Fluency

This happened about ten years ago. The scene is the senior executive committee meeting of a large Multinational Company. Those assembled are the select group who are being groomed for taking up top management positions. The discussion is on future trends in the FMCG sector in developing countries. Many ideas are being thrown up and seriously discussed, including those on new products and innovative packaging.

Rajeev mehra, (fictional name) is somewhat silent. A great performer on the job, he believes that actions speak louder than words. His last quarter sales figures are stupendous. Suddenly, this 38 year old Engineer and MBA from reputed B School has a flash of inspiration. He realizes that developing countries like India and Pakistan have a huge rural segment who are not yet aware of toothpaste and soap. Hitherto all FMCG companies including his own had concentrated on urban markets which were essentially saturated. Moreover brand loyalties were high among urban customers and weaning t hem away from competitors was simply impossible or needed high adspend and publicity budgets. So…attack the rural customer and expand the pie. A great idea? But Rajeev suddenly had second thoughts, then third thoughts and finally decided that the idea was too silly to be mentioned to this elite group of seasoned Managers. So he kept quiet.

Hardly, half an hour later, Sunil Vohra (fictional name), another younger manager who was in the shortlist for a promotion along with Rajeev stood up and propounded the Rural Market penetration theory! This was received with acclamation and applause. Sunil was asked to give a presentation in the afternoon and then made the Team Leader of a task force for implementing the concept. He finally moved on to become VP.

Fluency is the ability to convert ideas and thoughts from the conceptual to the verbal dimension. People who have this ability succeed simply because they speak up!

Let me end this post with a quote from an essay titled Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) a great and profound thinker and writer:

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within…Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humoured inflexibility…Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”