Addressing the Intent-Content Gap

 When Content does not Match up to Intent,  you are likely to  lose credibility.  The writing on the wall is loud and clear.  If we fail to live up to the talk as HR professionals then we are seen as folks "throwing the cannon balls" at the party.

Have you experienced that people speak about some new concept they heard of,  bring in a whole lot of jargon and then quickly adapt and adopt what was working somewhere and which they claimed could be a cure all, a solution for tomorrow and then .... Bingo !!! it all fizzles out as quickly as it got created.

If this rings a bell then it is probably a case of intent-content gap at work.  What you wanted did not happen and what you expected did not turn out to be.  Here are four reasons why this happens.

a) The concept did not fit into your context:  Understanding the context is key to successful implementation.  What works for A situation does not apply to Situation B.   Try remembering the last time you tried a least common denominator approach to employee engagement.   Wont' work -  it has to be segmented if it has to work,  Not everything that motivates an employee in second year of his job career can motivate the one with a decade or more.

b) Concept not thought through:  If you tried an approach that resembles tunneling your way through the mountain then at best you can see the other side.  If you want to see the top you need to climb the mountain.  Ask few of your HR teams what a normalization process intends to achieve and see how much they can explain.... or even simpler ask what the philosophy for performance management is and if you have a common response you are doing well otherwise the concept is not clearly understood.

c) Rome was not built in a day:  Big Bang roll out without a prototype or a working model is a sure way to rework, or in all likelihood failed implementation.  Ever remember a day when your folks at work decided that you need a new process or system from the scratch, from the ground up to replace the current one.

d) You put the squirrel to do what the turtle was supposed to be doing.  Climbing trees is best done by the squirrel and swimming across the current in the river by the turtle. If you ever tried switching roles in the name of meeting goals of  job rotation then you will be in for a surprise. (Read More About This Here)

Learning from Zen: The Light of the Lamp

Here is a story that can be interpreted in various ways.  

In early times in Japan, bamboo-and-paper lanterns were used with candles inside. A blind man, visiting a friend one night, was offered a lantern to carry home with him.

"I do not need a lantern," he said. "Darkness or light is all the same to me."

"I know you do not need a lantern to find your way," his friend replied, "but if you don't have one, someone else may run into you. So you must take it."

The blind man started off with the lantern and before he had walked very far someone ran squarely into him. "Look out where you are going!" he exclaimed to the stranger. "Can't you see this lantern?"

"Your candle has burned out, brother," replied the stranger.

From a human relations perspective you can derive different meanings but the one I want to highlight is....

…if you are oblivious to something does not mean it is irrelevant to others.   What may be important to you may (at the same time) be of no use to the others.   Managers need this realization often in their day to day work.

You may have mastered the art but there are others around you who are at different levels on the learning curve and to each the way ahead will be different.  Apply that yardstick when you decide how to develop people.

Other interpretations I would leave to the discerning readers.

A Simple Perspective on Incremental Change

 In daily life at home, at work, or in other places change can be brought about in small steps. Many a time we might dread "Oh how can I bring about change? It's too big an effort"Wanted to share that it's often the power of compounding that can come in handy. 

Take for example in any activity, task, or effort a 1% increment may be more achievable and reasonable to our mind. It can bring down the resistance in our minds drastically. If we make a 1% improvement every day take a guess how much improvement in output, effort reduction, and task completion can one achieve in a month. STOP !!! Don't read further but pause and make a guess before reading further.

If you guessed it's about a third or thereabouts you are perfectly right.

You can bring about a 33% improvement in about a month just by a small incremental change of 1% daily. That's something that we fail to imagine and often end up overamplifying the difficulty of achieving targets.

Visually shown in the chart above is a trend line with a 1% increment for each day and end of the month you are 1.33 times where you started. This kind of change in a month is the envy of many organizations and surely worth pursuing. 

So next time you are faced with an uphill task think about how you can break it up in small incremental steps and bring about a significant change.

Big Bang is not always the best approach, compounding power can come to your rescue many a time.

For the nay-sayers who say my work cannot improve by 1% per day, suggest you should take a shot with compounding by the week or even month and the effort will seem to roll like a well-oiled wheel.

Happy Festival Season !!

Observations & Reflections... Life's Lessons

It was a hectic week.   Here are some reflections.  Simple Lessons learnt from a celebration called life

Ideas grow wild in the fertile plains of empowerment.


Your progress does not halt as long as the wheel of learning is in motion.


Don't let the perennial flow of positive thought be stopped even by the biggest dam of disappointments.


The seed of thought produces the best fruit of success when watered from within.


Unlike other journeys...In Life's Journey even the Red Signal of Failure should not prompt you to stop.

Shying Away from Asking is sometimes akin to writing an epitaph for my Learning!!!


Aim that your headline goal is nothing short of Breaking News !!! Success will be like a prime time event.


Only in the temple of learning can you make yourself the idol.

When you are done...burn the books. Your Learning should not be captured between the cover pages of the book,  but within the folds and crevices of your mind.


In the  graph paper of your life strive to ensure everything is in the first quadrant !!!

11th Oct 22
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Feel Free to use if you like any

Some Wise Ones to Reflect Upon !!!

"The real magic of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."                                                                                                                                                   - Marcel Proust

No wonder we have heard of things like reimagine as a powerful concept in the recent past.   Gareth Morgan talks about Imaginzation.  Wear a different lens and you will see the problem differently.  Isn't this what is taught in most leading B’Schools.

"Anger Is One Letter Away from Danger" 

                                                              -  Elanor Roosevelt 

And so said First Lady Elanor Roosevelt of United States.  Yes it is true that controlling your anger makes life much more simpler, much more calmer and a lot more easier.   Most big fights and misunderstanding are out of snappy thinking, getting angry and reacting.  No wonder they say “The sent arrow, the spoken word and the transmitted email can’t just come back, so think before you send, speak or Click”.   Never respond to mails when angry.

Few more to reflect on as we near the end of one more beautiful year.  Soon we’ll bid good bye to 2014 and usher another year of fine things to come.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that  counts.                                                                                                                                         - Winston Churchill

"The way to get started is to stop talking and begin doing" 

                                                                              - Walt Disney Inc.

"Kites Rise Highest Against the Wind, Not With It"  

                                                              - Winston Churchill

"A Man is But the Product of His Thoughts.  What he Thinks, He Becomes."                                                                                                                                                    -  Mahatma Gandhi

“Grinding a sword for ten years, but the blade is yet to be tried.”

                                                                            - Jia Dao , Chinese Poet (779 -843 A.D)

"Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. "                                                                                                                                                     - Anon

ARISE, AWAKE DON"T BE A BOILED FROG !!!

When change stares you in the face what do you do?   Depending on how you see change there can be two things that happen. You act on it or you let it go by.   To understand the implications better let us consider the boiled frog experiment.  Whether this was actually an experiment conducted in a laboratory or someone's kitchen should not be the point of debate. The issue is understanding change and how this is handled.  

In the boiled frog experiment you put a frog into boiling water and it reacts and jumps out instantly.  It survives.  However you put the frog into a vessel with cool water and slowly start heating the same the frog eventually dies.   The frog does not realize the change in temperature and snugly sits in the warming waters and eventually can't react and dies. 

In the same way it is important for us to understand the changes happening and know how they would affect us in the long run.  Else a day would come when it might leave you like the boiled frog.  Not understanding the deterioration of a condition and waiting without action is something we have seen often either in our lives or in the lives of people we know. 

In our personal lives it can be things like a vice which we could tackle saying "one more time" .... just "one more time" and then its done. By the time you want it "no more times" it is too late.   Similarly in professional life we keep procrastinating and pile up work or leave an issue unattended...day after day enjoying the comfort of warm waters.  We can end up like the BF.

How does one overcome and realize something is deteriorating.  There is no other option but to keep tab.  Which means focus on what you think is going on.  When you focus you are able to tune in to your situation and understand it better.  Read my blog on Focus:  What Gets Focus Gets Attention; What Gets Attention Gets Done.  So if you focus on the problem you have and try to understand you may do the right thing to address the same and give a miss to being the next boiled frog. 

The Barriers and Obstacles Lie Within !!!

One day a wise man from a distant land came to the Court of a Great Emperor of the East and proclaimed that he wanted to challenge the learned men of the kingdom by testing how intelligent they were. The emperor readily agreed and invited some of his courtiers and ministers to face the challenge. The wise man kept a pot covered by a cloth and asked the courtiers and ministers to tell him what it contained. Every one was dumb founded and kept starting silently at each other. There was complete silence. The emperor went blank with anxiety.

Then the kings clever minister came forward, he opened the cloth, looked inside the pot and then said there was nothing in the pot. It was empty indeed. 

"But you opened it." said the wise man. 

"You did not tell us that it can't be opened" shot back the clever minister.

The wise man was cornered. He quietly left.

Learning: There are many interesting lessons which come out from this simple story that we can relate to our world of work. While I discuss couple of them here... readers are welcome to add their comments and interpretations.

Often the limitations, boundaries, barriers are all in our minds. We as human beings set the limits and most often those that never existed in the first place.

Very often just because someone thought it so... it became the accepted norm. Common sense might suggest this is not so but we don't stop by to question. Is this familiar in our organizations?

In hind sight the message may seem simple but one needs to break out of the patterned thinking in order to have more creative solutions and approaches to the problems we face.

We also learn that there are others around us who can be more intelligent than we are. Those that outsmart you.... those you never expected to. So it does no harm to accept and acknowledge them for what they bring. When was the last time we acknowledge someone for how they think... of course without pretentions or without being hypocrite like.

I have covered just one dimension of how this story can be interpreted and the message about how the locus of how we respond to any situation is driven from within.

Will be interesting to see other interpretations and dimensions arising from this story.