Words To Chew On

From FS (Farnam Street) Briain Food vide FS (a free blog) for “actionable ideas and insights you can use at work and home”.

“Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication…In the long run — in the long run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”

— Viktor Frankl

“The common trait of people who supposedly have vision is that they spend a lot of time reading and gathering information, and then they synthesize it until they come up with an idea.”

— Fred Smith, Overnight Success: Federal Express and Frederick Smith, Its Renegade Creator

“People are more adept [at] working against [things] than oftentimes we give them credit for. We often think of people working for things, but they often work against things. They work against poverty. They work against their upbringing. They work against some of these things just as much as they’re working for them. Some people are very fear-driven. We talk about fear as being very negative, but it also can be very positive.”

— Dr. Julie Gurner, Source

You don’t need more time; you need more focus. Fewer projects. Fewer commitments. Fewer obligations. Fewer responsibilities. Carefully choose your commitments, then go all in.

Rich people have money. Wealthy people have time.

In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency.

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A Closed Fist Picks Up Nothing!

fm Seth Godin

Closed/open

I’m told that the hardest part of being a teaching golf pro isn’t helping adult golfers develop a good swing.

It’s getting them to stop using a bad one.

Our position feels so fragile, we hold on very tightly.

Competence, status and connection are fleeting yet hard-won. We can often feel like an impostor and one way to find peace of mind is to fortify the foundation of what we believe got us here.

And so we close up.

Alas, it’s almost impossible to pick up something when your hand is in a tight fist.

This is why emotional enrollment is the key to learning. No toddler learned to walk by insisting, again and again, that crawling was good enough. Or by trying to walk by simply crawling harder.

Teachers (leaders/organizers/coaches) have two jobs. The first is to earn enrollment, the second is to teach.

If the student is unwilling to become open, afraid to let go of what they’re holding on to, then better is going to be elusive.

Resistance is wily. It will come up with a thousand reasons to remain closed, narratives about entitlement, security or cultural dynamics. Whatever it takes to stay still. Extinguish one and another will replace it.

Let’s get real or let’s not play.

**

End

Rough Is Good!

Just when you think you got it all figured out, wrinkles smoothened…Seth Godin comes up with this:

**

Sanding off all the edges

It’s easier than ever. Solvents, power tools, market research, AI, committee meetings, online reviews and ennui are all aligned in one direction. To fit all the way in.

Of course, once you sand off all the edges, it’s hard to get traction. Hard to find the texture or anything worth talking about.

Smooth might not be the goal.

**

Of course, it isn’t entirely news to us. What is the fine line between ruffling it up a bit and being an obstructionist? Well, the latter does not bring one a wee bit closer to the solution.

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A Simple Way to Assess Very Early In Building A Software Solution

Software Solutioning even today begins with a Requirements Definition. In one or more steps, it is transformed into sets of functional use-cases, granularity of which varies widely. A use-case conveys the intention and its implementation.

Not very obvious, many attributes of the solution, determining its success in the field, get infused beginning with this decomposition exercise.

Is there a way to assess how well this is achieved way upstream before it gets too late or too expensive to retract?

Well, Kaufman’s Pyramid offers some help, better than nothing at all.

Rom Kaufman in his Service Pyramid (not his term) has defined the service levels as Criminal (failing to deliver or flawed delivery), Basic, Expected, Surprise (by exceeding expectations) and finally, Unbelievable!

Adapting it to Software Solutioning, it seems worthwhile to have a review where each of these use-cases is assessed independently by the User, followed by the Analyst, as to which Kauffman’s level of service it gets pegged. Followed by a discussion on how the rating could possibly be improved. Might reveal opportunities to enhance its value. For instance, suggestions to reduce ‘fail’ exits improve resilience of the solution. Considering the points-of-view of ‘minor’ stake-holders systematically brings out easily missed integration-across-functions opportunities. Etc. Etc.

Empowered use-cases are the first step to building a highly successful solution. Not sure if it presently gets the attention it requires. Mapping them onto Kaufman’s Service Model, light on time and effort, is certainly useful when no other help is on hand.

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Service Pyramid

Rom Kaufman, a prolific author/speaker and a guru on service culture [NYT bestselling author of “UPLIFTING SERVICE: The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues and Everyone Else You Meet”] in this short clip below introduces a six-level Service Pyramid he has conceived.

Here it is here (4.44 mins). If it doesn’t open, get it at https://youtu.be/4gEspbDQcv0.

It set me on a search for some exemplifying incidents on Service Delivery.

And I read this from Ramani Venkata (RV) 👇 (only a gist)

**

Happened to RV in a recent trip to US.

He had just missed his bus plying on route 45. Visibly disappointed he stepped back to wait for the next one.   

Close on heels appeared another bus, screeching to a halt. He made no move from where he stood, as others boarded.

The driver, a sardarji (?) threw a hey-how-about-you look at him.

RV nodded his head: ‘Not this one, waiting for a bus on route 55.’

Sardarji: ‘Get on, I will drop you off at the next stop. 55 you missed takes a devious route from here and will reach there later for you to catch.’

And so it happened!

Now, which level of service is that?

End

Note: Ron Kaufman on LinkedIn: 👉 Helping Leaders & Organizations Build Winning Service Cultures | Global Keynote Speaker | NYT Bestselling Author of “Uplifting Service” | Ranked World’s #1 Customer Experience Guru 2018-2023

If Only Winds Didn’t Blow…

A Ring-Side View Of A Leader And His Team – Org’s Pride And Peer’s Envy!

Kaleidoscope

Blogging does three things: Makes you observant, shifts the focus away from self and leaves you a humble student of Life!

Successful people and also the not so…have always interested me for the varied lessons they offer.

O belongs to the first kind and I had/have the opportunity to see him from close in my past and present assignments.  What makes him tick! Would like to share a few of my findings very briefly leaving it to some enterprising biographer to grab the opportunity and do the subject at length!

S and he head a company of long years, now on a relatively uncharted course – digitally charting/mapping the cities and the lands of this country in 2D/3D, using technologies, complex, challenging, innovative and obviously quite expensive. Man-power intensive, their enterprise provides gainful employment to hundreds. He has the responsibility for offering 3D mapping services and applications, mostly unprecedented, to…

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On Hiring – Seth Godin

Expertise vs Attitude

The typical online job site lists millions of jobs. And just about every one of them is a cry for expertise.

From the title to the requirements, companies hire for expertise.

Logic helps us understand that only one out of ten people are in the top 10% when it comes to expertise. And that means that most companies are settling for good enough. If the organization needs people with expertise in the top decile, they’re going to have to pay far more and work far harder to find and retain that sort of skill.

So most companies don’t try. They create jobs that can be done pretty well by people with a typical amount of expertise.

That means that the actual differentiator in just about every job is attitude. From plumbers to carpenters to radiologists to pharmacists, someone with extraordinary soft skills (honesty, commitment, compassion, resilience, enrollment in the journey, empathy, willingness to be coached… the real skills that we actually care about) is going to outperform.

If this is so obviously true, then why don’t organizations hire for attitude and train for expertise?

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Source: Seth Godin

Communication: Message Or Mess-age?

M in his daily morning walk takes a couple of shots and sends them out to a few of his contacts. 

Received from him a couple of days ago the above taken from a resort in Neral (Maharashtra) he was holidaying in.

A question rose in my mind.

In turn, I forwarded to a few of my contacts adding my question:

“How does one tell sunrise from sunset?”

Just these words along with the snap. Rather laconic admittedly, but certainly unambiguously – at least I thought so.

Folks were just as clueless. It couldn’t be said one way or the other looking at the snap. One of them ventured to say the answer was in the glow though he did not know what, how…It was/is my theory too.

And then there were a couple, achievers in their career, incredulously asking: “WTH? It depends on you’re facing east or west!”

That’s when it struck – the link between the text and the snap above was in my mind and could be entirely missed out by some.

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Azad Maidan

Was attending a crucial meeting on planning for kicking off a large project. We were about half a dozen of us including the function-heads from the company.

The spreadsheet was up on a small screen before us. N was checking with us and updating the sheet in his laptop and on the screen.

It involved factoring in delivery schedules of many vendors, new hiring, statutory clearances and other umpteen dependencies. The meeting often devolved into confabulations in knots of two’s and three’s. Of course, for right reasons.

It fell on N and D from time to time to call the meeting back to order.

This is when I heard them use the metaphor ‘Azad Maidan’. A deshi description, though not exact for the present occasion, with an interesting etymology:

Azad Maidan is a triangular-shaped maidan (sports ground) in the city of Mumbai. It is located on 25 acres of land near the CST rail-station. It is a regular venue for inter-school cricket and club matches. And for the kids and young men from near and around playing softball cricket. Home to many cricketers of international fame, it boasts of something like twenty-two cricket pitches (Wiki), not counting interstitial spaces also used for the same purpose.

But what’s the connection, you ask, eh?

Here you go:

On a Sunday morning, especially when exams are not around and no official matches scheduled, the ground would be a host to so many teams engaged concurrently (mostly in soft-ball cricket), each match played on its own pitch, and the pitches, nearly overlapping!! Though an observer from outside would be hard put to trace a rolling ball to the pitch and batsman it came from, the players always knew. It was rare a fielder in the outfield found himself chasing a ball that did not belong!

It is this concurrent action of teams, independent, in close proximity, but mishap-free, each busy about its own play – the vivid imagery that gets captured and distilled into this metaphor Azad Maidan so succinctly!! Buzzing beehive? Yes, something like that, but with weak/no commonality of purpose expressed/hinted, more human for us to easily relate.

It is not too much of a stretch to liken this to a scene frequently played out in corporates where a meeting in its course often gives way to multiple mini-meetings, each with its own steering, diluting the focus.

A very colourful addition to one’s vocabulary of phrases and idioms! Sure to come handy to spice up any conversation. Just right for describing any coordinated collective activity going ‘to pieces’ – and Life throws them up for us aplenty!

Who knows, one day Azad Maidan may even make it to Oxford! Thanks to Deepak and Nikhil for the education.

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