How do we evaluate the decisions we make? Considering that decisions are essentially choices we make under risk and uncertainty with incomplete information, how do we tend to view our decisions subsequently with the passage of time, when the information we have is fuller and cold facts eliminate that uncertainty? When is a decision a good decision?

There are broadly two schools of thought on this. For many people, the instinctive response is that good decisions are those that lead to good results. If I chose to switch jobs, and the second job turned out to be great, it was a good decision; on the other hand, if I was worse off after switching, then my decision wasn’t a good one. Indeed, the way we refer to decisions in casual conversations almost exclusively focuses on the results (Smart move, Wise choice and so on..)

On the other hand, others (usually on reflection) come up with this response – good decisions are those where the decision maker followed an appropriate process for arriving at the decision. That the manner in which the decision was made– the right data / information, the right considerations and appropriate logic – was correct. It was the right call to have taken at that point, even if things didn’t work out later.

Let’s say I need to get to a meeting at the other end of the town. I know that there are two ways to get there – one by using the main arterial road, which is slightly longer but where traffic moves faster; the other by smaller roads through suburbs, which is shorter but likely to be more congested. My history of prior experiences tells me that the arterial route is likely to be 10% faster. I consider all relevant factors (time of day, any recent construction activity or other such impediments I am aware of) and decide to take the arterial route. Turns out that there was a major hold-up due to some unforeseen reason, and I reach later than I would have if I had chosen the other route.

How good was my decision? Is it good because I followed the right process or bad because the results were bad?

(I know what my normal reaction would be – I’d be kicking and cursing myself, especially if I were running late for the meeting. It takes an unusually stoic temperament to remain detached and objective in this situation)

Ideally of course, we’d like to have both. If we follow a thorough process and arrive at a decision that also turns out well, nothing like it. The problem is we often get one or the other. Sometimes we get great results, with not-so-great processes due to a fortuitous turn of events. Other times, we do all the right things to no avail.

Our innate tendency is to evaluate based on outcomes. How often do we see this in say, cricket matches. The fielding side gets a couple of early wickets, the middle order batsmen dig in and are threatening to forge a partnership that could be match defining. The fielding captain brings in a part time bowler (to give his main bowlers a bit of a break, or just to break things up, or whatever..) for a couple of overs. Or perhaps he changes the field settings. And what do you know, the part-timer gets a wicket, or the batsman offers a catch straight to the fielder in the new position. “Brilliant captaincy!” say the commentators, and we agree. Of course, if the part-timer were to get clobbered, or if the catch were to go to the old position, we’d equally rail at the deficiencies of the chap wearing the captain’s arm-band. I’d like to see one of the expert commentators evaluate the decision at the time it was made, rather than post-facto. In fact, some columnists make match predictions in various sports, and their hit-rates are no better than yours and mine would be. This doesn’t stop them from carrying critical pieces simultaneously, which contain several post-match assessments of the ‘woulda,,shoulda…coulda…’ variety. But then this is perhaps only to be expected – true foresight is as rare as hindsight is universal.  

On the balance, my view is that the process is more important than outcomes. For one thing, we can only fully control our actions – we can’t fully control outcomes. There are always going to be variables that come into play (call it Fate if you will) which we have no control over. Secondly, only a good process guarantees repeatability of overall consistently good results, as opposed to a one-off success. A blindfolded chimpanzee throwing darts at stocks could perhaps outperform an average fund manager using all the available information, models and decision making tools; but I’d lay odds on the fund manager doing better in the long run. (This example of course, takes me into highly unfamiliar territory – so I’ll caveat it by saying that this assumes that both the stock market and fund managers have some method in their apparent madness)

This also places in focus the importance of building in learning mechanisms into a process. A process that remains static and doesn’t learn from its history of wins / losses, is little better than trusting to blind luck. The next time I decide on the road route, I need to factor in the latest experience, attach a suitable weightage, not get over-influenced by the recency of the good / bad result and so on.

But if process is all that matters, doesn’t this lead to the risk of people abdicating accountability, claiming that all outcomes are determined by Fate? We do know result-oriented people, who ‘do whatever it takes’ and stretch themselves to achieve seemingly impossible tasks, when it appears that the odds are against them. We also know people who operate purely in ‘execution mode’, doing what the Standard Operating Procedure demands and nothing more, and ‘explaining away’ outcomes. Will everyone not end up like the latter, following this school of thought?

This is a tough one, to be honest. As a practicing manager I tend to follow the ‘Measure Outcomes, rather than Activities’ approach. My reasoning is that measuring outcomes allowed personnel to grow – figure out solutions themselves, rather than be spoon-fed; take ownership, responsibility and accountability for their work areas. Isn’t this at odds with my tilt towards process over results? Can a commitment to measuring outcomes as a performance yardstick ever be compatible with a belief that outcomes are never fully controllable and that the process matters more?

I think both can co-exist (though you could get schizophrenic at times!). When affixing responsibility and setting down performance yardsticks, you must emphasise outcomes and accountability for results to drive the stretch. However, you must make it clear that these are not to be achieved at the expense of the ‘right means’. In a sense, you are self-imposing additional hard constraints, and making the problem more difficult that it would be if you relaxed one or the other. Basically, no short-cuts. It is surprising how often human ingenuity manages to work things out even with the hard process constraints, once people recognize that the boundary lines are inviolable. Finally, when evaluating performance, you have to factor in the specific circumstances – including the variables that actually were in control, events that could not have been foreseen and the efforts that were actually put in, before concluding on whether or not the right decisions were taken and whether or not performance was actually good. This requires maturity, balance and detachment.

“May God grant me the power to change the things I can, the ability to accept the things I can’t and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I know there are a lot of you F1 fans out there. I am a sports fan myself. I’ve closely followed cricket and tennis continuously for over 30 years, followed events like the football World Cup and the Olympics on a quadrennial basis over the same period and have had more than a passing interest in others such as golf, badminton, billiards / snooker, table tennis, chess and athletics.

But I just don’t get F1. Oh, I can understand the excitement of F1 – many of us love cars, the faster the better. A friend who’s a major F1 fan and actually attended the Singapore GP last year told me that watching on TV doesn’t give you any sense of how powerful these cars are – she said that the sound of the engines revving on the grid was unreal. Fair enough, I guess that’s true for most sports – TV is a poor substitute for the real thing, and I am willing to accept that the loss in transit is very high in an event like F1.

No, my inability to see F1 as a sport is purely to do with its underlying logic. Excitement and entertainment alone don’t make for a sport, otherwise rock concerts would be sports. You need a physical-mental contest of some sort, involving people. OK – so F1 does have a contest, but what exactly is it a contest of? In every other sport, the contest involved is an individual’s (or team’s) skills against another, within agreed rules and boundaries. When Federer plays Nadal, its two men on a tennis court armed with only a racket and their skills. You can throw in physical conditioning, courage, presence of mind and all those other attributes in as well, but they’re still part of the package that constitutes the individual.

In F1 though, you have a contest with two variables – the drivers and their cars.  Is it a contest to determine the fastest driver? Then why are they driving different cars? Is it a contest to determine the best car? Then have the same drivers test-drive all the cars, and just measure the average lap times. Can the same contest with both variables combined determine both, or either? Nope. F1 with its drivers championship and its manufacturers championship running in parallel just seems plain illogical.

So you have the spectacle of past ‘World Champions’ finishing at the back of the pack in subsequent years, merely because they changed their cars. Doesn’t inspire much confidence in the whole ‘World Champion’ tag. Champion of what? Finishing first with the fastest car around?

To see how ludicrous the logic is, let me take you back to your school days. Imagine you’ve got a bicycle (say bicycle A). A new kid on the block turns up with a different bicycle that looks a bit better (bicycle B). He challenges you to a series of races. You race each other 10 times – he wins say 6 and you manage to win 4. After going through complicated points calculations that converts timings etc. to points, your pals, the race referees announce the following – a) Your rival is the ‘Champion’ and b) His bike is better. Would anyone accept either of the results? Of course not. What an impartial observer would want to do is to get you both to swap bikes and run another 10 races, and then use the combined results.

The larger point here is the influence of technology on sports. Most sports use some equipment (I would be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t use any – even athletes have shoes; perhaps chess might be one example). There are two questions here – a) How much are the differences in performance capabilities of alternate technologies and b) How much does the technology matter in the sport?

Some sports have rigidly controlled the incursion of technology – golf, I believe has standardized the materials from which clubs are made, while cricket periodically examines new bat materials, but has historically allowed limited change. In other sports, the changes have been more rapid and more dramatic – tennis rackets have changed from wood to metal to graphite composites, the strings have undergone their own changes.

Regardless of the rate of change, the common element in all these sports is that there is (by and large) a free market in choice of equipment. If player A wins over player B, primarily because he uses better performing equipment, there is nothing stopping player B from switching at the earliest. So while equipment from individual manufacturers may have marginal difference, the free market evens things out fairly rapidly.

When a sport allows an ‘unequal contest’, the results are quite bizarre – the recent swimming world championships being the perfect example – with over 10 world records being smashed in one afternoon, and races between swimmers using different swim suits throwing up relative unknowns as winners. However, this situation is likely to be very temporary – the swimming federation outlawed the new materials from next year, and if they hadn’t you would have found every swimmer switching to the new suits immediately.

Formula 1, by contrast, is hardly a free market. For the period of the year, which is the basis of the competition, the driver is wedded to his machine, for good or for bad. Sure, a driver can switch teams for the next year, but this is hardly analogous to a player in a different sport just walking into a store and picking up a different brand, which he can use whenever he wishes.

The second point is in terms of the relative contribution of different technologies to the end result. In most team sports, technology plays less of a role. You could have a new design football, or have one team wear better performance shoes, but one could argue that individual skills, team dynamics and tactics would count for a lot more. In individual sports, the impact could be more but if a free market is assumed, the differences are so marginal that I don’t see it making a big difference. In Formula 1, there is a difference, there is no free market and a marginal difference makes all the difference between winning and finishing at the bottom of the pack.   

F1 is a spectacle, a marketing and branding success story. It makes for compelling viewing, has a loyal fan base, which has expanded across geographies. Is it a sport, though?

I am fascinated by queues. Why do they work so well in some places, but not at all in others? Public behavior in queues and queue-type situations raises several interesting questions, many of which have wider implications.

Obviously, there is an immediate private advantage in trying to beat a queue (say cutting in at the front with some ‘urgent’ excuse, or merely muscling your way in). What’s the downside if you attempt this? Worst case someone will force you to back up and join at the end, which is where you would have been anyway. If you have a sufficiently thick skin, you should always try to beat a queue – even if in 20% of the cases, you manage to get ahead, you are better off, and in the remaining 80% you are no worse off than before.

Queues are therefore inherently unstable, delicate mechanisms. Given a slight push in the wrong direction, a well functioning queue can quickly degenerate into chaos. For queues to sustain, two critical control mechanisms are required – a) a mechanism to prevent people from wanting to beat the system and b) a mechanism to restore order / prevent people attempting to jump the queue from gaining private benefits.

The most overt control is policing - queues with security personnel enforcing order usually have no trouble sustaining. The presence of enforcers acts both as a deterrent and as a damage-control mechanism. Self-regulating queues are more interesting – how does a queue sustain itself, when there is no one to police it?

Public disapproval can act as a reasonable deterrent. Many people may be unwilling to risk the glares / comments from people standing in line to realize their gains. Here is where the general civic demeanour makes a huge difference– in some cities / situations, queue-jumpers get quickly yelled at by the people in line, whereas in others they don’t.

But does this mean that people ‘follow the rules’ only when they know that they are likely to be penalized if they transgress? Is it a foolish pipe dream to imagine that people are capable of self-regulation, even when they know there is no chance of getting caught or penalty for offences? Take a simple example – you are driving in a small town at midnight, nobody’s around and the signal turns red. There is no traffic on any of the roads, no likelihood of any cops around. Do you stop? Two millenniums back, Plato asked this same question with an analogy – “If a man had a magic ring which made him invisible, in effect allowing him to do anything he wanted with no risk of getting caught, would he continue remaining moral?”

There is another strong internally-driven (as opposed to externally enforced) motive for following system rules.  This is the realization that behavior that results in short-term private advantage inevitably results in long-term chaos. If you jump a queue, you have to accept that everyone will, and there will eventually be no queues at all. Therefore, it is in your own private long term interest not to jump queues.

Now this line of reasoning can (and does) lead to ‘gift-giving’ behavior. Basic etiquette, courtesy and ethical conduct are founded on a group of people having realized at some point that gift-giving is best for all in the long run.

However, this presupposes two deep-rooted and related conditions.  The first is our sense of identity - our notion of who we are and who we believe belong to us, who we define are a part of us. The second is a matter of trust, or lack thereof – what we believe we can trust others to do or not do.

In any optimization, the ideal is to weigh and balance several interlinked variables and constraints to get a globally optimum outcome, rejecting the many locally optimal, or sub-optimal solutions that abound. . However, before one even begins looking for solutions, optimal or not, one first has to define what the globe or the system is, for which one is seeking to find the best result. If one defines the entity, not as the whole but as a part, one gets the solution that is right merely for that part.

A sense of identity that is purely private / individual is anathema to the concept of ‘gift-giving’. The notion of giving freely, giving way is founded on two expected outcomes – that by foregoing something in the immediate, short term, we make the system better off, and that in consequence, we ourselves would be better off, assuming everyone does likewise. These outcomes crucially depend on the two issues I mentioned. The desire to make the system better off, even if it is only to gain ourselves in consequence, presupposes that we think about something more than just our individual selves. The expectation that everyone will do likewise is founded on the principle of trust.

Conventionally, people attribute freedom from want as a cause of gift-giving behavior. Where scarcity mentality prevails, it is believed that people will be far less likely to give freely in the short-term. Therefore, the conclusion goes – developed countries are more likely to have self-sustaining systems, and people who are higher up on the economic ladder are less likely to indulge in rule-breaking.  Certainly there is some truth in this, but it isn’t the entire truth. There are plenty of counter examples:  Relatively well-off Indians scramble for the exit door with no sense of decorum when an aircraft lands; groups of well-heeled tourists scramble in front of museum entry points; corporate excesses across the world demonstrate that high income levels are no guarantee of ethical behaviour.

Also, we shouldn’t under-emphasise the importance of sheer habit and upbringing. Societies that work hard to inculcate basic civic discipline and belief in systems in their children have a better chance of sustaining their rule-based institutions.

Looking at Indians in general, we are confronted with twin challenges:

On the one hand, our multi-faceted heterogeneity poses a huge barrier to our sense of a larger identity beyond our immediate self / family. Given the number of variables along which one could split an average Indian city-street (language, religion, caste, socio-economic status and so on), it is unsurprising that people hardly regard ‘belonging to the same street’ as a basis for defining their identity. The only places where I’ve seen un-policed queues work in India are inside corporate organizations (where the organization seems to provide a strong basis for identity), in Bombay (where the heightened sense of civic discipline is amongst the first things that strikes the first-time visitor from other cities in India, and is among the few redeeming features of living in that infrastructure-starved city) and in family weddings, where people have no problem giving right of way to their guests and to the elderly. Take out Bombay, and you can almost guarantee that when a group of strangers is involved, lawlessness will prevail.

On the other hand, far from emphasizing law-abidance and respect for systems as values in kids, I increasingly see people regard law-breaking as something positive. With eyes firmly fixed on ‘getting ahead’ in a competitive economic and social environment as the all-encompassing goal, families treat rule-bending and ‘do whatever it takes’ behavior in children as ‘street-smarts’. The child that stands in line, studies hard and doesn’t cheat is a nerd with no initiative / enterprise. The child who uses every trick in the book (and then some) to get ahead is encouraged to treat these exploits almost as badges of honor. Increasingly, the philosophy at work seems to be "The only sin is getting caught". 

We need to look beyond GDP per capita as the ultimate indicator of development as a society. Perhaps we should look at our queues, at the way we drive in traffic and the values we pass on to our children as better indicators of how civilized we are, and how far we still have to go.

I’m sure many of you would have had the dubious pleasure of experiencing a botched ‘new initiative’ at your workplace. The new ERP  / Performance Appraisal system / Cost Reduction drive ….

As a management consultant, I’d seen plenty. Consultants are probably second only to lawyers on the unpopularity stakes, if the number of ‘did you hear the one about the consultant…’ jokes is anything to go by. We used to laugh those off as one of the things that go with the job. Nevertheless, the unavoidable fact was that there were plenty initiatives which consultants were involved in, on which good money had been spent, which were far from successful in terms of business results.

When I moved on from consulting into a corporate position, I found that corporates can do a great job of launching-new-initiatives-with-desperately-poor-results all by themselves. When an internally launched initiative would fail spectacularly, the matter would be quietly buried, and the think-tanks would work on the next wonder idea.

Now, the unfortunate part is that the core idea that people were trying to implement would often be a really good one, both in consultant facilitated initiatives and in internally driven ones. The fault almost always wasn’t in the idea itself, but in the manner in which it was being implemented. The most common reasons why great ideas don’t necessarily translate into great results on the ground are as follows:

Inadequate planning 

A good idea by itself is not adequate. Sometimes, people who come up with the idea get so enamored by the ‘wow’ factor that they rush headlong to stick it in, without appropriate review / feedback / critique. For an idea to develop into a workable solution, it needs to be stress-tested and refined based on identification of potential issues.

One company wanted to reduce its travel costs by moving from a setup where every manager picked his own preferred airline to one where everyone would fly one of two designated airlines. Now as an idea, it was not a bad one – the reality was that because the volumes were split, the company lost out on volume based discounts it could avail by pooling its total travel requirement. However, before a policy change was announced, someone should have looked at potential issues impacting implementation – how would people react, did the selected airlines provide adequate network coverage and flight schedule flexibility, would the savings be offset by cancellations and so on. Unfortunately, this was not done, and within a month of the policy change, the company was forced to revert to the earlier system due to issues which cropped up. When this happens, people tend to believe the idea is fundamentally bad – throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Proper planning involves a lot of detailing – the devil lies in the details, always. This includes identifying resources that would be required (personnel, funds etc.), getting appropriate sign-offs from concerned departments and preparing back-up / contingency measures. The sooner a project stops being a ‘separate initiative’ and ties in with routine financial reporting, the better, at least as far as funding requirements and benefits assessments are concerned.  

At one organization, an internal team had completed a diagnostic assessment, identified several new initiatives, prepared detailed plans and were ready to roll. They’d forgotten to get their resource requirements approved by Finance, though. Oops. While they were busy with their planning, the organization had separately approved the next year’s corporate budget. Where were those funds going to come from now?

Absence of buy-in / consensus

The most successful initiatives are those where everyone impacted believes they have been part of the process. Ideas shouldn’t remain brewing within a closed set of people for too long. If the wider organization believes that an initiative is imposed upon them, their natural resistance to change of any type will be strengthened.

Somewhere between the origin of an idea and its execution, the idea has to be shared – exposed, if you will. Organisations (and individuals) sometimes hesitate to do this – fearing adverse reaction, not wanting to share the credit, or out of plain indifference.

Obtaining buy-in should not be seen merely as a process to be ‘tick-marked’ or as an unavoidable burden to be carried. The buy-in process can be hugely value adding, because it ties in neatly with the first concern – adequate detailing / planning and anticipation of issues. When you air out the idea, you will get adverse reaction, but that provides you an opportunity to improve / refine the original idea by taking care of the specific concern raised. At the same time, because a wider set of people have been involved, their support for the eventual initiative can be assured.  

No ownership

An initiative needs an owner – someone who’ll take responsibility for making it happen. Any implementation involves countering barriers to change, keeping people motivated and at times escalating issues / kicking people on their backsides – all of these require effort and attention from an owner who associates personally with the success of the initiative,

When ownership is loosely defined or is shared, chances are that the execution will suffer from lack of direction at some point. It is preferable that ownership is voluntarily taken up, rather than assigned to individuals, though this may not be always possible. If initiatives are assigned, then adequate care must be taken to ensure that the group that planned / thought through the initiatives takes the owner on board and adequately transfers knowledge, including the relevant details. Finally, the owner of a major initiative must be adequately empowered – a lightweight, with all the goodwill in the world, may not be good enough.

I have seen organizations include initiative success on the KRAs of senior ‘initiative leads’, believing that this is good enough to motivate these owners to take on the project success as a serious goal for their performance year. Initiatives-on-KRAs are surely necessary, but may not be sufficient, though. The problem is that senior leads often have multiple KRAs, and may decide early on to cover what they consider their ‘must-do’ KRAs at the expense of the lesser ones, reasoning that if they have to slip up, they’d rather slip on a non-critical KRA. So, just as Finance approval is critical to a project ensuring its access to funds, the active involvement of Top Management / HR is critical to ensuring that leads treat their project related KRAs seriously, in addition to their line responsibilities. 

Improper staffing

Where is the implementation team staffed from? Typically from line departments / functions who depute operating personnel for the duration of the project initiative, either full-time or on a part-time basis. When the call goes out for nominating personnel, line department heads shy away from deputing good / capable personnel – anyone who’s good would usually be handling some serious responsibility and the department reasons that it cannot do without them. Thus, projects are all too often staffed by whoever can be spared (personnel who are often available for a good reason), rather than whoever is best positioned to execute their responsibilities on the project. Likewise, within departments, line personnel often see project postings as career limiting moves, and refrain from volunteering for such assignments.

The best project teams I have seen are at those organizations which have clearly defined career plans in place for their employees. At one such organization, people on the project team saw the assignment as a logical progression, picking up skills and capabilities which they could put to use on subsequent roles. They were clearly informed in advance that their performance on the project would be treated at par with their peers’ regular line performance, so they never felt threatened. 

Loss of focus

Sometimes a project can fall by the wayside for no reason other than sheer boredom. When an idea is fresh and a project is launched, there is plenty of excitement. People are energized, posters put up, newsletter articles written, initial reviews well attended and so on. Six months into the project, that sense of excitement is reduced, and the initiative has to compete for attention with all the new ideas that have come up subsequently. A CXO at one client once told me that every time his CEO went abroad to attend an event / conference, he would remain in a state of apprehension – invariably his CEO would pick up the latest management fad while chatting with his fellow business class travelers on the flight back home, and insist that they implement it in their organization! For complex initiatives that have lengthy implementation timeframes, building in mechanisms to sustain organizational interest is as essential a part of good planning/detailing as any of the other, more obvious project workstreams.  

Change in conditions

Lastly, conditions can and do change between the time an idea was originated and the time it eventually got executed. Changes in the overall economic and specific market climate, changes in organizational priorities, government regulation, senior personnel and so on can all result in a once-good idea being no longer relevant or effective. Execution teams have to periodically re-affirm that the initiative they are implementing in the organization continues to remain current. 

Looking at all the factors which can throw a spanner in the works, it’s a wonder initiatives succeed at all. A proper appreciation of these ‘watchouts’ helps you in two ways:

a)You could build in processes and mechanisms to address each of the issues upfront, rather than discover each hurdle as you go along.

b)You tend to be somewhat circumspect about the next wonder idea / initiative you hear. This doesn’t mean you become negative or excessively skeptical, it simply means you guard against ‘irrational exuberance’. Of course, a potential downside is that you may end up being the naysayer in a room full of excited go-getters!

Observing people at work, you find various styles – dictatorial / consensual, big-picture / detail oriented, delegators / do-it-yourself-and-take-all-the-world’s-trouble-on-your-shoulders types, panicky / cool-as-cucumber…and so on. Now a lot of this is obviously a matter of individual style, which evolves through a person’s entire personal and professional experiences. If a person is a control-freak at work, chances are he/she’s the same outside of the workplace, and there are so many factors that lead to anyone being any particular way.

Amongst all these influences though, one stands out for me – and that is the influence exerted by a person’s initial employment circumstances – the first manager, the first company / industry and the nature of the first role (perhaps not literally first, but say in the initial 1-2 years). Young, bright minds, fresh out of college are highly susceptible to their professional world-view being shaped by those initial experiences. A ‘kiddo’ who sees a work culture that emphasizes inclusiveness, trust and mutual respect will tend to view a professional corporate career very differently from one who starts off in a polar opposite environment. Over time, each will undergo varied experiences – for sure, the first one will encounter the proverbial lousy boss, and equally the second one may move to a better work environment - but the first experience imprint remains and gets internalized more.

I count myself exceedingly fortunate that on my first project, I worked under two outstanding managers. Even to this day, I can trace back my most essential beliefs and attitudes to the learnings I picked up working with them and watching them at work.

From Prithvi, I learnt that quality is first and foremost an attitude. On one memorable night, this chap went through an entire 150 slide deck for the next day’s steering committee meeting, carefully checking for typos, alignment, exact phrasing, re-sequencing slides and so on…Mind you, this was after our partner had gone through the entire deck and approved it. Frankly, from an outside-in viewpoint, he didn’t need to spend those three hours- nobody would have noticed perhaps, if two slide objects were a few pixels out of alignment. We used to drive back to our guest house in the same vehicle, so initially I was a bit irritated – but as I watched I was fascinated by his inner drive for perfection. His point was – ‘if you prepare a document, it’s got your name on it. And you should stop when you are internally satisfied with what you’ve produced’.

The other manager, Prem in his laconic, somewhat cynical style expressed the same thought ‘Quality means 100%. Anything less is only an explanation.” (He actually said ‘excuse’!)

Prem was a funny old bird. He would rarely give you any straight answers. Instead he would give you big complex pieces of work, way beyond your experience and capabilities, and expect you to use your brains. If you got horribly stuck, or were going off in a totally wrong direction, he would set you right, but never by giving you the answers. He would ask you questions, which forced you to think it through. In the end, you’d get it right and in consequence your confidence / belief / ability to handle greater responsibilities would be much higher than if he had simply spelled out what was required to be done and asked you to merely execute it.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" – Confucius
 

Now, teaching people how to fish is easier said than done. So many difficulties come in the way:

Firstly, you should want to develop your team. The rationale is fairly clear – the more your team steps up and takes on bigger responsibilities (typically yours), the more you free yourself up to take on higher order challenges. Unfortunately, too many managers see young bright minds as potential threats to their own position. ‘Forcing yourself to become redundant’ presupposes a high degree of internal security about your own performance and position.

The corporate environment you are working in is another huge factor. Highly political cultures which emphasise hierarchy and discourage risk-taking behavior make it near impossible for the best intentioned managers to develop / groom their team members.

Next, not all personnel respond well to the ‘throw in the pool and let them figure it out’ treatment. Some personnel are better geared for a structured, organized initiation. This approach works best when the concerned employee is bright, has some degree of self-confidence and has the right attitude towards challenges.

Lastly, the manager concerned has to be prepared for a short-term hit, either in terms of quality or in terms of deadlines. If you have an immediate deadline to meet (which you almost always do), and if you know exactly what needs to be done (which is some of the time), it takes a lot of will power not to tell your struggling junior how to go about it. If you don’t know what exactly needs to be done and have to figure it out, it is even more difficult to let go.

In a sense, in the short-term you have to let go of your ‘Quality is 100%’ quest for perfectionism, for longer term gains. I have personally never been able to do this to my satisfaction.

And thank you, Prithvi and Prem.