Anding & Butting

Earth is a big planet. And it has water. And it has vegetation. And it has fish. And it has humans. And it has volcanoes. And it has storms. And... And...

But it isn't the universe.

I read. And I write. And I workout. And I watch movies. And I listen to music. And I play drums. And I FB. And I want...

But there are only 24 hours. But I have only so much money.

There's no end to Anding. But there's always a significant But. For good, may be for bad. And it is that significant But that will force choices. And those choices and living with those choices will make or break us. Make or break brands. Make or break great stories.

Where's your Butt?

Who takes the decisions?

You learn by taking decisions.

You learn by solving problems.

On most occasions, decisions solve problems.

Who takes the decisions? Who is learning?

How we jump?

This one has stuck to me for a few days now. So makes sense sharing. Besides, the fact that I'm struggling to get a grip here definitely makes this stint nothing less than an adventure :). I made a choice.

Hugh Macleod shares his nuggets here.

Raw Zone

What do I call a thing like moving from Mumbai to Bhilwara? Or, from Communications to Hospital Management? Just trying to articulate this move. Stepping outside the comfort zone seems like a good description. Or flip it and shorten it, and capture the essence of a place like Bhilwara (as seen from the eyes of a person who has experienced Mumbai). And I call it Raw Zone.

Raw Zone = Out of/Outside Comfort Zone, which leads me to ask what is it that we call a Comfort Zone?

Wikipedia says:
The comfort zone refers to the set of environments and behaviours with which somebody is comfortable, without creating a sense of risk. A comfort zone is a type of mental conditioning that causes a person to create and operate mental boundaries. Such boundaries create an unfounded sense of security. Like inertia, a person who has established a comfort zone in a particular axis of his or her life, will tend to stay within that zone without stepping outside of it.

Alasdair A.K. White, a British Management Theorist, has to say something about comfort zone and performance management. He and John Fairhurst formulated the White-Fairhurst Performance Hypothesis which states that “all performance will initially trend towards a steady state, particularly after a period of performance uplift, and that steady state will then develop a downward curve leading to a significant performance decline”.

They gave a model called TPR Life-cycle Model. TPR = Transforming, Performing, Reforming. It looks like this:



White argues that what is important now is to determine trend-change points on the performance curve so that the most appropriate performance management actions can be applied. Guess this is my trend-change point!

Not that I knew all of this. Was just trying to explain the decision to myself and Google and Wikipedia just made it easy. Important discovery for me.

In the subsequent posts, I'll go beyond this theory. Actually into the Raw Zone!