Gray Smoke

A gem from Dilbert.

I saw this great talk on Delusion of Positive Thinking Proponents. In the corporate world, everyone is expected to rally around the leader and buy in to the leader's vision.. This is supposed to make the person/company successful. Even though most successful solutions come from the ground where they get executed, the leader often pushes not just their vision but also their solution. No one can voice dissent against this solution however impractical it may be. Early in my career, I thought my dissenting note was not heard because I was a junior engineer. However, over the years I have realized that the leader's deafness to a dissenting voice is because leaders needs to keep justifying that their worth. They surround themselves with many YES-men who are willing to accommodate every whim and fancy of the boss. These people do not take ownership when things fail, as they were only following the boss' orders. Instead, they end up getting rewarded for their efforts, even ...

I have been interviewing a lot of senior managers in the past months and one of the question I always ask is, if they have fired or let people go. I have been amazed at how many managers have never done this or shrugged of their responsiblity by letting HR do a complicated process. I have always been an optimist and hired for the potential in others rather than their immediate experience. This has mostly worked for me but I have had cases where I had to let person go mainly because of attitude. There has also been times when I had to let people go not only because of their performance but because the company was not performing as expected. The issue with any firing is that human connections are broken and effects the moral of everyone. Here are my top advice. 1. Make sure the process is transparent, not only to the one getting fired but also everyone around him. 2. Do not delay the firing decision. Make it fast and painless. Move-on and let the other person also move-on. 3. Do t...

Customer satisfaction is one the most abused terms in management. Almost every CEO wants their company to be rated high on this. However very few are willing to invest in making sure this happens. For his you need to make sure your operations, your product and even your sales is focussed towards it. It starts with sales not over committing and selling what is available. The product itself must be designed to meet the customers explicit and implicit needs and finally the operation must make sure that these product/service delivered to the customer is as expected. Breakup down in any one of the steps will hurt the satisfaction.

A part of management is do forecasts. Forecasts are most of time based on totally wrong assumptions or worse past historical data. Even after making a forecast, how many times are they really tracked against performance. I guess the only reason to make a forecast is to justify a decision. So always make a rosy, over-the-top forecast because no one likes a depressing one to start with. If the rosy forecast does not meet the performance you can always make excuses of " external unknown environmental variable s".