The Time Mystery

The lines such as time and tide wait for none and keeping a track of time have always been taught to every child including me. The importance of the clock ticking away and each task to be completed within a stipulated time is given a lot of importance

When a child goes to play school he is taught how to solve a puzzle or

assemble a toy and the one who does it fastest is acknowledged. In school, students race against time to complete a test in three hours and the same follows in every competition or rather throughout life.

Looking at how we spend our lives chasing time and trying to fit into

it’s frame it feels like we’ve turned into machines that have a timer set and would starting beeping ‘failure’ as and when the last second ticks. All over the world people are just running after completing the task and meeting targets. When I looked around I saw a similar story; students slogging on the last night before the exam, employees’ burning the night oil before a presentation at work, contractors working to meet deadlines for construction projects and so on.

So how do we break the deadlock from time and stop functioning like a mere machine. People have found out the one and only answer to the question via different sources and life experiences. I found mine through an incident too.

Driving around the city I stopped at a red light and saw the timer counting down from 90 to 1 waiting for the light to turn green and I thought that there is no point trying to complete something just because it has to be done within the given time. To break the deadlock one needs to take up the job or task as his passion because the best things in life happen when one is lost in what he is doing.

So stop looking at the clock ticking and work towards what you love doing.

Do what you love doing and the clock will stand by you and say,

“Sir you still have a lot of time to spare how would you like to use me.”

Being Pulled Down

What I’m writing about is something that everyone has experienced sometime or the other in their lives. When you start doing well, you feel good, start enjoying life and think that everything is under control. You start feeling that time is on your side and you will make it big in life. It’s like walking on lush green grass with a cool breeze blowing away your troubles.

As soon as you reach such a tranquil phase people around you start feeling jealous and leave no stone unturned to ‘pull you down’. The sole reason is competition and the opportunities available are far less than the millions running in the ‘rat race’. Due to the immense competition people generally are not able to digest the fact that someone is doing better than him. The principle of relativity comes into place here and I quote “An individual’s success is another’s failure”.

Everywhere people talk about how dejected an individual gets on failing and what he goes through, how he should take it in his stride and consider the failure to be a pillar of success. But nowhere does anyone talk about the other side of the story.

The individual who fails tries his level best to bring the other down by resorting to all kind of means. No matter how much an individual says that I’m happy to know that you are doing so well or happy to know about your achievements very few actually mean it. They start thinking as to why him or her and why not me.

Then comes the phase where the person who’s failed indulges in speaking ill about the one who’s succeeded and spreads rubbish about him because he himself cannot take it. In today’s world people say that what nonsense others talk about you shouldn’t really matter to you but when people do speak rubbish you tend to lose out on the tranquil phase of mind and get lost in it. How much ever you say that all this does not affect me it still does. It may not completely bring you down but does hinder your free thought process and diminishes your confidence a lot.

With such a loss in your confidence level it becomes very difficult for one to concentrate in whatever he’s doing and hence starts messing up his work, his personal and social life too. With something like this happening an individual completely loses it, feels dejected and thinks that even after doing well he is not accepted among his peers and society.

The only way to get out of this is to keep doing what you love doing and not worry about the others, if you’re doing something that like doing and succeed then the sense of accomplishment of the task is more than enough to keep you going. Another important aspect is to stick to what you believe in and follow it religiously. Following this would surely help in climbing the stairs back up to the tranquil phase and when people see the means they’ve adopted to pull you down have failed they will stop and eventually will have to come and pat your back because now you’ve not just won the battle but have won the war too.

                  Perceive the Perception

 Every individual becomes what he is, due to what he has gone through in his life. His past incidents, hardships, successes, triumphs and a lot more play a vital role in shaping up his thoughts and his attitude towards a certain scenario he’s up against.

This begins right from childhood. For example Adolf Hitler had a very sad childhood where both his parents died early and he lived the life of an orphan. Thus the way he was treated in his childhood affected the way he turned out to be as an adult.

Now, we come to the concept of a value system or an ethic which gets incubated into an individual. The various decisions he takes is by virtue of his value system and ethics developed over the years. The general steps to decision making are to perceive the particular scenario, drawing a parallel with the thinking and finally coming up with a solution.

Understanding the above mentioned thought and applying it in the present day world is vital for a manager. A manager who’s getting the work done through his employee should be in a position to perceive what his employee has perceived and thus should be empathetic towards him. Various factors influence decision making and are generally clubbed as internal and external factors. The internal factors cater to the individual’s attitude, behavior and competence while the external factors are not in his hands.

Let’s take an example where the sales of a product is low in a particular area and the manager fires the particular salesman. The question here lies is “Was the decision correct”?                                 

The low sales of the product in the particular area could be due to various factors other than the salesman’s communication skills and competence. The other factors could be a glitch in the logistics, seasonal demand, outdated technology, competition, low quality, low supply and many others.

Thus perceiving the perception is an important quality a manager should have for taking effective decisions and thus benefiting the organization on the whole.

Start Up Mantra

Start up… the oxford dictionary defines it as the action of setting something in motion.

The other way of defining it is:

of or pertaining to the beginning of a new project or venture, especially to an investment made to initiate such a project,as in a commercial or industrial enterprise

The above two definitions give us a picture of what a start up is……..but a start up is something much more than just the two definitions.

According to me a startup can be defined as a medium of providing goods and services to the masses by thorough examination and analysis of the needs of the society

.

All over the world people dream of having a splendid business in order to mint money. A startup is basically a seed that blossoms into that huge tree that will eventually bear fruit.

Starting up in your own country is easier than in a foreign country. This is because a person is well versed and knows the thinking of the people in his society and community.

A lot of factors need to be considered before starting up like purchasing power of the people, how you would beat your competitor, whether your product will sell, how would you market your product and how would you generate funds and many more.

All the above factors you can easily read and analyze by using the Google search engine. Here I would like to talk about the most important factor which is “Customer Satisfaction.” If your customer or end user is satisfied with your product and services that you deliver you will surely make it big.

 Lets us answer a few simple questions…

Would you like it if your product is not delivered on time?

Would you like it if your cab driver does not know the route?

Would you like it if there is no network coverage on your cell phone?

I’m sure the answer to the above questions is a big NO...and thus customer satisfaction is the most important for any start up. Following the “Customer is KING” phrase is very vital as your total output depends upon them.

One more aspect on which every business or start up should capitalize is ‘human nature’. No matter how different or diverse people are all over the world but when it comes to human nature everyone rides the same ferry across. It’s a very simple funda. For example, “people are attracted to certain colour combinations” which can be used in various products to enhance its sale.

‘‘THE JUGAAD FEATURE’’

Indian Innovation Technique

               

Indian innovators are one step ahead when it comes to coming up with new ideas and solutions to problems. The main reason being our ability to come up with something new even after taking more number of constraints into account or in other words using less number of resources.

From our childhood there is one word we have heard called ‘ jugaad’.People all over the world use various algorithms and techniques to come up with various solutions for their problems but are unaware of the fact that sometimes using ’jugaad’ can give a better solution to the problem. Tons of money is roped in to set up research and development labs to come up with a viable solution. But here in India a very simple solution is generally obtained by brainstorming and using the Indian innovation technique.

You must be all wondering what ‘jugaad’ actually means. So here it is, jugaad literally means an improvised arrangement or work around, which has to be used due to lack of resources. The lack of resource is considered as a constraint.

Jugaad is increasingly being recognized all over the world as an acceptable form of frugal engineering pioneered in India. Companies in India are adopting Jugaad as a practice to reduce R & D and development costs. It is now an acceptable management technique of Indian origin. It also applies to any kind of creative and ‘out of the box thinking’ which maximizes resources for a company and its stakeholders.

Now lets analyze as to why ‘jugaad’ is now taken as an acceptable form all over the world by drawing an analogy with Operations Research.

Operations Research can be defined as employing techniques from other mathematical sciences — such as mathematical modeling, statistical analysis and mathematical optimization to arrive at optimal or near-optimal solutions to complex decision-making problems. The basic funda applicable here is:

Maximize or minimize a function f(x)

Subject to:

Constraint x1

Constraint x2

…….

…

Constraint xN..

The above technique provides us with a feasible region and a few solutions and maybe we can generate an optimal solution to the problem.

Now what ‘jugaad’ feature does is that it changes the above expression as follows:

Maximize or minimize a function f(x)

Subject to:

Constraint x1

Constraint x2

……

…

Constraint xM

Where M>N….

So what actually happens here is that the feasible region gets reduced i.e. we get a smaller area due to the increase in the constraints and hence reaching the optimal solution becomes easier.

Now the question here lies is that which is the constraint that generally adds on to give us a better solution?

The constraint that generally adds on is ‘time’ as ‘jugaad’ is mostly done when time is scarce.

Most multinational companies say that an R & D center is a must for the growth of the company and they are right to a certain extent. But a few better ideas and innovations can come up even without such world class facilities; all that is needed is to work with more number of constraints which means using limited resources and hence using ‘jugaad’.