6 May
2003
SriRam/Raju/Kartavya,
CREATING
A SENSE OF URGENCY
Enclosed
please find a copy of this chapter taken from tom peter’s book
THRIVING
ON CHAOS
If
anything, during these 16 years,
- Competition has increased
many - fold & become cut-throat
- The speed with which businesses
must develop & implement, new strategies in order to survive, has gone-up
tremendously.
No
wonder, today’s eco Times reports that employment in organized sector in India
has gone down for the FIFTH consecutive year and software companies have
started trimming manpower costs.
“Hustle
as strategy. We must cut this cycle time and that by 75 to 90 percent (and do
it fast) become orders-of-magnitude more responsive, implement thousand of
individual and team suggestions each day.
Learning to love change
minute-to-minute risk-taking organizational fluidity by everyone. We must break
out of the old molds, and fast.
Monster/Jobs
Ahead/Naukri
- New, flexible competitors : GPRS (Global
Recruiter Webservice of RecruitMine & Resusearch)
- New market creation is the premier
business success strategy
- Customer visits by everyone
- Numerous “small starts” and
instant pilot test
- “Swipe” ideas from anywhere
- Eccentric champions
- Pay for performance plan
- Constant rewards and celebrations
for small accomplishments.
- Encouragement to “be the best” and
“ be unique” on some important performance dimension.
- Everyone evaluated information
availability to everyone.
- “Bottom-up” setting of objectives
and appraisal of performance.
You
must be and act excited.
Being
fascinated by it showing it off to everyone, displaying it everywhere bragging
about it (and its creators). The sound of the guns is wherever the customer is.
Be
Observed (by your people) canceling an important meeting with the boss in order
to rush to a customer’s side. Heightened self-awareness. Urgency and laughter
go hand in glove. Get going try something. We simply must learn bureaucratic,
action delaying foibles (L-8). We must learn to laugh at interesting and useful
mistakes.
Be
the first to get in to work:- I am always in first –last 44 years.
Your
personal display of spunk, of energy and zest for your task and life in general
especially if you are visible to the line, will be the single most important
determinant of the organization’s energy.
A
sure sign of first-class leadership.
Urgency
and Fear:-
Hustle-urgent
testing’s of the untried.
Confidence
means non-paralysis, a willingness to act, and decisively to start new things.
Exhibiting
a willingness to move fast to test strategies, Experiments fast, bravely, and
continually having the guts to cut off the failed experiment before it becomes
an elephantine disaster then plunging ahead with new one post haste.
If
any of the projects, Manhattan-Ego-cyber, fail to produce desired results (1
million resumes in 6 months)-then, we should scuttle them unceremoniously! We
must discard all “historical baggage”. May be we will then, try OPERATION
BLACK-HOLE! On “JAWS” or something else.
Confidence
only comes not when you are rolling the dice on a “big idea” but when you know
you’re working successfully at implanting the basic skills which will turn the
organization into a hotbed of experiments aimed at improving everything
dramatically and creating little new markets at a record clip.
Our
organization’s new sense of urgency.
