In my experience, the key to remain innovative in your core area is to find an ‘alternative’ – a creative pursuit that you love, that is different from your normal work and where you spend at least a few hours in a week. It could be playing a guitar, learning salsa, hitting the gym, writing a blog, reading novels, learning how to cook, starting a social initiative and so on.

I know a doctor who is passionate about music. He does not miss a single live music concert that happens in city. “It just refreshes me, pours new energy into my system and makes me more effective at work” – he says. He also started taking tuitions on music in the weekends to explore his passion. What a fun and what a refreshing change.

Studies have shown that these ‘alternate’ activities have a huge impact on your stress levels as well. They could be your greatest tool to bust that stress you accumulate by doing the routine. These activities can also stimulate different faculties (emotional, creative and logical) of our mind.

For me, writing is refreshing. I love the written word and I get a kick when my mind works in tandem with my fingers ferociously hitting the keyboard to produce ideas in form of words. I practice my passion for Quality – the core. But I stay effective because I write. Writing then, is more of a selfish activity for me.

Biggest folly is to think that these ‘alternate’ activities are time-wasters and that we could have produced better results had we spent that time doing our core work. In my view, it could have been counter-productive. Spending a few hours on these alternative activities is not a ‘waste’ but an ‘investment’.

The key however is -

• To experiment with yourself and do things you like doing (or you wished you did).
• Find out activities that gave you most pleasure. (you wished you did them more).
• Eliminate the rest and focus on these one or two activities.
• Devote/plan at least a few hours a week to do these set of activities.
• When you do these, don’t plan too much. Just go with the flow. Enjoy those moments.
• Create an alternative body of work that you could be proud of.

So stick to your core and get better at the ‘alternatives’ – they could be so much of a fun, so much of refreshment and a great tool for making you more effective in your core.

On that note, have a super-effective week ahead!

P.S: My post “On Leadership, Opening Up and Being Prepared” is featured in February Leadership Development Carnival, along with a number of fantastic posts from Leadership community and friends. Check it out.

Whenever I need some inspiration, I refer to “Quote of the day” series on Michael’s blog. You know what? They never fail to inspire me. Today, I am presenting Seven best business quotes I have read off late on Execupundit: 

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom. (Link)
- Francis Bacon

Why do questions matter more than answers? If you don’t ask the right question, it doesn’t matter what your answer is. And if you do ask the right question, no matter what your answer, you will learn something of value. (Link)

- Alan M. Weber

Power of right questions in business environment cannot be undermined. You can read my views on this in my posts “Right Questions > Right Answers > Right Results” and “Ask Right Questions”.

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality. (Link)
- George Santayana

I wrote two posts (here and here) which presents my views on quality and quantity – and why achieving quality is the first step towards excellence.

The usual way of doing things often gets in the way of doing things. (Link)
- Russell L. Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin, Beating the System

In some cases, a system can be beaten by rigorously following its rules and regulations. (Link)
- Russell L. Ackoff

In my view, processes are “tools” that help us become more effective. That, in no way, means that processes are a silver bullet that will solve all your problems.

People don’t work for an organization; they are the organization. (Link)
- Richard W. Buchanan

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. (Link)
- George Santayana

I collected great quotes ever since I was in school, because they allow us to peek into the minds of great thinkers. Profound learning in a few words.

Thank you Michael – for sharing such brilliant wisdom.

P.S: Michael Wade also wrote an advance praise and a review of my book #QUALITYtweet – 140 bite-sized ideas to delivery quality in every project.

If you are someone who ‘does things’, sticking to your desk all the day long is still fine because you get paid to do the stuff.

But as a leader in business setting, where you are expected to get things done, you cannot afford to be confined by cozy comforts of the office environments.

Leaders can have a bigger impact when they focus to “Work ON the business” rather than “Work IN the business”.

Not sure what you should do to get out of the comfort trap? Try any of these 3 random strategies. They not only pull you out of your comfort zone, but can also add tremendous value to your team/organization. These have always worked for me:

• Spend more time with your customers
  • As a leader, your impact on an organization is as large as the impact you have on the customers.
  • You can only get to know the “real” problems of your customers if you spend quality time with them to build a relationship.
  • It is easy to “monitor the numbers” (sales dashboards, internal efficiencies and other metrics). Once seen, what is difficult is to connect to customers, act and take right decisions.
  • Some of the most successful business leaders were known for spending more than 50% of their time facing customers.
• See people, don’t just watch them
  • When dealing with a team, it is easy to take people at their face value.
  • You can constantly “watch” your people (i.e. track their hours, outputs, track the time they spend away from their desks etc.) and that is easy.
  • Or you can “see” your people (i.e. understand them, their motivations, their skills and treat them as humans) and put right people on the right task.
  • You double your chances of success when right people do the right job with right levels of motivation.
  • Empower people, add value to them and help them grow in their individual capacities. That is the core of leadership. Be a catalyst.
• Improve something
  • Here is the idea. In a silent moment, sit with a pen and paper. Think about “Top 3” pain areas in your team/organization.
  • Ask “Why they are a pain?”
  • Identify what needs to be done to address these pains and then execute the improvement actions. Track the progress and improve further.
  • Sure, it is a hard work first time. But structuring an area of work in form of processes, you are reducing dependencies and improving operational efficiency.

So if you are a manager or leader at any level, do a reality check this morning. If you feel stuck, pick any one of the above and get yourself moving. I can assure, you won’t regret doing any of these!

Have a wonderful Wednesday!

Photo Courtesy: DJHuber’s Flickr Photo stream

In case you were busy all the month and could not catch up with this blog, here is a round-up of my writing activities in January 2010.

Posts at QAspire Blog:

• I started 2010 blogging with a review of Nicholas Bate’s book Instant MBA.
• I wrote earlier about “toxic leadership”. This month, I touched upon “Instinctively Reactive Leadership” and how it is a huge cost to the organizations.
• My post on Quality and Quantity – Compliance and Excellence tracked conversations of compliance versus excellence.
• I continued the conversation on Quality and Quantity in my subsequent post.
• I resumed my series on “Great Quotes” and this month, I presented a brilliant quote from Theodore Roosevelt - It is not the critic who counts.
• The Leadership Test by Timothy R. Clark is one of the finest books I have read on essence of leadership. I posted a review of the book.
• Simon Young at iJump posted a video review of my book #QUALITYtweet.
• I posted “Lessons in Using Checklists for Managing Processes”. This post generated some very interesting comments on the blog and on Facebook.
• I documented the lesson I learned from my gym instructor a few years back. The post was titled: No Pain, No Gain. Life Lesson on Endurance
• I continued the thinking on self-improvement aspect and realized that “Thinking” is a very useful (and important) habit in life and career.
• My last post of the month revisited Leadership and offered some ideas on how leaders can stay open and receptive to new ideas.

#QUALITYtweet Series at ActiveGarage

• #QUALITYtweet #13: Reviews Can be Fun (if done right)
• #QUALITYTweet#14: Process Improvement and 3 E’s
• #QUALITYtweet #1-12 : Read them all here

Looking forward to a Fascinating February!

Confined by constructs of an organization. Limited job descriptions. Rigid ways of handling situations. Status-Quos.

Being in a leadership position is more than being a box in the organization structure, or having a fancy title. Modern day leadership demands us to open up, engage in new ideas, new ways of doing things and experimenting with them. The traditional concept of having associations, communities helped leaders to network and interact with each other to gain fresh insights. Social media has made it even easier. Today, we have limitless power to engage in communities, gain access to ideas with single click and communicate with anyone anywhere on the globe. The world has just opened up.

Opportunities favor prepared minds. Here are a few things leaders can do to be prepared and stay open to new ideas and constantly explore:

• Offer Strong Reasoning: When you have an idea, ask yourself “Why?”. People follow those who clearly know the “Why” aspect of their decisions. Offer strong reasoning to create strong influence. Part of good reasoning is to challenge the assumptions. Policies of any organization are based on a set of assumptions. When those assumptions are constructively challenged, new ideas emerge.
• Engage in Constant Learning: One of the biggest challenges for a leader is to stay on top of the game, to bring different thinking on board and constantly raise the learning bar. Social Media, online communities and offline networking are some of the great ways to learn. Writing a blog is a great way to document your lessons. It also helps you validate your thinking, when others read and comment. You can witness your own thinking after you have written.
• Imagining and Reflecting: Applying knowledge in a business environment requires the understanding of context. Imagination, visualizing and setting time apart to think are two most important tools to understand the context and map actions for a long term difference. Thinking is a tool that opens up our minds. When mind is open and receptive, it absorbs the knowledge.
• Deciding and Acting: Leadership is all about results. Quick and timely decisions enable people to swing into action. With a constant focus on taking right decisions, leaders can really open up to alternate ideas that work.
• Failing and Re-aligning: Failures are stepping stones to success. I recently heard someone saying, there is no such thing as failure. There are only lessons. Making mistakes is fine as long as we don’t repeat the same ones again. Failures are important for success, and the idea is to consolidate learning from every failure.
• Enabling and Serving: Knowing how people work is crucial in leadership positions. When you constantly enable others succeed, you gain better understanding of human motivations and ways to constructively use them for better results. When a leader leads with a mindset to serve others, they become more open and receptive to richer insights.

If you are a leader, what strategies have worked for you to stay current, open and receptive to new insights? I would love to know.

Have a Fantastic Friday!

Photo Courtesy: Flickr Photostream of Artistic Rhythms

Yet, I see so many people who are always in “doing” mode. Even when they have a few solitary moments, they would pull out their cell phone and start checking their text messages or worst, play games! They literally hunt to find things that can fill their time.  Their minds are programmed to do stuff. To always be in “act” mode.

Doing stuff, executing is extremely important because all progress depends on how well we execute the ideas. But pre-requisites for executing well is to have a good idea and a thoughtful plan to execute it. Be it your project, your people, your career or your family – thinking before doing is crucial.

I do a very interesting exercise with my team members and friends. I give them a central idea or a problem statement and ask them to think about it for 10 minutes. They need to come back to me with their take on the idea and whatever they were able to think about it. Since they are not used to dedicate a time slot for thinking, they hit the wall. Their mind just stops.

Eventually, as I do this more and more with them, they start opening up. Their brain cells start ticking and they come back with ideas, thoughts and solutions. It takes time, but this exercise can work wonders. Our brain needs conditioning and environment to think.

Personally for me, early morning is the best time to ruminate and reflect upon my subject, priorities and things that occupy my mind space.

Idea is to allocate some part of your day to active thinking on your subject, your project, your career and your priorities in life. Silence is important, so is solitude.

So let you be alone, let your cell phone be switched off for a while, let your brain go on a thoughtful ride. I can tell you, that the ride is completely worth it.

As one of my mentors say - “Man who lives without thinking is a two-legged animal.”

I learned one of the most important life lessons from my gym instructor a few years ago. I had then joined the gym with an objective of shedding a few kilos.

We would start our routine with some basic warm-up exercises and as the time passed, the rigor of our work-outs became more extensive. When I went through some of the new exercises for the first time, my muscles almost screamed in pain. One day, in a very casual moment, I asked the instructor, “Isn’t this too much to loose only a few kilos?”

“You get almost nothing without going through some kind of pain, unless you win a lottery.”, replied the man who was himself a fitness freak. He was a marketing executive with a large pharmaceutical company when he decided to pursue his calling and start a fitness center. He neither had space nor money to start out. He went through a painful process of starting up, getting space on lease and getting some funding from the bank to get some basic equipments. At may points in this journey, he felt like giving up on his dream and going back to his job. But then, his belief in his pursuit was stronger than the pain he was enduring. What started as a two member team was now a successful fitness center running round the clock with a number of trained instructors and some very good facilities.

I learned that:

• Road to achievement is more like a marathon race and less like a sprint.
• We have more strength and capacity to endure, than we think.
• When we strongly believe in our purpose, the roadblocks don’t deter us.
• No pain, no gain. (It is very aptly said so.)
• All great leaders have undergone the pain to achieve their purpose (e.g. Gandhi)

I pushed through those rigorous work-outs. Every time when my muscles screamed, every time when I thought of giving up, I remembered those golden words from the gym instructor - “You get almost nothing without going through some kind of pain”.  

Wish you a wonderful week ahead!

A few other posts on Persistence, that you might love reading:

• What I learned from my daughter about “Persistence”
• Great Quotes: Persistence
• My Guest Post at Mountain State University’s LeaderTalk Blog: On Perseverance and Pushing through.

Photo Courtesy: Eric Lon’s Photo stream

Why checklists?

I was thinking about why engineering disciplines focus so heavily on checklists? Here are a few reasons I could think of:

• Checklist can be a progressive database of your knowledge on building certain type of systems.
• Checklists are excellent guides for others to perform the same activity in a consistent fashion with little instructions.
• Checklists help in controlling quality of the products in verification stage.
• Checklist standardize the operations and serve as great reminder to get the most crucial activities done.
• Checklists can serve as a training/reference material for new comers.
• Checklists are a great communication tool.

In essence: "Checklists seem able to defend everyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws." says Dr. Atul Gawande, author of the book “The Checklist Manifesto”

The Problem with Checklists

Checklists mean standardization – and often standardization is blamed for killing creativity. People get blinded so much by checklist that they stop innovating, experimenting and learning. In this context, I read a review Dr. Gawande’s book written by Dr. Philip K. Howard at Wall Street Journal. The review says -

The utility of formal protocols, according to organizational experts, varies with the nature of the activity—some activities are highly systemized, like engineering, and others dependent on the judgment and personality of the individual. Spontaneity and imagination are important in many jobs, including teaching and management of all kinds. Dr. Gawande seems to assume that formal checklists will be an unalloyed benefit. But most people can think of only one thing at once: If they’re thinking about a checklist, they may not be focusing on solving the problem at hand. Many tasks require trial and error—not checklists designed to avoid error. "Hell, there ain’t no rules around here," Thomas Edison famously said. "We’re trying to accomplish something."

My Learning?

• Checklists are indispensible in a business setting, specially when dealing with production systems that demand consistent outcomes.
• Success of checklist approach depends solely on nature of work. You can have detailed checklists for specific engineering activities (where outcomes solely depend on inputs and process). 
• From a management and leadership standpoint, broad-level checklists can be helpful. However, the focus still has to be on situational thinking, innovation and assessing the variables in the process of managing/leading people.
• In any case, the importance of experimenting, making mistakes and innovating cannot be ruled out. Challenge for improvement experts is to implement checklist in a way that it does not limit thinking.
• Checklists are tools. As with all other “tools”, a lot depends on your understanding as a professional to use these tools optimally and achieve desired results.

(Hat Tip to Michael Wade for pointing me to this book review post at WSJ).

Simon Young at iJump reviews my book “#QUALITYtweet – 140 bite-sized ideas to deliver quality in every project” and other books in Thinkaha Series. You can also watch this video at iJump TV website.

I resumed my article series on ActiveGarage with my 13th article titled “Reviews Can be Fun (if done right)” published a few days ago. You can read previous 12 articles here.

Here is an excerpt from my latest article at ActiveGarage:

Success of any process depends on 2 E’s – Efficient and Enjoyable. Same holds true for your review processes. Review is a control mechanism, and hence the focus on getting it right the first time is still very important. A good review is just an internal quality gate that ensures that internal customers (reviewers) are happy with the final product. If your internal customers are happy, your external customers will be happy too!

Have a great Wednesday and a wonderful remaining week ahead!

The answer is simple - they got into a leadership position as a natural progression without any reality check on their aptitude, skills and capability to lead.

When I interview people for technical positions, one question I invariably ask is - "Where do you see yourself two years down the line?". Most of these would answer that they want to be a team lead, manage people and projects. That is a noble aspiration, because business needs good leaders. But why do they want to lead? There are plenty of resources available to address "How to lead?" aspect. But a very few touch upon "Why do you want to be a leader?"

Any one who aspires to be a leader must read "The Leadership Test - Will You Pass?" by Timothy R. Clark, Ph.D. (His Blog) The book is organized in form of conversation between a teacher (named Isadore Kroll, Izzy) and his former student (Marcus), who is now facing a dilemma of whether he should accept a leadership position being offered to him by his company. The teacher takes Marcus through a soul-searching process to address "Why" aspect of leadership. At the end, teacher puts Marcus through a leadership test. Quite a revelation!

Here are a few very important excerpts from the book on spectrum of leadership -

“Leadership is a business of influence, but what kind of influence? Think about it on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum is manipulation. At the other end is coercion. In the middle is persuasion.”

“All three may be considered to be forms of influence, but only persuasion is leadership. Only persuasion really helps people. The other two hurt people.”

“Leadership is based on influence-through-persuasion at the front end, combined with accountability at the back end.”

Most important of all leadership test questions is the fourth question “Take the Oath” – a personal oath to act with honesty and integrity at all times. The organization or society may not need it, but it is up to you to take that oath and enforce it. I find this more important because private virtue is the most important factor that determines growth/health of a team, organization or a society. No point in having leaders who are self-centered or dishonest.

At the end of all this, the book emphasizes the most important fact - “Leadership is about RESULTS”. Leadership is an applied-science. You can think about leadership, but that won’t help until you practice it to execute and deliver.

Reading this book cover to cover took me 30 minutes, but story of Marcus and Izzy still occupies my mind space. The more I think about it, the more it reveals.

That, to me, is a power of well written book. Go, read “The Leadership Test” to kick start some serious soul-searching and self-assessment on leadership.

Have a happy Monday and a great week ahead!

Quality is to first ask “Why are we doing it?”, “Is it worth doing it at-all?”. Quality is to first seek the purpose. Once purpose is clear, numbers can help you measure progress.

It is almost easy to figure out “What” and “How” of processes once you have addressed “Why”.

On 11th Jan 2010, Harvard Business Review’s blog featured a post titled “Why Good Spreadsheets Make Bad Strategies” by Roger Martin. The ideas presented in the post complements my views. Here is an excerpt of some key ideas presented in the post at HBR.

We live in a world obsessed with science, preoccupied with predictability and control, and enraptured with quantitative analysis. We live by adages like: "Show me the numbers" and truisms such as "If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count."

The fundamental shortcoming is that all of these scientific methods depended entirely on quantities to produce the answers they were meant to generate. They were all blissfully ignorant of qualities.

Adding up the quantity of credit outstanding won’t tell us nearly enough about what role it will play in our economy. Adding up sales won’t tell us what kind of a company we really have. We need to have a much deeper understanding of their qualities — the ambiguous, hard-to-measure aspects of all of these features.

We must stop obsessing about measurement so much that we exclude essential but un-measurable qualities from our understanding of any given situation.

Spot on! 

To me, this is the power of social media. You take a subject to explore, think and write about it. On the other side of globe, someone else is thinking about the very same subject, but in a different context. Different views come out, complement each other and just take the subject forward. It is also a great validation of your thoughts.

Hat tip to my friend Tanveer Naseer for pointing me to the HBR post via Twitter.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

So let the critics do their job while you get busy in :

• Getting things done.
• Embracing the change.
• Stirring the pot and thinking.
• Ruthlessly re-prioritizing.
• Raising the bar.
• Getting better by learning
• Enjoying what you are doing.
• Being the best of what you can be.
• Thinking possibilities.
• Living each moment to its best.

Remember, it is not the critic who counts. Have a great week ahead!

Consider the following conversations. Have you heard them  before? I have!

Quantitative: My goal is to have 500+ LinkedIn connections by end of February.

Qualitative: I would prefer 100 connections by end of February and these connections will be based on trust and/or a strong prior relationship.

—

Quantitative: After MBA, I will look at getting a pay package of at least X.

Qualitative: Can’t wait to complete my MBA so that I can get to what I love doing – Marketing!

—

Quantitative: In 2010, I will write at least 200 blog posts.

Qualitative: In 2010, I will focus on writing at least 75 posts that are highly relevant in core areas where I can add value.

 —

Quantitative: Let me check your timesheets to see how many hours you have worked on the project in the past month.

Qualitative: Let me assess what progress you have achieved in key result areas of your work in past month.

—

Quantitative: Lets go for quality certification which will open us doors to more number of customers.

Qualitative: We need a quality certification so that we can improve our internal efficiencies and streamline the processes for having delighted customers. 

 —

Quantitative: I have 6000+ followers on Twitter. Feels great!

Qualitative: I have 50+ trusted relationships on Twitter who add a lot of value to each other. Feels even greater!

 —

These are conversations of “compliance” versus “remarkability” and “adherence” versus “excellence”. Does it not happen that you meet your numbers, but the overall quality of work product/customer experience remains same (or deteriorates)?

Quality is to first ask “Why are we doing it?”, “Is it worth doing it at-all?”. Quality is to first seek the purpose. Once purpose is clear, numbers can help you measure progress.

It is almost easy to figure out “What” and “How” of processes once you have addressed “Why”.

Have a great weekend!

Photo Courtesy: FirstIndy’s Flickr Photostream

Managing a team/organization means managing confrontations, conflicts and uncomfortable situations. These are integral parts of business. Leaders can decide to give their knee-jerk reactions to these confrontations or strategically and thoughtfully frame response to set the right precedence for organization culture and values.

When leaders are reactive, they:

• Expose their vulnerabilities
• Take impulsive decisions
• “Tell” a lot and “listen” a lot less
• Become overly obsessed with ‘correction’ and results.
• Loose trust and respect. People don’t see them as dependable leaders
• Fail in creating well rounded teams around them.
• Quickly punish people for making mistakes
• Instantly react to changes

Quick reactions from leaders are helpful when dealing with a potentially life-threatening (read existence-threatening) crisis for an organization. Sure, there are situations that need immediate reactions. But routine and long term decisions which impact organization culture and habits of people cannot be based on an impulse. They harm more than they help.

People look up to leaders for right examples, and most of the time, emulate same behaviors and actions. These behaviors and actions sets a culture of an organization. This is why leadership in organizations is a huge responsibility, because it ultimately determines the culture of an organization. Leaders ought to react thoughtfully.

Leader’s become transformational when they influence change and inspire people to act. As a leader, you can swing people into action by reacting (and thereby forcing) them or by taking proactive steps that inspire people to act and deliver. Your choice!

P.S.: Read this earlier post “To Err is Human – Treating People When They Make Mistakes” to see another example of reactive leadership and its cost.

Nicholas Bate is a prolific thinker, blogger and author. More than that, he is a wonderful friend.

He shared some of his best work with me in 2009, in form of his books and innovatively done cards. With his book titled “Instant MBA" – Think, perform and earn like a top business-school graduate” – I can safely say that I have just completed my “Instant Do-It-yourself MBA”!

The thing about a good book is – every time you read it, you learn something new. Instant MBA will do that with some very practical advice on how to inculcate MBA thinking and emotional intelligence to advance your career. Through this book, Nicholas Bate intends to say that more than a degree, MBA is a way of thinking. Whether you have done an MBA or not, whether you are experienced or novice, you got to read Instant MBA. MBA thinking is crucial for success in modern workplace.

Creativity, Effective Presentations, Pricing, Excellence, Vision, Human Resources, Research, Entrepreneurship are just some of the topics covered in the book. Bate’s brevity and style of representation comes out nicely in each chapter – informal and straight-to-the-point. Quotes at the end of chapters add to the reading pleasure.

Here are a few more FREE resources (PDF Downloads) from Nicholas Bate’s kitty -

• “How to be BRILLIANT” – 50 short ideas for personal excellence. I have taken a print-out of this to refer it often.
• “Selling Without Tears” – A fantastic selling guide with practical ideas.
• “How to Write & Publish Your Business Book” – A very recent gem from Prof. Bate.

2010 promises to be exciting and there is no better time than now to read such brilliant resources and go from good to great!