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