT necessary. OK, without wasting much time let me dive into where I left last time.
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Life improves slowly but goes wrong very fast and only Catastrophe is clearly visible - Edward Teller (American Physicist) The above quote really tells us the whole story - only the catastrophes are clearly visible to us. Before we even start, I think we need to clearly understand the catastrophe theory and then look at the possible connections. According to the scientific dictionary - Catastrophes are bifurcations between different equilibria, or fixed point attractors. Due to their restricted nature, catastrophes can be classified based on how many control parameters are being simultaneously varied. What does it mean in plain English? Catastrophe theory, in mathematics, a set of methods used to study and classify the ways in which a system can undergo sudden large changes in behaviour as one or more of the variables that control it are changed continuously. So what is the importance of this concept? A simple example is the change in shape of an arched bridge as the load on it is gradually increased. The bridge deforms in a relatively uniform manner until the load reaches a critical value, at which point the shape of the bridge changes suddenly—it collapses. This example is for a discontinuous process. While in a continuous process such as heating the gas, the process is very smooth. The temperature change and the rate of change are smooth and predictable since it is continuous. (Calculus and differential calculus solves these) So there was a need to predict changes in non-continuous process, which is what a catastrophe theory does. In the 1960s a French mathematician named René Thom (1923- ) developed a mathematical tool known as catastrophe theory. Thom used his theory to study and make predictions of processes involving sudden abrupt changes. OK, now what is the relationship between startups and this concept? I'm not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep ; I'm afraid of an army of sheeps lead by a lion -- Alexander The Great Drishyam 2 is a really good movie with a very simple plot. It is a gripping tale of a police investigation and a targeted family which is threatened by it. So what has that got to do with leadership lessons? Well, there is a lot of learnings that we can take from the protagonist role - Georgekutty. Mohanlal has done the role to perfection and what has he done is the main moot point of this blog. How well he has handled a crisis situation in his family in a very calm and composed manner. There has always been a question - what makes a good leader? There are 1000s of blogs and books that give you answers which to most of us (include me first) enters through one ear and flies through the other within seconds. Since there is no right way or a wrong way, everyone can have his or her point of view and the debate continues endlessly. So rather than pondering over what are the skills required I would like to change the perspective of trying to learn from every person or activity that we encounter around us. There is another school of thinking which even questions if leadership can be taught or learned. Basically, their approach is that it is an inborn skill that can only be sharpened and never created. Now let's drop all these debatable viewpoints and just try to learn small things from our everyday life - that is a better teacher than books, videos, and blogs (all put together) Most of us always think that leadership skills are much like any other normal soft skill but in reality, we are wrong. There is no one size fits all solution in terms of leadership. Let us see for example in the current political arena - there was Trump, you have Kim Jong-un, Putin, Modi, and Angela Merkel. All of them are good leaders but when you look at them closely - they all approach the same skill using different techniques and points of view. This means that leadership needs to be learned from everywhere and not from a single source. I do not wish to dwell on the movie or the plot but want to highlight a few instances from the movie and then connect them into practical corporate life and share a few lessons on leadership. Of course, Jeethu Joseph did not think of this story from the leadership point of view but he has certainly created a great leadership experience in the form of Georgekutty who is not well educated and hails from a remote village but has a great presence of mind - on a mission with a strategy to get his family out of a crisis. So let's get to the moot point before I forgot what I started. Are you ready? Ensuring that the benefits of globalization are shared widely remains a challenge. -- Sushma Swaraj Globalization has been a buzz word for more than 2 decades and also the most over abused buzz word in the corporate world. Even before I try to denounce it, let me try and understand what it is anyway. In this frame of mind I started researching on this topic and I landed upon a really great book titled “Small Is Beautiful” By Ernst F. Schumacher. Before I get into the book, let me tell about this author Ernst F. Schumacher, a renowned German-British economist and statistician who is best known for his proposal on the human scale. Mr. Schumacher wrote on economic topics for the Times (London) and slowly became one of the chief editorial writers. This book “Small is beautiful” is a collection of essays and was bought to the wider audience by one of his friends. The main theme of these essays was that we cannot plainly assume that the problem of technological production will be solved by capitalism which meant eroding the finite natural capital that nature has given us and depriving the future generations of its benefits. As globalization and its effects have been studies over and over again by many researchers and organizations, the subject has been divided into three sub-categories: political, economic, and cultural. Political globalization refers to the presence of the international governing body that acts as a world government. UN is the example of political globalization in practice. Economic globalization deals with spreading good, services, technology, and information among nations. Finally we have cultural globalization: there is a very strong trend in making all cultures around the world turn into Western lifestyle. This has be done via the pop culture, international trade pacts, communication and media via Internet and social media platforms. All these combined have made the modern world to be summed into one thing: Consumerism (Which was also started by the Americans) To put it simply, the east are slowly getting translated into a miniature west – slowly decaying the long lasted local heritage and culture. There are some good things in globalization but when added the negatives, it seem that the negative angle has a clear edge. There is a huge negative force which performs only one thing – the loss of national identity. This book argues the same and I will try to summarize the book in a crisp and concise mode possible. [Warning: Lengthy read] |
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
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