Bamboo In The Wind

At first, it looks like we need to learn from our experiences and adapt. Changing our thinking can provide us better ways of doing things. A big part of finding a better way is learning. When we learn to synthesize what we have experienced, we begin to turn that into residual know-how. Residual know-how helps us in triggering a beneficial change. Without residual know-how, changes can still happen but without purpose and benefit. The benefit of the residual knowledge-driven change is it has the potential to provide us the leverage. Having leverage provides us significantly greater results for the efforts put in. Consistency offers significant leverage. Consistency in trusting, listening, honesty, obedience, exercise, learning... There are many ways to be consistent in how we are. Consistency is a significant advantage. When we are consistent, we are believable to others; we can be trusted. Being consistent pays off in the long run. It defines who we are.

Acknowledging the problem does not mean we cannot do anything about it.. Sometimes we show the tendency is to stay.away from problems, trouble areas, awkward situations. We think we are better off by closing our eyes to something we don't like or want.  We think rejection of bad influence is a recipe for good influence. Alternative is to confront adverse situation by standing up to it. First step of that is to acknowledge that there is something that requires our attention and action. Ignorance of it never a good strategy. Acceptance on other hand offers a progressive response.

It is to create something. On your own time and effort. Bootstrapper creates something of value. Creating value is such a commonly used term. In the business world, it has almost lost its sheen because of the promise of the term, ie. Value is never delivered! Our job as a bootstrapper is a run good social circuit, a good family, good business, products excellent creativity. Corroboration of that happening is when others feel like inspecting, experiencing, and using what we bootstrapped from our imagination. Imagination is such that it has a real angle to it. It benefits the recipients of that creativity. It makes them happy. They enjoy the experience of it. Garnering someone's attention and expenditure is a testament to great creative work. Since we know our work may have core constituents and consumers we must think hard about whether what we do is for someone real. It's worth their attention and money. So bootstrapped pledges that they must not get paid until creating somethi...

To deify or to vilify someone or something means having extreme views. It reflects being on one of the two ends of the spectrum.  It sometimes means reacting instead of responding. The reaction is generated because of insufficient information. Our views are temporal in nature. They are not grounded in reality. Anything that is not grounded in reality can build extreme views. To deify a person, a process can be a sign of followership and progress at first. It can, however, derail into a follower-ship of status-quo and regress later. Vilification is the aftermath of an uncorroborated deification. It represents a swinging opinion. It is best to be on the spectrum with some grounding in reality. It is best opinions are rooted in care, evidence, and understanding.

Industrial age businesses are used to hierarchical structures that over time become overheads. To know the actual work taking place, we have to penetrate the peel layers of the management structure. As an organization grows and receives customer interest, we see the need to add to the army of people to create sliced-up responsibilities. This army of people requires supervision for carrying out organizational processes. Over time supervisory role has become responsible for knowing who has the information about the work.  In organizations that do well, the supervisory role is encouraged to know everything about the n-1 layers in their work units. Knowing what your teams are involved in at a thorough level is a competitive advantage in such organizations. Communication is uncluttered and unambiguous. That supports sound data from a responsible person and triggers quick decision-making. Interested, informed, and involved supervisory personnel is an asset that makes an organization make...

It's a defense mechanism. When we realize that things are unlikely to go our way, we raise our defenses. The instant reaction is to conserve ourselves for later. After all, we do not want adverse conditions to take away our ability to do something more. What if what we are doing is going the way we expected. It does not mean we cannot put a pause or even a stop to it and do something else. However, we can do something else if we come out of the present crisis unscathed. Protecting ourselves from damages to reputation, financial overcommitments, and lost relationships goes a long way in having a runaway even though the present one is not looking great. Protecting ourselves does not mean we do that for personal benefit. It does not mean staying out of harm's way at any cost. Protecting ourselves means doing the right thing when things are not going our way. Doing so even when what we focused on dearly is seemingly falling apart. There is recognition that, along the way, our assum...

The achievement reflects a great alignment of cause, plan, and ensuing actions. Without the clarity in each of these, the achievement is usually sheer luck. We cannot build wealth by fluke. We become wealthy when we have an asset that works even if no one watches.  We need machinery, a software program, or specialization that can be offered as a service. Careers don't happen without clarity on which skills to develop and how to utilize them in specific situations. We develop affiliation and reputation through a worthy cause and intense story-telling of how it benefits some and thus resonates with others. Achievement is an aftermath of the deployment of available resources, thoughts, and steadfast execution - an act of doing the work. Achievement is a mere fall out of what came before it. We simply need to orchestrate the required alignment.

Tension has the potential to show us the need to do something. It can get us unstuck from inaction. It provides a sense of urgency to change the status quo. In the workplace, tension creates an urge to attack a problem. For instance, it creates an urgency to talk to an aggrieved customer or creates an urgency to produce challenging employees tired of the monotony of work and want to quit the job. Tension is an act of inducing pressure in the system. Tension makes something move inside. It stresses the system such that we err on the side of acting. Have you ever been in a quiet wild only to find a fierce animal coming before us? It creates tension. Monetarily we freeze with fear.  And, very next minute, we try to shed the fear and look for our way out. We either make gestures, mount an attack, or even try running away. All these are actions to change our circumstances. The opposite of tension is worry. Worry stops the action. It puts us in a bind. Tension creates an urgency to addre...

We have a very strange way of solving problems. We try to guess what others might want, turn that into a real need, and provide them with what we think they need.  An example of this is a child returning from school trying to make a desperate attempt to connect with her parent. They have many stories from the day at school and need someone to listen. We think they are trying to catch attention. We happily assume what they want and shut them down under the garbs of being busy. A co-worker wants a quick chat with a manager, and the manager brings his own context of co-workers' past interactions and assumes that they know what the co-worker needs and offers no time or tosses them on an inconveniently scheduled meeting.  When we are in a store, the store in charge has a customer who needs a sledgehammer but misses the point about what the customer wants to do with a sledgehammer. Why is he in the store in the first place? These examples tell us how we connect with people and misun...

From whose perspective? How do we know if the right is right and wrong is wrong? Our biases develop from quite a lot of things. We are affected by what we read, how we are raised, our experiences, and our actions. We absorb information from our environment and try to make sense of it through our emotions. What we learn becomes a vital input to our thinking and subsequent actions. So it is important that we decipher what we experience through a balanced lens. For example, if we are concerned about a lack of career progress, can we come up with at least a few reasons for why we lack progress? Reasons provide us with relief. Rationally thought-out reasons provide unbiased possible explanations. They tell us why certain things may work the way they do. When that happens, we are comfortable with the clarity we ourselves provide. An important side effect of building out reasoning is, that in the process of reasoning, we avoid self-criticism. Don't blame anyone for our situation. We tend ...

Have you ever been appalled at why something continue to be in a state disarray? You see people in all kinds of problem situations, bad habits or poor company. They are unable to pick themselves up. It makes you even more distraught that those around them whom they trust make no effort to help them change their situation. After all, the person suffering may not ask for help, but you can volunteer rather than standing by as a witness. When we are witness to an accident, our first instinct often is to see who else steps forward.  What if we did not worry about if anyone close to them is in a position help or others who are present at spot step in? What if we moved from being a mere spectator, stepped forward and did something to provide them help and relief? When we are first movers, it makes the person feel in place, at peace, panic goes away, hope shows, and the possibility of recovery awakens. First movers are great influencers. They create useful movement. Many are in desperate n...

Have you run out of ways to try? Do you feel held back, or stuck? Feel a huge burden that you are going to miss the boat and there is no one who cares about your situation. That feeling is the worst nightmare. Our urge to be self-sufficient can resist us from reaching out for help. This is usually because it might make us look weaker, and dependent. Asking for help is a great way out however less futile it appears. When we ask for help, it triggers a conversation about what's on our minds. It's a process of redirecting our thought from what looks impossible and turning them into possibilities. It has the effect of clouding judgments that prohibit us from making movement. Look at what happens we go to Gym, go for a run, or are at the workplace. We effortlessly strike conversations that aid in loosening us up giving us ways to think a bit more freely. We tend to take ourselves and our abilities a little too seriously. When we are stuck asking for help isn't a weakness. It...

Consistency stems from a calm mind, determination, and discipline. It is about keeping the path even during uncertain times.  Consistency is an end-results of the courage shown in starting out. A calm  mind tells us to do something to get past a stumbling block.  It tells us that we need to continue to make repeated efforts. To never give up the path we have chosen.  It provides adjustment to a short-term frame of mind to persist with action. Determination, on the other hand, provides us impetus.  It's the force against the desire to stop.  Determination  is a reminder of our goal post. It tells us there still are ways to get to the goal post. Discipline is representative of the order one needs. Predictable timely, regular work that one can count on. Consistency is an internal trait that effaces when we recognize intention and give it a go.

Pretense is a cover-up. When something does not look closer to our expectations, we fall back on acts to avoid embarrassment. Pretense is a desperate attempt to show that things are going as per plan. All in control. Fear of getting exposed to the poorest performance makes us create a shield that masks reality. It seems that pretense originates from insecurity, a strong desire that we must achieve what we want. Often we are unaware of the blind spots. We have unknowns we need to properly prepare for. Without the preparation, there is a sudden unexpected outcome. We are in for a surprise. While we know what a crest is, we have no experience of the trough.  Often, we are surprised because we are used to seeing only an upward trajectory, success, and having everything our way. We have no exposure to seeing what it means to not be up to the mark or even fail. More importantly, pretense also comes from wanting to be a winner in our minds and in the eyes of others. Pretense creates false...

Feeling that we are falling behind is a common fear. Fear is a strange enemy. It freezes us from acting. Make us avoid taking the obvious next step.  We feel like that because of our own image of ourselves. Sometimes it's our imagination of what people think of us. At other times we feel that way because of the rough, insensitive feedback we receive from people. And then there is a feeling that we are falling behind. We feel the lack of progress because of our ability to poorly handle how people perceive us. We need external encouragement when, in fact, we should find an internal reinforcement of our own image of who we are. Often emerging from the pressures of how others think of us requires us to do things. Try them and figure out the right ways to do them until we succeed, albeit it may require many attempts. In the process, we get bouquets or brickbats. Both are immaterial and unwarranted. All we need is to reinforce what we are trying to do.  We must take external critici...

We are good at responding to recent memory, immediate reaction, and instant feedback. It tends to create a reactionary force to act as a result of our work of satisfying someone else. Is that the real reason we are doing something? To satisfy someone? Perhaps. However, in that case, it is best to personify who our work is for more specifically. This way, our audience can be characterized. We understand what such an audience expects. In turn, it helps in refining our work. Often specific people take time to consume what we offer, and there is a time gap between when they consume it and when they see the value of what they got from us. There might be even more lag when they offer feedback. This means there is a significant delay in getting feedback and the changes to our work. We need to build resilience for such a time lag. What we offer may not be what consumers need. They might need something different, and we might learn that much later. The very fact that we heard, they said to keep...

When we put out a display in front of our store for what is on the offer, that is called a promotion. It's a sales gimmick. Promotions are means to generate instant gratification. Promotion yields short-term associations. They often focus on reducing the cost of acquisition of product or services.  Promotions usually create an image of immediate benefits for using products and services. Marketing, on the other hand, is about building trust. It's a slow, sustained process of bringing out the best facets of the product or service on the offer.  Marketing focuses on customers' journeys, their feedback, and their delight.  It  helps customers decern the difference from before. Trust is developed when daily pain points are reduced. Users feel productive because of using the product or service. Marketing is the art of bringing out the best approach to improving inefficiencies someone has. How the product or service aids in reducing them. Best marketers seek to clarify the ...

The status quo can become problematic over time. The status quo helps avoid knee-jerk reactions. Risk aversion is another key reason we like to keep things the way they are. A fast-moving world brings rapid alterations in our environment and priorities, and it requires us to make quicker decisions. In such a world, unfavorable outcomes are acceptable. Risk aversion is a poor way to negotiate difficult circumstances. When we are prepared for adverse situations and unexpected outcomes they may bring, we learn to adapt. Shipping our work is better than waiting for it to be perfect. Evolving it with someone else's feedback is better than going in circles thinking about how it will be perceived. Often small changes can bring a lot of unexpected outcomes. They often yield positive results and impact us in unimaginable ways. We just need to exit our echo chamber and be prepared to abandon the status quo! Before enacting any change, there is always a thought-storm! A perfect well-orchestra...

What if we missed the bus? There is always a next one waiting. It makes no sense to create a crisis when we have enough slack in life. Schedules and habits are ways to build a buffer so that we keep enough plans in place for what we do. They help in avoiding surprises.  Everything then happens at a frequency. We don't fumble when there is a reference and timetable for things to be done. Delay is factored in. There is time for one more attempt. The next ride is available. Involving ourselves in something urgent results in thinking that we are in our most productive phase. Focusing on the urgent has the cost of ignoring the important. There is a risk of being ad-hoc. The most productive work happens when we have the discipline to get back to it. There is regularity and rigor even when we don't feel like it. Especially when no one else is watching. This is a lot of responsibility.  By all means, take a break, and miss a bus. But then be sure to catch the next one. Schedules and h...

Disappointment can be very distracting. It stays until we give a satisfactory answer to ourselves. Disappointment is generated with the difference between expectations and outcomes. We expect to pass an exam with flying colors and find that we are not there. We expect to be selected for the football team and find that we are not. We expect our speech to go well, only to find that our mind is wandering while we are on stage.  There are numerous such situations where what we expected does not happen. The reality of how well prepared we are determines what the outcome may be. The question, then, is, do we have what it takes to understand the reality of our preparedness. Very often we like to tell ourselves more than we have what we have. We comfort ourselves into thinking we have prepared adequately. When we falter, we blame the circumstances, the people around us. Strangely, despite placing blame, we feel uncomfortable about something we cannot explain and disappointment comes raging...

One must be clear. Founders and outsiders are different people. Startups belong to founders. Outsiders are brought in as professionals. They are not the owners. The company is never their baby. It's the brainchild of its creators. As long as the professional understands this, everything will be fine. As a professional, you must respect that. An empowered company is willing to go beyond founding power in pursuit of continued progress. It does not hesitate to place the most deserving person in the decision hot seat. The founders' dream is to build a lasting impression on the intended audience their creation serves. As the product or service gets roots, organizations evolve; cultures evolve; so do everyone's ambitions. Founders who are intent always know the efforts to build something good can outlast their prime time. They also realize that hanging on to the hot seat does not necessarily mean progress. Outsiders brought in as professionals will have a role to play at some poi...

Comparison is a double-edged sword. On the one side, it makes us understand what we are missing and why. And that provides us with the drive to work hard. On the other side, it makes us constantly validate if we have or do what others have or are doing. There is a fine line between the two outcomes. And the outcome depends on our outlook and our nature. The side that makes us understand why we are missing something that makes us better off. It shows us that there is hard work behind gaining what we desire. It tells us about the mindset of the go-getter attitude that is at the core of it. Importantly, such thinking helps us realize the steps that get us to where we want to be.  When we act with this cognizance, we tend to have a fulfilling experience. Destination looks within reach. This principle is true everywhere in life, and at work. Fortunately, this side of the comparison is a ride on the softer side of the knife. It motivates us into action and provides a sense of direction. ...

Relevance develops with the experience we gain. The ecosystem in which we operate provides us with that experience. We become relevant by doing something for the ecosystem comprising us and others. We belong in the environment, with people, and because of our work.  The nature of our work can mean something to others who are around us. Sometimes we know it a priori because we do it deliberately. Starting projects is a deliberate act of providing something to the audience. Sometimes we do not know who is affected as a side effect of our work. Like, when we volunteer our participation unexpectedly, others realize the benefits of the act. When we become relevant, our opinions and actions are deliberate, take into view all possibilities, and usually involve a lot of care for others. The ecosystem notices such deliberate work. People also care about our work. When they do, feedback comes to us much more proactively. That is such a valuable thing. Care moves both ways and work is much mo...

The future organizations will be different. The industrial age has brought to us organizational hierarchies for daily decision-making, the rigor of group meetings, and unfathomable goal tracking herded by someone. They have made stock expectations and role-based job assignments mainstream. It is plain unproductive; misses the whole point; people are capable of much more. In the future, leaders who care to make an impact need to think differently. Organizing people for some useful cause requires a more common sense of the past. Throughout the history of mankind, communication, worthy cause, and well-organized efforts have separated those who have progressed in their intent from those who have not. History shows us that many emperors have rallied locals from geographies they conquered and turned them into loyal troops through organizational structures that were loosely coupled. They focused on giving people a sense of purpose (albeit to the detriment of peoples' own social structures...

Innovation is mainly about changing current ways of doing things. Changing things for the better. Making them efficient, easier, and faster. Causing us, the beneficiaries to do less so our time is better utilized for something unsolved. Electricity solved the problem of being the power behind lights, locomotion, and mechanical machinery. It was an innovation that made us focus on using lights, thinking beyond movement, beyond metal cutter leth machine. Software solved the problem of routine computations, pattern recognition, inferences, or taking certain actions that help other users of the software.  Things simplify when we innovate present methods, practices, and customs.  Innovation has the potential to disrupt what we are used to. Universal Payment Interface changed the way people banked or transacted for routine shopping experiences. At first, it looked risky, unfamiliar, and disruptive to the current way of using money. But it was innovative enough to make e-commerce pos...

Why are kids creative and happy? They are not bothered by failures and no one around bothers them when they make mistakes. They try one thing after another until they find something that gets them excited. When they reach that satisfaction point, they are happy and content, and their exploration ends. But only until they feel bored again and need new stimulation. This process represents the growth circle. You create something, use it, get bored of it and go back to creating! It happens in cycles. We do something, it keeps us content, and then we need new stimulation. What if all early-stage efforts operated in this way? If we leave a lot of room for contributors to explore, fail and explore all aspects of their responsibility, creativity and enthusiasm will catapult the organization and its productivity. Of course, early organizations are wary of cost overtures, and unproductive efforts. If growth circles are employed to provide space to create a safe place to fail. It can accelerate c...

We are faced with opposition when we have a differing point of view. A differing point of view is due to our personal biases. How strongly we hold our biases determines how strong an opposition we are likely to see. Opposition is a formidable force against progress. It makes our minds think of ways to stall the progress simply in favor of maintaining our biases. An open mind often softens the blow we receive due to opposition. An open mind is a reflection of the ability to listen independently of your own point of view. An open mind is willing to accommodate others' thoughts or plan for what to do. An open mind can thus provide a huge leap and means to progress. Does it mean that we are faced with unrelenting opposition when we do not notice the traffic (communication) in the other direction? Definitely. We draw opposition to our own approach to sending information without others' context and processing the received information without their context.  Factually the information ...

Hitting the deck consistently (in the game of Cricket) is a sign of being on the mark and a measure of progress. That is what a team would expect you to do. As an entrepreneur, one does not know whether the idea will make the mark. In such cases, daily small achievements are a good measure of progress. Such measure lies in the daily assessment of what we are composing fits well together.  For example, the daily checker-maker process of assessing cash burn is well within limits. The daily constructive dialog raises the enthusiasm of our fellow employees. Keeping an eye on the customer needs routinely or making sure their treatment does not change when we grow and undergo changes internally. For the sake of a healthy collaborative organization, ensuring that rising org structures do not cripple decision-making is key. So is ensuring that the taste of success does not result in employees' access to those from whom they seek help. The calendar appointments need not take away easy hallw...

They say courage is infectious. Why is that? Courage results in exploring the unexplored. Courage means pushing the boundaries we never cross. Going out of comfort zone. Being ok with unfavorable outcomes.  Overcoming fear of failure. Accepting that someone may point out in hindsight how what did was never going to work.  It takes a lot of initiative, protectiveness and an environment of safety net for someone's courage to show up.  First step towards magic of courage is to start. A starter is someone courageous who walks the uncharted path and set the direction despite all odds.