Monday, February 08, 2010

Build on your strengths

Recently I was addressing various groups in a client organisation around creating development plans for their subordinates. The people were required to identify strength and weakness areas for their subordinates and then create a plan for the next one year.

Nearly all the development plans got created around the weakness areas and hardly anyone thought of developing the strength area further. This is a huge problem with development planning in my mind. To me the strength areas are more important than the weaknesses purely because those define my uniqueness and my capabilities which I need to focus upon and use to my advantage. There is no point in teaching a creative person numbers but the best use of the person is to use their creative skills to the advantage of the organisation.

Most of us as managers need to focus maybe 75% of our energies in developing our as well as our subordinates strength area and only focus on 25% of our energies on bringing the weakness areas to a level of acceptable performance, which should ensure that the performance of the strength areas do not get diluted by the problems in some of the weakness areas which are interlinked in some manner.

Sanjay

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Demo-Crazy

India is apparently a democracy, but is it really? Looking at the recent happenings in Mumbai, does not seem like it. So the Shiv Sena and the MNS have the sole point of view about Mumbai and who can live there. Any other person, including Sachin, who is also a Maharashtrian cannot have any other opinion about it, which is counter to the opinion of the Thackrey family. And also if you decide to have any other opinion we will not let you do business hear, beat you up or threaten with all kinds of things.

The government is a silent spectator to all of this for a long time and does nothing, because there are votes to be counted in the end. Despite the fact that the fundamental rights of citizens provided in our constitution about freedom of speech are being trampled upon.

But what is amazing about the Shiv Sena and MNS is that they hate competition. They want sole right to bash up North Indians and take offence when the Australians do the same, I atleast did not see a Maharashtrian name in any of the ones reported in the newspaper.

Its high time we stopped these elements from spreading more discord in the country, we already have too many points of differences available to fight about.

Hope good sense prevails and the government takes some action against such open goondaism.