Management and Handling Ambiguity

Before I joined ISB, I received feedback from my Manager (s) that I need to improve my ability to handle ambiguity. They even said that as you go up there will be more and more ambiguity and that one has to learn to handle it.

I could understand that ambiguity increases as you go up, I never really understood how they were handling ambiguity and how their actions were improving the situation. Everytime a unexplainable decision was taken, they blamed "Management."


It is very interesting to note that this is the same thing I observed even in the old economy firm that I first worked with. Everything was blamed on the elusive and invisible "Management." At that point I was in the junior cadre and thought that the senior managers formed the Management and used to get little surprised when the senior managers themselves blamed "Management." But then when I saw the CXO level also blame the "Management" I couldn't stop myself from wondering where/who the hell is this "Management." But Mr. Ramalinga Raju of Satyam, by taking complete blame on himself has kind of answered my question that the "Management" lies at the top and now where else.

How foolish does he expect the shareholders by stating that he and he alone was responsible for all the non-sense. He may have given the okay for all the decisions but then every other top manager must have known what was happening and had all the opportunities to raise alarm. To this a classmate of mine said that who knows if someone has raised an alarm and he was stopped. But then raising alarm is to get attention and unless you get enough attention and thereby some action, you shouldn't stop.

May be this is a reflection of our behavior. As someone said, we are ready to fire anything as long as it is over someone else's shoulder; we will never take responsibility and I think this explains why the "Management" Devil never dies - it doesn't matter if it is old economy or new economy. We have so much pressure to comply with the boss that we are afraid to talk against the decisions that may harm the company forget about taking decisions.

In my view handling ambiguity is not sitting there and waiting for ambiguity to get cleared; instead everyone in the management has to work to reduce ambiguity at each level and give decisive direction to lower levels. I had seen that very few managers actually accept ambiguity and talk about it lest try to reduce it. In fact their behavior adds to the ambiguity.

What I would like to say is that every employee at every level is part of Management and that they have take responsibility to the possible level and reduce ambiguity in company's business and take decisive action towards performing company's business. This is what would benefit all the stakeholders not the shareholders who just give the money. Only then can we expect to rise against the tide not just along with it.

It is a day of great importance to India and to all the so-called Corporate Managers and Leaders. When I read Mr. Raju's letter, it appeared to me like a suicide note acquitting everyone else from any responsibility.

I must share this small discussion I had with my colleague who is active in the stock market the day-before-yesterday about Satyam. He was saying that since the company had cash, he would buy the stock if it falls to Rs.100/- as at that price it would be lucrative for other companies to takeover; my comment was that one cannot be sure how the money would be used and that may be the reason no one is yet making a serious effort to takeover and now that whole cash has vanished in to the past. We can only wait and watch what happens to MAYTAS (reverse of SATYAM)

A Very Happy New Year

I always wondered why do we celebrate a New Year. Strongest association I have with a new year is that I would keep wrongly writing the year part of the date for sometime. Apart from this the zillion number of times I would repeat wish you happy new year. It feels nice that we have some reason to gift a wish and smile to each other as we tend to make good mornings formal and serious very quickly even at any place. In the bigger scheme of things I don't know how a year matters but as human beings we tend to make any kind of measure seriously and a year seems to be an important one.

Last year at ISB, I wasn't very happy with my performance, despite my diversity, dean's list, success in the most-participated-at-ISB-competition, I wasn't shortlisted by any of the consulting companies but then I have learnt my lesson in life that your plan and God's plan need not be the same and if your plan fails, God's plan will prevail - nice and easy way to excuse oneself of any sort of failure. After all human beings are supposed to be thinkers to make sense (awkward phrase).

2009 promises to be a year of different kind. Mankind screwed itself in a big way and created a catastrophe of a different kind. Will the collective intelligence succeed in coming up a with a text book solution and be able to implement it as meticulously; would be noble-prize or other-great-prize winning intellectuals be able to predict how the future would like; would be growth again or will it be sustainability or will it be the Green agenda. Lots of questions but no answers, in fact I don't think even the most powerful man can predict what route humanity is going to take in 2009.

We can take respite in one thing atleast. 2009 cannot be as bad as we are expecting it to be. Take my own case, my firm has been awarded the first ever license to build and operate a transmission line on the first day of the year and the project is going to take off even while three other project bids are under process. For me it's going to be year completely different from 2008. 2008 despite bringing me the most success in terms of money and fame has been a disappointing one from learning perspective but 2009 is already promising.

My reading has picked up and I'm reading a wide variety of books. I am reading Snowball, Stories by Sudha Murthy, some nice Telugu literature, apart from all the random readings. I have just started Snowball and I don't know why but I see lots of similarities between this book and Godfather (by Mario Puzo). Let's see how I would feel as I move further.

2009 is a year of challenge - it's going to test each and everyone of us on how we are going to take it up and handle it. Just keep the phrase "This too shall pass" in mind if you ever get bogged down

Handling difficult times - 2

Though I am continuing the series, I have decided not to force myself to maintain any continuity, which means you can expect these posts to be random and readers will have to make the connection.

One very important skill necessary to handle difficult times is planning. We are experts in corporate planning and very easily make assumptions about different variables but when it comes to planning in personal life, we act in a completely different way.

We don't want to take any risk in personal life and can only visualize a straight path almost all the time. There is no contingency planning, which means even a small unforeseen event can throw us into a negative spiral. Instead if we assess the bottom of a downfall (even the stock market can't go negative) and then be prepared for it, I think the shock will be minimal and we can fight the negative spiral.

Like in corporate planning, we need to make assumptions in our personal life and should weight the probability of different outcomes and come up with the expected outcome. If we are either too optimistic or too pessimistic, then we are in for some kind of trouble.

That's all for today. Meanwhile I am back in Delhi after a whirlwind sleepless four day trip to Hyderabad. I have done some very interesting things during this trip apart from meeting my classmates at Solstice 2008 that included giving a treat to my friends by getting them all together for the first time.

Solstice 2008

My trip to ISB for Solstice has been in doldrums till yesterday but all of a sudden I have decided to go.

This would be a great opportunity to meet with all my classmates,few current batch students and few alums. I will also be meeting my friends, those who know me from my school days.

I am planning to visit my native place and my grandfather. I shall continue the "Handling Difficult Times" series once I am back from this trip.

Handling difficult times - 1

It was not the best of times when I was looking out for a job for the first time in 1994. I was searching for a technical job and all the job openings were in sales. I never thought twice as my objective was simple - start earning before the 100 bucks I got from my grandfather exhausted. I took up a Jr. Sales Officer job at a start up that was to publish a telugu socio-political magazine by name "Sravanthi." I had no chance to think about "how my job was related to what I studied" neither did I mull over "what's in that job that I enjoy." I just needed to get started and I did. From then my career took so many twists and turns, some driven by me and some driven by situations, in fact I never thought about going back to college till 2006 (which is 11 years after I started working).

These surely are difficult times and it is more probable that even at the top B-schools, one may not be in a position to choose but one would be in a situation to be chosen by someone. However there is no need to despair, one would not be in a position to influence the situation at all times; you will have to accept the fact and the situation and act accordingly.

This is not the end of this post, I am going to discuss how I handled difficult times and hope that the readers would benefit from this.

In thick of things

Only reason for my inactivity is that I am right now in thick of things.
I have been doing donkey stuff, which does have certain value addition but also gives a feeling that you have earned your salary for the day. When I began 5 months ago, I wondered whether there would be any serious activity in the Power Transmission sector but suddenly things started rolling when every thing else seems to be slowing. This clearly shows how decoupled I'm from the main stream business, it's seriously contra-scenario here.


However the decoupling is only till the point where white paper is involved, as soon as the time comes for the other paper (Indian currency is in different colors, so can't say greenback)things are gonna change. But you have to be optimistic till the time you actually face the situation, you can be prepared for the worst though.

Solstice this year will be held on 19th and 20th Nov and I am looking forward to meeting all my classmates again. While 6 months is not a long period at work, most people would have overcome the starting troubles. I look forward to listening whether the paid holiday syndrome is over or is it still on.

Meanwhile it would be interesting to see how immune B-school admissions are from recession.

The current financial melt down is going to provide a new episode for "Commanding Heights." Uncertainty rules

Last couple of weeks

I got to see how Delhi celebrates Diwali this time and I can say that it is a much bigger festival here than in South. Dasera is celebrated much better in South. Bursting of crackers started at around 8pm and went on till midnight.

I had four days of holidays for Diwali and despite all the planning, I managed to do only one thing - watch a silly movie titled Fashion. It was a welcome break however. Sometimes you just want to lie down and spend time lazily, it is a luxury nowadays considering that everyone seems to be busy and wants others to be busy too. In fact people get surprised when I say that I am able to restrict my office time between 9:30 to 5:30 except on few odd days. At the beginning of my career, I was in a similar situation and I was able to devote considerable time for my hobbies. I am able to do this again.

Another observation I made is that though some things such as, providing good service to customers are quite obvious as a customer but most service providers either forget it or don't get it right. I have experienced both Pizza Hut and Dominos service and I can clearly say that Pizza Hut is much better and will surely do well. Similarly I saw Meru Cabs doing much better than Easy Cabs.

After the B-school competition season, it is time for cv reviews. I have been getting lots of requests and trying my best to give whatever inputs I can. Those with interesting past-experience are the ones who find this process most difficult. Sometimes you feel why can't they look at me, talk to me and then give me the job. After all I am taking a bigger risk than the company in joining them - if I fail, my career will be ruined but the company can easily replace me, and if I do well both parties will benefit. However firms are more worried about many other non-sense parameters and the cost of observing your performance that they would never do this. All the talk of diversity, opportunity, risk taking etc by companies is nothing short of nonsense as they go back to their tradition of recruiting people who fit into a set mold.

Change is easy talk but difficult to implement. I have been reading a lot of books but a simple auto-biography titled "A Celebration of Youth" by Mr. Anand Mohan Lal has been the most interesting readings of all. There was no way I would have even stumbled upon this book had it not been sent to me by a friend of mine from Hyderabad.

Apart from the admission queries, cv reviews, request for a xxx report spam mails, there have been regular "I am getting married - invites" have been regular in my mail box. My Diwali greetings spam also got responses from old colleagues and friends, which was possible due to nice feature in gmail.

Weather in Delhi is at its best now. That's all for now.