Thunder Thirtees – Winning Team

 

This snap is from our early days hence some names are missing….

Left to Right: Ashish, Rashid, Dr.Bose, Me, Sushant, Harmeet, Yogi, Manish, Rajiv, Suresh, Naveen, Amit

 

~~Rohit~

Thunder Thirtees – First Match of Season

This snap was taken after the first match of our season last year

 

(Left to Right…Top to Bottom)

Top Row : Administrators 2nd Row: Nitesh, Captain of loosing Delta Energy team with a V Sign

3rd Row Onwards: Naveen, Harmeet, Dr.Bose, Me, Sushant, Rajiv, Rashid, Suresh, Manish, Yogi, Ashish

 

Managing Productivity – Not too distant future…

Budgets, Scorecards, Strategy Plans….

For the nth time I came across a client yesterday who had done some very interesting and innovative thinking in their Next 3 Year Strategy/Business Plan. They have also been using Balanced Scorecards (BSC) for some time now. To top it all they have a very good annual budgeting exercise.

 

Painful as it is, however all three of these documents: Business Plan, BSC, Budgets: are set of three different and independent documents.

 

Budget is a combination of inside out (mark up over last year) and outside in (market potential assessment), BSC is arrived at through now almost famous, role holders workshop if you please, and business plan is 300 page document about new strategies and new plans for the next 3 years. There is absolutely no correlation of new strategies on budget…If one was to wonder if the budget would look any different had the business plan not been there…the answer is NO. Would the BSC look any different…NO.

 

Instead of having these as integrated single document, they continue to be fragmented documents. When infact one easy way out is to use BSC as the tool for capturing business plan (hence avoiding 2 separate documents atleast), and then converting the same BSC into a budget, with a line item in budget for every BSC item hopefully. I hardly come across organizations which have a separate line item for key strategies…I often wonder if budget progress is what they are likely to look at million times in a year, when and how they monitor progress on strategic interventions.

 

Problem in my view lies in obsession with templates and hence failing to notice that basis your requirements templates keep changing. Strategies are supposed to define the template and not vice versa ….there is no framework that suggests that line items in budgets remain same even after 20 years, when infact strategies have changed completely. The other large problem is with the failure to travel the last mile in any intervention….the mile that ensures ground preparation for any intention and intervention. Unless on ground simple things like MIS format, aligning review mechanisms to strategy etc is done, pace of progress would never be controllable. Number of strategies hitting the mark and missing the mark would be subject to luck instead of actions.

 

Do you also come across similar situation often..??

 

~~Rohit~~

Two CEO’s Better Than One

Indian technology giant Wipro has replaced former CEO Vivek Paul, who left in 2005, with two joint CEOs recently: Girish Paranjpe and Suresh Waswani.

 

This is a more than ever prevalent phenomenon. I see more and more companies which are adopting this route. There are surely some merits and advantages of this approach.

 

Let’s think about some advantages of this system over the more traditional system where few people ran for the post and only one made it:

 

-          In usual format, very often the top contender who does not make it, leaves the company (GE has several such instances every time they appointed global CEO). Joint CEO’s ensures retention.

-          How often do you find that the CEO is either strong in market place (customer oriented, sales kind of guy) or work place (people oriented guy). You don’t get the right mix of both easily. Joint CEO gets you that.

-          It provides for natural in-built succession planning as even if one leaves, you have the other completely on the job.

-          With the power of two to tango, persistence ability in implementation of strategy becomes much improved

 

Let’s look at the other side now in terms of disadvantages of this system:

 

-          In order to maintain balance of power almost every process in the Company would be divided amongst the two guys

-          Consensus driven strategy would almost always over ride the best strategy

-          Your people start getting dividing into camps on both side

-          Nothing is spontaneous and honest. Almost everything is pre-thought pre-planned to ensure friction.

 

I am sure there are several other benefits and disadvantages of this system. However I am of a firm believer that if strategy itself is not strong and powerful, no internal mechanism can deliver great results. I personally feel there is net loss to the company in long run in this system as everything gets convoluted in order to ensure consensus between the Joint CEO’s.

 

What are your thoughts on Joint CEO’s as a concept??

 

~~Rohit~~