Articles

Articles

Every suggestion is not a solution!

There’s this very nice startup ad on the radio – “Every Suggestion is not a Solution – come, find the solution here…..”

It is truly overwhelming to any first time entrepreneur to receive candid feedback on his maiden business pitch made to a bunch of unanimous collaborators. We see it in every session of House of Genius (HoG). Irrespective of their background, experience or business maturity, founders find it hard to convince, defend and win over the house, in the first go. After all, that’s what they come for. Free, unbiased sound boarding to help them validate, strengthen and build a great venture. But they all benefit more than one can imagine as they settle in.

What job is there tomorrow?

We used to eagerly wait for a guest lecture during college days. It was a great opportunity to connect to the external world, away from books. If the guy happened to be an old-student of the college, it was more interesting. There was a possibility to find a role model, a future employer or at least a mentor!

One of the best I liked was when folks who came, painted the picture of tomorrow and described how we may be playing our part in that picture. When I started taking the stage as a guest/ industry speaker I continued the same. Made sure to study, prepare and then together paint a picture of tomorrow – a projection of what we see through the lens of technology advancement and societal impact.

Today’s session was very intriguing. It was comparing all the pictures I had used in last 30 years of working with technology, projected on a picture depicting next 10-15 years.

Interesting facts I noticed, include:

  1. Across generations, technology advancements have changed the society at large, workforce in particular. Level of intelligence / smartness of people, Wealth of Nations & Individuals, Economic Inclusion & Risk aversion are some indicators of the same.
  2. Interestingly, every step change in technology has created a lot of new jobs and displaced several of them at the same time.
  3. Similarly, it has increased labor productivity while widening skill gap at the same rate! Re-skilling, De-skilling, Portability – all are mainstream HR actions today. Average relevant experience within teams in any stream of work is continuously decreasing. Performance appraisals disappearing, attrition getting new definition, employee engagement is short-term focused.
  4. In almost every country, several highly-in-demand jobs never existed 5-10 years ago. Extending this further, may be over 65% of kids joining school now, may be working in jobs that are not yet defined!

In the current context, projecting and showing future job picture is daunting. But this is a routine challenge for Governments, Industries and Academia. Tracking trends and relating them back to how they impact in short, medium and long-term is critical. Over years, technology is helping here too. The paradoxical nature of technology advancement and societal good is best pivoted around the basic need of employment. Having a tool / dashboard, is very neat. Here is one such wonderful attempt: MyNextMove

Irrespective of a tool, mentor or own guess-work, it is important to stay current and close to changes relevant to our jobs. Investing in “personal” technology upgrades as routinely as that of your next OS upgrade for the mobile phone or computer, is very critical. After sometime, no one will support that, at any cost!

One simple strategy that works for your business, works for you too…

Be close, relevant and significant contributor in your field of work!

 

What to do when you feel stuck?

Mentoring is based on the premise that there’s at least one useful, bridgeable gap of experience or expertise between the two people in the relationship. With this comes the responsibility of making sure that the progress is multiple than normal course of journey. But, when there’s progress, it becomes that much difficult to show whether it was truly due to mentoring or was it natural if you are on the path of success.

True test of mentoring comes, when we are stuck.

It happens all the time with open roundtables. We neither have a background of the founder, nor fully aware of their current business situation. Last week, we had an interesting case – a seasoned engineer in his early fifties, ventured into a new business with a set of three friends from his earlier team. All are familiar to each other – their capabilities, behaviour and work culture. They came with their issue – unable to take their product to field trial. With signed up customers, lined up distributors and great review of the product by experts, there was nothing that seemed stopped them. But they were feeling stuck.

Careful examination of their status and diligent observation of their readiness threw open the most important issue – it was just that fear of failure wading in their minds. They had managed large businesses for bigger corporates and never launched anything of their own craft any time before. They wanted just an assurance from someone who had successfully failed in new ventures and still managed to sail through to upstream. A small push from inside.

Reminded of the saying “Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way” that drove many managers to think same, but act differently to get better results.

Here, getting out of their own way was very important.

When we feel stuck, it is mostly the case – We should watch and just get out of our own way. Progress follows…