Travails of an Amateurish Manager

It was almost 30 years ago. Interning with Mahindra Tractors as an apprentice, I was getting my first taste of the industry, trying to learn the ropes of real engineering. We were a bunch of newbies each in our early 20s going around the factory, feeling important and giving an onlooker the impression that it was we who really made the tractors roll.

The progressive Mahindra management decided to put us all through a 10-day Management Development program, where we would take classes in an on-campus seminar room. Experienced honchos from the organization would come to lecture us on various aspects of management.

One of the sessions of those times has lingered with me, and keeps making an impact time and again.

A manager who came to teach us leadership qualities had devised a game. Three teams would compete to assemble a disheveled bunch of loose papers into three neatly ordered books, each identified and serialized by page numbers. 

Eager to get into action, I volunteered to be the leader of one of the teams. The teams were given 10 minutes to discuss and plan their strategy. The competition took off at the whistle, and sheets of paper rustled around in a frenzy. One by one the teams submitted their three organized books.

To my dismay, my team finished last, taking almost twice the amount of time as the second slowest team.

What had gone wrong?

The other teams had put one team-member in charge of each book. The sheets would be handed over by all to the respective book owner, who would quickly organize his book serially.

I had however led my team on a horrendously inefficient path. I the leader took upon myself to personally assemble every book. The rest of the team had to just stand by hand me the sheets of paper. The process went on and on and on.

The management gurus were nice people. No one branded me a failed leader.

Piecing together the events of the day, the differences between our team and the others stood out stark.

Other teams planned together. Five heads put together spawned the plan and made it work. Our team plan was the chief's plan alone. Others needed to follow suit.

The other teams split the work; each intelligent member in charge of assembling his book. All books got ready concurrently. Our team leader trusted only himself to do all the work. 

Other teams took up the challenge as a team. For our team the whole thing was the leader’s baby, the leader’s making; and as it turned out eventually, the leader’s debacle :)

Three decades since, as I sit through the many planning sessions that happen in the office, I look at those awesome youngsters on our team with admiration. Each young man and woman capable of thought, plan and innovation. 'Oh just leave it to them', I say to myself. They will do it. Clearly, the team stands out a lot more capable than each member in isolation. The leader needs to play merely a support role.

Those loose sheets of paper taught me a lesson of teamwork that I will cherish.

I quietly smile at the wet-behind-the-ears, 20 something boy from not so long ago.

But Measure you must!!

Lord Kelvin is the guy responsible for telling me whether I have a high fever or low. He invented the temperature measuring scale.

Lord Kelvin said over a hundred years ago:

 "I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind..."

Expressed in modern day English, it simply means "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it'.

We all set goals for ourselves and hope to excel at achieving these. I realize that I think of too many important matters in mere Qualitative terms and then hope to do better at them. With qualitative descriptors, my thinking gets muddled up.

-          Am I more punctual in responding to people than I was before?

-          Is my track running performance better than it was last year?

-          Am I playing my favorite musical instrument better now that I have practiced for a year?

-          Am I communicating better in the foreign language that I learnt, than when I began?

I am aware that we all measure these goals in some number formats or other. However to make any kind of judgment about ourselves we need more than just isolated numbers.
 
If I measure my performance on a 100 meter track on 20 days, the stopwatch tells me that I am good on some days and not good on others. Does it mean that the workout schedule I follow has had a positive impact? I am not sure. To be certain, I will need to compare measures across two horizons of time in the following terms:

1.       Shift in baseline of the performance measure.

2.       Consistency of performance across measures.

To measure performance, I need a single number that will tell me in no uncertain terms that improvement has taken place.

What I write about personal goals applies to corporate goals too, and a single number that gives you a clear mandate on improvement would be of great value, in performance measures, appraisals et al.

A few years ago I had studied the work done by Genichi Taguchi, the eminent Japanese engineer and statistician. His metric of Signal-to-Noise Ratio seems to be the single number that I am looking for. I am going to write about how the S/N ratio metric could be used to gauge sports performance improvement. Watch this space.

Measure you may more correctly than others, measure you may not so correctly, but measure you must!

Selling a Fridge to an Eskimo

Having spent over 25 years running a business, the importance of good selling keeps coming back every day, stronger than ever. Clichéd phrases abound, highlighting the fact that a business becomes robust only if it is able to sell.

There is one cliché that has been flying around for a long time that I can’t somehow relate to. The one about Ace Salesmen being able to sell a Fridge to an Eskimo.

It stinks of gimmicks, of lies and of deception.

So consider the scenario where an Eskimo does get sweet talked into buying your refrigerator. The next day he realizes that he has been taken for a ride by your salesmanship. The customer gets upset. The word goes around, and soon no Eskimo wants to have anything to do with you; fridge or no fridge.

I have read that the justification of this story is to sell of possibility thinking. It narrates how the Eskimo’s wife would be better off that she doesn’t have to bury reindeer meat in the snow any longer. I wonder whether the people who came up with this believe the story themselves.
 
Sales, the way I would like to look at means- think deep, scratch below the surface, honestly find how your products and services would benefit a customer, and then go painstakingly about finding those customers.

An honest way of selling…takes your wares a long way!