All in a day's work

Ever felt that you could have done better on a given day. Well good if you did. There is always a scope for improvement.

To Do lists are the most used as well as unused efficiency tools people employ. Used largely to make the lists and unused as it is seldom followed post that.

While you could still use a To Do list - the problem is that you also limit yourself in to doing at the most that. Instead try a simple tool of listing what you did - in terms of effective work. Can it add up to 50 in a day. Try  doing this. Based on your nature of work you know what is 50 for you. It is a self evaluation process in which you realise how little effective work you do on a given day. Start. Build. Improve. Stretch. Set records. Break them... Tabulate in a worksheet. Your efficiency is there for you to see!

What I read about Steve Jobs ...

As a child Steve Jobs grew up like a normal child. Grew up admiring his father and his craft. As a kid he believed that he was special. That he was smarter than the rest. Some of us do think like that, but we outgrow the thought. But Jobs never stopped thinking that. He always believed he was special, smarter than the rest of the world till his last day i guess.

It is norm for kids to genetically acquire some of their parents skill sets. Steve grew up admiring his (foster)father and his craft. Steve imbibed skills by observation. Virtual genes! 

He had no love for formal education. He did not find value in it. He did not complete it. That was the time when the anarchic mind was at rest. The era of the pot-smoking hippies who was into Zen, Hinduism, Yoga and other self-fulfillment missions. Once such search took Jobs to India where he wandered about. He came back armed with the power of meditation and admiration for the Indian way of using intuition more than intellect.

Both the Apple founding Steves much like their personal computing peers were mavericks who had wanted to build a world that din't exist. 

There was never a great idea or an innovation. It was always about reinventing, bench-marking that Steve's thoughts were all about. There in lies the greatest learning for the future. It is not that you need to invent- rather you need to make it better than what is thinkable. That is the core of Steve's thoughts. He introduced versions of existing products that the customer couldn't possibly think off. 

As a leader he was the very antithesis of what is prescribed as ideal leadership styles. He was brutal. He would pass of his failures on the team and team's success as his.  He always used Reality Distortion as a tool to his advantage whether it was to build alliances, to get the best talent to work with him/retain them or even to shield himself from the fact that he was grossly ill towards the last stage of his life.

The best to be admired for :  He was one of the greatest sales person around. One of the best show men. Who could put up an act; could impute(a core Apple marketing philosophy) so much that the audience would be left wanting for more.

( from some of the notes i scribbled while i read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs )

Win every battle ; war can wait for now

You may loose the battle, but win the war - is one of the oldest axioms around. It focused on the larger picture of winning the war - while you may loose a few battles in the process. It also serves as a motivator to keep teams focused on the larger goal.

Happened to read Tom Peters tweet earlier in the day where he talked about the fact that one will be remembered by one's reaction to adversity and the fact that no peacetime generals are remembered. Today's recessionary market is akin to a war like situation -where you fight a battle for every iota of business. It is no longer about what you do at the end of the year. Rather it is the every single day, week, month and at the most a quarter. One such poor period puts you back so much that one can hardly recover; since the next period's expectation is already hitting at you.

Hence the need of the time to focus on the smaller picture : it is very critical that we win each battle. For you  may not survive to win the war. It is the way to excellence as well.

Plan or Not

This post is provoked by what has transpired in the last one month.

When you work on achieving certain goals the ideal way is to set up a plan to achieve the same, break it down into actionable tasks, get going. Monitor the progress and so on...

Usually I do start every key project like that. And then the dynamics of business takes over. In the most recent situaion, had accomplised what had to be done much in advance only to have people who committed back out of it. Thus it took me back to troubleshooting, reacting, huffing and puffing to finally reach the desired objective.(which is what i do of i do not go as per a systematic plan).

So the point is why do we still plan. As we always ending up re-writing the whole thing almost all the time.