Tag: Enterprise

Knott Do-able? Or Do-able?

Doorstep at-your-feet delivery, touch screen inspired command and control at our fingertips, the increasing absence of humans in any interaction with an organisation( and therefore the superfluousness of our emotions) and many such in our zeitgeist has made us the sacrificial lamb at the altar of ease and convenience.

 

 

In the school industrial complex, we were taught compliance from an early age. Non compliance equalled failure, mind you, we were made to believe that. In order to amplify compliance, people in authority have instilled in us not just a fear of failure, but worse, a fear of fear.

 

 

The diktat going around is that of ease and convenience. And the freedom from the fear of failure. A fear of weakness only strengthens weakness. You are only adding fuel to the fire. Fear of failure is a mental virus that stops us from taking risks and trying things in life. It tells you a scary story. It says you are not good enough, and things will turn out terribly bad.

 

 

Eloise Ristad put it beautifully ” When we give ourselves permission to fail, at the same time, we give ourselves permission to excel “.

 

 

The reason it’s hard to push ourselves, even when there’s no external downside of doing so, is our fear of fear of failure. That feeling, the feeling of insufficiency and doom, pushes us to seek the comfort of compliance instead.

 

 

Easily do-able is the default whereas great work be it for enterprise, art, music, literature, new inventions etc stem from us allocating our time to things that may not work.

 

 

Failure. The perspective would be to see it as a lure( to create or make things better) rather than see that as a speed breaker.

 

 

An interesting throwback on failure can be witnessed in this article from BrandKnew about ” What Designers Can Learn From The Museum Of Failure (Yes, It Exists) “.

 

It’s good to remember that ” fear is a reaction, creativity is a response ‘.

 

 

ENDS

Needed: A Bias for Action!

Needed: A Bias for Action!
A small tweak, with due permission from Issac Newton ” every action has an equal and opposite action “.
We assume that enterprise excellence is something that we can define, analyse, plan for and them maintain in perpetuity. With every turn of the business wheel, we fancy that we now understand the One & True Lasting Thing that will distinguish a good idea from a bad one, a winning strategy from a dud.
Indeed, we labour still under the delusion that the key to winning is….the right strategy. But, what we have to learn is that ‘ excellence ‘ is not something that we can ‘ envision ‘ or  ‘ plan ‘ ahead. We create it as we go along. Then blow it up, and start anew.
Simply put, the search for excellence is…never-ending, ever-shifting. How do we ‘stick to our knitting‘ when one form of ‘knitting‘ after another unravels? You are sprinting, only to be standing in the same place.
The absence of a bias for action remains the biggest problem for large organisations. They simply Think too much. Plan too much. Meet too much. And accomplish too little.
It is an Age of Perpetual and Accelerating Transience. ” Permanence ” is a myth, it is dead. All the basic principles of business are up for grabs. We have got to play as it lays. We’ve got to make it up as we go along.
A little bit of re-emphasizing here: Of course we need Analytics(Desperately). Of course we need some Metrics(Desperately). We need to understand the power of Data(Desperately). But, like All Good Things, ..the ‘ analytics ‘ and ‘ abstractions ‘ have come to subsume the Real World of the living, breathing, emotional, complaining customer.
Companies would be extra keen to re invent their way of doing business. And there is an increasing need for a new breed of intellectual capital to make that happen.
At ISD Global we are getting ready to throw our hat in the ring. Are you biased for action?
ENDS
 
 
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