Management Musings

I had the opportunity to be part of an event recently that got me thinking in multiple dimensions. One of the most interesting of these dimensions was one about self management. There are volumes written about how leaders should be, could be and are. There are books on managing projects and leading teams. I'm not sure how many of these place enough importance on self management. In a public setting, when meeting with a whole bunch of strangers for the first time and working together as a team, who you are as a person stands out. The difference between the work environment and the new public setting could not be starker because the reputation or title that precedes you at the work place is missing in the public forum. In such situations, the way that one carries oneself becomes a true reflection of who you are as a person and in many ways, is representative of your position in society. It is truly fascinating to encounter people that are so much in control of their emotions and...

Recently, I had the opportunity to reflect on a question on career investment. Do Managers do enough in terms of investing in the careers of their team members? Often, employees are unclear on what they are looking to achieve in their careers. While this may simply be put down as a lack of ambition, it is undeniably important for the leader to inculcate a sense of self worth where it is lacking and encourage his team to think about themselves. Now, each person is different and the classic mistake that one can easily make is to apply the same paint to every idol, so to speak. With career planning, it is simply not "one size fits all". Very often, in India especially, we have kids in middle class families choosing between only Engineering or Medical streams of education in college. The main reason that this happens is because the previous generation (parents) have seen that these two fields are the most secure and "safe" for their kids in the future. The mindset ca...

  As humans, we have a fascination with moving fast. There are enough sports around either running, driving or even flying! The tendency to go "faster than ever before" has lead to numerous inventions around improving the speed. In swimming, there were faster shark suits invented that would ostensibly help the swimmer wipe off seconds from existing records, a huge margin considering how little the timings have varied over the years. In running, there have been fantastic advances in the kind of footwear to assist in healthier and consequently, faster times. Sports science is a specialized area and there are innumerable advances in this field over the past 20-30 years as we learn more about the human body and its response to external stimuli. In motorsport, the goal is simply to go faster and reach the finish line quicker than anyone else. Teams in Formula 1 spend millions of dollars in aerodynamic development of the cars and in research on the type of material to be used as t...

In the past couple of weeks, a huge controversy has broken out in the Indian Premier League (IPL), a popular cricket tournament organized by the Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI). 3 players of the Rajasthan Royals, one of the 9 teams in the competition were arrested by the Delhi police for their alleged involvement with bookies and underperforming in their roles for the team during various cricket matches. Although the element of fixing is not new to cricket, having famously been admitted to by Hansie Cronje, the South African cricket team captain in the year 2000, the recent arrests and ongoing investigations by the police has lead to wide spread outrage amongst cricket followers and fans in India and elsewhere. The evidence against the three players was telephone conversations and the footage from the games in which they underperformed. While the fallout of the investigations continue, the captain of the affected team, Rahul Dravid, called the effect of having the playe...

Gamification, as explained in some detail here (https://class.coursera.org/gamification-002/class/index), is about applying game elements to business contexts. There are numerous game-like elements that have been applied to various websites and business models that have been widely successful. One popular example is FourSqaure.com, as quoted by the professor in the course mentioned above. FourSquare gives away all kinds of badges to the users of the website for achievements as varied as checking into a restaurant or location some X number of times, for logging in Y number of times, etc. That is an example of Badges, which is a game element, being employed for the specific purpose of engaging people and making it a habit for the users to log in to foursquare and report their specific location. Now that is an example of gamification as deployed in a very commercial sense. Although I am not immediately aware of the business model for FourSquare, vis-a-vis their revenue generation model...

During a course on Gamification that I have been attending recently, the professor talks about different kinds of motivation - extrinsic and intrinsic. I found the classification of the motivation to be very insightful and structured. Extrinsic motivation is when we are motivated by external factors, such as rewards, a feeling of social obligation, if you will or even when you are forced to do something although you don't quite believe in the task. Intrinsic motivation is when one feels good doing a task by himself/ herself only because he/ she likes it. Of course, the best kind of motivation is intrinsic. If we were to have a team that is full of folks like Anil Kumble in cricket or Lebron James in basketball, then it is safe to assume that that team would be the most efficient and excellent team in whatever task they do. Both the stars in their respective sports are known to be very hard working and appear to be intrinsically motivated to be the best that they can be in their ...

  An oft repeated remark amongst siblings - "Behave your age!" or "Behave yourself!". What exactly does one mean when they say something like that? I have heard that often enough from my sister (when I was little, of course ;) ). At the time it would draw a retort from me which would be along the lines of the very original "YOU behave yourself!" Oh well! Times have changed now.   It gets me thinking on some of the behavioral traits that we carry forward from our childhood. One such example is with possessiveness. As a child, invariably, either we were possessive or have encountered other children who were extremely possessive about their things. It may have been about a toy, their notebooks, tiffin boxes and in many cases, about their family. How often do we see kids clinging on to a toy or a video game - refusing to let others play even if they are not interested in the toy any more? Personally, I had a thing about toy cars, had a huge collection of th...