Lead 3D

Rajiv Rajendra

Description

Would you like to free up your mind to solve more problems and make better decisions? Is your company suffering from bottlenecks in decision making? Are your next-in-line managers or team members adequately prepared to take on all challenges when the time comes for them to move up a level? Do your leaders and peers simply wish they had more time? Would you like to spend more time creating solutions rather than wasting your time worrying about situations and their impact? If the answers to these questions is a 'Yes', Lead 3d, shows you a new and exciting way to manage your existing time and business without changing its structure-but simply re-aligning your individual thinking and organizational decision-making workload.Lead 3d, presents some interesting ways to engage your mind and thereby your organization, and become a greater achieving individual, leading yourself, your teams, and your organization into a higher sphere.

Sujets

• Gestion et management

Informations

• Publié par: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
• Date de parution: 11 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184006377
• Langue: English

Extrait

Rajiv Rajendra

LEAD 3D
The Future of Leadership is Here
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Preface
Opening Thoughts
Part I: Think 3D!
1: Context of Leadership
2: The Mind in 3d
3: The Importance of Design in Decision-Making
Part 2: Decide 3D!
4: The 3d Org Chart
5: Unravelling the 3d Organization
6: Creating Your 3-d Org Chart
Part III: Act 3D!
7: The Culture Connection
8: A Fitter Leader Means a Fitter Team
9: Putting It All Together
Follow Random House
Copyright
About the Author
Rajiv Rajendra, consultant, trainer, and author, has spent many years covering different management assignments around the globe, earlier with one of the largest companies in the world and later advising and training firms of all shapes and sizes. He has presented and delivered sessions at many leading business schools and has been a speaker at various forums including corporate seminars and industry association meetings.
Rajiv believes that the learning process is only complete with relevant practical exposure and a fun work environment. He has authored the well-received, The Handbook of Global Corporate Treasury and two mass ction novels, Doosra and its sequel The League. He has a degree in Computer Engineering with a Masters in Finance and Marketing. Rajiv is also a playwright and theatre director and runs Blu Lotus, a foundation created to foster literacy, creativity and culture.
Rekha, Tara, Suman and my parents
Preface
A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.
- J OHN C. M AXWELL
P laying golf with business leaders is a trying task. Their BlackBerries beep non-stop, their global organization demands their time, their mind, their virtual presence and most of all, their decision-making.
And so I discovered one day in 2009, while teeing-off in Thailand with a Korean-American settled in Hong Kong, a Chinese from Singapore, and an Indonesian resident of London. That was the easy part.
As we proceeded from hole to hole, these leaders were answering calls in between shots, responding to emails as I drove the buggy on the fairway, and it appeared for the five hours that they were there on work, golf was incidental, a small break in-between work decisions.
My partner in the buggy seemed flustered in Hole 13. I wonder if the network is fine, he muttered to no one in particular, I haven t received a single email in the past twenty minutes.
I don t usually get too many emails (or at least wasn t then).
The network seems fine, I replied, I haven t received any mail, which means it must be working.
The humour was lost in a few button presses. He was furiously gunning away at the BlackBerry.
What are you doing? I asked, a little concerned now for the well-being of the device.
Sending a mail to myself to check that the email is indeed working, he said, and beamed broadly when the message that he had sent to himself got sent, and received. It s fine!
I just saw your mail, he barked on the phone, as I prepared to tee-off on the 14th, send him and email and bcc me. Tell him that this needs my approval and he should send me an email. I will then approve this.
It set me thinking on why it was that organizations weighed-down management so much on decisions and communication. Having worked with and studied various companies, of sizes, shapes, colours, and industries, reading what masters of the organizational craft had to say, and indeed talking with a few since then, left me dissatisfied. I was still not getting the picture, not being able to identify, through the structure, where the decisions were being made, why the corporate world was always on the edge, and how weighed-under different levels were by the act of using their minds.
Organization structures created ever since man started his role as hunter-gatherer, identify roles and the span of operations. Organizational charts, in recorded existence for over three hundred years, show us the reporting line, but not the influencing line. Not how much each role tends to add value in each decision that the organization makes. Not how much each role is expected to think .
Why did that seem important?
Simple-because that would tell me how much weighed on the time of the person making that decision, which in-turn was the function of how much mind went into productive use.
The human mind is full of thoughts. We seem to be always in the middle of something-distracted beyond belief. Today, we have the attention spans of gnats, flitting from one subject to the other, surfing the proverbial channel as our minds flit from one topic to the next.
We keep thinking, of the past-incidents and instances. We keep thinking, of the future and generate multiple scenarios that play themselves out even when we don t want them to.
They say that our brains are not being used. I disagreed. I think we re using them too much, but not optimally. So I did what came optimally.
Think .
In the book we present a few, very different ways of looking at things-unconventional, and hopefully will redefine some conventional thoughts along the way.
Two things got me started on the journey. The first was to determine human priority. What are our priorities? How much do we think? What is it that we seek when our minds work? Why do some companies and some humans seem to generate more intellectual output than others?
The continuous human quest for comfort, communication, and conveyance (the last two eventually contributing to the first), has driven human behaviour, and corporate activity (Figure 0.01). Companies try to make and supply more of things that provide and satisfy the human quest. Humans desire more of these-comfort, communication, and conveyance. Overall, the objective is to maximize comfort, communicate when it provides comfort (check out this global tsunami called social networking), and use conveyance to increase comfort (thought sometimes conveyance itself is the comfort-ask the luxury car owners who go on a drive !).
The second was to determine the use of material wealth to humans. Not all of us have the same yardsticks on defining comfort, and not all of us treat monetary wealth in the same manner. It is what I call personal purchasing power parity (PPP) , or how much each individual attributes to each relative dollar of value. Not how much it can buy (that is what the actual PPP delivered to us by the economists give you), but what each person treats a dollar as. And it is not always a function of how many dollars you have-more likely, it is also a function of how much you think you need that dollar.
But more on that in my next book, which is based on my travels and experiences on money.

FIGURE 0.01: WHAT DRIVES HUMANS AND COMPANIES?
The journey of this book is also landscaped with thoughts, perspectives and experiences of a few people whom I have an extremely high regard for, and have proven their leadership skills in real life. These wonderful people are: Ajith Nivard Cabraal (Governor, Central Bank of Sri Lanka), Sim S Lim (Group Executive and Singapore Country Head, DBS Bank), Sam Balsara, (Chairman and Managing Director, Madison World), Rajiv Menon, (Award-winning Film Director), Rahul Singh (President, Financial Services and Business Services, HCL), Dr Madhukar Shukla, (Professor, XLRI), Dr. R.K. Raghavan, (Former CBI Director & NMS Board Member) and Swati and Ramesh Ramanathan, (Co-Founder Janaagraha).
To them, my thanks. The reader will be richer for your perspective. (Their thoughts have been encapsulated in boxes titled Leaderspeak and Expertspeak .)
For now, an incident comes to mind that propelled me in this direction of thought.
I was working in Sri Lanka, on the trading floor of a large global bank. I was new in the country, and had brought along my typical dealing room aggression-work hard, die for the customer, get rewarded. So on a Friday evening, London opened and the pound sterling started tanking against all expectation. A customer had done a derivative transaction earlier in the week and the markets had surprisingly moved against him. So, I ran up at 10 pm to the office, bringing along a nonplussed colleague, since there were policies against single occupancy. I ran some computer models, checked for exit strategies, and then called the client. He was quite shocked. But I was even more shocked by his response.
What the hell are you doing in office? he asked.
Rajiv, you are losing-, you are losing money every second you delay transacting. Your mark to market loss has crossed five hundred thousand dollars on this one transaction. It might be wise to exit before it increases beyond this level, I told him.
Rajiv, he said sagely, it is late at night on a Friday evening. I have a drink in my hand and my daughter is playing on my knee. I can t ask for anything else. This money-it will go, it will come back. Why are you wasting your time-it s my money-don t spoil your weekend.
But the losses......, I tried to impress the fact further, but in vain.
We ll figure it out on Monday. This moment is too precious for me to worry.
And so it was that I embarked on this journey of thought. The book is the result of debates, discussions, research, reading, mulling, and more importantly, thinking-about thinking.
And, as I started writing the book, the aspects of leading-oneself, one s team, one s society and one s organization, started to come out. The similarities, the commonalities and where they differed. The book wrote itself out for varied audiences (Figure 0.02)-because the concepts of thinking in three-dimensions and leadership are universal-just applied differently.

FIGURE 0.02: CONCEPTS IN THE BOOK APPLY TO ALL KINDS OF CONTEXTS
This book is not about good decisions or bad decisions. It is more about who makes decisions and how they are made-individually and organizationally. And how we can lead ourselves and our team members to be more efficient-making the whole much lar