Should India experiment with a 4 day work week

Since the Industrial revolution, one thing has remained constant -- a belief that working longer and harder begets great achievement.

But if the benefits of new technologies are to be evenly spread around, employees can work less hours a week and employers can benefit from the increase in productivity and better attendance.

This can be simply explained by the fact that when there's 'less time to work, there's less time to waste.'

Hence, when you have a compressed workweek, you're likely to focus on meeting important deadlines.

There is a productivity challenge and especially for India.

Despite working 5 days and more than 50 hours a week, India has constantly faced productivity challenges.

According to a survey, India leads the charts as the 'hardest working' country, surprisingly, it also has 69 per cent full- time employees who will prefer to work 5 days a week even if they had an option to work for say 4 days at pay equivalent to 4 days as work does not seem to complete in the time available.

The same survey was conducted amongst many full and part time employees in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, the UK and the US.

The survey found that 35 per cent of these employees in these countries would take a 20 per cent pay-cut to work one day less per week.

Working longer doesn't mean working better. Indian employees as well as employers desperately need to bring about a significant change in their work styles, lives and results.

For employees working in now established, "hard working" country like India, the enticement of having more time to yourself is surely an experience and worthy enough to work towards.

The 4 day work week experiment

Psychologist Dan Ariely, the author of The Upside of Irrationality, talks about how Google strongly believes a 4 day workweek is a practical idea. He talks about how Google gives its engineers 20 per cent of their workweek, which amounts to one full workday, to do whatever they please.

At Cockroach Labs, as an HR manager, Grenawalt informed that she was "open-mouthed" when the founders first presented her with this idea.

But having seen it work in practice for almost two years at the company, she said it certainly challenged her to 'think outside the box' about new ways to motivate employees.

Researchers did a survey of approximately 3,000 workers around the world and found 45 per cent of these could do their jobs in less than 5 hours a day which implies that many jobs could be done easily in a 4 day workweek and there would be no intrusion of work in the personal lives.

This Spring, a trial was conducted in New Zealand by Perpetual Guradian, a firm which manages trust, wills and estates.

The idea was to let the employees work 4 days a week while being paid for 5. It was observed, that this change actually enhanced the productivity amongst its 240 employees, who claimed to have been able to spend more time doing their personal chores.

The employees said, that this twist in their work-life motivated them to improve their productivity while at work.

Like, the meeting times were reduced to 30 minutes from 2 hours, number of breaks and break time were also cut down.

Similar experiments in various other countries too have tested the concept and reported the encouraging results including maintained work standard and quality along with increased teamwork, work engagement and decreased stress.

Why India needs to experiment too

Time has come for companies in India to participate in this experiment with the idea of a 4-day work week where people need to achieve the same targets in the reduced time.

This will force employees as well as the management teams to explore more efficient ways of working.

Some of the small and medium-sized organisations, especially the start-ups can start the revolution and create a template which can then challenge others to follow.

The companies need to have a look at the non-value adding activities and purge those.

How to make it a win-win

To make this successful will require a significant culture shift in the organisation starting from the top.

The companies will also need to find a way to measure productivity before the experiment and after in real terms else it may not lead to any tangible results for the organisation.

A successful experiment will lead to higher productivity for the company and will provide the employees more time for personal chores and engagement.

In the long term the company will gain due to better efficiency, higher accountability and happier employees.

Professional vs Lala company

I got asked a question, what is the difference between a professional company and a Lala company (typically used for a promoter led company). I had not come across any clear definition so went on to google and searched for Lala company. Was surprised to know that there are/have been companies which proudly call themselves Lala company, they of-course do not know the derogatory implication in the Indian context of that name. People have asked questions like what is the difference in salary between Private, limited and LALA company, I am wondering what would be the definition in the mind of the person who asked that question around the word Lala company.

Having not found any satisfactory definition for the term on Google, I can safely assume there is no definition, so I have my first opportunity of a Newton moment to define something in my name. The moment was as momentous in my life as an apple falling on my head and me discovering gravity or finding an unknown star and give it my name. The discovery is also important because of my lineage carrying a standard definition of the Lala community.

Let me put down my thoughts around what could be the difference between the two. There will obviously be some variance from the stated principles, but in general, I think most of them will fit the general situations and the way we filter between the two. This of-course is work in progress and can use some refinement, so if you have some opinions to refine and make this better, please provide your inputs and I will share credit for the definition.

• If you work for a company where the promoter, who has the maximum stake and started the company, worked really hard to get the business established, put money at risk, learned the business from scratch, he/she also manages the company, then you work for a lala company. If some random person manages the business, who has otherwise no interest in the company, may or may not have a clue about the business, understands that the company sells soap, or is a BPO or some such stuff, has to ensure multiple times valuation so that he/she can make a lot of money, networks with the potential investors over golf, has read Blue ocean strategy, Good to Great, Strategy focused organisation, seven habits and many such great books, then you work for a professional company.
• If your company is staffed by promoters relatives who he/she can trust, friends who have stood by him/her through bad times, people who have been loyal to him/her because of who he/she is and the company has taken care of them even in bad times, then you work for a Lala company. If you work for a company where the company is staffed by people who shift jobs with the CEO, every time he/she moves company, never worked for a company for a long time, nobody trusts anyone in the environment, and most of these guys will get fired in the next downturn, then you work for a professional company.
• If you work for a company where the top management team abuses you in Hindi or other regional language you work for a Lala company. If the top management team abuses you in English or fashionable Hinglish, then you work for a professional organisation.
• If you work for company where the CEO decides everyone's pay and performance without the inputs of all managers, you work for a Lala company. If you work for a company where you fill forms, give ratings, give suggestions, which go up a complete chain of managers, gets reviewed, moderated and then the CEO throws the data in the dustbin, decides on everyone's salary and ratings, in discussion with the HR manager who has been with him/her for the last 5 jobs, then you work for a professional company. 
• If you work for a company where the CEO takes all the decisions, you don't know what the decisions are and work on what has been given to you, you work for a Lala company. If you work for a company where the Vision, Mission, Quality / Security / Toilet etc etc policies, have been put up everywhere in the office, you rarely look at them, the business has no connection to what has been written on those walls, the CEO seems to be changing business strategy everytime he/she reads a new book, you remember all the funny posters (put up as part of the Fun at work initiatives last year) but not the vision, mission, when asked you mention your last company's vision and mission and you still come out correct, you are definitely working for a professional company.

Disclaimer / Warning / Notice : I know from my previous experience at sarcasm, that some of you, especially if you work for a professional company, will feel offended by the content, please understand that this content is for adults and you should not have been reading this in the first place, you should have been working and not using the internet, as defined by the policy with reference to the policy hanging above the urinal in the washroom, duly notified and signed by the CEO.

Meeting Menace

Recently one of my friend was complaining about how meetings keep getting dragged without any outcome from the meetings. I was in a workshop with some people around how to write job descriptions and many of them wanted to write one of the key responsibilities of their job was "to attend meetings".

Most managers that I have spoken to have always complained about too many meetings in their jobs across various kinds of organisations. To me having too many meetings are indication of not enough work in the system for the people or not enough clarity on who is responsible for what.

One of the things we did in our organisation to cut down on the wasted time was to do a simple thing. We would ask ourselves two simple questions, did we achieve anything out of the meeting ? Could we have done this better any other way ? Over a period of time we realised that we could have dropped many of our meetings that we were doing on a regular basis and get more work done from the same time.

So all you people who suffer the meeting menace, force people to answer these two questions after every meeting and you will suddenly find that the number of meetings would have to go down as most of them were not serving any purpose.

Simplify please

I would like someone to help me understand why have HR teams over all these years continued with, in my opinion, a very funny way of calculating leave. If you take a holiday on Friday and Monday then the weekend is also counted as holidays or if you take leave before and after a holiday then the leave will include all the days of holiday.

How does it impact the organisation so badly for having a need of this nature. Are we of the opinion that if a person takes leave on Thursday and Friday then we count them as two days of leave because we have lost two productive days of work. But if a person takes leave on Friday and Monday then we have lost 4 productive days of work.

Organisations spend huge amount of time trying to explain this funny policy and people spend lots of time trying to find ways to not lose unnecessary leave days. They also spend huge amount of time just keeping track of whether the person went on leave where there were holidays in between.

It would be so much easier to just reduce your total number of leaves and count only the working days lost. It would make the policy simpler to understand and also administratively easy.

The only problem I see with the change is that we may not be in line with the benchmark practices in the market, should give you a good reason why you should not give too much importance to senseless benchmarking.

Regards,

Sanjay

Leadership learnings from Dhoni

Since cricket will remain the flavour for many months to come, thought of noting down what I think are the learnings Leaders can take from Dhoni.

The key ones being :

Go by your gut-feel and do something different : There are times when conventional logic tells you to go on the beaten path. A true leader would need to take decisions which have not been tried and risk being criticised by all and sundry, but if your gut-feel tells you that what you are doing is right, just go ahead and try it out. There is a 50:50 chance for success but when you succeed it will be something awesome, when you fail, you will be in the same place as all the others who have just been giving conventional advice.

Give credit don't try to grab attention : The most amazing thing I find about this guy is that he allowed Sachin and Gary to be carried around on shoulders. He stood on the sides in pictures and yet everyone would give him credit for what he has achieved, without him asking for it. Sometimes it just helps to not hog the limelight, let the others enjoy the moment equally as they deserve to share credit as much as you.

Face challenges head on : Always face crisis situations head on, rather than push others in the fire. To do this, one needs tremendous amount of self-belief, have good knowledge of subject and expertise, build all of those so that one can face the challenges rather than hide behind the team. The team loves leaders who are hands on supporting them in difficult times.

Be Cool : A cool head will find a way out of crisis. A tense person will will not be able to see the path from the woods.

Great show team India. Hope we keep repeating this success.

Regards,

Sanjay

Young Startup questions

Recently I was called to address a group of people called the young startups, people who are at an early stage of their entrepreneurial journey. Was happy to see a bunch of excited people who had lots of passion for their idea, the right ingredient to have in an entrepreneur.

One of the key question they asked me was around how do you hire talent into the start-up and excite them to join, and also more importantly where do you find them.

My simple answer to them was that all the people that you want to hire are in a way all around you, you are just not looking. In my experience of being part of start-ups, we have hired people from the most unlikely sources and have had good results, sometimes bad too. The problem most time is not knowing what exactly do you want in the people, and in a start-up most times what you want is people who are passionate, willing to learn and flexible to multi-task. Only for a few roles you need serious technical expertise and if you have not figured those out before venturing out then in any case you are in trouble.

I have lots of stories around how we hired very different kinds of people, people you interacted with in a hotel, at a party, at a wedding, your little cousin who you would never have imagined can be a great person in the company and so on. I had another panelist with me who had similar experience of hiring the journalist who came to interview him and many other such stories.

My simple advice to most young start-ups would be to not start putting up too many structured ways of working in the organisation because that may at times kill the passion or adventure that people may have signed up to enjoy. A start up has to provide a very different kind of an environment for the people so that they can leave their boring corporate stable jobs and basically come for a ride which have those elements of thrills, bumps, scares, enjoyment and all the kinds of amazing experiences that most corporate jobs fail to provide. Hence flexibility in everything is key and so is flexibility around hiring people who may not have all the technical skills but will be able to learn and contribute to the idea.

Regards,

Sanjay

Enjoy your coffee - Happy New year.

As we step into another new year, just wanted to share a very nice thought which is a good way to look at life differently in the coming year. Hope you enjoy your coffee and your life !

Enjoy. Happy New year, may you have the wonderful one.

Thanks Kamlesh for sharing this.

Regards,

Sanjay

A CUP OF COFFEE

The happiest people in the world are not those who have no problems, but those who learn to live with things that are less than perfect.”

A group of graduates, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor.

Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.

Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups – porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite – telling them to help themselves to the coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee, the professor said: “If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the simple and cheap ones.

While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.

Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee.

In most cases, it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink.

What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you Consciously went for the best cups… Then you began eyeing each other’s cups.

Now consider this:

• Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups.They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of Life we live.
• Sometimes, by concentrating on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee God has provided us. Enjoy your coffee!.”

• The happiest people don’t have the best of everything.

• They just make the best of everything.”

1. Live simply.

2. Love generously.

3. Care deeply.

4. Speak kindly.

5. Leave the rest to God.

You are the miracle, my friend;

Your life either shines a light OR casts a shadow!

Shine a light & Enjoy the Coffee!!!

Learnings from bosses 2

Continuing with my learnings from my bosses here are the next 3 important ones from my perspective.

- Kick them but stand by them : I have had two bosses who would literally kick you on your backside every time you made a mistake, but would also stand by you and help you in the time of crisis in helping resolve the matter. I have also had bosses who would shiver at the thought of getting involved in an issue of crisis, but would keep giving you advice on what you should do next from the sidelines, and most times their advice was more disastrous than the situation itself. Crisis has always been part of work that I have been involved with, so having people who did not mind getting involved in the crisis really helped in keeping you calm and senile and doing the right things to resolve the issue. This is one of my most important learning from some of my bosses that has helped me in my work immensely.

- Satisfaction leads to incompetence : Never be satisfied with what you have achieved is something that I personally really liked about a few of my bosses, who would continuously challenge you to doing things better. It ended up haunting all my team members by way of a constant statement from me, i.e., "I am not happy with your performance". But definitely the caveat being that it did not mean they would not recognize the effort put in or the success of those efforts. The thin line was about never letting the team feel that they had arrived and had nothing more to achieve.

- Politics bites back : Some of the bosses who indulged heavily into organisational politics ended up in very difficult situations when the politics got back to them. Key learning hence was to stay away, focus on your goals, set your own standards for yourself and understand and accept that organisational life is not fair, so that you have a way to deal with heartbreaks when people get more than you without deserving it. Hope and pray that some day someone will recognise your true worth and you will get what you deserve, in many cases I have seen that happen.

I hope that some day I would be able to follow all these principles in my work life and be a role model for myself as a boss. Would love to hear other perspectives around the same.

Sanjay

Lessons from my Bosses!

I have had more than a dozen bosses in my working career till now, and was trying to figure out if I had to pick out a few things about them that I have admired and would like them to be qualities in myself what would those be. So in the next few posts I am going to put down a few things which I really liked about my bosses to create a reminder to myself about what I need to have as my leadership style. They are not in any particular order or preference just how they are coming to mind.

1. Show the way : I have had many bosses and many of them have continuously used one phrase "work smart not hard". The only problem with this being not many could explain 'WHAT THE HELL DOES IT MEAN'. Being a film buff it seemed like Fardeen Khan telling people to act better, but how dude, you seem to have no idea about it.

I was lucky to have two of my bosses who could tell me exactly what they meant and it was such a great luck to have people who could not just tell you what you were doing wrong but also tell you about how you could better what you were already doing well.

2. Dirty your hands once in a while : The reason why these two bosses, I think, could tell you what to improve was because they would dirty their hands once in a while. They would not just sit in their ivory tower but would be talking to customers, talking to employees, getting involved in all parts of the process, ofcourse only sometimes when required, but they were in touch with the entire process to understand the issues at each level and that I believe helped them also think about ways to resolve issues faced at each level of the process. And the key was to think about them, process suggestions by others and make the correct judgements about how things can be better.

3. Hire hungry people : Given the amount of food we used to eat, in all my jobs, it seemed true always :-) across all bosses. But the more important part was to hire people who were all hungry for success, achievement, growth etc. I can say half my bosses could manage to do this to multiple levels of success and once you could put this restless lot together then you had created an environment for success without any effort, they would all do it themselves.

This also gave me a lot of opportunity to work with great people who had lots of interesting ways of looking at the same problem and helped me broaden my knowledge base.

I will continue this post in a series and if you agree to some of these and have good experiences then would love to get your opinions on the same.

In the next post will add the next 3 qualities I have admired in my bosses.

Sanjay

Game Theory

I read this on my friend Abhinav Sinha's blog (http://systemsview.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/the-game-theory/) and found this to be an interesting explanation.

Game Theory :

While driving around the India gate, have you ever wondered why most (if not all) ice cream vendors are stacked together in and around a small patch. Or that most highway ‘dhabas’ are located in clusters. Or maybe, next time when you fly out do check why various airlines schedule flights fairly close to each other, on a given route!

It comes to me as a surprise why would each one of them choose to operate in a zone of maximum competition. Maybe a possible explanation is that since the cluster is already frequented by a lot of potential customers, it makes sense for a new entrant to logically attach itself to the cluster, rather than someplace else, where he would have to invest in building customer traffic.

The question to be answered is how the clustering begins. What would the scenario be like if there was a unchartered territory and just two players in perfect competition. Does system thinking in any way influence the way, they would approach setting up their respective businesses.

Consider a scenario where the two ice-cream vendors A and B, who have to sell their products at similar pricing for sustenance, have to decide on where to locate themselves on a stretch of road, that will make perfect business sense.

To capture the sense of this example, imagine that customers are smoothly distributed all across the road and brand and price being the same for both A and B, they choose on the basis of sheer convenience and proximity.

Imagine that the two vendors ‘A’ and ‘B’ start by locating themselves at roughly a position shown above. It now appears to ‘A’, that they have a equitable access to business opportunity, since half of customers located between ‘A’ and ‘B’ will go to ‘A’ and the other half to ‘B’, depending on a convenient walking distance for them.

‘A’ turns out to be an aggressive competitor to ‘B’ and decides to move a 100 meters towards the center of the road so as to gain access to a share of ‘B’ customers while protecting his own share of customers (lying to his left).

To offset this, ‘B’ plays his own counter move and moves 200meters towards the center. Subsequently, ‘A’ moves 300 meters and this continues till both ‘A’ and ‘B’ are located right next to each other, at the center of the road.

Both A and B have created an equilibrium that stays even when a third player C enters the market. C has limited choice, but to locate itself within the cluster for survival.

This is of course until C weighs his payoffs and decides to locate at a niche location and offset the disadvantage by offering a discounted price to the customers. This of course will set up another un-equilibrium which in due course will be answered by the competition A and B.

The study of strategic decisions making process in an interactive environment is called ‘The Game Theory’.

Regards,

Sanjay

Taking the plunge

I am pleasantly surprised by the number of calls I have started getting from people who want to know about how I managed to become a successful entrepreneur, its besides the point that the successful part is questionable to a great extent, but nevertheless, its a good kick that people think you are worth calling for advice :-).

Its good to know that there are a lot of people who are allowing themselves to think outside of the comfort zone of monthly pay checks and fairly limiting work environments. Its also good to know that people have such brilliant ideas about new business ventures and I hope they manage to convert them to reality.

One thing that concerns me though is that most people who are looking at a potential entrepreneurial journey come with an exception clause, if this does not work out in 3/6/9 months then I will go back to a job. This is the single most reason a lot of these entrepreneurial journeys fail to proceed as planned.

My advice to anyone who is looking to start their own venture is to not have that exception clause, not at least something which is below 2-3 years. I remember someone mentioning to me a comment by one of the entrepreneurs about how he had become an instant/overnight success after 20 or so years of struggle. Business is like that, it takes a lot of time to establish and create a business venture. Very rarely does it happen overnight and a minimum timeframe that one should look at is 2-3 years. The problem is we only hear of the success stories packaged such that they feel like overnight successes.

Most of the times it takes a minimum of 6-9 months to just research, hone and put your idea to a shape where it can then be taken to some plan of execution into reality. The business comes much later, so many of these friends who call, end up quitting too early and are back in their cushy comfort zones before the action actually is set to begin.

When one decides to go out on ones own, you have to take that as a long term career goal, unless ofcourse if you realise that you are really bad at it. Even then I would advice looking at role models in Tushar Kapoor, Fardeen Khan, Bobby Deol etc, who have never allowed the handicap of not being good at their craft stopping them from doing what they really want to do.

My simple thought for all people wanting to take the plunge would be to jump in and jump in deep and then stay in, don't think of being too close to the sides so that you can pull yourselves out, an important lesson I learned during swimming classes which comes in handy in real life as well :-).

Go ahead follow your dreams, all the best.

To Teach is to LEARN

Recently had an opportunity to teach at a Management College, thanks to a friend, who called me in for a full course on HR due diligence in M&A. It was quite an experience. I have been in situations where I have had to address client organisations and teach them about various new / old concepts of HR / Business, but teaching a bunch of youngsters in a management college is a very different experience.

The most satisfying thing from my perspective was the fact that I learnt a lot during the experience. Having had to read a lot to prepare the course outline and to combine the experiences from my past work situations by itself helped me in doing like a review of things which were done in those situations and understanding what else could have been done to make those better.

In most of the consulting assignment, we were always short of time, so one worked with available tools, tried methodologies and templates to ensure that the deadlines were met. There was rarely an opportunity where one could sit back and find new ways of doing things. This experience gave me time to look at alternate theories / tools / processes etc which could have been applied in the same situations and how we could have made the deliverables better.

I also learnt that easy availability of information on the net can be a good learning experience as well as a bad learning experience. Good if you took the pain to read through and broaden your perspective. Bad if you just found a quick link and completed your assignment :-) since one did not apply ones mind.

The other learning experience came from the questions that the students asked. Some of the questions can really require you to think very differently and open up a new perspective that you may not have thought of a situation about.

My suggestion to everyone who wants to learn or become better at his / her subject will be to try teaching a course on that subject. Because I believe from my first experience, that to TEACH is to LEARN.

Sanjay

Is freelance consulting a good option ?

Having jumped ship and started my entrepreneurial journey a lot of people often ask me about how I managed to take a big career decision and survived the crash that the world market has seen. My savior during the process of setting up our retirement home venture has been freelance consulting work. A lot of people ask me questions around how difficult or easy it is to find freelance consulting work and many a times I find that they carry a lot of wrong notions around how lucrative it is to be on your own. So thought will try and put down my perspective on freelance consulting, hope it addresses doubts in a few people's mind.

Freelance work is easy to get
Sure its easy to get, but then you need to have something of significant value for people to want to work with you. There is a big requirement that a lot of consulting companies have for associates on a flexi basis, many corporates would like to work with individuals and there is lots of requirement out there. The challenges is to be in the right place at the right time, to encash an opportunity, and believe me its a big big challenge. As a freelancer you have limited reach and don't have others selling you.

Freelance work is very rewarding
For some it is, but for most its not. If you are not attached to a regular source of long term freelance work and have to go and sell yourself practically on a daily basis, then budget for approx 3 days of selling for 1-2 day or work. This makes the equation very unfavourable. Mind you no one is paying huge amounts of money for freelancers, cost saving is the biggest driver for employing freelance consultants. Consulting companies employ freelancers predominantly to bring down their cost of delivery, a full time consultant would be priced nearly 4-5 times for equivalent talent.

Freelance work is easy to do
One of the biggest challenge I faced when I moved out of a big consulting firm on my own was the challenge of managing everything on my own. There was no one to do research, no one to print invoices, no one to format presentations and so on and so forth. Suddenly doing the same assignment becomes much more difficult to do, especially availability of information, templates and benchmarks that did not require any effort become big challenges. And when you start thinking as a consultant, thats a lot of valuable, expensive time going waste.

Everyone who is freelancing is having a great time
The grass always looks greener on the other side :-). Freelancing's biggest challenge unpredictable work load. One would have to be prepared for long periods of vella time and then hopefully sudden level of activity. If you do not know how to utilise your vella time well, then you are in deep trouble. If no work coming your way makes you anxious then you have had it, be prepared to enjoy watching TV, meeting friends (hopefully they would have time for you), generally flooding all social networking sites with arbit information to make people jealous or take up new hobbies. I know of many of my friends who tried it but could not bear the uncertainty and were back in their jobs. If you are a married guy, also factor in the fact that your wife who used to complain about you never being in the house, will start chasing you out of the house precisely after two weeks of sitting at home :-)).

My friends will give me work
This could be the biggest mistake when you are out looking for freelance work. Most of your friends and network will not be able to help you, and many a times genuinely, because of company policy or engagement with other established consultants. This can create a situation where people may start avoiding you and you may lose a lot of friends, especially if you start chasing them aggressively for work. Don't expect much out of friends in established large corporate setups, they will feel jealous about your guts, they will always say they will push your case, they will always meet you for the first couple of times and then they will suddenly get very busy :-). Be prepared to not push your friends who you genuinely want to keep.


If you still decide to go ahead and take a plunge, some of my golden rules are the following :

- Have good friends, who believe you have genuine talent, you need to have something of significant value that your friends can push your case
- Attach yourself to a few consulting organisations who are on a lookout for free lance help, most of them are, so you are in luck at this time.
- Never sign an exclusive arrangement with a consulting company, unless there was guaranteed days of work in the agreement
- Find friends in smaller organisations, they want good talent at low cost, thats the sweet spot
- Create consortium with other free lancers so that jointly you can create bigger market reach and support each other on large, complex assignments
- Make sure you know how to enjoy your free time, believe me you will have lots of it, else what was the point on going in for freelance work :-)

Hope you guys find this useful. Feel free to ask questions and will be happy to help.

Regards,

Sanjay

Complicated Consulting

Sometimes we consultants can really make things too complicated. Faking News carries an interesting perspective on how a Chai wallah hires McKinsey to find out if he should sell omelets and maggi too. Found it very funny, which can mean that probably I am not a true consultant.

http://www.fakingnews.com/2010/04/chai-wallah-hires-mckinsey-to-find-out-if-he-should-sell-omelets-and-maggi-too/

A true consultant would be able to find multiple arguments around how McKinsey is ignoring some critical assumptions which are important to get the right business model :-).

Cheers !

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

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.

Aall izz well !!

Today, no conversation is complete without mentioning Aall izz well so let me start out by saying that and be done with.

For some of my friends who keep asking me why I have not been writing on the blog, some clarification. There was a recession of ideas that I was facing predominantly because I was working on a new business venture, which refused to take off given the market dynamics. So was not involved in too much consulting work during this period hence was not generating too many ideas in my head.

I am happy to report that our new venture "Aamoksh One Eighty Hospitality Pvt. Ltd." has taken off and has launched its first Retirement Home, which will come up at the foothills of Kodaikanal and have world class international facilities for Retirees, including a Golf Course. So all you people who have been wanting to retire early, we are giving you a good reason to take the plunge now.

Please visit our website at www.aamokshoneeighty.com for more information and of course please inform people who need these services about us.

Regards,

Sanjay

Penny wise pound foolish..

Nowhere else will one be able to find a true example of the above statement "Penny wise Pound Foolish".

Our great leader Rahul Baba travels by Shatabdi to save the government some Rs 20546 odd (Now don't ask me how I come up with these numbers !! But trust me its probably thereabouts in range).

Some children throw stones at the train, which is a common happening in India across the country and I don't remember the railways ever taking note of this.

Now the government will spend Crores worth in investigating who threw the stones and if there was any terrorist organisation involved in the act. Probably the security level will also be upgraded and will become from Z+++ to ZZZZZZ++++, which may cost the country some more money (Yawn !! I am sleepy looking at the number of Z's).

My simple question here is WHY THE HELL DID HE WANT TO SAVE Rs.20546 !! Can someone please explain !

Unprofessional employees

I am appalled by the behavior of the jet pilots.

Normally I always believe that most of the companies will not care about their employees as soon as the tide turns negative and all talks about the company being a family will be tossed out of the window. We saw that on display recently. No company will ask its investors who have made super normal profit during good times, to fund the salaries of its employees during a rough patch and when I say most companies I mean practically 90%. So when I make this comment about the employees this time around, I think they have crossed the limit.

I think the employees (pilots) of Jet don't deserve any sympathy for calling in sick and inconveniencing thousands of passengers, who finally pay their salaries. This is the worst display of unprofessional attitude that any employee of an organisation can display towards its customers and I hope that Jet airways has the guts to terminate all such employees who have taken leave on a false pretext.

I definitely do not believe any more that Jet Airways can deliver on its promise of customer satisfaction, as its employees are just not interested in the problems of the customer and any compromise with this unprofessional bunch does not solve the problem for future.

I also wish that all these pilots are blacklisted and not hired by any airline company in the country so that we are sure that the other airlines are not being run by a similar set of unprofessional people who will leave you stranded midway if it suited them. In any case there is no dearth of pilots in this country, I am told that there are more than 3000 + pilots looking for a job in these recessionary times, one can easily tap them and get them trained to fill the vacancy.

I definitely am going to move on from Jet Airways and will only fly when it is the last option available.

I hope the HR teams of the airline companies and their management have the guts to take a bold step and ensure that its customers are not exposed to the blackmailing tactics of such employees.

Cut the flab..

I have been lazy !! I can blame it on the recession so am hopefully back to write about what laziness has costed me.

In my state of laziness I have managed to emulate the six-pack wonder Aamir Khan, only difference being he has six-pack muscles, I have six packets of fat on my tummy :-). So big lecture from wife and a quest begins to lose the extra weight. Now gaining it was so easy, but losing it has been a painful experience, without any gains.

I did what any sensible(one can always debate what this means) person would do, looked for the quick-fix solutions, surgery, some sauna belt, medicines so on and so forth and armed with huge amount of data and research sat down to evaluate the best option for me. My doctor friend walks in and tells me that all these methods will not help, I will be gaining back the weight back in no time unless I made fundamental changes to my lifestyle, which included change in food habits, exercise, regular sleep, regular hours etc etc. Sounded very difficult to do.

Applying my new gained knowledge to the world of business, I realised that most organisations seem to be in the same state as me.

Suddenly there is a realisation everywhere that there is extra flab which needs to be shed and everybody seems to running for the most 'sensible' thing to do, shed the extra weight and fast, so organisations are going for quick fix solutions, firing the bench, firing non-performers, going for VRS and so on.

What they are not realising is that as soon as the markets turn around, all this flab will come back more quickly than how much time it takes to shed it. In the business context, also, there needs to be a systemic change to ensure that the organisation changes the way it manages people, performance, skills etc to ensure that they have the right people at any point in time and do not have extra weight. All the people are skilled and re-skilled (just like I am trying to exercise my right muscles) in the right manner to ensure there is no provision for extra weight. And ofcourse good planning is a key to managing your weight, including your manpower numbers.

My simple thought hence is that while you are trying to shed your extra weight, make sure you are making those fundamental changes to ensure that you stay trim in the long term.

Wishing everyone and myself all the very best in this weight losing quest !! Cheers !!