A Shout Out to Execution Excellence

I was remembering a conversation that I had with one of my team members many years ago. He had walked in to my office and said, "Ravi, I need a job that is more strategic than what I am doing today." I told him that it was really nice that he was trying to tie in strategy with what he was doing and asked him why he thought his own role was not strategic in nature. He responded,"I am handling operations today. It is a delivery role. There is nothing strategic about this role."

Any definition of strategy shows how implementation is critical. This is because, as the poet TS Eliott wrote, "Between the idea and reality falls the shadow." Thomas Edison said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." What he wanted to say was that genius was pretty much hard work rather than just a sudden flash of insight.  Similarly, in the organizations of today, a strategy is useless unless there are people who can make them a reality.  Today, there is a desperate need for people who can execute and execute well on time. The best of plans are of no use if they are not implemented.

When it comes to brass tacks, most of the leaders are those who have executed very well on their jobs and not necessarily strategic in their thinking. While strategic thinking has helped, it is not the only ingredient to be in those leadership roles. Please do not mistake me as someone who under estimates the importance of strategy. That is definitely not the case. It is critical to understand that the spark of strategy is essential.  Leaders need to have a strategic bent of mind but not necessarily be strategists.  This also means that leaders need to understand that if formulating strategy is not their forte, they need to hire people with those skill sets so that the spark is available for the organization.  Such skill sets are not easy to find and so leaders need to choose the right mix of people in his/her team to ensure they have these thinkers.

As these strategists are hard to find, we end up paying a premium to them. Hence the clamour for such roles.  In my professional life, I have put a lot of emphasis on getting a mix. To succeed, we need a mix of thinkers, doers and thinker-doers. As we go through turbulent times where everything around us is changing rapidly, there is a need for people who will put their heads down and execute to plan.  With 99% being perspiration, there is more need for great executors and organizations should start investing in to such people. Some of them will be great thinkers but not all...does not matter at all.

 

We pay so much of heed to disruptive technologies (and rightfully so) that, at times, we forget the wonderful beings who are executing phenomenally well whatever be the business condition. Let us invest in these people as much as we invest in technologies...organizations will reap the dividends.

Good, bad, right, wrong...

Good and bad, right and wrong are as created by man. Someone or something is good or bad and right or wrong at a particular point in time only and that too at an individual level. So, what was good for me this morning may not be the same in the afternoon. If the concept is as fickle as this, why do we spend so much time on it? Is abortion god or bad? Is gay marriage the right thing to do? Should trans-genders be part of mainstream society? The news that a pregnant lady who died because she could not go through abortion as law thought it was bad, was shocking. Does all this good and bad come before us as human beings or should we put humans before such concepts? After all, all these concepts are man made.

I was talking to a friend of mine who recalled his first reaction of shock when his brother confided to him that he (his brother) was a gay and was confused. He recounted how it took his mother years to come to terms with the fact. He was someone who had not thought of gays as good or bad, but when he realized his brother was a gay, it changed his outlook. Obviously, the brother who he had grown up with and loved, was not bad. He could not become bad because he was born with a different sexual orientation.

The same goes for trans-genders. In India, we have marginalized them so much that they are in to begging and crime to a large extent. It is only over the last few years that the Government has given equal status. Whose fault is it that someone is born as a trans-gender?  I watched, in horror, a transgender recounting his story of how he was scorned by his family. His parents could not accept that he was born different. He was asked to leave home as he brought ridicule from the society to everyone in his family. He was cut off from the will. Finally, he was the person who supported the family when they needed it most. All of a sudden, the bad son had become an angel. The bad had become good. The so called shameful act of accepting him as a son, was not really shameful after all. But, the fact that he was able to forgive his family was amazing to say the least.

As a society, we are prejudiced. We do things that suit us and call that good. The only problem is that this good does not suit all of us.  Money is a great means to divide us in society. The difference between the haves and the have-nots has increased so much, that this society is facing a time bomb that is ticking away. A lot of what we call bad for society - theft, terrorism, unrest, mafia, etc. are all as a result of economic mal-functioning in society. A person who cannot get a job ends up transporting RDX for $60 a month without realizing what he is doing...right or wrong? People who have fought for their right over land and investments from the government, get tired of waiting for decades for the government to invest. They get violent and now demand for their rights - right or wrong? You turn on the TV and news is all about something not going well somewhere in the world.  And if you look at the root cause, it comes down to our inventions most of the time - money, religion, apathy, greed...and the list goes on.

There are 7 billion of us in this world (7000 million)...of this we have 10 million people in prisons...and maybe another 40 million criminals outside (purely guess work from me)...so, 6950 million people run their lives based on the poor tendencies of these 50 million people.  Take the security checks that we go through at airports..the kind of time and money that is spent on such activities has only been increasing...the society is wasting its resources on protecting us from ourselves!!! Great way of blowing up our money...and guess what..this same money is one of the main reasons for the spend.  We have become experts in leading our lives to protect ourselves from this absolute minority. This minority that was largely created by our own inventions.

Right, wrong, good, bad...we need to think this through clearly. As I stated at the beginning...these concepts are from a particular person's point of view and at a particular point in time. Inclusive growth, lesser greed, a mind to give (and not only to take), sharing and tolerance are the need. We need to put the human being and his/her life above all other considerations. A lady dying because law did not permit abortion is just not acceptable. A trans-gender not getting equal rights as his/her brother or sister is just not acceptable. A gay or a lesbian denied rights in mainstream society is just not acceptable. Human life should mean much more to us than our inventions like money, law and religion.