Skip to main content

The Popeye & spinach lesson of management.

The turning point for Popeye the sailor is when he gets his spinach. He guzzles a full can & wallops a large competitor. The turning point for Asterix is when he gets his magic potion. Guru Gobind Singh administered the Amrit to the ordinary to get transformational results: the metaphorical sparrow that could challenge the eagle. It’s the confidence in oneself & the responsibility of a leader to discover & administer this magic potion that transforms an ordinary person into a winner.

Research on a particular species of a bee sums up this behaviour. This species is known to jump 36 inches. When placed in a jar of 12 inches, they jump out. However, when a lid is placed on the jar, they struggle & eventually give up. Once the lid is removed, the bees no longer jump 36 inches. They jump only eight inches & remain in the open jar. They have been conditioned. While in the closed jar every time they jumped higher their head hit the lid.

Most of us in life live smaller lives to avoid pain. We forget the capability that we possess & are afraid to take risks. Next, in the bee example, something strange happens. A new bee flies into the jar & easily jumps out. On seeing her, the other bees remember how they too could jump 36 inches & begin to jump out. This is the power of positive association.

The essence of leadership is about creating a charged atmosphere, one of excitement & inspiration where people rise to heights they never dreamt were possible. It’s like an inverse paranoia where you believe the whole world is conspiring to do you good.

In CADs we believe that in order to define the industry & continue our leadership position, we need to be paradigm pioneers. This is a phrase you will hear on every individual’s lips in Team CADs. In marketing companies, to stay ahead & be pioneers one has to be open to change. India is changing at a very fast pace & companies will be successful if they stay open to change. Half of our India was born after 1982, which makes us the youngest country in the world. These 20-year-olds think very differently from us & in order to be successful a company needs to understand & empathise with this large group.
We have to accept change & do things differently. One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. Our biggest investment in CADs has been on our team. The endeavour is to let people be at their creative best.

The work environment must aid & encourage the process. Only then can they discover the world outside, romance their relationships, spend time with their families & be creative. The marketing team focuses on building compelling campaigns that grip the consumer.The focus is to maximise each person’s strengths, to keep them energised & imaginative. The secret of passion is purpose. Goal setting is another aspect wherein a lot of thought & creativity is exercised. Well set & defined goals ensure a sense of focus & that creativity is channelled for the desired results.

Lastly, it’s important that people enjoy the work they do & develop a larger sense of purpose. The real value of achieving goals lies not in the rewards they receive but in the person they become.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Will Automation make human work obsolete?

Will Automation make human work obsolete? Robots now build cars and power mechanical diggers and other "dumb" jobs. What will surprise you is how quickly "mechanical minds" are making human brain labor less in demand. Still think robots can’t do your job? Automation and robotics will eventually take over most of the tasks, especially the labor expensive ones, as computing gets smarter. Talk of robots making humans obsolete is generally a topic that is still laughed off as science fiction by most, but this video could get you to rethink the future human work. It lays out a compelling case for why almost half of those currently in the work force could struggle to find work once automation takes over in the near future. Unlike "the singularity," in which artificial intelligence takes over the planet in rapid and dramatic fashion, this paints a picture, backed up by statistics and current developments, indicating that the true singularity will occur gradually,

How do you think & act?

At work & at home, each of us has been & again will be in communication. Our personal communication styles will dictate to a great extent our success in coordinating action & in relationships. It's unfortunate that we usually enter into communication situations without an awareness of our personal styles of communicating. We just do what comes naturally to us (but not necessarily to others.) One thing is certain every communicator anywhere continually THINKS & ACTS. This is where we begin our exploration of communication styles: how we Think & Act? In the Communication Styles , there are two thinking styles, and two acting styles, Acting Style 1: The Stimulators as you might guess, people with this acting style strive to implement new actions quickly & intuitively, without structure. On teams & in meetings, stimulators will speak up to suggest easier ways to accomplish work & will be the first to embrace new approaches to old problems. Because they

Roko mat Toko mat

Bachpan se bada koi school nahi, curiosity se badi koi teacher nahi. There is no greater school than childhood and no greater teacher than curiosity. Parle G (the largest selling brand of biscuits in the world) asks parents to encourage their child's curiosity and creativity in its campaign called 'Kal ke genius'. While the song has an '80s feel, it is the soul of the film and is written, sung and composed very well. The song aptly encapsulates the philosophy of the campaign. It is urging people to let their kids be just kids and let them explore if they are curious. Parle-G 's Glucose biscuits always evoke a sense of nostalgia. The ad in a nice way talks about the increasing parental control and societal pressures that make kids these days spend more time in study classes than learning through exploring new things. Curiosity is actually the best teacher. Unfortunately, it is just the kind of a thing which parents often discourage. In fact, we keep stopping ch

The new coming wave of automation is blind to the color of your collar

The new coming wave of automation is blind to the color of your collar Kaplan said that in the next decade or two, driverless cars could put many of the more than three million licensed professional drivers around the country out of work. While automation long ago revolutionized the assembly line, advances in big data computing power could soon downsize the traditional white collar workforce as well. "Even what you think of as advanced professions that require a great deal of specialization and expertise, the vast majority of the work is routine, and it's those routine tasks which can be now taken over by computers, so that what used to take the work of 20 lawyers may be done by five lawyers, or 20 doctors may be done by five doctors," Kaplan said. Maybe even journalists. Now computers are creeping into the reporting field. At The Associated Press, approximately 4,000 corporate earning stories are being written by computers. The AP uses a program called Wordsmith, created

The Science of Willpower

How willpower is often misunderstood, and what we each can do to improve it? It’s the third week in Jan. and at about this time, that resolution that seemed so reasonable a week ago — go to the gym every other day, read a book a week — is starting to seem very hard. As you are teetering on the edge of abandoning it all together Kelly McGonigal wants you to know that you’re not having a hard time sticking to a resolution because you are a terrible person. Perhaps you’ve just formulated the wrong resolution. People come up with resolutions that don’t reflect what matters most to them, and that makes them almost guaranteed to fail. Willpower is the ability to do what matters most, even when it’s difficult or when some part of you doesn’t want to. That begins to capture why it’s so difficult — because everything we think of as requiring willpower is usually a competition between two conflicting selves. There’s a part of you who is looking to the long-term and thinking about certain goa