Lokking Back before Looking Forward II

I signed off last time with a note on what I had learnt and this month I will dwell on what I learnt thereafter.

The next phase was consolidation of my business activities, and on a personal level, raising of a family. There were up and downs, but we (my wife and I) consolidated to such an extent that I could get away from the running of a business and divert my attention to consultation. The reason I diverted to consultation was a quest to learn new things and apply them. The scope for such activities was limited in the trading and the service business.

I picked on telecom management as a field for consultation as in 1991 telecom had been opened for private investment, and a lot of value added services were available in the market all of a sudden. Being throttled for years together, users were exposed to a plethora of services in telecommunications. However users were not disposed to make use of such services as they were just thrilled with the opening of various services, and proper management was not on their minds. Due to competition prices were dropping, and that was sufficient for them.

Simultaneously, I was also attracted towards knowledge management, but I soon realized that it was old wine in a new bottle. Even today I hold the same view. Who has created this word knowledge base or BoK (Body of Knowledge) ?. It’s been created by IT software vendors. Can anyone explain in an objective manner, how different it is from the databases of yesteryear? In my opinion it is nothing but a database and information, and the appropriate word could be a rich database as users may not have to filter or extrapolate from basic data. No doubt IT has helped in making it possible entirely. The earlier technologies were simply not capable of doing so. This is nothing but information management, but calling it knowledge… sorry, no way, in my opinion.

As I moved on I realized that IT is grossly underutilized in a majority of organizations, and I therefore added training to my consultation area. I started with MS Office as by 2000 most organizations had braced themselves with MS Office as a tool to handle word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Microsoft (and its followers) has packed numerous features, but there was no one who could explain the practical aspect of the same, and that’s when I first realized that productivity matters in offices too.

While looking at ways to improve productivity I studied Lean or TPS about 4 years ago, and wrote my first newsletter on “Lean Office” in January 2006. My efforts to popularize this concept and improve productivity in offices and the service sector as this has no “traditional” production cycles, have met with lukewarm response from industry. I put forward my analysis in later newsletters. Due to recessionary trends, from August 2008, my training activities were almost nil, consultation zero and with advancing age and me entering the Senior citizen bracket, I decided to slow down.
I am satisfied with what I have achieved and look forward to the next 10 years. I will talk about it next blogspot.

Looking Back and planning ahead on this Diwali festival

With the festival of lights is here I wish you happy days ahead, and will dwell upon looking back as I completed 40 years of my professional life about 2 month ago. It’s a long period for anybody, and I decided to take stock of it and share my views as well as some social activities I plan to carry out in next few years.

I passed out from college, finally, in June 1968, and after getting through the interview process with a few companies and started working as a trainee from 16^th August, 1968. My days of freedom - of getting up late, bunking lectures and going for a movie as I wished - were over one day after the 22^nd Indian Independence day - but I was happy. I had been longing to enter the professional world, which is what I did. On 16^th August, 1969 I was confirmed as an employee.

I will dwell on three things: first, what I learnt, second, what I achieved, and third, what I can contribute in the next 10 years, which would probably be the last phase of my active professional life. I will divide these forty years into 3 phases of which the first phase would be of ten years, the next phase of 20 years and the last of 10 years. Since this covers 3 parts in my life I am also spacing this newsletter in 3 parts. In this newsletter I will cover what I learnt.

The first phase was the learning phase. I joined as a trainee engineer, learnt what was not taught at all in college, learnt different aspects of working, that is, how people react, hate work, what is meant by excellence in a job and office politics, good bosses, bad bosses, colleagues who will protect you and those who will dump you and so on. I am sure everyone goes through such phases. Since I had decided to start my business in early college days, I plunged into it with 6 years of experience, and since I do not come from a family background having a business, everything had to be learnt from scratch.

By the end of the first 10 years I was firmly established in the business of office electronic equipment. I had not graduated in this field, but I could establish myself because I had learnt what commitment meant. I had followed what was described by somebody as commitment:

"Commitment" is not a game for bystanders or

other witnesses of events, who can only report on what's happening....

Rather it's for those who can only define events and make things happen!

I have never forgotten this, and at times suffered financially, but in the long run, it has paid off. In my opinion, the present debacle in the world financial market is because of a lack of such commitment in the entire supply chain.

I sign off now with my best wishes for a Happy Diwali to you, your family and your organization. The business scenario is now more encouraging than last year, and let’s hope this festival of lights brings better business in the New Year as per Indian tradition.

With best wishes

Satish