Someone said, “ Words may inspire you, thoughts may provoke you but only action can lead your dreams to reality”. I found this very profound. Many of us are guilty of articulating words on new year through resolutions and even thinking about the same for some days. But mostly we do not act on those resolutions and they remain dreams in our lives.

Life is no different. We need to express ourselves in words and then think about those ideas. However, unless we act on them, we may never achieve what we want to. It is like strategic planning exercise in many organisations. Most strategic plans remain in power point presentations and in think tank discussions since no action is taken to make it a reality on ground.

In this regard, we have a lot to learn from the start ups. They spend less time in expressing what they want to do and thinking about it . They take the risk and experiment with their ideas and are not afraid of failure. Most organisations spend years on strategic planning and evaluation of alternative options and take no risks or action on the ground to try out their plans to make them real.

Imagine a student writing an essay on what she wants to become in her life. Then thinking and dreaming of how she wants to become a pilot and go to ISRO or NASA in her life. Unless, this is followed up with internships and courses in space research and visits to these institutions or similar ones, such dreams will remain a dream.

I have found employees are no different in organisations. They express their ideas quite eloquently and even think about their ideas and share them. However, they fail to act on them. This means that in most cases it remains a great idea or thought but will never see the light of the day.

We are no different in our day to day lives. As parents, teachers or leaders in organisations, if we focus only on sharing ideas in words or thoughts and do not have the courage to experiment and fail, it will remain a fantasy or dream in our lives.

This characteristic is learnt by our children, students or team members and they also spend all their time in expressing their ideas in words or thoughts but do not put in the efforts to translate those thoughts into deeds through concerted actions.

In many organisations, there is always a debate between the time spent on planning and execution. Many purists will tell us that if we spend enough time in planning, then execution becomes simpler. I do not disagree. However, my experience teaches me that many of us stop with expressing our ideas and thoughts in paper and fail to experiment through actions and execution on the ground. This means plans remain great plans on paper and never see fruition.

We need to dream. Then express our dreams in words. This could be followed by thinking about those dreams and words. However, the critical step for success is working hard and acting on those thoughts to make those dreams a reality in our lifetime. Otherwise, they will always remain dreams and fantasies in our lives.

Let us act today to convert all our dreams into reality.

S Ramesh Shankar

8th August 2022

The workplace of tomorrow ,is going to be radically different than what we have seen so far. Nobody would have imagined how businesses will transform overnight and thereby, the places of work too. I am trying to predict the workplace of tomorrow based on my imagination and insight. If it comes true, you can give credit to the teams with whom I worked in my career , as they instilled this wisdom in me and if it fails, I take responsibility for it, as I failed to assimilate knowledge over the years ,from my teams.

1. Work from anywhere : Work from home has become the norm in the days of the lockdown in most organisations today. In tomorrow’s organisation, work from anywhere will be the norm. This is because organisations will realise, that if majority of their employees are able to connect online, it does not matter where they work from. In the past, many old age leaders felt insecure allowing employees to work from home, since they were not sure how productive they would be. However, thanks to Covid, work from home was thrust on organisations ,as the only alternative and most organisations and employees have willingly and effectively adopted it.

2. Offline to Online : While most of us have got used to fulfilling most of banking needs online due to internet banking and mobile apps, it will be seen that ,most business transactions will move online. People will prefer to buy everything possible online. This would mean that physical infrastructure will have to give way to a robust IT infrastructure. What we have seen in the days of the lockdown is that, the internet speeds are impacted due to heavy overload as the service providers were not ready for this catastrophe.

3. Interpersonal to intra-personal behaviour : All organisations focussed a lot on building teams and thereby developing interpersonal skills of their team members. This is likely to give way ,to focus on individual behaviour, which I have termed as intra-personal behaviour. How do I behave when I work alone at home and still have to deal with other teams online. This would mean conscientiousness and self discipline. Employees and their managers have to trust each other and focus on deliverables rather than the time spent by the employee at the workplace.

4. Manufacturing will get robot driven: We will see a radical transformation in the shop floors of production units. We may see more robots and automation , take over manual labour. This would mean that human beings have to move up the value chain and focus on quality, productivity and innovation. The minimalisation of human interface in production lines , will see improvement in quality, productivity and consistency. This does not mean that human interface will vanish from shop floors. It means that human beings will add value to what robots can never do even in the future.

5. Remote Servicing : An interesting development will be that ,servicing will become more remote ,than it is today. Most service centres will provide remote diagnostics and will be able to service products remotely. Even today power plants are monitored remotely and even troubleshooting and repairs can be done remotely through connected devices. In the digitalisation era, it may become possible for all products to be monitored and serviced remotely except for possibly replacement of parts. Even that may change ,with modular design where consumers may be able to replace parts themselves based on artificial intelligence and remote service guidance.

6. Paperless organisations : One of the positive outcomes for the future will be ,that organisations will truly become paperless. Everything will be transacted online. From the offers of employment to employees to purchase orders to suppliers and invoices to customers, the entire value chain will be operated with the aid of online -connected technologies. This will not only ensure efficiency and effectiveness, it will also eliminate waste and non productive processes within organisations.

7. Boundary less organisations : One of the dreams of organisations is to dissolve the stringent boundaries between functions within the organisation, which actually come in the way of delivering value to customers. In the future, we will see that such needless boundaries will not only disappear within the organisation but will also vanish between organisations. All institutions which add value to a customer or supplier, will form a continuum and thereby produce more, with less, in the future.

8. Social equity : The transformation of workplaces in the future will have a positive outcome ,in terms of social equity amongst employees. Employee value addition will be clearly measured by outcomes and not by efforts and time spent. This means that people contributing the same or similar outcomes are likely to get paid similarly. This will become necessary rather than obligatory ,as it will be otherwise very difficult to monitor remotely ,how employee performance can be differentiated.

9. Employment types : Organisations will no longer have all employees on their rolls. It will be a combination of full time employees, part time employees, consultants, gig workforce, contractual, interns and short term employees. While all these categories may exist in most organisations of today, the proportion of full time employees to others may reverse. This means most organisations will try to operate with a basic minimum number of employees on their rolls. The rest of the workforce may consist of, all or most of the above categories of employees.

10. Work-life-balance : The line of demarcation between workplace and home, is going to diminish further. While this will bring in flexibility both for the organisation and the individual employee, it will have its repercussions ,in terms of relationships both at the workplace and at home. Family and marriage as institutions will be under strain and hence psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists , counsellor and coaches will have a bigger role to play in maintaining harmony at the workplace and at home.

If all or any of the above predictions come true, I may be lucky as I will survive as a student of management. However, if all of them bite the dust, then I have to start writing on philosophy in the future.

Being a born optimist, I believe that the changes in workplaces will benefit organisations and individuals, as long we prepare for it and train our employees to embrace the change.

S Ramesh Shankar

7th April 2020

 

 

 

 

One thing which fascinated me always is – “ why don’t we listen actively to our stakeholders ?”. Be it your customer, supplier or employee – it does not matter. I have seen multiple instances where instead of listening to them, we assume what they have in mind and make our own judgements.

This attitude leads to misunderstanding stakeholder issues and thereby leads to wrong diagnosis of the problem and hence inappropriate counter measures at our end. Let me illustrate this point with three real life instances, which I have witnessed myself and understood how deaf we are to our stakeholders.

In the first instance I was working in an automobile company. We were travelling in a bus for an offsite with the sales and marketing team. I noticed that the bus was not our brand and was wondering why customers don’t prefer our brand in that region of our country.

When enquired, our sales guys promptly told me that “Price” was the issue. On the other hand, when I asked the same question to the driver of the bus who was also was its owner, he said that “price”was not an issue but the issue was “non-availability of timely service and spares” and they could not afford their bus to be off-road for long as it could impact their business income.

The second instance is that of a patient and a doctor. The patient had mistakenly taken a tablet with its aluminium foil without realising it. When she complained to the doctors that her tablet had got stuck in her throat, they did not listen to her actively and investigate appropriately.

On the other hand, they examined her throat and told her everything was fine. Even in the end when they did an endoscopy the doctors said it was possibly a denture and not a tablet. Ultimately, a tablet with its aluminium foil was removed from her upper oesophagus. If the doctors had actively listened to the patient, the agony of the patient could have been reduced from one month to a few days.

The third incident is that of an employee. We were in process of selling a business to a buyer. We had a fantastic track record of employee well being and never had a strike in our history in that business. However, on the day when we were to hand over the business to the buyer, the employees went on strike.

I was incharge of that business and never realised that I did not listen to our employees. I had fought hard with the buyer to take over all the employees as part of the sale. The buyer had reluctantly agreed. On the other hand, while our employees were very happy with us, they were are not keen to join the new employer. They wanted to make their own decision to join or not. A clear situation where we did not listen to our employees.

In the all the three cases, if we had listened to our key stakeholder, we may have been better placed and the decisions we may have taken could have been a win win in each situation.

Organisations need to train their employees to listen to all their key stakeholders and not put words in their mouth or assume what they have in mind. If we listen attentively and act objectively, all our decisions will be the best we could make in any situation.

Let us learn to listen to all our stakeholders.

S Ramesh Shankar

15th April 2022