Trade off
Synergy. That ubiquitous word we find mentioned in every merger, alliance, partnership or business acquistion. That most elusive of things to actually realize business value from. Ok so, the most common synergy resides in cost efficiencies that are achieved through combining shared activities of two firms. It is THE easiest synergy to realize, if there was ever a low hanging fruit among synergies, this is it. Now, in order to achieve these cost efficiencies some people will lose there jobs, well someone will have to fire them. We slickly call it ‘active management of overhead’ or ‘SG&A trimming’ from a financial perspective or ‘right sizing’ in the realm of corporate strategy. Whatever it maybe, we state is so simply, in our case reports – an easy win, an obvious move. But it changes the life of people who are affected.I saw some one get fired the past week. I was a bit saddened by how quickly it happened, how quickly people forgot and moved on. The business student in me understands the logic behind it and does admire the ruthless effectiveness of the human machinery that kept on working inspite of this key ex-employee’s absence, but the person in me dislikes the way in which the termination was carried out. I felt like saying “show some respect” to those who oversaw the job termination.
Somethings must be done, like reducing staff but there is a civil respectful way of doing it and this way sometimes is not consistent with Effectiveness and Efficiency tenets and a trade off must made.
Stuck !!!
It is 3:55 AM EST and i am stuck at Newark on my way home back to Mumbai after a long 1 1/2 year away. It has been the most wretched half a day. What began with four hour delay at Columbus airport has now been surpassed by a 12 hour wait at Newark en route Mumbai. Well it is at times like these when we have time to think, you know really think – as there are limited number of things that you can do at the airport to pass time. People watching is fun but its charm wears off quickly especially as your frustration level with each passing minute rises
Isn’t it ironic that when we are physically stuck our mind races
Treasure chest hidden at the depth of your soul
INSPIRATION! That is the treasure chest hidden at the very depth of your soul. Unaware of it’s existence we spend our life looking for it at every other place except inside our very self.
It is strange when we say that we are inspired by a movie, book, poem or deed; like inspiration was some kind of a foreign feeling that we derived from these objects or deeds. It is more likely that we forgot what resided in our own self and these things just reminded us of what we had forgotten. Cowards don’t become heroes because they read a book or faced something that inspired them, it is the brave that become heroes because the same things remind them of what they have forgotten, bravery. It is like ‘if he can do it then so can I’, that feeling of self confidence that rises like a Phoenix from it’s ashes. So when we search for inspiration we don’t search for something that we don’t have, we search from something that would remind us of what he already have and bring it to the surface like a catalyt does in a chemical reaction.
People find these catalyst in many things. I find them mostly in movies and sometimes in books. The journey of Duny who was later named Ged and became known as Sparrow Hawk in A Wizard of Earthsea inspires me more than any other story i have read.
Legacy
My professor of Organization Behavior, ever so frequently stresses on LEGACY, he says that it is the thing most business leader think about the most when they come into the twilight of their careers, when it is almost too late to leave the kind of legacy they want to leave behind. That got me thinking about what do i want my legacy to be, and i could not come up with anything instantaneously. The more i thought about it, the more it became clear to be that without an enduring legacy to leave behind, my life would not have matter. We always think of short and long term goals, but these goals range from 2 to 20 years. But legacy i guess is beyond that, the ultimate long term goal. So i thought it would be easier to start with immediate goals and how they lead to my legacy but that is a rather backward way of looking at it. It should be the other way round, your legacy must lead to your immediate goals and define all the actions that you take.
So what do i want my legacy to be? I want to be a person who is remembered as great a mentor who enriched the life of those he touched, the one who not only helped build & grow businesses, but also changed the landscape of the industry that he was a part of.
To leave this kind of legacy, at some point I need to be part of organizations like CII, FICCI or NASSCOM, the kind of organizations that set the tone for the direction an industry of a nation takes. I will begin my career in operations and strategy consulting, this way I will be able to work with a diverse scattering of organization and rise quickly along a steep learning curve. After working in the consulting industry for 4-5 yrs I will then take up a role in a large multinational conglomerate or a holding company and rise through the ranks into the C-suite. This may take a decade or more, it will be hard, there will be politics and bureaucracy, but the i guess one needs exposure and experience of leading large diverse organizations if one dreams of impacting an entire industry. A C level designation would be a perfect segway into a facilitator role into organizations like FICCI or NASSCOM, from here on the real work begins, to make INDIA what it aught to be, a economic powerhouse. These are just the broad strokes of my master plan :p
So what do you want your legacy to be ?
Pride of ‘not so great’ things
It is strange, there was a time not long ago that we used to be proud of things that were worth being proud of. Nowadays many people(including yours truly) is\are proud of strange things. We have pride of laziness, disheveled appearance, predominance of stupidity, ignorance, contempt for authority and very many small big obscure things. Is this something specific to Gen X? Is this necessarily a bad thing? How could it be bad… Can we not think of it as being proud or comfortable with ones own self, even though that self may not be conventionally thought of as ideal… I guess Gen X is exactly that… It is comfortable with it’s own self image… Well maybe not exactly comfortable but at least it is not in denial.
