Ship sails smooth in silent waters, and everyone overboard enjoys the ride but captain enjoys when the ship is in turbulent waters. The calm sea always supports the ship, but it is turbulence which throws ship either far ahead in the direction of the journey or somewhere far away. It all depend on the skills and action of captain and staff.
In my organization every manager is captain, we make motor cars. Someone said vehicle industry is like an economy wheels. State of vehicle industry in any economy indicates the health of organization. Let me take you all through the vista of thoughts, which I think could be useful to us (my organization ).
Organization is synchronous group small departments, which have different goals and initiatives but all support the business strategy of organization. We have following departments :
1. Dreamers : They with the help of “Nomads” (marketing), give the birth to a concept, to a requirement. this department have many sub-departments too but for our ease we will call all of them “dreamers”
2. Creators: They are the one who understand and rewrite the dreamers dream in the language of science. Geek once.
3. Makers: They are the one who take the conceptualized dream and give shape to this dream.
Let’s start the journey:
“Batten down the hatches and seek safety from hatched eggs”. Manger should stay away from this adage. Turbulence in business always come up with opportunities .The key word is stay connected to market viz a viz customer.
Turbulence doesn’t mean chaos but yes it can create chaos if we don’t act accordingly, as chaos occurs because of unpreparedness. Turbulence defines the unpredictable and sometimes undetectable patterns that external factors place upon businesses across the world in these uncertain times,”
1. Develop early warning system: find what is happening at customer’s customer end and vendor’s vendor end. Study complete value chain and identify what is happening in terms of cost and pricing downstream.
2. Engage in all scenario based strategy instead of best and worst case analysis.
3. Prioritize key scenarios and develop strategy: It should be continuous activity. Planned and evolved on quarterly basis.
4. Decision should be based on cut/delay; increase/accelerate and outsource.
But for our organizations, we have to concentrate on following points :
Engage all stakeholders, All mean All:
Identify all stake holder, all mean all. Internal and external too. Internal includes all of above mentioned departments . External customers : competitors, government, consumer, weather and business scenarios.
Once identified bring them all on one page and break the silos. Big organizations usually face this issue. Being big departments, every department in the organization have it’s own BSC (balanced score card) to maintain so in the race of maintaining this departments lose the big picture and organization fails to achieve the set goals.
Survival or growth :
In volatile market, trends changes overnight so agility to align oneself could help organization to survive but survival is the hygiene, growth is the target.
“Scan the horizon, find the value and create the opportunity”
Look deep into: - Engage market shareholders, Market requirements, Customer explicit and implicit needs, Customer behavior, Global socio-political picture, Organization’s current strategy, Global trends, reprioritization of projects, challenge unproductive activities, honest assessment of future plans and consumers needs and latent requirements.
To have solid ground organization should first survive, which means lets put major resources on few main projects and let them make successful rather than trying to catch all rabbits.
0- Read market requirements and make sure to deliver what is required by the market not by any senior individual .
0- Once requirements are set, Give full support to achieve what is set.lets not teams wander .
Policies and decision making:
Decisions should be made at right level not at highest level.
Policy maker or decision taker have all the onus to steer organization in foggy times but decision makers should be few only. not more than 5-6. On organizational level, keep making the decision and maintain the momentum. Avoid policy paralysis, to minimize the momentary losses. Policy paralysis can have negative effect on the organizations; it can be more dangerous when the disconnection extends to middle management.
organizations should not postpone planned initiative and plan budget cutting without measuring the status and opportunity cost of the initiatives. Stay focused on the performance and has difficult conversations within the organization.
Pass the buck to middle management, empower the people and accountability should be pushed harder and down till the bottom level of organization. Momentum of activities should be maintained, core activities and project should never be halted.
find opportunities in uncertainty:
Extract latent needs of customer and commercialize the need into opportunity. Opportunities don’t wait around for good time to come; organizations should invest in human resources and create opportunities from uncertainty and capitalized on it.
Special attention should be paid to following:
Human resources:
Quality, experienced and home grown talent should be retained at any cost during turbulent period. We should make policies conducive so that employees can breath easily. we should empower them in this time.Unite them in this hour of need. Organization should be very careful, as usually tough time brings lot of tough but unnecessary policies which not only demoralize employees but force them to leave the group.
Supply chain
should be maintained or at least infrastructure should be maintained so that after revival period; things can be run smoothly.
It is just not enough, one have to get into each and every thread of the organization to bring the killer instinct but for leaders, leaders should shift gears from command and control to empathy, humility, authenticity and compassion.
Tough time never remains there but it decide who will stay there or who will not!
