After you ......

Buddhism deals with one of the mostcoplex topic - death , and the way of doing it is very simple imagining every day as your last day and thinking what would I do if this is my last day of life today . For an entreprenuer or an executive who is running a business succession planning should be a similar afair , specially for entrepreneur it is life changing matter to leave the organization they built from scratch , so continously they need to have succession planning in thier mind , what if I leave this company today - who will be the most suitable person to run it after me . In case of family managed businesses answer to this question is crystal clear , Children are going to take over one day and a great deal of effort is spent on grooming children on thier future role from education to th ecorrect experience and mentorship . For organizations which are professionally managed , succession planning and next line leadership is the buzz word of the day and it has been there from more than couple of decades but the success of such programs is always questionable . In very few such organization we will have a clear visibility as who will be running the show after the current leader. Consider example of GE where Jeff immelt had clear step wise vision placed for 3 prospective leaders out of which Jack welch came out as clear winner , some thing similar happened in ICICI recently where 3 strong candidates were mentored for the top post . Such succession plannings brought predictability in the business and hence no knee jerk reaction in the share market when a new leader is announced about whom stakeholders dont have any idea. However it may sound easy to say that one should always be in look out for his successor when he is in top job but thats the beauty of being in top job that you probably never want to leave it ... It is as hard as thinking about end of life ...

Abandon

One should abondon yesterdays bread winner before one really wants to let alone before one has to. - Drucker

Drucker quoted it so strongly decades back and it seems to be true irrespective of time and context , organizations and individuals need to come out of their comfort zone a little earlier and start looking out for next big thing , the problem is if they dont do that willingly at early stage then after some time they will be forced by changing business environment to abondon exiting belief and adopt new and then they will have little or no time to react , infact entire approch will be reactive and no space for creatvity and pilot runs.

Abandon the way you work : In todays dynamic (yet vibrant) business environment , organizations need to ask continously what will be the next way of working . They can not keep working on same set of business processes because technology is injecting changes into processes every now and then and significant number of disruptive ones.

We need to constantly think about new way of working and abondon old ones. for example Even before there is need or question of cost advantage we need to evaluate cloud computing.
In fact in my opinion Abandoning itself may not be as beneficial as the process of thinking in this direction which will help you visulaize new and improved ways of doing things.

Project Management - what not to do

A new manager is sent to save a project which is showing red in all its SLAs and KPIs , team is all burnt up taking heat from Customer , client and top management , people are working overt time but something has gone out of hand , may be some wrong decisions , may be a heavy work inflow because of some upgrade / roll out which has lead to mounting backlog and a tired and
demoralised team . Management is keen on getting things back on track , they are looking for a super hero to save the project , they do a head hunting and bring a "Manager" who has proven his worth in the past ( well at least in his resume) , all eyes are set on him and he is feeling trapped under pressure cooker .
If I am that manager , what would I not do

1) Don't ask for too many new dash board / Reports : I may have a way in which I understand things , I may have learnt and built priorities in my previous projects to resolve such situations . So when I come to this land where existing reports , terms , KPIs are nothing but Greek and Latin to me . I may not understand the reports , I may not find the data which I am looking for and I immediate temptation is to walk in to the team leads , module leads and tell them to create some more dashboards , which I think is relevant and flash necessary information . Now imagine this is a team which is already slogging and I may have added to their frustration . More reports mean taking away a little more productive time from their schedule and filling little more dissatisfaction .

2) Don't jump into decision : Just after my arrival , I start making decisions , changing team structure , setting new target for people . Its not that I am doing it out of my random thought . I have good experience in such projects and some of these things have worked in past for me so I think it will work here too . A team hates manager who takes decision without getting
himself involved in the situation , all projects have different grounds and so different ground realities . My past experience can be perfectly the right thinkg to do but it will be much better to apply it after knowledge of environment and context , the biggest factor ignored most of the time is the ecosystem of team . I am desperate to get results but then it is not a war front .

3) Build consensus rather then imposing decisions : Before I enter into team , the team is already under leadership of some one else . Existing organizations may have ways to take decisions , it may be a good possibility that previous manager made decision on his own but if a new manager does it , that may slightly difficult for team . The best way is to have consensus driven decision making , If I have valuable inputs , I am sure team will understand provided I have supporting arguments to convince

Goodness in grievance

Mahabharata ended and Pandava reclaimed the glory which they deserved , It was time for Sri Krishna to go back to his Kingdom so he asked his aunt Kunti , is there anything you want ? What esle I can do for my loved pandva's ? Kunti's response to this question was very astonishing , she said oh lord I want that more problems should come to our lifebecause whenever we have been into trouble we have remembered you with utmost sincereity , we have called upon you for help and guidance and you have always appeared to show उस the path in troubled waters. If we are in trouble that would meen being constantly in toubh with you , thinkig of you and your belessed presenece.
Kunti is attitued towards problems and grievance in her life is not very common otherwise , that is because normally when challenged by difficulties of life we are toobusy in fighting with them to notice what kind of changes they are bringing to us , I am not saying these changes are always good but certainly there are lots of positives in such situations. Bad times are the real groomers of any individuals and some of the most admired people could do wonders because they faced bad times , some of the greatest innovations of human history are from the period of world war.

Changing (BA)asics

Business Analyst is supposed to bridge the gap between business users and technical solution provider by using the business domain knowledge and technology understanding.
As per international institute of busyness analysis, “The Business Analysis Professional is responsible for requirements development and requirements management. Specifically, the Business Analysis Professional elicits, analyzes, validates and documents business,
organizational and/or operational requirements. Solutions are not predetermined by the Business Analysis Professional, but are driven solely by the requirements of the business. Solutions often include a systems development component, but may also consist of process improvement or organizational change. “
This traditional definition for role of a BA is accurate for customized application developments where some needed to help customer understand his requirement , document it and explain to technical team for developing application. In current IT project landscape there are many ways to address a business problem and hence role of BA is changing with broader set of responsibilities

Package Implementation : Packages are off the shelf component which provide standard set of solution for a particular business function ( with minimum development effort) so in such projects the role of BA changes to Business process Analyst and even business process re-engineering. BA will perform "AS-IS" and "TO-BE" process analysis and then help technical consultants to customize wherever needed.
Support Projects : For support projects BA will handle level 2 and level 3 support for an application where his job would be to resolve functional queries posted by end users. He may also be involved with application developers for bug fixing and other maintenance related issues.
Reporting projects : One of core responsibility of BA is process large data and derive conclusion from it, reporting or data warehouse projects focus on this strength where a BA needs to provide reports as needed by business.

Freedom

In his classic Zahir paulo coelho makes an statement "absolute freedom doesn’t exist; what does exist is the freedom to choose anything you like and then commit yourself to that decision" something similar to what Geeta proclaims in very beginning When Arjuna faces confusion over fighting and killing of own family members and looked for help from Krishna , Even before Krishna starts revealing anything he makes it very clear , " Arjuna I will not take decision on your behalf , it is you who will have to take decision and then that decision will be your responsibility , the ownership of that decision will be with you if you think that some one else will take decision on your behalf and you will be spared from the burden of consequences , thats not happening"
This is what freedom in this world means , one can not sit as a victim because one is associated with its surrounding , family , country. These are emotional associations like Arjuna was associated with his brothers , wives , mother , cousins etc so even though in the beginning of battle he is devastated and thinks of renunciation to attain liberation or complete freedom but we all know that he would have not been able to sustain this. Imagine the scene when Arjuna leaves the battle without fighting , their would have been joy on the side of Kaurava's with sheer excitement they would have eliminated rest of the pandava's within few days , What would Arjun do then ? some one who can not see his teachers and uncles in pain would have seen dead bodies of his real brothers , was he so detached with the world that he could have still continued with his meditation .

I doubt if that would have been the case , instead we would have seen another Arjuna - the destroyer force , who would have again picked up his gandiv and hunted down Duryodhan and company in revenge. That's the reasons Krishna asked him to take a decision considering what his duty is (Karma Yoga ) .

Hence it seems to me that the best way of utilising your freedom is to choose what you consider is right , and stand by it with all might. You are free to choose what do you want but you are not free from choices as long as you are surviving in the society , choices have to made at every step . Let no one make those choices for you , people may help but can not take decision on your behalf because the only way to be happy is to know you have complete authority over choice , it is you who has chosen this path and it is you who will finish it .

The Bottom line of Business

Over the time again and again philosophers have dwelt into the question , what’s the purpose of business and answers have varied to cover almost every dimension from economic growth to value creation for its stakeholder and beyond. The greatest management guru of current time Peter Drucker mentions

“Business exists to supply goods and services to customers, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers, or even dividends to stockholders. Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity” – Peter Drucker

As per Drucker business identifies the need of the value creation for a particular segment of people and creates that value, if your business is making profit that just validates your creation of value for your customer. So there is something larger which is purpose of business , profit creation may not just be validity test ( as Drucker mentions ) but definitely be an integral part of it however there are other people like John Renesch who have put a very strong support for greater purpose of business

"Corporations are human-made organisms, associations of human beings. To see this association as having one solitary purpose and responsibility, to grow only in economic terms, is such an extreme view that implosions like what happened to Enron, WorldCom and other corporate collapses will become more and more commonplace." -- John Renesch

John has hit the profit creation part of business too hard, taking specific examples like Enron and Worldcom. Same sentiments are shared by James C Collins in his book “Built to last” mentioning that maximizing profit has not been the dominating force or primary objective of visionary companies, yes they seek profit but they are equally guided by core ideology – core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money. Even though we can never undermine the bottom lines for any business yet we have sufficient reason to believe that this can never be an ultimate goal of business. If we go back and find out reasons of starting of several organization we would come across passion for technology, innovation, identification of improvement and value creation, making things better and faster as some of the key reasons which may include something as personal as working for self of being once own master.

Anu Agha of Thermax sums it well "We survive by breathing but we can't say we live to breathe. Likewise, making money is very important for a business to survive, but money alone cannot be the reason for business to exist".
Whatever is the objective of business, profits can not be negated but why do we need profit? If a firm wants to sell some product why can not it provide just by covering its operational and capital expense without taking any extra profit, this much should be enough for sustaining any organization but will that be enough for growth as well? Can it enable value creation and innovation?