June Diary

07.06.2007

Programme on Managerial Effectiveness for the executives of Aban Constructions Limited.
Inspired by Mr. Ajith Pannikkar the GM - HR of the company I created a small wallet sized cards containg the Old Lady/Young Lady Optical illustration on the one side and a set of one liners summarising the day's learning on the other.

08.06.2007

Programme on Executive Time Management for the executives of Gabriel India Limited, Hosur.
The Hosur plant is part of the Rs. 600 crore Gabriel India Ltd, which is itself a part of the Anand Group. This unit manufactures shock absorbers. Their major customers are TVS, Honda and Yamaha.

The plant is situated on seven and a half acres of land. The spic and span production unit is surrounded by a lush green landscaped lawn with a lot of tree cover. In fact the group policy is to create "sixty percent tree cover and forty percent production facility"!

There is a small shady bamboo thicket on the facility with seats in the middle. Executives retire here for "filter coffee" with the GM. The activity is a freewheeling brainstorming exercise where the GM documents suggestions for improvement made by employees. On the whole an enriching experience, hopefully mutual!

12.06.2007 and 13.06.2007

Programme on Budgeting, Costing and ERP Skills for the executives of the Vikrma Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Trivandrum. The two day long programme was quite interactive with participants raising various issues. But there was an alarming drop in attendance during the post-lunch session on the secong day. As I evaluate myself on this, I have to concede that my own rating of myself on a scale of 10 would be 5 for this programme.

This could possibly have been due to my being unable to relate commercial costing concepts to the "spend what you want so long as you've budgeted for it" approach prevalent in most government run institutions like VSSC. Many participants expressed the need for a VSSC based case study, especially on Activity Based Costing.

As VSSC is competing with China and US for international (Satelite Launch Vehicles) SLV contracts, costing becomes relevant. The basic cost unit for an SLV is the cost per kilogramme of the payload (i'e. the satelite).

On both the days I was received and escorted by Mr. Gopakumar of VSSC. He is a fund of knowledge on philosophy and life style related issues. Being a strng advocate of the back-to-basics culture he was very critical of the Pizza and mall culture slowly taking over the entire country and thus destroying the traditional and time tested life style which was conducive to the holistic development of the body, mind and soul.

Every time I visit VSSC, I feel proud that I am handling sessions at the institution where our President the great A P J Abdul Kalaam worked!

Coordinated the Management Study Centre programme on Arbitration on Contractual Disputes. The programme was facilitated by the Nani Palkhivala Arbitration Centre, Chennai. The speakers were four distiguished advocates, viz., Arvind P Datar, N L Rajah, V S Jayakumar and M S Krishnan. There were twenty two participants.

The programme was well received.

24.06.2007

Conducted the Management Study Centre programme on Managerial Effectiveness. I truly apprciated the enthisiastic and energetic participation of Mr. Hosmani from Bangalore. He has already attended my Team building workshop and is very much interested in personality development and the Seven Habits.

28.06.2007

Conducted the sesion on "People Skills" at the Two Day "Wealth Management" programme for the senior executives of State Bank of India.

Flame of the Forest

29.06.2007

Went to "Flame of the Forest" a play inspired by Kalki R Krishnamurthi's epic novel Sivakamiyin Sapatham. Took my children Srija(13) and Srivatsan(8) with me, as I thought they would benefit from the exposure to Kalki's works. As it turned out Srivatsan became ravenously hungry towards the end of the play and started whimpering and groaning!Srija sort of went to sleep around that time! I am sure they imbibed Kalki's great words at a subconscious level!

My first acquaintance with Kalki's works was when I was seven; Sivakamiyin Sapatham was serialzed in Kalki. My Tamil wasn't that good then and my mother used to read the words aloud to my sister Sreekala and me. This was a weekly ritual as we followed the adventures of the young Paranjyothi (Truly the D'artagnan of Tamil Novel genre!) and his mentor Mahendra Pallavar. We recoiled at the evil machinations of the bikshu Naganandhi;We laughed and cried with Sivakami; we were suitably amazedat the elephant bridge used to ford a river; we rejoiced when Mamalla and Paranjyothi finally conquered Vathapi; and finally as Sivakami sublimates here unfulfilled love for Mamalla in the effulgence of Lord Shiva as Nataraja we wept and smiled at the same time. What a story!

Ponniyin Selvan, is definitely more intricate. But Sapatham has stark character portrayals that are indelibly etched in our memory.

That was why I was eager to witness the play which would hopefully bring alive these unforgettable characters. This it did. The playwright cum director Gowri Ramnarayan appears to be clearly aware of the impossibility of telling the entire tale in one hour forty five minutes. So she has deliberately chosen to highlight certain characters and events. I think she has done this correctly. Mahendra Pallavar(Deesh Mariwala) walks tall and majestic. Paranjyothi (V Balakrishnan) is an exact portrayal of the brash young hero who becomes the mature Nayanmar Siruthondar later on. The two Sivakamis junior and senior are exquisite and bring out the pathos and determination of the eponymous heroine. The scenes where both are portrayed together are truly artistic. The young girl giving perfect and faster hand movements while the older woman goes through the motions gracefully yet slowly.

We can say a lot about what was not covered! But what was portrayed was true to the original and representative of the master's work. The divine songs of Appar and Kalki were the true bonus for the evening. Especially Appar's Namarkum Kudiyallom and Kalki's Maraven, maraven.

Including Bharavi's slokha extolling Kanchi as Nagareshu Kanchi is a device that added variety as well as humour to an otherwise serious play.

The grand finale where Sivakami surrender's to her Lord was exquisite. The words Thalai Pattal Nangai Thalaivan Thale! would ring in the ears of true Kalki fans for a long time.

I wish they had had a small interval. There was more narration than acting. This meant that the audience sometimes felt slightly bored listening to a long dialogue narrating important events which could have bben better portrayed on scene. The cast could have been slightly larger instead. While V Balakrishnan is to be congratulated on his thespian skills of combining Paranjyothi and Pulikeshi, this could have been avoided. Poor Mammalla gets a walk in part towards the end! It was Just Them and nobody else!

The language preferred was English. This is indicates an enormous social phenomenon. The generation which read Kalki in the 60s, 70s and 80s was typically upper middle class! This generation is now us! We are either abroad or totally convinced that Hindi is the route to success. So our children are growing up without becoming experts in literary Tamil. For example my I trained my daughter Srija on tamil myself. She can read the Daily Thanthi! She knows a few select Kurals. But can she read Sivakamiyin Sapatham in Tamil? I doubt it. Those of us who are abroad asre struggling to keep our Tamilian roots alive.While our children are experts in Carnatic Music and Bharatha Natyam, they cannot read Tamil fluently! English is the only vehicle for carryng the works of masters like Kalki to the next generation. So English it is friends! Yet hearing Kalki's immortal words in English gives the whole show a School Annual Day English Play feeling.

But let's congratulate the excellent attempt to bring Kalki's wonderful and lovable characters alive.

Chinese Management

Attended the joint meeting of the Indian Society for Training and Development (ISTD) and National Institute of Personnel Management (NIPM) at the Maple Hall, Hotel Savera. The speaker was A Natarajan. He spoke on "Chinese Management."

Having headed the Chinese operations of the TVS group for more than three years he brought with him a lot of insights into Chinese work culture and behavioral patterns. If some one had come to learn about the secrets of Chinese productivity, the event would have been a sad disappointment. But as an opportunity to learn how the chinese psyche works, it was a great learning experience.

A Natarajan had a disarming and self-mocking delivery methodology that kept the narrative flow going strong in spite of its extremely autobiographical content. But on the whole what was shared was one perspective of Chinese society from the point of view of a typical conservative, quality concsious Indiam manufacturing-centric group!

The mild mannered speaker did react a bit nvehemently to the last question (Or was it the lost question!) which insinuated that TVS had gone to China only to take advantage of the cheap and exploitable Chinese labour force. A Natarajan strongly disagreed to this and went on to show that TVS was actually paying more than double in manpower cost to operate in China. The reasoning was strategic. They wanted to be nearer to their European customers, like GM and othrers, most of whom had an IPO (International Purchasing Office) or production facility in China.

Some new information I got from this speech:

• Most of the Chinese are single children! These single children are irresponsible and therefore genearlly attrition is high in China.





• The Chinese rarely lose their temper.





• The Chinese are sticklers on rules and regulations. If it is not told or written in their contract, it doesn't bind them.





• They are not intelligent and are poor in quality consciousness.





• They cannot multiskill. They are good only for routine mass production type of work. Difficult to retrain or redeploy.

A useful evening spent in understanding another country and its culture through the eyes of a man whose been there and done it!

Arbitration Program

A program on "Arbitration on Contratual Disputes" was conducted by the Management Study Centre today at the GRT Grand hotel, T Nagar, Chennai. As the Hon. Academic Co-ordinator for the Centre, I was present at the program. A cross section of about twenty managers from legal as well as other departments attended.

The content facilitation was done by four eminent lawyers from the Nani Palkhivala Arbitration Centre, Chennai.

Arvind P Datar, N L Rajah, V S Jayakumar and M S Krishnan were the resource persons.

The programme was well received and the participants expressed that there awareness about Arbitration issues had been enhanced by the programme. In fact, one of the participants Mr. C Vasanth Kumar, Manager - Legal from Bharti Airtel Limited, put it beautifully like this:

Normally everyone knows how to drive a car. They know the basics like how to hold the steering, clutch operation etc., etc.,. But they really appreciate learning how to control a skidding car on a slippery road in the rain! This is the type of knowledge that the expert faculty panel shared today on Arbitration issues and handling them, which added value to the participants.

Sivaji -- Message or Massage?

Is watching a movie Quadrant IV (That is a waste of timeand hence non value added) or Quadrant II (That is highly value added use of time)? The answer, as you've by now guessed, is "It depends!" Stephen Covey lists Recreation under QII. But the word recreation should be spelt Re-Creation. That is the activity should enable us to renew ourselves and gain new insights into life and living. Or it should prepare us physically and/or emotionally for better performance. Classic examples are Music, Aerobics and such. Now Movies cannot be wriitten off as a time waster as there are movies and movies.

For example two recently released Tamil movies were truly classics. They are "Mozhi" i.e. Language. This movie is a gentle comedy that makes us understand the futility of oral communication and the value of the "language of the Heart." As the song in the movie states, "When you have learnt the music of Nature, what is language? Where the language of the heart is heard, do we need language at all?" This is a great movie.

The other is "Paruthiveeran" a stark and realistic movie that portrays the life and behaviour in a remote village in interior Tamilnadu. The ending is not to my liking and the basic message of the movie and its possible impact on viewers is subject to argument, but the movie as such is a flawless portrayal and each frame is work of art in cinematography. Watching such movies makes us realise the value of having intellectual discernment and taste.

Now, we come to "Sivaji". If you have not seen it, you are unfit to live in Tamilnadu! Everyone is crazy about it. So I had to go through the compulsory agony of watching the movie in Abirami Mall.(The place stinks! My vote goes to the Sathyam Cineplex any day!) That was a truly QIV experience!

How many more times will Shankar rehash the "Lets Bring an End to Corruption" theme? How many more times will the Tamil movie-going public be duped into parting their hard earned money to see and listen to ideas for ending corruption that border on childishness and illogicality. Even to call Shankar's concepts Utopian would be to give that perfectly good word a bad reputation by association with the idiotic.

Okay, here's the grand plan for ending corruption once and for all and flushing out Rs.20,00,000 crores of untaxed money also known as Black Money:

You want to flush out black money? Hire a large hall with an annex "office room". Hire a gang of reformed Goondas and dress them up in ill-fitting suits and short ties to make them respectable.
Call all the auditors, accountants, drivers and cooks of rich people to this "secret" meeting and simply "request" them to spill the beans about the untaxed money belonging to their employers/clients! If they refuse send them into the "office Room" and beat them up. That's it.

How will you invite these people? Hey, this is a Shankar movie starring Super Star Rajinikanth! If you ask these stupid questions, they will ask you to "wait" in the "Office Room"!

And, of course, if somebody dies from electrocution all you have to do is give "CPR" or simply pass an electric current through them to bring them back to life!

Even a mentally retarded chimpanzee could have come up with a better story line. (My apolgies are due to the Chimpanzee, of course!)

What is truly pathetic is that with all this masala mania and pandering to the popular palette, Shankar is regarded as a director of repute. Big budgets should not make big directors. Good story, tight screen play and suspense should be the criteria!

Shankar wants to give a message through his movies. But his themes are so jaded and outworn that this has become a formula in itself! The really serious issues like corruption and reform become farcical and outworn! In fact in this movie the Hero actually decides to go the corruption route first. The choice whether it is Gentleman,Indian, Annian or Sivaji is always between Corruption or Violence. The point is both are wrong! He ultimately ends up providing a predictable high budget massage to the popular psyche and emotions with loud and unnecessary music numbers with underdressed starlets running around with an aged superstar who desperately wants to become fair! There is no intellectual finesse in the movie to warrant the popular acclaim it has received.

If Kids enjoy Sivaji, it is acceptable; If Rajini fans go crazy about it, it is understandable; If the mindless mob appreciates it, it is forgivable; but, when the educated intelligentia says it is a `great movie, there must be something seriously wrong with the discerning capacity of Tamil audiences.

Movies like "Mozhi" and "Paruthiveeran" were a welcome breath of fresh air for Tamil Cinema, and then we get "Sivaji"!

Indo Latin American Relations

18.06.2007
Annual General Meeting of the Indo Latin American Chamber of Commerce
The Chamber of Commerce is the brainchild of Dr. R Ravichandran who has travelled extensively in Latin America especially in the Mercosure and Carricom region. Dr. Ravichandran is a walking encyclopaedia on the region and the methodologies for doing trade with the region.

After the brief business session, which was ably handled by Mr. Swaminathan a highly talented Chartered Accountant another founder of the Chamber, the floor was thrown open and many senior executives from companies with presence in the region shared their examples.

Mr. V. Ganesh Ramnan, Senior Manager- Marketing, Shasun Chemicals and and Drugs Ltd who has travelled in Venezuela shared his experiences.

He felt language is not a barrier for doing business in Latin America. After all we Indians do business across a country with nearly thirty different languages! He felt that after Chinese, Spanish would become a major world Language. Most countries in the LAC region speak spanish. THe exception is Brazil where Portuguese is spoken.

He also said the opinion that there would be collection problems in the LAC region was wrong. Only those who travel in the region realise that if you choose the customers and insist on LC terms or advance, there is no default risk. Even otherwise there is no major default risk.

As in Japan, in LAC also relationship matters. But unlike Japan, in most LAC countries the people are friendly and easy going.

Boats

River boats at the jetty near Dakshineshwar, Hoogly

Boats are safe when they are near the shore, but....

Riverboat on a rainy day on the Hoogly

That is not what they are meant to be doing!

ICAI GMCS

Here is the group photo of the 27th batch of the General Management & Communications Skills Programme conducted for the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India at Chennai by IMS Learning Resources. I am a faculty on this programme.

Participants are budding CAs who have to go through this 15 day intervention to acquire much needed Communication Skills.

Making Every MInute Count!

Did my usual Half-day Executive Time Management Workshop at the fifteen day MDP conducted by L&T ECC at MGM Resorts on ECR. It is a pleasant half-an-hour drive. The executives are extremely interactive and the learning is highly practical and experiential. Here is what I generally share with participants at my Executive Time Management Programmes:

What is Time Management?

If you were to ask me to define Time Management in a single phrase I would give you the phrase, “Making Every Minute Count.” All of us would agree with the statement, “Time is Money.” But, do we treat Time like money? Do we carefully record and allocate our time the way we handle money? Isn’t it a fact that most of the time the answer would be in the negative?

All of us know the metric value of two meters or two liters. But how long is two minutes? Try this experiment. You would need a stopwatch. If you are doing this on your own you need a buzzer to ring at the end of two minutes. Or you can ask someone to time you with the stopwatch. Set the stopwatch for exactly two minutes. Now close your eyes and keep them closed till you think the period of two minutes is over. Now look at the stopwatch. You would be surprised. Most people open their eyes around one and a half minutes. Of course there would be those who open at forty five seconds and others who cross the limit. Irrespective of when you opened your eyes, if you go through the entire duration of two minutes, you will discover that two minutes is a very long time. Go ahead, try this experiment and discover the ocean of time that you have at your disposal.

In fact you can squeeze in a lot of work into two minutes! But this needs an approach that I will now discuss.

Let us look at another metaphor now. You are leaving for Bangalore for a two-day business trip. You have a standard size suitcase that you normally use for this purpose. You have a small mountain of things that need to be packed.

The box is dimensionally limited. A day in our life is a 24X60 box i.e. it has exactly 1440 minutes. But the ‘luggage’ or the things we need to do are numerous. Time Management is a lot like packing this box. How do we go about packing a box?

Doing things for the Right Reason:

You are right! You will first sort the items on the basis of their link with your ultimate objective or reason for going to Bangalore. Time Management, too, begins with the objective or goal.

Eliyahu M. Goldrat, the author of the international best seller, “The Goal” says, “Productivity is the act of bringing us closer to our goal. Every action that brings us closer to our goal is productive. Every action that does not bring us closer to our goals is not productive.”

So we ask these questions before we do something:

How will this activity take me closer to my goal?
Will I move away from my goal if I do not do this activity.

At the end of the day we ask, “How many things did I do today that brought me closer to our goal?

Thus linking our daily schedule to a clear long term vision is important. So Time Management is not only about running faster. It is running faster in the right direction. Goal clarity and Clear Vision can provide the right direction.

Doing Things at the Right Time:

Continuing the metaphor of the box, what goes into the box would be based on its relative importance. Things that are important and/or absolutely necessary for the trip go in first. Relatively unimportant items go in last or not at all.

Similarly we need to rank tasks based on importance and urgency. This is called Prioritization. In fact, if you wanted me to define Time Management in one word I would say that word is “Prioritization”.

Good managers of Time have a clear plan for the day. Activities are scheduled based on their priority. When you do something important but not urgent, you are in the Second Quadrant. Second Quadrant activities focus on Prevention, Building Production Capability, Relationship Building, Recognizing new opportunities and Planning.

Here comes the catch! While planning our day, we sometimes lose focus and start doing things that appear to be urgent but that are not important. These are called Third Quadrant activities, which are urgent but not important. We become Reactive and focus on the short term.

The high pay-off activities are not those that give immediate result. They are long term focused and yield rich dividend later. The secret is to move away from things and time to relationships and results.

When the focus is on the Second Quadrant, there will be a slow disappearance of the First Quadrant activities like Crises in our life. Similarly, we would avoid time wasters which would take us into the Fourth Quadrant. When you have a clear daily plan with you, you are focused on doing the activities that you’ve planned. But, where there is no plan that is linked to long term vision it is quite possible that you will end up reacting to trivial issues. This is why Stephen Covey says, “Don’t just Prioritize your Schedule, Schedule your Priorities”.

Doing Things in the Right Way

I am now going to describe the Quadrant II approach to Time Management.

Identifying Roles

An average person has to perform on various roles in his daily life. Examples are practicing Chartered Accountant, Manager, Team Leader, spouse, child, parent, Rotarian, musician and so on. An effective person performs exceedingly well in all these roles. Therefore, it is necessary to have clear Goals for each role. These goals can pertain to the next one week.

Scheduling
Ideally you should do your weekly planning on Sunday. Identify the Important things you need to do in the coming week. Put these activities in first! This is the essence of the Third Habit, “Put First Things First”.

If you set a goal to become physically fit through exercise, you may want to set aside some time for this or possibly every day during that week, to accomplish that goal. When you do weekly planning, it is possible to fit everything in. Daily planning would only shuffle the urgent work around and we end up postponing the important.

Daily Review
Within the broad framework of the weekly plan, there is a daily review or “adapting.” Man proposes but God may dispose. So, Daily Planning becomes more a function of daily adapting, of prioritizing activities and responding to unanticipated events, relationships, and experiences in a meaningful way.

All of us have heard the popular adage, “If you want to get something done fast, ask someone who is busy to do it!” This is true of all Seven Habits Practitioners. The Quadrant II focus gives the flexibility to include an important activity in our daily schedule and as it were, take it in your stride.

Let me quote Stephen R. Covey on the efficacy of Quadrant II Time Management,

“Having experienced the power of principle-centered Quadrant II organizing in my own life and having seen it transform the lives of hundreds of other people, I am persuaded it makes a difference—a quantum positive difference. And the more completely weekly goals are tied into a wider framework of correct principles and into a personal mission statement, the greater the increase in effectiveness will be.”

When you have expectations about people and things, you become frustrated that there is no time to achieve everything. Frustration is a function of our expectations. When we let go of expectations and work with a set of higher values and long term goals, we can subordinate our schedule to those values with integrity. You can adapt; you can be flexible. You don’t feel guilty when you don’t meet your schedule or when you have to change it.

At the same time, we should have the courage and conviction in our goals to say “No!” gently and firmly when we are asked to do something which has no link with our value system or goals.

Swamiye Saranam Ayappa

I went on a pilgrimmage to Sabari Malai with my son Srivatsan. The temple is opened for one day to commemorate the Installation Day i.e. the day on which the idol of Ayappan was first installed. It is usually somewhat less crowded durfing this day.

There are certain things in life that can be explained. There are other things that need to be experienced. The Yathra or Pilgrimmage to Sabhari Malai is an experiential process.

It cannot be explained except to say that the divine experience begins with wearing the sacred maala which is made of Tulasi beads. The experience of oneness with the divine continues during the arduous climb up Neeli Malai and Appachi Medu. It is only as we climb and realize that our body has to be carried only by us that we feel its useless weight. We also realize, in flashes of inspiration, and sorrow the futility of worldly association. We may realise that we are alone and only GOD can help us. This saranagadhi bhaava or posture of surrender is symbolically expressed in the Sarana Gosham, "Swamiye Saranam! Ayyappa Saranam!" which rings all over the steep mountainside.

And finally as I reach the Sabhari Peedam, exhausted and physically weak, the mind whispers, "This is enough. This is the last time. No more next time!" But lo and behold as I approach the Sabhari Peedam once again after Dharshan I pause, look back and sincerely pray," Ayyappa! Let me come back one more time!" (This too is a symbolic representation of the inexplicable nature of the desire of the Jeevathma for the Paramaathma (OM)).

The Jeeva is flesh, weak and unable to control anything. Through surrender it realises its oneness with the Lord and its own insignificance in that magnificience. This is the truth that is boldly emblazoned on the gopuram of the sannidhanam: "Tattvamasi" meaning "That Thou Art." As the Jeeva crosses the 18 steps which are symbols of eighteen qualities that blind and bind the poor jeeva, it glimpses the lord in the Yogic position, the right hand showing Chin mudra.

All this in a flash of realisation. Gone immediately to be replaced by mundane prayers for personal wealth, health, power etc.,

As I make the pilgrimmage year after year I hope to become purified and made subtle in he same way that flour becomes finer and finer when passed through a sieve.

As we were walking down to Pamaba someone asked me why they do not keep the temple open always. I think the reason is that Ayyappa is in a yogic meditation. He does not want to be disturbed. So he requested Panthala Raja to create a place where he could meditate in peace. But during the Mandala Pooja and Makara Jyothi period he is willing to see us. At other times he would not like to be disturbed. Would you like people to pester you when you want to be alone? Well, he needs to be alone.

There is so much symbolism surrounding the Sabhari Malai Yathra. No ritual is meaningless or barbarian. One who knows the symbolism grows. Others stay wherever they are. But all have tasted the great joy that is Divine Experience.

Every time I visit Sabhari Malai, I sharpen the saw on the Spiritual dimension and rediscover my own Principle Centre from which I cannot Err.